The Month That Was - August 2021

Swamped.  Multiple straight weekends of activities have severely cut into my ongoing plans. That's why I'm later than ever and with some very thin content.

I was soooo close to having the next book published and then I discovered a timeline problem.  I know how to solve it, but I won't have a chance to get to it until mid September so the book is delayed a month or so.  In fact, I've pretty much written off accomplishing anything until after I get through the late August/early September weekends. I hop at least to generate some good travel posts.

I am officially un-layed off at work.  I was to be terminated with severance in April, but the corporate hive mind has backpedalled. I'm relieved...I think.

[TV]Binging Oldies

[Tech] Waffling Into an Upgrade

[Roaring 20s] Roaring 20's (2.0) Watch, Coding AI

[TV] Binging Oldies

It's amazing how TV shows even as recent as ten years ago could not be greenlit today. I've been binging shows from the first decade of the 21st century.  With each passing year, I feel more and more like that was a truly special time for the medium.  A real peak, unlikely to return any time soon.

Sopranos

This is the one that started it all; ask yourself if HBO would allow it today.  This one is borderline.  David Chase would have had to seriously up the number of roles for POCs, and he might even be pressured into a female mob boss, but maybe it could get done.  We are still allowed to delve into the darkness of various forms of crime, so it's possible we would still have gotten it although I bet it would be reduced in quality to something on the level of, say, Sons of Anarchy or Animal Kingdom.    

Mad Men

Insufficiently diverse, of course. Insufficiently negative about women's roles in the '60s.  Attempted to portray the era in which it was set realistically, rather than in accordance with popular mythology.  Insufficient comeuppance to the male characters for their sins.  Smoking glamorized (was a problem even back then).  Even in its day, period dramas went the way of things like The Nick or Masters of Sex to promote corrrect cultural values over realistc looks at humanity. Complete unacceptable.

Deadwood

Every sin known to man, yet all the sinners had their place, and the drive to civilization was led by a murdering racist whoremonger.  Casual and constant ethic and racial slurs.  Indians are referred to as dirt-worshippers, Chinese as celestials, the n-word is dropped with regularity, the single Jewish character is frequently just referred to as "The Jew".  The slurs go beyond names into negative stereotypes. One of the female leads is called a "loopy f-ckin' c-nt" on a number of occasions and women are generally referred to by euphemisms for their genitals.  And that's the Good Guys.  The Big Bad is actually more polite.  Honestly, if cancel culture ever turns its eye to Deadwood, everyone who ever came within earshot of this production will never work again.  (I just hope they don't come after the people who binge it.)  Despite all that it remains the finest TV show ever created and one of the finest works of art of our lifetimes.

Entourage

Obviously not is the same dramatic class as the others but it shares a similar fate.  It was the male equivalent of Sex and the City, that is to say: a fantasy.   Fantasies are our often dark, unhealthy, desires that need to be overruled for the sake of civilization.  It's probably psychologically beneficial to have such fantasies and satisfy them through fiction. But we can't do that any more.  Even acknowledging the existence of lusts and untoward thoughts is a transgression.  Entourage was pretty much non-stop lusts and untoward thoughts. I thought it was fun. I have no illusion that it represented anything short of make-believe, but it's portrayal of a male fantasy life appealed to me.  I guess that makes me one of the bad guys.  (I'll leave it as an excercise for the reader to determine if its female counterpart, Sex and the City, could be made today.)

Leaving Entourage aside, the other three are absolutely pantheon level drama.  It may be possible in this brave new world to create shows of equivalent quality that do not violate any of our new hyper-moral constraints, but nobody has yet.  Perhaps there is the belief today that socio-political validation counts as good drama and delving into personal humanity is passe.  More than anything else, this leads me to believe we are wandering into an artistic dark age. 

Tangentially related: Also a Nike commercial dark age.

[Tech] Waffling Into an Upgrade

 t's time for a series of tech upgrades.  

My trusty Moto G6 is reaching the end of its life.  It has started with flaky behavior increasing lag time that requires a reset now and then and goes downhill from there.  I know because I've lived it before.  Everyone in the world will tell me to get an iPhone, but I am still anti-Apple enough not to.  Also, I just can't force myself to drop $1000 for a phone.  It's a psychological hurdle I just can't leap.  Part of it may be my tendency to lose and break things.  I have a decent pair of Maui Jim sunglasses but I leave them untouched and wear cheap aviators from 5 Below because I know I am going to lose them.  I'd feel better about having to replace a $300 phone instead of a $1000 phone.  I'm doing better at this.  I have a fairly decent pair of wireless earbuds as opposed to the $20 wired cheapies I used to use because I knew I would lose them. I also have an expensive watch that I wear daily because of its sentimental value, and I haven't lost that yet.  But still, a phone goes from pocket to table to car console to backpack and so on.  In the course of that I am sure I would do something stupid.

So no four-figure phone for me.  In my price range, the latest flagship phones are out.  The Google Pixel 5A looks awesome and lists for $450, call it half-a-grand all-in. Google's version of Android is the "purest" and they are really good about pushing updates.  That said, I really don't like the idea of Google having that much more claim on my life.  Of course, since it's going to be an Android phone, I don't know how effective this is at sticking it to the man.

Another option is the OnePlus Nord N10.  This is the latest darling of reviewers and it does seem like an incredible deal at a $299 list price.

A third option is to get the latest Moto, the G Power, which is on 199.00 at Amazon.  The camera is lame, but the battery does last forever and if I lose or break it, I can live.

A fourth option would be to find an older model of a flagship.

A fifth option would be to shut up, do what everyone else does and buy a damn iPhone, get the insurance if I'm worried, and don't pester us with 300 words of blather. Also shut up.

Next up, my laptop.  My laptop is also struggling with occasional issues, mostly regarding power management.  Also the trackpad is behaving badly.  Time to replace.  Here's the question: how much laptop do I really need anymore?  Virtually everything I do, I do on the web.  I have very little need for local computing power and storage.  Back when I was active in photography, I used to need space to store photos and processor power to edit them.  But I haven't done any serious photography in years, although I always tell myself I'm going to get back to it.  

All that seems to imply that I could do well enough with a Chromebook.  But then there's the Google thing again.  Also, I like knowing that I can work offline if I ever need to, like maybe writing on a plane without wifi, or maybe actually getting back to photography.  This amounts to buying aspirationally, not practically.  Like buying a huge 4wd pickup for daily commute in town, just because I might run the Baja 1000 one day.

I'm pretty sure I want a larger screen and a 3:2 ratio since I don't do gaming or much video streaming.  That's really all I need and, like the phone, I should just shut up and get a Surface Book and stop fretting the details. But then I get tempted by convertibles with detectable screens and I think maybe I could retire my one Apple product, my iPad, which I got for free a couple of years back so it doesn't count against my anti-Apple stand.  But I have to admit the iPad is pretty sweet and most convertibles suck as tablets.  So...yeah.

Sheesh, this has gotten borderline stream-of-consciousness, hasn't it?  I'll be sure to let you know what I end up doing because I know how extremely important it is to you.  For now, I think I'll take my own advice and shut up.

[Roaring 20s] Roaring 20's (2.0) Watch, Coding AI

This is a little Inside Baseball but this astonishing video came to my attention and hit home with me as a technologist.  It starts a bit slow, but essentially it involves two people asking an Artificial Intelligence to write a certain computer program -- literally asking vocally -- and the AI doing it live as we watch.  That in itself is remarkable, but the most remarkable thing is that the AI taught itself how to program from simply being fed tons of previously written programs and analysing them. 

Speaking as someone who has spent three decades doing this in concert with numerous teams of human programmers and fought through all the communication and coordination complications involved in completing huge software projects, I suddenly feel like my Model T was just passed by a Tesla.

Tangentially related:  There is a new and superior pasta shape.