I Went Back to East Hagbourne, and the City was Gone

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Today I was reading an article that linked to a real estate listing in England. It includes a video. (DANGER! Ear worm!)

That was fun and cute and all, but it reminded me of a time I lived in a cottage some distance from London. I decided to pay a visit. I fired up Ye Olde Mappe Appe, zeroed in on East Hagbourne, and scanned up Blewbury Road looking for the pub near the brook.

No pub. That side of the road is now occupied by large, modern homes. The solar panels on the rooftops don’t fool me, these are English McMansions.

It makes sense. Nearby Didcot hosts the last super-high-speed train stop before London (at least it did in 1980). If I worked in London, East Hagbourne would be an ideal place to live, although only one of the three pubs I knew still stands. The Fleur de Lis was always the choice of the gentlemanly class in town, and now apparently that’s the only class remaining.

With all this change, I was not certain right away that the place I had called home for a little while still existed. I typed the address into Apple Maps, and was relieved to see it was still there, and a little bit delighted that the pin showed not only the address, but the home’s colloquial name. The cottage still stands.

Beyond the large new homes that line Blewbury Road, the fields remain. The land here is fertile, the rain reliable, and agriculture…

Holy shit Didcot has grown so much, usurping farmland to the point it has almost swallowed East Hagbourne. East Hagbourne also has doubled in size or more; entire neighborhoods of homes that look identical from space.

Compared to Orange County, the growth of Didcot is negligible. Just a little dot among the fields. But we have seen this show often enough to know how it ends. And if I worked in London, I would likely contribute to the destruction.

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Year 19.000 begins

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Happy Road Trip Day, to those who still observe. Elevator Ocelot Rutabaga, my friends! It is a prime year, and we all know that that portends.

There are about 1.2 million words in this blog, all written by me. Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas is, in blog years, ancient. Today, as the Muddled Calendar rolls over to 19.000, I can only look back on the time since I drove away from San Diego and think of all the things that have happened and ask myself, “shit, that was only 19 years?” It seems like another life.

Another two lives, actually. Maybe two and a half. You can read all those words and decide for yourself. (I do not endorse this idea.)

This life I’m in right now, while a good and happy life, doesn’t generate stories that fit in the intersection of “interesting to other people” and “things I can talk about” and not “things that aren’t your damn business”. And to be honest, I’ve been cheating on you, loyal reader(s), by rambling in other venues. I was born a ramblin’ baby; lately I’ve been roaming with my rambling. This coming year I’m going to work on pulling some of my roamin’ ramblin’s back home.

Meanwhile, I set a goal to reach by Muddled Year 20.000, a big goal, but minor annoying health issues have one after another knocked me off track. I’m going to make a run for it this year, but if I don’t reach the summit until 21.000, I will forgive myself. As long as I am moving forward, it’s all right. I will start moving forward as soon as I wake up later this morning.

But for now, another sip of inoffensive Canadian Whisky seems like a good idea. Tooooooooooast!

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When Coding, Always use Descriptive Function Names

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This evening I’ve been coding up something on a tight deadline. A few minutes ago I wrote a function named:

handlePluralTypeNameBecauseRESTWasInventedByIdiots()

REST is an acronym for… you can look it up if you care. It’s a way for code running in your browser to communicate with services off somewhere else. Some guy got his Phd making this nonsense up, and it has now become an industry standard. That guy is very lucky I was not one of the ones to review his dissertation, and the rest of the world is very unlucky that I wasn’t.

Like with HTML before it, someone came up with a half-assed solution to a real problem, and before the smart people in the room could say, “hey, that has some pretty serious flaws, but with only a little more effort we could fix most of them” the whole world went romping off with the flawed solution. And here we are.

Not only does REST violate previously-existing standards, it does so for no technical advantage. Servers and programming languages had to be updated to accommodate those violations. Maybe that should have been a red flag.

It would be SO DAMN EASY to fix most of the problems with REST. Use your head(ers)!

But here we are sweating over REST. And here’s a fun thing: for no technical advantage people who use this standard-violating standard have to understand the rules of pluralization in American English. At least in any implementation of REST I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Not only is that fucking annoying, it’s exclusionary. Sorry, kid in Senegal, we’re making a standard that disadvantages you.

Sure, you can get a code library to do plurals for you, and with any luck the rules in the browser code will match the rules on the server. Up until now, I’ve chosen the approach, “always name your data types in a way that just adds ‘s’ for the plural.” Tonight that wasn’t an option, so I a made a way for specific REST servers to keep only the rules relevant to them. More efficient and more reliable than someone else’s library.

And as I’ve often said, your code should express what it does without resorting to comments.

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Quantum Leap is Out of Focus

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Much like many of you out there, the Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas and I will choose a show on television and watch the whole damn thing from beginning to end. Right now we’re working on Quantum Leap, with Scott Bakula.

I will not bother explaining the conceit of the show to you; but for a brief respite during season two, every episode starts with an explainer. Note to producer: The last six people watching your show in season five already know what is going on. But the explainer does eat minutes of airtime that would otherwise have to be filled with newly-produced entertainment.

In season one, there were some serious technical problems that made it all the way to my screen. Focus was dicey, and whoever was holding the boom mic was fully incompetent. Audio quality during a tedious monologue would degrade until suddenly it shifted to terrible ADR. No attempt was made to make the dubbed audio match the sound that had come before.

And no show I have ever seen has piled the stereotypes up in such a magnificent heap. Sexy Nun, Nice-Girl Stripper, and evil fight fixer were all in the same episode! Hoo, boy, when you get to the serious issues, the straw men and insulting archetypes come swarming out of the rafters. When a story about desperate measures so a Native American can die under the sky on his own land suddenly turns to scalping, you just want to kick Hollywood in the balls.

One of my favorite performances from Johnny Depp is when he played Ed Wood. Wood was perhaps the worst director ever, but Depp turned him into a hopeless optimist. As long as the words were there, as long as the actions were there, the kids watching would see through all the flaws and love the story as much as he did.

I do not credit the makers of Quantum Leap for such a fantasy. They were making a TV show for a major network, and it is baffling to me that simple, fixable flaws made it to the screen. Ed Wood would roll a scene and shout “Perfect! Move on!” even though the shot was a disaster. Somehow, the directors and producers of Quantum Leap were allowed to do the same thing.

“Good focus on Al’s ear,” I said last night.

There is a person on most sets whose entire job is to get the focus right. In some shots that’s incredibly complicated, keeping tight on a particular part of the action as actors move thought a scene. Other times, when people are holding still, it’s just about carefully measuring the distance from the subject to the lens, and getting everything set up right.

All that assumes, of course, that when the camera is rolling, that the subject is still at that same distance from the camera. Maybe the focus puller did their job, and then the actor moved. But these are professionals. Someone has to notice and speak up when the actors are off their marks.

And if you shoot three episodes in a row with serious focus problems, maybe you should realize that it’s time to change something. If you suck at focus, stop down the camera to make it more forgiving. Maybe the background is more distinct, and maybe your Director of Photography doesn’t like that, but tough shit, asshole. We’re putting the training wheels back on.

OSMRHBI and I have only four episodes left in the series, and we will watch them. We’ve come this far; we will see it through. At this point, I think the entire crew is saying the same thing — let’s just end it and go home — with the possible exception of the two stars of the show. It seems like they still give a shit, most of the time. Bakula is still the earnest doofus he was in the pilot, and that is the only thing that has earned this show a fourth season, let alone a fifth.

I have to say that this show confronts racism without blinking, and I appreciate that. The n-word is used by white cops, with all the bile and violence it carries. The word is also used by people who imagine themselves better, and prove they are not. Sexism is confronted, and while it took a few seasons, homophobia is brought into the network TV spotlight as well. This is a show with justice as a pillar of its very existence, and they are mostly brave about that.

The fifth and final season, when the writing was already on the wall, put our leaper in and around famous icons — Kennedy, Monroe, Presley. It felt desperate, but Official Sweetie and I started making shark jokes at the opener of season four.

And they all keep saying “leaped” instead of “leapt” and while the dictionary doesn’t support me on my distaste for that form it still bugs me.

* * *

Official Sweetie and I, in the scant hours since I wrote the above, have watched the final episodes of the series. The last episode is really pretty good. Well-written, and almost always in focus. If there is a little last-show-of-the-series indulgence, it’s thematically accurate and not overwhelmingly sappy. It could go down in the annals of great series endings but first you have to wade through a bog of shit to get there.

It’s over, now. We are done. There is better TV to watch, and better things to do with our lives.

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Hibernation

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I have in my email in-boxes and message app threads a growing pile of unanswered correspondence. I have a long to-do list. Or lists, actually. I’ve not been exercising or even flossing. Writing has been reduced to random noodling.

Like most people my age, I have a couple of prescriptions. I was proud to support a local pharmacy, even prouder because the pharmacy served a community that is often overlooked. But while communication was challenging in person (they would see me coming and shift around so a better English-speaker was available), but on the phone it just became too much to deal with.

So instead of dealing with them, I did… nothing. One by one, I ran out of my medications. And still did nothing. Finally, I turned to a pharmacy that requires no human interaction whatsoever, and contributed to the destruction of small business in our nation.

Human interaction is work. Often this work is rewarding; friendships and relationships are cornerstones of the human experience. There have been times throughout my life, however, when those interactions have just been too much work for me. Driving to a party in a Seattle suburb only to turn around outside the house and go back to my hotel. Bailing on a balloon festival in Slovakia. It’s a long list.

Back when humans evolved, meeting new people was probably pretty rare. Maybe I haven’t adapted from those times.

That doesn’t mean I’m unhappy. I’m doing all right. But over the last few months I’ve just had a hard time developing energy for any challenge. I am fully aware that expending energy generates more energy, especially when referring to exercise.

There’s a catch, though. A trap. It is a somnolent quicksand that puts you to sleep even as it engulfs you, a quiet, comfortable tomb. If it is temporary, it’s hibernation. Recharging the batteries, as people say. I’ve curled up in that warm embrace before. But you have to wake up eventually.

I’m working on that now. I’m consciously working on waking up. I’m flossing and doing the little chores around the house. Writing more often, even if there is no focus. Wrote a really nice (tight, sorrowful) Allison in Animeland scene the other night. Words that served no purpose other than their own.

To my friends who have so patiently maintained contact, thank you. I really don’t deserve your faith, which makes me appreciate it all the more.

I’ll see you all on the Sunny Side.

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Power to the (Drill) Press!

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Another afternoon puttering in the garage, putting the shop together, and it felt really good. My drilling-holes-in-steel-plate skills have definitely advanced (this mostly means “let the tool do its job”), and the first major machine is now on wheels!

My handiwork.
The mobile Drill Press – note in the background safety gear close to hand, and duct tape.

One thing about a shop where things don’t have a permanent location is that getting electricity to them can be a hassle and cause dangerous situations. Ideally you don’t want cords across the floor or hanging across a space where someone might want to walk. When your tools can move around, the electricity has to come from above.

This is what I got from my mother-in-law this Christmas:

Power… from the sky!

That’s a 12 AWG cord with a 15-amp breaker that reels back up to the ceiling when not in use. It’s been up there for about ten hours now, and all I can say is that it’s awesome to set up a power tool and drop power down to it.

Overall, a good day today! You can see that there’s still plenty to do (note the pegboard on the workbench with the notches cut out to match the shelf supports above it – not exactly sure how one goes about getting it up there with the spacers). Wheels for the table saw have arrived, so that is coming into the shop soon. That will be a big moment, if I can find the safety key for it.

Drill, table saw, router, a thousand hand tools up on their pegs, and a bluetooth speaker for the tunes — soon I’ll be ready for some real projects.

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Putting Together the Workshop: Drill Press

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There was a moment this afternoon that I regret not immortalizing with a photograph. I don’t have much experience working with metal, but I had drilled holes in a hefty chunk of steel plate to attach casters. After I had bolted on the second caster I stepped back and realized that I had put the second wheel on the wrong side of the plate, so that there was a wheel on each side. Not going to roll very far like that! I didn’t appreciate at the moment how funny that was.

In the workshop, everything will have to be on wheels. The tools are large, and need space around them to operate, and half a garage just isn’t enough space to allocate a permanent place to each tool. So, they will have to be on wheels to roll into the spotlight when it is their time. With leveling casters, I can get the tool into position, then lower the feet on the casters that lift the wheels off the ground and also allow me to adjust for irregularities in the floor. I can get the tool where I need it, level it, and then execute my project.

Getting the tool positioned just so and perfectly level is a nice exercise as well, a reminder before anything is cut that half of craftsmanship is simply patience. It’s a time to quiet the mind set the pace for the project.

Today I was using the floor-standing drill press to drill holes in steel plate to make the new rolling platform for the floor-stranding drill press. As I worked there was a tiny wobble in the press, because the floor isn’t quite perfect, and I was happy to know that these would be the last holes I drilled before I would be able to level the tool perfectly.

I was wrong, it turns out. I made a mistake less silly than bolting a wheel to the wrong side of the plate. I didn’t account for the way the base of the drill press tapers and it runs into the nuts sticking up from the wheel mounts. I need to drill again, new holes to adjust the position of the wheels.

To be honest, this never would have happened if I trusted the steel more. I could have positioned the wheels closer to the edge of the steel plate from the get-go, and not had this problem, but I wanted the wheels to be directly under the load-bearing corners of the drill press’s foot. Like 3/16-inch steel plate would buckle if the load was offset an inch. Circumstances are forcing me to put the casters where I should have put them in the first place — out at the edge of the plate, for maximum stability and easier access to the leveling screws.

I have to say, I never could have drilled holes in steel plate like this before I had the drill press, but then again the only reason I have had to drill holes in steel plate is to make the drill press more useful. But I have done that now (and will sixteen more times to relocate the wheels), and it feels… good. It feels good to make something, and it feels good to see the shop coming together.

I will share pictures in the future, I promise. Especially of the silly mistakes. But tonight I just want to celebrate something in me that has long been dormant. I build things with my brain all the time, but sometimes it’s nice to build something people can touch.

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The Best Glue

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Recently I was installing a shower curtain rod, but not the normal straight-across kind, but one that turned in the middle to enclose two sides of a space.

The kit was comprehensive, with different methods of anchoring the curtain rod based on what it needed to be secured to. I surveyed all the pieces, then turned to the instructions.

I shit you not, this is absolutely how the written instructions started:

After our experiment, we changed the glue in the non-performing installation scheme to Chinese glue, which is better and stronger than the Japanese glue we used before.

Okay, while I question the wisdom of bringing up past failures to new customers, I do have to appreciate that our Chinese friends weren’t done yet. The instructions follow:

Our factory sells 4000 bathroom poles every day in the world, which is a large amount. My colleagues and I work late every day. We work day and night to bring better products to customers, and we hope every product we sell can help everyone.

This all seems a little defensive. “Hey! We’re doing our best, man!” But this is the instruction sheet, so at any moment there might be instructions. I had to keep reading. But next comes a plea that if there are any problems with installation, that you contact them first and they will make it better. An email address is provided that is a big number and is probably unique to this exact copy of the product.

Another paragraph follows, on the same theme. If there is a problem, we will make it right. Just give us a chance.

It’s funny and I will always laugh about Chinese glue, but what we also see here is a company that is learning that in listings at Amazon and the rest, customer reviews are what separates success and failure. Some dickhead customer doesn’t apply the inferior Japanese glue properly, gets pissy about it, and it can ruin a business. So they upgrade the glue, and improve the instructions, and forge ahead in a wild-west marketplace.

Meanwhile, some other company, who is using fucking Andorran glue for crying out loud (Andorran! The fuck do they know about modern polymer chemistry?) is flat-out paying people to give them good reviews. It’s tough for an honest company out there these days.

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DevOps and the Invisibility of Success

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Some of you may have heard that some new guy owns Twitter now. You may also have heard that despite the dire hand-wringing by <insert people you don’t like>, Twitter is still running. Therefore, you might be tempted to conclude, all those engineers weren’t really necessary in the first place.

There are a lot of people working around us right now whose job it is to keep bad things from happening. I worked in a very small tech company once, and the boss was constantly trying to reduce the hours of our only IT person because clearly things were running just fine. When the people are doing really well at keeping bad things from happening, we forget we need them at all.

Twitter manages gazillions of data, and they propagate that information around the world in near-realtime. So many ones, so many zeroes. And right now, all those tweets are still flying around, and we’re willing to believe for a moment that Elon Musk is not simply an idiot baby of blood emeralds, but some kind of business smart guy. Twitter is still running! But that’s a tribute to the hard-working people who don’t work there anymore.

Elon has seen things running smoothly, and has not stopped to credit the people who are responsible for that. Quite the opposite, in fact; he has sent them packing. The plane is autopilot; it is a credit to the people who built the plane that it may go quite a while before slamming into a mountainside.

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NaNoWriMo so Far

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I haven’t been very bloggy lately, but that’s how it goes sometimes. I am (sort of) pursuing NaNoWriMo again this year if for no other reason than habit; there were 110 people who “won” the first year I did NaNo, and that was twenty-one years ago. Most of those have not written 50,000 words every November since then. It is possible that some of them have, but there is a finite possibility that I have the single longest win streak in all of NaNoWriModom.

Were it not for that streak, I probably would not have bothered to fire up the word processor this time. But maybe that in itself is a sign that I need this one more than usual. I have to answer the question, “am I still a writer?”

I will eventually publish my November 1 output, as is traditional. It’s a cool hard science fiction setting, and the big story is a series of vignettes across a millennium or two. It’s pretty cool.

I wrote a draft of the first vignette, enjoyed it, saw problems with it, and… stopped. Lots of ideas, lots of themes to explore, interesting characters. Sounds pretty neat! But I’m not up to writing it right now. With more than half the month gone, and only a few thousand words so far, I realized I need to change stories. I decided to take an idea I had used before, a story called “The Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy” — a romp that plays with silly fantasy tropes — and put it in space.

So I started to tackle “The Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy — In Space!” and I quickly realized that I was writing Star Wars. That movie doesn’t revolve around an Important Thing so much, but all the Sci-fi hacks are there, ready to be played with. You have probably seen more than one Star Wars parody in your time on Earth. There’s a reason for that.

So, what the heck, let’s just run with it. This is less overtly a Star Wars parody than the others, but not by much. It follows the same story beats, but the characters are very different, and I think more fun. C-3PO is now a sex-bot, and R2 goes by G5MBRAB. It will not respond to any simplification (It’s not his fault people insist on communicating using vibrations in the air), so in dialog I can chew up words with, “Hey, Gee Five Em Bee Are Ay Bee, go get the hammer.” G5MBRAB swears like a sailor.

I have not figured out how to address the fact that in Star Wars, R2 completely forgets it can fly through the air and electrocute entire platoons of battle-bots, to land years later on a planet and be waddling along in an extremely inefficient way only to be zapped into unconsciousness by a little scavenger with glowing eyes. But it has to be in there.

A hitch I did not expect as I wrote the irreverent banter when Bixby goes to get some new bots: One group of sentient, articulate beings paying money to own other sentient, articulate beings. Sure, they’re only robots, created by the organics, but let’s face it: they are as much characters as any of the carbon-based life forms in the story.

In Star Wars, the ownership relationship is quickly forgotten — at least for two exceptional droids. But it’s still there for all the others.

G5MBRAB says at one point, “This story isn’t ready for that yet.”

It will still be a frivolous romp, playing with the absurdities of space opera, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t also shine a little light on the unspoken darkness that lives there as well. The real revolution may not be against the empire.

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The Big Bed

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Every now and then, when it has been an emotionally draining day, we invite the dogs to hop up into the big bed with us, so the whole pack can be together.

While Gilfoyle enjoys being up there, Lady Byng lives to be snuggled with the pack. Last night was a pack night. Tonight, every time I look toward the bedroom, she tears off in maximum excitement, sure that tonight her dream of being on the Big Bed will be realized again. She has cracked the code, knows what to do, and there will be Big Bed nights forevermore.

Except nope, there is nothing she can do to change the outcome tonight. Some outcomes you don’t control, as much as you would like to think you do.

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The Atlis Work Truck (Atlis not a typo)

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Somehow it came to my attention tonight that there is a new maybe-vapor entry in the pick-up truck market called the Atlis. It is remarkable in several ways, not all good, but the top-line message is that it’s electric.

“Work Truck” is a market where electric makes a lot of sense. Torque, stop-and-go efficiency, low maintenance. Electric outlets to power your tools. Oddly, all images of this work truck show a jacked-up off-road suspension and a paint job perhaps intended to confuse laser-guided missiles. I’m guessing that doesn’t match your worksite requirements.

Here’s a picture. Take a look, we’ll be coming back here often.

The Future

First, let’s talk about the nose of this beast. If you have driven lately, you may have noticed that the grilles on trucks have been getting bigger and bigger, until now when you look in the rear-view all you see is massive chrome accordion climbing up your ass. (The drivers of these vehicles are invariably discourteous.)

Those massive grilles are in front of equally massive radiators, because as these trucks get ever-more powerful, the waste heat they create increases as well. Roughly half of the energy created by burning fuel is waste, and must be dissipated by the radiator. The need for so much airflow to cool the engine means that the vehicle must be less aerodynamic, which means it needs to burn more fuel to get where it’s going. Which produces more heat.

But now you have an electric truck! There’s no need for a radiator at all! So instead of a massive, aerodynamically-awful grille, you get this… massive, aerodynamically-awful flat plate. First impression: Man, that’s ugly. Second impression: It’s a work truck. Can you take $1000 off the price by abandoning aesthetics? Then that is the right choice. And shit, it still looks better than that weird Tesla thing.

Let’s not talk about those headlights.

The description of the interior sounds like a true work truck. “Durable materials.” “Easy to clean.” Now we’re talking. Sure, there’s a touch screen, and sure, touch screens remain a bad idea anywhere within reach of the driver of a car. But other than that, the interior says, “some expense spared.” No frills. Not afraid of mud. Mostly I suspect this is a spin on “we can’t match the luxury you will find in the latest Ford.” But that right there is singing my song. You can listen to your Beethoven and sip your latte in your GMC Sierra or you can go to fuckin’ work in your Atlis. Just try not to think too much about the name.

And you want a work truck? This thing has the juice to power your worksite, and an air compressor too.

They make a big deal about the batteries. They’ve got some unique tech or whatnot that lets you fully charge them in fifteen minutes. That sounds pretty nice, but…

The limit to how fast you charge a battery is how much damage you are willing to do to it. Heat is an inevitable product of charging, and the faster you charge, the hotter things get. Heat also is a big contributor to batteries degrading. It’s a work truck, not a transcontinental cruiser. (If it were a transcontinental cruiser, I’d hope for better aerodynamics.) Go to work. Do your work. Get dirty. Haul stuff around. (Four motors on four wheels! unstoppable!) Go home and plug in. You have all night to get ready for another hard day. I hope fast charging is optional, because if this were my work truck, I’d want the battery to last as long as possible.

I grew up in New Mexico, so I know that sometimes even a Work Truck has to cover some miles in a given day. Three hundred miles round-trip is actually kind of common (now I’m getting a little more concerned over aerodynamics). But even then, it’s a round trip, and then you’re home and you can plug in for a few hours. This is the reality of a Work Truck.

I should note in closing that I’m pretty sure they’re not selling these yet. Interestingly, when/if they do reach production, it appears that leasing (I mean subscribing) is the only option, but the lease includes free charging. If you have to go somewhere else to charge up, then maybe the fast charging makes sense. Especially if you’re swapping vehicles before the battery goes kaput. The monthly cost seems kind of high, but if you subtract gas expenses it starts to feel competitive. Especially if you use those batteries to power a bunch of other stuff as well. As long as you work near a charging station. Which, at this point, seems undefined. And insurance is included!

To sum up, this truck does a pretty good job with not having features that a work truck doesn’t need. It’s ugly as fuck, but it’s electric. If it’s spartan that means that you’re only paying for things that actually matter. If you need a truck, it seems like you could do a lot worse. If it ever becomes real and if there’s a charging station close to you, consider Atlis for your work-truck needs.

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Summer Evening on the Patio

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It’s a pleasant evening here, still warm but not oppressive, the sun dropping behind the hills to the west. I’m on the patio, enjoying new(ish), deep chair cushions, and a tasty malt beverage.

Nearby, a neighbor has fired up the grill, and has filled the gentle air with the sweet smell of barbecue. Thank you, neighbor!

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Fool Me Once

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HBO’s been pushing its new “Premium Television” series that takes place in the same world as Game of Thrones. I haven’t been paying attention, but I think it’s a prequel. There’s dragons and shit, so it might be cool. But…

The final season of Game of Thrones was giddily anticipated. HBO was on top of the world, producing the most talked-about show for years.

The final season of Game of Thrones also sucked. It sucked in very apparent and obvious ways, and also in subtler ways as well. From the writing to the CGI to the Starbucks cup, it was a train wreck. I say this honestly and sincerely: I could have done better, for half the cost.

The storytelling failure is the least forgivable. Sure, they were setting up for season after season that there was one human on the planet that could kill the crazy undead snow skeleton. And in previous seasons, we watch her journey into something incredible and we are FULLY ON BOARD.

Then in the final season there’s the big battle: slaughter, slaughter, slaughter, a few heroic deeds, a heroic death or two, then the girl kills the supernatural symbolic threat from the north and everyone says, “whoo, that was close!” They wipe their brows and ten minutes later the threat to the very existence of humanity is forgotten.

Before the first frame was shot, that story should have been challenged. But it wasn’t. The writers who didn’t care were given a free pass by producers who didn’t care.

Even before production for the season began, when people are reading the story and deciding their own personal goddam legacies in the industry, that story wasn’t challenged. The thing that (we thought) symbolized the extinction of the human race is beaten in an ordinary battle, and there’s high-fives and hugs and then it’s on to the absurd conclusion. It’s video-game logic; just another boss to beat, all the symbolism of life and death trampled in the rush to just get this goddam thing over with.

It’s pretty clear the whole production ran out both of money and the ability to care. I can hear the director say, “fuck it, we’ll fix it in post,” and move on — without considering that maybe post didn’t have the budget to fix all that shit. But no one cared. Not even the people who hoped to extend this dynasty into other shows.

I don’t know the specifics of why that production ran out of steam. Why they stopped caring. Money, exhaustion, boredom with the subject. But the last season of GoT was a sloppy mess, and the brand will never be the same. If the goal was to be Marvel With Swords, they fucked up.

I will not be watching the new production. I like the dragons and whatnot, but I will not invest any time in this show until the final episode of the final season is aired. I do not trust these people. “OMG OMG OMG that episode was so awesome” my friend will say, and I will reply, “that’s where they get you.” Unless they put Vince Gilligan in charge of the ending, I will wait.

I don’t know how to calculate the cost to HBO of that shitty conclusion to their biggest show ever, but I guarantee the cost to fix that season is less that what they have lost because their new show isn’t must-watch, but simply “whatever”.

I suspect, (but I don’t know), that there were people at HBO saying of the final GoT Season, “We have to push the release. This is shit.”

“Do you know how much that would cost?” is the obvious response.

But none of the big-wigs considered the cost of not fixing it. The cost HBO is about to feel, no matter how much they spend on marketing. We don’t trust them anymore.

6

Thanks!

Sexy Units

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I was reading a not-great-but-interesting science fiction story today, set in the far future. There was this line: “She might have been only a bit short of a meter-and-a-half tall, but she packed every inch of her frame with massive muscles.”

I’m hoping right now that people in that distant time are a little more settled on their units of measure. But there is a fundamental issue that speculative fiction especially struggles with: metric units are not sexy. Damn near every one of them is four syllables at least.

“I would walk one thousand miles” is light-years ahead of “I would walk one thousand kilometers,” or even, “I would walk a megameter.” (Hm. That last one has a little spark.)

Inch is cooler than centimeter. Mile is WAY more poetic than kilometer. But in science fiction writing, there has been a failure to give humanity credit for the ability to take the mundane and technical, and bring it to life.

In this case, the military has already started: Kilometer is ‘klick’. “It’s ten klicks out and coming in fast!” In some contexts, that’s better than “mile”. Such a hard-sounding word. It has an urgency to it. You wander for miles, but when the threat is coming in at twenty klicks per second you don’t fuck around.

I don’t think I have ever read a story that has reduced these units the way they surely will be. “Give them a cem, they’ll take a klick.” “I missed it by half a mim.”

And let’s face it, “a meter-and-a-half tall”, while getting high marks for hyphen usage, is not casual conversation. “She wasn’t even 15 dems tall, but she packed every cem of her frame with massive muscles.” Better, don’t you think? It’s not simply that the units are consistent; it creates part of a language that gives the world its character. And it’s just tighter.

I have often decried the dry, non-poetic nature of the metric system in literature. But now I see that that dryness is my fault. There will be poets in the future, long after miles are forgotten, yet they will still speak of distance, and they will not use four syllables just for the unit designation. Maybe they will be even more versatile. “A million klicks away” might mean one thing, while “A million kloms away” would connote something else entirely.

As writers, we can imagine how people in the future will streamline these words, and make the form these shortened words take be a subtle part of the world they live in. Natural to them, instructive to us. Fun for everyone!

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Thanks!