Spectre Collie

Top. Men.

Reconsidering the Indiana Jones movies through the male gaze of the male gays

Today I responded to a gag on Bluesky which said that it was insane to make the new Indiana Jones game first person, since a huge part of the appeal of Indiana Jones was looking at Harrison Ford shirtless with a whip.

“Ah yes ha ha I can relate to this as part of my shared experience as a gay man,” I thought as I nodded and smiled along in… wait hang on! Have I been wrong about the Indiana Jones franchise my entire life?!

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my top 5 favorite movies, easily, and is usually what I’ll say if you ask me point blank what my all-time favorite is. I’ve seen it an awful lot. I had the poster for Raiders on the wall of my bedroom, the one with Indy in the center, cracking his bullwhip, his shirt half open. I also had the teaser poster for Temple of Doom on my wall for a while, the one with Indy standing in an archway with half his shirt missing.

I never thought much about how much of the imagery of Indiana Jones is bare-chested. Actually, that’s a complete lie; I thought about it a lot. What I mean to say is that I never thought much about the implications of it.

After all, these are some of the most heterosexual movies ever made, right? Not like Roadhouse or Commando by trying so hard to prove that they’re heterosexual; the Indiana Jones movies always felt super-straight to me because they didn’t have anything to prove. These are action movies all about recreating a long-lost archetype of a Man’s Man from the early 20th century. Women want him; men want to be him — and if the connection weren’t obvious enough, they made it explicit by casting Sean Connery¹ as his dad. And even though the second movie started with a fabulous musical number, it felt less like a musical number than like a man going out of his way to look at his hot new girlfriend in a tight dress.

I’m so used to things being “queer-coded” — whether it’s secret messages hidden in a work by sly artists speaking to a subsection of their audience, or oblivious artists making art that queer people will spend the next several decades furiously re-contextualizing and reinterpreting. I always just assume by default that I’m watching or reading any work “the wrong way,” appreciating things that the filmmakers never intended.

But now that I think about it, I’m no longer sure it was unintentional. The thing that’s become abundantly clear is that the Indiana Jones movies are super horny, and they’re super horny exclusively for Indiana Jones. And although I’m sure they exist, I can’t personally recall ever hearing a woman name anything in the franchise as their favorite movie. But tons of men do. So we have a group of heterosexual directors, writers, and actors all working to make a film franchise for men that’s about how impossibly sexy the male lead character is.

That’s not to say that women don’t enjoy it, of course. I still remember seeing Raiders for the first time as a middle school birthday party. Our chaperone, a young woman in her 20s, was silent throughout, until the scene in which Indy gets off a submarine, punches out a Nazi, and takes his hat. At which point she said, out loud, “He’s so fine!”

I’d even say that the spark of the movies directly correlates to how sexy Harrison Ford can be. Crystal Skull has a lot of issues, but I think the bulk of it comes down to the feeling of being a kid watching your parents at a dinner party with a bunch of other grown-ups. And Dial of Destiny kind of drives the point home with its extended opening sequence saying “remember when Harrison Ford used to be impossibly hot?” I read an interview that said he insisted that he appear in his underwear after the extended flashback, to drive home the idea of how much Indy (and he) had aged. And I respect that a lot, especially for a movie that is primarily about regret and vainly wanting to turn back the clock. But it’s an entirely different vibe from the earlier movies.

None of this is at all unprecedented, either. I can still remember seeing an interview with Robert Conrad as a retrospective of The Wild Wild West, in which he made a joke about how the producers of the show were always putting him into impossibly tight pants.

My conclusion from all this is that I should be less hung up about target audiences and whether or not I fit. There is a long tradition in commercial entertainment in making money off of attractive people looking sexy and doing exciting things while looking sexy. It was happening long before anybody started over-analyzing it, and before anybody realized how much money you could make by having stuff explicitly marketed towards queer people with disposable income.

The entertainment industry has never cared whether I was watching stuff “the right way.” They only cared that I was watching it.

I kind of prefer to think that I wasn’t alone in some weird silo watching Indiana Jones cracking his whip at Nazis² and swooning that he was cracking that whip for me. Or even finding community from other gay kids whose formative movie-watching years were in the early 80s, like how I discovered so many other guys who vividly remember the scenes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when Eddie Valiant had his shirt off. That’s all fine and good, but it’s somehow even more comforting to think that all of us were part of an even larger community, transcending gender and orientation, all sharing the universal human experience of being super horny for Indiana Jones.

1
Even though he’s cleverly cast against type
2
Or every character, male or female, in all of Bull Durham

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Six or Eight Thousand Years Ago

Two tunes with misunderstood lyrics about the cradle of civilization

I ain’t no student of ancient culture, but there’s one thing that I do know: The B-52’s didn’t do a ton of research when writing the song “Mesopotamia.”

But that’s kind of what the song is all about, and kind of why I love the band. They made songs about whatever weird shit they felt like: counterfeiting, driving in the south at night, odd beach encounters, how there are a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia.

Because we’re living in the future, Apple Music automatically showed me the lyrics as I was listening, and I realized I’ve had it wrong for 30 years. When Kate sings, “I know a neat excavation!” I had always heard it as “I know I need excavation,” which I’d always thought was some kind of weird horny double entendre. The real version is much more charming and in the spirit of the B-52s, of course.¹

Another lyric I always misheard was from “River Euphrates” by the Pixies. I thought they were just saying “ri-ri-ri-ri” over and over again for River Euphrates, much like Shaggy would say “gh-gh-gh-gh” for Ghosts. Apparently the real lyric is “Ride a tire down the River Euphrates.” Which is also much more charming than I’d thought. It generates a calming image of the Black Francis and Kim Deal tubing through the cradle of civilization while Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson call from the shore to come check out some neat pyramids.

1
I don’t think they ever had any racy lyrics at all, did they? Apart from “Strobe Light” and “I’m gonna kiss your pineapple!!!”

Literacy 2024: Book 6: Poirot Investigates

A collection of short stories featuring Agatha Christie’s most famous detective.

Book
Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Synopsis
A collection of short stories about Hercule Poirot’s various cases, all narrated by his friend Captain Hastings.

Pros

The variety of stories shows that Christie was a master at finding variation in a shared formula.
The stories don’t feel particularly rushed, and still manage to capture most of the characterization and personality of the full-length mysteries.
Often feels as if Christie didn’t consider the mystery aspect much of a challenge, and she was far more interested in the personalities of Poirot and Hastings.
No one would mistake this for a feminist work, but it does subtly reinforce the intelligence and capabilities of women while still staying mostly within its boundaries as classist, sexist, early 20th century England.
I always like it when Christie introduces elements of Egyptology and ancient Egyptian history into her stories, because it’s clear she dearly loves the subject.
There’s a delightful couple of afterwards written by Christie, talking about her love/hate relationship with Poirot.

Cons

Jarringly racist, in particular against the Chinese.
The gimmick doesn’t always work; a couple of the stories are entirely in the form of Poirot telling Hastings a story that had happened years previously, and the lack of immediacy makes it difficult to follow.
Some of the stories end abruptly.

Verdict
Light and mostly fun, especially good for establishing Poirot as a long-running character, with more presence than the full novel-length mysteries.

Side Note
My modest goal was to read 12 books this year, and I’m clearly not going to make it. It’s not been a great year, and maybe reading challenges are dumb?

Agatha the Irredeemable

Final (for now) thoughts on Agatha All Along. Spoilers for the entire series.

Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.

My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.

The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.

I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.

Things I Know to be True Right Now

Stray, unorganized thoughts while changing focus and priorities

It has been an absolutely beautiful day in my section of Los Angeles today. I went up to the roof for a while and enjoyed the sun and a very nice breeze, while appreciating the view around my house. Seeing mountains and palm trees all around is still such a novelty for me, and I hope I never get tired of it. There are two tall palm trees (which are perfectly framed by my office window) that have become a symbol of serenity for me.

I should’ve known after my experience with smoking, but giving up anything cold turkey just doesn’t work for me. So instead of being able to change my focus and priorities all at once, I should probably expect sporadic bursts of I Have A Take On Politics That I Must Share With The Internet.

I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I have a strong suspicion that many of the people I spent years aligning myself with online, who’d talk about equality and rejecting classism and capitalism, etc, are people who never talk to their Uber drivers.

That’s not purely a condemnation, by the way. I have a lot of scorn for hypocrites and snobs, but I also need to acknowledge that I’m out of touch with people. In the case of ride-sharing, even if I weren’t an introvert, I don’t think anybody doing their job should be obligated to make conversation if they don’t want to. And it’s inherently a deeply unfair situation, more than a taxi, because the company that doesn’t give them benefits still holds them accountable to driver ratings. You’re unlikely to get a candid conversation that will build bridges. But when I’ve been in a ride with a particularly gregarious driver, or an extroverted passenger, it’s been a reminder that I very rarely talk to people whose jobs and economic situations are different from my own.

Speaking of smoking: over the past few days, my brain keeps asking “What would it even matter?” if I had a cigarette. But I haven’t had one yet. And in the days since I last tried one and hated it, I haven’t been that interested in getting one. I’ve noticed I think of myself as a non-smoker now, too: whenever I do get the urge to have a cigarette, I think of it as a novelty, instead of going back to my default state of always having a pack on me. Plus the memory of my last one is still really gross. I have a ton of sympathy for people battling addictions.

While I was up on the roof today, I was reminded that I hardly ever go up there, and in fact have spent entire days without going outside. Worse, instead of being outside in the sun with a great view, I’m most often indoors on my phone looking at things that make me angry or sad, which I have no control over and no influence to do anything about. It drove home the fact that I’m not actually just being lazy and using social media or the news to procrastinate, as I’ve always assumed, but I’m actively choosing to look at it instead of doing something healthy.

I was reminded today that one of the best TV series of all time, The Good Place, ran from 2016 to 2020. It seems fitting for a series that was all about ethical behavior in a world that made ethics seem like an impossible luxury. The thing that I love most about the series was that it was so full of grace: never saccharine sentimentality, never compromising on its core values, but still understanding that there’s so much complexity in what makes a person good or bad.

Another thing I thought about while I was on my roof was how grateful I am to have that place to go to. It’s a luxury that I’ve been embarrassed to even talk about, since it often feels like I don’t deserve it. And if you spend too much time online, like I have, you’ll be constantly subjected to crucial ideas of societal injustice and inequity being used as a bludgeon, making a convincing case that you don’t deserve anything.

Today I reminded myself that although I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate, benefiting from the hard work of my parents, the incredible kindness of friends, and just plain good luck, that it’s not just luck and privilege. I’ve worked hard, made thoughtful choices, and set priorities. But the most important thing is the simplest: I’ve tried to be humble, kind, generous, and fair, always. And even when I haven’t succeeded, I’ve tried to be the kind of person that people want to work with. It’s always seemed like the bare minimum, but lately as I’ve been filled with despair at seeing arrogance, selfishness, and unkindness succeed, I’ve realized just how valuable humility and kindness can be.

Pedal to the Metal, Late to the Party

Here’s why the board game Heat: Pedal to the Metal is my new obsession

Heat: Pedal to the Medal is a board game published by Days of Wonder and developed by Sidekick Studio that came out in 2022. Each player controls a Grand Prix race car competing against up to 5 other racers to navigate the tight corners of a track, managing a hand of cards representing the car’s speed, the driver’s stress, and the engine’s heat.

And I am straight-up obsessed with it at the moment. It’s not just because it’s a lot of fun, but because it’s so elegant and clever. The core mechanic is so well-balanced, with every component having a clear cost-vs-benefit aspect that seems to generate an infinite number of interesting decisions from what should otherwise be the most tedious and repetitive process of going around a race track.

Even if you have no interest in auto racing, Heat is such a clever abstraction that it gives you a better idea of where the depth and complexity of the sport lie. Each track — there are four included in the base game — has its own peculiarities which can lead to surprisingly different strategies.

And then that core mechanic can be expanded on seemingly indefinitely, with a bunch of modules included in the base box, which players are free to mix and match. The game has been out long enough that the first expansion, Heat: Heavy Rain came out earlier this year, but I feel like I could play the base game dozens and dozens more times before needing to add anything else.

This is neither a tutorial nor a detailed review, but my list of the aspects of the game that impress me the most.

On Second Thought, Maybe Not

An appreciation for a few months of hope, and a resolution to keep my focus smaller and healthier from now on

The internet doesn’t need to know the details, but my reaction to the election results last night and this morning were enough — and were physiological enough — to convince me that I haven’t been keeping it together as well as I’d thought. And I’d thought I’d been doing pretty bad at it.

So while it’d be better if I could share something meaningful about resistance and defiance and strength and resolve in the face of evil, that’s just not me, realistically. For about as long as I can remember, people have been yelling that it’s selfish and irresponsible not to be deeply concerned about politics, and I’ve believed them. Social media has amplified that, blurring the line of what constitutes genuine activism, and loading us all with more stress than I think any of us are equipped to handle. Maybe it is selfish and irresponsible, but I prefer to think that it’s simply being more conscious of the tremendous gap between awareness and influence. It accomplishes nothing for any of us to be filled with concern and anxiety over something that we have no control over.

I don’t feel naive, or regret the couple of months I let myself feel hopeful because of the Harris/Walz campaign. I’m grateful for it. It was a great feeling, after years of feeling my hope just dwindle and flicker, to let it flare up again, to say this is what I believe in, this is what I value. They did so much to fight cynicism. And I believe it worked, for me at least, because what I’m feeling isn’t rooted in blame, or second-guessing, or suspicion. I got the chance to declare what I believe in. And there’s no longer any need to give other voters the benefit of the doubt — they clearly chose what they believe in, and they said that the things I value don’t matter.

Unlike 2016, when people like me tried to find sages online who could explain exactly what went wrong, where the Democrats failed, and what we could all do better next time, I don’t feel any need to look at post mortems. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz connected with people, and they had so much support that they’d raised over a billion dollars. And it somehow still wasn’t enough. The message there isn’t to try harder; it’s that the current system simply isn’t working.

And I hope I can finally just come to terms with the fact that I don’t have an answer, and I don’t have to have an opinion. I’ve spent the last few months formulating and clarifying my opinions and putting my money behind the people I want to support, and keeping up to date on the news because it was encouraging again, and it’s been at the expense of everything else in my life, that’s actually important.

My life was so much better before Twitter existed. I haven’t actually used Twitter in several years, but its influence has lingered on, not just in other social media, but in the way my brain is wired now to have a take on everything. I used to make things. I used to spend my free time working on projects, and enjoying movies and television and games and books, and writing about them on here to think in more depth about how they worked. I’ve seen several people today saying that times of crisis and uncertainty are when it’s most important to make art — I agree, although I think that overstates the inherent importance of art works by quite a lot.

There is value in the work, but the greatest value is the part of your life you dedicate to creating it. Pouring yourself into the creation of something simply because it can’t possibly exist otherwise, the diametric opposite of creating “content” to fill the space between ad slots.

So if nothing else, I’m artfully excusing myself from politics indefinitely, apart from giving help to people who are threatened, and concentrating on smaller, more local topics that can actually benefit from my efforts. And I’m pledging to drastically change my relationship with social media. Focusing only on what I control, like this blog; or the parts that actually constitute community.

For most of today, it’s felt like my light was finally extinguished, after years of sputtering in naive hopefulness. I’m resolving to change how I think about it: drawing in and hunkering down to re-ignite it, to be more protective of it, to keep it from being blown out for good.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Amen

Two tunes hopeful that we’re about to move forward

I’m writing this on Monday night, so I don’t yet know how the election will turn out. I’m confident enough that sanity and decency will win out, but after being blind-sided by Proposition 8 in 2008, and then the presidential election in 2016, I don’t trust people to do the right thing as much as I used to.

Whatever the outcome, though, there’s no blaming the Harris campaign. They’ve been working tirelessly to earn every vote they can, against attacks from all sides, and understanding they’re not just working against the GOP but against voter apathy and cynicism. They’ve been stunningly effective and positive, and I think they deserve a victory lap regardless.

If for nothing else, then for choosing “Freedom” by Beyoncé as the campaign song. Not just as a campaign slogan, not just for the significance of a powerful Black woman using the music of another powerful Black woman, but as an undeniable message that this campaign was different. Dragging America kicking and screaming into the 21st century, prying it out of the claws of desperate white Boomers if need be.

And since Harris has made her last speech of the campaign, her final argument and the summation of her message, it seems appropriate to pair it with “Amen,” the last track on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.

It’s the companion to the starting track of that album, “American Requiem,” which sets up the album’s message: it’s about reclaiming her space as a musician and, more significantly, as an American. I’d initially took it as just a play on genre, Beyoncé insisting that she doesn’t need to be relegated to R&B, she can damn well make a country album if she wants to. But there’s more to it than that, as if the cover image of her wearing a red, white, and blue suit on horseback while waving an American flag didn’t make it obvious. The idea is pretty clear: you don’t own this country, you don’t get to tell me whether I belong or not.

That’s an even more perfect fit for the Harris campaign and what makes it feel so exciting to me. For as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had people appointing themselves to be the arbiters of who does and doesn’t belong where. Wrapping themselves in American flags, calling themselves “patriots,” shamelessly declaring that they’re the “real” Americans, acting as if everyone else is here by their grace alone. Honestly, all that Trump and Vance have done is taken that tired old idea and made it explicit. We’ve been hearing it so long, in fact, that people can wave signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” given to them by the GOP at the Republican National Convention, and it barely got a blip of interest from the media. Promises of ethnic cleansing treated with such a lack of interest or alarm, you’d think it was yet another mass murder of children and teachers at a school.

This campaign has been all about taking back the things that have been stolen by the Republicans from Reagan onward: patriotism; belief in the ideal of America; accepting that the ideal has never been perfect, but that striving for it is the entire point; and hearing “anyone can grow up to be President of the United States” as aspirational, instead of a dire warning of the lack of safeguards in our election system.

“Amen” ends with lines repeated from “American Requiem,” and I think they’re perfect: “Them old ideas are buried here. Amen.”

Half the Country

On the day before the election, I’m mentally back to where I was a couple of months ago

As much as I love Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg, I’ve been avoiding watching their sketches playing Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff on Saturday Night Live because I need pure, earnest enthusiasm to mentally handle this election season.

But I watched last weekend’s cold open with a guest appearance from Harris, and I was surprised. Surprised that it was actually funny, surprised at how much of the material they can gather for a sketch without having to make anything up¹, and surprised to be reminded of how easy it is to feel joyful and hopeful.

Even out of office, Trump has spent so many years doing psychic damage on all of us that it’s surprising when we’re not feeling beaten down and paranoid. It was unsettling to watch something and not be spinning through all of the reasons I should be rolling my eyes, and instead just see two quite wealthy and famous women having such a good time goofing off with each other that they could not stop smiling and giggling. Yes, “Keep Calmala and Carry Onala” is inexcusably silly, but yes, I will absolutely allow it and would even consider buying the T-shirt.

I’ve never seen anybody in Trump’s circle ever look genuinely happy. The closest they get is a kind of coked-up mania, or a self-satisfied sneer as they’re saying something particularly racist, misogynistic, or transphobic. Apart from that, they’re always dour and mean, even when they’re trying to be light and funny. They’re the personification of Melania’s horrible Christmas display. They’re not just joyless; they actually tried to make the case that being joyful was bad or shameful.

Early in Harris’s campaign, people said that she was running on “vibes.” Emphasizing being free and joyful. And the pundits all lost their shit at the idea, insisting that Americans really care about serious business like policy proposals.

If nothing else, we’ve seen that that’s demonstrably false. Because one of the two major parties in this election has brought jack shit to the table in terms of policy, and it’s still apparently a close race. Just complete incompetence, despite the media’s desperate attempts to help legitimize them, repeatedly excusing them for having no policies, or translating their nonsense into an absurdly generous interpretation of what they might have tried to almost be saying. They have nothing to promise except ethnic cleansing and higher prices for everything. The party of freedom and fiscal responsibility is running on the promise that if they win, it’s going to be a dictatorship that will mean hardship for most Americans.

It’s nothing new to point out that they’re just so spectacularly bad at everything², but at this point it’s completely bottomed out. They have nothing left. And all the people who are still desperately trying to make it all seem sane and normal have nothing left to defend them with besides “half the country.”

I’ve complained about it lots of times before, but it’s one of the most pernicious lies that people across the political and sanity spectrums insist on repeating, that “half the country supports Trump.” It’s still objectively false, since half the country doesn’t bother to vote. And of the half that does, only a relatively small percentage are actually the MAGA stereotypes that we keep seeing getting dunked on and/or exhaustively interviewed in the media. It would be more accurate to say that “a little less than a quarter of the country isn’t bothered enough by Trump to vote for a Democrat.”

The reason I think it’s a distinction worth pointing out: once Kamala Harris is in office, and Trump loses yet another presidential election and starts having to answer for his long list of criminal offenses, that’s only the start of fixing everything that’s broken. No doubt there will be some MAGA types trying to First Order their way back into relevance, but I feel like they’ve blown it with this campaign, and they’ve become too much of a liability for all the billionaires hiding behind them.

I think the more pervasive enemy is apathy and cynicism. It’s obvious that there’s been a huge propaganda push telling Americans that there’s no real difference between the two parties, and that everybody’s corrupt. But propaganda can’t force people to believe something that they didn’t already suspect on some level.

So personally: I’m feeling optimistic that Kamala Harris is going to win the popular vote — as long as every eligible voter does their basic civic duty and votes! — and I’m confident that they’re prepared to jump through the inevitable hoops that the GOP will try to put them through in order to steal the election. That’s not based on any real info, just feels. It feels like the message is connecting with people, it feels like people are motivated to vote, it feels like Republicans have once again spectacularly underestimated how strongly women feel about their autonomy, and it feels like enough people still remember 2016-2020 and have no desire to see an even worse version of it.

But more than any of the positive signs, I’m optimistic just because my despair reserves are empty. It’s no exaggeration to say that people are exhausted. I’m tired of seeing those assholes constantly being shoved in my face and demanding my attention, cackling like Emperor Palpatine, begging me to hate them. I’m hoping that they’re all resigned to an America where they have no relevance apart from being on trial, being voted out of office or disbarred, and of course, appearing on Dancing With the Stars before vanishing completely.

My secret special wish is that they manage to take Elon Musk with them.

And I’m back to feeling like I did on that first White Dudes for Harris Zoom call, when I heard Governor Walz come on and lay out the facts. All the things that we’ve known for years, but the media acted like we weren’t allowed to say. That it’s 2024, and we care more about competence and confidence than outdated ideas about whether race or gender alone makes somebody “electable.” That nobody actually wants the bullshit the GOP is selling, stoking fears of immigrants and trans people that normal people don’t actually have. And that it’s just plain weird how we lived through the batshit insanity of the Trump administration, and all our institutions insisted on treating it like it was all normal.

I refuse to believe that “half the country” actually supports Trump’s bullshit, and I don’t believe they’ll even get the people who used to begrudgingly tolerate Trump’s bullshit. I don’t even believe that half the country supports Kamala Harris! But I don’t believe it’s naive, unrealistic, or overly optimistic at all to believe that half the country is tired of the dysfunction of the past ten years, and we’re all ready for a reboot.

1
Yes, the Republican candidate for the President of the United States did mimic fellating a microphone at one of his rallies.
2
And so smug about it, which is the part that always gets me. How anyone can support these clowns and be not just embarrassed, but arrogant, is beyond me.

Nostalgia Buffer Overflow

Classic computers, emulators, and realizing I need to upgrade my computer memories

I’ve spent years talking myself out of buying a “vintage” Macintosh or trying to upgrade my old one, each time thinking I’ve put the compulsion to rest for good, only to have it reawakened a few weeks or months later, the second I see a compact Mac in the background of a YouTube video, or I see a screenshot of an old ICOM game.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to stop the lambs from screaming, and I bought a Macintosh SE from a collector on Craigslist. I spent more than was recommended by people online,¹ but it included the original keyboard, mouse, manuals, and box, and it appears to be in excellent condition, so I’m satisfied.

It’s pretty easy to find tons of software for vintage Macs — more than I ever would’ve been able to get in the late 1980s — but actually getting it from the internet onto an actual computer means using a device like the BlueSCSI. I ordered an external one and received it about a week later, and it was so straightforward to use that within a few hours, I’d already ruined it.

That’s just me being over-dramatic. I’d just made it so that the BlueSCSI keeps booting into Dark Castle, which was designed to run from a floppy, meaning it never returns control back to the Finder. So I had a dedicated Dark Castle machine, which honestly wouldn’t be so bad, except that I at least want to be able to run HyperCard as well.

It’s not that complicated to fix, but it does mean re-installing the Basilisk II emulator on my MacBook Pro to fix up my SD card. And running the emulator on a modern computer, with gigabytes of ram instead of 1MB, and a high-speed connection to the internet, and a processor that’s so fast it makes everything open and run instantaneously, is a stark reminder of how much computers have improved since the late 1980s.

And it’s actually made me reassess what kind of nerd I am, and exactly how much. The Mac SE I bought only has 1MB of RAM, meaning it can barely run System 6 comfortably², and can’t run System 7 at all. I ordered an upgrade to 4MB over ebay³, which seemed like a no-brainer, but now has me more than a little anxious about trying to install it.

There’s no shortage online of instructions on how to open up a classic compact Mac, and they all come with warnings about how dangerous it is to work around a CRT. I’ve spent enough time working with PC motherboards that I believe it’d be easy enough for me to do, but there is something that would be even easier for me to do, and that’s not bother with the memory upgrade at all. It already feels like with a machine this old, I’m playing Russian roulette every time I turn it on, just daring the hard drive to finally fail, the power supply to go out, and the computer to demand I leave it to its well-deserved eternal rest.

What kind of computer nerd is reluctant to open up a machine and do a simple memory upgrade? I’m starting to think I’ve spent the last several decades in denial about what kind of computer nerd I actually am.

1
Although honestly, the “never spend more than $50” advice seems unrealistic based on everything I’ve been seeing for years. I’ve never seen a listing for a functional one including mouse and keyboard for under $150.
2
Hence all the disk swapping I had to do on my Mac Plus back in 1988
3
Which, hilariously, cost as much as 16GB in modern RAM

Saved by the Bell Curve

A celebration of being comfortably in the boring majority

When I complained about the American news media’s gross journalistic malpractice, I also talked about my disappointment with the Harris-Walz campaign falling back into the worst Democratic election habits. But it would be foolish, and just plain unrealistic, to ignore everything that the campaign has done remarkably well. If nothing else, simply bringing back a sense of hope to all of us trained by the Democratic Party to be perpetually anxious and on the precipice of the downfall of democracy itself.

But the aspect of the Harris campaign that’s been impressing me the most lately is how they’re fighting multiple opponents on multiple fronts — at times, it’s seemed like a dogpile — without going too far on the defensive.

After all, the thing that first got me enthusiastic about the campaign wasn’t that they surpassing the GOP by every measure of success — the Biden Administration has been doing that for four years — but that they were beating the “Democratic elite.” Since Biden’s withdrawal, the campaign has been holding its own against the right, the left, and the media establishment, staying on message about doing what’s best for the middle class.

They’ve also done a remarkably good job of emphasizing that multiple contradictory things can be true at the same time. For instance:

Donald Trump is shockingly stupid, incompetent, childish, narcissistic, and completely unfit for office.
Donald Trump is a serious threat to the future of American democracy.

Those two things have always been true, but seeing them both in action at the same time creates a cognitive dissonance that people just aren’t good at processing. We’re used to our villains being devious masterminds, always thinking two steps ahead of their opponent, always having a contingency at the ready to thwart our heroes.

When you see this worthless shitstain staring at a solar eclipse, it’s difficult to reconcile with the fact that his self-serving incompetence resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. We can’t understand how somebody so incompetent could be given so much responsibility.

During this election season, the thing that keeps pushing me from anxiety to incandescent anger is being reminded of how undeserving everyone in the Trump campaign is. This has been the most brazenly incompetent, voter-hostile, off-message, poorly run campaign I’ve ever seen. Just a non-stop clown show. Even more than with Hilary Clinton’s campaign, it’s felt insulting to the Democratic candidate that she has to prove herself competent without fault, while the Republican candidate is praising Hitler and rambling about the magnificence of Arnold Palmer’s penis, and everybody just shrugs and says “oh well, that’s Trump for ya!” It’s made me long for the good, old-fashioned sinister evil of the past. Devious masterminds working from the shadows, instead of billionaire dipshits just blatantly buying a campaign without even trying to hide it.

So that’s another thing to like about the Harris campaign: she’s brought war criminal Dick Cheney back into the spotlight. I have to admit it’s been entertaining to see people throwing tantrums every time the DNC brought a Republican onto the stage, and especially as Harris has done multiple appearances being chummy with Liz Cheney under a banner reading “Country Over Party.” Not because there’ve been signs that Harris is going back on her progressive policy proposals, which would absolutely be a valid concern, but simply for acknowledging that moderate Republicans and never-Trumpers have more in common with Democrats than MAGA types do. And that the President of the United States has to represent everybody in America, regardless of political party.

It is most likely my pro-Harris bias talking, but I’m a lot more comfortable hearing her talk about working alongside Republicans than when Nancy Pelosi says it. Pelosi comes across as having genuine nostalgia for the Reagan and Clinton administrations, as if they were the golden age of reasonable American politics, instead of the breeding ground for everything that’s wrong with both parties today. With Harris, though, I get a sense of practicality and authenticity. Part of that is simply because she often says stuff I don’t agree with entirely; nothing she says sounds too good to be true, but just common sense good ideas that if enacted, would be more progressive than what we’ve seen in years.

She repeats her talking points relentlessly, to a fault even, but that doesn’t seem to me like a lack of sincerity but instead an insistence that this is the platform, we’re not changing it without a lot of deliberation, because it’s what we believe in, instead of just what people want to hear.

Again: we’ve been stalled for so long that ideas that used to be thought of as wildly progressive are now just plain common sense. Nobody in the Harris administration is going to be pushing hard for universal basic income, but then if the left got everything they wanted, they’d have nothing to complain about.

Which is their favorite thing to do. For several years now, I’ve just kind of gritted my teeth and kept mostly silent whenever the Extremely Online Left went off on yet another self-righteous tirade that had little to do with reality. I always assumed “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and we were both ultimately on the same side. But this year, it feels like I’m better able to see through the bluster and realize that all of the posturing and purity tests have never done much of anything to effect actual change. After seeing a lot of people spending years yelling “Kamala is a Cop,” it’s tough to take them seriously when they threaten to withhold their support for Harris unless she moves to the left.

The one enormous issue, of course, is the Biden administration’s poor handling of the attacks on Palestine, and the Harris campaign’s refusal to talk publicly to Palestinian Americans to reassure them that their concerns are being heard. Harris has stressed wanting to stop the genocide without abandoning the alliance with Israel, but it does seem tone deaf for a Democratic campaign to be giving more visibility to Republicans than to Palestinians.

Which is a stark reminder of the concerns of practicality vs ideology when it comes to a presidential election. I like to think that since the Obama campaign, most of us have matured a bit and can appreciate that you’re not voting for your cool new friend, but for someone who’s going to have to represent 300 million people with wildly differing opinions. It is inherently compromised, and it’s not idealism but fantasy to pretend otherwise. It’s entirely valid to consider Gaza the most important issue in this election, but that means doing everything possible to elect the only candidate who can possibly broker a solution, and it’s appalling to me to see people refusing to acknowledge that.

Considering how often people on social media point to the “Land doesn’t vote, people do” maps, you’d think that they understand how numbers are important to democracy. And you’d think they’d understand how a bell curve works. When you’re in a position of trying to get as many votes as possible, it makes more sense to aim for the big group in the middle instead of the small groups at either end who very loudly insist that they have all the answers.

The most perplexing question in American politics remains why such an ineptly run campaign, led by an idiotic and felonious election-loser, assisted by a few charisma-free trickles of lukewarm diarrhea whose only interesting feature is their absolute hatred of women, could be “so close.”

Obviously, it’s largely if not entirely driven by the outsize influence of money in American politics; the richest people in America clearly do not want Harris to win, and they’ll sacrifice the whole country to keep their hoards intact.

Some of it is simply desperation. They repeat over and over that “50% of America” supports Trump. Fox News’s Bret Beier just recently made that claim when trying to tear down Harris in an interview; he asked, “are you calling half of America stupid?” Traitor Ted Cruz has tried to use the same tactic to repeat his attempts to undermine the 2020 election, saying “a lot of Americans have doubts about the voting results.” It’s always used to defend the indefensible, when they reach the point where they can’t reasonably justify a lie, and can only claim that it’s what the people want.

I’ve already put in my vote¹, I’ve donated as much money as I can afford, and I’ve sent a few letters to try and encourage others to vote, so all I can do at this point is hope that the numbers work out. I no longer believe, as I did for most of my life, that progress happens as a result of the extremes pushing the complacent middle in one direction or the other, but by boring moderates recognizing that the goal is to make as many people as satisfied as possible.

I don’t consider that compromising values, I don’t consider it abandoning my own label of “progressive Democrat,” and I don’t even consider it putting an end to my own idealism. It’s a different kind of idealism, an insistence that reasonable adults can strongly disagree on important issues and still get along and still make progress. That seems more permanent, better able to break us out of the current cycle, where the United States of America has an existential crisis every four years.

I’m tired of having to pretend that the MAGA “movement” is a genuine political party, or that it deserves a voice in my government, instead of just acknowledging that it’s the racist, lunatic fringe that it’s always been. For that matter, I’m tired of feeling like I should be doing more to appease the people who are going to end up calling me a “shitlib” anyway. Go make yourselves useful and start a viable third party or something.

When everyone is trying to tell you that we’re just a coin flip away from disaster, it’s reassuring to be reminded that I’m comfortably in the majority — at least as long as you split the graph horizontally. Unlike a politician, I can comfortably say that MAGA supporters are stupid, and I’m part of the over 50% of Americans who just want reasonable, competent adults running the government.

1
For Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in case you were wondering

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Joysticks

Two of the most joyful tunes in video game music

The Dreamcast is the console I most associate with “Video Game Soundtracks That Rock My Body Til Canada Day,” mostly because of the core memory of being at an E3 and hearing “Mexican Flyer” start up at the Space Channel 5 booth.

But I was a little surprised tonight to discover that the two video game songs that make me the absolute happiest aren’t actually from the Dreamcast.

“Funky Dealer” by Hideki Naganuma is actually from the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack, which was an Xbox title. I just remember having a CD-R with a ton of ill-gotten Sega music on it, and this was the absolute highlight.

But the most absolutely joyful song in video game history is, of course, “Katamari on the Rocks,” from the soundtrack to Katmari Damacy. If you can listen to the first 60 seconds of that track and not be grinning from ear to ear, feeling like the King of all Cosmos, then you have a cold dead heart and I do not wish to know you.

I said good day, sir.