Chuck

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.

Everybody Loves a Quitter

Of all the uncool things I used to do, smoking was the uncoolest

I realized I’ve been talking about this on Zuckerberg-owned social media, but not on my own website that I (technically) control:

I quit smoking on July 23, 2024. At the time I’m writing this, that’s about 13 weeks ago, or a little over three months.

Three months tends to be the point where I either fall off and start smoking again, or can quit completely. The longest I’ve gone is three years, until a serious illness in the family had me stress-smoking again around 2019.

None of the usual methods have ever worked for me. The only success I’ve had is from Chantix/Varenicline, which is like magic in terms of getting rid of my compulsion to smoke, but has some pretty lousy side effects. The nausea and stomach cramping are the most obvious ones, and the ones I remember most vividly. I’m not used to eating breakfast in the morning, and if you take it on an empty stomach, you’ll be wrecked.

More subtle, at least from my perspective, is it gives me low-grade depression, or possibly just makes my pre-existing depression worse. It killed any desire to do anything whatsoever, even stuff that I knew was urgent. That would cause building anxiety and then spirals of feeling worthless. I’ve been off the drug for well over a month now, and I’m only just now getting my motivation back.

Still worth it overall, but I think on the whole I’d recommend just not getting addicted to cigarettes in the first place.

One of the many gross things about smoking is the tobacco would stain my mustache a gross brown, forcing me to shave it off every time I quit. This time, the mustache survived with only a little bit of strategic trimming. I’m taking that as a sign it was meant to be.

A dramatic development: last week during Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, I spent the entire night feeling like I’d been smoking. I’m assuming it was due to all the smoke effects and walking through other park guests’ vape clouds. Whatever the cause, it triggered a weird compulsion like a days-long knot in my chest. I had to have a cigarette.

After hours of talking myself out of it, I finally broke down and bought a pack at a gas station. I went out to the sidewalk and smoked exactly one from the pack, which made me violently nauseated. Nothing pleasurable about it in the slightest. I threw the rest of the pack away, and I haven’t missed it. Have I survived one last temptation, proving that I’m done for good? Or am I cursed to keep doing that every few months until I completely fall off the wagon again? It’s too early to tell, but at least for now I’m not concerned.

On top of all the obvious problems with smoking, there’s a whole host of less important things that make life so much better without it. Going on long flights was a nightmare — getting anxious on the flight itself, and having to go in and out of security just to find a smoking area. Long road trips, days at a theme park or a beach, all of it so much better without the constant distraction. And if you’re addicted like I was, it was a drag having it take up so much of your mental space. Waking up in the morning and deciding to sleep in is so, so much better than having to get up and get dressed immediately just so you can get outside for a smoke as soon as possible.

I’ll never be one of those people who can just have a cigarette on occasion and then forget about it. I know from experience that I either have to avoid it completely, or else I’ll be smoking half a pack a day. In the past, it’s often felt like I was denying myself something, so it’s really nice to realize that I’m so much better off without it, and I don’t miss it at all.

Mid-season of the Witch

Agatha All Along revealed a bunch of stuff we already knew, and it was surprisingly good

Up until episode 6 of Agatha All Along, I’d been enjoying it a lot, if not exactly loving it. I couldn’t help but compare it to WandaVision, which I loved for being so aggressively meta and having each episode feeling like a dense puzzle box. But if Agatha All Along had tried to be as gimmick-driven, it would’ve come across as an uninspired retread.

So I think the show runners used the extended gag of the first episode for all that it was worth, and then wisely set off in a new direction and allowed this series to be its own thing. Instead of each episode being themed to a different era of sitcom, each episode has been an escape room themed to a different decade. They’re still packed with easter eggs and references the MCU hyper-fans crave, but the episodes have felt a little more straightforward as a result.

Which feels odd to type, when I think back on stuff like battling fire demons with prog rock, or an extended Evil Dead slumber party with Agatha hanging from the ceiling and backwards spider-walking. This is still some spectacle-driven television, high-budget even if not quite high enough budget to avoid cutting away right as someone turns over Elizabeth Olsen’s body. And all the elements of horror-comedy are there. The series deserves a ton of credit for sticking to its dark and weird tone without watering everything down. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t felt as cohesive; I haven’t gotten a larger sense of this is what the series is all about.

Until episode 6, which jumped back in time to tell the Teen/Billy’s story from the start. And which was so well done that it’s retroactively made the entire series better. There weren’t any incredibly surprising reveals¹, but it all fit together perfectly, and it answered questions that I didn’t even know I had. There was way too much I liked about this episode for another “one thing I liked,” so here’s a bunch of barely-organized observations (with spoilers).

1
My fiancé predicted the one returning character from WandaVision in another bit of stunt-casting, but I hadn’t seen it coming at all.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: When I Say Stupid I Mean Stupid Fresh

Two tangentially-related tunes for the machine gun ladies in the house

I’ll admit that this week’s two-fer is mostly just because I wanted to hear “Machine Gun” by The Commodores. It came out when I was three years old, but I didn’t discover it until I was almost thirty.

My version of The Commodores was in the 1980s, when they were doing inoffensive R&B hits and I had absolutely no idea that they were ever a funk band. (I’m not proud of it, but I admit that I always thought “Brick House” was by Parliament).

I just assumed that they were indistinguishable from Lionel Ritchie’s solo stuff, until I found out that “Machine Gun” was sampled in “Hey Ladies” by the Beastie Boys.

Which I’d always thought of as a product of the 1990s, but which I’m seeing now came out in 1989. At that point, all I knew of the Beastie Boys was Licensed to Ill, so I didn’t even bother listening to Paul’s Boutique or any of the subsequent albums, thinking they’d be more of the same. It wasn’t until Hello Nasty came out that I got hooked and went back through all of the previous albums. And basically discovered two bands that had been cool this entire time, right under my nose.¹

1
I still really don’t like “Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet, though.

Fourth Estate Sale

Democracy Dies In Disappointment

My enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz campaign has cooled a little recently. Not enough to change my vote, obviously, but enough to make me less optimistic that we’re going to see the significant reboot of the US political system that I’d been hoping for.

The problem: it seems like whoever was the Harris campaign’s Authenticity Manager was brought in for a meeting with the Democratic elite and quietly let go. “Thanks for your service, I guess, but I think we can take it from here,” they said with condescending smarm, probably. “After all, we have been running Democratic campaigns for the past forty years, so I think we know a thing or two about elections. Why don’t you Pokemon Go on home?”

Do campaigns even have Authenticity Managers? I don’t know. But for a while, it sure seemed like the campaign was cutting through the bullshit and taking a definitive stand on a bunch of issues that Democrats have normally tossed around like a hot potato. I was even happy to hear Harris taking a stand on issues I don’t agree with (She said repeatedly, “We’re not taking away anybody’s guns,” and I’m like, “Well, you could take away some guns, certainly, seeing as how the problem is that there are too many?”) because it meant we were getting back into the realm of adults who can reasonably disagree on important issues. Instead of “my unassailable and infallible savior” vs “the demon who will destroy civilization as we know it.”

Over the past couple of weeks, though, it seems like the campaign has been settling back into the old familiar nonsense.

I understand that the Democrats are still traumatized by the 2016 election, and they want to avoid being overconfident. And I also understand that it’s in Harris’s best interest to play the underdog. But every day I see another message from the campaign suggesting that things have taken a terrible turn, they’re just barely hanging on, they desperately need our help, doom is upon us all. This isn’t the party that was coming in and energizing everyone just a couple of months ago; this is the party that’s spent the last decade with control of multiple branches of government and still shrugging and insisting that they were powerless to do anything. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be emphasizing enthusiasm and excitement? Saying “our message is really connecting with people,” reminding us that the GOP doesn’t have the overwhelming mandate it insists that it does, and giving us some hope that they intend to make a difference?

And seeing more of the same in terms of funding requests is particularly frustrating. Early on, we were getting reports of raising hundreds of millions of dollars within a week or two, which was hugely exciting as a sign that there was a clear mandate for Harris. After the announcement of Tim Walz as VP candidate, the enthusiasm and support took off again. Last I checked, the campaign had raised almost a billion dollars, mostly from first-time donors — meaning this wasn’t the usual Democratic machine grinding away, but genuine excitement that change was coming. But now, I’m getting increasingly desperate requests for donations from Harris, Walz (with increasingly strained football metaphors), and Barack Obama. We’re being outspent in battleground states! Ma’am, you’ve got a billion dollars! The Obamas have enough money to buy at least a dozen of me, outright! If you’re getting outspent, that sounds like a you problem, tbqh.

The ad that set me off in particular was something like “Do you want to wake up November 6th feeling like you could’ve done more?” Deliberately — shamelessly — taking advantage of the despair a lot of us felt back in 2016, when our anxiety over “why is the race this close?” turned into “holy shit, how did this happen?” I’ve already donated more money to this campaign than I have to any other political campaign, and that’s on top of trying to donate to hurricane recovery and humanitarian relief charities from the multiple disasters going on. And we all know that the most prominent Democrats are very wealthy (if not obscenely wealthy) people, and most of us don’t begrudge them that. But when the Obamas are coming onto my phone to tell me that if Trump wins, it’s because people like me didn’t do enough, that just strikes me as extraordinarily tone deaf.

It all makes me wish there were some way to get information about what is actually going on, from a source that’s not directly invested in any political party or campaign. It would be great if something like that existed in the United States.

Instead, we’ve got the most prominent newspapers and broadcast media all deciding at once that they’re bored with the same old journalistic malpractice they’ve been doing over the past decade, and committing to actively undermining campaigns and eroding our faith in our institutions.

I wish that were hyperbole, but there’s just no denying it anymore. It’s not even tricky to find examples these days; I just randomly went to The New York Times website, and right there at the top of the front page are multiple examples of misreporting things that I know to be true. Creating a false equivalence between Harris’s support for an actual child tax credit, Trump lazily repeating the old GOP cure-all of tax cuts for the rich (or people “higher up the income scale” in Times speak). Harris’s outreach to black communities spun as political maneuvering to “shore up” the Black male vote at the last minute, even though she’s made a point of talking directly to Black men for the duration of her last two campaigns at least. Reporting on Trump’s blatantly fascist speeches — in which he promises to use the government to punish his enemies — not with emphasis on what he actually said, but on the idea that his supporters don’t believe it’s a serious threat.

For the past several years, I’ve been making excuses for the Times and the rest of “mainstream media,” saying that they were driven by fear of litigation or an overabundance of caution over journalistic integrity. We saw it in the “both sides” coverage of the climate crisis, long after the truth was evident even to the most gullible person? We thought we saw it with the Clinton campaign, where they normalized the most lunatic fringe claims of the GOP, seemingly out of respect for political norms or some such. I find it impossible to be so charitable anymore, and keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

We’ll Get There Eventually

Thoughts on twenty years as a known homosexual

I wouldn’t have made the connection myself, but I was reminded that today is National Coming Out Day, which this year marks 20 years that I’ve been out.¹ It feels like much longer. And I wish it were longer, since I highly recommend coming out in your teens or twenties if at all possible.

Earlier this week, I was trying to find digital photos of an old project I’d worked on, for a presentation at work. I was horrified to discover that for some unknown reason, my iCloud photo library seems to have stopped keeping any pictures older than 2011 or so. My backup hard drive failed a couple of years ago. I believe that I have photo backups on a CD-ROM or DVD somewhere, but haven’t been able to find them. And I no longer even have an optical drive that could read them.

It felt as if there’s been an enormous wall of entropy that’s been relentlessly following me ever since I was born, and if it ever caught up with me it would wipe me out of existence, and I just looked back and discovered it had jumped forward 15 years.

In any case, I resolved to dig through all of the old prints I had stuffed away in my closet, and I ended up finding a lot of photos from the late 90s and early 2000s, when I’d just moved to California and was perpetually overwhelmed by just about everything. Several of them I’d forgotten even existed; for years, I’ve been thinking that I had almost no photos of myself from my 20s. The truth was that I’d hidden them away because I hated how I looked — like a combination of young John Flansburgh and Skippy from Family Ties, but completely lacking the charisma of either.

Looking through them made me sad for that guy, who lived so long ago that he’s basically a stranger. He was smiling in most of the photos, but in others, it seems more like a grimace. I remember he was just a shuffling jumble of insecurities, and I wish I could go back and tell him that it’d be difficult, but he’d make it through, and eventually settle down with a mostly different set of insecurities.

As if the universe were trying to drive the idea home, later in the week, there was a meme going around of posting the oldest photo you have of yourself, next to a current picture.² Unsurprisingly, this prompted quite a few gay men online to get introspective about everything they had to go through to change from the kid in one photo to the man that exists today.

What’s standing out to me is everything that happened to the four- or five-year-old kid, sitting shirtless on his front lawn smiling and chewing on flowers, that changed him into the stubbly, sad-looking guy in his 20s, taking a picture of himself in a mirror as if to prove he still exists.

It makes me think about everything he learned in the years between those two photos. He learned to keep his mouth closed in photos, because his teeth are embarrassing. He learned to be embarrassed about being seen with no shirt on. He learned that a photo like this was kind of gay, and that was bad for some reason. He learned not to go around hugging people because it made them uncomfortable. He learned that by several different standards, he was a weirdo, and he needed to keep that shit under wraps and try to be normal.

Comparing sexual orientation and gender identity to just being a weirdo can trivialize the issue, especially when religious beliefs get involved. And it can be just plain offensive as well: obviously, plenty of LGBT people are stultifyingly normal, and plenty of straight people are flamboyant freaks. But for me at least, it helps explain why “coming out” still feels like an ongoing thing, 20 years on, after the traumatic and difficult parts are long past.

That’s the part that makes a “national coming out day” worth observing and celebrating: encouraging people to take that difficult first step. Not because it’ll suddenly fix everything, but because it’s the only thing that will make fixing everything possible.

At the moment, it feels like I’m still trying to unlearn all the things that weren’t an inevitable part of getting older and wiser — as I kept telling myself — and were actually all about keeping that weird, overly emotional, overly earnest, undeniably gay kid stuffed away in a closet and out of sight.

It’s been nice rejecting all the excuses I had for hating myself throughout my twenties. Not because I got better glasses and a better haircut and realized that I’ve been cool and impossibly attractive this whole time, but just because I stopped giving a damn about any of that.

Or I guess I should say almost any of that. The best conclusion to this blog post would be 53-year-old me recreating that photo, sitting shirtless and smiling on my front lawn while chewing on some flowers. But I’m not eager to share that with the world just yet. Maybe in another 20 years or so.

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Almost to the day, even, since the first time I told any friends was in October.
2
No doubt to train LLMs on, because hooray for the future.

Hat Speech

When you get maybe a little TOO into a piece of campaign merchandise and what it means for America

Back when Kamala Harris’s campaign took off, she quickly secured the Democratic nomination, and then announced Tim Walz as her running mate, I got swept up in the moment. I quickly blew through my “campaign donation money” budget and even bought a couple of pieces of campaign merch.

One of those is the camouflage hat, which was quickly sold out and was immediately called “iconic” by the campaign. And sure, that’s a little too over-enthusiastic, but not by that much, surprisingly. It’s a pretty great piece of merchandise because it’s got layers of significance to it.

Most obvious is that it was introduced to welcome Walz to the campaign, since he’s apparently an avid hunter. It’s intended to underscore that contrast between Walz as being from the rural heartland, Harris from the coastal urban areas, coming together with a shared vision of America. And it’s pointedly taking back that rural heartland imagery from the Republicans.

For my entire lifetime, the Republicans have somehow managed to push tax cuts for the wealthy and anti-consumer deregulation, all while painting themselves as the America-loving populist party. It’s been a bizarro world for decades, but it’s gotten especially ludicrous as we’ve seen these guys who’ve clearly never been to a fast food restaurant before try to pass themselves off as Champions of the Common Man. It’s fitting that they’ve ended up with Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan as mascots, because they both made fortunes selling a cartoonishly trashy version of America.

And the Democrats have just shrugged and said “let them have it.” What’s also been true my entire lifetime is that the most visible people in the Democratic party have acted like there’s nothing more cringe than being “folksy.” I remember Clinton being sold to us on the idea that he was the anti-Jimmy Carter; southern but with no trace of Hee Haw, cool enough to go on Arsenio Hall’s show with his saxophone, and highbrow enough to fit in with the liberal elite.

One of the things I love about the Harris-Walz campaign is that it’s often felt like a rejection not just of the modern GOP, but of the weird, elitist disappointment that the Democratic party has become. And the camo hat is a symbol of that, too: I would bet you just about anything that Schumer and Pelosi were more comfortable appropriating West African clothing than they would be wearing anything that had a whiff of Wal-Mart about it.

So the hat just underscores the whole idea of the Harris campaign as being a big tent — they’ve stressed that everybody is welcome in their version of the Democratic party: not just rural types and city types, not just all races, but anybody who wants sane politics in the United States. I could tell how clearly that message was coming through by how angry it was making leftists on social media any time a Republican was given the stage at the DNC.¹

So getting a camouflage hat was me being a poseur, but I felt like it was in the spirit of this campaign being a dramatic reboot. Anyone who actually knows me is well aware that not only am I not a hunter or fisher, I don’t even like being outdoors that much. So I figured that a camo hat would be for me like wearing drag. Practical clothes turned into a costume for a pasty-white computer boy. Maybe the beard helps me get away with it? Whatever the case, I figured it would be important as a middle finger to the GOP and to anyone who would reduce all of us to cartoonishly broad stereotypes.

But I have to say that actually putting it on felt more momentous than I’d expected. If I were in an anime, or an early-80s Amblin movie, there would’ve been blue sparks of electricity coming off of the hat. I never expected that a performative show of anti-snobbery would have me flashing back to being a kid. Like I said, I’ve never had any interest in hunting, and I pretty much immediately disliked fishing as soon as I tried it. And that was treated vaguely like a failing on my part. Never quite explicitly, and never by my parents, who were always completely supportive of whatever I wanted to do, but it was all still enough to suggest that I wasn’t quite a “real” man.

And I felt like I had a fleeting moment of clarity. I remembered how much I tried to lose my accent, and how much I aspired to distance myself from anything that would get me branded as a redneck. I realized that I wasn’t so much assigned the stereotype of “gay liberal computer nerd” as I embraced it, and even aspired to it. A bunch of rich people decided that these people fit into a stereotype that has nothing to do with these people, and I’d dutifully picked my side. It was like realizing I’ve been spending all this time putting the clown makeup on myself.

Considering how big a fan I am of Miller’s Crossing, I should know that sometimes a hat is just a hat. But I really, really like the idea that we’re chipping away at the last 50 years of stereotypes and assumptions and finally understanding that people are capable of a hell of a lot more than a bunch of political strategists ever gave us credit for. I like the idea of actually moving into the 21st century.

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To be fair, more or less: Nancy Pelosi has frequently gone on about the need for a sane, rational, and functioning Republican party in the US, but there’s a very clear sense that she wants to go back to the pre-Trump days, where there was an eternal stalemate between Reagan/Bush Republicans and Clinton/Obama Democrats. No thanks.