“Somehow is a super-weasel, a word that betrays that the author didn’t want to bother thinking out the story…Nothing in your story happens ‘somehow.’ It happens because you wrote it. Take responsibility!” —Ursula K. Le Guin
My #SteamDeck is in for repairs right now, so I’ve resorted to playing DOOM and Hunt the Wumpus on my aged laptop
In this household, we do the Rabbie Burns version
The final boss of each night is Blankety Blank, Sawer of Logs
Why has Taylor Swift not written the song “Spider 2 Y Banana”?
The odds of my partner turning into Kokomon are low, but never zero
I just listened to “Welcome To The Plains,” and I don’t mean to pick on the artist because he seems like a decent young man, but the lines,
“And looking back now through the years Before the hands of man were here Rusty shovels found black gold And tumbleweeds were free like the Choctaw and Cherokee Before they had to call this land their home If only they could see how it’s gone”
are just all over the place. Like, there’s obviously a time jump between lines 2 and 3, that’s fine. But then, “the tumbleweeds were free” puts us around 1870 (tumbles are invasive) and the next line is “like the Choctaw and Cherokee [prior to removal],” but removal started in the 1830s, so the timeline is really weird. It’s okay to compare things that take place at different times, but the structure makes me feel like I’m lurching backwards and forwards in time with no clear progression
Also, the lines “were free” and “If only they could see how it’s gone” don’t make much sense. You could go and ask a Choctaw or a Cherokee person, right now, what they think. They’re still around. And still free, despite waves hands everything
I’m about halfway through this book, and characters can’t stop “sucking [his/her/their] teeth.” It happens almost every other page. I like to say that usually I don’t mind this sort of thing, but it’s getting to the same level as “suffused” in the Inheritance Cycle and it’s driving me nuts
What level of deranged is “The #Godfather is a #Christmas movie.”?
A pug won the dog show, and we are now celebrating celebrations of our own hubris
Were the Sea Peoples from Punt?
Remember to add #Custer by #JohnnyCash to your #Thanksgiving playlist. And #WeWereAllWoundedAtWoundedKnee by #Redbone and maybe the #FrankWaln remake of What Makes the Red Man Red?.
All certified bops, all Native artists,¹ and all fun conversation starters.
- Johnny Cash was neither born Johnny Cash nor Native, but he adopted the name and the Seneca adopted him.
Happy Thomas Granger Day, to those who celebrate
FromSoftware released #DarkSouls 10 days after #Skyrim.
Since then, the soulslike and Dark Souls style combat have taken off and evolved and From has released Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring.
There’s not been another mainline #ElderScrolls release, and it’s wild how much the landscape has shifted beneath Bethesda’s feet
So, I just finished House of Leaves, and so far my theory is that it’s about cycles of trauma and how they can only be understood in context. The monsters (read: broken people) they create are answerless without understanding their creation
The NFL pressure model debut
So, I’ve been working on-again, off-again on an NFL pressure model for a year and a half, maybe two. It’s really just a mutation of Richard Mcelreath’s cat-bird model (https://gist.github.com/rmcelreath/17a0b9373b04f50e335f027c17d379f5). The main differences are that this model is multivariate and lets the presence rate vary by team. The code itself is here: github.com/JSTrostle… It’s a lot, but not quite an eldritch horror. The data section is pretty self explanatory. The only thing of note is that the QB EPA, CPOE, and air yards are all in a matrix together rather than being vectors on their own.
Widow (female) Widower (male) Widowest (gender neutral)
Spinst (male) Spinster (female) Spinstest (gender neutral)
Me listening to “Silk Chiffon” after drinking espresso at 10:00 PM
I was just at a concert for #FontainesDC and people were trying to move around and there wasn’t a lot of room… But let me tell you, when the guy behind me hit me with the “‘xscuse me, brother” in a thick accent, I turned into Flat Stanley. He was getting where he wanted to go
The new #Transformers movie is really good. Like, shockingly good.
With the news of Tesla’s robot puppet and the news that Amazon’s grocery identifier was a metric ton of underpaid workers from India, I really hope we don’t see a future of most everyone in the U.S. having a robo-butler controlled 1–1 by some destitute kid halfway around the globe
Finished #MirrorsEdgeCatalyst. I didn’t love it. Maybe I’m too smooth brained, but I never felt like I was moving fluidly despite beating the game an hour quicker than average. The open world did nothing for me either. Increasing the FOV helped, but not enough to save the experience
I feel like we need to have a discussion about the implicit bias of using “tribalism” as a pejorative, but a lot of people aren’t ready for that. Y’all ain’t talking about Gaul, are ya
So, I don’t like Led Zeppelin (I don’t like Roy Lichtenstein either), but further more, I never got the appeal of Led Zeppelin.
But I keep relistening to “De Selby (Part 2)” by Hozier, and now I get the appeal of Zeppelin; I can see what it was going for but that never clicked for me
Testing to see if this cross posting thing works