sawall

Lin-Manuel Miranda at the White House (2009):


Lin-Manuel Miranda on Colbert (2015):


Daveed Diggs on Colbert (2016):

I was extremely impressed watching Hamilton a couple weeks ago. I went in cold and hadn't even heard any of the music, and thought it was wonderful. I honestly had been avoiding it because of all of the hype surrounding it and because I don't love hip hop, but wow, it's so good. I've been youtubing some late night interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda on youtube and he's brilliant. The guy who played La Fayette and Jefferson is also a hoot on late night and worth watching too.

I've been extremely careful and am being driven crazy seeing how a lot of other people in the U.S. are acting after doing proper distancing, mask wearing, minizming shopping, and everything else for months now. When I go out for a socially distant and masked walk with one of my friends every couple of weeks we constantly play frogger with non-mask-wearing joggers and cyclists that get within inches of us as they weave around us if we don't take evasive action. In a few states, including Texas, we are RIGHT at the line where our hospitals are about to exceed their capacity and I feel like a lot of people are acting like everything is winding down.


Part of it is poor leadership and messaging - early on due to PPE shortages we were told to "only wear a mask if you are sick", and Republicans will only ever suggest people wear a mask and never tell them to. It was big news a few days ago when Trump was shown wearing a mask in public the first time. I think a lot of people don't know what to do and don't understand what is risky and what isn't. The science has told us for months that being indoors with circulating aircon is much worse than being outdoors, but most folks I talk to seem to treat the social distance as optional and don't get the difference between being indoors and outdoors.

Akire is right that there is something really American about this as well. Similar anti-mask protests came up during the Spanish flu a century ago. There is this notion of "individual liberty" that in some ways is a superpower of America but it also manifests in really toxic ways that makes it hard for a lot of us to consider doing things that are sane that are for the common good if we're being "forced" to do it. This plays out in some strange ways where the same people that are clamoring for schools and business to reopen are also the ones who are refusing to take measures to make it safer to reopen things.

Here's a heartbreaking account from a North Carolinan store clerk who is asthmatic and talks about trying to get people to wear masks in the store she works at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/...north-carolina/

I've mentioned Master Pancake, an Austin-based comedy group who does in-theater heckling, MST3k style. Since the lockdown started they have taken their show to Twitch. There's some general chatting between hosts and then they have sometimes gone back and replayed their old shows, and other times they do some live heckling over whatever they are streaming. I saw Independence Day 1 and 2 on the 4th of July, which was pretty fantastic. They did Martian and Gladiator this week, and haven't posted their schedule for next week yet.

Their Twitch stream is here: https://www.twitch.tv/masterpancaketheater/

The calendar on Twitch is sometimes only partially filled in, you can get a better idea of what's coming up on their Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/masterpancaketheater/

The absolute highlight from ID4 was they played back a recording of when they had Bill Pullman in the theater at their showing in 2010, and he gave an amusingly modified version of his speech and followed up with playing President to a series of audience members who were doing Jeff Goldblum impersonations:

related: http://exptv.org/

This is a curated stream of weird and obscure media from what looks like it's mostly the 80s. I've seen breakdance fights, weatherman bloopers, early Devo fans being interviewed on the street, gobs of music videos I've never seen, and so on.

Hat-tip to Fenchurch for the link.

Ooof. Well depending on which part of America, it might be not too bad.

Several cities in Texas, meanwhile, are topping the charts for the most new cases per day. Austin is #5 in the U.S. Who would have thought that aggressively opening for Memorial Day might have caused trouble!?

Ah, thanks for the good idea! I never got above a population of 5 so every time I lost someone it usually took away my only something-or-other.

I was _just_ beginning to get into animals with some of those big white ox things and also some chickens. The chickens seemed like more trouble than they were worth with having to constantly make kibble for them. Grazing animals were a lot easier to deal with. I love the idea of having a bear pit!

I think my other problem with my last colony is I was trying to do a ton of water mills which were nice for a lot of reasons but it also meant that I was wide open on one side. I am not quite sure how to set up a good kill box with water mills - maybe my energy setup should have been separate from the front of my colony.

My longer running Rimworld colony has now had three near-wipes, and it's left me feeling a little weird about continuing. On one hand, all the stuff I was working to build is there, on the other hand, the crew of colonists that I had keeps changing completely. It's interesting how I get caught up in the stories of the people living in the colony more than the buildings themselves. Even though what I have is functioning reasonably well with a skeleton crew of two, the thought of building up an entirely new population for the same set of structures feels tiresome.

The last near-wipe was especially brutal because I thought that I had my defenses dialed in when suddenly the enemy decided to not only retreat, but carry off three of my wounded in a colony of five. I went from expecting to have some delicate time rehabilitating everyone in my hospital and suddenly everybody was still alive but gone. I guess it's time to get more serious about setting up kill boxes but I think I'd rather the entire colony wipe than have to do it in the one that keeps losing all of its people.

I might check out ONI again. I petered out last time when I had to start paying really close attention to moving gasses around, which I find a little tedious. I also never quite got ranching down in a way that was very useful. Farming was never that bad from my perspective, but I think I also was building a lot of good insulation from the start because I'd read a couple guides about how much of a problem temperature can become.

Not sure where to put this, but I'll recommend Steamworld Dig 2. It's a really excellently designed Metroidvania. The early tutorial bit felt a little too on rails to me and I was about to set it down, but it opens up a lot after the first couple of hours of play and is this nice combination of a resource gathering game in a somewhat openworld mixed with challenging platformer levels. As you play you mine gems and can use the money you make on upgrades to yourself. Upgrades organically open up new areas of the game.

It was almost exactly what I needed right this moment. It isn't too deep with plot and you can easily set it down, but it's also got that satisfying feel of something that's evolving over time.

what a fantastic interview!


I believe that I read somewhere that his brother is on the autistic spectrum, and part of Tarn's working on it is a labor of love to help him out. It's wild that he has a Math PhD from Stanford - he could probably be a prof almost anywhere he wanted to be.

We're fine in Austin, and live 5 miles away from the city center. Most things that are happening are in the city cores, so unless you deliberately go there to protest or happen to live there, you are pretty clear. Austin police don't have the best record, but they don't have the worst, either. That said, I have some friends who are volunteering as street medics and one of the people they were working with was deliberately shot with a rubber bulletin the hands while she was treating someone. You can find hundreds of examples of medics, bystanders, members of the press, and completely peaceful protestors being assaulted. In the middle of a pandemic protestors are being rounded up and put in close quarters for hours on end. It's totally bonkers and I basically feel like the "real" narrative is that it is the police are who are rioting because they feel threatened that there are a huge number of 99.9% peaceful protestors.

The right still has their own narratives. One example - some white guy threatened protestors with a machete. Some people threw rocks at him and it looked like was about to turn and run. Then he changed his mind and screamed and went after a kid who managed to fend him off with a skateboard. Kid got cut but disarmed him, and about a dozen people attacked the machete wielder and beat him to a pulp. The last half of a video of this was posted to right wing websites and Trump was tweeting about it saying it was some store owner who was dragged out of his shop by rioters and then left dying on the street. In reality the guy was taken to the hospital and is in stable condition. But now I see people on the right with a false equivalence along the lines of "you don't care about tax paying store owners protecting their property getting murdered, why should we care about rioting hoodlums?"

One of the most scary things to me is that federal police are being deployed in Washington D.C. without nameplates, numbers or even organizational insignias. They won't tell the press who they work for. Cops in New York are wearing a black band around their shields with some bogus excuse that it's in honor of their fallen brothers when it also conveniently covers up their id numbers. This is leading directly to more acts of police brutality without any way to identify the perpetrators.

There are some bright shining stars. The police chief of Houston is brilliant to listen to. He has gone right down with the protestors and given several passionate speeches to them and has spent a lot of time listening to their concerns on the front line. As a result, the protests there have stayed peaceful because the mission of the protestors AND the police is the same: let people say what they need to say while not tolerating violence from either side.

I'm mainly using mine as a secure jump point to shell/vnc into my home network. It's a lot easier to lock down than a windows or osx pc doing the same. I may also be moving my media server from a Mac Mini to a Pi to save space, admin headaches, etc. I also use it for a few little tools that to don't want to run in the cloud, like Slack bots, persistent sessions for things I shell into, etc.
I know a number of people using a pi as this nicely designed ad blocker, which might be a great excuseuse case for one: https://pi-hole.net

I've also got a Pi Zero to interface with some electronics projects that are better with a temporary use standalone computer. For example I have an RFID reader/writer that works nicely with a Pi so they are packaged together. When I get around to it apparently I should be able to make some amiibo stickers for Animal Crossing with it!

I've got a Pi 4 now, and it is WAAAAAY faster than the 2, for anyone who was thinking about whether or not it is an upgrade. I might phase out my current Mac Mini fileserver as a result.

I've played through a couple of game years on a fairly easy mode and do enjoy this quite a bit! I didn't realize quite how deep the Dwarf Fortress comparisons went - there is a LOT in common between the two games. I do like the fantasy theme a bit more but this pretty much makes it so that I am not sure if I'd ever need to play Dwarf Fortress again. They are similarly complex and Rimworld is way easier to manage.

I decided to play in permadeath mode and stick with it til I got wiped out, but I am getting a bit bored with how easy my current setting is so far. Also, I used gobs of steel in my original construction and am now mostly out of it and don't want to have to dismantle everything to use it more effectively. It took me forever to figure out that I could click on a colonist and then right click on something or someone else to get them to do something - I missed several opportunities with visitors and traders as a result of that. I was surprised that I didn't wipe during my first winter. I made a really dumb decision during a raid that cost me my top researcher and left my other two characters bleeding out. The game threw a "Man in Black" deux ex machina at me to get me back on track. Not having a researcher was awful for a while but I ended up getting a couple more colonists, one of whom is getting the research going again. At any rate, I think I am going to restart with a bit more difficulty and a clearer idea of what's going on.

There are great emergent stories just like in Dwarf Fortress, and the alerts in the UX make it even easier to pay attention to what's going on in the lives of the characters. Dwarves could have epic romances and breakups that I never noticed but there's just enough hints to let you know what's going on in Rimworld as it's happening.

I might check out some of the mods, it seems important for micromanaging as you get bigger. I've only got 5 colonists now and I want to get very specific about what they are doing.

We've got a two-drawer file cabinet that I've been eyeing and I am hoping to make similar progress with it. A quick glance through it a couple days ago told me that probably 3/4 of it is unnecessary.

I found an old journal of mine from 2003 or so where I was doing some goal setting and there was something about "purge unnecessary files" in it, so I'm glad that I am finally getting around to this!

Those levels in NZ are fantastic. A big driver of angst in the U.S. is that it's really unclear where we are and how we are doing. Every state and locality is doing their own thing, and then businesses are making their own decisions on top of that. The governor of Texas released one aggressive plan that is supposed to supersede cities, Austin released some different guidance that contradicts that, and local businesses are tending to err on the side of caution. There is no clear messaging around where we are on the curve as a locality, state, or country.

My understanding is that if you dig into the data the picture is starting to look ugly in rural America. States look like they are at the peak of the curve or are going down, but what may actually be happening is that big cities are getting past the big hump and then more rural areas are getting worse. But people in rural areas are acting like the only problem is in the city.

After having spent a bit of time in Asia it's maddening to see western reactions to mask-wearing. Masks are meant to protect other people and a lot of people are acting like wearing a mask will make them appear weak. The worst that I've observed firsthand is that most cyclists and joggers don't seem to wear masks, and they are the ones spraying droplets everywhere.

We're still hunkered down and I'm doing a ton of house projects. All the hard drive stuff is done (the sacred texts turned out to be a FreeBSD swap drive) and we also did a bunch of outdoor work including getting fencing and planters up in our little yard. Now I'm shifting to some general possession purging and getting into some creative projects that have been languishing forever. I've decided to do a "real" sabbatical instead of look for work since I am in a pretty good position to do so and social expectations are pretty low at the moment. My mood was definitely problematic for a while but that seems to have mostly settled out lately.

I never thought that Dwarf Fortress needed graphics + mouse, just that the keyboard UX was awful and needed to be improved. I felt like I was constantly using eight keystrokes to do something that I should have been able to do in two. The UX was also bizarrely inconsistent, for example when you were placing areas there were different ways to do it depending on what kind of area it was.

That said, I hope that the port is well done and that it makes this fantastic game more visible to folks who don't like ASCII.

I think I might check it out again. It certainly seemed promising and maybe I had some poor luck with the RNG for my first three or four runs.

Along somewhat similar lines, I enjoyed Oxygen Not Included for a bit there. The pacing is excellent - you do have to keep building to stay alive, but systems don't tend to completely collapse abruptly. It also does a good job with only needing to tackle one or two new types of systems at a time rather than having to do EVERYTHING at once. As you expand and run out of initial materials, you encounter new problems to deal with in an organic-feeling way. I haven't reached the endgame yet but what I saw of the first ~20 hours of play was good. The art is also pretty great.

I quit my job in mid-February with the intention of starting up a software development agency with a few colleagues and drumming up some work during SXSW in mid-March..... that's not gone at all according to plan. The market crash led to investment capital drying up and marketing plans pretty much went out the window. SXSW was canceled a week before it was supposed to begin (which in retrospect was a brillant move on the part of the City of Austin Mayor). Fortunately I hadn't gotten farther along with my professional plans - I hadn't hired anyone so don't need to worry about paying anyone for a sudden lack of work, and the money that I had saved to spin up the venture is plenty to sit at home with for a good while. I've been not complaining too much because this ends up putting me in a WAY better off position than a lot of people, but wow, I'm feeling the disruption.

I've been using my time to deal with a pile of personal projects and maintenance that has been languishing forever. That box of old hard drives that I have been meaning to archive data from and then wipe and ditch someday? Well now is "someday" so I've been hip deep in old old hard drives. I even found a 250 meg drive from 1993 that sounds like it spins up, though I don't think I have an OS that will read from it right this minute.

My feeling is that a lot of people in the U.S. are in denial about how things will "get back to normal" at some point. I think that some aspects of this will linger with us for years if not decades. Who knows whether or not this virus or a variant of it will resurge in the fall or in next year? Remote work and minimal contact may be the new normal for the foreseeable future.

It's hard to express how completely bonkers it has been in the U.S. without clear messaging from leadership. We were getting "it will be over in a couple weeks" at the same time as we were getting "wear a mask at all times and don't go out unless you need to". I was on top of my mask game from fairly early on, honestly in part because I often wear one when outdoors in the spring time because the pollen is horrendous for my allergies. Over only a week or two there was a shift from people in Austin looking at me like I was a plague delivery service to seeing lots more people in masks. Having spent a lot of time in Asia, I don't really understand the weird aversion to mask-wearing here. It's just a smart thing to do if you think you might be sick.

There have been very few clear national directives so everything's been left up to cities and States to sort out. If you look at heat maps of deaths per population (ref: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/...rus-infection/) there are some nasty hot spots more rural Trump-friendly regions, which I like to attribute to his magical thinking and messaging around that. Of course, Trump's approval ratings are at a nearly all time high since everyone is rallying around the leader in this time of crisis, despite how awful he is at it.

Most of my family lives in the original epicenter in north Seattle, so they have luckily benefited from the early "well it's just in Seattle, YOLO" attitude that was in the rest of the country. They went on pretty fast lockdown and the region is turning around as a result. I feel fortunate that they are there rather than in one of the regions that is acting like they are invincible because they aren't doing the testing to find out how bad it is. In the long run we'll eventually see real death counts and that will tell us how different regions were doing.

I loved the season 3 premiere of Westworld. Mild spoilers:

People in the US started treating it seriously, almost overnight. Tom Hanks getting it followed by the NBA cancelation seemed to push everything over the edge to make it real. We are still not as quarantined as some other countries but a lot of things are finally shutting down.

A lot of the small unofficial SXSW gigs are still planned but I've decided to not attend them. Heather is a massage therapist and has a couple of elderly clients who she is continuing to see carefully, and I really do NOT want to be the vector for anything.

Meanwhile grass allergens are nearly at record highs so I am sneezing up a storm whenever I go outside. Haven't had TOO many askance looks yet but I'm sure people aren't exactly excited to hear that.

SXSW cancellation is hitting Austin hard. Business in the city make about $350 million from it every year. A lot of the bars and clubs barley scrape by for most of the rest of the year and then put their SXSW money in the bank for a rainy day. I am hoping that they are able to stay in business -- rents downtown are going up up up, and a lot of venues are getting torn down and replaced by condos full of people who want to live in authentic downtown Austin but also make noise complaints about all of the open air live music venues. Two of the most well known clubs (The Mohawk and Stubb's BBQ) have to shut down the sound by 11pm most nights now because of this situation.

I am hoping for the community to pull together around all of the "unofficial" programming that I've been saying is best anyways. There are several venues who were planning to run shows with local Austin bands and small indie acts and they haven't canceled anything yet since they aren't technically part of SXSW. There seem to be a trickle of tourists still coming in, probably because a lot of the airbnbs charge huge amounts of money in March and don't allow cancelations. So folks may still be coming and looking for whatever party is still left. It might end up being something like I hear the SXSW music festival was "before it got cool" -- just a bunch of bands in a bunch of clubs and no bay area tech bros. Hipster Throwback SXSW 2020!!!

I've been watching quite a lot of television and fewer films lately.

The Expanse: Reviewed this above but I am bumping my rating to 4.5/5. It's really fantastic, and watching it all pays off because they do such a great job with character and plot development. I've also read all the books and highly recommend those as well.

Insatiable: Black comedy about a formerly overweight girl who gets into beauty pageants after having her jaw broken by a hobo she picked a fight with and being unable to eat for months. S1 focuses more on the pageant world, sort of like Best of Show, and S2 goes off the rails (in a fun way), going super dark with multiple homicides. S1 explores themes around bullying and S2 focuses more on eating disorders. The acting is amusingly over the top including a great performance by Alyssa Milano as a saucy Southern trophy wife. 3.5/5.

Avenue 5, is a darkly comedic shitshow in space where a space cruise liner has been knocked off course. The humor is generally pretty juvenile but there are occasional good bits. 2/5.

The Magicians S1 is Harry Potter but with hot alternative college students, and then S2 takes those students and drops them into Narnia. Apparently seasons beyond that are fun too. 3/5.

The Order is what happens if you take The Magicians, remove all the Narnia and Harry Potter riffing, make all the characters normcore, and introduce some Skull & Bones elements. Meh. 2/5.

iZombie is a procedural about a zombie doctor who works in a morgue to get access to brains. When she eats brains she gets flashbacks from the victims, which she uses to help a police detective solve crimes. The ensemble cast is fun and there is a lot of romantic moping due to her breaking up with her fiance in order to not turn him into a zombie. Imagine Veronica Mars (the previous show from the same show runner) crossed with Buffy. 3/5

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: I started this as part of a MCU watch and it's generally pretty good. It's about about a a team of agents who is responding to various super-threats that don't quite rise to the level of needing the attention of The Avengers. If you're a MCU completionist it's got lots of great little references to the films. 2.5/5.

Marvel's Runaways: Some teens figure out that their parents are super-villains and decide to fight them. Definitely aimed at high school students. One arm of the villains is an obviously Scientologist-inspired cult which is amusing. Mainly an adolescent drama and mystery and fairly light on the super part. 2.5/5.

The Man in the High Castle is set in a parallel universe where the Axis won WW2. Great acting and cinematography. I expected the science fiction elements to ramp up much more quickly, but it's still interesting if you like shows about fighting oppressive regimes from within. The show makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable about how incredibly stylish and well designed everything having to do with the Nazis is. I'm early into S3 and it's still barely barely scratching the surface of whatever is going on with the parallel universe science fiction plot. 3.5/5

Colony is another show about living in an occupied territory, this time it's the entire world that has been dominated by mysterious aliens. Sawyer from LOST is the lead, and he's an ex-special forces type who has gone into hiding to protect his family. The core of the show is family drama around whether it's best to resist using guerrilla tactics, to pretend to collaborate with the invasion and resist from within, or to be a good citizen in hopes of not getting targeted. Aside from the drones that enforce the curfew the villains in the show are almost entirely human - you barely ever see the actual alien overlords because they've got human collaborators in charge of day to day in a way that's awfully similar to what went down in Nazi and Soviet occupied countries, Cambodia under the Khmer Rogue, and so on. It's a bit melodramatic and not "good" by a lot of measures but I really enjoy it. 3/5