I haven't written about politics lately, because honestly I don't have a lot to add that isn't already out there. But these are weird fucking times, where senators are getting manhandled for asking questions of cabinet members, and the backbone of the farming and hospitality industries are being dragged away by ICE agents who are not wearing uniforms but are wearing masks. And yeah, the president is doing a hundred things that violate the Constitution and obvious laws. This weekend, there are protests being planned all over the US, while the president attends a parade that is not about the necessary humility of having a powerful military for the protection of our citizen, but rather a boastful demonstration of power.
The strangest cultural phenomenon that we're enduring right now is that the segment of the population that, during the Obama and Biden years, constantly harped on the ideas that the Constitution was being violated, talking about freedom and rights (which were not at all endangered), is now silent about the clear violations of civil liberties. You'd think that the people who were so certain that they might be limited by an "oppressive" executive branch are now witnessing the very thing that they were worried about, but are now silent.
The reason is not a mystery. A notable difference between the right and left, is that factions of the more recent right are not concerned with their ethos if it doesn't benefit them. It didn't used to be this way. I used to find that right-wing folks were dogmatic in their beliefs, but it was at least consistent. But now, the belief system only applies when it aligns with their broader world views. In other words, all bets are off if it involves brown people, non-heteros, etc.
Remarkably, despite the appointment of judges by Trump, the judicial branch has mostly aligned itself with the broader intent of the Constitution. That's not to say that there haven't been losses in terms of women's healthcare rights, but that's more because we haven't seen the right laws passed. (For real, how has the ERA still not been passed, and why haven't more people advocated for it?)
The last week has been interesting, in part because the administration keeps losing in court when it tries to enforce an authoritarian motif of absolute power. The sketchy part is whether or not military leaders will push back and say, "Hey, I can't do that, it's not legal." Kind of makes you appreciate the way the founding fathers set up the separation of powers.
As much as I find everything going on right now distressing, there's small comfort in seeing the response, and the direction that the larger populace seems inclined to drive toward. The next few months should be interesting.
Those memories of serious air conditioning shortly after we moved to the Orlando area brought back a lot of feelings. What's interesting is that so many of those feelings were positive. I genuinely felt content and on an excellent trajectory. In recent years, mostly since the pandemic, I feel like contentment is intermittent at best, and anxiety is pretty much always high. For that reason, I feel like it might be useful to look back at that time and identify the things that made it better. Granted, people tend to look back fondly at certain times in a way that is more positive than it usually was. That said, I'm not big on nostalgia, and I don't view many periods of my life as exceedingly positive, so I think my memory is legit.
The first thing is obviously the excitement of all of the newness. I felt this a little in moving to Seattle, but it was muted I think because of the sheer volume of change. In that case I was moving away from Ohio after 36 years, navigating a new place, just got married, starting a new job, baby on the way, houses that couldn't sell, and it was a lot. Coming to Orlando from Ohio, I felt kind of done with the Cleveland area, wanting something new. Professionally, I had been wandering around much of the first half of the year, with a contract job, a false start, and relief that I got out of health insurance. All at once, and in just a few weeks, I landed a contract job at SeaWorld corporate, sold the house almost immediately, and secured a new place to live while building yet another. It was high stress for a couple of those weeks, but then everything was on autopilot and routine. It was radical change that came and settled quickly.
I was optimistic about the contract at SeaWorld, but also not married to it. Nothing was given about it, but after the prior few months of being unsure about what was next, it didn't even matter. I was very Zen about career, and the opportunities were so numerous that I could pick and choose. Even with Simon being 3 by that time, I felt like my most important outcome was to make sure that he and Diana were comfortable and getting everything they needed, and that box felt very checked and prioritized over work.
Parenting was just not very complicated. While we would get Simon's ASD diagnosis in that first year, there was no panic or serious worry. The biggest problem that I had with him was his unique ability to headbutt or otherwise hit me in the nuts (something that continued for the next three years). It's not that he never misbehaved, but he was happy to see me when I got home from work, and we were making all of these amazing memories, for me and Diana at least, at Walt Disney World.
Despite not being used to the heat of summer, I forced myself to go walking, a lot, with the acquisition of my first FitBit. I listened to tunes and just walked whenever I could. I got down to a weight almost matching my 2005 coaching days, and I felt great. I suspect that this had a lot to do with my contentment.
And yeah, there was a particularly great stretch of music around then. Our 2013 and 2014 playlists were pretty great. Alt rock and pop was having a moment, and it was pretty great. To this day, we listen to those playlists quite a bit, and they're the longest we've ever had.
Oh, and the world did not feel like it was on fire. An actual adult ran the country, racism and the various phobias were being relegated to the fringe of society and we were coming hot and fast out of the recession. There was a lot of reason for optimism.
So what do I do with all of that? If it's the circumstances that made it awesome, most of those are things that I can't reproduce. Simon will not be younger, we don't want to move, I'm in the longest job I've ever had and don't want to change. Obviously I can up my physical activity, but it's so hard for me because I kind of hate doing it. (And fuck you to the fitness people who think that's a personality flaw... You don't get extra points because you do something that you like to do.) All of our circumstances are different, and we're in a different stage of life. The question really is, how do I optimize this stage for contentment? To answer that, partly I need to define what I want it to look like. I can't stop being a parent though, and I have to responsibly game out the rest of life, which means wealth building so we don't have to work a "career job" indefinitely. This is especially true if these idiots in Washington tank Social Security. Those two areas already require more discipline than I think I have.
I can't recreate that year, obviously, but I'm trying to lean into the things that feel good now. It doesn't seem like that should be so hard, but it is.
When our DC friends were in town a few weekends ago, we went to Epcot and did the Finding Nemo ride. I haven't been on it in years, because Simon has aged out and, frankly, I was never aged in. But when we first moved here, and he was 3, we couldn't visit the park without doing that ride. When we walked in this time, I felt a mediocre blast of air conditioning, but that's probably because it was full of people, which was unusual back in the day. But in my mind, it felt like a huge blast because I remember it that way. Other attractions that day did have the blast.
In general, having moved here in July of that year, entering every building anywhere around town felt like that. July is certifiably what I call "swamp ass" season, because it's the part of the year that's 90 everyday and fairly humid (with an afternoon thunderstorm). It goes from June to September, and it's a small price to pay for 8 other amazing months. But many places seem to over-compensate for the heat, and chill interiors to a ridiculous level. Now, when I first feel that early in the season, it takes me back to those first weeks that we lived here. The memory extends to the rental house we had, which was a nice place.
You would think that the feeling would have worn off by now, but 12 years later, it has not. I've been experimenting with pushing our new upstairs air conditioning unit, in part because we had guests, and it's funny that I can get that same "arctic blast" feeling at home. It's comforting for some reason. That's a topic to cover in the next post.
Someone on PointBuzz referred to the old discount department store called Uncle Bill's, which I now understand to be local to the Cleveland area in the 70's. I haven't thought about that in many decades. But the funny thing is, it triggers a bunch of other defunct store memories.
There was Zayre, which people called "Zayre's." Just the name of it wakes up memories of the tile floors, the shopping carts, and the logo with an asterisk before it. Then there was Gold Circle, which I think had a location near my childhood home. Do you remember Best? They had the, uh, best Christmas catalogs, and their stores were weird because most of them were built as a showroom, and you had to buy stuff and they would bring out the product. Radio Shack lasted much longer, and in high school I remember buying some minor electronic parts to hack speaker jacks into my boombox or a switch for my model rocket launcher. Of course, everyone knows K-Mart and Sears, which combined to suck even more before disappearing. I worked at an Ames in high school, which I recall actually bought the Zayre locations in the Cleveland area. I closed that one when it went out of business, and bought a lot of crap cheap. That one was down the street from us in Brunswick, and it was later turned into a movie theater, which was extra weird having spent so much time in that building.
As a kid, it was fun to visit the toy sections of those stores while my mom shopped for whatever. It was kind of torture, because while I would inevitably get some of the things I desperately wanted for Christmas, most I obviously did not. It was especially rough when I got a little older and wanted an Atari 2600 or one of their early 8-bit computers.
These days we're down to Target and Walmart, and I rarely enter either one. I miss the dopamine hit of shopping for stuff I didn't really need. I suppose for a lot of people that has been replaced with social media likes, but I don't have a replacement.
Simon apparently came in to our room the other night (I didn't wake up) and told Diana that he couldn't sleep because his brain was constantly racing. It kind of makes you wonder if it's hereditary, or the result of something hereditary like autism.
I've articulated before about what this is like. I have to emphasize that it's like this most of the time for me. If he has to endure that as well, that's heartbreaking to me. Sometimes it makes living in the moment and relaxing very difficult. But it's absolutely the worst when you're trying to sleep. As I get more tired, the context shifting is reduced, but then I get into tighter loops thinking about the same things, which might actually be worse.
I don't have a ton of solutions, because honestly I just learned a few years ago that most people don't have this problem. It can in rare instances be useful, because it's definitely why I'm able to say witty things now and then. But mostly I find it exhausting. I'm not entirely sure how to coach Simon around it either.
I can say that a few milligrams of THC does wonders before bed, but the developmental risks are way too high, even with limited research, to give that to non-adults. It definitely helps me though. In waking hours, there are certain activities, mainly video games, that help me turn it off. And this will sound weird, but if I can focus on sexual thoughts, the lizard part of my brain seems to take over and shut down the spiral. Maybe I'm tapping into biology for that one. Oh, writing helps a ton. If I write multiple blog posts in one day, that's me coping with it.
It's a rough way to exist. I'm trying to find something positive that I've passed to my kid.
I've been a fan of free television for a long time, ditching cable for most of the last 15 years. Going cable-free has certainly become easier with the advent of streaming. If you go back more than 20 years, I built a PC in this sweet "stereo" case intended for your living room, and in that computer I had two over-the-air tuners. TV was still standard definition, so even then, you could load up a hard drive with so much stuff. The basic cable channels were not scrambled or encrypted in any way either, so if you did have cable, you had your own DVR, without the cost of subscribing to TiVo at the time. I used software called BeyondTV for that, and it was awesome.
Broadcast TV still has had some stuff that we watch, mostly awards shows and some sporting events. Oh, and we used to DVR the nightly news and SNL. Six years ago I bought a FireTV Recast from Amazon, which was a pretty great little box that you attached to an antenna and your network, and it recorded stuff off-air. Unfortunately, Amazon discontinued support for Recast, and it crashes a lot. It's a bummer, because it worked pretty seamlessly with the FireTV sticks on our TV's. Fortunately, there's a little box called a Tablo that does essentially the same thing, so I bought one of those, hoping to get a few years out of it before everything is streaming. And unlike the Recast, it seems to be getting our CBS affiliate, so we can actually watch the Tony's this weekend.
Beyond that, the landscape is so much better. Peacock seems prepared to perpetually charge $20 per year, so that covers NBC, which will also have the NBA back starting next season. ABC and FOX stuff is mostly carried on Hulu. We do the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle ad-free for $30, totally worth it. CBS is Paramount+, the old people channel, and there's nothing I want to watch there other than the Tony's (60 Minutes segments are all on YouTube). We're not big sports people, though we do enjoy watching as much of the US Open as possible. We usually get a Sling trial for that, which includes ESPN, and it's cheap the first month. I don't know how regular Sling or YouTubeTV makes it, because it's cable-expensive.
The eventual retirement of broadcast TV makes me kind of sad, because it's the thing that I aspired to work in. That, and terrestrial radio, which has been completely useless for a very long time. I haven't listened to it since maybe the mid-aughts, when 107.9 The End met its, uh, end, in Cleveland. But maybe when that all shrivels up, more marketing dollars will move online, helping those of us who have a side-hustle on the Internets not tied to a social platform.
I spend a little more for proper redundancy on my sites, because I believe that's important for the folks that choose to use their distraction time with me. Also, obviously, that's my kind of nerd stuff. Sure, the ad revenue doesn't cover it, but I can't not provide a high level of service. (Also, it's worth mentioning that back in the day I could pay my mortgage on 30k daily ad impressions.) I pride myself on how fast it all is, and the up-time, especially compared to the days when it all ran on a single rented server. The forum app powering the PointBuzz forums normally runs on two instances using only 1.75 GB, and a working set of 500 MB.
That all works fine, because typical traffic to that app is around 2,000 requests per hour, which is nothing. However, I've been dealing with a lot of bots originating from Alibaba servers in Hong Kong, Singapore and sometimes China or India. Sometimes it's from a single machine in Google or Amazon's cloud in the US (not the search engine). They go nuts and generate 100,000 requests per hour. This is also not what I would consider "high," about 28 requests per second, but it does push the limits of what that tiny amount of memory can handle because it's so bursty. By that, I mean the requests are not uniformly distributed over time. It can slow things down, and sometimes generate errors for people.
I can scale it up to 3.5 GB of memory, and everything is again fine. In fact, there's enough overhead at that point probably to do hundreds of requests per second. I don't actually know what the upper limit is there. But it's also the difference between spending $25 a month and $50 a month. I'm already spending $72 on the two "premium" instances running all of CoasterBuzz and the non-forum part of PointBuzz (as well as this blog an a number of other things), $110 for all of the databases and small amounts for Redis, ElasticSearch, Functions, etc. The database has yet to be overwhelmed, fortunately, so I haven't had to scale that up.
The bots are annoying, but if they get really ugly, it's easy enough to see where they're coming from, and block them. Alibaba is especially easy, because they come from predictable ranges of IP's, and always in East Asia. The one-offs are the more annoying ones, because any idiot can spin up a bunch of ephemeral machines and run a script to scrape the sites. Between the two sites, there are hundreds of thousands of pages, so there's a lot to hit. It's great for long-tail Google juice, but not great for rogue crawlers.
We spent last weekend on a cruise, which is hardly unusual for our vacationing endeavors. It's so completely different from everyday life, in no small part because there are people taking care of you in every way. They're making your bed, cleaning up after you and bringing you food. Oh, and taking care of your kid. While all this is going on, you meet people from all over the world in bars, during activities or just sitting around. Coming back to land, it's clear that humanity at its best is people serving people, sharing their experiences and connecting. Sure, in that environment, that's literally the crew's job, but it doesn't mean that it isn't genuine. It takes a certain commitment to work like that, and for guests it takes empathy and kindness to show your appreciation for the crew.
This happens in everyday life, too. Civil servants at all levels of government do their jobs not for the money, but because they believe in the mission of government. Volunteers in every capacity further their causes. People give money, often to the same causes. Again, this is humanity doing its best.
Would you not prefer that the people you elect also work like this? Elected officials are by definition supposed to be serving their constituencies. They must exercise wisdom to decide how best to make government work for all of the people it serves. It doesn't mean that they don't have to make difficult decisions, and it doesn't mean that they have to satisfy everyone. But they must approach the job with the seriousness and care that matches the impact they will have on people's lives.
Instead, we have a bizarre cult of personality that people treat like a sports team loyalty. Outside of working for a political party, I can't see any world where anyone would ordinarily be anything other than cautiously skeptical of anyone in office. It's not that you should expect the worst, but people who seek power are generally the ones who are least qualified to wield it. The power is used to hurt people and marginalize others. The cult turns a blind eye to the blatant self-interest that is antithetical to public service. And for what? To stick it to all of the communities that you fear because they're not like you? No wonder we are where we are.
I got my professional start working for a municipality. I did it full-time for three years, and part-time for the six years prior. It sure as hell wasn't for the money, but I stuck with it as long as I did because I found it deeply fulfilling to be doing things that benefited the community. What I did mattered to people. At no time would I have ever considered using my position to tear anyone down or cause harm to people.
I don't expect Trump and his sycophants to change. What is most disappointing is the regular people who are fine with the destructive outcomes. One can be for, against, or indifferent, but make no mistake, that indifference has the same outcomes as being for it. Is that the legacy that you want to leave?