Words are inadequate

Yesterday I flew home from Minneapolis. My bag got lost, for the first time in ages, so I slept CPAP-less (poorly) last night. When the bag deigned to arrive this morning, it was missing one of the zipper sliders. Same thing happened to an identical bag last year. Time to stop buying and recommending Travelpro suitcases, no matter how nice the wheels are.

I also had a crown break and pop off on Saturday. And my dentist is on holiday until the fifth of January. Argh. At least it's not hurting. I did speak with him briefly and got "yeah, just keep it clean and be gentle with it, and DON'T PUT THE BROKEN CROWN BACK ON."

We lose our use of colour
Just water on the brush

Minneapolis had snow and sun, which were both a nice change from the overly typical wintergrey here. Contrariwise, it remains nice to be back at home with my kitten.

Small changes, small improvements, day by day. Sunreturn.

From today's Ask A Manager update:

I am still job searching. It's extremely rough out there, and I have not been able to get very far in interviews for the same job I left at this company because I am so early career. I've been getting feedback from companies when they do not move forward with me that they just have more candidates with more experience, always.

Money is at least sorted for the short-term. Assuming I can in fact sell this place and find somewhere else to live, it's sorted medium-term as well. Beyond that, I refer you to John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."

(Context makes that quote much more interesting than simple fatalism. Keynes was arguing with someone claiming that certain economic policies would make things worse in the short term but in the long run we'd all be much better off. Keynes believed strongly in fixing what we could now, an attitude I appreciate even when I have trouble implementing it. Can't have a better future if you can't get yourself into the future.)

Books on shelves, roof overhead, food in pantry, snoring cat. Breaking out the xmas stuff this weekend, I think. Could be worse.

Took Mr Tuppert in to the vet today for his annual vaccines. Apparently when you get a rabies shot they give you a cute lil tag. I may put that on his collar, Just In Case. The odds of him getting out are basically nil but why take chances.

He's got a heart murmur, but it looks like that came up last time, and it's not gotten any worse, so that's just a Thing That Exists. Between that, the one tooth that the vet's been warning me about since he arrived, and what might be early-stage arthritis, this is a cat that is made of Problems (But Not Yet). I'm okay with that. Chaos started showing wear at about this point (thirteen-ish) as well, and he got another four years after that.

I did have a moment of "oh no" when the vet-tech took him to the back for shots and blood-drawing. Nothing real or serious, just the sudden realisation that I'm not nearly ready for him to go away, to be taken into a room by a kind and gentle tech and not come back out again. Of course I'll be there when it happens, this time, but still.

When we got home I gave him a little bit of tunafish, and filled up his treat-puzzle with treats. I don't think he's gotten -all- of them yet but he certainly spent some good time snuffling and crunching. Currently he is sacked out on the bed Recovering. Seems fair.

I move a lot. I was an Army brat, that's expected. But I've moved more since becoming an adult. As an Army brat I moved about once every two and a half years; as an adult, it's one move every twenty months.

I feel like I am in a good position to declare that moving sucks.

However. I've been remarkably stable lately. The three and a half years I've been at Corvaric are now the longest I've lived in a single place as an adult, and the third-longest in my life. (Four years in a townhouse outside of DC for high school, preceded by the five worst years of my life in Fayetteville NC in late elementary and junior high.) I was in the same apartment complex for the almost-five years I lived in northern Virginia right after college, but I changed apartments to move in with Emily halfway through that.

This also pushes my total time in the lower mainland (the Vancouver area) above the eleven years I spent in Blacksburg VA. (The longest I've spent in any one locale is still northern Virginia, at not quite twelve years, spread across three separate occasions.)

Sure, I'd rather stay in the same place, put down roots, all that. Just never seems to quite come together for me. There's always a good reason to move: money, or job, or relationship, or just "this place is terrible." This time I'm betting it'll be money, though it might be any of the above.

No real point to this. I'm not moving imminently. It's just interesting to look back at where I've been, and for how short a time.

Although moving DOES suck.

Joachim Rønning (dir.), Tron: Ares

Apparently I have developed sufficient distance to be at least somewhat objective about a Tron movie. Tron: Ares is ... not good.

It's not awful. It's fine. It's a movie-shaped object. The dialogue, especially in the first third, is too on-the-nose, too screenwriter-school, too concerned with making sure the audience picks up what it's putting down in terms of plot and character. It spends an insufficiency of time inside the computer and too much time bringing inside-the-computer to the Real World.

However. It does look pretty. It has nonwhite characters, something both previous films were sorely lacking. Greta Lee absolutely carries the bulk of the movie, and Gillian Anderson does the heavy lifting for all her scenes. (Zarf: "A good movie would have stabbed the kid and let Mom carry the third act.")

There's a plot. It's ridiculous, as is traditional. The Macguffin is "the permanence code," an algorithm that can allow things to come out of the computer and not fall apart after twenty-nine minutes. The rival heads of rival big-tech-AI companies are trying to find it: one (the one whose computer-world is red) to sell weapons and soldiers to the military, one (the one whose computer-world is blue) to ... make orange trees in Alaska? Just go with it. It's still the case that good, as Jonathan L-- observed in the late nineties, is higher on the electromagnetic spectrum than evil. Eve Kim, the good CEO, finds the permanence code in some forty-year-old five-and-a-quarter floppies that used to belong to Kevin Flynn. Julian Dillinger pulls his main security program Ares into the real world and sends it to get the code from Eve. Ares gets cold feet at the thought of killing Eve and goes rogue, and plot ensues.

Having said that, I can't actually be all that objective about the movie. I imprinted hard on Tron as a kid. I enjoyed Tron Legacy even when it felt like it was trying really hard to visually distance itself from the original. The Ares script is a mess, but someone told the designers that they were making a sequel not just to Legacy but to the original as well. There's a portrait of David Warner, who played the human villain from the first movie, in his grandson's office in the evil corp. I laughed out loud in the theatre when Eve's phone rang and it was the descending-arpeggio motif from Wendy Carlos's Tron soundtrack.

And towards the end there's about a fifteen-minute sequence where Ares ends up in the 1980s 'grid'. It -is- the original Tron, dim lighting and lack of textures and all. I laughed again when the Bit turned up, and caught my breath as Ares shifted into a proper lightcycle. That made me so happy. It even had a few moments of appropriately airy philosophizing, this time about the value of mortality rather than "if you're a User then ... everything you've done has been according to a plan, right?". Jeff Bridges returns to full-on seventies guru mode, and that's pretty good too. (People will say "It's just The Dude from The Big Lebowski" but The Dude was always channeling the same flower-child vibe that Flynn embodied, just twenty years later.)

So, it was absolutely worth it to me, and I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.

Maybe I'll rewatch the multi-hour Making Of Tron stuff this week.

Postscript: I saw Ares in 3D. I mostly avoid things in 3D, it doesn't add much for me and costs a lot more. (My go-to "this was worth 3D" are Tron Legacy, which I might have a different opinion on now, and The Cave Of Lost Dreams, Werner Herzog's movie about cave paintings, which really did benefit from being able to see how the artists used the texture of the wall.) This was worth it mostly to say "yep, 3D movies do very little for me, even in the kind of effects extravaganza that they're sold for."

Happy Canucksgiving. In light of a recent proclamation from the US Executive Office, do remember that Christopher Columbus is the second-most hated explorer of all time, behind only Internet Explorer.

I'm thankful that citizenship (and before that permanent residency) went through, and I can be unemployed and jobhunting and not have to worry quite so much about health care. I'm thankful for the roof over my head and for my mostly-full fridge and pantry, and for being surrounded by my books and games.

I'm thankful that I've made pies (different pies) for two separate Canucksgivings, yesterday and today. I'm thankful for my acquaintances and friends. I'm thankful that Erin is still talking to me, and for that relationship having had a solid positive impact on me being who I want to be.

I'm thankful for Stephanie, for having found / re-found someone whose flaws and insecurities can complement my own, rather than magnifying them and vice versa.

I'm thankful that after almost three years Mr Tuppert and I are getting along, and Establishing Routines. The last couple of months it's been "breakfast is a time for internet and scritches," which has been a good way to greet the morning.

Autumn grey and coolth have arrived. Time to drag the cold robot back into the storage room for another six months. Time to start baking again.

I'm still here. Next year maybe I can be thankful for that.

I Am An AI Hater: "I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. If you're pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn't read it anyway. You'd ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider."

How to not build the Torment Nexus: "I guess what I'm saying is that it's getting close to impossible to be in this industry -- at the moment -- without being on the Torment Nexus Team. And lest you think 'at the moment' is load-bearing... well, I wouldn't lean too hard on it. I don't see shit improving too soon."

How to Tell the Difference Between a Lone Wolf and a Coordinated Effort by the Radical Left: McSweeney's, no humour beyond the obvious repeated dark variety, plenty of links and documentation.

And, not about the present and thus more cheerful reading, Your Review: Joan of Arc: "This is, then, an agnostic's review of the evidence for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person." Fascinating reading.

Thursday I stopped at the farmers market to get eggs, which they were out of. I did get a thing of Concord grapes, though. Also a thing of raspberries, because they were slightly cheaper if you were already buying something else. I have been marketed to.

Not that I knew what I was going to do with them. So on Friday I got a thing of whipping cream, so I could have crepes and berries and whipped cream.

Crepes take forever to make, though, and awhile back Erin sent me a recipe for what's basically a crepe made in the oven in a 9x13 pan. The texture isn't right (too cake-y) but the taste is.

Anyway, after having done that for breakfast for three days running I am a) out of whipped cream and raspberries and b) pretty confident in being able to make it. The general idea is "make sheet-pan crepe, spread whipped cream and raspberries, roll up, slice and eat". (The original called for strawberries, cream, nutella, and dust with cocoa powder, but I don't so much like strawberries and am meh on chocolate things.) I cut the recipe in half since otherwise it's too thick for me to roll well, and learned to let it cool substantially before adding the whipped cream.

Very yum, kinda fancy, and pretty easy.

( recipe )

I started rereading Pattern Recognition (my favourite of William Gibson's books) because I remembered and agreed with his theory about jet lag:

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

I love the prose, the immediacy of the present-tense narration that still manages to feel at one remove from any character's interior life, including Cayce Pollard. I love the depiction of the early oughts, the internet where forum posts and text are the primary interfaces, where permanent connectivity is available but unevenly distributed and never assumed, where "video" has to be uploaded to obscure corners of sites.

I was startled to find, in a reminiscence about London in the snow, a perfect depiction of my experience of Paris:

Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.

But every time -- every time -- I read this book, I get caught off guard by the absolutely stupid joke that he spends literally a third of the book setting up. Voytek and Hobbs and Ngemi are, in their own ways and for their own reasons, collectors and connoisseurs of old computing equipment; when we meet them they are attempting to sell a trunkload of Curta calculators so that Voytek can buy a bunch of ZX/81 Spectra. The money has finally come through but there is a hiccup:

"Yes," says Ngemi, with quiet pride, "but now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King's Wang."

GODDAMMIT GIBSON.

COMMENTER 1: I'll predict that when he's dead and buried, the ground will be quite damp.
COMMENTER 2: And have a certain Musk also, too? One can but hope.

Look, if you're gonna leave me an opening iambic pentameter line the morning after I've been rereading Mike Ford, I'm gonna take it.

Well, I'll predict that when he's dead and buried,
The ground above his corpse will be quite damp
And have a certain Musk of odor, carried
To grace our noses with that acrid stamp.
Upon gold highlights golden showers splash,
Reflecting further graveyard elegies.
Veneer peels back; someone has saved some cash
With accents from Home Depot shopping sprees.
His plastic headstone rapidly decays,
Collapsing into softened earth, until,
Weaken'd by overzealous acid sprays,
It's indistinguishable from landfill.
    So shall that asshole lie; then we'll begin
    To scrub the mess he's left our country in.

Not bad for under an hour's work.