We have a saying in our house that’s about our approach to cooking bacon, but it applies in many different aspects of life:
Cook the bacon until the fat turns to meat.
It goes without saying
I don’t like writing, or thinking, about Donald Trump and everything is presidency represents. First of all, it’s gross. He’s awful. Second, the situation seems so obviously terrible that my comments don’t add anything to the discourse. If it’s not obvious to you why threatening democratic allies, promoting dangerous misinformation, and encouraging hate towards trans people is bad, I’m not going to convince you.
That leaves me saying nothing. If I read a diary of someone who lived through the 1940s in Europe and it didn’t mention World War II, I would be bewildered. If I (or someone else) looks back on this website decades from now, they might wonder: What did he do about it*.
* The ‘it’ will be more obvious in historical hindsight depending on where we end up, but in general, I’m talking about a political climate of intolerance, corruption, and dangerous stupidity.
I’m a Canadian who lives in Canada, but today I ended up on the United States Department of Health and Human Services website. What I saw that scared me more than any of the dangerous garbage that Trump and his enables spout off.
The site will change, but when I looked at it back in February of 2025 (screenshot) if featured a photo of Donald Trump with Robert Kennedy Jr. – A guy who has an entire section on his Wikipedia page called “Anti-vaccine advocacy and conspiracy theories on public health”. In the parlance of the show Succession, the “are not serious people.”
The next most prominent thing is a photo of a smiling white woman with the darkly Orwellian headline “Protecting Women and Children.” This leads to a page from the Office on Women’s Health” where you learn that what seems to be their most important health issue for women is blatant fear-mongering about trans people in sports.
Fuck that.
It’s somehow much more disturbing when the garbage I expect from Trump shows up on an official government department website. A real government department that matters to people’s lives.
Trump also keeps talking about taking over Canada (and now Greenland). It’s absurd on the surface. I would have assumed fifteen years ago that no country could take over a part of another modern democracy. Then Russia took Crimea from Ukraine. It’s not acceptable to even suggest taking over another country.
What am I doing about it? Not much. I don’t know what to do.
I’m relieved that we in Canada didn’t hand over control of parliament to the Conservative party, which is parroting Trump-style nonsense more and more.
Trump is dangerous and needs to be stopped. But this type of passive-voice statement isn’t changing anything.
Yellow snow warning
Environment Canada has a new color-based weather warning system.
How do they know the snow is going to be yellow before it comes?
Simulating consumption
When we create simulations, we seem to simulate passive consumption rather than active participation.
Two examples come to mind:
- Sports video games that simulate the TV viewer experience rather than the player experience, and;
- Software musical instrument recreations (like guitar amp simulations) that simulate the listening rather than playing experience.
I’d love to hear of other examples.
Sports TV simulators
First, sports video games. When you see someone playing FIFA, Madden NFL, or NBA 2K on a PlayStation from across a room, it can be difficult to distinguish from a televised live game. The games are designed to look and feel like watching sports on TV, not to look and feel like playing an actual sport. The perspective is that of a viewer, not a player. The viewpoints mimic TV cameras. The on-screen graphics and stats look just like broadcast TV graphics.
To further illustrate what I mean by simulating consumption, imagine the alternative: a PlayStation game designed to simulate the first-person experience of an NFL quarterback, not the experience of controlling parts of a televised game. There would be no birds-eye view of the whole field and no coloured lines on the field showing where your receivers will run. Instead, you’d have an often-obscured eye-level view of the chaos of a defensive line coming at you.
Software musical instruments
My second example of simulating consumption rather than creation comes from the world of music. We’re at a point where a tube-powered guitar amp can be simulated in software at a level that can fool professional musicians.
Many of these software guitar amps are designed to sound not like a guitar amp sitting in front of you, but like guitar amp mic’d up in a recording studio. The characteristics and position of the microphone are simulated. The physical acoustics of a studio room are simulated. The whole process feels geared toward making playing your guitar feel like listening to a polished recording, rather than standing in front of a guitar amp like you would in a live band.
So what?
I don’t mean to imply that either of these examples – simulating televised sports or produced guitar recordings – is necessarily negative. My imagined first-person quarterback game (let’s call it GarrityBowl 2026™) might be a lousy game experience. I love using guitar amp sims.
Maybe we just want to simulate what we know. Many more of us know what it’s like to watch sports on TV than know what it’s like to be on a football field. Many more of us know what it’s like to listen to Spotify than know what it’s like to play through a guitar amp in a band.
I do think there can be a danger if we don’t realize that what we’re simulating is a mediated consumptive experience, rather than an unmediated original creative experience. Just like it’s dangerous to expect your real relationships to work like TV/movie relationships, it can be dangerous for us to expect any real experience to be like what we see in the media.
Bonus fish
In our home we some times enjoy some prepared frozen breaded fish. A box usually comes with four pieces of fish. Occasionally, when the stars align, there are five pieces.
When this happens, we celebrate this bounty by singing “Bonus fish! Bonus fish!” to the tune of Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit Gloria.
So, things aren’t all bad.
The max q of a puzzle
When you see video of a rocket launch, you hear them talk about “max q.” This is the point where the rocket is under the maximum amount of dynamic pressure from the atmosphere.
As the rocket accelerates, the pressure from pushing through the atmosphere increases. Eventually, though, the atmosphere thins, and the pressure reduces. There’s a crossover point where the pressure is highest: max q.
Similarly, when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle at home over the holidays, the puzzle process has a max q.
The difficultly of a puzzle decreases with each piece you place, as fewer options are left for the remaining pieces.
However, the difficulty of placing a piece increases as you run out of easy and obvious placements.
There’s a crossover point somewhere in the middle where a puzzle is at its most difficult. There are still lots of pieces and positions left, and the easy placements have run out. This is puzzle max q.
Old browser, new tricks
You might think someone in their late-forties, like myself, is too set in their ways to change their life. Well, dear reader, I switched to putting the tabs on the side of my browser! It’s never too late.
Emotional nail biting with YouTube
If you’re anything like me, when you can’t sleep and your phone is too nearby, you might find yourself going down a YouTube rabbit hole.
Maybe it’s heart-warming surprise virtuoso performances at TV-show singing contests (the apparent shock here is often than people who aren’t traditionally attractive can be talented). For me, it’s live concerts where the crowd sings along with the audience. Maybe it’s the crowd helping out Lewis Capaldi when he’s struggling to get through a song, or the singer of Snow Patrol marvelling at the festival audience taking over for him. I love these. Especially when the artist themselves are obviously delighted. It’s like emotional candy.
Of course, enjoying this experience in real life is even better. I’ve gotten to sing Better Man along with a baseball stadium full of other Pearl Jam fans in Boston – or sing Sonny’s Dream along with The Once at the St. Mary’s Church in Indian River, PEI.
Once of these YouTube rabbit-holes brought me to the video for the song Monsters by James Blunt. If you have or have ever had either a soul or a father, it will probably make you cry. If you’ve lost a parent, It might need a full-on emotional content warning.
The video is such an obvious tear-jerker that there seems to be an entire sub-genre of reaction videos on YouTube where you can watch people experience it for the first time:
It’s all trade-offs
The further I get through life, the more I realize that most things in live can be seen as trade-offs.
Some things are obviously trade-offs. Should you take that new job? On one hand, you’ll get better pay. On the other hand, you may not get on as well the the team as your current job.
Beyond the obvious cases, I’ve come to believe that everything is a trade-off. On top of that, we usually don’t have a great sense of what we’re trading off.
Obviously-bad choices are just trade offs that are weighted against our preferred outcome. Obviously-good choices are trade offs that are weighted to our preferred outcome.
I find thinking of things as a trade-off helps with post-decision regret. If you made a big decision and it’s not perfect, just remember that this decision had trade-offs, and any other choice would have just had a different set of trade-offs (maybe much worse).
HTMhell all over again (now with feeds!)
My friend and co-chief-blogger-in-chief over at silverorange, Maureen Holland, has written again this year for the venerable (but evil) HTMhell Advent Calendar.
This year, Maureen has written about something close to my heart: The Wonderful World of Web Feeds.
