Conversational gambit…failed

I listened to your suggestions. So, this morning when I made my trip to the bait shop to pick up wiggly things and the clerk made a friendly remark about fishing, I said, “Oh, I’m not fishing. I use these to feed my spider colony.”

He hesitated for a second, gave me a funny look, and reacted as if he was going to pretend I didn’t say that. He gave me my change and didn’t say another word. I may have derailed his brain, and he didn’t have an easy reply to mind.

I’m not taking your advice anymore, especially if a mob with torches and pitchforks shows up outside my house tonight.

How I will respond if you insult my cooking

I need to memorize this speech, just in case.


Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK!

Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til’ ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more — only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin’ tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye — a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself — forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!

Come to think of it, that is a generally useful response to any complaint. A student tries to tell me my exam was too hard…”Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Amanda! HAAARK!” etc.

The Lighthouse is such a great movie — it, and Willem Dafoe, were robbed in the Academy Award nominations. They ought to swap out that boring, self-indulgent, overlong piece of mobster dreck, The Irishman, and replace it with this. It’s a disgrace that Dafoe has never won the award.

Total wreck here

Our cat has reached new heights of obnoxious behavior. She is not the kind of cat who curls contentedly at the foot of the bed and lets us all sleep peacefully — no, she goes into bouts of antic behavior, rooting about, jumping on things, deciding to rearrange our closets. So she’s not allowed in the bedroom. Her new discovery is that she can get our attention at all hours of the night by scratching at our door and hurling herself at it, effectively pounding on it to wake us up. All night long. I would start to fall asleep and then … scratch, scratch, pound, pound, and I’d yell at her to make her go away, and then she’d start up again as soon as I began to drift off to sleep.

Today I am bleary-eyed and crankier than usual, barely able to think straight. Fortunately, today is an exam day so I don’t need to think or speak much, but this evil psycho cat is going to drive me mad.

Our next solution is to confine her to the kitchen at night, keeping her 10 or 15 feet away from our bedroom door, so she’ll really have to figure out how to make a ruckus loud enough to be heard. I anticipate that we’ll be awakened by the sound of crashing glassware. Or that she’ll figure out how to use a butcher knife.

I don’t care anymore. I welcome the sleep of oblivion.

Hey, why do people freak out at the sight of spiders, but get all melty goo-goo eyes at the sight of a kitty? Those responses ought to be reversed.

I was just sent a link to this extraordinarily appropriate song.

Take me back to giant spider mountain,
Where the zombie goblins, are toiling in the sun,
Take me back to giant spider mountain,
And let me join the zombies when I’m done,
When I’m done, when I’m done,
Let me join the zombies when I’m done,
When I’m done, when I’m done,
Let me join the zombies when I’m done

I’m already there!

Worldcon contemplates the abominable

I guess it’s that time when the venue for Worldcon is considered, and there are currently two candidate sites. One of them is … Saudi Arabia? Yikes. This is not a criticism of Muslim science fiction writers — I’m a fan of Saladin Ahmed, for instance — but the country has some major problems.

…Local laws require men and women to dress modestly covering shoulders and knees in public, avoiding tight-fitting clothing or clothes with profane language or images. It is not mandatory for female travellers to wear the traditional robe or abaaya. Information on important laws and etiquette around dress codes is available to visitors on the Visit Saudi website.

Forget about cosplay, then? But there’s worse:

…Homosexual or extra-marital sexual relations, including adultery, are illegal and can be subject to severe penalties. It’s also illegal to be transgender. Transgender people travelling to Saudi Arabia are likely to face significant difficulties and risks if this is discovered by the authorities. See our information and advice page for the LGBT community before you travel.

Shouldn’t that be instantly disqualifying? The only people who would be pleased at that choice would be the rabid puppies fans, who would find Saudi-style oppression perfectly copacetic.

The alternative choice is Chicago, in the US. That makes it tough to argue that we should avoid repressive puritanical governments. So far, though, the US is clearly to the left of Saudi Arabia.

Cool but impractical driving hack

Google Maps provides real-time traffic information along your route by by counting the number of cell phones in use along that stretch of road, which suggests that you could fool Google by loading up a large number of phones and bringing them with you. This guy is claiming to have demonstrated that by filling a little red wagon with 99 cell phones, impersonating a traffic jam, and trundling along roads that are relatively empty of cars.

I don’t know if I believe it, and the video doesn’t show it. I mean, he does show screens from Google Maps that light up red as he walks along, so I can believe that he’s exposing the algorithm, but I doubt that it would have a particularly strong effect on traffic — those streets are empty because of the time of day that he chose to record it. How many people diligently plan their commute by checking for traffic flow, and have a set of alternative routes? How many would use the evidence of their eyes, that that street over there is obviously clear of cars, to decide where to go?

I don’t count because out here, a traffic jam is when more than two cars are waiting at a stop sign.

If it does work, I’d expect rich people to load up on cell phones in their cars just to discourage others from following their route. I could imagine Elon Musk thinking this was a clever idea. It’s more practical than boring tunnels everywhere you want to go, anyway.

If you’re on Facebook to follow Stephen King, don’t bother

Stephen King has announced that he has left Facebook! The trickle has swollen to a raging…well, trickle. I doubt that Facebook is panicking over the departure of a few people. But his reasons are good!

I’m quitting Facebook. Not comfortable with the flood of false information that’s allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users’ privacy.

If it’s any help to others, I can tell you that this is the easiest addiction to break, ever. I just stopped cold turkey and didn’t miss it at all. I think it’s the act of being on Facebook that provides the stimulus to keep following the stream, and once you get away from it, all interest fades fast.

Am I the only one who thought The Good Place finale was BS?

The Good Place was a comedy show about the afterlife that took philosophical questions seriously — in fact, much of the action involved placing interesting characters in difficult situations that required them to think through their choices. It featured characters with broadly exaggerated, but mostly endearing, flaws who had to cope with a complex afterlife that kept confronting them with meaning and purpose and conflict, which they generally overcame with good humor. It was a kind of Sesame Street for beginning philosophers.

They recently aired their grand finale, ending the season and the series definitively. It was an entertaining, sweet, charming episode in which characters we’d grown to know and love moved on (or beyond) their afterlife. I enjoyed watching it, and it was quite nice to see a show wrap up four years of build-up in a consistent, satisfying way (Game of Thrones, I’m giving you some side-eye there).

But here’s my problem with it: shouldn’t a show that is wallowing happily in its philosophy at some point question its premises? The show concludes nicely within the self-contained bubble of its own conceits, but it never tries to go outside of them — instead, it builds a complex set of rules that sort of work together and provide a framework for coming up with answers that fit its universe, but never steps outside of itself.

The premises of The Good Place are

that people have an essence that persists after death,
that there are higher powers that judge your behavior,
and that the universe is ultimately kind.

Accept those ideas, and you have a set of rules within which characters can operate and drive a story. These are also premises that are as old as sentient beings’ attempts to find meaning in their existence, and they are also the premises that people want to be true, which ought to immediately throw up a red flag on the play. I distrust those ideas. I can see how they are necessary to drive a commercially viable, relatively long-running narrative, but there are alternatives that aren’t addressed.

It’s a kind of anti-Lovecraftian show, for example. The premises of a Cthulhu story would be

that people are insignificant, ephemeral specks moving into the void,
that there are greater beings who are implacable and unsympathetic,
and that the universe is ultimately cruel in its uncaring nature.

There isn’t a lot of room for humor or plot development there. My show, The Meaningless Place, which I ought to float for some network executives, would begin with Eleanor Shellstrop dying an unexpected, arbitrary death, and then…credits. We could maybe linger over her decaying corpse for a bit, but otherwise it’s over. There are no amusing hijinks, no character development, no dilemmas for Eleanor to think about, because she has ceased to exist and there is no one there to think anymore. The universe would roll on, unperturbed. Viewers would receive no comfort or consolation in a heart-warming finale.

It would be cheap and quick to make, at least.

I can understand why the show made the decisions it did — it was one of the few ways to set up propositions that would allow dead people to move within a framework interesting to living people — but its premises are also its greatest limitations. I can still enjoy The Good Place as a thought experiment or metaphor for a humanist ideal of a well considered life, but the finale only works within its own conceits, and none of its solutions are applicable to me. I’d been maneuvered into an improbable scenario with its own internal logic that had placed it outside of any useful experience.

Which is fine. You can still enjoy a fantasy novel, even if dragons and magic aren’t real. It’s just hard to find a real-life situation where dragon-slaying skills matter.

Need assistance with a social interaction

About once a week, I go into a bait shop (bait shops are far cheaper than pet stores) to buy a bunch of wiggly invertebrates for certain purposes. As I’m leaving with my purchase, the clerk invariably wishes me good luck on my fishing ventures; I’m becoming a familiar enough customer that I expect him to start chatting about what lake I’m ice-fishing at, or about how successful last week’s fishing trip was. This worries me.

So, when the guy says “Good fishing!” as I leave, how should I reply?

  1. “Uh, errm, thanks! Bye!”
  2. “Yes. I’m sure the fishes will find your high-quality invertebrates delectable.”
  3. “EEP! I’m caught!” [runs for the exit]
  4. “Fish? Bwahahaha. No. These are provisions for my spider horde.”
  5. [Stare silently. Remove one worm, pop it into my mouth. Chew contemplatively, as if trying to think how to answer]

I usually answer the first way, I’m sorry to say. How should I reply, and how would you? Better suggestions welcome.

Unoccupied

Today dawned cold and foggy — subzero temperatures and a fine cloud of ice crystals everywhere, and you know what that means?

No spiders.

I looked everywhere outside, in likely spots where I’ve seen spiders before — in, like, July — but no luck at all. Here are a few photos of my failures. Disappointing.