One other movie I watched recently was the "Cats" adaptation. I guess I'll just say here that I posted a four-star review of it on letterboxd. One of my friends got me to watch the first two Pitch Perfect movies; the first one was good, but the second one was pretty meh so I haven't gone on to 3 yet.

Of course I've been mostly keeping up on the MCU movies, as they come to streaming, anyway. They've mostly been a little underwhelming (particularly the last Thor and Doctor Strange ones), but I did like "Eternals" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home".  I also liked the (less MCU) "New Mutants" movie, and it may be the best movie adapted from the X-Men universe.

Pixar has been a bit more of a hard sell for the kids, though we did all enjoy "Encanto", and "Turning Red" was pretty good. "Onward", "Toy Story 4", and "Frozen 2" were middling.

But it has been hard for me to motivate myself to watch movies. "Everything Everywhere All At Once" is the only time my wife and I have been out to see a movie in a theatre during the pandemic (in very uncomfortable CAN99 masks), and it's hard to carve out a movie-sized block of time without feeling antsy about wasting two hours I could have spent doing something else more fun on my computer. So in my head the expected return of enjoyment from watching a movie is just too low to be worth it.

I read a book a while ago talking about "explore vs. exploit"--how one chooses between trying new things and revisiting old things. And part of the heuristic is the factor of how long you have to choose things. As someone who entered his fifties last year, it almost feels like "explore" time is over. Maybe I should just rewatch, reread, and relisten to known quantities.

Okay, maybe I'm not quite there yet, but it feels like I'm ramping up to it.

Still been watching more TV than movies for the last few years. Though "Knives Out" and "Everything Everywhere All At Once" were fantastic.

We got Disney+ to watch "Wandavision" and "Loki"; also made it through "What If", "Hawkeye" and "Obi-Wan Kenobi".  I watched one episode of "Falcon & The Winter Soldier" but mostly gave it a miss. The Marvel shows are interesting but uneven, and watching Star Wars shows reminds of how little I really care about it any more.

We put Disney+ on pause when we got Prime and Netflix to watch "Wheel of Time" and "Sandman" with the family. "Wheel of Time"...I'm not quite satisfied with the adaptation, though not for racisty kind of reasons. The casting is not a problem. But they just played too fast and loose with the story, particularly near the end of the season, until it just wasn't the story I wanted to watch any more. Admittedly, the first book was never my favourite, but I just hope they don't screw up the later stuff. "Sandman" was better, though I'm still That Guy who mostly focuses on the things they did differently. Maybe I'm just doomed to always be disappointed by adaptations unless they're word-for-word identical.

With the family we've been watching Babylon 5 on a weekly basis; we're up to Season 5 now. At some point in the past I'd thought to myself, "Simon will have graduated from university before we finish. I wonder if we'll make it through?" But Simon is still job-hunting, and not eager to move out in a pandemic, so maybe we'll make it.  We also started belatedly watching "The Good Place", which we've been alternating with B5, mostly two episodes a week, and we're only two from the end. That is a great show, and it is good to know I'm not completely unable to like new things.

With my wife we've been making our way (slowly) through a number of shows. We're two episodes into "Rings of Power", two episodes from the end of S2 of "Star Trek: Picard", two episodes into the new "Quantum Leap", one episode into S3 of "Star Trek: Discovery" (but we haven't watched it in a while). We had been watching Doctor Who with two of the kids, but they bailed after the end of Tennant, so it's just been the two of us watching Matt Smith. (I've already watched to the end of Smith, and I stopped there so the others could catch up.)  We just finished "The Pandorica Opens" there.

And myself I've been rewatching a lot of stuff--I finished making my way through Star Trek: TOS and have started on the animated series, which is better than I was expecting, and also jumped ahead to TNG (where I'm in Season 3). Also rewatching "The Muppet Show" desultorily, "Friends", "Red Dwarf" (which I've been buying on DVD because it's so hard to find online), "Buffy" (but only to sync up with a podcast I've been listening to), "Lost", and "Lexx". I had been rewatching "South Park" but it disappeared from the streaming service it was on, and I find that I have aged out of its humour or something so I may just give up.

I'm also watching "Glee" (into Season 3, now, I think), and "The X-Files" for the first time. I avoided "X-Files" first time around because I think UFO mythology is stupid, but I decided to give it a try anyway, and I find that I mostly just like the Mulder-Scully dynamic.

There are of course also a few that I've tried and given up on. I got four episodes into "Yellowjackets" before deciding I didn't care about it any more, and two episodes into "Only Murders In The Building". I've watched two episodes of "The Man In The High Castle", at least partly because one of my friends is in it, but it's just too bleak for these days so I doubt I'll keep up. We tried "Resident Alien" but haven't gone back to it, and I wasn't impressed by the first episode of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" so I haven't pursued it either.

I stopped "Torchwood" after the end of Season 2 because they just decided to kill off half the characters; we stopped "Angel" after Season 4, though we haven't quite given up on it yet. (I mean, they did get rid of Connor, but it doesn't sound like we're getting Cordelia back, and Whedon's star is on the wane, so enh.) We never did get back to "Supergirl" after "Man of Steel", and we don't find ourselves missing it either.

Then there are things we mean to watch sometime. I'm very curious about "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", and I enjoyed the first two seasons of "The Orville" and want to continue that. The kids evinced some interest in "Stranger Things" so maybe we'll try that while we have Netflix (which may not be forever). We watched "Good Omens" on DVD but Jinian wasn't old enough yet and keeps bugging us about watching it. And there's tons of other stuff too. "The Witcher", maybe, or "Andor", or "The Mandalorian" (though see above re: Star Wars), or "Orphan Black" or "The Librarians" or "The Magicians" or...who knows what.

But we are not binge-watchers. With the family, we can manage our one night a week, most weeks at least; with my wife, maybe we can manage one more hour of TV a week. And by myself, it'll depend heavily, but I hardly ever will manage to watch an hour of TV every night. So we will never catch up. There will always be more stuff. The FOMO is real.

I still exist. Keep meaning to swing by more often. Most likely I'm here because of the current Twitter instability. Maybe I should spend more time browsing blogs. After all, I do lurk on tumblr.

Started working from home in March of 2020...but now I've been back in the office for a month. I do not feel particular safe there; I mask all day except when I'm eating or drinking, even though I have an office to myself. I'm pretty sure the bloody pandemic is not over, thank you very much, despite media and government-sponsored gaslighting, and I would like to reduce my risk of Long Covid as long as possible. Though I do miss karaoke something awful.

Haven't been blogging much. On my Wordpress blog I've mostly been talking about my chronological journey through my music collection, though I did also do a pass through my favourite Crusader Kings II/Europa Universalis IV game sequence. Twitter (and tumblr) I've mostly been browsing to find entertaining things to read to my wife while she cooks; most of my tweets have been about music, still my main obsession.

Watching a modicum of TV, but maybe I'll save that for later. Increase the changes I'll come back.

Nos et mutamur in illis.

I started hanging around Metafilter in law school, late 90s. I was a 10ker who managed to snag an account during the wild days of sign-up windows, which were randomly open for very short periods of time.

For years, I was a monthly subscriber and a regular member of local meet-up host committee. I spent a lot of time on Metafilter, for twenty years nearly. I have remained logged-in but not actually looked at anything over there in years; early pandemic, I think, is what finally drove me away for good, including ending my subscription.

Now, it seems, the financial situation is dire and the place may shutter. Which seems about time to me. Not because Metafilter has changed—though it has—but because the internet has.

A friend (a 1ker) has always said "Never read the comments, including at Metafilter." And he's right. When I first went there and stayed, the comments were irrelevant. In 1998, the internet was random and hidden.

In 1998, you went to Metafilter because the front page was the fruit of people spending hours, clicking random links and find that place where a person posts her daily ode to today's random insect or that place where another person is documenting every published photograph of Cher's knees or a grand conspiracy theory about Violet Beauregard. Finding fabulous things you would never have stumbled across on your own. Gawping at strange obsessions. Laughing with the wonderful things people do when they are doing them for self, not audience.

This is not the internet anymore. Everything now is someone's pitch, someone's product, someone's public face. Curation not needed any longer. Whatever the internet is now, it's not random. It's not personal. Treasures are not hidden. Back then, when they were hidden, Metafilter found them and shared them. It was invaluable.

But the internet changed; Metafilter changed, more or less successfully. And Metafilter—for me—lost its purpose as it became about the discussion, the conversation, the community. I can't imagine going back.

Not sure who really cares about main stream social media in this sphere but this article, *chef's kiss*, spins a hilarious tale of a truly dumbass rich person.

Thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I'm behind on the very tail end of Inktober and want to finish that first.

And really, this year, Thanksgiving is going to be the 'big' holiday since Trina, Ben, and the boys will be in town then and not for Christmas.

But with all of that said, I know I can 'win', and I kinda want that.

I first attempted NaNo in 2008, and it was a rough attempt. I mean, I started at least a week late (though memory says more) and with tremendous support from Jill "xtingu" Knapp I still almost crossed the finish line.

So it's kinda stuck in my craw ever since.

I've only made half hearted attempts in subsequent years.

I think that, as I'm writing this, I'm 'talking myself into it'.

Well, I guess I better get my Inktober images finished. I've got a lot to get done in the next 24 hours.

It will almost be something fantasy or urban fantasy based, but what do you think I should write about?

I'm back to work updating OnePo's codebase to modern standards on the server side. Specifically async/await as opposed to callbacks. it's BOOOOO-RINNNNG. But I have "only" one file left. Of course, it's the one where most of the code is.

So after that I should refactor that file as well. Also BOOOOO-RINNNG, and yet somehow satisfying. Then maybe crank up eslint to call me on my shit. Poor man's typescript. Then maybe typescript?

Then rethink the frontend code. Using [ugh I will not even think about choosing a framework today].

Of course OnePo is still a tiny, tiny place. As in "I've never bothered to index the database collections for performance" tiny.  I may need to dial up the disk space just a tad soon though.

"But Tom, aren't you gearing up to welcome former Twitter residents?" No, not really, although the six people who will actually leave in this, the most recent of many outrages are warmly welcome.

Moderation of a successful public social media site is a huge, unsolved problem. As others continously have pointed out, the real challenge for something like Twitter is moderation, not engineering. Yes, it's bad that Musk's plan is basically to fire the moderators.

But I'm in no position to improve on that. There's no moderation in practice on OnePo at the moment, although I'm pledged to supply some in the event of certain types of abuse.

What we have instead is an invitation-only model and a predilection toward thoughtfully locked posts, which reduces (though it absolutely does not eliminate) the likelihood that someone you're connected to needs moderating... at least from your perspective. So far this seems to work OK for our needs.

But, a system like that cannot function as a public square. If we indulge my ego in imagining OnePo writ large, we wind up with a worse echo chamber than Twitter, because it's so difficult to discover new people and the general habit is to limit audiences for things.

Also, OnePo is just a whole 'nother idiom. The intersection of OnePo and Twitter is a ridiculous idea. That would be... uh... BeReal, actually. BeReal is pretty fun. But it does one tiny job.

Actually I kinda like the idea of doing one tiny job. OnePo's one tiny job is allowing friends to know and support each other better. That's fine for what it is, which is a lot.

PAM, TIM, I AM OWAT.

Who are Pam and Tim, and why do they keep saying "Woohoo"?

EDIT:

I wrote the below sometime last year, apparently (December? 2021?) and...forgot all about it. I totally forgot that I had the draft sitting there. I just rediscovered it and decided to post, so as to clear the decks and maybe, like...write some more?

It's so weird to read this now, in October 2022.

Hi, self, it's STILL A PANDEMIC, 10 months later.

Still Omicron, but now, there's all these variants of it, each one worse than the other, apparently.

You just got the NEW bivalent booster for the Omicron variant, about three weeks ago, or has it been a month now?

The director of the CDC just announced she has Covid, and the agency is messaging about the importance of handwashing rather than acknowledging the fact that this thing is airborne and we should still be wearing masks most of the time and we need to figure out how to make the air in public spaces safe again but apparently we're just not gonna do that so we're all doomed.

You have :knock on wood, and don't even want to say it out loud for fear it'll jinx things: not come down with the panini. (You just typed "yet" and then erased it immediately, thinking, wtf, does this mean you believe you WILL eventually?! Ugh. Don't do that.)

You did NOT get a new desk or new chair, but instead you got a foot rest thingy that goes under the desk, which sort of mostly helps but mostly, you just got used to this keyboard.

And I didn't do an end of 2021 thing, obv. Will I do an end of 2022 thing? Only time will tell.

*** below written in Dec. 2021, I think ***

So, I just got a kickass new keyboard and kickass new mouse and extremely kickass new computer (lucky lucky lucky me x infinity!) and thought I'd test them all out by writing a post here. I've been thinking I should do some kind of year end thing anyway.

It's about to be 2022. It's still a pandemic. The pandemic appears to be never ending, and now we're on the Omicron variant, which is hyper transmissible, and apparently on the way to becoming the dominant kid in town with lightning speed--but I've also been reading that the effects, if you're vaccinated, are less severe?

I'm not so sure about this new keyboard...I think it's highlighting the fact that my desk is too high and my chair is too low and the only thing I can do about that is get a new desk, I think, because the chair is new.

The desk is old--literally, it's about 100 years old, I think. Not meant to be a computer desk. The new keyboard is ergnomic, split, with a built in wrist rest thing, so it's meant to put your arms and hands in the right position.

I'm having a tough time enjoying the first two episodes on their own merits.  The departures from the book seem to grate me more than, say, the first season of American Gods (of which i was reminded by the intro sequence, same feel, except for the bit they lifted from The Expanse's intro).