Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Shows shows shows!

2026-03-29T01:01:29Z

(A note on perspective: I'm a "gen-X"-aged person from the Bay Area, raised on a diet of Monty Python, Stephen King, and Ducktales. Your own tastes may vary.)

It: Welcome To Derry

Autumn was a good season for this show but instead I binged it all in January. (I struggle with waiting a week between episodes. So instead, I wait much longer!)

The theme of a mid-20th-century white American town slowly revealing its rotten racist and sexist core has gotten pretty tired at this point. Back when I was a child in the 80's I was already surrounded by Baby Boomers who would happily talk about the state of open rebellion they lived in. The good news here is that the show's writers seem to be aware their setting is a sort of double throwback - a memory of a memory - and have deliberately ripped out a lot of the broader context (external events, other places) compelling viewers to take all the anachronisms, unreal lighting, and CGI wide shots that mimic 1962 as set-dressing for what is really a fairytale. So if people don't act quite right and things seem unreal, it's all part of the show.

I rolled with it, and none of the episodes dragged, though it was sometimes frustrating to wonder if a particular episode was going to spend more time mucking about with scary one-off encounters or push the overall plot forward. I like a "monster of the week" format. (Anyone raised on the animated Ghostbusters cartoon would.) But if you have questions at the end it's nice to know whether they'll be answered. For example, the first episode unveils a scary looking demon baby creature and a bunch of callbacks to the movie The Music Man, establishing an interesting theme, and I was looking forward to some kind of explanation or elaboration on both. Neither appeared.

I also confess I might have an unreasonable dislike for writing that establishes rules and then ignores them. The monster in this series apparently causes people to hallucinate their worst fears, in order to feed off their reaction. It can do this from any distance, and at any time that’s convenient for the plot. But it can also decide to climb out of the sewer system and walk around in person, gouging out eyeballs and tearing off heads and cutting people in half, while also changing shape and teleporting randomly around the environment. It can have its head blasted clean off by gunfire at close range, and it will simply grow a new head. It has powers like a Greek god. And at the same time ... it is apparently also extremely stupid.

(I'm at the edge of real spoiler territory here, so be warned that now I'm walking right in...)

This monster has been confined for at least 300 years, and the instant it realizes it can break free from its prison, it doesn’t go running for the gap in the fence, but instead collects a long slow wagon train of children. Then at the end of the same episode, it becomes clear that the creature can grow wings and fly, rather than loping along the ground like a slowpoke. Why didn’t it sprout the damn wings from the beginning? Because the writers thought the end was kinda boring and wanted a Dragonball-Z-style "final form" I suppose?

Still, I was engaged through all eight episodes, and that's pretty good. Six creepy red balloons up out of ten.

Alien Earth (2025)

The titular Alien - the one we associate with the franchise anyway - is almost an accessory to the story here. You could potentially swap out some other alien creature with an entirely different lore, and it would be the same story. But that's always been the case with the franchise: From the first sequel onward, it's been "X but the Alien is involved", where X is some new genre exercise. Which is good, because aside from a cool aesthetic and a sneaky reproduction cycle, there isn't much to the creature itself.

To be specific: When Alien became Aliens, the style and story went from slow-burn horror to action adventure. Alien III jumped a track onto apocalyptic survival. Alien Resurrection told a Frankenstein story, Alien Covenant was Lovecraftian muck-about in the ruins of the elder gods, and recently Alien: Romulus looped back to horror (after waiting an acceptable 45 years), which I suppose is a repeat, but it's pretty well done so fans don't care. (I know I didn't. In particular I enjoyed the sound design, so much so that I made a mostly dialogue-free remix of it for use as background while writing.)

But we're talking about Alien Earth here, the recent television series. And I know it's supposed to be this show's cool new genre flavor, giving it a reason to exist next to the other Alien stuff, but I find the Peter Pan and Lost Boys angle with this particular Ripley to be ... kind of a snooze. Apparently each Alien/Prometheus gig always needs to find a vaguely French fairytale pixie lady as a Sigourney Weaver replacement, and was that really necessary here? I suppose it attracts eyeballs...

Speaking of eyeballs, the Alien is not really the most compelling monster here. That would be a new, smaller alien, little more than an eyeball with legs. Mega-creepy. I would definitely watch a show built around that thing. Also in play is Vyvyan Basterd as an avuncular butler, buttle-ing for a "tech CEO who is actually a sociopath child" stereotype. And, in the middle of the series, you get a self-contained episode aboard a spaceship that is a delicious throwback to the original Alien. So if you're not into Wendy and the Lost Boys, skip to episode five.

Like I said above, I enjoy a "monster of the week" kind of show, and if this show was built that way I would rate it higher. Watching Wendy explore her relationship with the other androids and the Alien was a lot less interesting than the writers thought.

Six creepy creeeeeeepy eyeballs up out of ten.

The Residence (2025)

The most emphatic thing I can say about this series is that the film editors went absolutely bananas, and happily, it works. Sometimes you get a hundred cuts in a single minute of screen time, but there is enough thought behind them to make the barrage worthwhile.

The Residence is a drawn-out cozy murder mystery, scripted like a farce, full of rat-a-tat dialogue and broad acting, and it manages a sustained energy over eight episodes without getting overwhelming. Before I started watching it I was concerned that a single mystery wouldn't be enough material to work with, when other detective shows finish a new case every hour, but the complexity of the semi-historical setting and the wide array of interconnected characters drawn from the source novel fills the running time admirably. Someone is always arriving, arguing, lying, looking shifty, explaining their whereabouts, et cetera, and the detective has an audience surrogate sidekick to explain things to when the plot gets thick, so you never feel like you need a break.

In fact, when it does slow down to take a few character-building detours, you'd expect those scenes to be a welcome rest, letting you recover your breath before the investigation plunges forward again ... but instead I found myself just waiting impatiently for each detour to finish so I could gather more clues. That might seem like a strike against this show but I have a hard time saying so. It's not that the asides are boring exactly, it's that you know something more interesting is waiting for you afterward. Like ordering dinner at Fenton's Ice Cream parlor.

Partway though the mystery you will grow suspicious that you're being led into a "Murder On The Orient Express" situation, and the thought will annoy you. Thankfully the writer doesn't go that way. This series will drift out of your head quickly when it's done, but you'll have a good time watching it.

Seven-and-a-half pairs of binoculars out of ten.

Creature commandos (2024)

James Gunn jumped his own shark way back in 2006, with the movie Slither. That movie is an amazing mash-up of practical gore, dumb action fun, and a surprisingly effective exploration of multiple deeply uncomfortable topics - for example, addiction and eating disorders - in fine horror tradition.

After that he started making the same thing over and over: A ragtag group of smart-mouthed anti-heroes must fight through their differences while facing down one or more depressingly one-dimensional villains. And so, Guardians Of The Galaxy (1, 2, and 3), The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, and now Creature Commandos. In fact, if you count Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo 2, he was doing this before Slither, so perhaps it's just his niche and he likes being in it.

This series has the same flippant approach to dramatic stakes, and the same selective disregard for basic physics in the action scenes like everything else he's written and directed in the last 20-ish years. I watched it and it mostly held my attention and I could tell there were things happening that were supposed to be jokes, so it was good while I was on the couch recovering from getting five vaccinations at once, but eh, I dunno. Go watch Ducktales or The Venture Brothers instead.

4.5 out of ten super-duper-duper radioactive limbs that can melt stone but otherwise have no effect on living things up.

Fallout (2024)

Game-to-series adaptations are rare, and it's fun to see how they make the leap from interactive fiction to screenplay. What's too awkward or nuanced to bring across? What's going to alienate viewers who haven't played the game? Is there even enough drama in the source material to work with?

That last dilemma is why (in my opinion) the Halo and Castlevania adaptations feel simultaneously arbitrary and lacking in depth: The games they draw from are all about action, and the lore is window-dressing, meant to be dismissed between rounds of shooting and jumping. This is awful source material for writers, whose job is to tell a story with dramatic conflict and neat ideas, with the action as the window-dressing instead. Beyond the title card, the existing fan base is actually a disadvantage: What do players of the game want, going in? Probably nonstop action, but if that's all they get, they'll be dissatisfied. By the end of the first episode they'll say "I'd rather just be playing the game."

Games in the role-playing category have a better chance. There's plenty of drama and lore, and players aren't expecting an actiontastic explodaganza. Fallout seems like a great choice. So why doesn't it hold together? Because it has the opposite problem: There's too dang much drama and lore to cover!

This is obvious from the first episode, which kicks off four separate stories with four (almost) entirely different sets of characters. When the episode finished I was immediately worried that I would be splitting time across four separate histories that didn't intersect, like I was playing various sequels of the game Fallout, even though I was only interested in two of them. (The vault story felt like great satire, and the ghoul was a badass. The knights made no sense and seemed like a downer.)

Thank goodness they all did intersect in due time. Yeah, it felt really contrived how they did, but it was interesting, and that always matters more than anything else. From there it was a bunch of episodes combining a MacGuffin hunt, a mysterious tragedy, and lots more vault-centered satire. Sometimes the series is playing the apocalyptic survival straight, sometimes it's mocking the whole idea, as well as the idea of it being appealing. Either way it stays sharp, and thankfully it resolves enough conflict by the end that I didn't feel cheated by the cliffhanger.

As I post this, I just finished season 2, and I'm glad it came back for another round. After shoving too many parts onto the workbench in the first season, the second season takes time fitting them together.

Seven and a half radioactive axolotl up.

Outlaw Star (1998)

I missed this anime back in 1998 when it appeared. At the time it sounded like a knockoff of Robotech, and a less stylish version of Cowboy Bebop, so I didn't put much effort into finding it.

It got a Bluray release a while back, so it looks way better than any version I could have seen in 1998, which would have been a second-hand VHS dub played in a cluttered dorm room. The transfer is top-notch and you can really get into the whole hand-drawn pastel 70's space aesthetic. But really, what's interesting is how a goofy sci-fi anime from 27 years ago stands up as viewing today.

Not very well. To a modern eye it's composed entirely of tropes that have been so exercised they can only be interesting when they're subverted, or done with obvious self-awareness. The young male hero with an attitude, the magical MacGuffin girl everyone fights over, the tight-lipped ronin companion, the OP antagonist who is Just Plain Evil, the homosexual supporting character who exists to cause gay panic in the protagonist... Catgirls, giant space robots, a Star-Wars-style transplanting of the Wild West out into the galaxy... Done to death, I'm afraid, before or after the era of this show. The sexism was also uncomfortably dated in its own era.

But those 70's-style space backgrounds! Sumptuous. And though the show is a tonal mess, there are some fun one-off episodes late in the series that almost make it worthwhile. Though alas, not enough to run the whole set.

Four spazzy catgirl tails up out of ten.

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The apology list, episode 1

2026-03-22T23:28:28Z

This year I am 50. That's simultaneously very old, and still young enough to get plenty done. I can feel my body really complaining on some days. The sleep apnea is the worst of my troubles. Still, on a relative scale, I'm pretty lucky.

In this milestone year I present the following:

The Apology List, Episode 1

Each of these things is something from my past that I regret and wish I could apologize for, but for some unfortunate reason an apology is out of reach. The list is partly about unburdening myself, and partly a chance just to think about how behavior and wisdom evolve over a lifetime. I do of course have other regrets, many far worse. These are the ones that I can put on a public list.

They're not in any particular order.

The Pool

Approximate year:

1985

Person:

Our next-door neighbor, one house up the street. I think her name was Jeanie. Her property had lush landscaping that had grown a bit wild, and somewhere in there was a swimming pool, which had been drained and lain empty for years. The pool was built on a hill and had a small pumphouse below, lost in foliage.

Incident:

One day I wandered into the pumphouse and discovered the pump. I was fascinated by the wires and metal bits, so I returned later on with a screwdriver and took it apart, and stole the motor and carried it home. My parents realized what happened and apologized to Jeanie. She graciously said I could keep the parts. I never spoke to her about it personally.

Reason I can't apologize:

I no longer live at that house, and she no longer lives at the one next door. No one has her contact information, and she is likely deceased.

What I would say:

"I'm sorry I destroyed your pool motor. Thank you for handling it so graciously. I've lived in a lot of neighborhoods now, and I don't think I've ever had neighbors who would respond so well to a kid sneaking onto their property and doing such vandalism. More likely it would result in a furious and threatening rant, police action, and years of resentment. You were truly a great neighbor to a weird and unpredictable kid."

The Industrial Fan

Approximate year:

1999

Person:

An adorable young lady deep into industrial music, arriving as a freshman at UCSC.

Incident:

She had short brown hair and wore a lot of black, and like many people who were in the goth/industrial scene of the time, it was clear that sweetness and cynicism were fighting an epic war inside her head, and she needed allies. She was thrilled to meet people who were into her music, and I could sense she also had a crush on me after we bonded over Skinny Puppy albums. We had friends in common and would often run into each other.

One day she ended a conversation with me by saying "Brap on".

"What?" I said, confused.

"You know ... Uh ... 'Brap', like Nivek Ogre. 'Brap on'."

"Oh! Hah! Yeah, definitely! Brap on!" I said, grinning madly. I'd been too slow to get the reference.

She looked horribly embarrassed. I could read her thoughts on her face: "Oh my god he thinks I'm absolute idiot."

I wasn't fast enough on my feet to correct the impression. She turned and walked quickly away. We never spoke again.

Reason I can't apologize:

I never got a contact email for her outside of the UCSC system, and I've forgotten her name. With luck, she's forgotten completely about me.

What I would say:

"Sorry that exchange went so badly. The truth is, I wasn't used to being in a situation where my approval mattered to anyone else. In fact, I was an idiot in general, for a bunch of reasons during that time, and you would have made a great friend and we could have had plenty of fun conversations, but it might have actually been a blessing that we never dated."

"Dud"

Approximate year:

1983

Person:

My father.

Incident:

When we would greet each other around the house, I would sometimes call him "dud" instead of "dad". In my head I thought it was a fun little tweak to the word that reminded me of Milk Duds and being a "stud" and other good things. What did not occur to me, was that "dud" had another more obvious meaning: A defective explosive. So it was like I was calling my Dad an unexploded bomb, or more generally, a failure.

I probably did it a dozen times. He never questioned me about it. Did he think I was insulting him, and he just swallowed it rather than getting angry? Or did he somehow intuit from my tone and expression that it was positive?

It never even occurred to me to ask, until many years later when I suddenly remembered it.

Reason I can't apologize:

I had opportunities to but it never came up. Now he's gone.

What I would say:

"Whoah dang, I can't believe I didn't realize how stupid and inflammatory that sounded! Thanks for taking it in stride, though I do kinda wish you'd asked me about it."

The Art Teacher

Approximate year:

1988

Person:

The nice art teacher in Santa Cruz that my parents took me to for lessons.

Incident:

I was fascinated by a transparent plastic curtain rod that she had in the back yard as a garden decoration, and at the end of a lesson she let me keep it. There were two other boys present during that session, who were brothers. We were all hanging around on the back porch waiting for our parents to pick us up, and the teacher was inside.

The boys saw the curtain rod. One of them wanted to hold it, but I said no. We argued about it. The other brother saw this, and tried to wrestle it out of my hands. I held on. The first brother got involved. I pushed the curtain rod down onto the porch and added my knee on top, trying to augment my two hands against their four. They pulled upward and yelled at me.

Fearing the curtain rod would break, I decided to run away to the other side of the garden, so I abruptly reversed my effort and pulled it upright. On the way up it smacked the first brother in the face and he let go. Crying, he ran into the house, and the other brother followed. I went to the other side of the garden and sat down, unsure what to do.

A little later it was time for our parents to pick us all up. The art teacher brought me inside and sat me down, and gave me an explanation of what was happening.

The two boys had told their parents they'd been attacked by me without provocation. Their parents had declared that they didn't want to bring their kids to art classes if I was going to be there.

The teacher was familiar enough with me to know I wasn't the kind of person to start a fight, but she hadn't seen the incident so she had no way of defending me to the parents. She said she was on a tight budget and couldn't afford to lose two clients, and the parents had also threatened to tell all the other parents about me and tell them to keep away. So she was giving in to their demands, and I could no longer take classes from her.

For a very long time after this incident I just felt sad, because I'd let the nice art teacher down by getting in trouble. I'd really enjoyed the lessons and wished they could continue. If I'd just let the brothers have the dang curtain rod, even though I was pretty sure they would keep it, that could have happened.

Eventually I saw from the perspective of an adult that she'd left me unsupervised with two kids who were strangers to me, and they were sibling boys who behaved very differently as a pair when together. Perhaps it was a recipe for conflict. Also, while those two boys had been outrageous liars, the real tragedy was that their parents had been bullies, by threatening harm unless their demands were met. The teacher had been caught in the crossfire. This is one of those incidents where I felt there was less to apologize for as time went on.

Reason I can't apologize:

I'm pretty sure the art teacher is deceased. With luck, no one else remembers this incident anyway.

What I would say:

"Sorry I was a factor in that mess. I've always had a stubborn streak, and I didn't get along with almost all the other boys my own age. If I'd been smarter I would have left the curtain rod and run inside, to get an adult back into the situation. I hope your art classes continued and you managed to make enough money that you could be more choosy, and didn't have to placate obnoxious parents any more."

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Newstalk '74

2026-03-22T22:43:27Z

When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys of all time was a battery-powered tape recorder. It was about half the size of a shoebox, and had a handle you could clutch while running around the house making farting noises.

My siblings used it too. In 1985, when she was eleven years old, my older sister had an idea: She would be a radio interviewer. She didn't discriminate: I remember interviews with Mom and Dad, visiting houseguests, the dog, the neighbor's dog, and us playing (badly) various celebrities, all recorded to tape, which we'd play back a hundred times.

Against long odds, ten of the interviews have survived. Here they are, along with a little commentary from 2026 as I write this.

Newstalk '74: Sonya

My mom wasn't interested in politics for a long time, right up until Obama ran in 2008. Having spent her teenage years in Berkeley in the 1960's I assume she just got burned out on it for a while.

Newstalk '74: Sting

Petrea's friend Jessica had as big as a crush on Sting as Petrea had on David Bowie. This interview where Jessica pretends to be Sting survived, but there was another equally ridiculous one where Petrea played Bowie.

Newstalk '74: The President of the U S of A

My older sister switches things around, and has her friend Jessica interview her as The President. Welcome to an 11-year-old's vision and knowledge of Ronald Reagan.

Newstalk '74: Jessica "Brownang"

This one is noteworthy because it is exactly the sort of idiotic accent-based humor that would get a young person crucified if it appeared in a social media post any time in the last 15 years.

Some time in the 1980's after this was recorded, us kids spent some time hanging out with a lovely Chinese man named Jin, a visiting university student whom we all adored. This was quite exceptional: Most of the people in our town - adults included - had never even seen, let alone met, a Chinese national in person before. I'm pretty sure we would have been mortified if Jin heard this interview, and felt appropriately bad about it. Luckily he never did.

We're all so old now that the chances of anyone's career being ruined by this dumb recording are zero. I think it's worth preserving because it serves as evidence that yes, suburban kids from the 80's really did live in a pre-internet bubble, and the only real difference between the kids of this decade and the kids from that one, is that our crap went mercifully unrecorded. (Except for this! Oh dear.)

People don't like humor that seems to be "punching down", and I think the one saving grace in this recording is that Miss "Brownang" doesn't come across as an idiot, while at the same time the interviewer mocks the person doing the accent for knowing jack squat about Chinese history.

Compare and contrast with the "southern accent equals stupidity" thing going on in the interview with the President above. Way more palatable in this century, mostly because an American mocking the President of the USA has a long-honored First Amendment penumbra.

Family members and neighbors! We're all silly, but I'm definitely the worst!

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The Download Mix

2026-03-20T02:28:30Z

Unlike most of my other mixes from the 90's, this one isn't full of fart noises and screaming. It's a CD-length tribute to Download, stitching together my favorite tracks with some mild editing and a few chunky transitions built in CoolEdit Pro. It never existed on tape, because by the end of the 90's I had a decent CD burner.

So what is Download like? Hmm. Take a thrash metal band from the early 90's and put them on stage. Then, throw a brick at the lead singer, and while he crawls into the wings, shove Edgar Allan Poe up there as a replacement. Give him a barstool and a little side table with a dead rose on it, so he can sit down while he free-forms poetry into the mic.

You're not quite there. While the band is jumping around behind Edgar, gather up all their audio cables. Feed them into the back of a massive keyboard and mixing station. Now, populate the station by summoning THE LORD SATAN HIMSELF to do the mixing and keys.

Replace about half the thrashing audience with skeletons, and tell them to throw bones and grave dirt at the musicians on the stage while they're trying to play. Have them aim to wound.

Lossless-encoded version:

DJ_Fixed-Download_Mix-ALAC.m4a

AAC-encoded version:

DJ_Fixed-Download_Mix-AAC.m4a

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Quiet Mix For Jeremy, Reconstruction

2026-03-16T05:11:00Z

This is a two-part mix I assembled for my friend Jeremy. I might be misremembering, but I think he heard "numbah crunch, second edition" and liked the way the first two tracks went, with the rain and the slowly building beat, and he asked for something that would start that way and keep going.

We both loved the "Throne Of Drones" anthology, so I picked my favorites from that, then spliced in quieter pieces from Pink Floyd, Coil, Download, and my other musical obsessions in 1998. I wasn't entirely happy with the result but Jeremy must have enjoyed it, because almost 30 years later he unearthed an mp3 version of the mix from his library and sent me a copy. (I'd only saved a chunk of the first part, and lost the second part entirely. Bad filing clerk! No donut! Or stapler, or whatever.)

The mix posted here is what I think I would have built, if my library was just a bit bigger in 1998. The first part is about the same, but the second part has a new back half. I was aware of all these artists, but believe it or not, music piracy in 1998 just wasn't quite good enough for me to find what I wanted, and I was already blowing a hundred dollars a month in music stores up in Berkeley. If the adults in my life (age 22 is definitely not adulthood!) had known I spent my money this way, they would have rightly called me an idiot. Which of course is exactly why I never told them!

Lossless-encoded version:

DJ_Fixed-Jeremys_Quiet_Mix_Rebuild-Part_1-ALAC.m4a
DJ_Fixed-Jeremys_Quiet_Mix_Rebuild-Part_2-ALAC.m4a

AAC-encoded version:

DJ_Fixed-Jeremys_Quiet_Mix_Rebuild-Part_1-AAC.m4a
DJ_Fixed-Jeremys_Quiet_Mix_Rebuild-Part_2-AAC.m4a

The cover art is a photo taken by my father in the 1970's. One summer he drove a truck up through Canada into Alaska, and one day he walked into a tiny church that was converted into a museum, housing artifacts brought there by Russian settlers before Alaska was purchased by the United States. The situation of these weird, mostly forgotten silver-and-glass portraits hanging in a wooden church deep in the wilderness feels appropriately unexpected.

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Meat Beats The Devil '96 Mix

2026-03-15T18:59:03Z

This is a showcase for Meat Beat Manifesto's crunchy industrial energy in 1996. It's also full of the st00pid kid energy my friends and I had in high school a few years before, because tape recordings we made at the time are scattered all over it: Sketches, commentary, fart noises... You get the idea.

The result is not dour and spooky like most industrial mixes (well okay, there are a few places that get spooky because I couldn't help it) it's more like a party that starts out fun, grows out of control, then somehow continues even while everyone is crawling around on the ground in the public park or lying on the beach trying to sober up and find their missing clothing.

The story behind it:

This mix was put together the same way I did "numbah crunch": Windows box, two CD players, and a tape deck. Then the tape got thrown around in a Mercury Tracer hatchback, accumulating hamburger crumbs and dirt, and roasting in parking lots.

Four years later I was driving a Honda Accord with no tape deck, so I re-digitized the cassette into a couple of MP3s and used those as reference to painstakingly rebuild the mix from lossless CD tracks. In the intervening time I'd lost some of the Monty Python dialogue, tape recordings, and random sound effects I'd scattered across the cassette, so in parts of the new mix I just crossfaded from pristine digital goodness back to tape-derived sludge, so those samples could stay where they were. Not for whole songs, but for, like, one-second chunks of songs. Aggressive filtering on the tape source disguised only some of it.

This thoroughly proves how stupidly obsessive I can be: Back in 1996 when I hit "play" and "stop" on a sample of John Cleese trying to buy a pack of cigarettes using a prank language translation book, cutting the conversation up into pieces so it played out across a creepy ambient thing from the Quake soundtrack, I didn't plan on re-splicing the whole sample back on top of the original source track, dragging every bit into place like I was reconstructing a long-lost scroll from the Library Of Alexandria. I mean, okay, it only took a few hours, but was it worth even that? All I can say is, I thought so at the time...

Anyway, I burned the reconstruction onto two CDs, and those lived in a 200-CD jukebox for, I don't know, another eight years maybe? Then those got ripped again. They hopped across an unknown series of hard drives and operating systems for fifteen more years, and now (in 2026) I'm putting them on the internet. What a strange ride, for a strange mix.

Lossless-encoded version:

DJ_Fixed-Meat_Beats_The_Devil_1996_Mix-01-Side_A-ALAC.m4a
DJ_Fixed-Meat_Beats_The_Devil_1996_Mix-01-Side_A-ALAC.m4a

AAC-encoded version:

DJ_Fixed-Meat_Beats_The_Devil_1996_Mix-01-Side_A-AAC.m4a
DJ_Fixed-Meat_Beats_The_Devil_1996_Mix-01-Side_A-AAC.m4a

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New mix page

2026-03-09T00:42:47Z

At the suggestion of nephew Nick, I have consolidated all my mixes into a wee gallery.

That is all! Carry on having a good Sunday.

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Old Driving Tapes, '93-'97

2026-03-08T22:55:53Z

A CD player in a car, let alone a multi-CD changer, was a rich person sort of thing. Also it would be some years before they didn't skip going over a speedbump, or choke on their own guts and scratch your CDs. A beat-up pile of cassettes breeding in a glove box or roaming around under a car seat was still the way to go.

I had about a dozen cassettes with mixes on them, and they all broke or washed out or got lost before I had the time and the hardware to dub them into a computer and stick them on an iPod. Except for four of them.

The first three I rescued from the car, and the fourth one I mailed to my friend Breakpoint, who dubbed it and sent the file back to me ... twenty-five years later! The fourth one is partly a driving tape, and partly just a bunch of stuff I thought he would like. So it's labeled a 'bonus mix'.

What are the other three like? Well... Manic. Wacky. Designed mostly to make you grip the steering wheel and go, go, go!

Old Driving Tape 1, Side 1.m4a
Old Driving Tape 1, Side 2.m4a

Coil, Lard, Shonen Knife, John Zorn, KMFDM, Laurie Anderson, Siouxsie and the Banshees, David Bowie, Intermix...
...Sheep On Drugs, Front Line Assembly, Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy... (etc)

Old Driving Tape 2, Side 1.mp3
Old Driving Tape 2, Side 2.mp3

KMFDM, T-99, Skinny Puppy, David Bowie, Jimmy Jackson, The Butthole Surfers, Laibach, Machines Of Loving Grace, Nine Inch Nails, Monty Python, Negativland...
...Pink Floyd, Intermix, Shonen Knife, Skinny Puppy, Pop Will Eat Itself, Front 242... (etc)

Old Driving Tape 3, Side 1.mp3
Old Driving Tape 3, Side 2.mp3

DJ Zog, T-99, (weird KDVS tape loop burp insanity), Meat Beat Manifesto, Moby, MST3K Theme Song, Steve Roach, Front 242, Shonen Knife, Pink Floyd, Coil, Monty Python, Nine Inch Nails...
...My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, Grotus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Intermix, John Zorn... (etc)

Old Driving Tape 4 (Bonus Mix), Side 1.m4a
Old Driving Tape 4 (Bonus Mix), Side 2.m4a

Aphex Twin, The Young Ones, Liquid Television, Deep Forest, Michael Kamen's Dead Zone Soundtrack, Jack's "Long E Pete", Biosphere, rather a lot of Meat Beat Manifesto... (etc)

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Numbah Crunch Mix, Second Edition

2026-03-08T22:39:12Z

After my summer internship, I moved to Davis and got a job assembling web pages and network management tools for a tiny dial-up "internet service provider". Once again I needed hacky music for the office, and I decided to revamp the first 'Numbah Crunch' mix.

Same setup as before: Windows box, two CD players, and a tape deck. I had rough notes from the first mix, but this time I wanted something that was ... deeper. More hypnotic, more alien. Farther into those dark caverns.

The result is an entirely different creature hanging on the skeleton of the old mix. It's clear the two are related, but they move differently. There's more Intermix, Scorn, and Mandible Chatter, less Mr Bungle, Bjork, and "Disco Toilet".

Numbah Crunch Mix Second Edition-Part 1.m4a
Numbah Crunch Mix Second Edition-Part 2.m4a
Numbah Crunch Mix Second Edition-Part 3.m4a
Numbah Crunch Mix Second Edition-Part 4.m4a

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Numbah Crunch Mix, First Edition

2026-03-08T22:25:16Z

A couple years after I graduated High School I got a summer internship, at a tech company in Mountain View. This was pre-iPhone, pre-MP3-player days, but I really wanted to hear my music at the office.

At home I had a giant Windows box that could play samples, two CD players, and a tape deck. I wired them all up into a mixing console, made a pile of rough notes, jammed a blank 90-minute tape into the recorder, and off I went.

The result is basically a time capsule of all the music I liked in 1996 that was just distracting enough to keep my brain content, but not distracting enough to keep it from working. My "good thinking" place was full of beeping devices, cement blocks, lightning, dark echoey caverns, chanting, engine noises, chunky grinding beats, et cetera. And to a casual listener, I expect it sounds rather ... violent.

For example, around the ten minute mark, you can hear a long loop of terribly distorted explosions and shouting drifting around over the music. That's the "Doom 2" application loaded into CoolEdit as if it was a raw sound file. If I'd opened it as "unsigned 8-bit" instead of "signed 8-bit", all the samples would have been clear... But why would I want that? Heh heh heh.

About 30 years later my nephew Nick got ahold of this mix, and he reports that it's still good for hackery!

Numbah Crunch Mix-Part 1.m4a
Numbah Crunch Mix-Part 2.m4a
Numbah Crunch Mix-Part 3.m4a
Numbah Crunch Mix-Part 4.m4a
Numbah Crunch Mix-Part 5.m4a

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Mira turned 20 last year!

2026-02-25T10:50:39Z

We found Mira in 2005.

If I hadn't been in the back yard at the right time, I wouldn't have heard her blind cries from the other side of the fence, as she dragged herself out from under the neighbor's house with failing strength.

La and I were pretty sure that without the immediate rescue, Mira wouldn't have survived the night. If a hungry animal hadn't taken her, the cold would have. She would have had one miserable day outdoors for her tiny life, and that would be it.

( Intead she got... )

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Thought for the day: I think I need to go re-read some Asimov

2026-01-28T07:12:35Z

Nature was unable to evolve telepathy, or even silent, digital radio communication like the kind we use to coordinate swarms of drones, but it has managed to create impressive methods of coordination through the unremarkable mediums of sound and light, as well as direct touch and even smell. When we build devices that appear to manifest consciousness in these mediums, even something as simple as a vinyl record that re-creates a human voice when you apply a needle, we feel an unease, because the device has entered an uncanny valley and we suddenly feel like the answer to a question is very important: Is this a person? Or a rock? This could be something baked into us by evolution, as a fundamental part of the process we use to recognize other people and communicate with them. Its usefulness precedes us, too: Any mobile animal that doesn't lay unfertilized eggs needs to at least learn how to recognize its own kind, or it's gonna have a hell of a time reproducing.

Suppose you created a robot. Suppose it was in the shape of a human with a speaker grill where the mouth would go, and it contained an audio player that would play speech through the speaker, so that every couple of hours, this robot doll would appear to be contemplating its existence aloud to anyone nearby.

You would look at that robot and know that it was doing a poor job of imitating a human. You'd know there wasn't any actual contemplation happening -- no mental process. No being was present whose existence could be contemplated, whatever words came droning from the speaker.

Now, consider a doll with a computer inside, and a program running on the computer, using the latest generative language techniques, and trained so that when you converse with it, it appears to be speaking to you the way a Midwestern teenager would. Throwing in "like" and "um" according to a statistical pattern, and so on. Also, install a microphone and some voice recognition software, so the conversation goes both ways. Perhaps there's some suspicious delay because the computer isn't very fast, and maybe the conversation degenerates into nonsense if you give it nonsense for input - which is unlike most humans who would stop and say "what the hell are you babbling about?" - but it would still be an alarmingly good simulation. It would absolutely fool a child.

You still know exactly how it works, but if you placed it in front of some adult who didn’t, they would either assume they were having a two-way radio conversation with a slightly insolent human somewhere else, or they would be forced to assume that they were talking to a sentient robot. Mostly sentient. Easily confused, but obviously trying to think.

The only reason you are not fooled is, you personally witnessed the robot being constructed.

Let a child watch while you construct and program the robot, and they would probably still assume you had just created life. They might and even refuse to believe your claim that it’s artificial. What does that word even mean to a young person?

This leads to a more fundamental question: Why does it matter, whether the thing in front of you is life, or a simulation of it?

Young people must have some instinctive impulse to recognize the self in other things for society to function at all. If we left it up to external training alone, the chance of empathy arising and then taking permanent hold would be hilariously small. On top of this instinct to empathize, to see bodies and faces and recognize a range of emotions, we soon need to learn that some animate things are more human than others, and that humans are the most human of all. We learn that people have feelings, and all the way on the other side of the spectrum, things like rocks do not.

Relatively speaking, humans are really, really good at cooperation, and empathy is foundational to that. It compels humans to act altruistically, but without accidentally prioritizing the survival of, say, rocks. Young people practice empathy by keeping dolls and imaginary friends, and humans of all ages practice their empathy by keeping pets. But now we encounter modern devices that act so convincingly human we cannot tell the difference. Evolution never had to deal with this.

When we become surrounded by devices that handily stride across the uncanny valley - that realm of suspicion that kept us from giving humans the same consideration as rocks, even really interestingly shaped rocks, for millions of years - what are the consequences?

And what are the consequences, when these robots are impossible to distinguish from people, but they are still programmed and directed and acting on the behalf of other people -- people we don't know?

This is the futue we are in, right now.

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Quackaroonie!

2026-01-28T06:05:07Z

I woke up from some weird dreams about cross-country trips and bike touring. Typical, really!

Rachel led me out into the living room to show me her morning project: She'd assembled a bike grease shield for my right leg, using the cloth and straps I gave her, just the way I'd described. It looked very promising! I decided to ride out with it that day. Rachel was late for work on campus, so she took off as I was loading the bike.

I pedaled out west of the house to the river, through the park, then threaded north. Across the fancy bridge I picked the nearest coffee shop and got a mocha and a B.L.T.

As I was moving my bike closer to the table, a young woman walked over to me, pointed at the grease protector that I had peeled from my right leg and draped over the handlebars, and declared, “I just learned what that is the other day. It’s called a spat!”

Me, thinking: “Wow. I have a bunch of nephews that I take on adventures, and now I wear spats…”

Waaait a minute...

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Thought for the day: Drafty

2026-01-27T07:30:08Z

The rise of blockchain-based "coin" economies, and the buying into them by the lower-middle class, is a direct result of them feeling shut out of the standard avenues of commerce for their young working lives.

From their point of view, boomers and tech magnates own and control the economy, and have found so many ways to twist it in their favor that it's nearly impossible for a young person to get established.

So, why wouldn't these people embrace things like Bitcoin?

If they instinctively believe that all currencies are scams, even the so-called "regulated" ones, then walking into the Shitcoin Casino doesn't seem like a change to them. Except perhaps the newness and obscurity of it can give them some breathing space from the chokehold of previous generations. You don't have to gain enough power to exploit everyone around you, you just have to be sneaky and fast enough to exploit enough of your own peers.

This exact line of thought is also why "prediction markets" - i.e. legalized gambling over an infinite variety of increasingly niche claims - has caught on at the same time. Everything is a race to beat public perception, and scam or be scammed, because productivity and objective truth are both traps for suckers. (Also, fighting your job to unionize can be violent and precarious, whereas blowing half your wages on DraftKings might make you rich.)

Hooray; another ugly monster for the next generation to fight. I might be a little too old and cranky at this point to care.

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Thought for the day: Inner wiring

2026-01-27T07:09:52Z

Imagine a person who was born without the ability to hear. Ask yourself “what does their interior monologue sound like?”

You can tax your imagination trying to answer this, but you can also do another thought exercise that might explain why the question is a trap:

Imagine a new species of animals that communicate with each other through wireless signals, broadcast directly from one mind to the next, without anything visible or audible occurring. To be clear, this is not like using a telephone. They're not sending the sound of spoken words on some other frequency. The information that passes between them has no real equivalent in audible sound at all. You could try recording it and then playing it back as audio but it would sound like garbled hash to your ears.

Imagine that the animals call this activity “wiring”, and they can understand each other quite well using it.

Now imagine that, like you, these animals have an inner monologue -- the equivalent of what happens in your mind when you think a bunch of words, to figure something out, without actually speaking. But it's not exactly the same thing, because their primary method of communication is "wiring". So appropriately enough, when they think about sending signals without actually doing it, they call it “inner wiring”.

Now ask them what their “inner wiring” would “wire” like if they couldn’t “wire”.

The question is crazy because you don't know what the noun is, what the adjective means, or what the verb is doing. So you have to throw all that away. What you're really asking is, "how do you communicate with yourself, if you can't use the units of expression and reasoning that you need to communicate with others?"

It's obvious that you can think without "inner wiring". You yourself are proof of this. Want to know what it would be like? You have an answer: It would be like you. And yet, you can still think quite complicated things without engaging a wireless transmitter ... or opening your mouth.

You're using something adjacent to - underneath - those sensory means of communicating. It would be there, even if those means were stripped away. But here's a fun riddle for you: What would thinking be like, if all those sensory tools were stripped away? I don't mean, "what if you were suddenly struck deaf," I mean, "what if you somehow learned to think without having any senses at all?"

Give us even the faintest, most tenuous sense - anything at all - and with time and willpower we can conjure the most amazing thoughts. But what if there was nothing? I rather suspect there would be no thought either.

And so we arrive at ... "Sum, ergo cogitare possum". René Descartes would be proud?? Hmm.

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Thought for the day: Social problem

2026-01-27T06:37:06Z

In about five years, our culture will discover a new social problem, where groups of (mostly terminally-online) people socially engage with each other and the outside world the same way they engage with the AI bots they use for their hobbies and careers.

Think of it less like a communication style and more like a mental disorder. It will go beyond simple speech patterns and tactics; these people will start to see other people as chatbots, and treat them in the same disposable, exploitable way.

This will be the thing that the current crop of new parents will panic about in their children.

I'm willing to bet it will mostly be a "young man" problem, because that group is historically a combination of:

1. Cynical about social interaction.
2. Not wise.
3. Hyperfocused on their work (because they need to survive and don't know how yet.)

Treating other people like chatbots will also have an ugly resemblance to a role young men are already vulnerable to, that women are all-too-familiar with: Being a pick-up artist. Say the right things to "game the system", and the reward is yours. Then hit "delete" and move on. Or, if it's not working, retreat back into your reassuringly pliant community of robots. Real people are "hard mode." Who wants that?

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Oooeeeerrrr -- young people!!

2026-01-27T06:19:06Z

Outside the cafe today I heard a bunch of kids in their early 20’s reminiscing about the "good old days" of being ten years old, talking about console games, bumper cars, candy bar fundraiser campaigns in school, and lemonade stands.

"Bruh, I made 120 dollars selling lemonade in one day. I sat outside with a guitar, bruh. In a chair."

"Nice bruh!"

"I was, like, learning how to play and I thought I was real good. So I’d make up songs about lemonade. And so many people walked by. One guy gave me a 20 dollar bill for a cup of lemonade, bruh."

"Haha! What!"

"I was like, what do I even do with this money? Can I take this? Bruh, he walked away without asking for change. I don’t even remember what I bought with it."

"My Dad’s friend is like, a gardener at Disneyland, bruh."

"You mean, a dream maker, or whatever they call them."

"Yeah bruh. He has a special card that’s green. All the normal people get cards when they go in, but his was green."

"Yeeeah!"

"He took us on the Toy Story ride when it wasn’t open for the public yet, bruh. It was so amazing, bruh, I was like, oh my god, I’m VIP at Disneyland.

"Ballin’ bruh."

"I was so ballin' bruh."

The speech patterns are so weird! I was packing up my bike so I heard a lot of it, and I wanted to make some kind of friendly comment, but I had no idea what to say. "Bruh, if I made 120 dollars at your age, I would have gone to Fry's Electronics and bought a hard drive."

(Long, confused, pause.) "Okay, sir."

It’s like ... a thousand hours of urban influencer prattle and braggadocio, flattened down and then used as a strainer, to create this very specific dialect, and so help me I know these people are smart - they’re Berkeley suburban kids, basically raised in luxury, with every resource at their disposal - yet I hear that dialect floating out of their mouths and I want to deduct five hundred points on the "reliable", "dependable", "interesting", and "experienced" scales, and start from the assumption that all they’re really good for is being crass consumers and working service-economy jobs, because they would slack off, and crap on, anything harder.

Yes, I am definitely too old, and I know it. What's amusing to me is, it's the dialect, not even the subject matter, that's messing with my head.

And also, yes: For a certain amount of time at that age, I slacked off, and crapped on, most of what adults claimed was worthwhile!

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More thoughts about stuff and things

2025-11-18T00:11:29Z

In the years leading up to my father's demise, he began giving away almost all of his possessions, and over time I realized that you could separate the stuff he was getting rid of into categories, grouped by the questions you would need to ask yourself about each group. Some examples make the point:

"This ping-pong table: I have trouble just walking and holding a glass, so I am definitely done playing sports. This table needs to be with someone else."

"These books: They look nice on a shelf, but my vision's not good enough to read such small print. The most rewarding thing I can do with them now is enjoy the act of giving them away, to people who would be grateful."

"These nice clothes: They look good on me, but if I'm honest, I can't be arsed to go to fancy events that would mandate them. Besides, shoelaces, and buttons, and neckties, are a nuisance now. I'll make them into gifts."

"This truck: My wife doesn't like it, and recently the DMV said I was no longer qualified to safely drive. I'll never need it again. Time to get rid of it."

"All these tools in the garage: I use them to repair stuff. Do I want to spend my limited time repairing stuff? Especially now that my concentration and coordination are this shaky? Not ever again. Time to give them away."

The end-goal, which he never quite reached, was to have empty bookshelves, an empty garage, an empty driveway, and empty closets. It was a smart thing to do, and in his case it was complementary to what was happening in his mind, which was also being slowly emptied by dementia. One of the best things you can do to fight dementia is to engage socially, and asking the people you know if they might like some free stuff is a great excuse for it. Just about everyone likes free stuff. So come on over and let's chat for a bit while you muscle this ping-pong table into your car.

Popular culture has recently extruded a quirky little growth of books and videos about "Swedish Death Cleaning," based on the common problem that Americans have with spending too much time seeking and maintaining piles of stuff, and the quaint feeling that anything Swedish must be a clever, less-stressful alternative to anything American. We love having space and we love accumulating piles of material goods onto that space, and in multiple ways that makes America the envy of most of the world, where space or material goods - or both - are very expensive. But our typical approach to everything good, is to do it until it's so incredibly over-done it flips around and becomes evil. So what do we do when we're drowning in piles of stuff, for example, too many books? We buy a book explaining how to solve the problem. Which is why I think the opening sentence of every book and video about "Swedish Death Cleaning" should be: "First thing, return this item, and get your dang money back."

But I think of those books, when I think of what my Dad was doing. Around here, it's apparently so hard to counteract the desire for material goods that we can only succeed by invoking the finality of death itself. When you're gone, all this crap will still be here, but - and I guess this is really hard for people to internalize - you won't actually get any joy or utility from it, because your body is kind of an essential component. Physical objects are beholden to physical bodies, and no amount of mental attachment in the form of sentimentality or stubbornness can overcome that. If you apply this lesson about death to the lifetime that precedes it, you get the idea that you're are always paying a physical price, or taking on a physical debt, for every object you keep. The satisfaction you feel as you arrange and curate it, and marinate in the knowledge that it's there when you need it, gets smaller with time, but the object continues to require exactly as much space, and shelter, as always. Or if you neglect it, you eventually have to clean it up. At the same time, your own body gets harder to maintain, making the management of your stuff even more annoying. I think that's a big reason why this lesson is naturally easier for older people.

On the other hand, if you're the rebellious type, you might refuse to embrace it, and refuse harder every year, until your house and property are a grimy mausoleum of books and furniture and old letters and jars of urine...

Anyway, the point I'm trying to arrive at, is that personal experience and popular culture have both conditioned me to be very skeptical about accumulating stuff. I've found that it's very hard to get rid of, or just to let go of, and it's also hard to stop it from accumulating in the first place. There have been times in my life when I moved into a new living space and actively tried to fill it, just because I suddenly had empty rooms, or open shelves in the garage. It's fun! And plenty of times in the last decade or so, cruising around Oakland, when I've found free items and felt the urge to haul them home just because, hey, free stuff! I could re-stain this coffee table and it would look pretty good, and I could always use more plates and cups (except that honestly I couldn't.)

I'd like to sound wise and cool by saying that what I've truly embraced is experiences, rather than possessions. How mature! But no, the real motivation here is, dealing with stuff is just an absolute pain in the ass. It's the physical debt. It's inescapable. You can defer it for a very long time by, for example, buying a larger piece of property than you really need, and maintaining couple of extra rooms to heap the stuff into. Workshops and sewing rooms and libraries and personal "maker spaces" and so forth can be very pleasurable and useful as well, and if you're living with someone else, an extra private room for one or both of you can be essential. Having a hobby is one of the keys to a long life, and enjoying your older years, and I personally have two huge cabinets in the garage filled with bike parts and little electronic bits. But it is really easy to give time to the maintenance and curation, especially when it only feels like fun, and it's really hard to reclaim that time later on, when one bicycle and one shelf of parts has expanded to three - no, five - no, let's be honest, seven - bicycles and most of an entire garage of tools, spare parts, and working space. Good ol' Stephen King opined many years ago in a book about writing that art needs to be a support system for life, and if you have it the other way around, you're going to have problems. I feel like I'm constantly in danger of the same thing, except it's not art, it's just the material goods I might use to make art. Piles of it, growing organically like some malevolent compost heap.

Ironically, I never used to worry about this until I became a "property owner" (by which I mean, I took on a massive loan) and was suddenly completely responsible for maintaining an entire house. You'd think that since I could do anything I wanted with the space, I would feel free to cram it full of stuff. Well, perhaps if I didn't have that massive loan. To deal with the loan I've been renting almost all the space out to other people, and I'm being paid to maintain space for them instead of me. That means a garage full of tools, arranged into labeled boxes. And currently, it means all the rest of my materials for living part-time in Oakland are crammed into the garage as well, so I can maximize the rentable space. I guess it's not your typical "home owner" experience. I guess I've never actually had that experience. Property has meant much more responsibility than freedom, for me. But maybe that's had a positive effect overall because I've been forced to to learn the lesson about the physical debt of stuff.

This creates a cognitive dissonance sometimes. I feel like I'm expected by society around me to have a particular living space, because of my age. If you're 50 years old, shouldn't you have a house with a bunch of rooms, all your own, all deliberately furnished, with lamps and framed art, and a big dining room with seats for a whole party, and maybe a rug that really ties the place together? A den, a man-cave, a craft room? Plus a back yard, with a barbecue or a pool or both? If you have a living arrangement that's smaller, or you technically have the space but you're putting it to some other use (like renting it out), does that mean that you messed up somewhere along the way? College people and early adults can be expected to make do in apartments, living on top of each other, but by the time you're pushing out to the edge of middle-age, shouldn't you have "arrived" in a big, permanent, curated, possibly suburban, residence?

Here's the strange thing about that: I've had those things already. For like, years and years. I used to do Friday dinners with at least six people around the table like clockwork. I had a series of amazing kitchens, a series of dens, a series of man-caves, in different places. They were wonderful. I have great memories and a giant pile of photos. That all started in my late 20's and ran pretty consistently, until I began aggressively paring my stuff down. I gave away the dining room table in 2012, and downsized to one that seats four. Almost all the time, what I enjoy now is a meal with one other carefully chosen person. Almost all the time, my hobbies happen with equipment that occupies a space ranging from a table-top to about eight feet of shelving. Some external force keeps whispering to me that, if I really want to fit in with society, I need to expand that out again, and damn the expense. Kick all the tenants out and claim the den, dining room, and driveway, stock a pantry with bulk items, fill up all the walls with art, play my stereo much louder because no one is sharing any walls, and organize another series of dinner parties. Forget about being portable, and minimal. And when I hear that whisper, that expectation and the pressure behind it, something in me hisses back, "No! Shut up and go away! This is better!"

Which is odd, right? Because I really did like doing all that. When I first moved to Oakland I rented a five room flat, and my housemate and I filled all of it immediately. We both got craft rooms, and we muscled the giant table with room for eight into the dining room. Turns out the flat upstairs was a classic "punk house" though, where every single weekend was a giant party, so we didn't even need the table; we'd just walk upstairs. Either way, the space and the furniture felt essential, like we needed it to properly experience life. I hauled that table to two other houses, then at some point I can't remember, I must have decided it wasn't worth the work, and I needed to figure out what came next.

This is a kind of transition I run into, over and over: Society and culture implanted me with a bunch of long-term goals, and I spent many years chasing them down, building them up, and then having them accomplished - taking the metaphorical victory lap - and then I went skating ahead, into a place society and culture made absolutely no mention of, beyond the goal they are still, even now, stridently endorsing, and the message is so loud and constant that it makes me think the right thing to do is turn around and go back to where I was - the victory lap - and stay there, even though I don't actually want to. Just so I can stop feeling the cognitive dissonance of this loud message. When everyone around you seems to be clamoring for something you don't want, how can you help but ask, "What's wrong with me?"

I think in my case, it's the awareness of death that caused me to "go wrong", combined with an ever-increasing awareness of the much longer arc of history that created the world I grew up in. Like, when you grow up in a house with separate bedrooms and a giant dining room table, that feels like your goal; and then you learn that your longer family history involves growing up with 13 siblings jostling around in a two-room cabin on a farm, or ditching all their possessions except a couple of suitcases to board a ship for another continent. And then you start looking at that giant dining room table with a more critical eye. Is it there because you need it, to have a real life? Or because your grandparents dreamed of having one, and now you get to make your own decision? Awareness of death has taught me that the most important factor, in whatever you decide, is whether it will get you more time with the people you love, or second to that, more time doing what you love.

It bites you in the end: It's possible to spend a whole lot of your time and money managing the stuff you think you need for a hobby, or just a level of material abundance that will make you feel successful, and in the meantime the chances you get to do stuff with the people you like - the people who really know you, and get what you're about - get smaller, and shorter, and then bodies fail or accidents happen and the chance is completely gone. You'll still have that organized workshop, that amazing classic car you rebuilt by hand, that house full of extremely well-matched furniture, but you'll eventually only have enough time to start figuring out who's left that you can pass it to, aside from indifferent strangers.

Dealing with this is a challenge! Because like I said, hobbies are vital. And it's a good challenge, honestly, because it's something you get to worry about only after you've avoided starving to death, succumbing to disease, or getting run over by an oxcart. It's led me lately to ask the question, am I going to go for a big career change, like I've been contemplating the last five years or so? Maybe it's time...

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More fake movie listings

2025-10-01T21:43:11Z

A Few Good Men (2009). After a string of gory murders, the owners of Studio 54 are placed on trial for operating a secret sex dungeon in the basement of the nightclub, behind the regular sex dungeon in the basement of the nightclub. Meanwhile, a detective (Guy Pearce) finds evidence that the killer will strike again, and hires a former dominatrix (Helen Mirren) to get him 'in the right headspace' to solve the case. (R, 96 minutes, also NC-17 version at 110 minutes. Four out of five stars.)

The Hunger Games (2009). Young prison camp inmates compete to see who can make the most appealing food items out of dirt. They are discovered by the warden (Bruce Dern), who arranges a multi-prison musical bake-off, during which they plot a daring escape. (93 minutes, PG-13. Two out of five stars.)

8 Mile Island (2011). A rabbit farmer named Rabbit, living in an illegal bunker deep in the exclusion zone around Pripyat, opens a petting zoo. KGB agents arrive to shut it down, and discover that the rabbits can freestyle rap. The farmer avoids prison by training the animals to produce propaganda. 'Rabbit's Rabid Rapping Radioactive Red Rabbit Revue' becomes famous throughout the USSR, and when the Soviet Union collapses, they begin a von-Trapp-family-style secret exodus from Ukraine into Belarus to avoid slaughter, hopping through forests and hiding in basements. (PG-13, some scenes of animals in peril, 105 minutes. Three out of five stars.)

Smile (2003). While brushing his teeth one night, a young boy comes up with an idea for a new toothpaste flavor. He and his friends sell jars of toothpaste out of the family garage, prompting lawsuits from big corporations. The "Toothpaste Kid" is elected major, then runs for president. As the election results are being announced, it is revealed that the boy is actually in a coma triggered by hitting his head on the sink in the opening scene of the film, and everything else was a hallucination. (79 minutes, PG-13, zero stars.)

Twilight (1988). A high school student (Martha Plimpton) is cursed by a homeless man (Pete Murphy) after hitting him with her truck, and begins to transform into either a werewolf or a vampire any time she hears the phrase 'like, oh my god'. Most of the student body is drained or eviscerated before her father (Christopher Walken) performs a ceremony to lift the curse. (85 minutes, R. Three out of five stars.)

Note: Spawned a whole series of Twilight sequels, where the curse moved to a procession of wacky victims: The high school principal, a sex therapist, a pilot on a mission to Mars, and finally, a squirrel. Decades later, fans continue to debate over whether it was more fun to watch the staff of an auto shop be terrorized by a werewolf vampire squirrel, or watch a werewolf vampire sex therapist try to do her job.

(The last episode.)

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Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

2025-09-12T22:12:08Z

I poked into this book about ten years ago, and posted a sort-of review on Amazon. Then much later Amazon notified me that an automated system had detected a violation of its content policy, and in response it was taking down every review I'd posted on the site, over approximately 15 years.

It never told me what it had found, and the process is left very deliberately opaque as a cover-their-ass legal policy. I had zero interest in making some kind of appeal. That was the last in a series of signals to me that contributing any meaningful content into Amazon's universe of data was utterly foolish, and frankly I should have known that from the start.

Anyhoo, the review I wrote is below, preserved for the heck of it:

If this book had any more strawmen in it, it would have to come wrapped in bailing wire.

But that's rather beside the point, isn't it, because you and I both know that the people who sit down to read this book will fall squarely into only one of two categories, and that will determine how much they enjoy the experience:

The categories are:

1. People who pride themselves on having an "open mind" about creationism, and are looking for some kind of balanced presentation.
2. People who feel personally invested in the idea of divine creation and are looking for reassurance (or ammunition).

To save time, I'm going to assume that anyone reading this review is in one of those two categories. Anyone who falls into any other category would steer away from this book just after reading the title. Now I'll explain why the category you're in is important.

If you're in category 1, you're going to choke right when you get to the end of the introduction, where the author states quite boldly that Darwin's theory describes evolution as "a purely undirected process". If you have sharp eyes you can stop right there. The author hopes you won't notice this little falsehood, because the entire book that follows depends on it completely.

He will spend 20 looong chapters building a castle in the sky, made of many bricks, each an example of how incredibly unlikely it is that any of the components of modern life would spontaneously form in various "undirected" ways. But you don't need any of that, because you have recognized the switcheroo, and you know that the cornerstone of Darwin's theory is that evolution is a very directed process indeed. It is directed by a process that had been thoroughly described in all its myriad forms since his time. That process is given the name "natural selection" and it is both ruthless and incredibly creative. And, unlike what this book claims a few chapters in, it applies just as well to the precursor molecules that formed the first living cells, as it does to the living cells that followed. That selection process changes the numbers drastically.

But even so, the numbers don't actually need to be changed that much. To you folks with open minds in category one, here's something that may interest you:

Did you know that the eukaryotic cell - the kind of cell that makes up all plants and animals, every creature you can see with the naked eye - was quite likely created "by accident", by a very specific collision of two types of bacterial cell - archaebacteria and eubacteria, a billion years ago? It was a very unlikely smashing-together that resulted in a viable, new creature. In fact, in all of the Earth's history, it happened only ONCE. (How do we know it happened just once? Because when we examine the genetic code of various cell components in plants and animals, we can trace their lineage back, and we find that all the lines everywhere converge to one single parent.)

(Don't just take my word for it, take the word of a textbook, for example: The Cell, 2nd edition, by Geoffrey M Cooper of Boston University. Very much worth reading.)

Before that one eukaryotic cell appeared, archaebacteria and eubacteria ruled the Earth, for three billion years. It took three billion years, of an entire planet sloshing around, for that "accident" to happen JUST ONCE.

Consider this entire planet. Not just your house, or the city you live in, but the whole planet. Now consider your lifespan, of about a hundred years. Consider that lifespan passing repeatedly, 30 times in a row. That's much farther back than you can trace your ancestry. Now consider a thousand intervals of that. You can't, really. Our brains just can't manage it. They go up to about a hundred years or so and just break. Think of it as a design constraint. A thousand of anything is too much. But now, in a purely numerical sense, think of a thousand of those intervals of a thousand intervals of 30 lifetimes. That's how long three billion years is. All your instinctive notions of what's "likely" to happen in the environment around you are completely destroyed by an interval that long.

You could take a few shots at calculating the odds of two fairly incompatible types of organism smashing together and surviving as a hybrid, applied to that interval, but all the numbers would be speculative, because we still don't know enough about early biochemistry to narrow them down. Nevertheless, once on a whole planet over three billion years is enough room for some very long odds. If the chances of a coin toss coming up heads is 50 percent, and you flip a coin twice, you would not be surprised at all if it came up heads at least once. If the chances of something happening in a year anywhere on the planet are one in a billion, and you wait three billion years, you shouldn't be surprised or even impressed if that thing happens.

And so, here we are to talk about it. Every other place in the universe where it could have happened, but didn't -- well, intelligent life isn't there, so it's not around to talk about how it didn't happen. That means the fact of our existence is not even evidence that anything truly mathematically unlikely has occurred. We can't really be surprised by our own existence.

All you folks in category one: Sorry, you'll be disappointed. You just bought 20 chapters full of strawmen, and the state of the art of biological sciences left all of them well behind at least 20 years ago when DNA sequencing got cheap enough to do on a large scale.

To you folks in category two: What can I say? You'll get exactly what you want, here. You won't encounter anything that will make you more informed of the science, except in broad strokes, but that doesn't matter to you, does it? Enjoy your guided tour through this castle in the sky. But, to steal a phrase from a classic game, "Sorry Mario, the truth is in another castle."

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Expose yourself to art

2025-09-09T05:58:18Z

One of my absolute favorite comedy shows is The Young Ones. It first appeared in 1982 and made its way to my living room in 1985. Surreal, manic, highly destructive, puerile, kind of loathing youth culture... Basically my personality at the time.

A while back it finally, FINALLY got a Blu-ray release. In the first episode you can see a poster on the wall for a few seconds, and now it's visible enough to make out details:

The photo on the poster was taken in 1978, by a fellow named Mike Ryerson, in the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. He originally intended to make it a poster for the Venereal Disease Action Council, until a reader of The Northwest Neighbor newspaper wrote in and submitted the caption "expose yourself to art".

How in the bloody hell did a photo taken in Portland end up on the set of the first episode of The Young Ones four years later?

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Сэм and I meet for a day, then I get philosophical

2025-09-02T22:36:37Z

The day after hanging out with Алисса, I slept until noon and awoke with nothing to do all day except read, hack, and eat my delicious leftovers. I felt calm and composed. The conversations of the last week had helped to settle my emotions. I was suddenly connected to a bunch of new people, with good things to say, and good ideas. It all seemed so much easier.

I received a message from a young woman whose profile I'd browsed a few times before. It was short but very forward: "Heya, handsome! How's your day going?" I responded at the same flirty level, and we did a back-and-forth that lasted most of the day. Her name was Сэм.

She outlined a tentative scheme to drive all the way down from Fairfield - an hour-long journey at least - to meet me in the evening on Wednesday. By the feel of the conversation, she intended to get a good look at me, make a few sanity checks on my personality, and follow or lead me to some secluded location of our choosing where we could make out for a while. I had a feeling she talked a bigger game than she walked, but there was no point in calling her on it. Besides, she was the one doing all the driving, and taking the lion's share of the risk.

It was the first time I'd actually agreed to future plans with someone, however small, in a while, and that brought to bear a curious pressure in my mind. What was that about? This lunch date with a nice lady was looming in my mind like a dentist appointment. How much unstructured time can one person need?

Сэм and I met at Cafe Trieste on Piedmont avenue. She was seated facing the window, reading a book, and easy to spot. She was tall, big-boned without being fat, and had a curiously rounded head and large eyes. She was a combination of good pieces that didn't add up to attraction for me, even while I could see how they would easily catch the eyes of other men. The biggest factor for me was her years of sun exposure. There was a large patch of thick, burned skin across the front of her chest, and similar patches along the tops of both arms.

Now, people can do what they want with their bodies. But I think many people don't realize just how severe the slow accumulation of sun exposure can be, until they start to get damage that it's too late to prevent. So I keep getting this idea of renting a billboard in the center of town, and putting up a huge sign that says, "PALE PEOPLE: INVEST IN LARGE HATS." Then a link to a website, laying out the details of UV light and RNA damage...

Sunburn or no, I was determined to have a nice time. I put myself forward for her, and began to tease her out of her shell. She never fully emerged, and never really relaxed, but she at least trusted me enough to be completely honest about her past, her plans, and her impressions. We told lots of travel stories and had fun comparing Bay Area life and culture to some of the other places we'd lived. I liked her but, as I'd done with Алисса, the feelings were turning into something between friends.

It was interesting comparing these two people, since they were fresh in my head. Алисса was more structured in the way she spoke. She would set the stage for something, then say it, then talk around it a bit to build the context the way she wanted. She was also more likely to speak up, and out, and grasp at questions. Сэм was different. More straight-ahead, and more about problem-solving and practical skills. As the stereotypes go, it was more masculine. She also kept an emotional distance from me by teasing.

It was something I saw in Аннет, too, but in Сэм it was constant. During our coffee shop discussion, and later at Rudy's Cafe, she jibed me about a whole series of things, most of which I veered quietly around, and it was only after my third or fourth show of complete indifference to it that she got the hint and realized that it wasn't having the effect she wanted.

This is probably a case of me being oversensitive to the tactic, after an entire year of having minor arrows of judgement flicked at me by Эрика, in a tone that only had the veneer of teasing but was all business underneath. Nowadays I interpreted teasing as a power-play - an attempt to provoke me into accepting an inferior position, where my date's approval of me is cast as an act of generosity on their part. After 20 years of varied experience, that tactic has started to really turn me off. I was aware that teasing was used by some couples as a kind of tension relief, but it always struck me as a crappy alternative to vulnerability -- something grown-up children did. If they didn’t have the skills to express things fairly and tactfully, they just inoculated each other to a certain level of abuse, so they could smuggle across the important admissions of need or desire by wrapping them in sarcasm, which had to be unwrapped on the other end.

Eventually Сэм responded, and dropped it from her repertoire, but only after the date had almost entirely run its course. We hugged in the parking lot outside Rudy's and she drove away. There was no make-out session, and I wasn't surprised.

I cycled home, feeling curiously happy, just because I'd had the chance to be my outgoing and sharing self for a while with a person who was not a bitter misogynist like my housemate. I also checked my phone and discovered a message from a woman I'd written to the previous night, and was further elated by the warm reception she had given me. I was sure that Сэм wouldn't be interested in seeing me again, nor I her, so it was onward to the next thing. And that brought up the question of "Why?"

My housemate was out somewhere and the cat was curled up in a little basket in the living room, and the question buzzed around my head as I ate a snack and settled in to do some reading. "Why am I going on these dates?"

If I just wanted to make out with someone I could have probably convinced Сэм to go for it pretty easily. It was clear she thought I was handsome enough. It's true we weren't a great match in our communication styles and I didn't believe she was long-term relationship material, but it's also true that a part of me - an embarrassing but undeniably real part of me - was going on dates specifically to look for sexual interaction. It had been on the table just an hour ago, and I bicycled home instead.

When I was younger, I went right through my teenage years feeling indescribably horny, but never working up the courage to actually kiss someone, or do anything else overtly sexual. My imagination ran amok, picturing the things I might do with people, if only I knew it would be socially acceptable, mutually desired, and wouldn't summon the wrath of authority figures. But those things were never, ever clear enough. I was at war with myself, and something I firmly believed was that when the opportunity to actually kiss someone presented itself, I would take it, no matter who it was. It seemed too amazing to ever turn down.

That belief turned into a general belief, about boys and men: They were supposed to doggedly pursue sex, even with people they didn't care about or didn't even like; even with people they knew they never wanted to see again. Just because it was sex, and they wanted that more than anything else. Likewise, women were supposed to play the opposite side of this dynamic: They were supposed to be indifferent to sex at best, and put up as much resistance to it as they could muster, so the man had to work and wait for it, thus proving that he was committed enough to her specifically.

Since being a teenager, I'd met a whole lot of different men and women, and gathered a whole lot of experience, and realized that the dynamic I'd been shown by the culture around me was a lie. Not just a general guideline that was intended to be pushed gently past as a person came of age, but a straight-up lie, with a deliberate intent behind it to distort male and female sexuality for other purposes. And the lie was harmful, inspiring shame and self-doubt and a truly appalling amount of wasted time in myself and hordes of people around me. Women and men ran a spectrum, with some in both groups diligently pursuing sex, and some only wanting sex with people they liked in specific ways, and some not being particularly interested ... and people could also change positions over time. The stereotypes were blunt instruments used to validate the preferences of some people, and viciously hammer others down below the threshold of public perception.

There's a word floating around, that many people do not like because they think it means something "anti male". It doesn't. It describes a specific social system, one that screws up women and men alike. That word is "patriarchy." And those lies are part of it.

But that's outside the scope of this little piece of dating autobiography.

I knew better than what the stereotypes claimed, but even now, part of me struggled with the cognitive dissonance they created: Wasn't I supposed to be so eager to make out with someone - anyone - that it didn't matter how nice they were? A big part of my motivation for dating was the desire to have a sex life. Does it make sense that my desire for romance would be working at cross-purposes with that? Aren't men supposed to be "simpler"?

Well, no. And all I could do was keep looking.

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Date number two with Квиг, and some confusion over my approach

2025-08-28T01:48:23Z

I rode home around 6:30, showered, shaved my head, and changed into nice clothes. Then I rode over to Pho 84 to meet Квиг for our second date. This time I arrived before her. We ordered fish cooked in curry sauce and a noodle plate, and we both devoured it. We both seemed more relaxed, like there was less at stake, even though a second date actually raised the stakes because it was a declaration we were actually interested in each other.

We chatted about work first. "So," I asked, "Have you been using those ADD superpowers we both share?"

"I have!" She told me about a complex training project she was working on. "But you know, there's downsides to our brains. It can be so hard sometimes to focus on stuff that doesn't have enough novelty."

"Oh I know. Sometimes it's hard to build the novelty sandwich, with all the different flavors. Your schedule has too much bread and not enough lettuce, and you end up with something too dry, and you can't make yourself eat it."

She laughed. "That's a fun way of putting it! Yeah, too much bread at work lately. I have a lot of experience covering over and faking it when I'm not functioning on all cylinders mentally, but I'm thinking about seeing a therapist who specializes in ADD, to teach me different ways to manage it. I'm kind of excited."

"Excited about what? OMG, look, a pony!!"

"Hahaha! Are you one of those bronies I've been hearing about?"

"Why yes, of course I am a brony!"

"I should have known!"

"You know, honestly, when we talk I don't actually see a lot of the ADD thing going on. Well, I guess I have to say, I don't see it relative to other people. Some people I've talked to, you can barely keep up with them because their brain is jumping all over the place like a cricket in a box."

"Well that might be the difference between ADD and ADHD. I'm not the hyperactive type."

"Ah, right."

We talked for almost four hours, about past relationships, personality quirks, life priorities, and so on. She ordered two glasses of wine and got rather tipsy, and her usually well-settled emotions began to simmer a bit, which I found intriguing.

"You know," she said, leaning forward, "I think it's kind of embarrassing to say this, but I think what I really want in a man, in a romantic life, is just to have a guy come over to my house about once a month or so and give me a pedicure, and then afterwards, maybe if I feel like it, we'll have sex. Then he'll head back home and I won't see him until next month."

I laughed at that and said, "Sounds pretty good, actually. But just for the record, I don't know how to do pedicures."

She smiled, and I quickly changed the subject to leave the ambiguity in place. Maybe I was auditioning for a role, maybe not.

We broached the subject of polyamory again, and I backed off from the preachy attitude I'd shown on our first date, telling her that it was her arena and that I had no business telling her how to talk to a boyfriend. She accepted the apology graciously.

After a pause, she said, "So, please don't take this the wrong way, because I'm not judging or anything, I'm just trying to get your perspective. Have you ever successfully been in a polyamorous relationship? It sounds like they've all been either disasters or things that you've avoided."

I thought for a bit. "Well... I don't know if I could declare what I had with my ex a categorical success or a failure. When it worked, it worked very well. ... But I know why you're asking."

I told her the story about Кэрол, and she compared that to her own relationship and made a few observations about jealousy. I could tell she was thinking over her own polyamorous situation, and how it made her uncomfortable, and how I'd recently pressed the eject button on something like it. Perhaps it would be a mistake for her to do something that pulled me into her romantic life. But, she was tipsy, and I was apparently game, and we both seemed to like each others' bodies, so...

I didn't explain it to Квиг, but I'd been thinking already about why I was willing to see her despite the prospect of more polyamory shenanigans, and the answer was not flattering: I was feeling a lot less immediate passion for her, relative to Аннет. It was an echo of something my mother had told me a few years back, when I was trying to pin down my jealousy with Кэрол: "Passionate relationships don't share." I was learning that the inverse might also be true.

When the restaurant closed we started walking together, and realized she was too late for the bus. I offered to accompany her to the outside of her apartment complex, then ride my bike home. She agreed, and we took off again, arm-in-arm, chatting away, with me pushing my folding bike along with the other hand.

When we got near the waterfront we slowed down, then stopped at a park bench at her request. We snuggled close, looking at the slowly undulating waves beneath the boardwalk.

"So, are you dating anyone else right now?" she said.

"Nope," I said. For a change I had only one prospect and I wasn't in a hurry to add more.

This seemed to be the right answer. She leaned further in, and I held her head in both hands. Eventually we kissed. Her rhythm was strange -- a bit random and seeking. She would open her mouth and then stop, with her tongue tucked away, as though she was waiting for some kind of signal I wasn't sending. I was reminded of the other times I'd shared a first kiss and found a clash of patterns. I could taste the wine in her mouth. It was fun, but it didn't set off any fireworks. I was a bit surprised actually, and a little worried voice in my head asked "Is there something broken in me?"

Suddenly she got up, faced me, and sat down on my lap, with her legs split on either side of my waist and her knees on the bench. Our heights were so different that she only needed to tilt her head down a bit for us to meet for another kiss. I took her bold move as a sign that I could let my hands roam around, so one went up the back of her sweater to grab the muscles on her back - toned from all that rowing on the lake - and the other went down the back of her pants to discover that she was wearing some adorable thong underwear.

We made out with an escalating intensity for a while. It could have been two minutes or half an hour, for all I knew -- my brain was off the hook. I bit her on the neck, which had an effect like pull-starting a generator: She growled deeply and all the muscles in her back tensed, then her body cycled slowly through one intense arc, pressing down onto my lap. If I kept doing that she would probably lose her composure.

She must have decided the same thing, because a minute later she abruptly stood up, patted down her clothes, and declared that she really had to go to bed.

We parted tenderly, and I watched her until she was safely inside her parking garage, then I climbed aboard my bicycle and pedaled slowly home. We traded a few text messages to say we'd both had a fun time, and agreed we should meet again.

That's how it stood for a few weeks. She turned her attention to her steady boyfriend, trying to untangle her feelings and confront him about a few difficult issues, and in the meantime I focused mostly on work. I left the dating profile on, and when conversations looked promising I was happy to line up dates. Квиг and I both knew we weren't going exclusive, and according to the modern rules that meant we didn't necessarily have to share everything that went on elsewhere in our romantic lives. I had room to explore.

This felt important. I felt like I couldn't approach this period of bachelorhood the way I'd approached the last one -- hell-bent on finding the perfect match and the perfect beginning. I had never honestly tried the new-fangled adult practice of dating people on a more casual basis, and I remained deeply skeptical of it. Could I still recognize someone I could love deeply, while seeing others casually? Could I still feel with enough depth to fall in love? Could I express with enough depth to inspire that in others? For a while now I'd been a person who might feel butterflies and fireworks from the first moment I see a date in the real world. Should I wait for that? Or should I be skeptical of it, and wait for something else?

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First date with Квиг

2025-08-27T03:11:53Z

I had a first date with Квиг just as my rollercoaster relationship with Аннет crashed back into the loading area. As soon as I marked myself "looking for dates" on the site, she sent me a message. It wasn't our first exchange; we'd already talked months ago and I knew she was good conversation. This time she made me laugh out loud with a few well-placed puns, which was a great sign. In a little less than a week we were both standing outside a pho restaurant in downtown Oakland.

Квиг was a short, compact woman with a vaguely Eastern-European face, tanned skin, fine brown hair to her shoulders, and a quiet, geeky demeanor. She was wearing jeans and a puffy jacket, which she took off in the restaurant to reveal a long-sleeved buttoned shirt. The clothing was comfortable - nothing revealing or conspicuously expensive - and she wore comfortable shoes. She didn't need to work hard to show off, anyway: The way the jeans curved over her legs made It was obvious she was in fine shape, thanks to a long-standing membership on a local rowing team.

It only took us a few minutes to agree that we both wanted small bowls of the same kind of soup. Just after handing over the menus she looked at the cartoon on my shirt, and recognized the Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist character. Turns out she used to work for a publisher that distributed an anthology of the comic! I was delighted. In these first few minutes she came across as younger than her age, and shy. Both strange things, because she was older than me by about six years, which meant she should be the more sophisticated one, and me the shy suitor.

We picked opening subjects at random, and talked about cats - she had two - and her slow abandonment of the Mac platform. She described her contract work, and I described my previous job, and then at her behest I gave a long-winded description of the science at my new job, which she found fascinating. We chomped the heck out of our soup, between monologues. There was a fun exchange about technical writing, then impostor syndrome, then career burnout and recovery, and then the ADD symptoms we both had in common. We both felt they were a combination of superpower and curse.

"A lot of times in my work," she said, "I get dropped into oceans of new information. For a while I just flail around in it, absorbing things randomly, and that's when the worst of the impostor syndrome hits me."

I nodded.

"But then I start to see patterns, and more patterns, and instead of just flailing I start diving down into specific things, and eventually I can put the whole thing together. Or at least, together enough to build training materials that work, so other people learn what they need quickly. At that point I feel like a hero, you know? Like, 'I'm great at this!'"

"That sounds prefect!" I said.

"Oh it's so much better than what I used to do," she said. "And I don't have to stomp around in heels all day, in my little 'I'maperfeshonal!!' outfit, and smile at clients like my feet aren't killing me."

I laughed.

We switched over to telling travel stories. She had many excited questions about bicycle touring, and what it had been like crossing the midwest. I told her about the insane weather and the spooky abandoned houses. The questions she asked made it clear she was thinking deeply, and she even scaffolded ahead of me when I was having trouble describing something, which was impressive. She was able to build on or challenge my own thoughts with ease, but also willing to be vulnerable -- a rare combination.

Late in the dinner I decided to take a risk and go meta, asking "what drew you to my profile on the dating site?"

She grinned impishly, looked down, and said "actually I'd been stalking you for a while, reading your journal. When you marked yourself single I jumped at the chance to go on a date with you, because I figured you wouldn't be single for long." She rummaged in the noodles with her chopsticks, flustered at revealing something that might shift the balance of power between us.

"Well that's flattering," I said. "I'll swear I won't go on some kind of ego trip about it. Much." I smiled. "But really, I don't want to go diving into some new thing right now. I want to be single for a while just to catch my breath. So there's no rush."

I knew she was curious, but also wouldn't want to appear as if she was prying, so I volunteered a brief description of my dating history, and a conversation I'd had with my older sister about how much time we'd each spent outside of relationships. Up until a few years ago, I'd only spent a few months of my adult life as a single person.

Квиг confessed that she had overbooked herself with dates recently and was feeling a bit exasperated.

"I have an interesting relationship with ... relationships," she said, and laughed. "Being in something committed doesn't feel right, but I've been wanting something more consistent than casual dating. So what I've been doing is like, long-term dating. Or polyamory, I guess, but that word has a lot of baggage. There are a couple of guys I've been seeing, but the amount of time we spend together varies a lot."

"Oh?" I said.

She explained that she'd been seeing a guy for over a year, but his military job made him disappear for months at a time, and even when he was back in town he was hard to contact. To keep herself occupied she'd been dating a few other guys with his permission, and it was somewhere between a nice distraction and a hassle, depending on the way everyone's life was going from day to day. I got a bit preachy in response, saying the guy wasn't respecting her enough with his communication, and she should confront him about it because she deserved better. Instead of getting annoyed - which she had every right to be - she took it in stride, saying she was thinking of doing that but still considering her options.

Even without some immediate rush of physical attraction, I was intrigued by Квиг. She had a depth to her. Her personality was well-established as an adult but there was a grasping, reaching quality to it, as though she just could not stop trying to understand everything, even if the world was far too large to fit in one head.

She paid for the meal, which I found refreshing, and we gathered our warm clothing and left the restaurant so they could lock the doors. We went in the general direction of her bus stop, zig-zagging a few times to find the right street corner, talking the whole time. Through subtle signals between us - mine more overt than hers - I eventually had my arm around her, with her face buried in my sweater, and one of my hands stroking her hair. She made a series of deep sighs between bits of conversation, and eventually said "You have a nice touch." In my mind I wondered for the hundredth time how much of my habits when touching women were established from petting the household cat when I was growing up.

Eventually her bus came, and just before she boarded, she thanked me for waiting with her and dove in and pecked me a kiss on the lips. I enjoyed the playful gesture, and felt a mild elation as I climbed over my folding bike and rode back to the house.

There were no huge fireworks, but there was a comfortable, warm attraction. I wasn't hit with the urge to derail the rest of my dating life, but I knew I would be happy to schedule a second date and see where things went. It was almost a month before we both made time again.

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Dates with Аннет, and a road I didn't have the energy to walk

2025-08-21T02:37:30Z

Even before my breakup with Эрика was official, I'd been scanning the dating site trying to find new people.

Oh, don’t act so offended! I’d known it was going to end, and I knew she knew. Browsing the profiles was part of how I gauged whether I really wanted to be single.

Once the separation was declared, I felt free to write all the messages I'd been considering, and the most interesting one was to Аннет. Her dating alias was a reference to a fictional character we both knew, so I wrote my message as a short story, where I approached the character's father and asked him for permission to date his daughter. I was very proud of the writing, independent of whether it impressed Аннет. But I definitely did want to impress her, because we had both answered over a thousand match questions on the site, which was rare, and sported a 98 percent match rate even with that high count, which was shocking.

The letter caught her attention instantly, and we began talking in-depth over email. She described herself as dedicatedly polyamorous, and I was a bit wary of her declarative tone, but I didn't feel like the arrangement was an instant "no." She mentioned a man she'd been involved with back in Maryland, and said she was still seeing him occasionally, and in fact he was visiting her during the weekend she received my first message. I told her to have a good time, and meant it.

We chatted back-and-forth for days, and when we weren't doing that we traded big emails full of lively discussion. I told her all about my polyamory experimentation from a few years ago, and she asked a lot of curious questions about how I compared it with monogamy. The emotional mechanics of it; the way it forced a person to confront ideas about communication and jealousy. I was happy to share it all with someone who didn't just see it as a disaster. She said there had been rough times for her, too, but she'd learned a lot. I said that was reassuring. She said it was all a matter of integrity and respect, and she knew how to manage both, so we should set up a time to meet and see if there was chemistry.

Our first date was on a weekday. I sat at my desk and tried to put in a solid chunk of work so I could enjoy the evening without guilt, but my head wouldn't cooperate. It wasn't Аннет, it was dating and romance in general. Where was I truly headed? Would I ever actually find a "purpose", as my recent ex had so precisely defined it a few months back, when we were comparing notes on our post-breakup lives? I really needed to just relax and let this be a date. Having things be so high-stakes all the time was exhausting.

5:00pm dragged slowly up and then pounced on me, leaving me just enough time to pedal home, shower, change clothes, grab the folding bike, and cycle to MacArthur Bart. I boarded the train for Fruitvale, clattering and lurching under the weight of a thousand commute passengers, and walked down from the platform with only a minute to spare. Аннет's train was late. She would be arriving straight from work, and since the Bart was part of her regular commute, we could hang out for a while and then she could continue to her house.

I waited, standing tall in my striped shirt, reading articles on my phone. A few thoughts rolled around to the front of my brain.

"She seems great but we've only traded words over the internet. Some people need a slow start in the physical world even if they've welcomed me into their mental one. If I'm too eager, I might overwhelm her."

"The thing that brought us together was mutual love for an author. It might be fun to think of us as characters meeting inside one of those novels. Hmm, no, that's too distracting. I'll just be myself."

I thought I saw her approaching from the corner of my eye, so I made sure to put away my phone slowly, giving her time to get close without feeling embarrassed. As soon as I looked up she grinned and gave me a little wave. I took a step towards her, took her offered hand, and gave it a single firm handshake, like we were two guests at a fancy party. Then I said hello to her little dog: A remarkably intelligent and self-assured creature. Watching Аннет play with him - frolic even - as we locked my bike and walked through the mall to a sunny bench, was very entertaining, and made me feel happy.

That was the first thing I found interesting: She was broadcasting an energy that made me happy.

Аннет was a short, pale-skinned woman with soft but muscular limbs and a wide, smiling face, with a spray of wavy reddish-brown hair bursting out behind her head. This much I knew from photos, but what I really liked was the way she moved as I watched her talk. High, melodic voice, easy laugh, very expressive hands, her head in constant motion, tilting and swaying to add meaning to her words. There was an enthusiasm beaming out of her like sunshine, and it felt familiar. I had a feeling like I was already used to it. From previous romantic experience maybe, but maybe from something deeper.

That in-person energy made many things about our previous conversation click into place. Suddenly I understood the intent and the force behind a tone that had seemed confusing before, in the emails and chats. Even the driven, voracious way she'd dug into the discussion about monogamy now made sense. It was clearly that mind, animating this body.

As we sat, the clouds split briefly overhead, and a sunbeam drifted across her eyes. Time stopped as I looked into them. Yellow-green and jewel-like, with a feral wideness, like some creature that belonged in a mythical forest had snuck into the modern world, and I had just accidentally seen through her disguise. I struggled with a compulsion to just stop moving, and thinking, completely.

"Don't turn into a slack-jawed idiot," I thought. "That would bore her, and you'd regret it."

I pushed past the moment and we kept talking, telling stories back and forth and enjoying each others' enthusiasm, both of us laughing. At one point she laughed at a joke and I said "Mission Accomplished!", referring to a joke from a few days ago, and she got so flustered trying to come up with a funny retort, with her face all screwed up and her head sideways, that I burst out laughing, feeling overjoyed, and she gave up and joined in with me. It was a lovely moment. This was the infectious feeling of instant chemistry.

We kept talking, and she missed her bus. I immediately proposed a solution where we would ride Bart for a while and then I would bicycle to my van and drive her home. She accepted it without hesitation. Then we got so busy talking - again - that we left my bicycle behind at Fruitvale station. I only remembered it as the train pulled in at MacArthur. I slapped my forehead. I would have to get to my house on foot, which meant a much longer wait for Аннет.

We emerged at MacArthur and found her a sunny patch of curb to wait with her dog, and before she turned away I placed my hand on her shoulder and looked right at her and said "be safe". She didn't just say "okay" or "I will", she brought her hand up so that it was covering mine, returning the eye contact, accepting the concern and showing that she valued it. I had made a little gesture of chivalry and she'd taken it gracefully. Often these things were hard to balance but I think I got it right.

I turned around and ran most of the way to the van. I didn't want to leave her alone for any longer than necessary. I knew she had her dog, and my reasoning mind told me she would be perfectly fine, but I wasn't acting for my reasoning mind; I was acting from instinct. A man just doesn't leave his date sitting somewhere.

Ten minutes later I rolled up in the van, and as we were loading up she thanked me again for my flexibility and apologized for being a few minutes late earlier in the day. I called up a map to her place on my phone, and handed it to her, and she guided us onto the freeway. I could tell she was subtly impressed by the fact that I already trusted her to just take my unlocked phone. As before, we talked nonstop, all the way up to an overlook of the city, where we parked the van for a while because we still didn't want the date to end yet. The dog seemed happy to hang out in the spacious back.

More storytelling, more laughter. We went a little meta, and I made a few observations about how I saw her mind working. She told me a few key stories that knit together pieces from our online conversation, filling me in, giving me time to tell stories of my own. We had an exchange about the mental faculties of programmers that was a nice back-and-forth, with a slow, thoughtful cadence, working towards shared understanding without the need to be "right". I liked that dynamic. In the middle of the conversation she pulled some knitting out of her purse and worked at it for a while, then stashed it away, keeping her hands occupied, which I found completely adorable. Much later I realized that she'd been giving her hands something to do because what she really wanted was to put them on me, and it wasn't appropriate yet. Eventually we drove the few remaining blocks to her house, and against her better judgement, she brought me inside, to her room, and we continued the conversation there.

Neither of us wanted to end it, but at the same time, we both knew we had real lives to maintain. She needed to eat and sleep, and I needed to eat and recover my bike. I said hello to a few of her housemates, and to another very old and adorable dog, and then goodbye to her dog, and then goodbye to her, standing outside the door, leaning in to hug her and enjoying her returned embrace.

"You're good at hugging!" she said.

"Well, you're the right shape for it!" I replied.

As we drew back from the hug she tilted her head up, and instead of moving my hands to my sides I raised them up and cupped the sides of her face. I had already decided it wasn't the right time to kiss her. I also knew I was taking a risk by even holding her in this possessive way, but I couldn't help myself. It seemed a natural enough gesture; a combination of a parting note, and a selfish chance to frame the source of that energy. Neither of us was making any predictions about the future, but we both acknowledged that we had very strong chemistry and wanted to hang out more.

She said I was interesting to her, and important, because she had thus far never met an adult man who could accept her high energy, and take real pleasure in doing so. That surprised me. Hadn't she met a lot of men? It couldn't be rare.

We tried to get together again soon, but it was a logistical nightmare. She lived way up in the Oakland hills, had no car, worked six days a week, had a two hour commute to San Francisco, and had a dog that was her constant companion because he provided medical support for a metabolic condition she'd had for most of her life. She also had to walk and feed the dog of course. And she lived with three housemates, in a cramped and cluttered room, making privacy difficult.

I worked with it gamely for a while. She was fantastic conversation, very energetic and upbeat, and I loved the dog too. But after two or three more outings I began to see a clearer picture of her mind and how it operated, and realized there was a downside to the energy that drove her. She had a tendency to flit from place to place inside her head, and often missed social and emotional cues, and had an unassailably high self-confidence, which in itself was not a problem, but combined with the previous two attributes caused an ongoing cascade of small misunderstandings that were time-consuming to sort out.

She had alluded to these character flaws in the online profile I read a month before, and I didn't feel like they were deal-breakers. Eventually people learn emotional signals just from pure exposure to a partner, even if it doesn't come to them naturally. Or they accept their limitation, and learn to welcome the corrections people offer them without rancor. "Oh, sorry, I'm bad at signals sometimes." With Аннет, there was something else in play: When she missed a cue and made a wrong assumption, she would fight against appearing wrong, as though that was what was at stake, even if the correction was put very gently, with carefully chosen words to try and keep ego out of the picture. If you didn't have a deft skill at de-escalating, an argument was guaranteed.

Another thing also became clear, and it was surprising to me. Аннет never, ever talked about her emotions. She would talk about her philosophy, her ethics, her work, her ambitions ... but never about how something made her feel. She had well-examined opinions about everything, and would defend or debate them ferociously, but I never got the sense that she was saying anything that felt like a risk -- that felt like she was making herself vulnerable. She claimed - with great pride - that she was an open book, but the last few chapters had obviously been torn out and locked in a desk somewhere, and I was apparently not supposed to notice, or mind. She was holding herself in reserve and I knew it.

I could even sense it in our kissing. Only a few days after the first date we became physically involved, and her kissing was very practiced and enthusiastic but there was a measure of passion being held in check. Even when we had sex she turned inward, focusing mostly on enjoying her own body and the sensations that her partner was inspiring inside it. That was probably enough for most men - at least, for a while - because her body was a curvy work of art. But it felt strange to me. She didn't feel a need to reciprocate the attention or share the focus. In fact, after four of five rounds of sex, I began to feel as though she was barely in the room with me.

One week, after she'd been entirely out of contact for about five days, she announced that if I wanted to meet her other boyfriend, he would be in town for a pinball tournament. I told her I was hesitant but willing. Then she described how it would work: She would be spending the weekend with him, in his hotel room, and I could drive down and visit the two of them and check out the tournament.

Now, at this point, I was still fresh out of an 18-month relationship with Эрика, and she was still my basis for comparison. Эрика liked to talk about her feelings. She needed to. She talked about things she was unsure of, so we could hash them out together, like I did. Аннет was totally different. So again, just as with Кэрол, it wasn't the open relationship or polyamorous aspect that bothered me. It was the way she declared that it was Just So, setting the schedule ahead of me, and then confidently declaring that of course she could manage things with care for my emotions, despite this divided attention. Some part of me had assumed that while she and I were nurturing our relationship past the initial stages, she wouldn't go hooking up with her other lovers out of respect for the process. But that was me, trying to apply my own hypocritical standard to her emotional life, and basing my trust on that standard. Polyamory doesn't work that way. You can't assume anything. You need to make the subtext text, and then work with that until everyone's on the same page.

Even though I knew I was reacting unfairly, I very suddenly cooled to the idea of a relationship with Аннет in general. She had laid claim to a title of "expert at polyamory", but here she was constructing an awkward situation without realizing it. I would be meeting this very important stranger for the first time, by driving to the motel where he and Аннет were going to be canoodling all weekend. It didn't feel good. This was a bad setup, and we needed to discuss it.

Which we did, at length, but the discussion did not go where I expected at all. Аннет insisted that my unease didn't make any sense, since sex was just a fun physical activity, no different than going bowling. Would I begrudge her going bowling with a friend? No, of course not. Then why would I begrudge her having sex with this guy? I told her I didn't buy into her premise. To me, sex was very different from bowling. More intimate, more important.

She said she didn't understand, and wanted explanations. She wanted me to present a reasoned argument. I knew I was coming from a place of emotion, but I also knew there were rational arguments I could make. I gave her one based on anthropology, and she responded with a stump speech about how we should all become masters of our instincts in pursuit of the optimal happiness promised by polyamory. I changed tactics and asked her: Why is sex fun in the first place? It's basically a wrestling match ending in fluid exchange -- how dull. Yet it's pursued endlessly and elaborately by nearly everyone on Earth. The point is, its appeal is not based in reason. We don't pursue sex because some debate team won our minds over as adolescents, we pursue it because we are constructed to do so. Whatever reasoning you add to that is only in service of answering the question of how and why we are constructed that way -- not whether. And, it's the same thing with the perceived importance of sex, sexual propriety, sexual access, et cetera. These are complicated and often sensitive issues with real, legitimate emotions driving them, and you can't redraw their foundations with argument, any more than you can argue a gay man into lusting for vaginas on the grounds that it "makes more sense".

She hand-waved past that, reiterating that it was all a matter of integrity and respect, and that in her past, when people had actually trusted her to handle their emotions with integrity and respect, she did right by them, in spite of their nervousness. I couldn't tell if she was trying to gaslight me, or if she really didn't understand that a fundamental difference had just been laid bare between us: Sex meant more to me than a few rounds of bowling. A piece of my soul was in it.

Аннет gave me a lot more words, in spoken and written form. She said that she loved "all her partners equally", but in practice, the most this actually meant was that she currently loved whichever one she felt like making time to see slightly more than the ones she was currently keeping in the holding pattern. Another favorite saying of hers was, "All my relationships thrive on their own merits, separately." The unspoken addendum being, "therefore your jealousy is illogical." Anyone who's ever had to support a lover depressed from a bad breakup with someone else knows that this idea is wishful thinking, polyamory or no.

I gave up on arguing with her, and asked her to describe the other man in greater detail, thinking that if I could build a picture of him in my mind and find that picture approachable, perhaps this scenario could work. She held forth with, "I owe everything to him. It's a relationship deeper than any I've ever had. After four years, it's a connection that I'm not going to just throw away, just because we live on opposite coasts." I asked for more detail. She described how the man and his wife had been married for 15 years, and she'd moved into their house and lived with them for two of those years. How she'd formed a triad from a marriage that was on the rocks; how she'd moved out west when the drama became unbearable and the wife began to hate her, how the man was now already seeing two other women but was "flying out to California on a regular basis, to show me he still loves me."

As the whole story emerged, I grew a bit disoriented. This was the arrangement she'd learned her skills from? It reminded me of the twisted, dysfunctional scenario I'd weathered several years ago. I told her I saw some parallels with her situation and mine, and I wasn't surprised when she protested that opinion fiercely, setting off another long-winded far-reaching debate about polyamory etiquette, and explained that he was both a perfect gentleman to his non-married women (what I couldn't stop myself from thinking of as his "harem"), and a hero to his wife because he was still working on their marriage. She took it to email, and backed herself up with pages of exposition. From my point of view, she could have easily explained herself with a few short sentences: "I still have feelings for him, and I want to keep seeing him. Sure I could move on if I wanted to, but I don't. I'm not ready to go through that pain. And why should I?"

That would be a statement about feelings, however, and she was determined to keep those out of the discussion. To her, sexual politics were a guide to the appropriate emotions, and if we all acted with rational self-interest, we could all get what we wanted.

After a few days of mini-essays back and forth, I grew exasperated with her -- and with myself. I tried to "bottom line" it: She was lovely, and I could keep spending time with her, in and out of bed, if I would just accept that she wanted to bang a couple of other people on an ongoing basis as well. If I never met those people, it would essentially be like we were dating. The usual "don't ask; don't tell" rule would apply. If I met those people, it would be a journey into the world of polyamory again, and I would need to start accounting for the emotions and quirks of several people, only one of whom I had deliberately chosen. Maybe it could work out fine, maybe not.

I suddenly didn't feel up to the task. Not this soon after my breakup.

Besides, the math was bad. I didn't like the idea of getting involved with someone who was overconfident and evasive with her feelings and carrying a massive torch for a man who had, from my point of view, cynically exploited her by welcoming her into his spider-web of a marriage, and was still exploiting her even now from three thousand miles away. (In my opinion, the best thing he could have possibly done for her was to stop talking and disappear.) To get to a place of real commitment with her - if that was ever possible - I would first have to rise to the top in an ongoing competition, with that guy parked on the throne. It sounded like a slow road to heartbreak.

A few days later, I officially called off the relationship, and moved on with palpable relief. She seemed stunned by my reversal, and also stunned because I had made no attempt to bargain with her, even after all that discussion. I had just picked up my hat and gone for the door after making my discomfort known. She kept pushing me for details, and we corresponded enough for me to admit that I didn't think I could put in the work of polyamory with her in good faith. I said I just wasn't ready.

What was the real truth of the rejection? If we were just dating and I was having fun, how much should I care about all this? Аннет was fun to talk to and a physical knockout. Maybe it was just the logistics: I would be dating a woman living deep in the suburbs with no car and no bicycle, with crazy work hours, little money, and a 24-hour mandatory dog escort, who was dividing her time between me and several others. The cynical part of me probably just thought "I can do better."

A few days later she emailed me to ask what she should do with the socks I left in her room up in Oakland. I told her to just throw them away. About a week after that, I received a package in the mail, and within it, the two dirty socks. I sat on the steps to my house and laughed, and then pitched them into the garbage can. At least we had both treated each other with integrity and respect.

Quite a while later - about a year or so - we spotted each other in a park while she was out walking her dog. She smiled and waved at me, but I didn't wave back because I was on a date at the time. That evening we traded a few kind words of greeting online. Аннет and I weren't a match, but I'll always remember that energy radiating from her face like a sunbeam.

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