Author: Doyce

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We Hate How Much We Love It

Eight in 10 voters say the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited.

Except…

It's everywhere on social media streams. Hits on political and news sites skyrocket. Both cable news channels and parody/comedy shows got ratings boosts.

We hate how much we love it.

Just like any/every other trashy reality TV show.

And, just like any other trashy-yet-successful reality TV, the fact that we hate-it-but-love-it guarantees we'll get more of the same in the years to come.

Shoot me now.

Voters Express Disgust Over U.S. Politics in New Times/CBS Poll – The New York Times
Most voters say that their minds are made up and that late revelations about Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump made no significant difference to them.

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The Internet is Too Big

I’ve spent the better part of two days worth of free time hunting for two posts on two unrelated subjects.

The first, older, was a really interesting discussion about how it would change werewolf stories if werewolves (and lycanthropes) weren’t tied to the lunar cycle. The idea was proposed, and the following conversation broke out what that would look like. It was good. 80% sure it was on Tumbler.1

The second, far more recent1, probably also on Tumblr2, was a shorter thing about how, given what we know about loss and depression, Bruce Wayne, having lost his parents in an event guaranteed to saddle him with CPTSD, would far more likely become an unmotivated, antisocial shut-in, rather than hitting the gym and traveling the world to study dozens of schools of hand to hand violence.3

I still haven’t found either post. It’s driving me to serious distraction.

Update: The original Batman observation was from an article on Patton Oswalt, from Oswalt himself. Thanks to Christian Griffen for the quote:

He said he now saw the lie of so many of his favorite comic books that portray the impact of a death in the family. “If Bruce Wayne watched his parents murdered at 9, he wouldn’t become this cut hero,” he said, referring to the Batman origin story. “He would become Gotham’s most annoying slam poet. How about someone dies, and they just get fat and angry and confused? But no, immediately, they’re at the gym.”

  1. There’s a better than 50% chance I dreamed one or both of these posts, and I’m searching for things that don’t exist. In which case, I should probably write it all down in as much detail as I can ‘remember’. ↩ ↩
  2. Because Tumblr is where fan-theories go to get exposed to gamma-radiation and hulk-out into spectacular monsters. ↩
  3. My own follow-up on that subject: it would be recluse-slob-billionaire’s child who’d become both a philanthropist and secret crime-fighter while presenting a public face of youthful indiscretion, because parent-issues, but that’s a whole different discussion. 4 ↩
  4. Basically, a DC world where Bruce Wayne hits 70 with a personality somewhere between Trump and the WoW player from that one South Park episode, but his oldest child (estranged, from four marriages ago) is sort of Paris Hilton: early adult years involved a few leaked sex tapes, many tales of wild parties… yet a remarkably savvy business record since then… and maybe a few years of international travel and mystery, and now The Kid is funding urban renewal projects and job initiatives (like any billionaire who really wants to stop crime SHOULD do), and hey there’s this ninja tactician mystery woman in the Justice League. Pick your Batman-analog ↩
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Every October, I get obsessed with a Tech Project

All of my domains renew annually or biannually, somewhere in October. RandomWiki and http://fireflywiki.net are the same.

Changes to backend platforms. New programming projects… I built an online campus/forum/archive for my MFA program during one such binge.

I don't remember what grabbed my attention last year (probably nothing, since I was hip-deep in new house projects – https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DoyceTesterman/posts/NTreF1eetYS), but 2014 was a massive project to automate the collection/archiving of my blog and social media posts as they were created.

This kind of bug always – always bites me right when I'm supposed to be prepping for a big writing project of one kind of another. Always.

This year, I've wandered down the rabbithole of website creation and hosting using a combination of Jekyll (markdown-based blogging platform) and github. It's become a situation where I hit a roadblock, back up, try it from another angle, and hit the same massive barrier from another direction.

The basic problem is, I'd like to collect the material from both of my main blogs into one unified one, with all the posts stored in markdown/plaintext, and while Jekyll can do it and Github supports it, the fact that I want to add sixteen years worth of previous blog posts brings the whole thing screeching to a halt – either Github gets mad when I try to put more than a thousand files into the same directory, or Jekyll refuses to build the site when there are so many source files – basically, I can import back to about 2014 (or 2013 if I never write another new post :P) which is roughly 20 to 25% of the stuff I want to include.

(And when that failed, trying to import the same .md files into a fresh install Day One turned out to be a total sandtrap as well.)

I don't know why it's always October, but there it is. Writing this out so I can at least avoid revisiting the same project in a year.

FireflyWiki.net | Firefly / Home Page
FireflyWiki.net · About Firefly · Episode Guide · Characters · Actors · Supporting Cast · Firefly Lexicon · Firefly Links · Firefly Timeline · Firefly Theme Song · Firefly Universe · Factions · Medicine · Places · Planets · Ships · Technology · Weapons · Firefly Gaming · Wanted Pages.

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VW TDI Dieselgate (personal update)

We got a letter from our VW dealership today, letting us know that if we wanted to, we could bring our TDI Jetta in early, provided we'd gone through the website registration process, and they'd give us the full value of whatever Volkswagen was going to pay us, as credit, weeks or months early, keep our car on their lot, and then deliver it to VW when the time came.

The downside to the proposal was that we had to buy something from the VW dealership, but since we were looking at slightly used non-VW AWD stuff, that wasn't a deal breaker.

The upside: I didn't have to drive the equivalent of forty cars to work every day.

So I drove down to the dealership today, found a low mileage 2013 Rav4 that met our eclectic criteria, and made the trade. The payback from VW was high enough (pre-dieselgate bluebook, plus $5000) we were able to make up the difference ourselves and buy the car outright, as is our preference.

Everything wasn't roses and champagne: the used vehicle has only one key fob, so I'll need get a second fairly quickly, and for some reason they couldn't pull up the VW estimate for what we'd get paid for the car, so they had to go by the manual, using the lowest estimate for our make and model, and then write us a check for the difference once VW finally does the buyback. The troubles caused a few twinges of buyer's remorse, but I'll get over it.

But… that said, we've got an AWD vehicle again (useful for those rare Denver blizzards and not-at-all-rare trips up to Loveland for family skiing), and big enough to carry the whole family (dogs included) without being so big Kate wouldn't be comfortable driving it (she took the kids for a spin this afternoon).

I wrapped up the day by building a second above-garage-door storage platform for our paddleboards, so all in all, a pretty busy day and YES I BELIEVE I'LL HAVE THAT ICE CREAM NOW THANK YOU.

VW diesel settlement and buyback program nears final approval
U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, who has been presiding over the diesel settlement proceedings between VW, several federal agencies and a class of almost 500,000 plaintiffs, indicated that …

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Vote

"The biggest landslide election in US history was the election of Warren G. Harding in 1920, when Harding won with about 60% of the vote to his opponent’s 34.2%."

"Some polls are reporting Trump with as little as 35% of the popular vote right now."

"If turnout is large enough and loud enough, we can make Donald Trump the least supported major candidate in US history. Since the recording of him bragging about sexual assault came out, he has turned to dragging the whole election into the mud; the usual goal of that kind of tactic is to drive down voter turnout. Trump’s band of Redcaps is pretty much guaranteed to vote, so they figure if they reduce turnout enough, they’ll win."

"I want their plan to fail. I want their plan to fail so fucking spectacularly that NO ONE will dare to run for President on a platform of thinly-veiled fascism again."

[…]

"If turnout is strong enough, the possibility exists for a massive upset."

"All you need to do, voters, is show up."

Economy-Class Whywolf – Time for another political essay. If you’re not an…
Time for another political essay. If you’re not an American citizen or able to vote in this upcoming election, my apologies.
I make no secret that I fucking despise Donald Trump. I actually like…

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Knock Loud, I’m Home

Shedworking: Ecocapsule
The egg-ish Ecocapsule from Nice Architects is technically a ‘portable house’ with off-grid capability but would be great for shedworking. As well as a desk, features include a kitchenette, lavatory, and shower. The whole thing is powered by a built-in wind turbine and solar cells which cover …