Bryce Moore's Blog, page 70

$1.9 Trillion: Too Much Help?

I am not an economist. This post isn’t going to be about the nuts and bolts about how government money should or shouldn’t be spent. I’d be out of my league, and there are many other places you could go to get information on that. Of course, the places you choose to go will in all likelihood simply confirm the pre-existing opinion you have on the subject. If you think government spending is out of control and this is just the latest sign of that, I’ve already read plenty of articles that agree with you. If you think we’re in the worst economic, social, and health crisis our nation has seen in decades (at least) and that necessitates extreme measures, then again, I’ve already read plenty of articles that agree with you.

Some people like to point out that the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill is popular, and they’re baffled why no Republicans supported it. Republicans like to point out that just because something’s popular doesn’t make it right, and it’s pretty easy to be popular if you’re handing out money. They express concern that this extreme spending will in turn cause extreme problems for the country in the future. They might be right. As I said: I am not an economist, and I’m not qualified to pass judgement on those sort of things.

No, in the end I’m just a librarian, and so by profession, I’m much more likely to end up on the side of the people trying to help out the general populace than the ones trying to hold onto the purse strings. I have a fair number of opinions about this whole mess we’re in, and they’ve been stewing in my head for a while. I wanted to see if I couldn’t get some of them out of me so I could make more sense of it all.

First, America is a wealthy, wealthy country. The 11th wealthiest country in the world, and the ones ahead of us are much, much smaller. (So it’s easier for the averages of the country to be tipped by a relatively few number of wealthy individuals.) There’s no way to argue we’re a poor country, and I don’t think anyone realistically would. What have other wealthy countries been doing to address the COVID crisis? Is the American response grossly out of line with what other nations have been doing? There are reports that have compiled this sort of information. Let’s break it down for 10 of the top wealthiest countries with significant populations:

NationCOVID Stimulus (in Trillions)GDP (in Trillions)% of GDPUSA$5.6$21.4326%China$1.4* $14.3410%Japan$2.1$5.0841%Germany$1.0**$3.8626%India$0.1$2.873%United Kingdom$0.6***$2.8321%France$0.3**$2.7211%Italy$0.5**$2.0025%Brazil$0.1$1.845%Canada$0.2$1.7411%*China hasn’t really been forthcoming with exactly what it’s done, so this number is hard to pin down.
**The EU passed a $450 billion dollar COVID relief measure in addition to these separate efforts by countries
***The UK passed several other measures that weren’t immediately clear as to how much they cost

One thing to note is that in the process of trying to fill out this chart, I realized just how difficult it was to compare things across the board. This is my best 5 minute math estimate. Actual economists would no doubt have a better, more reliable number for you. Also, if you take away the lates $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that just went through, then the US’s % of GDP would have dropped to 17%.

Looking at this back-of-the-napkin math, there appears to be a fairly large range of approaches to handling COVID and the fallout from the pandemic. Much has also been done through monetary policy and not just fiscal spending. However, it appears to me that American hasn’t exactly broken the piggybank when it comes to dealing with this crisis. Yes, you could delve into the intricacies of the relief measures, but you could no doubt do that with any of the other countries up there on that list.

Is it a lot of money? Yes. But it’s also a singular problem our nation is facing. The Republican hand-wringing around the subject loses a fair bit of credence for me when I see them now arguing we need to do away with the estate tax and when you keep in mind the Trump tax cuts that skewed heavily to the wealthy. Income inequality is only getting worse in America, but it feels to me like the Republicans have at this point abdicated all hope of actually being any sort of a party that represents people other than strict conservatives and rich people. A large part of my perception is no doubt influenced by the fact that I’m around a slew of college-aged students every day. I talk with them. I’m friends with them. I hear about what they’re worried about and what they hope to accomplish. And then I’m the parent of three school kids. So when I read about pundits and people dismissing these students as snowflakes or uninformed or manipulated, it just doesn’t carry any weight with me.

I’m impressed with the youth of today. I think they’re genuinely interested in making the world a better place, and all they’re looking for in return is a chance at having the sort of life their parents (or grandparents) had. They see real problems with the way minorities are treated in this country, and they’re much more willing to be compassionate and understanding with people who aren’t like them. They’re a generation that has grown up seeing a ton of hypocrisy, and they’re very good at spotting it. Gun violence, income inequality, LGBTQ rights, racial injustice, and more. These are all issues they’re passionate about, because they’re issues that affect them.

This is a generation that has been affected by not one, not two, but three separate national crises. Between 9/11, the great recession, and now COVID, that’s a 20 year span of living under extreme measures. It’s going to skew anyone’s perception, but for people who grew up in it, they don’t know any different. The world we live in now is a very different one than the world I grew up in, and yet so many Republicans seem to want to insist that it hasn’t changed, and that our responses to what’s happening don’t need to change.

Is $1.9 trillion too much money? You could argue it is. Maine will be seeing much more coming from the government than it lost in its budget over the past year, to the point that lawmakers are wondering what to do with it all. I have worked steadily throughout the pandemic, and I’ve seen 100% of every stimulus check that’s been available. I know I’m not alone in that. Though at the same time, my position could easily have been much worse. There are universities and colleges that have folded in the last year, after all.

In the end, it’s hard for me to get behind the argument that we don’t have the money to spend, when we spend so much money on things like our military or tax cuts. If we have enough money to fund drone strikes abroad, how can we justify the inequality we have here at home? I realize that as soon as I say that, I risk having a number of Republican friends roll their eyes at my bleeding heart and begin to debate whether it’s worth it to write a comment explaining to me The Way Things Are. And that’s how it comes across when they do it. Like they’re the only reasonable person in the room, and it’s on them to explain why we can’t buy All the Things, but we still have to buy the things they happen to believe we need to buy. Each time this dynamic plays out, I believe there are fewer Republicans at the end of the conversation, as more and more people throw their hands up at the whole thing and start looking into joining a commune.

Speaking from experience at the small university where I work, there are a ton of hard working people who do the best they can with what they’ve been given in terms of a budget. I see the same story played out in libraries across the state and the Northeast and even the country, in my conversations with other librarians in the field. And these are individuals who consistently see their budgets cut (in libraries specifically and higher education for my part of Maine) because they’re deemed non-essential. And yet I also see the first generation students who come here and have their lives changed for the better because of what they experience here. I see the children in public libraries who grow to love reading. I see the community members who can’t afford internet access who are able to suddenly do so much more because of what libraries offer.

And I see that a small slice of the $1.9 trillion is going to libraries. More money than libraries have received from the federal government in years. And I see a chunk of the money going to higher education, a sector that’s been really negatively affected by COVID. This money is desperately needed. The same applies to my local school. And to think that for once, those institutions will be looking at more money than they’ve gotten recently doesn’t make me shake my head and wonder why in the world we’re wasting that money on those places. It makes me excited to think of what they’ll be able to do with it.

If that’s the case with the small piece of the COVID relief bill that I’m actually somewhat qualified to opine on, I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to think it’s the case for much of the rest of it. So I’m not going to stand up and say it’s too much money. If anything, I hope it’s a change. A sign that we might start begin to offer adequate funding to the institutions we rely on as a society to look out for the underprivileged and to enable the framework that makes the American Dream possible. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t have any bootstraps. Education, libraries, infrastructure, and the ability to avoid crippling debt are, in my mind, a basic bootstrap component.

I’m out of time for today. There’s more I’d like to say, but it’ll have to wait for the comments section or a future post. But for today, I’ll just go on the record that I’m grateful the COVID bill passed and leave it at that.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

How Much Credence Do You Give to Personality Tests?

Last night Denisa and I watched Persona, a new documentary out on HBOmax. It focused on the development and rise of personality tests, spending the most time on the Myers-Briggs. It was an interesting look into the history and controversy surrounding them, and I’ll admit I had never really spent that much time thinking about the impact those tests have had and potentially can have in the future. The more I thought about this, the more I realized this is likely in large part due to the fact that I’ve got a personality type and a “profile” that wouldn’t cause any problems for me in my life. The documentary does a fair job illustrating why that might not be the case for everyone.

My experience with Myers-Briggs has always been more on “gee whiz” level of curiosity than anything that I might decide to base my life around. If you’re not immediately familiar with the test, it’s the one that asks you a series of questions of how you’d act in various social situations, and then it gives you a four letter “code” to define what sort of personality type you have. Are you an introvert (I) or an extrovert (E)? Are you thinking (T) or feeling (F)? That sort of thing. I know I’ve taken these tests in the past, but I never really paid that much attention to where I ended up on them. Why would I? I knew there were people who placed more stock in them, but it seemed like an irrelevant thing to me.

I never realized that a growing number of businesses require job applicants to take these tests as part of the application process, however. Then they use the results of these tests to weed out people they feel wouldn’t be a good fit for the position. On the surface, I suppose I can see the logic behind the argument. If they get 500 people who apply for one opening, then if there’s a way to quickly sift through those for the best applications, then why not use it?

Except the tests in question are problematic for many, many reasons. First, they weren’t designed for use in the job application process. They were more designed for use in self-discovery. Second, they were designed based around a limited number of people: mainly educated white men. This places people outside that demographic at risk of having their results misinterpreted. And third . . . they’re personality tests, for crying out loud! I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to be told I wasn’t being considered for a job I really wanted because they thought based on this random test that I’d do poorly in the position. Especially if I have a track record of success in those types of positions.

As the documentary points out: if you have a biased person somewhere in a hiring process, that person can impact maybe a hundred different position searches over the course of their tenure. But if you have a biased automatic algorithm that’s baked into the hiring process, then it can impact every single search it touches across the entire company for years to come. And it’s sometimes very hard to recognize when a fundamental process like that is biased.

This struck me even harder because of some thoughts I’ve been having ever since the pandemic started. I had always considered myself to be an introvert. It’s a label I voluntarily applied to myself, and I think I used that label as a crutch or excuse for why I did certain things. If I didn’t want to go somewhere or interact with a group of people, I’d just do a mental shrug and remind myself I was in introvert, and give myself a pass. But when the pandemic hit and I was cut off from so many other people, I realized I was much more extroverted than I gave myself credit for. I relied on those other interactions to keep myself going.

So was I an extrovert all along? To me, it wasn’t that simple. I dislike the idea that there’s this either/or setting for introvert or extrovert. I think it’s misleading. In some instances, I may be feeling introverted. In others, I may be a total extrovert. I haven’t thought about it enough to figure out which situations call for which response. (I may be self-analytical, but I’m not that self analytical.)

The more I thought about it, the more curious it was to me that I was so willing to apply a label to myself when, generally speaking, I dislike labels. I feel they’re reductive, and they almost never do a good job of explaining why people do what they do. It’s a step away from explaining everything by astrological signs, and maybe it’s even not that big of a step. And yet people willingly buy into these theories and then start framing their life decisions around them.

In the end, if I don’t want to go to a party, I should just not go to the party. I don’t need a label of introvert as an excuse. And if someone wants a job, they should have the chance to apply and interview for the job fair and square, without some whackadoo computer program telling them they’re a bad fit. Am I being overly reductive here? I don’t think so, but of course I’m open to other thoughts on the matter. I recognize my amount of research into this consists of one potentially biased documentary and a lifetime of idle Google searches into the topic . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Netflix Review: Murder Among the Mormons

With a title like Murder Among the Mormons, how could I not watch? If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a documentary that just came out last week, focused on the Mark Hofmann case. Directed by Jared Hess (of Napoleon Dynamite fame), you might expect this to be some sort of light-hearted, zany look at an historical event. If you’re at all familiar with what Mark Hofmann did, however, you’d know that’s anything but what you’re going to get.

How to review a documentary where I assume many of the readers don’t know anything at all about the subject, and it’s presented in a sort of mystery format? I think I’m going to lead off with a spoiler-free discussion of the three-part documentary, and then I’ll get into some spoilery details after those who want to go into the show “clean” have a chance to leave.

It’s a compelling documentary, and since it’s just three parts, it’s very accessible for anyone to watch. You could easily finish the whole thing in a long evening. Denisa and I watched it over the course of two nights. They actually did something in the same vein as I did with THE PERFECT PLACE TO DIE, which is to treat the historical case like a mystery. Yes, a fair number of people might already know the specifics of the case, but a fair number won’t. More importantly, the people who were living back then didn’t have a clue what was really happening either. I think it’s more interesting to look at how things seemed at the time, rather than to view it all with perfect hindsight. One of the reasons noteworthy cases become so noteworthy is that they seemed unsolvable and unique at the time.

What do you need to know about the history going in? Back in the 80s, there was a man (Mark Hofmann) who specialized in digging up obscure documents out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ past. Documents that became more and more problematic for the church. And then pipe bombs started entering the mix. Police had no clue who was doing the bombing or why. Take it from there.

It’s well executed, and I found it very compelling. It doesn’t treat the church with kid gloves, though it doesn’t treat it really unfairly, either. I thought they found a good balance between the two extremes, something I was very curious to see how it was handled heading into it. All told, I gave it an 8/10, and I appreciated having something that was longer than a movie but shorter than a long series to watch. It would make an excellent show to watch in between shows.

With the spoiler-free part of the review out of the way, I want to dig in a bit more to the actual history of the case. So here’s your warning if you’d rather avoid those comments.

SPOILERS BELOW

So. Mark Hofmann. I’m always amazed at how easy it is for people to become really evil. I know he presented himself as just a normal guy, but I was astounded at how far he sank and how quickly. Justifying murder with the thought that “they might die in a car crash anyway” and “it’s really self-preservation, which is justified.” I don’t think Hofmann viewed himself as a terrible person, and I don’t think people who commit atrocities generally do either. You just get to a point where you’re able to justify it to yourself, and once you can do that, you reduce a lot of things down to a thought experiment.

People made a big deal in the show (and in some articles I’ve read around the case) about how the case proves Latter-day Saint prophets are phony. If they commune with God, then how come God didn’t tell them Hofmann was a murderer and the documents were fake? I tend to think people oversell the “commune with God” angle when they’re viewing religion. I don’t really believe God is just there with a red phone hotline that He uses to direct things. By and large, He lets us muck through things on our own, because that’s why we’re here on Earth in the first place. To figure out how to do things on our own. To grow and develop. If God intervened to keep the church from buying some phony documents, where does the line get drawn? Just my thoughts on the matter. (Richard Turley, the church historian interviewed in the mini-series, did a podcast entry about it here, which was interesting as well.)

I was really impressed with the investigation that went into the case. Proving Hofmann was a forger took a ton of hard work and persistence. That’s not easy to do when the common consensus is that all of that hard work is a waste of time. Hofmann’s discoveries were real, after all. They’d been verified by the FBI! But because of a few people’s persistence, it all began to unravel. (Also interesting to note just how quickly it all fell apart, once the story began to fray.)

Anyway. It’s a show that’s getting a fair bit of attention, or at least enough that I’m hearing a lot about it in the online circles I walk through. It was a fascinating look at the history of an event I knew something about, but which I’d never really taken the time to fully dig into.

What did you think?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Television Review: WandaVision

There aren’t many appointment television shows out there for me anymore. Shows that I make time to watch as soon as I can, week after week. But one highlight of the pandemic has been Disney’s Friday night offerings on Disney+. First with the second season of The Mandalorian, and just barely with WandaVision, I’ve looked forward to having something new and fresh to watch with the family. (Well, MC doesn’t watch, but Tomas and Daniela really enjoy it, and Denisa generally tolerates it.)

WandaVision was a very strange concept that I wasn’t sure about heading into it. Some sort of a strange adaptation of sitcoms throughout the last six decades combined with a Marvel superhero plot? I had no idea how it was going to work, and how they would tie things together. I know Marvel movies have gotten criticism in the past for all of then blending together. This hasn’t really been a complaint of mine, since I’ve felt like they’ve done a solid job at differentiating them all by style and tone. Thor Ragnarok vs. Guardians of the Galaxy vs. Dr. Strange vs. Iron Man? They’re all different types of movies, though all still definitely superhero movies. (Maybe the complaint might be “too many superhero movies,” but I still haven’t reached that point. At least not for Marvel. DC, on the other hand, tried to differentiate itself by having the “serious” superhero movies. The end result is that, outside of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, they’re almost all broody and one note and just blah.)

WandaVision continues that exploration into different territory, and I think it really succeeded. I loved how they blended comedy into mystery into action, though admittedly I’m already the sort of person who really likes some genre bending. In the end, the whole series felt like a uniquely Marvel-flavored experience, and it gave me a lot of the same vibes I used to get seeing Marvel movies in the theater. A very wise move in the middle of the pandemic.

I know some have criticized it for being things it wasn’t. For not having huge character reveals. For not setting up enough Marvel franchises for the future. For not being explosive enough. I didn’t really connect with any of these complaints. For one thing, I realize WandaVision was never meant to be the next big step for Marvel. It had that role thrust upon it due to the world going crazy. I’m impressed that Marvel is able to consistently deliver great characterization and plot development into characters I didn’t really know a whole lot about before the movie or show. Wanda and Vision? I mean, they’re fine and all, but they always struck me as third fiddle to the other characters. Now that they’ve had a better chance to shine, it’s great to see that they polish up so nicely.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but I’m still excited for it, and happy that we have some time for continued experiences like this. For me, this was an 8.5/10. A much needed breath of fresh air for my evening viewing experience. What did you think?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Television Review: The Crown Season 4

I’m not sure if I’ve reviewed older seasons of The Crown. I don’t review everything I watch, even the shows I quite enjoy. I’ve stuck with the Crown through all these seasons because I like the way it presents different slices of history. Each season deals with a decade of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, and the shows I like the most are when they get away from the royals themselves and focus on what the royals were doing. What events were happening in that decade. It’s fascinating to see what they choose to fill each of the 10 episodes with.

So while many might have been really looking forward to Season 4, which focuses on the 80s, I wasn’t terribly enthralled with the idea. I expected it to be dominated by Prince Charles and Princess Di, and indeed it was. I understand why’d they do that: there likely would have been many people who would have been upset if they hadn’t given a lot of attention to the couple, since the couple was a focal point of the royals for the 80s. But man oh man was it a downer of a storyline. The show presents it as a miserable, failed marriage almost from the beginning, and it’s very hard to have any sympathy for anyone other than Princess Di coming out of the season.

(That actually makes me question just what things were really like. I know this is all a dramatization of historical events, and I know the royals are famously tight lipped about what they do and who they are. The Charles/Diana storyline seemed almost 100% in favor of Diana, to the point that Charles comes off as some sort of fairy tale troll. Perhaps they thought that all the goodwill they tried to earn for Charles in Season 3 would help offset that. Provide context for why he acted the way he did. It didn’t. He comes off as an entitled boor the whole time, gaslighting and manipulating this poor innocent wife. I hope it wasn’t really as bad as that.)

In any case, I wasn’t a fan of the Charles/Diana plot. Each time they were on the screen, I just felt physically drained. Too much baggage for a pandemic audience. Then again, Gillian Anderson did a tremendous job as Margaret Thatcher, and I really enjoyed seeing that arc unfold, even though it was also a bit of a train wreck, historically speaking.

In the end, you have a wonderfully produced, directed, and acted season about a subject that is very much not what I was in the mood to watch. It says something that I watched it anyway, which is why I gave it a 7/10. If I were being more impartial, that score would likely be higher, but I just didn’t have a fun time watching it. I understand that’s a petty complaint. I wasn’t supposed to have a fun time watching it. But there it is, nonetheless.

If you’re a fan of Charles and Diana and want to see one version of how it might have played out, or if you’re just into star-crossed marriages destined to go wrong, then have I got a show for you. If you’re not, then this might be a season you can skip. It’s rated TV-MA, but I think that’s more for the series as a whole. I don’t recall anything content-wise in this season that would call for it, short of the depiction of Diana’s experiences with bulimia.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Board Game Review: Jaws of the Lion (Gloomhaven)

I bought the original Gloomhaven shortly after it was released a few years ago. It’s a mammoth of a game: tons of components with a sprawling storyline, designed for a playgroup to explore the game over many, many sessions. I enjoyed playing it, but I had a hard time really getting a feel for the rules, and it always felt like I was just sort of winging it the whole time. After 5 sessions or so, we just kind of stopped playing. I wanted to play again, but it seemed like too much work to set it all up.

Queue Jaws of the Lion, a standalone Gloomhaven game designed to provide a better introduction to the rules than the original had. (It’s also much, much cheaper.) I read over the description and reviews, and I decided to give it a shot. Tomas and I started playing it just after Christmas. We’ve now played about 16 sessions and are rapidly approaching the end of the storyline (which for all intents and purposes implies the end of the game, though we could go back and play it through with different characters, should we choose. The game comes with 4, and we’ve only played 2 of them.)

It’s a much, much better way to get to learn the game, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who has a core group of gamers they’d like to experience an entire story arc together with. (It can do single player straight on up to 4 players.) We’re planning on going straight from the end of Jaws of the Lion into the actual Gloomhaven set, though I haven’t decided yet what we’ll do about the games we’d already played before. (Should we just start fresh? Get new characters? I don’t know.)

What is the gameplay like? It’s basically a role playing game where the game is the dungeon master, and the players are all discovering what’s going to happen next together. There’s not a whole lot of room for actual role playing (though you could probably get away with some, if you wanted to). You level up your character, playing them from one game to the next to the next, unlocking new cards and abilities as you go. You face off against monsters in a variety of scenarios, using strategy and teamwork to meet the scenario objective.

You build a deck of ability cards and then use that deck to perform actions each turn. The rules remain constant, though your skills will get better as the game goes on. Then again, the monsters get more difficult too. It has felt challenging the whole time. We’ve lost some games (which is a real downer), but we’ve had some really close games we managed to eke out, which felt great.

One session takes around an hour to an hour and a half, though it would probably take more with more players. There are a lot of bits to fiddle with and keep track of. (Though Tomas has 3D printed a great set of organizational tools to make that easier for us.) It’s not an easy game. There’s a lot of rigid strategy involved, but it does such a better job of introducing the rules that I never felt too bewildered.

For $38, I think it’s a pretty solid deal. As I said, we’ve gotten around 30-40 hours of entertainment out of it so far, and we likely have about 10-15 hours to go (as long as we don’t suffer a huge losing streak).

If any of this sounds remotely up your alley, I definitely think you should give it a shot. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Canceling Dr. Seuss?

If you follow children’s books at all (or even just the news in general), you likely saw the story yesterday on the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing 6 Dr. Seuss books due to racist imagery contained in them. In a nutshell, the publisher decided those 6 books crossed a line it was no longer comfortable crossing, and so they’ve voluntarily stopped publishing those titles.

First, it should be noted that this is a sort of self-censorship. No one asked the company to stop publishing the titles. The government didn’t require them to do this. True, you could argue the company decided simply to preemptively censor itself because it was concerned about what the fallout would be if it chose to keep the status quo, but at that point, you might as well start complaining when fast food chains stop offering fare that isn’t as popular or is causing financial headaches for it. Also, it’s important to note this was a decision the Dr. Seuss folks came up with on their own. Random House didn’t force them into it.

That said, is Dr. Seuss being canceled, as so many people have started to claim? And should this move have been made? First, seeing how popular Dr. Seuss books are, and how this is a fraction of the books in his catalog (less than 10%), I think you’d be hard pressed to say he was being canceled. Because of the announcement, Seuss books rocketed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, taking up half of the top 20, for example. I don’t think anyone should really worry about Seuss suddenly disappearing from the shelves of bookstores.

Should the decision have been made? The books in question contain blatant stereotypes, and they’re aimed squarely at very young children. If you’d like to stop perpetuating those stereotypes, a good way to begin is by doing your best to have children stop being exposed to them at an early age. That said, if they hadn’t been stopped being printed, I also wouldn’t have been calling for their elimination. I would have just . . . not bought them.

But then again, I’m pretty agnostic when it comes to what should and shouldn’t be published. Calling for any one thing to stop being printed is a good way to put other things you want printed at risk. In other words, censoring things you don’t like might feel good at first, but then it starts spreading into people censoring things you do like, and it’s all downhill from there. I don’t think Huck Finn should be banned. I don’t think Dr. Seuss needs to be banned. But this isn’t a banning of Dr. Seuss. This is a decision by Seuss folks to stop publishing some Seuss books. Does that make it sound better?

I wonder if all the people clamoring against it would be clamoring quite so hard if the item being cut were something else they already didn’t like . . . I think of all the furor over books like And Tango Makes Three, for example. It’s hard to make the argument that a book about gay penguins can’t be put in front of impressionable young minds while also saying that a book containing blatantly racist caricatures can, though the reverse of that is also true. The key difference here is that it’s a publisher and the entity in charge of Seuss’s books making the decision, not a library or a school or the government.

All of that said, this does highlight once again the simple fact that people are human, regardless of their professional or public role. Theodore Geisel made some flagrantly racist political cartoons. He also wrote a slew of beloved books for children. If we start to limit what we’ll watch, read, or listen to based solely on a purity-of-the-artist test, I tend to think we’ll end up with nothing to watch, read, or listen to. But sometimes there are cases where the art itself is questionable. We always have the option to not watch, read, or listen to it, whether it’s about gay penguins or kids running a circus. Likewise, a company has the option of deciding not to print it, just like an artist can decide not to create it.

This is fairly easily translated over to other areas of pop culture. If a person is making inflammatory remarks on Twitter, the person’s employer can choose to stop employing that person, especially if they work in a position where image is key. That’s not canceling. That’s a business decision. That person is free to go find someone else to employ them, and if enough people want to hear what that person has to say, they’ll still find a platform to say it.

But the more I write on this topic, the more something’s feeling offf to me. I read this piece in the Deseret News this morning that essentially calls out both sides for creating an environment where people feel unsafe to question anything that might deviate from the popular norm. I’m still not sure what my thoughts are around it. For a long time, it seemed like censorship was a favored tool of conservatives and right. McCarthyism comes to mind, and the fear that went along with it. I said earlier in this post that what the Seuss Foundation was doing was self-censorship, and Bari Weiss, the author of that article I just linked to, cited self-censorship frequently as well.

If people refuse to speak because they’re terrified that they’ll say the wrong thing, how is that different from not being allowed to speak in the first place? There are nuances there, true, but is the end result the same? I’m sure there are some on the left who say people should self-censor. That there are things that no one should say, because they’re wrong-headed, out-dated, or whatever.

To me, the more I think about it, the more this sort of self-censorship is dangerous ground to walk on and encourage. As long as it’s in line with what you don’t agree with, then it might feel appropriate or warranted, but once that path is well-worn, it becomes much easier for things you want to protect to be deemed worthy of self-censorship as well.

Is “cancel culture” a new phrase for “censorship”? When they’re both viewed in that light, do we see any similarities between the two that make us uncomfortable?

I guess for me the conclusion (as it’s always been for me in the past) is “it’s complicated.” And anyone trying to reduce it to a simple black and white issue is being overly reductive. Hopefully this post has shown that I’m still stuck in the middle on this topic. I’d really love to hear some other points of view, though I ask that they remain cordial. (Am I asking people to self-censor? If that’s what it takes for people to treat each other kindly, then yes.)

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Paying for Quality Information

For the first long while of the internet, the push for everything seemed to be toward making everything free. Companies were happy just to have their pages used, so the content there was free. Bloggers popped up by the thousands overnight, with all of them happy to push out their own content, gratis. File sharing was enormously popular, with platforms like Napster letting users swap music files back and forth, much to the consternation of media conglomerates.

After those first wild west years were behind us, everything seemed to shift from “free” to “monetized.” Google was happy to let you use its service for free, as long as it could embed ads in its search results. Facebook did the same. YouTube has followed suit, and it’s fairly ubiquitous at this point. The saying went, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” and that’s still largely true.

But what I’m beginning to see is a swing in a new direction. A swing back to paying for content, because it’s worth it. There are a ton of free books out there right now you could buy. Amazon has gobs of them on Kindle. But people are still ready and willing to pay for books. Why? Because they’ve seen a difference in quality. There are great free books out there, sure. But finding them, sifting through the tons of other books, is a real slog. It’s worth it to pay some money for a book that someone else has done that effort for you.

Likewise, there’s a whole ton of free information out there. Many, many people are ready and willing to tell you just about anything you want to hear, when it comes to the news. Yes, much of the free stuff is biased (and so is much of the paid stuff), but for the last long while, that hasn’t seemed to matter. Free beat out quality.

These days, I’m thinking quality beats out free, and that’s why news organizations have been able to start charging for subscriptions. The Washington Post. The New York Times. The Atlantic. Places with trained editors and paid staff. Because you can get much better information when people do something professionally, by and large. (We can have a different conversation around organizational bias by different institutions, but that’s not for today’s discussion.)

I expect to see this trend continue for the next few years at least, as we finally begin to reach a sort of balancing point between what people are willing to pay for quality information. The problem is, because quality information will continue to cost more than nothing, there will be an uphill battle persuading people who don’t pay for information that the things they’ve been reading might not be as accurate or informed. In other words, taken to its extreme, free and abundant shoddy information is a big threat.

What can we do about it? I’m honestly not sure. On the one hand, you could get around it by having a state-sponsored information channel, but that makes me skittish for clear and obvious reasons. It’s all fine and good while the state is trustworthy, but what if that stops being the case? I suppose you could somehow enact some kind of legal protections around that subsidized information source, but again, those are only as useful as the enforcement behind them.

You could argue information should just be free, period. But that’s not how it’s been able to work in our society. Reporters need to eat, and they need time to really investigate different issues. They should be compensated for the time they spend on investigating, so that they can eat. The better compensation they get, the more likely we are to get quality information in return.

I’m not sure I have a conclusion here. Just the general observation of a problem, and the statement that, while I used to be obsessed with getting everything for free, I’m believing more and more there are some things that are just worth paying for. Information is one of those.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Time for Implants

I realize there’s a fair chance a number of you read that and thought of a certain kind of implants, and wondered what in the world I was writing about today. Those aren’t the kind of implants we’ll be discussing today. Rather, I went to the dentist on Friday for my checkup, and I mentioned that a tooth had been giving me some problems on the lower left hand side of my mouth.

Not huge problems, mind you. A year ago it was sensitive to cold twice in the space of two days. And then that flared up a bit here and there over the course of the year. During the Super Bowl, it hurt when I was eating Doritos, of all things. But that’s about it.

So they decided to take a look. This is generally not followed by happy news when you’re at the dentist, in my experience . . .

First of all, they noticed that I had a huge hole in my wisdom tooth on that side of my mouth. (I’ve got a big mouth. I still have all my wisdom teeth, and they all pretty much fit fine.) Not a cavity. A hole. There’s no decay around it. It just looks like a chunk of tooth decided that it didn’t want to be there anymore, and so it went away. But it needs to be filled, just like a cavity.

Second, there’s some gum soreness in that area, which indicates I’m probably grinding my teeth on that side even more than normal. (I’m a grinder. I wear a nightguard every night, and I actually chewed through the first one I got.) Apparently the pandemic has been causing a real spike in grinding across the board, so that’s not too surprising.

Third, they took an X-ray of the tooth. The one I was complaining about seems fine, but the one next to it is still a baby tooth. (I never had a real tooth in that spot to replace it.) And it appears that its root has finally cracked. They’re going to double check it, but if that’s the case, then I have to start looking at, you guessed it, a tooth implant.

I’ve now made the mistake of googling what, exactly, the process is of getting a tooth implant. For a person with a mild phobia of dentists, this does not look like a Fun Experience. It’s enough to make me start wondering if I couldn’t just give that baby tooth a pep talk to get it to work with the team for a while longer. (Especially since I’ve got a baby tooth on the other side that might start getting ideas as well.)

So I wondered if any of you fine folks out there have gotten dental implants. If so, care to share your experience? Should I just settle down and accept the fact that I’m getting older, and more and more parts of my body are going to begin to fail on me? Are there any other alternatives I should look into? (To implants, not to getting older.) Any info from real people I know would be greatly appreciated.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Mid-Maine Youth Orchestra

Back in . . . September? October? I can no longer keep my dates straight. In any case, back in the fall, Tomas and Daniela decided that they’d like to try out of the Mid-Maine Youth Orchestra, on the off chance that the group would actually be able to do something this year. It’s a regional ensemble that Tomas had tried out for once before, but this time they had more time, and they figured they could put more work into the audition pieces.

After much practice and recording of their auditions, they were accepted into the group around December, as I recall. And in January, it was decided they could actually get the group together, though this year it would only be strings who could play. (Sorry, woodwinds.) Now, two months of weekly practices later, they’re set for their one performance, which will happen tonight at 7pm Eastern time on Facebook. (You can watch it here, if you’re so inclined.)

I’m glad they were able to do something, and I’m looking forward to watching and hearing how it all comes together. They had to follow COVID guidelines for Maine, which meant fewer than 50 people in the space at any one time, six feet apart, and lots of cleaning. But it’s been wonderful to have something approaching normalcy (and amazing to realize just how little it takes for that to qualify these days). I believe they’ve enjoyed it as well. At the very least, it’s given them something to do that’s not skiing, and it’s not like they can ski all day every day (no matter how much Denisa and they might wish that were otherwise.)

Anyway. Just thought I’d spread the word. Tune in with me tonight and watch for Tomas on violin and Daniela on cello. Great job, guys!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.