Let's roll some dice, watch some movies, or generally just geek out. New posts at 6:30 pm ET but only if I have something to say. Menu at the top. gsllc@chirp.enworld.org on Mastodon and @gsllc on Twitter.
I’ve seen this and similar Facebook groups cited a lot recently: “This group is not an airport, no need to announce your departure.” I know it’s nothing new, but they’re cited even when people are very polite in their announcement.
Do you know what else you don’t need to announce?
What you had for dinner last night.
What you think of voter ID.
Why you bought the car you just bought (this one’s mine!).
Why you quit your job.
Whether you prefer hot or cold climates.
Where you’re going for vacation next month.
Storms: Scary or fun?
Whether you think you have too many keys on your keychain.
How great your new bed is (also mine!).
Why you don’t care that the person is leaving the group.
You don’t have to announce any of those things, but you do. Why? Because that’s probably the most important use of social media. Sure, except for Elvis, it would be awkward to announce your departure, whereas the rest of the list is common party fodder. That said, Facebook isn’t a party. It’s a social media platform. We’re communicating our thoughts, often to strangers and sometimes mundane, in a medium designed for that very purpose. Most of what you say means nothing to most of the people to whom you say it (even at a party of strangers), but the means to say it is a primary reason why these platforms are so popular.
I’ve only once had people do that to me, and surprisingly it wasn’t when I told everyone I was forming an exit strategy for Facebook (so far unsuccessfully). I left an XFL group and said I was giving up on the league because of a tremendous lack of integrity they showed. Officials at headquarters allowed a game to end when it shouldn’t have. The members laid into me. I laughed it off, but some take it more personally, and I thought we were all supposed to be nice to one another.
Instead of telling everyone, “Bye, Felicia,” or posting snarky animated GIFs (pronounced gif, not jif, obviously), how about you just be honest and say, “I don’t care about anyone else’s opinions but my own and those that agree with me.” Someone saying they’re leaving, and especially when they say why, can have value, but only to the open-minded. The rest may continue citing those groups. Which group are you in?
By all means, add a comment that you’re never going to read my blog again, but if you do, please tell me why.
To all my lovely spammers that follow this blog: No matter how many times you like one of my posts, I’m not buying any of your products or services. It’ll never happen.
Here’s something non-nerdy presented in as nerdy a way as I can. (Translation: Boring.) Many of you know of my relatively recent weight loss. That context may be important for this post, but hardly necessary. This week, I was off work for Winter Fantasy, and I spent most of that time at home. That gave me the opportunity to completely control my diet. Eating at home was never inconvenient. So, for the second time in recent times (I lost 17 pounds in two months last time), I decided to go on the carnivore diet for one week. Today is day seven, so my report is actually for only six days. I enter my weight and nutritional information into MyFitnessPal. Here’s my weight chart for most of the past 3 months.
Yeah, that’s the carnivore diet at work.
In case you don’t know, the carnivore diet is what I call a starvation diet. As far as I know, my use of that phrase differs from what you’ll find on Google. I define that as any diet that insists you starve yourself of one or more food groups (e.g., no carbs, vegetarian, carnivore). The carnivore diet allows you to eat only meat: chicken, lamb, pork, fish, and beef. When you do so, you eat whenever you’re hungry without concern for calorie count. For example, on my first day (Wednesday), I ate 1,039 more calories than I should have ( based on my usual 1,850 daily calorie limit and factoring in my workout), and on the next day, I ate 1,388 to many. By the time I woke up on Friday morning, I had lost 1 pound. There was a strange blip on Friday morning’s weigh in, but then things started to drop again.
The results are as follows: When I started, I weighed 230.4 lbs. This morning, I weighed 223.8 lbs. Almost 7 pounds lost in 6 days. I stayed with meat this morning for breakfast, am skipping lunch, and have clearly broken this diet for dinner (National Pizza Day!), so these are the final results.
Note well that the carnivore diet may not work for you. In fact, it’s not necessarily good for me. As with all of these starvation diets, the results vary greatly from one person to another, and some of them are too new to address concerns for long-term effects. Sure, there are people who’ve been on the carnivore diet for years, and their kidney still work. However, I still have 24 years left (according to the statistical average for my demographic), and the data doesn’t go that long. Moreover, I don’t think it’s much better than any other starvation diet, and the losses aren’t sustainable. I wouldn’t disappear after 32 weeks on the diet.
What I do know is that the most important factor in losing weight is willpower. You can lose weight in a lot of different ways, and while the science remains unsettled, the most important thing is to pick a diet with which you’ll remain consistent. Studies seem to suggest that diet is the most important factor, outweighing cardio and strength training. I have a strong suspicion that those studies are more a measurement of human psychology than nutrition. After all, one reason they say to eat a big breakfast is to avoid hunger pains that will lead to extra eating later in the day. When I’m on my normal diet, I eat 100 calories for breakfast. Yes, I get hungry, but I ignore it. My willpower overrides their science not because the science is bad, but because it’s based on a psychological trait that simply doesn’t apply to me anymore (I was once 303 pounds!). I stick with the plan.
So, find yourself a diet that works for you, but once you’ve gotten to a reasonable weight (or sooner), make sure to add cardio and weight training to it. I personally focus on cardio because, like you, I have only so much time to workout, and perhaps unlike you, I’m getting old. Having a strong heart is more important long term than being able to lift things up and put them down. It seems that the studies suggest that strength training is a bit more important than cardio for weight loss. For what it’s worth, my anecdotal experience agrees. You have to figure out those things for yourself, because again, nothing will work unless you stick with it.
Do what works best for you.
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This post will make very little sense without the context of the last post. Here are just a few more notes on how this week went.
Dave really knows how to run these conventions. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but you just can’t say it enough.
I had yet another game with Mike and Michelle, and again purely by coincidence. We didn’t plan it.
I played a couple of other games that, again, I doubted I’d enjoy, but I did.
It’s now official according to Facebook. Beth is my sister from another mister, and she knows something about me that I’ve shared with only on other person (though I think Stephen was listening in, dammit). Nobody better talk!
I don’t want to even look at scotch again. I had way too much.
I went on the carnivore diet for this week, and I again had great success with it. It’s incredible that I can eat ~1,100 and ~1,350 calories extra in the first two days and drop four pounds. I’m sticking with this until Tuesday and am still losing weight. It’s a remarkable diet, but I’m not willing to risk long-term health effects of diets that eliminate entire food groups. Maybe I’ll do it again in a year if necessary.
I may have been talked into attending GaryCon this year. We’ll see.
Thank you to everyone that was part of my convention time.
This week should have been my annual trip to Ft. Wayne, IN for Winter Fantasy. We climb into a van in Sterling, Virginia, and drive to the Arctic Circle, gaming along the way. We call it Winter Vantasy: The Best 8 Hours in Gaming. It’s essentially the only time I game all year, and virtually the only time I drink. On any given night, I have as many drinks as I drink the rest of the year. The drinking is why I go. I get to see all my friends and hang out with them at O’Reilly’s. So, my primary concern was that I could put together some Zoom rooms and hang out with friends.
This year is obviously different. Like every other industry, Winter Fantasy has shifted to online only due to the pandemic. Unfortunately, I’ve never liked online gaming, even before I stopped playing altogether, so I had little faith that aspect of the con it would work out for me.
Gaming
Surprisingly, the gaming has been better than I expected, so I’ve enjoyed it. At the last minute, I joined a table with Erik, who I always want to play with at least once. For my second game, my friends Mike (@slyflourish) and Michelle (@rosamoonshadow) coincidentally were on the same table with me. I was in Mike’s home game for years, so it was good to play with those two again. I had no games on Friday, but I’m optimistic that my two Saturday games will go well, and my Sunday game, the Eberron epic, will almost certainly be fun. The epics are always great, though I’m uncertain how much of the feel of an epic will be lost because it’s online.
Drinking
Of course, none of that matters. If all the games suck, I won’t care if I get to see my friends and down some Glenfiddich. And I’ve done that. Each night we’ve had a great time handing out. I’m fortunate to be an actual friend of high-profile people in the industry and community at large, and we’ve had a blast, but that exposes a weakness of the online experience.
The flip side to having this opportunity is that these rooms have limits. Zoom allows up to 100 attendees, but that’s impractical for anything other than a lecture. There are tons of people that I want to see, and they basically don’t fit. Moreover, because some of the attendees are high-profile, everyone wants to jump into our room. (If only they knew how heavy the conversations can get.) I keep inviting more people, but there’s no attrition. Everyone’s having such a good time that they keep coming back every damn night. Worst. First World. Problems. Ever.
There are going to be a lot of disappointed people this week, but there’s a flip side to this flip side. This doesn’t have to end this week. Many of us are trapped at home anyway. So if you’re interested in a Zoom meeting in the future, hit me up. We’ll schedule something. I’ll even drink. I bought a 1.75 liter bottle of scotch, and there’s no way I’m going to finish that this week. In fact, I want a commitment to meet up via Zoom at least once a month. That’s not hard, is it? If we meet every week, that’s fine, but I’m not asking for that as a commitment. I want us to commit to once a month. Easy peasy.
I’ve seen a lot of (private) censorship going on by Facebook, and now it’s hit me right in the nuts. My “posting and replying privileges” were suspended for 24 hours because I made two jokes over the course of thirteen days that “violated community standards.”
RJS: “I have a long list of things I’d like to see improved with the coming administration, but one thing on that list, and I’m not going to say where it falls, is the decriminalization of a certain substance. Can’t. Wait.”
JD: “Okay now for sure if you and I ever both make the insane decision to attend a con in person, and it happens to be the same con at the same time…. Yeah, that.”
Me: “Hippies.”
Calling people hippies is something I’m known to do whenever someone disagrees with me (a la Eric Cartman), but it seemed particularly appropriate here. Continuing . . .
RJS: “Frog enthusiasts.”
This, of course, meant that RJS and JD licked toads. Unfortunately, I had a brain fart and thought he was referring to me as a frog enthusiast, and that I was missing some sort of reference. Mea culpa. So, not knowing what he was talking about, I responded, “Mais je deteste les Francais” (“But I hate the French.”). Get it? The French are frogs. Not my best work, I know, but it was just a goofy response to something I didn’t immediately understand.
That was deemed hate speech. Here’s some discussion on it from a subsequent post, again if you have access.
First concert – Billy Joel Last concert – 38 Special (with Erik Nowak) Best Concert – Iron Maiden Worst concert – Jimmy Buffett Loudest concert – Iron Maiden (I was on the floor) Seen the most – Billy Joel (twice) Most surprising – Cowboy Mouth (soooo good) Next concert – It’ll be a while. I’m not a huge concertgoer. Wish I could have seen – Fleetwood Mac, RUSH, Genesis, George Benson
Someone responded “’Last’ sounds so final. Perhaps ‘most recent’?” I replied, “I plan to kill everyone who responds.” I assume that was deemed terroristic threatening.
Basically, Facebook’s algorithm (and apparently the humans that perform the follow up review) can’t distinguish obvious humor from actual hate speech or terrorism. Of course, neither can many people nowadays, so I guess there’s always going to be a market for Facebook’s humorless bubble. However, if you’re in that group, you’re a tiny minority. Most people get it, and the only way Facebook will learn to stop catering to such a small minority is for people to either reduce their presence or leave altogether.
I think I’m going to do my part. I’ve been looking for an excuse to part ways with Facebook, and they just handed me one. My presence is going to be greatly reduced until I settle on another option. I’ll refocus my efforts towards Twitter and my blogs, so if you want to connect on Twitter, just send me a Facebook private message. I have several different handles that deal with different subject matter (geekdom, sports, politics, and law) in order to reduce the noise. As long as I’m still on Facebook, if I see something interesting there, I’ll respond via my Twitter feeds (quick responses) and blog sites (verbose responses). I’ll link to my posts via the Facebook news feed but won’t engage in discussions there, relying only on my posts’ comments sections. I don’t mind discussion on my Facebook wall; I’m just saying I won’t be part of that discussion or even follow it. Will you really miss me though?
No one seemed to miss me for the 24 hours.
This Isn’t the End of the World, but It’s No Small Matter
I’m an attorney. I’m well aware of the distinction between private and public censorship. Private censorship is almost always legal, and public censorship is almost always illegal. Facebook, Twitter, and other “microblogging platforms” are private entities largely permitted to suppress speech, but they’re clearly heading for (if not already there) an oligopoly (i.e., a monopoly, but where there are a tiny number of providers rather than just one), which means antitrust law applies.
While many of you hate the people who joined Parler, don’t you still find it troublesome that, the moment a competitor started to gain a serious foothold in the market, one of Twitter’s companions, Amazon Web Services, effectively bankrupted them by cutting off their access with a 30-hour notice? If MeWe gets too popular, they could be next. Facebook and Twitter could cut out all competition, leaving you no other options, and once that happens, who knows what rules they’ll impose? The fact that one’s access to the primary avenue to communicate with others (i.e., speech), in a pandemic no less, is the precise service being suppressed makes this even more troublesome regardless of whether the government is doing it.
Each of these cases turn on their facts, so I’m not going to condemn or complement the Court’s denial of an injunction in Parler’s suit. Also, this one incident isn’t the end of the world. I’m simply pointing out the immense market power these companies have and how they’re making sure they never lose it. Sooner or later, that will result in an antitrust violation, and the violation will be to everyone’s primary means to connect in the Internet Age. Everyone thinks they’re virtuous, but these giants could easily come for you next. Whether they’re destined to throw you out, or you’re destined to get sick of it and leave by own free will, maybe it’s time to form an exit plan just in case. While doing so, don’t be your own worst enemy by letting these guys off the hook.
My exit plan is under construction. The fact that one is even necessary is evidence advancing my argument.
Cobra Kai inspired me to watch the often-maligned Next Karate Kid, which I recently learned is on Netflix. It wasn’t Highlander 2 bad, but it was bad, and I was happy when the final credits rolled. I just wanted it to be over. The writing was garbage, but you could still tell that Hilary Swank was going to become a good actor. I love when movies connect (perhaps explaining my obsession with the MCU), so despite its weaknesses, it would be great to see her in a future season of Cobra Kai. The primary villain, Michael Cavalieri, could return, as could Michael Ironside (who really sucked in this) and Jim Ishida. Ishida is the one still-living actor that played a monk. Hell, Walter Goggins could return. Walter Goggins! Despite all its flaws, I’d love to see this movie recognized in Cobra Kai.
After all, it’s not as if Karate Kid III deserved any awards, but we all want to see Terry Silver and Mike Barnes, right? As always, YMMV.
I bought something that arrived on Thursday. It’s stupid, and it appears to be the most brazen example of copyright infringement since Napster (though with far fewer consequences). For that reason, I didn’t want to support it. But I had to. It cost less than $15 with shipping.
I discovered via Facebook a game system known as Bruno’s Earth. I’m not going to post photos because of the nature of the infringement. Instead, I point you to the Amazon listings.
This book shamelessly copies the artwork from the AD&D Players’ Handbook and Monster Manual (and perhaps others), including the covers of the books. There’s no way you know about these books and not know that it’s infringement, yet Wizards of the Coast, who enforces and threatens a hell of a lot more than they have any right to, has apparently taken no action. It’s bizarre. I’d be surprised to hear that Wizards licensed it, but it’s certainly possible. Until I hear otherwise, I’m assuming that. Besides, as Kermit the frog might say, “But that’s none of my business.”
Oh, by the way, I haven’t had much of a chance to review the material beyond the artwork, but I can tell you that it’s riddled with language errors/typos. I’ve been told the game system itself rather sucks. I’ll let you know what I think of that when I’ve had the chance to really look it over.
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Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to nor endorsed the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)
Some random channel surfing on Tuesday night led me to Arnold Schwarzenegger Predator. I picked up about halfway through and was struck with how well this movie held up. People will always find a way to complain, but I don’t think Predator would offend anyone. The acting and story remain interesting, and even the special effects hold up well. The most complicated thing to deal with is the Predator himself, but he’s invisible for most of the movie. His cloak is a bit odd, but that’s exactly what you’d expect from a cloaking device. It’s not going to be perfect.
Wednesday’s random channel surfing led me to one of my favorite movies during my teenage years: Jeff Goldblum’s The Fly. The computer technology that supposedly manages teleportation is also remarkably (but expectedly) primitive for such a feat, and the prosthetics are a little dated, but much like Predator, they’re irrelevant until the very end. Nevertheless, they made a great effort showing the slow transformation into “Brundlefly,” and Goldblum’s head tics were a nice touch. The end was emotionally powerful enough to help you ignore any special effects shortcomings.
As an elementary school student, I was terrified of the 1958 version of the film because of the final scene with the small human getting eaten by a spider (a cheesy scene I’m glad they didn’t duplicate in this version). I’ve had an irrational hatred of bugs ever since. Note well I said hatred. I don’t fear bugs; I want to punch them in their faces. And yes, lobsters are bugs, so I won’t eat them. The Incredible Shrinking Man made matters only worse.
Okay, you didn’t really need that journey into my twisted mind. Be grateful I’m stopping there. The point is that both of these movies are easily watchable today. If you have Starz, give them a(nother) shot.
I’ve watched only one and one-half of the six, 50-minute (or so) episodes of this show. That’s enough. This is an important show to watch, but not for the reasons the show advances. It’s important to see how low humans can get. It’s important to see how assholes will take advantage of peoples’ trauma to make a buck, leaning on the trivial point that “we don’t know everything” to justify making up bullshit at which traumatized people will throw their money. Seriously, to hell with anyone who gives these charlatans a voice.
That’s not to say that this couldn’t be a good show. It could be. There are patterns to near-death experiences that are impossible to ignore, but they should be studied from a psychological perspective to know why we perceive what we do.
Play What You Want 