Ever since movie theaters opened back up last summer, I've been going to quite a lot of weekday matinees (which are mostly empty, which is great for COVID reasons but also because of the lack of distractions). Over the last few months I've been particularly aiming to see all the movies in the Oscar race, and when the nominations were announced, I had already seen eight of the ten Best Picture nominees, and I watched the other two the following week. Overall I managed to see seven of the ten in the theater; I'm certainly glad that it's become so easy to stream movies at home, but there's still nearly always an appreciable difference when seeing it on the big screen. (Which was confirmed again when I saw The Godfather in a theater for the first time this past week!)

Anyway, I've been procrastinating writing up my Best Picture thoughts since then (I really should just jot down some notes right after I see the movies, but I never seem to get into that habit), and meanwhile, I kept on seeing more and more nominated movies... when finally, as of 2:30 this morning, I've now managed to watch every single nominated film! Now I probably won't have time to comment on the other categories before the ceremonies kick off tonight, but maybe I'll do that in a followup post later. But for now, here's my traditional write-up of just the Best Picture nominees, in the order I saw them:

Read more... )

So there you have it. Kind of a meh year; my only real favorite was Dune, but with a big asterisk for not having an ending. Which means I guess I'm rooting for Drive My Car? But really, I just want anything but Don't Look Up to win!

(See also last year's thoughts.)

dougo: (Default)
( Jun. 20th, 2021 08:13 pm)

At the beginning of this month, I binge-watched the show It's a Sin, a 5-episode miniseries on HBO. It's about a group of friends in London coming of age in the 1980s against the backdrop of the rising AIDS pandemic. It's semi-autobiographical by Russel T. Davies, who you might know from Dr Who and Queer as Folk.

It's a great show! I was expecting it to be heavy and morose, maybe akin to Angels in America. It does have moments that are deeply sad and tragic, and also infuriating as it demonstrates how the spread of this awful disease was made far worse by ignorance and prejudice in the medical and political establishment. But overall the show is lively and funny and even celebratory, not to mention having plenty of great new-wave classics on the soundtrack. Check it out if you get a chance.

After I finished the last episode, I glanced up at the wall behind my TV to see this self-portrait of my uncle, Dennis Orleans. He died in 1998, at age 43, of AIDS-related pneumonia. At the time, I was 27, and 43 didn't seem all that young, but looking backwards now from 50 it seems far, far too young! I don't know how long he had been living with HIV, but near the end I know it was affecting his mental health in ways not too dissimilar to how it was portrayed in one of the characters on It's a Sin.

Thankfully, when I think of Dennis, I don't usually think about how he died. My memories are about his life: his love of photography, and horticulture, and Fimo clay art projects; his dog Stosh, his little VW car (or Fiat?), the H.A. Winston's restaurant where he sometimes worked and where I think he also painted a wall mural? When I was a kid he'd sometimes put me on his shoulders, which was a little scary because he was 6'4"! But I know he relished being avuncular to me and his other nephews and nieces, and I'm glad we grew up knowing him.

Anyway, watching that show seems like a fitting way to have honored his memory for Pride Month. 🏳️‍🌈


100 years ago, a white mob burned down 35 blocks of a wealthy Black neighborhood in Tulsa, OK and murdered dozens or hundreds of Black citizens. I was never taught about the Tulsa Race Massacre in school, and in fact I never heard of it until 2019 when it was portrayed in the Watchmen show on HBO. It was also portrayed in last year's Lovecraft Country (also on HBO) and it's heavily alluded to in the recent Amazon Prime series The Underground Railroad. I highly recommend all three shows, with their nuanced depiction of atrocity and resilience.

Amazingly, there are three survivors who are still alive today! Viola Fletcher, Lessie Benningfield Randle, and Hughes Van Ellis: inspiring centenarians.
In theory, it should have been easier to have seen the Oscar Best Picture nominees than in previous years, thanks to the two month extension/delay and the ubiquity of streaming in pandemic times. In practice, I had only seen two of the eight nominees when they were announced, and it took me until three days before the awards ceremony to have seen them all. But here we are! And I've now seen 21 of the 56 films nominated for at least one Oscar, and I may try to knock off a few of the short films before tonight.

This year, the only one of the eight that really impressed me was The Father. I would be happy to see Minari win, though, and the apparent favorite, Nomadland, wouldn't upset me. I didn't outright hate anything, but I'm definitely rooting against Mank and The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Following tradition, I'll visit them in the order I saw them. There are some mild spoilers below, so you should probably just watch them all before reading!

Read more... )

Here are my actual top ten favorites of the year:
  1. The White Tiger
  2. Let Them All Talk
  3. Palm Springs
  4. I'm Thinking of Ending Things
  5. The Father
  6. Bill and Ted Face the Music
  7. One Night in Miami
  8. Malcolm and Marie
  9. The Forty-Year-Old Version
  10. Another Round

See also last year's thoughts.
dougo: (math)
( Dec. 31st, 2020 10:53 am)
In 2019, I kept track of all the music I listened to, and I planned to make a best-of list and post it sometime early in 2020. But as I was about to start thinking about the list, I realized that I just wasn't familiar enough with a lot of the things I'd listened to, most of them only once, so I decided to listen to everything one more time before making a list.

Well, that turned out to take longer than I thought it would. Back before I quit my job at the end of 2019, I mostly listened to music while I was in the office, when I needed to put on headphones to concentrate on writing code in an open-office plan. But in 2020, I basically stopped writing code, and I spent most of my media-consumption time listening to podcasts and watching TV. I did some amount of reading, mostly for an online non-fiction book club I've been a part of for the last couple years, and that's when I did most of my music listening too. But, I spent much of that time keeping up with two college-radio-show podcasts: Jon Bernhardt's Friday Breakfast of Champions show, and the biweekly Sunrise Ocean Bender show (both highly recommended, by the way). So that took up an average of 3 hours a week of my already small amout of music-listening time.

Anyway, on this the last day of 2020, I've finally finished re-listening to, and sorting, all the music I was interested in that came out in 2019! Here's the list of my top 20 favorites:

Swervedriver - Future Ruins
Zip-Tie Handcuffs - Warm Shadows
Chris Forsyth - All Time Present
Tropical Fuck Storm - Brain Drops
Dommengang - No Keys
Versus - Ex Nihilo EP
Ulaan Kohl - Collapsing Hymns
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats' Nest
Garcia Peoples - Natural Facts
The Chemical Brothers - No Geography
Julia Kent - Temporal
The Claypool Lennon Delirium - South of Reality
Vivian Girls - Memory
Elkhorn - Sun Cycle / Elk Jam
The Hair and Skin Trading Company - I Don't Know Where You Get Those Funny Ideas From
Ladytron - Ladytron
Khana Bierbood - Strangers from the Far East
In Gowan Ring - Moonlit Missives Compendium
Major Stars - Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy
Wand - Laughing Matter

Here's all the other stuff I liked:
Read more... )
Here's all the other stuff I listened to but was more ambivalent about:
Read more... )

I realize that a big flat list without comments may not be all that compelling, but I don't want to delay this post any further by trying to write up specific thoughts about each of my favorites. But if there's something about which you're particularly interested in hearing what I think, feel free to let me know in the comments.

...But I will say one general thing: Yes, I realize this is a painfully Gen-X list. I'm still struggling to discover more music I like that's made by people under 40. Let me know if you have any tips about that!
Hey everybody! I finally got around to migrating my LiveJournal to Dreamwidth!! I will probably continue cross-posting to LiveJournal indefinitely, but, really, you should follow me on Dreamwidth instead. And don't forget to update your RSS subscription. (Yes, I'm saying that with a straight face in 2020!)

For the last few years, I've managed to see all of the Best Picture nominees before the Academy Awards ceremony. Looks like I didn't bother writing anything about them last year, but I did two years ago and four years ago, so let's do it again this year!

Quick summary: my favorites were Little Women and Parasite, but I wouldn't be disappointed if any of them won, except for Jojo Rabbit and Ford v Ferrari.

As usual, I'll go in the order I saw them:

Read more... )


For the record, my favorites from 2018 were Black Panther, The Favourite, and Roma, but I didn't hate Green Book—it got kind of a bad rap.

dougo: (Default)
( Dec. 19th, 2019 05:21 pm)

Status update: earlier this month I put in my notice at Wellist; tomorrow is my last day. After a year and half working there, it's time to move on, and I'm looking forward to working on my own things for a while. No solid plans yet, but my main goal is to have a finished project on my Github profile rather than the hodgepodge of undercooked things that are there now... I'd also like to contribute more to open source projects and participate more in that community. I am very fortunate to have the resources to take time off from working, and I think that would be a good use of those resources. Stay tuned!

dougo: (Default)
( Jul. 1st, 2019 10:32 pm)

For many years, at the end of the year I would make a list of my favorite new music released that year. In fact, from 1995 to 2003 I ran the end-of-year poll for a private indie music discussion forum. Eventually I fell out of the habit, but this year I decided to at least keep track of the new music I listened to. And now that the year is half over I figured I might as well share, because maybe you might be looking for some new music to listen to?

To be honest I can't unreservedly endorse everything on this list, because a lot of it is stuff I only listened to once and haven't gotten back to yet. But they're all things I liked enough to want to listen to them again someday.

Read more... )


I started working at Wellist just shy of a year ago. The office overlooks City Hall Plaza in the middle of downtown Boston. I like to get out of the office to get lunch, and there are tons of options nearby, so for fun I decided to get lunch from a different place every day and see how long I could go without repeating. I figured maybe a few months, to last me until winter, when the snow would probably make me want to stick with the Subway one floor down from our office.

This past Friday, on the summer solstice, I decided to end my streak at the 200th different lunch place, Ruth's Chris Steak House at the Old City Hall.

As the streak went on, I developed some ground rules:

  1. Going out to lunch with the team for some occasion (e.g. to welcome a new hire) didn't count. I didn't want to be in the position of saying "sorry, can't join you because I've already been there".
  2. When the company orders food in, that doesn't count. We usually order pizza from the same place, and it seemed silly to avoid lunch if it's right in front of me. Same goes for eating leftovers.
  3. There are multiple locations of a chain within walking distance, e.g. Sweetgreen, Zo Greek, Dunkin', Starbucks. I counted each different location as a different lunch spot. (Yes, I got sandwiches from three different Starbuckses, because I had to spend a $25 gift card and I don't drink coffee...)
  4. Boston Public Market and Quincy Market have many different food stands inside. Each of those counted as a different location.
  5. Lunch trucks definitely count. I probably wouldn't have gone to the same lunch truck in different locations, but that didn't come up; lunch trucks generally get assigned to the same location all season. I probably would have counted a lunch truck separate from its stationary location, but it seems that none of the trucks downtown also have brick-and-mortar locations downtown. I also counted a few street carts.
  6. A couple months ago, I discovered a Fooda had opened up nearby, inside 75 State Street (with an entrance on Kilby St). They have a different pop-up restaurant every day, with some repeats (e.g. every Thursday is Chick-fil-A, although I never went there then because of Chick-fil-A's odious politics). I counted each different pop-up as a different lunch spot, on the theory that it's basically like a food truck.

I still have another dozen or so places on my to-do list, and I could easily expand that-- for example, I only went to one place inside the Corner Mall food court (in Downtown Crossing). But that already seemed a bit too far to walk for lunch. My rough rule of thumb was that I didn't want to walk farther than back to the Park St T stop, since I usually walk from there to work every morning anyway. But I did break this rule a few times: I went to the North End a few times, and once to Chinatown to meet Jasper, and I even walked over the Longfellow Bridge to have lunch with Kristin in Kendall Square (she works at the NERD Center).

Anyway, 200 is a nice round number, and it happened to coincide with the solstice, on a Friday, two days before my 1-year anniversary. So it seemed like a good time to have a ceremonial end to the streak.

For the record, here's my full list, in chronological order, in case you're ever looking for a different place to get lunch in downtown Boston:

Read more... )


Hey MA friends! If you're considering sitting out the election this Tuesday, because it's a mid-term and Senator Warren and most incumbent Representatives are well ahead in their races (or uncontested), please reconsider. There are three propositions on the ballot, but more importantly, the Republican Governor has a challenger. Please vote!

I'm planning to vote YES on all three propositions; I'm happy to discuss them more in the comments if you're interested.

I have had a hard time staying in touch with MA state politics; I know next to nothing about Governor Charlie Baker, except that he's a Republican who is somehow very popular in a very Democratic state. As far as I can tell, he hasn't done anything controversial or partisan, but he hasn't done much of anything at all. I've followed Jay Gonzalez since before the primary, and I'm confident that he will be a great governor. But even without knowing anything about him, I would almost automatically vote for any Democrat over a Republican governor.

Governor Baker supports Geoff Diehl, the Republican challenger to Elizabeth Warren's Senate seat (who was Trump's MA campaign co-chair in 2016). Democrats absolutely can't afford to lose ground in the Senate. While MA has special elections to fill absent seats, the Governor can appoint an interim Senator in the meantime: in 2009 after Senator Ted Kennedy died, Governor Patrick appointed Paul Kirk, who served for four months until Scott Brown took office after the special election. It's not out of the question that if Senator Warren or Senator Markey were to leave office for whatever reason, Governor Baker could appoint a Republican Senator for a few months.

More alarmingly, Baker has appointed 5 of the 7 justices currently serving on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and because of mandatory retirement at age 70, Baker will be able to appoint a 6th justice in 2020. In 2003, the MA SJC was the first in the country to rule (4-3) that same-sex marriage licenses were legal. Do you think a Baker-appointed supermajority would have ruled the same way?

There have been three gubernatorial debates; you can watch them here, here, and here.

If you are a Charlie Baker supporter, and especially if you're one of the 48% of Democrats who say they'll vote for Baker, please let me know why in the comments! I honestly don't understand why anyone who is voting for Elizabeth Warren would also vote against Jay Gonzalez.

dougo: (Default)
( Jun. 16th, 2018 04:25 pm)
Status update: I'm coming out of retirement! I accepted a job offer from Wellist as a senior software engineer, starting Monday June 25. Wellist helps hospitals connect patients with support services like transportation or meal delivery. They've been expanding into new markets and just received a series A round of funding. I'll be working with my former co-workers Bill and Dave, doing much the same thing we did together at PayPal: full-stack web development in Ruby on Rails. It should be fun!
When the Oscar nominations were announced, I had already seen five of the nine Best Picture contenders, which is a new record for me by far! So I made sure to see the rest of them, and I figured I ought to write up my impressions of them like I did two years ago. Again, these are in the order I saw them; my faves were Get Out (I predicted it would get nominated!) and Call Me By Your Name.


Vague, mild spoilers, maybe. )

dougo: (Default)
( Apr. 25th, 2017 12:41 pm)
I never planned to be here this long, and may not be here much longer. Good time for a look back:




#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday

A few days ago, Raymond Smullyan died of a stroke, age 97. It's sad to know he's gone, but I'm glad he led such a long and full life, as a logician, philosopher, magician, author, and pianist.

Read more... )
dougo: (Default)
( Dec. 3rd, 2016 04:50 pm)
I've been going to rock club concerts for 25+ years, and they practically always follow the same script: the headlining band plays for 60-90 minutes, they go offstage, the crowd claps for a few minutes, then the band comes back and plays a few more songs for an encore. (The Feelies typically play at least 4 encores!) I always imagined that this was a rare occurrence in the 1960s, where the norm was that the end of the set was the end of the performance, and only an extraordinarily insistent crowd would call the band out again for an encore, and the band would be thankful but they'd have to scramble to figure out another song to play because they hadn't planned to keep playing. But by the time I started going to shows, this had ossified into a mandatory ritual at nearly every show, hardly ever questioned or even thought about. Occasionally the club will turn on the house music right after the band leaves the stage, signaling that there will be no encore, presumably due to curfew requirements or whatever. Once in a blue moon the band themselves will apologize and say they hadn't rehearsed any more songs (e.g. if they have new members who don't know the band's whole back catalogue), or the band will simply announce ahead of time that they agree that the ritual is silly so they'll just play their encore songs as part of the main set and we can all just leave when it's over.

Last night at the Windhand concert at ONCE Somerville, though, something happened that I don't think I've ever experienced before: the crowd, which was not sell-out sized but respectably sizable (maybe 100-200 people), applauded enthusiastically after each song, but after the last song, they clapped for less than a minute and then just... stopped. And so after a minute of relative silence, the house music came on, the band didn't do an encore, and everyone went home. It was weird! Sometimes I don't bother clapping, because everyone else is clapping enough for the ritual to play out properly. This time, was everyone a free rider expecting other people to clap? Or were they genuinely not into the idea of hearing another song or two? (For the record, I thought it was a great show and would have been happy with another hour of it.) I felt bad for the band... Were they expecting to play an encore like they always do? And then it turned out the crowd just wasn't that into them? Or is this just something that happens regularly now, and it's no longer actually an automatic expectation? I'd be relieved, if so, because it's always felt silly and artificial. But I'd just hope that bands start playing longer sets to compensate.
One of the perks of having weekdays free is that I can see matinee movies: they're cheaper and less crowded. I haven't really been taking full advantage of this, but recently I realized I had seen two of the Best Picture Oscar nominees, so I decided to see the other six. Here are some thoughts about them (in the order I saw them). [tl;dr: my faves were Room, The Martian, and The Revenant; the others weren't bad, but I'd be disappointed to see them win.]

No real spoilers, but stop here if, like me, you like to see movies completely cold. )
I went to a lot of concerts in Autumn 2015 in the Boston area. Here's a mix of songs from (most of) the artists I saw, in the order that I saw them. Mostly I picked songs from their most recent release, but in a couple cases I couldn't resist picking a slightly older song.

Fall Like a Flower - Autumn 2015 mix

Since 8tracks is weirdly coy about showing the playlist until you listen to it, here's the full list (20 tracks, 1:31:24):

The Feelies - Should Be Gone 3:30 (Here Before, 2011)
The Besnard Lakes - Golden Lion 3:46 (Golden Lion, 2015)
Ride - Black Nite Crash 2:33 (Tarantula, 1996)
Grooms - Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair 3:52 (Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair, 2015)
A Place to Bury Strangers - We've Come So Far 5:07 (Transfixiation, 2015)
Quilt - Mary Mountain 4:59 (Held in Splendor, 2014)
Dungen - En Gång Om Året 4:32 (Allas Sak, 2015)
Boom Said Thunder - Summer Twin 5:36 (Summer Twin, 2015)
Major Stars - Blank Slate 5:57 (Decibels of Gratitude, 2013)
Ghost Box Orchestra - Sound of (Eternal Now) 5:08 (Sound of (Eternal Now), 2015)
Magic Shoppe - Trip Inside This House 4:03 (Triangulum Australe, 2014)
Ringo Deathstarr - Chainsaw Morning 3:55 (God's Dream, 2014)
Tasseomancy - Healthy Hands (Will Mourn You) 3:27 (Ulalume, 2011)
Braids - Miniskirt 4:54 (Deep in the Iris, 2015)
Kinski - I Fell Like a Fucking Flower 4:29 (7 (or 8), 2015)
Debo Band - Ney Ney Weleba 5:30 (Debo Band, 2012)
The Ex & Brass Unbound - Theme From Konono No. 2 7:10 (Enormous Door, 2013)
Acid King - Coming Down From Outer Space 5:47 (Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere, 2015)
Lera Lynn - My Least Favorite Life 3:29 (True Detective (Music from the HBO Series), 2015)
Wand - Reaper Invert 3:41 (Golem, 2015)

If 8tracks doesn't work for you for some reason, I also made a playlist on Google Play Music, but I think this might only work if you're a subscriber. And even then, I had to make two substitutions for songs they don't have in their library:

Ghost Box Orchestra - Into the Light 5:06 (Vanished, 2013)
The Ex - Theme From Konono 8:25 (Turn, 2004)

(I've been using Google Play Music for a while now, since it lets me upload my own mp3s and listen to them from any device. And I recently decided to pay the $10/month for a subscription, since it also includes YouTube Red, i.e. no more ads!)

I made a Spotify playlist too, but they also don't have all the tracks, so I made the above substitutions plus one more:

Acid King - Into the Ground 4:33 (III, 2005)

Likewise, I made a YouTube playlist, which has the advantage that some of them have actual music videos, but I also had to make some substitutions there (because I'm too lazy to figure out how to turn my mp3s into videos to upload to YouTube):

Major Stars - Black Road 2:45 (Syntoptikon, 2006)
Ghost Box Orchestra - Into the Light 5:06 (Vanished, 2013)

If none of these work for you, or e.g. you'd prefer to download the tracks, let me know and I'll do what I did for my previous mix and just host it all on my server.

Some commentary on the mix... )
dougo: (Default)
( Aug. 31st, 2015 03:51 pm)
Twenty years ago this month (August), I moved to Boston. I had been working in Silicon Valley for a few years after college, then started graduate school at Northeastern University. I put all my stuff in boxes in my mom's garage, packed a few boxes of clothes and CDs into my Honda Civic, and drove across the country. Along the way, I visited my uncle Dick in Colorado, my cousin Cathy in Iowa (she had already started grad school herself, chiropractic), and friends in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Toronto. I remember coming off the Mass Turnpike in Back Bay and driving down Columbus Ave looking for my friends' apartment, where I crashed on their couch for a few days until I found an apartment of my own: a tiny ground-floor studio a block from campus (rent was around $600/month). I remember opening my checking account at BayBank on Huntington, which became BankBoston, then Fleet Bank, and is now Bank of America. And I remember going to Lechmere (the store) to buy an air conditioner, even though I only needed it for another month or so—I definitely needed it!

Ten years ago this month, I defended my thesis and got my PhD in Computer Science. I was living in Somerville, a few blocks from where I live today. I had already started working full-time in January, commuting to Burlington every day and writing up my dissertation on nights and weekends. The thesis defense was in a conference room in the newly built glass tower building on Huntington across from the Museum of Fine Arts; it holds the CS department and is also a residence hall. The building's name is "West Village H", which as I understood it was meant to be temporary until a donor bought the naming rights, but it's still named that today! The defense went smoothly and was a little anticlimactic, since I had already incorporated all the feedback from my committee into the dissertation and gotten their final approval. The last step was to print off a copy at Kinko's on acid-free paper and deposit it at the school library. I don't think I bothered printing out a copy for myself—it's on Sourceforge, and I figured that was good enough.

When I moved from New Jersey to California in 1984, I never expected to come back to the East Coast, though I remember liking Boston when I visited it a few times growing up: it felt academic and technological, without being big and dirty like NYC. And when I got my degree I don't think I expected to stay in Boston for another ten years. But, it wasn't like I had a concrete plan to leave; I just figured I'd go wherever the jobs were. In 1995, my career goal was to work at a research center, like Xerox PARC or IBM TJ Watson, and those sorts of places required PhDs, which was my main reason to go to grad school (I was never interested in academia). But by 2005, doing research at a research center didn't seem to be as much of a thing anymore: innovation, particularly in programming languages and frameworks, seemed to happen more in open-source communities populated by hobbyists and people working at startups who had the freedom to stay at the cutting edge. I think I had also become a bit disillusioned with the idea of doing CS research, and wanted more to work on making things that people used. This is partly what led me to become a web developer, and I'm still pretty happy in that niche. And there are more than enough opportunities for that in Boston for the forseeable future.

On the other hand, remote working is on the rise, so in theory I could live wherever I wanted. I sometimes fantasize about moving somewhere out in the boonies where I could afford a nice big house. I've also always thought I would like to live in the Pacific Northwest. I suppose now would be the best time to think seriously about moving, with lots of free time and no job holding me down.

But, really, I'm comfortable here in Boston. Inertia is strong! In another five years I'll have been here half my life. Maybe I'll even start to think of myself as being from Boston...
Apparently the theme on my Tumblr doesn't handle extended quotes very well, so I'll post this here, an insightful excerpt from [livejournal.com profile] siderea's essay "Considering an Artifact of Military Culture":

The US military, and probably all militaries ever, have a really quite low tolerance for fuckups. When somebody isn't dependable, when somebody doesn't exercise adequate restraint in their conduct, they get marginalized so they can't do too much damage, or simply gotten rid of.

All these youngsters join up, and have it drummed into them that they have these huge responsibilities to their fellow warriors and their nation, and they must do their jobs right. It's not just that they have to cover their squad mates in fire-fights, but things like, "If you don't clean this surface correctly, the guy who is going to try to land a plane on this deck will die and maybe take a bunch of us with it." And they discover, yes, they have it in them to do their jobs that well, that dependably. They are somebody who pulls his weight and can be counted on.

And furthermore, they discover they are in a whole society of people who are equally determined to be dependable, to pull their weight and be somebody who can be counted on. That can be a down-right rapturous experience; I know, because there's other ways to have at least some of that experience, such as through the performing arts, and having tasted it, I can attest it's positively intoxicating. It's like falling in love. Or maybe it is falling in love: this probably is more the basis of that intense camaraderie shared by veterans who served together than common adversity or common purpose.

Civilian society, as a whole, is, in contrast, replete with fuckups. People who can't get out of their own way enough to be depended on, people who don't take commitments seriously, people who are exploitative, who phone it in, to try to get away with minimal contributions, who don't care about those who rely on their work, who don't want to be relied upon, people who don't want to have self-restraint. We don't get to throw those people out of society, so there they are, being part of civilian society, fucking up, and their fucking up being tolerated.

People in the military, who subscribe to the discipline of speech and courtesy described above, are way, way, way, way, way too polite to actually come out and say, "We're different from civilians because we're not used to putting up with fuckups," but that is what it sounds like is lurking between the lines. It feels like they're trying to apologetically and politely say something that more bluntly put might sound like, "See, among us, fucking up is not okay; being a fuck up is not okay. We have these values and stuff which say it's not okay. And we totally get that that's okay in civilian life, where if you want to be a fuckup, that's your free choice. In our culture, the military culture, we see that as not a legitimate choice. We see that as bad – and comport ourselves accordingly."
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