Doug Orleans's Journal

Apparently the theme on my Tumblr doesn't handle extended quotes very well, so I'll post this here, an insightful excerpt from 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."

In Part 1, I described how I submitted lists of 8 songs and 8 pseudonyms for ShuffleComp, an interactive fiction competition. On April 8, 2014, I received the following lists of songs and pseudonyms from the shuffled list of all submissions:

( Read more... )

In Part 3 I'll talk about the process of making "Look Around the Corner", the game. There will be spoilers, so I encourage you to play it yourself first! I'll also point out that no one's yet offered a guess for my pseudonyms puzzle presented in Part 1... (Edit: Solved!)

For those who choose not to vote today, I respect your decision. But, to quote Oblique Strategies (by way of Slacker): Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy. If you want to withdraw in disgust, consider voting for a third party or a write-in candidate; otherwise you'll be presumed apathetic.

A few months ago, my Uncle Dick died suddenly at age 63. He was always the picture of health, a lifelong vegetarian and an almost stereotypical "health nut". The coroner's report said that his death was partially caused by a "congenital bicuspid aortic valve", which often goes undiagnosed, so it seems likely that he was unaware of this condition. It also turns out to be "highly heritable", so I figured it was a great idea for me to get examined to see whether I had the condition also...

Well, good news! My doctor reported that my echocardiogram "looked fine", and that "the aortic valve is trileaflet". He also mentioned "Color Doppler is suggestive of PFO/tiny ASD with left to right shunt." I had to look up PFO (Patent Foramen Ovale) but it appears to be... mostly harmless? I asked him to confirm, and he explained: "These tiny abnormalities are seen in the general population and are not of clinical concern. You should be fine."

So, that's one less thing to worry about.

Here are some of the bands I saw live in concert in 2013, with the year they were first active:

Mouse on Mars (1993)
Ghost Box Orchestra (members of Lockgroove (1996))
!!! (1996)
Glenn Jones (1985)
Robert Fripp's Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists (1967)
Man or Astro-Man? (1993)
Wire (1976)
Big Country (1981)
Dick Dale (1959)
Melvins (1983)
Adam Ant (1976)
The Cult (1983)
Supersuckers (1988)
Peter Hook and The Light (1976)
Girls Against Boys (1988) (with special guest David Yow (1982))
Nine Inch Nails (1988)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor (1994)
Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson (1967)
Nik Turner's Hawkwind (1969)
The Dickies (1977)
Sebadoh (1986)
Octa#grape (members of Trumans Water (1991) and Olivelawn (1990))
My Bloody Valentine (1983)
Flamin' Groovies (1965)
Goblin (1972)
Queens of the Stone Age (1996) (members of Kyuss (1987))

Here are some bands I had the chance to see in 2013 but I didn't end up going:

New Order (1980)
The Breeders (1990)
Dinosaur Jr. (1984)
Simple Minds (1977)
Black Sabbath (1968)
The Feelies (1976)
The English Beat (1978)
Monster Magnet (1989)
The Flaming Lips (1983)
The Rolling Stones (1962)
Paul McCartney (1957)
The Psychedelic Furs (1977)
The Zombies (1962)
Yo La Tengo (1984)
Belle and Sebastian (1996)
The Orb (1988)
Elton John (1964)

In other words, I saw tons and tons of 40-somethings, 50-somethings, 60-somethings, and even 70-somethings!  This was the year of the old fogies.

I did see some good younger bands too: Tame Impala, Metz, Junip, MGMT.  But I'm definitely feeling out of touch with what cool music the kids are making these days.  Any pointers?

In December 1978, I watched my first NFL football game on TV: a playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Denver Broncos. The Steelers won convincingly, 33-10; Franco Harris scored two rushing touchdowns, and Terry Bradshaw threw two touchdowns, one each to Lynn Swann and John Stallworth. (All four of them, along with five others on that team, were eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame.) I was 8 years old; I liked their flamboyancy and their colors (black and gold), and I became a fan. They went on to win the Super Bowl over the Dallas Cowboys that season ("still widely regarded as one of the greatest Super Bowl games ever played," according to Wikipedia), and I learned the joy of rooting for a winning team.

In April 1979, baseball season started, and I discovered that the Pittsburgh Pirates also had black-and-gold uniforms, so I decided to become a fan of theirs too. They turned out to be just as flamboyant: Willie Stargell's windmill wind-up, Kent Tekulve's "submarine" side-arm, Phil Garner's mustache. In one game, an opposing pitcher tried to intentionally walk Dave Parker (professional sports' first $1-million/year player), but Parker got mad, stepped over the plate, swung and hit the ball into the outfield. The team theme song was the Sisters Sledge's disco classic "We Are Family", which played at every home game. They led the National League with 98 wins, and came from being down 3 games to 1 to win the World Series over Earl Weaver's Baltimore Orioles.

The Steelers won the Super Bowl again the next year, their fourth of the decade.  But the next decade, the '80s, were a bad time to be a Pittsburgh fan, as the Steelers sank into mediocrity and the Pirates became the worst team in baseball.  As the '90s began, though, Mario Lemieux led the Pittsburgh Penguins to a couple of Stanley Cups, Bill Cowher arrived to coach the Steelers to six consecutive playoff seasons, and the "outfield of dreams" (Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Andy van Slyke) brought the Pirates three division titles. In the bottom of the 9th inning of the 1992 League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves, Sid Bream, who had just left the Pirates as a free agent two years earlier, loped in from second base (Bream "was known as an unusually slow runner" according to Wikipedia) to just barely beat Bonds's throw to win the game and end the Pirates' season.

In the 2000s, the Penguins won a third Stanley Cup. The Steelers won two more Super Bowls and cemented the best record in the NFL since 1970. But after 1992 the Pittsburgh Pirates went on to have 20 straight losing seasons, the longest such streak in North American professional sports history.  I still followed baseball for a while, through the steroid-laden late '90s/'00s, as Barry Bonds broke the single-season and career home run records with the SF Giants, and the Boston Red Sox "reversed the curse" and ended their own legendary 86-year streak and won the World Series (the New England Patriots having won the Super Bowl earlier that year, Boston became the first city to have simultaneous baseball and football champs since... Pittsburgh in 1979). But the days of rooting for the Pirates in the postseason were long-gone fond memories, and I haven't really paid attention to any sports at all in the past four or five years.

Maybe you can see where this is going... Last Tuesday, Oct 1st, we were at the Middle East club to see the indie rock band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and there was a baseball game on the TV behind the bar. When I noticed it was a Pirates game, I figured something unusual was happening—why would they be on TV in an American League city at the end of the season? It turned out to be the Wild Card game, and the Pirates beat the Cincinnati Reds to get into the playoffs!

Right now, the Pirates are tied with the St. Louis Cardinals in the Division Series at 2 games apiece. The Red Sox are ahead 2-1 in their series with the Tampa Bay Rays. There's an outside chance that the Pirates could play the Red Sox in the World Series. I might just have to re-subscribe to cable TV...

On March 13, Google announced they were shutting down Google Reader on July 1. It was hidden as the fifth entry in a laundry list of things they were closing down; unlike most of the other bullets in that list, they did not offer any suggestion for an alternative service to use, instead just mentioning that you could extract your Google Reader data via Google Takeout (which is basically like evicting you by dumping all your belongings out a third story window onto the street below).

Several others feed readers started working on (or accelerating work on) services to migrate your data from Google Reader. I looked into Newsblur, The Old Reader, and Hive (nee HiveMined), but I eventually settled on Feedly.

I'll admit that I didn't do an exhaustive study of these (and there are probably lots of others that I didn't even try), but Feedly feels like the best replacement for what I want out of a feed reader, and specifically for what I want out of a transition from Google Reader. I was most concerned about losing all my Starred Items, because it seemed like none of the new readers had the ability to import them—or would only import the URLs, instead of the cached full articles, which was important because some of mine are over four years old and no longer exist at their original URLs. Once I noticed that Feedly had in fact kept the entire set of articles intact, I felt safe committing to the switch. Also, both the Chrome extension and the Android app have the basic features that I want: compact view, oldest-first sorting, keep unread, save for later.

Unfortunately there doesn't yet seem to be a good export capability from Feedly (ironically). I'm just going to have to cross my fingers and hope that they add this before they go under, or get bought by Google and shut down, or whatever fate is eventually in store for them...

I'm trying out Android Letterpress clones, Spell Strike and Glibber. Anyone want to play me? I'm dougo on both. (Are there better ones?)

Posted via LjBeetle

You know, Charles Schwab should not even have my plaintext password in their database, let alone print it on a piece of paper and send it to me through the mail! I feel like I should report this to someone, but whom? Better Business Bureau?

I've been putting off posting about my Tumblr because I was planning to write up a post about how Google shut down my blog but it may be a while before I get around to that post so in the meantime here's this post:

Hey, check out my Tumblr! That's where I share cool stuff that I run across on the net. Still reserving this LiveJournal for original content. (And, yes, you can put scare quotes around both of those words.)