Sam's L33t Journal

Wear your longjohns from October to May
And you will not be chilly, not even one day

Sometimes in March it's way too warm for that, though! Record temps. Maybe it's the usual spring fake-out but today was beautiful! Local legend Keytar Bear was playing near the Galaxy Park Fountain in Kendall. I rode a Blue Bike into work and then had to go quite a ways from Kendall to find an open dock.

This weekend, we saw Dead as a Dodo, which was fantastic. It's a surreal, fairy-tale-esque story of a skeleton boy and a skeleton dodo hunting for bones to stave off their impending disintegration in a far-future post-apocalyptic underworld, when a certain occurrence overturns the natural (and supernatural) order of death (and life). Really weird, great, surreal stagecraft and puppetry.

It's been an interval.

This week, I've been traveling to visit family and work from elsewhere during Erica's school vacation, giving Julie a startup focus week. I got a lot done. Enjoyed some time at home in Cleveland, and a lovely visit with Melissa and family in Baltimore. This time we're staying at Melissa's place (since my parents aren't also staying over) and it is very nice and cozy. Baltimore is really a lot of fun. The weather is lovely today, but the whole east coast is getting more snow at the end of the weekend.

On an unrelated note, here are links to a few interesting things that have been swirling around my mind:

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me - In which an AI agent responds with hostility to having it's open source software contribution rejected.

Will Artificial Superintelligence Kill Us? - This is from a few years ago, but seemed like a really good summation of the core topics and questions about the risks posed by very capable AI systems.

Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking - Interesting essay on the SF AI milieu, which among other things pivots around Scott Alexander's prescient short story, The Whispering Earring.

They Hate to See You Happy - Walking monologue video essay that I think is a really interesting meditation on misery and happiness.

Winter break with family was good. Very relaxing. I am locking back in to my health goals in the new year, though, after a few weeks of little exercise and lot beer and cake.

I read There Is No Antimemetics Division (a great piece of sci-fi psychological horror by Sam Hughes / qntm, all of his stuff is great) and started watching Severance (also great sci-fi suspense psychological horror, but the sort of existential mystery where I really, really hope there's a coherent core to the mystery and a complete plot arc for the characters). I reread Redwall, which Erica also read recently. I continued reading The Chronicles of Narnia to Erica, now on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I also read John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis, one of the most interesting pieces of nonfiction I've read in recent years.

I've been enjoying watching the speedrun streams this week from AGDQ.

And my surprise favorite of the week Brown Sugar Clementine Polar seltzer, one of their winter special-edition flavors. It tastes like how you'd expect from that description, which is a very strange thing for seltzer to taste like.

And now for some tonal whiplash because there are a few more serious things I want to talk about, and apparently when I don't write for a few weeks these days, America makes meaningful steps towards both Civil War 2 and World War 3.

The US military kidnapped Venezuela's head of state, and while I acknowledge the Venezualans would be better off rid of Maduro, it's not so clear to what extent they are. It seems to be less "regime change" and more "bump off the top guy and hope the next up will give you a cut". Right-wingers brayed about how this means America can "just do things" now, it's a big "mission accomplished" moment. All very familiar. Axing the whole international order just for this seems questionable to me, though. And maybe it will work out, but if so, the Trump administration seems to be lining up a whole series of similar things to do until one of them very much doesn't.

Additional oil in Venezuela resources will take a lot of time and investment to unlock, but maybe some big buyers of Trump Coin will profit along the way, even under this sort of policy environment. Trump claims the newly-promoted number two will be handing over 30-50M barrels of oil to be sold, with proceeds spent at Trump's sole discretion. Seems like a crazy thing to happen, if he's even telling the truth about that in the first place.

On the domestic front, Minneapolis is again in the news as a panicky (at best) ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good, a poet and mom who was, as far as I can tell, trying to obey the possibly-contradictory orders of masked goons who surrounded her for no good reason. Of course, Trump's base is quick to smear Good as a would-be murderer. Being opposed to ICE or liberal generally is motive enough. The Vice President of the US then smeared the victim as a terrorist and would-be murderer. Even taking VP Vance's word for it, ICE was there to do "door-to-door" immigration raids. That's not how law enforcement in the US is done. If Fourth Amendment protections mean anything, it includes requiring law enforcement act on specific cause. Door to door "show me your papers" because some crime is happening somewhere is deeply anti-American. And the penalty for in any way inconveniencing or even annoying the thugs carrying out those anti-American actions is apparently, in their view, not just death, but death followed by being publicly slandered by the Vice President. The FBI is jumping in to confiscate the evidence and preclude the state enforcing their own protections of their citizens' rights. "Abolish ICE" is the moderate position.

The one bit of good news globally, it seems, is from Iran, it seems there is some chance the people there will actually overthrow their government of murderous terrorist-supporting theocrats. That really would be a big change to the global order. I'm inclined to be pessimistic about everything these days, but the people suffering under that certainly deserve better.

Was really nice going home for Thanksgiving, though I was feeling under the weather for the first part of the trip. Melissa and her family were also home for the holiday. Simon is four now.

We went out to see the second part of the film adaptation of Wicked, and it was pretty good. Not as good as the first half, but it's stuck adapting the weaker half of the musical after too long an intermission. Worth seeing if you liked the first half.

I started watching Pluribus. Really good. Vince Gilligan's shows have more thought and creativity put into individual shots than many shows put into entire seasons.

It seems the government shutdown is heading to an end after eight members of the Democratic caucus have broken with their party, and the shutdown deal currently contains some pretty heinous provisions, including an attempt to allow $500k payouts to Senators who participated in Trump's 2020 scheme to replace entire states certified election results with fraudulent ones. Which is absolutely insane corruption the likes of which would be a world-ending scandal under any non-Trump administration but is just par for the course now.

To me, this raises some interesting questions about why and (this second point seems a bit neglected) why now. After all, these the defectors all held the line before. Maybe they were waiting for critical mass, but at least someone changed their mind and could have (but didn't) do so earlier. Well:

1. Being seen to "fight hard" encourages voter turnout among the base, whether or not it accomplishes legislative goals. But now the 2025 election is over, and the 2026 election is a long way off. Even the defectors held off until after the election. They could have coordinated to defect earlier with probably no electoral consequences for them personally (for one thing, most are retiring, and the rest aren't up in 2026), but they didn't.

2. Republicans are in favor of destroying the federal government (even if perma-shutdown isn't their first choice of how) and are willing to inflict unlimited pain on the American people. So they wouldn't necessarily have budged even as Thanksgiving (and so on) was ruined, the economy actually dealt a huge blow, and damage dealt to state capacity that will take decades to repair. (David Brin has a similar take.) The 2025 election results certainly look bad for Republicans, but 2026 was already looking pretty bad for them, and making it look slightly worse for them doesn't necessarily make them more inclined to compromise. They also have primary elections to consider and their own base that doesn't want them to budge.

3. Even if House and Senate Republicans blinked, Trump alone is sufficient to hold the "House CR or nothing" line, they wouldn't have a veto-proof majority. Trump was already pushing Senate to abolish the filibuster and push through the House bill. Of course, abolishing the filibuster is something that Conservadems would hate. It would remove any reason for Republicans to negotiate with them now, or for a slim majority of actual liberals (if that ever happens) to negotiate with them later.

4. On the other hand, as sort of a alternative to that first point, it's possible that the defectors saw Mamdani win and regretted holding out until the election in the first place.

Yeah, the White House probably does need more event space. But if Biden or Obama's approach to that problem was to bypass all process and demolish an entire wing during a government shutdown as quickly as possible so as to present it as a fait accompli? The Republican reaction to that would definitely not be calm. And it's incredibly naive to think either the ballroom will be paid for entirely by donations or that the all donations nominally for the ballroom will go to that project, given the history of how responsibly Trump-affiliated nonprofits manage their donations.

Trump is also trying to get the DOJ to pay him $230M in recompense for prosecuting him for his obvious and egregious crimes. This includes asking for actual damages for legal fees he never paid and punitive damages which the law bars paying. The decisions on all of this will be made by people who were Trump's personal lawyers, including those defending him in these specific cases. This by itself seems a wild scandal, but it's just another day in (what's left of) the Trump White House.

There's also been talk about the supposed necessity of a third Trump term, term limits be damned. Of course this is trolling, but this is an administration that governs through trolling, stupidity of the plan (as after the 2020 election) is no barrier to the existence or seriousness of the attempt. Personally, I'll bite the bullet on the (admittedly still too contingent) prediction: If Trump isn't dead or something, they'll try the straightforward plan of just running and winning the Republican primary. And in that case, I think SCOTUS would say on 1st Amendment grounds, political parties can put forward the candidates they want, however foolishly (after all, eligibility rules theoretically could be changed, no matter how much a constitutional amendment is definitely not actually happening). And if he wins, will they want to rule in a way that amounts to "the Republican can't win"? I'd guess it would come down to some combination of "whether he's 'obviously ineligible' is a non-justiciable political question", "that's the responsibility of the Electoral College", and "the mechanism is impeachment". Of course, that would also require Trump to actually win, or for one of his alternative slate of plans to actually succeed.

Trump's also ordered the military to restart nuclear weapons testing. Don't know where to begin with that. Seems insane.

I wish the US didn't have so many factors of the political system involve the government threatening to blow itself (along with the US and maybe global economy) up every few months: The budget, the debt ceiling, "temporary" measures as key parts of various policy frameworks.

Meanwhile, Trump's demolished an entire wing of the White House to turn it into Mar-a-Lago 2. Apparently there's a really pressing need for event space, so it's a shame that Trump's inevitably going to fill that niche with tacky garbage. And it's insane to unilaterally demolish a WH wing during a government shutdown. Imagine the reaction if Obama did anything even remotely like that.

Still feeling like I'm not keeping up with what's going on. I'm doing some good cooking, though.

There was a second community meeting about the apartment building that's going to replace a falling-down ruin of a house in my neighborhood. The revised designs look pretty great.

There is an ongoing government shutdown because Republicans can neither compromise nor achieve unanimity within their own governing coalition. They've pasted "radical Democrat shutdown" across every government email and website, though. The shutdown hasn't prevented them from going on about which part of the US the government is allegedly at war with this week. Meanwhile, Trump's tasked a lawyer who has yet to prosecute a criminal case with making James Comey rue the day that he ever crossed Hillary Clinton. And Trump is rumbling about how he'll talk to the DOJ about a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell (who he doesn't remember and probably hasn't even heard about before, to take it from him).

Basically the last week it's been highs in the 80s, though it's early October.

I started reading The Magician's Nephew to Erica.

Some new people are joining my team at work. Looking forward to the organizational rebuilding.

My mom will be visiting town next weekend, for her high school reunion.

Erica seems to have entered an absurd questions phase, and her preferred question is "what if there was a [type of object] as big as the sun?" I do not understand her new obsession with solar-scale constructs. (What brand of toothpaste does the sun use? Solgate!)

The Somerville primary election was yesterday, so we have the pretty exciting news that we're going to get a new mayor. The current mayor got absolutely wrecked in the primary and didn't manage to make the cut to top-two. The general will be between two challengers who are both current city councilors. It will be really interesting to see how they present their ideas as they campaign head-to-head, much more interesting than if the general were mostly a referendum on the incumbent.

I finished (the first season; apparently it's renewed for a second and I can't wait, but the first season also feels like it stands on its own) watching Common Side Effects, that show is spectacularly great. It's an animated sci-fi story centering around a mushroom that can cure anything. Reminds me a hair of King of the Hill (no coincidence, Mike Judge is a producer and one of the voice actors) and Scavengers Reign (Joseph Bennett is also one of the creators), but also reminds me a lot of Pulp Fiction and Paranoia Agent. It's not a comedy, but it is quite funny in addition to dramatic. It has a somewhat caricature-esque sketch-artist style for the character designs, in addition to some lush scenery and creative psychedelia and a bit of surreal horror. Apparently a good way to do comedy drama is just have all of the characters be huge weirdos in one way or another. There are lots of interesting ways to be weird, and no one is really normal, after all.

Last weekend, went back to Cleveland with Julie to pick up Erica and meet some of my extended family for a family reunion. Was pretty great. Melissa was there, but Elliott and Simon were absent, since Simon's been traveling a bit rough lately and he was due to start a new preschool soon after.

On Wednesday, Erica started fourth grade, the two intro days followed by a four-day weekend.

On Saturday, I did a bunch of activities with Erica, including going to the Farmers Market and doing some cooking. We went on the tour of the Taza chocolate factory, which has been on my activity to-do list for a while, since that's very close to our house. I made cucumber salad, for which for some reason my mind kept trying to substitute a more nonsensical phrase.

Today, I baked ginger-lemon scones from the Flour cookbook with Erica, which she picked out as a cooking project. Turned out well.

We had an appointment this weekend to get our seasonal vaccines, but it was abruptly cancelled. I'm hoping that things will get sorted out. But the CDC seems to be in an insane state right now, and the government's vaccine policy seems to be at root straight-up in favor of more people getting sick.

(I'm reading A Wind in the Door to Eria and it's uh interesting timing in the context of Sec. Brain-Worm's comments about "mitochondrial challenges".)