1) Seemed like a view of our times -- I often look out the window to see people on walks, by themselves, with dogs or with other people. The other day I saw two people bundled up in hoodies walking side by side...both looking down at their phones.

2) Also a sign of our times is higher prices and lower service. One of the speakers in our cars had become fuzzy and distorted. I planned to just take it to Best Buy and get a replacement but that was just the start of our problems.

Although the BB website showed that they did car audio (and as they have long done so, I didn't expect otherwise) it turned out that when I tried to check out with my speakers I couldn't make an appointment. Got through to the local BB and discovered that they hadn't offered installations for a few years now due to the inability to find trained people for the role.

And apparently that's a larger problem. I hunted down six other places in town that came up in searches for car audio work and not one of them was still in business. This left the dealership which I was not thrilled with but at least they could also diagnose whether it was the speaker or an electrical problem.

It took us two appointments to do this because when we showed up to the first appointment with speakers and mounting parts in hand, we were told that they could not install any after-market items. Purchase of their own (single) speaker cost only a little less than both speakers and the mounting equipment we got from Best Buy. They also wanted us to do other servicing to the car. I looked this up online and since we hadn't done either service yet for the car which is now 5 years old, I figured it probably did need to be done and we might as well do so before holiday travels.

Because the work was expected to be at least 4 hours, my partner dropped the car off and was shuttled home. But as the expected completion time came and went we got no notification the car was ready. After half an hour I told my partner he'd better call, and was told that no one was answering at the Kia building and they'd leave a message.

Half an hour after that, there had still been no call. Since our dealership had been using an external call center for a while, I told my partner to instead ask for a pickup since there was no one to walk over a message to the Kia building and get them to answer their calls. (A request to call the service person dealing with our car just went straight to voice mail). They confirmed our address and said that they'd put in the request.

You guessed it, half an hour later there was still no arrival of the shuttle and no callback about the car's readiness. A third call was made and this one confirmed that the request for the shuttle was in but as the Kia building had only 2 shuttle drivers it might be a while before they could get to us. Not encouraging given there was now less than an hour for my partner to get to work.

Finally as we were going to call a fourth time, the shuttle driver called him and confirmed he was on his way. Loaded up with all his bags and backpacks to go straight to the office, he headed out. He told me that when he arrived the service guy explained one of their mechanics was out with a family emergency and it turned out they had run out of brake fluid so had had to go out and buy some to complete work on the car. My partner said he just looked sheepish when asked why no one was answering calls or alerting us to the car's completion. To boot we were assessed a $39 charge for use of shop equipment in our servicing. That's the first time I've ever seen customers having to pay for the depreciation of their equipment.

3) I saw Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara. I'd never heard anything about this issue but at the same time I think it could have happened in a lot of fandoms. The doc spends some time explaining why it was particularly believable that Sara might have been in fandom spaces and making personal connections with people, both because of their lesbian following and her own attempts to connect with fans at personal appearances. The most likely perpetrator of the hoaxes was someone who had run an LJ account featuring twincest about them.

Although this started some time ago and has continued over 10 years or more, the way they spoke about how negative and critical their most active fans seemed to be drawn from more recent events. Yet their examples came from the days of LJ and forums. It was kind of fascinating to see the last decades of fandom from the other side. I wouldn't say it was surprising, other than how ineffective their attempts to discover the perpetrator were. However I can see how little time was dedicated to it given that there was no monetary damage or physical threats offered to the performers themselves, so I don't imagine they could actually pursue the catfishers legally.

4) I watched all of S1 of Doctor Odyssey. It didn't take too long because I am not a fan of medical dramas and forward through all the stuff I don't need to be seeing. But I have to hand it to this show for putting everything on the table as if they weren't expecting a S2.

This ship has already been through everything in 8 episodes including hurricanes, surgeries during hurricanes, more than one person overboard, awkward family reunions, shipboard weddings, plastic surgery nightmares, people poisoning themselves with quack health products, a gay cruise, viral duck activity, and staff medical crisis. I have no idea what's going to be left for a S2 -- maybe a giant squid attacking the ship.

But all the kudos to them -- whereas another show would drag out a boring love triangle for 4 seasons before probably writing someone out of the show, Odyssey went full bore into a threesome by episode 6. FINALLY.

Given it ended in an uncertain pregnancy and the character was going to be starting med school anyway, I am cynical enough to wonder if S2 won't take a hard pivot by writing her out of the show and replacing her, depending on how well received their canon threesome is. Hopefully not, as I'd really like to see a show tackle this.

At any rate, overall I found the show a mix of things where the fanfic will likely be better than the show. I generally found the guest stories tiresome, probably because they're so over the top and the guests generally unsympathetic. At the same time, because the guests take up a good chunk of each episode the rest of the crew is fairly undeveloped because all the show has time for is its main cast. I'd rather like to see more about them and less about the crazy guest issues. But clearly this would be a very different show were that the case.

5) I found myself unsurprised by this report on how Americans are miles apart from research when it comes to crime and the economy, which ends up contributing to political results in voting (or even not voting).

"When pollsters ask people whether their own financial situation is better or worse than it was a year ago, Republicans are much more likely to change their view when control of the White House changes. But there also seems to be something more fundamental happening. Before the covid pandemic, consumer sentiment was relatively predictable based on economic fundamentals. The hard data and the survey responses tended to move up and down in something like unison. But since 2020, they’ve become disconnected, with a wide and pessimistic gap opening up between them. It’s hard to look at that phenomenon and see the impact of a changed media environment."

Most of the article talks about perceptions of crime and how it can be indexed to reveal overall patterns. But this is a key issue:

there’s long been research showing that media consumption has a big impact on people’s perceptions of crime. Most famously, people who watch a lot of local TV news — “if it bleeds, it leads” — tend to be more afraid of crime and think it’s a bigger problem than people who don’t. But at the same time, watching local TV news was never an especially partisan behavior — Republicans did it and Democrats did it. There’s a sense that, as bad as the pre-internet mass media environment could be in many ways, it provided more of a shared universe of information for people.

I have to wonder if that split is widening now. There's also data showing that most viewers of local news are older and often Republican. Is there more of a split because younger people are particularly unlikely to watch it, and they're more likely to be Democrats?

The article also shows graphs reflecting that people's opinions on crime and the economy are very often divorced from their own experience in terms of financial security and being victims of crime.