One of my partners is a huge Supernatural fan, so I was pretty stoked when I discovered ambient-mixer.com had a whole section of soundscapes where people recreated the sound of driving in the Impala with the Winchesters, that was a cool discovery.

But that wasn’t quite enough.

So I created a personal internet radio station playing the Supernatural soundtrack with the driving sound mixed in. Not only is it music reminding her of her favorite (and "comfort") show, but the added ambiance increases that feeling while providing a little bit of extra masking of outside noise while she’s wearing her headphones.

The instructions below are how I did this using free software on a Linux box; you should also be able to do the same on OSX using Homebrew, and Windows using WSL.

Sourcing The Media

First, I had to find a good listing of the music used in the show, and what-song.com delivered. I double-checked it against this Spotify playlist as well.

Luckily, there was already a large overlap between my personal music library and the music used in the show, and plugging the few holes wasn’t a problem. I also omitted a few tracks either because she specifically didn’t care for them or (in the case of The Beatles’ "Revolution") because the beginning of the song was entirely too jarring. I additionally found a bunch of sound clips of the Winchesters at 101soundboards.com to mix in and use.

All in all, I ended up with somewhere around twelve hours (!) of music and sound clips in a giant playlist.

I also customized the ambient sounds from ambient-mixer to match what I wanted, and got an hour-long mixed MP3 of the track. There’s also versions on YouTube, but I wasn’t quite as happy with those.

Glue And Duct Tape

The important things for me were that the background was dynamically mixed, the playlist could be random, lightweight, and that it could be accessed by pretty much any device with at least a browser. I had recently installed a small server at her place, but any solution still had to be relatively lightweight.

The solution: Two parallel installations of the Music Player Daemon (due to its built in HTTP streams), Icecast, and FFMPEG. Figuring it out was hard; but implementing was surprisingly easy. Instructions are for Debian-like systems (Ubuntu, Debian, MXLinux) with SystemD running.

1. Install FFMPEG: sudo apt install ffmpeg

2. Install the Music Player Daemon for your operating system (sudo apt install mpd). If you aren’t using it for anything else, disable autostarting at the system level (sudo systemctl stop mpd.service; systemctl disable mpd.service). Any program to control MPD will work fine here; Cantata and Sonata work well enough for our purposes.

3. Install Icecast2 and likewise disable autostarting: (sudo apt install icecast2; sudo systemctl stop icecast2; sudo systemctl disable icecast2.service)

4. Create a separate directories in the user home folder for MPD to write to. For example:

   mkdir -p $HOME/mpd1/playlists
   touch $HOME/mpd1/tag_cache
   sudo cp /etc/mpd.conf $HOME/mpd1/mpd.conf
   sudo chown $USER:$USER $HOME/mpd1/mpd.conf

   Substitute your username for $USER. Then use your favorite text editor to edit mpd.conf, changing music_directory to whatever is appropriate, and then setting these:

   db_file "$HOME/mpd1/tag_cache"
   pid_file "$HOME/mpd1/pidfile"
   sticker_file "$HOME/mpd1/sticker.sql"
   state_file "$HOME/mpd1/state"
   bind_to_address "localhost"
   port "6500"
   
   # For audio output, enable the built-in HTTP stream:
   audio_output {
   type        "httpd"
   encoder     "vorbis"        # optional, vorbis or lame
   port        "7998"
   bind_to_address "0.0.0.0"       # optional, IPv4 or IPv6
   bitrate     "128"           # do not define if quality is defined
   format      "44100:16:1"
   max_clients "0"         # optional 0=no limit
   }

5. Repeat for your second instance of MPD. Substitute mpd2 for mpd1 throughout the instructions for the prior step, and change the first port to 6501 and the output port to 7999.

6. Create a separate directory for Icecast2 and its configuration:

   mkdir -p $HOME/icecast2
   sudo cp /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml $HOME/icecast2/icecast.xml
   sudo chown $USER:$USER $HOME/icecast2/icecast.xml

   Use your favorite text editor to set the source and relay passwords for icecast. That’s it.

7. Create this bash script as combine_sources.sh, changing ICECAST_PASSWORD to the password you used in the previous step:

   #!/bin/sh
   echo "initial sleep of 10 seconds"
   sleep 10
   echo "finished sleep"
   while true; do
          ffmpeg \
                  -i http://localhost:7998 \
                  -i http://localhost:7999 \
                  -filter_complex \
                          "[0:a]volume=1[music]; \
                          [1:a]volume=0.4[ambience]; \
                          [music][ambience]amix=inputs=2:duration=shortest" \
                  -c:a mp3 -b:a 64k -f mp3 -threads 4 -b 32k \
                  -ice_name "Our Mixed Stream" \
                  -ice_genre Rock \
                  -ice_description "A description because reasons" \
                  -ice_public 0 \
                  icecast://source:ICECAST_PASSWORD@localhost:8000/stream
   done 

   Set the script as executable (sudo chmod +x ./combine_sources.sh)

8. Start the programs:

   mpd $HOME/mpd1/mpd.conf &
   mpd $HOME/mpd2/mpd.conf &
   icecast2 -c $HOME/icecast2/icecast.conf & 

   I personally load each of them up in a pane in tmux; you could also use SystemD services. Whatever works here for you.

9. Use your program (Sonata or Cantata) to connect to each of your MPD instances (remember to use the non-standard ports!). MPD1 is our "music" one; load your playlist, set it to play random tracks and on repeat and start playback. MPD2 is our "ambiance" stream; load your ambient track and set it to repeat and start playback.

10. In a separate pane, launch combine_sources.sh

11. Test by pointing a browser at locahost:8000/stream. You should hear everything mixed together!

References:

• https://www.going-flying.com/blog/ffmpeg-mix-icecast-streams.html
• https://gist.github.com/LukasKnuth/4d7ee6812ccb221b2775e984516b56d4
• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide

Featured Image by Peter Fischer from Pixabay

There’s a lengthy piece over at the Conversation asking "Why are so many robots white?"

The author does not (just) mean "appear ethnically white;" they are including white plastic coverings as well. {1}

Given the diversity of people they will be exposed to, why does Kaspar, designed to interact with children with autism, have rubber skin that resembles a white person’s? Why are Nao, Pepper and iCub, robots used in schools and museums, clad with shiny, white plastic?

They author does raise some good points about cultural ideals, and there is a lot to be said about the appearance of AIs and interfaces that interact with a culturally diverse audience. But it’s not nearly as straightforward as the author makes it out to be:

The cultural imaginary that enshrines robots as white, and in fact usually female, stretches back to European antiquity, along with an explosion of novels and films at the height of industrial modernity. From the first mention of the word “android” in Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel “The Future Eve,” the introduction of the word “robot” in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” and the sexualized robot Maria in the 1925 novel “Metropolis” by Thea von Harbou – the basis of her husband Fritz Lang’s famous 1927 film of the same name – fictional robots were quick to be feminized and made servile.

Again for emphasis: Fictional robots were quick to be feminized and made servile.

Take that, and then add in a lot of our modern cultural attitudes toward robots, such as Star Wars‘s continual disregard and outright abuse of fully sentient robots.

Then add in the history of slavery in the global West.

So having these digital and mechanical slaves be depicted as people of color can also be super problematic.

Personally, I prefer the idea of non-anthropomorphic appearances to sidestep the entire issue. Like BB-8, R2D2, the robots from Interstellar, or event VINCENT from The Black Hole.

Do not mistake me; the original piece does a good job of raising a question that needs to be discussed. We do need to question our assumptions, for reasons both ethical and practical. Providing cultural and gender diversity is important when you are serving a diverse population.

At the same time, we must fully discuss the ramifications and implications of these decisions so we don’t simply trade one problematic element for another.

And in creating that discussion, the original piece has done a magnificent job.

{1} There is a logistical point that white tends to imply "clean," not due to any racial reason, but because dirt, oil, etc, show up more vividly against it.

Featured Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

This is a post about my laptop.

It is also an excellent model of how my neurodivergent brain works. {1}

I like my laptop, but the one thing that I’ve noticed is that there’s something up with the hard drive controller. Read and write speeds are… slow. Even after replacing a spinning disk drive with an SSD, it’s still underperforming.

I’m assuming that it’s a hardware issue. While trying to fix it, I managed to hose my EFI (boot) partition, so I had to reinstall the operating system, so that was fun.

What I have set up as a work around is that it delays using the disk drive as much as possible. It keeps information in RAM longer than you’d expect before committing it to disk, and uses the CPU to figure out how to write it as effectively as possible.{2}

This works pretty well… except for two times.

1) When I’m starting a particularly large program (modern web browsers, complex games) it can take a while. Once loaded, they run just fine, but getting them started is a thing.
2) When there’s too much going on and either the CPU or RAM get overwhelmed. Since I’m leaning on those two to compensate for the hard drive controller, if either of those max out it can cause my system to become unresponsive for a little while until it plods its way through enough hard disk activities, and then it is back to normal like nothing happened.

There’s supposed to be something here. Some coda, some resolution. Some way to "fix" things.

Trying too hard to "fix" things made it far, far worse. I spent yesterday reinstalling my operating system.

Instead, I have to show it a little bit of patience. It works great most of the time — there’s a reason I’ve not replaced it — and it’s tougher than all the flimsy ultrabooks and such that are the fashion these days. With the amount of traveling I’m doing and how clumsy I can be, its ruggedness and durability are really important to me.

There’s no "fixing" it. There’s living with it, and planning around it. I don’t wait until the last second to start loading programs for work, or videoconferencing, or running D&D games online.

And when I forget to do that, my laptop will freeze up for a while, sometimes display some visual artifacts, and seem like there’s something really wrong for a short while until it gets itself sorted again.

This is a post about my laptop.

This is a post about my brain.

{1} MY brain. Results are not generalizable; this is anecdata only, and a model that helps me make sense of how it works. If it works for you, great! If not, no problem!
{2} If you think this is a discussion about schedulers and SSDs, it’s not, and congrats on being as big of a nerd as I am.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I first heard of "The Autism Health Summit" from a friend of mine and was immediately concerned. Probably because it was in the form of a question: "Have you heard anything about the right [wing] hijacking the Autism Health Summit?"

They shared a couple of screenshots from @neurodivergentrebel on Threads which were… horrifying. Presenters berating "wokeness" and saying "we need to find a way to not have unwed black mothers who have autistic children be a drain on our economy." The screenshots are thumbnails because their recounting of the racist and ableist BS is disturbing; you can click the links to see bigger versions.

It didn’t take a lot of digging to realize the entire event was just a bunch of people looking to "cure", manage, and — most importantly — swindle neurodivergent people and those who love them.

This isn’t just embedded ableism, or even a casual disregard for the neurodivergent voice.

These are profiteering parasites.

Don’t look at the front page of the site for the event. Look at the sponsors.

On that page — including the "Speaking Sponsors" — I found several homeopathy companies and other snake oil "herbal" vendors {1} claiming to have formulas that "help" autists, vaccine deniers, evangelicals pimping their heteronormative "keys for a successful marriage", a site worrying about how "electromagnetic waves" might have led to increased autism diagnoses, an "education" site that has "constitutional law," "Herbology and Health," and "vaccine injury compensation programs" among its offerings, a disaster response team, and "An elite team of highly trained and skilled professionals equipped to assist with private security and paramedic services."

All waiting to prey on the vulnerable — not the autists, so much as the allistic people around the autistic person.

They offer simple — though useless — solutions: Take this pill to make the "problem" go away. Eat our special diet that we sell you. Drink some of our special "homeopathic" water to fix everything. Your marriage is under strain because our society doesn’t support disabled people? All you need is some God — only $20 for the intro course! Your loved one’s neurodivergence is explainable and it is NOT your fault. It’s someone else’s fault — vaccines, 5g networks, those with different colored skin or speaking different languages and eating different foods. And we will teach you how to say those comforting lies with authority in our special classes — again, for a fee. And should you feel threatened, why, we’ll also let you hire some ultra-violence at the same place!

Through half-truths and misleading implications, these charlatans make it appear as though there’s support for neurodivergent people… when really, they’re only interested in (maybe) making us more palatable to allistic people, and mostly interested in swindling people who actually need support.

There is only one real response to such opportunistic parasites.

OUR DISABILITY IS NOT YOUR PROFIT MARGIN.

{1} If you think homeopathy isn’t snake oil, then that’s fine. I’ll sell you "magic" bottled water at half the price they do, and it’ll have exactly the same effect. PayPal link is here: https://paypal.me/stevensaus . Put up or shut up.

Featured Image by Chen from Pixabay

Important Note: The Flash Fiction challenge is now hosted at https://weeklyflashfiction.com. If you had an account before, you will need to re-register!

WRITE WITH US WITH OUR FLASH CHALLENGE! Poetry, flash fiction, memoir, anything that is inspired by the prompt (or some of your work in progress).

It’s free and easy to sign up, either via e-mail address or one of a number of social login options. We only have you sign up at all to protect your rights to your story. Join us! The prompt is already up!

Several of us have started our own, self-hosted, flash fiction challenge that we call Obsidian Flash — although now it’s at https://weeklyflashfiction.com. over at a website we’re calling Obsidian Flash. It’s on a forum behind a password, so that anything you write and submit is considered unpublished. Registration is quick, free, and pretty painless.

Seriously, this thing is the perfect thing for you to do if you think writing is hard (or finding time for writing is hard), and especially if you haven’t been writing for a while. It’s also great if you have problems with getting past ideas that “you suck” (every first draft sucks, face it) or self-doubt.

Go sign up now at https://weeklyflashfiction.com and we’ll see you writing this weekend!

Note: If you do not want to do the “challenge” and competitive element, please feel free to SHARE your story and just mark it “Not for voting” at the top.

Featured Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Summary: I’m running Dungeons & Dragons one-shots using StartPlaying as a matchmaker for bringing together players and GMs. I have a referral link for $10 off if you’d like to check out the service. The first one-shot (original by me!) I’m running through the site will be this Saturday. Only four seats are available, and there’s an early-bird discount if you sign up soon. (If you sign up, use the referral link first so you get the discount.)

One of the downsides of working nights and traveling a lot between states is that getting a group of people together for some nice Dungeons & Dragons (or other role-playing game) can be difficult.

One of the bright spots from the pandemic is a company called Start Playing, which allows players to book game masters for campaigns or one-shot adventures. I’ve been using it for a while now as a player, and had a good amount of fun trying out different one-shots. Enough that I’d like to share my referral code with you to help encourage you to try it out as well.

Then I realized I wanted to run games, and took a deep sigh.

I’ll be running my original one-shot "Little Tavern of Horrors" on StartPlaying for the first time this Saturday at 2pm EST. It’ll run 3-4 hours. I’ll be running one-shots as I create and develop them; they’re all going to be loosely connected, so you can drop in and out as you care to and as your schedule and mine permits. Remember, if you have not signed up for StartPlaying before, use THIS REFERRAL LINK: https://startplaying.games/referral/cldl80otj0008l00821pq2wn7 and then sign up for the game to get the discount.

You can check out my upcoming schedule of adventures at: https://startplaying.games/gm/senor-wombat. For example, I’ve also added a second time for this coming Tuesday as well.

Little Tavern Of Horrors

The Empire ended many generations ago, even though most did not realize it at first. It did not fall, exactly, as simply lie down for a quick nap and never bothered to get back up again. The elves left, but no-one, not even the handful of elves remaining, knows where they went.

Much of the magic in the world went with them. Magic is sometimes treated with awe, sometimes with fear, sometimes with hatred, but it is never common.

But there are signs of things becoming better. The highways being mostly safe instead of mostly unsafe. New, sturdier, strains of crops that tolerate drought and temperature changes. Petty lords reaching unsteady, but persisting, periods of peace.

Now, isolated settlements, keeps, and fiefdoms litter the countryside, tied together by unmaintained roads and the brave — or foolhardy — caravans that travel them. Most of the remaining magic artifacts and resources were long ago gathered by The Black Talon Society, a franchised guild of problem-solvers, guards, and private enforcers. Even though they are few, their influence — and protection — is wide.

You and your companions are Talons, and you have a mission.

A caravan guard’s future brother-in-law went missing while their caravan stayed at the Rampant Strawberry, a tavern about a day’s travel outside of Songtooth. Your job is to find him, find out what happened, and bring him back. It’ll be a milk run for Talons like yourselves.

Right????

Featured Image by Jake Parkinson from Pixabay

I have a giant music library, but I also have a horrible tendency to keep listening to the same thing over and over (tell me you’re neurodivergent without telling me you’re neurodivergent).

However, I love eclectic soundtracks that don’t limit themselves to a single "sound" or "genre". They might lean towards one genre, but you’ll suddenly get a song or two that is completely different in the mix.

I’d written a program — mpdq — originally way back in 2017, and then rehashed it in 2020. I’ve been pretty happy with it. Mostly.

Now, nearly seven years (the hell?!) after it was first released, I’ve done a massive rewrite to solve some of the remaining problems with the last version, simplify a lot of things, and fix some stuff.

This release contains breaking changes. Most notably, rather than running in the background, it’s currently written to only be run as a timed process. I currently have it set to a two minute interval cronjob with a queue length of 6 songs.

• Rewrote and simplified a lot of the workings (and removed some troubling sub-sub-sub-shells).
• Now written to run on a timer like a cronjob. (Pausing works the same, though.)
• Massively simplified the genre selection into a "gating" mechanism.
• Made the album and artist frequency times actually work, and using the same log
• Configurable way to skip artist and album frequency for specified genres
• Because of the way it handles genres (just numerically, and then as an exact string), multiple-genre tags are treated as discrete entries, e.g. "Concert;Rock" is completely separate from either "Concert" or "Rock".

Installation and configuration are a bit simpler too, and if MPD throws an error or restarts, it won’t completely tank mpdq anymore.

Check it out:
Program webpage: https://uriel1998.github.io/mpdq/
GitHub: https://github.com/uriel1998/mpdq
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/uriel1998/mpdq
My repository: https://git.faithcollapsing.com/ssaus/mpdq/

Featured Image by Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay

There are two lessons to take from this short reel I ran across on Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Will Hitchins (@willhitchins)

First, there is the obvious lesson — "traditional" roles are NOT incompatible with feminism. They can co-exist just fine. Simple enough.

But there is a second lesson that female-presenting folx already know, and male-presenting folx still need to learn.{1}

It is not what women are doing that is good or bad. It is whether or not women have the same ability to choose and choices that are available to everyone else.

Not just "are they legally allowed to." That is the argument of either a coward afraid of women, or someone whose privilege has blinded them to reality.

The practical ability to choose means that they have the same educational opportunities. Not just "allowed to attend classes", but able to attend classes without fearing constant harassment. Without also having to bear the sole responsibility for figuring out childcare. Without already having a "to-do" list a mile long because their partners can’t or won’t do their share of maintenance household tasks or use weaponized incompetence. Without having to worry about being assaulted after a night class. Without having to be responsible for meal planning and preparation after a full shift at work. Without being called a "bitch" for the same thing their male counterparts are praised for. Hell, even without the "pink tax" that is regularly applied to female-coded products.

The same obstacles — and more — can be applied to careers, hobbies, volunteer work, serving in the military. You name it, those obstacles are there for women.

You don’t need a rule or test to effectively remove a woman’s choices when there are so many unneeded obstacles that effectively make it orders of magnitude more difficult than for someone who presents as a man. {2}

Yes, the legal and societal "permission" is important. But that "permission" is only the first and smallest obstacle to that real equality.

That’s the bad news.

However, I’m hoping that there are enough men out there who are now repulsed by those actions of other men, wondering if they might be one of the "baddies" themselves, or both.

And if that hope is even slightly right, then there is good news.

Because a lot of those obstacles that women face are things that you can do something about for the women in your life.

Go to the women in your life. Find out — without arguing — where they feel you’re falling short and passing the burden on to them. Use that list of obstacles above as inspiration. Then stop doing the bad stuff and start using your privilege to remove those obstacles. Where you have direct influence, take direct action (e.g. fixing the ways you’re falling short). Wherever you can, make it an unsafe space for bigots and sexists.

Need an example? A prior manager of mine {3} once told me that her objection to a plan in a meeting was discounted with the phrase "is it that time of the month for you?" Someone — anyone — in that meeting should have simply said, "Can you explain what you mean by that, Bob? Are you saying that a peer’s point of view does not count because … why? Are you keeping tabs on the menstrual cycles of your female peers, Bob? Because I’m pretty sure that violates our policies… and if you’re not, then you’re being pretty sexist, which also violates our HR policies."

Or, preferably, one could just say, "What the fuck is wrong with you, Bob?"

Because that is the world we want. Where women don’t hear the same sexist things all the time. Where sexism — and all forms of bigotry — are met with a reflexive "what the fuck is wrong with you," whether it’s at home, at a convention, in the locker room, webcomics, the board room, professional publications, or even the presidential campaign trail.{4}

C’mon, men. You can do this. You are not some coward who can’t take some critique. You are not some coward staying quiet when injustice is happening around you. That’s the irony, really, that the ones screaming about being "alphas" and calling others "betas" are the ones too damn scared to even look at their own behavior, too terrified to be better.

You’ve got to be one of the good guys, because there’s too damn many of the bad.

{1} From this point onward, I’m using "men" and "women" simply for space reasons; female- and male-presenting are what I mean. This is about gender roles and society, not chromosomes or genitals.
{2} Yes, this same situation also applies for race, ethnicity, manner of speech, disability, gender identity, and so on.
{3} Yes, that manager.
{4} It’s so frustrating that one sexual predator got impeached over a blow job, and another who was convicted of sexual assault won the Iowa primary yesterday.

Featured Image by 422737 from Pixabay

Kaiju — including Godzilla — have a Cthulhu problem.

At least, when it comes to Legendary’s film "MonsterVerse" franchise.

FYI: No spoilers that you can’t get from seeing the trailers for "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters", "Godzilla vs. Kong," and "Godzilla x Kong: New Empire."

The early form of what became the Cthulhu Mythos {1} was, at its best, pure nihilistic cosmic horror. The Great Old Ones and Outer Gods penned by Lovecraft, Howard, Lieber, Moorcock, et al — Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and the rest — are not merely big monsters, but effectively forces of nature that are not malevolent so much as completely indifferent to humanity. Rather like the way humanity regards, say, ants.

And then came along August Derleth. Derleth’s efforts were absolutely instrumental in preserving and maintaining these works. Derleth even coined the name "Cthulhu Mythos"!

However, Derleth also added in his own stories, which altered the entire tone so much that his works are sometimes called the "Derleth Mythos" to emphasize the distinction. Derleth’s Christian world-view muddied the cosmic horror elements, even going to far as to add quasi-benevolent entities that could oppose the existing amoral Great Old Ones.

This impulse is completely understandable — nihilistic cosmic horror is intended to be deeply uncomfortable — and has more than continued since Derleth’s death.

I’m just as guilty of this as anyone; right now, I have a crocheted Cthulhu plushie, wreath, and finger puppet all within my sight.

That said, there is a CTHULHU SQUISHMALLOW, for crying out loud.

By making the Great Old Ones into simply "the big bad guy" or something cute, it makes that horror comprehendable and manageable.

Which completely undermines the entire point of the Mythos.

Cosmic horror is not "there’s a big critter out there that can eat me." Cosmic horror is the inescapable realization that the universe is a place so large, so vast, that we cannot possibly comprehend it. So large, so vast, that all of our mighty struggles and triumphs and defeats, every act of valor and courage and triumph and defeat, are as utterly unimportant as the fate of a single bacterium on a drop of water somewhere in the sea.

That space beyond human understanding is also the space that Godzilla — and other kaiju — inhabit.

Godzilla’s roots are in Japan’s trauma from nuclear weapons and a society trying to come to grips with this force that is so indiscriminately destructive. That trauma is a clear parallel to the horror that the Cthulhu Mythos conveys. Godzilla is a force of nature, fundamentally unknowable. You cannot reason with Godzilla; merely get out of its way and hope it does not notice you.

The single best line in Godzilla (2014) knows this.

There is no way that humans can manage — let alone defeat — the kaiju. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe’s character) knows this. The best he and humanity can hope for is that the kaiju that is least problematic for humanity wins.

Not the one that is on humanity’s side. The one that is least problematic.

The distinction is vital. This is their world; we just happen to live on it.

This sensibility is perfectly done in the Apple TV series "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters". I initially approached it skeptically, but in ten episodes it manages to hit all of these notes perfectly well, solve most of the plot problems in the Legendary Godzilla franchise {2}, and got me to care about Monarch, the characters, the story, and even Godzilla itself. The plot is clever, the characters believable, and it is perhaps the best Godzilla story I have ever seen on screen. {3}

"Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" is so good it even got me to forget the train wreck of "Godzilla vs. Kong" for a while.

Then the day after the series finished, I saw the trailer for "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire".

I have problems with counting Kong as a kaiju, even though Legendary seems hellbent on doing so. Kong — unlike Godzilla or Cthulhu — is not unknowable. While Kong is not able to be tamed or controlled, Kong is understandable. He — like us — is an ape. Even in the original, Kong is moved by empathy towards Fay Wray, though humanity (in the film) does not return the favor.

But place him alongside Godzilla, and suddenly Kong is a stand in for humanity. Kong suddenly represents understanding and empathy and compassion and struggle and, eventually, triumph in the face of a nihilistic universe that does not care.

By including Kong as a peer of Godzilla, the tone immediately shifts from cosmic horror toward action movie. "Godzilla vs. Kong" — aside from not understanding either of these themes — was overstuffed and underwritten, fumbling plot point after plot point in service of "oh, that’d look cool" without thinking about what would make it cool.

I guess the difference is here: In the last episode of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters," the plot builds in such a way that a final reveal hits, even though I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming early enough that I stood up and turned off the overhead light (it was glaring on the TV). My amour started to ask why, but I just said, "Wait."

The reveal was glorious. It was fulfilling and satisfying while simultaneously evoking a sense of horrified awe.

Nearly every episode of "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" pulled that off.

I did not get that feeling — not once — from "Godzilla vs. Kong."

Regardless, the first minute of the trailer for "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" seemed to tack back toward that cosmic uncertainty, with a voice-over emphasizing the limits of human understanding.

But then there is a shot of a cute mini-Kong, followed quickly by these lines of dialogue:

"Kong can’t face this on his own."
"He won’t be alone."

And then this image of Godzilla and Kong doing the "superhero team-up dramatic run" toward an enemy.

The second trailer is worse, doubling down on dumb discredited ideas about "alphas", ignoring the work that "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" did to make the Hollow Earth idea less stupid (largely by still calling it the "Hollow Earth"), and then giving us THESE lines:

"Kong is going to need some help."
"Godzilla is on its way."

Look, I get it. My inner five-year-old went "OOOH," because that’s exactly the sort of thing I would have done with my toys when I was a kid. I understand the impulse that made Legendary want to pit two big critters against each other. I like seeing really cool visuals and effects.

But it completely fails in the way that "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" succeeds.

Legendary’s kaiju franchise — at least, in films — is a stuffed plush Cthulhu, filing all the uncomfortable and disquieting edges off in order to sell something more palatable.

They are big, dumb movies that turn cosmic horror into action figures. Literally.

Yes, it looks pretty. And the trailers use swelling, rising music to great effect to try to make these absolutely dumb things seem inspiring by confusing our limbic systems.

Normally, I wouldn’t care. I would just continue to not particularly worry about it the same way I’ve not worried about the live-action Transformers franchise for … well, all of them since the first one. I’m not just out to yuck someone else’s yum here.

But damn "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" for showing us how much better it could be. For being so damn good that it made me care just in time to be disappointed again.

{1} Obligatory acknowledgement of the straight-up xenophobia and racism of Lovecraft, which is not the point here.
{2} I’ve yet to see "Godzilla Minus One"; however, "Shin Godzilla" produced such a ludicrously funny-looking version of Godzilla that I cannot take that film seriously.

{3} John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society is near the top for non-filmed kaiju stories overall. HIGHLY recommended.

Featured photo by Fabian Reus on Flickr under a CC-BY-SA license.

While we were largely surprised by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R) veto of a ban of gender-affirming care, it was a calculated political move calculated as a win-win for bigots, and a lose-lose for everyone else.

At the end of 2023, DeWine vetoed House Bill 68 "that would have restricted health care for transgender minors and banned transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams." As USA Today noted,

House Bill 68 cleared both state chambers earlier in December and would have prevented doctors from prescribing hormones, puberty blockers or gender-affirming surgery before patients turn 18 years old.

DeWine’s veto seemed to lean heavily on the GOP doctrine of parental primacy and how parents should make choices for their kids — which sounds reasonable, until you know how many LGBTQIA+ kids are abused or kicked out by their parents.

(By the way, Adam and Bridget, a quick screw you on that score.)

But that wasn’t all that was going on.

That same USA Today story — quite a bit further down — noted that "DeWine said this week he wants state lawmakers to draft a new version of the bill that" only "bans gender-affirming surgeries for minors."

That wasn’t all. As Jessica Kant noticed, on Jan. 4, " DeWine announced Executive Order 2024-01D. DeWine’s order, primarily being reported as simply a ban on gender-afffirming surgery under 18, contains provisions for the enactment of new regulations on care for trans people of all ages that constitute a de facto ban on gender-affirming care for the majority of trans people in Ohio."

Specificially, that order proposes some new rules which would:

• Prohibit providers from even mentioning where some gender-affirming care they can’t get in Ohio may be available.
• Mandate a comprehensive and burdensome mandatory care plan and layer of paperwork for any person seeking gender-affirming care, regardless of age
• Requires any provider "that provides diagnosis and treatment for gender-related conditions" to annually "demonstrate compliance" by submitting "at a minimum" the entire care plan of the patient. Regardless of age.

No, I didn’t leave out who compliance is demonstrated to; it’s not clearly laid out. However, in addition, those reports — which remember, is the patient’s entire care plan — is required to be sent to the Ohio Department of Health.

The. Entire. Care. Plan. Including details.

For every patient seeking gender-affirming care in Ohio.

Now that Ohio’s legislators have doubled down on their bigotry and overridden DeWine’s veto, that does not mean his additional proposed rules will automatically go away. With this, the GOP’s political grift is almost complete.

• The Ohio GOP has delivered their bigoted agenda, useful to attract hard-line loyalists and bigots.
• DeWine gets to publicly oppose the bigoted agenda, and seem like the "reasonable" one for those disquieted by the open bigotry.
• While the press focuses on DeWine’s "disagreement" with the GOP rank and file, he quietly proposes farther-reaching restrictions and surveillance of trans folx.
• The GOP uses their majority to override DeWine’s veto.

The grift is centered on the illusion that there was a disagreement at all. The illusion that there is any moderation in the GOP’s attack on anyone they decide is too "different".

Jessica Kant’s blog has a wonderful "things you can do right now for Ohio" section:
https://jessk.org/blog/things-you-can-do-right-now-for-ohio. I’ll be doing a number of them after this posts.

As a depressing post-script, bills in my birth state of West Virginia aim to mandate that therapists try to "cure" trans people, among other bigoted asshattery. Check out Erin in the Morning for more on that: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/west-virginia-bill-would-mandate

Featured Image by Filmbetrachter from Pixabay

Fanfic — or fan fiction — was a pretty frequent topic when I was doing writing panels.

For those who don’t know, fan fiction (including film) is when fans of a film, book, or other media, create additional, unauthorized continuations of the story. Perhaps the author writes themselves into the story. Perhaps they fulfill a romantic connection they wanted to see, but didn’t happen in the original. Perhaps they just want to see more of characters and a world that they love.

But… they’re unauthorized. Even if they’re of good quality — and some definitely are — ultimately, they’re building off of someone else’s idea. Someone else’s intellectual property.

That’s where it becomes a problem for a lot of people.

Part of it is the idea that you’re messing with someone else’s creation. Whether or not the creator "owns" the characters and setting and story they create is debatable. What is not debatable is that those characters, story, and setting are someone else’s intellectual property. Something they actually get paid for. {1}

For me, that’s where the rubber hits the road, and where it becomes a pretty clear-cut thing.

If the fan fiction is making money then it’s a problem {2}. Other than that, it’s just fan activity.

That principle serves well outside of publishing, too.

If you’ve been to a convention or craft show you’ve seen them in "artists alley" and in the vendor hall. You’ve seen them at local hotel-lobby conventions, at craft fairs, and at giant cons like GenCon. You’ve seen them all over etsy and t-shirt shops.

I mean those people who sell knock-off digital avatars. I mean those people selling their fan fiction ebooks. I mean those people selling stickers and calendars and air fresheners and paintings and artwork and t-shirts that simply rip off someone else’s work. There is nothing transformative or original about them {3}; it’s just plain plagiarism and copyright infringement.

It must stop.

There is a lot of commentary going on — and rightly so — about the role of AI in these spaces. There are appropriate calls to ensure that AI-created art does not appear in artist’s alleys and at our conventions and fairs. As M. Sotherden, a glass artist, said on Facebook:

"[M]any Ren Faires require a photo of you WORKING IN YOUR SPACE. On a partially completed piece of yours. For computer stuff that means a half finished photoshop thing or whatever. For folks like me, that’s a soldering station with a half soldered piece."

They’re absolutely right: While there is a role for generative AI and ML, selling them as if they are somehow equivalent to human-created artwork is not that place.

And while we are having this conversation about high-tech copyright and intellectual property violations, we also need to have the same conversation about the low-tech varieties as well.

Contact the conventions, faires, festivals, and craft shows that are important to you. Tell them how important it is that they feature human art that respects the hard work, creativity, and copyright of other artists as well.

Hell, you may be doing them a favor by helping them not be potentially liable for hosting the illegal activity.

{1} We currently live in a capitalist oligarchy. I’m not saying it should be this way, just that it currently is.

{2} I’ve spent too much time marveling at fan creations in Second Life and other virtual spaces that were only able to afford their digital "rent" due to donations. That isn’t what I mean here.

{3} There is absolutely a place for transformative and original artwork, remixes, and that kind of fair use. That said, simply saying "It’s fair use" does not actually make it fair use.

Featured Image by Merlin Lightpainting from Pixabay

Once, I forgot to go grocery shopping before Thanksgiving.

In my defense, it was my first Thanksgiving after a tour in Korea — making it the first Thanksgiving in several years where my meal wasn’t coming from a mess hall — and my first as a single dad. So I found myself with little besides hot dogs and sandwich bread, and that thanks to a gas station that had remained open.

A quarter century later, you’d think I would have learned.

But I keep getting smacked in the face with this lesson: You have to plan for things.

Not the boring maintenance things that people typically plan for — I mean the fun stuff. The good things. The enjoyable things. The fulfilling things.

Yes, as you get older you will start having to plan things you hadn’t had to in the past. Salt and sugar intake. Whether or not something is too spicy. How much energy you have. If you need to take the trash out tonight or tomorrow before work. When to sweep or do laundry or if you have to save money to replace that garage door.

Here’s what doesn’t get emphasized: If you don’t do the same thing with the good things, if you do not deliberately prioritize relaxation and connection and fun, it just won’t happen.

Don’t make a plan to read a book, watch a play, go bowling, snuggle with your love, take a walk in the woods, painting, writing, whatever it is, and it simply will not happen.

Yes, spontaneity is good and nice — when it has space to happen.

But the demands{1} of modern life will fill all of your available space and time. Those demands will grow and expand to fill every second of your time, leaving you only enough time to barely recharge before having to address those obnoxious demands again.

Yes, sometimes those demands are fulfilling in themselves{2}, but for most people, that isn’t quite the same thing.

So whether it is a new year for you or not does not matter.

Plan to take some time for yourself, doing what you find fun, fulfilling, or both!

The world will wait.

{1} I mean demands here, because our modern life demands a whole hell of a lot that is not required or necessary.
{2} Children, pets, significant others.

Featured Image by Lars Nissen from Pixabay

This is one of my favorite essays from my time in the military. It’s from 2001 – I know, because I mention snow. New Year’s Day 2000 for me was temperate and mild — which seems like that’s going to be the norm from here on out. It predates ever-present cell phones with built-in NTP clients.

But this lesson still stays.

“It’s okay. My watch is set to atomic time.”

I knew better, yet I briefly expected to see a small nuclear generator strapped to his wrist, ticking the seconds away with radioactive precision. But no, it was just a regular plastic wristwatch (though with calculator pad and memory function) set just that morning to the most accurate time in the world. Apparently even more accurate than even the ticker clock on the Weather Channel, which disagreed with the watch by four seconds.

Normally, such a small difference would be insignificant, but this was different. This was important. Someone – nobody was quite sure who – had noticed that we were running out of year. That there were only minutes left until midnight – few seconds remained of the first (or last, depending on how you want to count) year of the millenium. The previously subdued party erupted in a frenzy of channel-flipping, trying to locate the ageless Dick Clark or, failing that, a ball dropping somewhere in the world: an effort to find an “official” countdown to chant with.

There are times when it becomes painfully obvious that I no longer live on the East Coast; New Year’s is the most obvious of them. As the channels flipped by, news, after-midnight televised parties resplendent with second-rate pop icons and drunken hordes, and even the occasional rerun of a sitcom confronted us. It seemed that our only timekeeping salvation would be in the precision of a small quartz diode, only hours ago calibrated to the National Institute of Standards and Technology atomic clock, a feat made possible by technology and an Internet connection.

“We’ve still got three minutes,” the watch-holder announced. The relief was tangible – for a moment there, we were afraid we’d missed it entirely. Paces slowed, and our final preparations continued at a more sedate pace. That is, until the bathroom door swung open, and another guest who had missed the ruckus raised their watch aloft.

“I set my watch to atomic time this morning! We’ve only got sixty seconds left!”

I caught sight of my reflection in the window; outside the night was dark and freezing, moonlight shone upon the snow. Behind me the ghostly reflections of people scurried, bearing hats, noisemakers, poppers, champagne. Someone was making sure the kids – collectively and safely sequestered downstairs – were on-cue and taken care of.

And we had no idea if the New Year had come yet.

Did our resolutions count yet? Did we have time for a last cigarette, a last sugary snack, a final drink? Was it time to kiss someone, or wish for someone to kiss? Should we be toasting, singing, reminding our loved ones that they were our loved ones after all? Was it time yet to start fresh, to wipe the slate clean and try to do things a little better than we had before? Nobody knew for certain – the watches disagreed with the television channels, and all of them disagreed among themselves. No ball (or Dick Clark) was visible yet, and suggestions flew back and forth. “Try CBS.” “ABC! Dick Clark’s on ABC!” “Headline News always has a clock!” The mood was nearly frantic – several of the timekeepers already claimed we were in the New Year. Then:

“Why don’t we just say we have twenty seconds left and start counting?”

In a rollercoaster of emotion, the thought ran through our brains. Suddenly, we would decide when our New Year began. We, nobody else, would decide when to start anew, to hold ourselves to our resolutions, to love our families and remember our friends. From there, from that simple idea, realization spun outward: If it was possible to just say that the New Year began whatever time we wanted today, then we could do the same each day. Every day, every midnight, every minute could be a New Year, a new chance, a new opportunity.

The New York ball suddenly glistened upon the television in gaudy glory; someone had found it. It was a replay; Mayor Guiliani smiling as the seconds counted downward an hour ago (despite the “LIVE” blazoned in the upper-left hand corner). Dutifully, we joined in, chanting away seconds with the televised throng; distanced by thousands of miles and nearly an hour of time.

It was several minutes into the New Year, poppers popped and champagne drunk, that we noticed that the ball hadn’t agreed with either of the disagreeing watches, both meticulously set to atomic time.

Featured Image by Nick from Pixabay

Patreon Creators — I have good news and bad news for you.

The Good News: You Can Back Up Your Posts

The good news: You can back up your Patreon posts and then — with a bit of scripting and some linux software tools {1} — get them, along with images in the proper places, as word processing documents or standalone web pages.

There is — as far as I can tell — no built-in way to export your data from Patreon. I asked a year ago, and they told me "Nope, but that’s a great idea." While other changes have occurred with Patreon in the last year, there’s still no internal way to export what you’ve written on the site/app — and if anything, Patreon seems rather set on making sure it’s that way.

There are some third-party WordPress plugins I’ve heard of (and not tested), but if you’re not using WordPress, you’re SOL. There are extensions and tools to download individual images and such from posts, but that’s not going to help if you need a backup of what you’ve created on the site.

Given the principle of "What you don’t own can ban (or get rid of) you with no notice," it is desirable to have a copy of your Patreon posts if you want to use them for anything else, or simply have a backup.

Using the tools (Linux instructions)

So here’s how we do it.

First, it requires a cross-platform tool called PatreonDownloader. Download the release and unpack it to a directory of your choosing and change into that directory. If needed (for linux) make PatreonDownloader.App executable by typing chmod +x ./PatreonDownloader.App.

Using the tool is pretty straightforward:

./PatreonDownloader.App --url --descriptions --embeds --download-directory /path/to/save/location --use-sub-directories

It will open a browser window automatically for you (chromium — a fork of Chrome without Google), warn that the browser is being operated by an automated tool, and have you log into Patreon. You can only access creator posts that you normally can reach when logged into Patreon. And then the tool will work for a while in a terminal window. This… may take a while, depending on how many posts you have.

PatreonDownloader will not download externally hosted images (e.g. on imgur) or videos (e.g. on YouTube or Vimeo). The --embeds flag will create text files in the appropriate directories with the information about those externally hosted embeds.

Each post will be in its own subdirectory, and there will be a description.html file with the body of the text. And while the images have been downloaded, the links in description.html still point to an online source. It’s all there… but not very easily usable.

Our friends sed, awk, detox, and pandoc are here to help (sed and awk should already be on your Linux system; pandoc and detox are probably available in your package manager as well). (I also use unzip at one point as well.)

I wrote a BASH script using all of those tools to go through, smarten the quotation marks (to avoid escaping errors) and producing the following:

• The document, renamed with the title of the post (and the title and date posted at the top of the doc), in markdown
• The document, renamed with the title of the post (and the title and date posted at the top of the doc), with images embedded in ODT (OpenDocument format)
• The document, renamed with the title of the post (and the title and date posted at the top of the doc), with images embedded in DOCX (MS-Word format)
• The document, renamed with the title of the post (and the title and date in the metadata of the format), in epub format
• The document, renamed with the title of the post, in HTML format with links to images pointing to ./media and the image files all located in that subdirectory.

The script (MIT license) is available from GitHub, GitLab, or my own repo.

The usage is pretty simple:

convert_patreon_downloader_files.sh /path/to/save/location

If you do not specify a path, it will start at the current directory and recurse downward.

If you want to have it all as a single file, I recommend taking all of the resulting epub files — assuming their titles are different — and combining them using the EpubMerge plugin for Calibre. While pandoc is able to take multiple files and combine them into one large ebook, if there are a lot of files and images getting pulled in, you may end up with your CPU and RAM at 100%. (Ask me how I know.) However, once Calibre combines them all into a single big epub file, you can use pandoc MyBig.epub -f epub -t docx -o MyBig.docx, for example, to make it into one big Word document.

There you have it. A genuine backup of (at least) your words and images that you’ve posted on Patreon.

The Bad News: (Sort Of)

If you were paying attention, you already know the bad news.

PatreonDownloader allows the user to use the tool with any post the user can normally see when logged into Patreon. For example, when putting this together, I was doing so on behalf of M. Sotherden (who makes glass art and often writes about her life) who wanted to have a backup of her writing. I did not need their login credentials, I just had to subscribe to their Patreon.

So, at least theoretically, any patron could download every post of any creator they support.

Should I Worry?

Is that actually something to worry about?

From what I’ve observed of Patreon — which admittedly isn’t much — it seems like most of the patrons really are there to support artistic and creative endeavors, not to "get the most bang for their buck". There are going to be scammers who try to rip off someone else’s work — not a large percentage, but with automation and the size of the internet, a small percentage can have a big impact.

If a Creator is worried about it, they can set their posts to only be visible for a period of time, so their most recent Patron will not have automatic access to their entire back catalog. I’m sure that once this gets realized, there will be a vocal few with their trousers all in a twist worrying about AI or plagarists or pirates or youths, and frantically changing the settings on their Patreon. {2} They will hit their socials, pearls firmly clutched. Again, not a large percentage of Creators, but a vocal one. They may even do something so stupid as to try to lash out at PatreonDownloader.

Let me say that again. SOMETHING STUPID LIKE GOING AFTER THE TOOL.

Because ultimately, this is the same issue as DRM, except a lot more personal. DRM — or restricting how far back Patrons can look — inherently says "I don’t trust you with what I made."

And Patreon is explicitly about trust and people wanting to support artists and creators rather than thinking they’re "pre-ordering" something with their pledge {3}. Patrons can — and frequently do — support artists and creators at financial levels well over the "cost" of any tangible gain they receive.

So to those creators who are thinking about doing something stupid, take a moment to reflect on that.

Your Patrons are not paying you for a product or a service. They may get something out of supporting you — something to read every week or month, a postcard, whatever — but that is not why they are your patrons.

They are not there to snag merch or take all your stuff.

They are your patrons because they are supporting you.

Further Work And Promoting Creators

If you are a Windows or Mac (or BSD, hi MWL) person who can tweak this for those operating systems (particularly the BASH script), please let me know so I can link to it here as well. There are some guides for the PatreonDownloader portion in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/s15j94/simple_patreon_downloader/

And if you have a Patreon that you support, leave a comment wherever you see this telling us why you support that creator and where we can find them. (If you have a Patreon, feel free to leave yours, but then leave a second, separate comment sharing another creator, please.)

I’ll start with one: As previously mentioned, I started this project on behalf of M. Sotherden, who is a fascinating writer and makes some exquisite glass art. You can find their Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MSotherden, and can read some samples of their work over at https://glasslassie.com/.

{1} It is possible to get pretty much all of these tools on Windows and Macs, but that’s beyond the scope of what I’m describing here, and I don’t have either handy to test this on. If you write that guide, please let me know so I can link to it here. Particularly the bits for using the BASH script.
{2} That is legitimately why this is going live after Christmas Day and before New Year’s.
{3} We know what service I’m talking about.

Featured Image by tookapic from Pixabay

I wrote a little script to give me a minimal GUI when posting to Mastodon which I call patootie.

Why?

Because sometimes you want a GUI and the speed of a command line, and just want to say something stupid on Mastodon without firing up a browser or Sengi or grabbing your phone, or or or…

So I made patootie.

patootie uses YAD and toot to have a GUI for sending a quick toot with possible image attachments, content warnings, and alt text. The script Includes interactive image selector and displaying the image while you are presented with a dialogue box to enter alt text.

Patootie uses the environment variable TOOTACCT to specify the tooting account otherwise it uses whichever one is currently active in toot.

You may specify the full path to an image file as the first (and only) command-line variable to "pre-load" the image attachment portion of the script.

You can find patootie on GitHub, GitLab, or my personal git repository in the multiple_scripts repository.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay