Matt Lichtenwalner's post on Random Stuff in Google Sheets inspired me to do a little tinkering with random stuff in Google Sheets as well. I now have a moderately good bingo card generator:

People frequently ask me for ways they can modify the HTML+Javascript+CSS version at osric.com/bingo-card-generator/, but I suspect they aren't up for that level of manipulation. On the other hand, loads of people are spreadsheet wizards!

I went through the Wayback Machine and found an old post that I wanted to update for my TTRPG audience. The updated version is now live over here, if you're interested. In short: both weighted and unweighted random selections from lists, which makes for useful tools for TTRPGs, worldbuilding, writing, etc. But I do it without the use of AI - which is (obviously) an easier method, but since some folks are super anti...

Sometimes the correct answer is the more obvious one, and sometimes it isn't, and even knowing the non-obvious answer doesn't help you decide which one to pick.  Sometimes you just need to read the question more carefully.

What is the common name of very thin stripes, often used in men's clothing?

What is the more famous name of the Misión San Antonio de Valero ?

What fruit popular in America has the Latin name Prunus persica and was cultivated in China during the Neolithic period?

What do the three previous answers have in common?

What is the name of the black cuboid building at the center of Islam's holiest mosque?

What does IBU measure in the context of beer?

Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera has the shortest land border in the world between Spain and what country?

Just wanted to let y'all know that I did a blog post over on my Patreon blog about The State of the Art - referring to my current project list and goals (art wise). It's freely available to read to the public - no membership or subscription needed.

Check it out, and feel free to reply here if that's easier and you're so inclined. :)
ETA: strange. There's a link at the bottom of my 'edit screen', but nothing is showing up in the actual post for me. *shrug* I added the link above in case / for future reference.

I cockily cheered at the final category "Flags of the World" before actually seeing the question, but did succeed in dunking on it.  

What actress shared hosting Jeopardy until Ken Jennings took over full-time?

What undrafted African-American quarterback was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006?

What name is shared by the currency of Panama, a fictional county in Veronica Mars, and #7 on AFI's list of movie heroes?

What country's flag is identical to neighboring Romania's except for a superimposed coat of arms?

Hardly the technological revolution of our time. But today I realized I was seated really far from the order status board at Starbucks. My eyes are quite good with glasses (1), but not that good. So I took a pic of it with my very midrange Pixel 8a, zoomed in, and read my name.

I remember posting a few years ago that I was looking forward to this, but cell phones were still inferior to the naked eye most of the time.

Of course, everybody could have carried opera glasses starting a century ago. But one's daily carry has limits.

I like to note these small milestones because I tend to miss how much has changed in our lifetimes. Despite how dystopian technology can be, I feel a bit cheated that we haven't gone from the Wright Brothers to the Moon. But some seriously crazy shit is going down, and cool little stuff too.

(1) People without glasses, particularly people who had vision surgery more than ten years ago, are often surprised that I can see stuff they can't. Look, I definitely remember my own "oh I don't need glasses" phase. But cheap glasses are nowhere near as dorky as they were THIRTY YEARS AGO 👻. Just grab an eye exam, under insurance if you're lucky. Make sure they write down your IPD (Intrapupillary Distance). And then just hop on Zenni. Don't be a boomer and get suckered into vision store prices.

Also there's contacts if you're vain. I get it. I'm totally vain.

Kim and i gave up our community garden plot.  We have too much going on still at home and we weren't taking care of things.  It's the first time we haven't gardened since our very early days together, other than my GBS year.

Dad and Mom came to California to visit me and Paul in December; Mom said that he was very insistent and, well, when a 92-year-old is almost desperate to see his kids, you can guess what might be going through his head.  Turns out that his health started declining soon after his return, where he couldn't keep any food down.  They found a mass in his stomach that was blocking the entrance, and we hope to have the biopsy results... today?  Welp, tomorrow, then.  Again, at 92, it seems immaterial.  He's got a feeding tube installed now, plus a catheter because he's had trouble urinating, too.  They had just pulled the trigger on a house in The Villages and now it seems unlikely that he'll move from Quito, given his health.

My department at work only got 30% of the headcount they requested, so i, sadly, remain an employee of the contracting agency and not Google.  But my contract was renewed for a full year, so it's not all bad.

This was Best Picture Weekend, courtesy of the Philadelphia Film Society. It's a great service, although it would be much improved by respecting high holy days, by which I mean not overlapping with the Super Bowl. All they had to do was screen Sunday's movies starting as early as Saturday's.

True, that would interfere with an actual holy day for some, but am I wrong in thinking that some attendees possibly missing one Sunday service is a lesser crime against inclusion?

Anyway, I've seen everything except Train Dreams now and here are my thoughts:

Marty Supreme is a helluva ride. Full of wonderful performances. Also a movie about a narcissistic asshole. But the ending arguably makes it someting more. And I saw it with someone who's been on the wrong end of several narcissistic assholes, and they loved it. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge the fun. I have a silly spoiler-tastic fan theory which I'll share later, after a cat pic.

The Secret Agent is arguably a better car movie than F1, and the camera only lingers on cars for a few minutes. But it rambles a bit, and opinion was divided in our party. I liked it, mostly for getting at the day to day absurdities of life under corrupt authoritarian rule. But it doesn't deserve Best Picture. It's certainly no I'm Still Here.

F1 is Brad Pitt's Top Gun: Maverick. There's no way it deserves to be best picture. It is a fine exemplar of the sports movie genre, and people who love cars will find themselves very well taken care of. We get two women whose story is not just about a man. There are a few lovely moments in which the director allows themselves to show us the great variety of motoring experience, both racing and non-, beyond Formula One. I wish there had been more.

I watched two-thirds of Bugonia on TV with my sister in Tacoma. I napped through part of it, but it's not fair to lay the full blame for that on the movie. Bugonia is another Yorgos Lanthimos — Emma Stone joint. Speaking as someone who loved Poor Things: Bugonia is fine, but I don't regret watching it on a TV. I enjoyed the ending.

I saw Sinners back when it was in general release. What a trip! The dual performance from Michael B. Jordon is impressive. But a certain speech on the political economics of vampirism really put it over the top for me. They cleaned up on nominations and I would not be at all displeased if it wins Best Picture. It is interesting that this movie doesn't feel the need to have any sympathetic white characters, although it does have sympathetic asian characters. I think we can take it, for once.

I also saw Frankenstein earlier in the year. Confusing the man with the monster is a tired joke, but here they blur in a new way. Strong cinematography, strong acting as well. May our creations be half as humane.

Hamnet is a beautiful, heartbreaking film. Feminist takes on Shakespeare are haunted by Virginia Woolf's riff on the topic ALMOST A CENTURY AGO 👻🤣,  and for good reason, but that space has been explored. Chloé Zhao gives him a wife who is an equal power, and his failings are those of a man ridden by a dream, not a man who takes women for granted. In the end he shows himself to have been present all along. Something in my eye dammit.

One Battle After Another is two hours and 42 minutes. And I didn't begrudge a single one of them! Like Marty Supreme it is a helluva ride, but it has more to say. I realize it's a Pynchon adaptation, and I haven't read the book, but I think Paul Thomas Anderson was also trying to will the revolution back into being and connect it with the present moment. I think I'll watch this movie again at some point.

... And that brings us to Sentimental Value. Which is basically the same movie as Hamnet. The same big idea: self-actualization itself has an empty heart, but can redeem itself by connecting art back to the personal. I was paying attention all along. I know it's painfully obvious to say it reminds me of Ibsen, just because there are Scandinavians in rooms. But there are Scandinavians in rooms, and I do enjoy that.

Who should win? I'd say... Hamnet, actually. Followed by One Battle After Another, or Sinners. No big surprises there. These are good movies. But I don't think there are any clear-cut jaw-dropping room-clearing slam-dunk never-seen-anything-like-it best goddam-movie-of-the-decades this year. Not like last year, which gave us I'm Still Here and Nickel Boys. Hell, even the deeply problematic Emilia Peréz was a fascinating watch. (It helped that I didn't know its flaws going in.)

But the prize went to Anora, because Anora was a tour de force of filmmaking itself especially given the budget available. And the Academy has a soft spot for that.

So... who will win this year?

Going by "filmmaking itself," it's a bit of a toss-up this year. Sentimental Value is clearly the most meta- when it comes to filmmaking, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best-made film.

But going by the nominations, it seems clear One Battle After Another or Sinners will take it. And in recent years, all else being equal the expanded Academy has tended toward diversifying the pool of winners. For a change. So I'm thinking Sinners will walk away with Best Picture.

However, I must point out that I still have not seen Train Dreams. If I fail to see Train Dreams before the ceremony, it will definitely win Best Picture.

Here is a ridiculous cat picture, followed by a spoiler-tastic fan theory about Marty Supreme.

OK, ridiculous Marty Supreme fan theory:

There's a rich asshole in the movie. He is Marty's nemesis. Marty largely gets the better of him, until he doesn't.

But there's a speech at the end that's completely out of its time and place:

"I was born in 1601. I'm a vampire. I've been around forever. I've met many Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed me, some of them weren't straight. They weren't honest. And those are the ones that are still here. You go out and win that game, you're gonna be here forever too. And you'll never be happy. You will never be happy."

Of course, Marty proves him wrong. Well... sort of. He wins the game but renounces the life of a showgirl narcissistic bullshitter.

But after the movie ended, R. looked up the guy who played the rich asshole. It's Kevin O'Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank (which I'm not really familiar with), aka a tremendously successful businessman and general winner in the lottery of life. I mean, the man has Emirati dual citizenship for business reasons. He's been accused of fabulous frauds. He and his wife are infamous for dodging responsibility for a boating accident. And speaking as a WASP... he has the WASPiest possible patriarch-at-Thanksgiving face and he knows how to use it. Ugh, this guy.

So a day later it hit me: this speech was not in the script. Kevin O'Leary was ad-libbing. He was telling the simple truth. Kevin O'Leary is a vampire, born in 1601.

It explains everything.

25 years ago, I was in a fantasy football league that had a live auction.

Each team had a $100 budget.
Bidding competition for great players drove prices up over $65 in some cases, so the guys who won those stars had to scrape together the rest of their rosters with players nobody else wanted.
It was a lot of fun because the tempatation to bid on players I really wanted on my team was strong, but the impulse to save money for the rest of the team was also strong.

The league fell apart because of drama, but the idea of a fantasy sports auction stayed with me.

Then I played fantasy baseball online, but I stopped because I would always have players on my fantasy team that played against the Phillies. Do I root for my guys? Do I root for the Phillies? Plus the statistics and scoring got too complicated, so I didn't play for a long time.

Much later, I was in a fantasy football league at work. The draft was lame, not an auction. The players on my team played against the Eagles all the time, which confused me, and my team was so bad, I was out of the running by week 3 and had no reason to follow it anymore.

January 7, 2026, while eating a Wawa hoagie, I had the idea for a website to host a free fantasy baseball service with:

• A live auction
• Phillies players only
• Scores tallied weekly

So I built it.

The rules and scoring are as simple as I could make them. There are four players on each team, one statistic for pitchers, and one statistic for hitters. That's it.

I made the "One Post Wonder Baseball League", which you can join here.

If you would like to play, click that link, then:

1. Enter your email address and a password.
2. Click "Create Account".
3. Give your team a name.
4. Click "Join league".

If you want to read the rules first, they're here.

I picked 6PM Eastern on Saturday, March 21 for our live auction because spring training will be almost over by then, and we'll have a good idea of what the opening day roster looks like. We'll do an optional Zoom call during the auction for banter and running commentary. If a different date or time would make it so you can join, let me know.

This is specifically designed for people who have never been in a fantasy sports league before, and for people who don't know anything about baseball or the Phillies.

The auction is going to be about 90% of the whole experience. After that, you just check in whenever you want to see how your four players are doing. There's no day-to-day management or anything. 

Anyone on One Post Wonder is invited to join.

I guessed the third one based on a memory of a Peanuts comic, but I can't find it online.  Has anyone seen it?

What American author set most of his novels in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County?

What English poet wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ?

What Austrian composer, known as the "Father of the Symphony" wrote 104 of them?

What last name is shared by a winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine and a British author whose estate sponsors a prize for thriller novels ?