Six weeks ago, we visited my (American) family for (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

(Can I note that I don't understand why so many of my [Canadian] friends felt the need to be perplexed by this trip?  My parents are retired.  We can visit them whenever we want.  What mattered is not that it was Thanksgiving, but that we had time off, and it was a lovely time of the year to go to PA.  Well, really, every time is a lovely time of year to go to PA, except possibly winter.)

It feels remarkable that we were there six weeks ago, mostly because a week after we went to PA for three days, we went to Asia for two weeks.  The one trip kind of overshadows the other.

Anyhow, we went to the nut outlet, while we were there.  You know, the nut outlet.  And they had strikingly good prices on a lot of, well, nuts.  So there are a lot of nuts in my pantry now.

Our favourite nuts are macadamia nuts.  This is in no small part because we fell in love with good fresh mac nuts when we were in Hawaii in December 2012 and 2013.  The mac nuts we have found since we returned from Hawaii have been, well, mehcadamia nuts. 

But the ones from the nut outlet?  They were good!  I bought two bags.  This morning's pancakes caused me to finish the first bag and start the second.

And the nuts in the second bag aren't as good.  The last nuts from bag one (which has been sitting in a tupperware in the fridge since I opened it) taste much fresher than the first nuts from bag two (which has been sitting in the panttry).

Moral of the story: refrigerate your nuts. 

Meanwhile, tonight's dinner was excellent: composed baby spinach salad, with roasted butternut squash and brussels sprouts, Sichuan pepper duck breast, apple, pomegranate and flash-pickled onion.  Oh, and (less good) macadamia nuts.  We have to try harder in winter, but occasionally it's worth it.

We met with a representative from MCC today.  We love MCC.  We also donate a lot to them.

One of the standard measures of a charity's efficiency is, "how much of the charity's revenues go to program costs versus administration costs?"  Charities strive to be under 20% in administration costs, because those that spend lots on administration also often have serious ethical concerns (like overpaid senior staff, say).

MCC is pretty decent in size, but its programs are extremely efficient.  In particular, it has lots of semi-volunteer staff (who are often following whatever the Mennonite equivalent of the Quaker concept of a leading is) from the developed world who work for peanuts in developing countries (basically, they're paid their living expenses plus a tiny stipend), a small amount of professional staff in developing countries paid essentially Canada's minimum wage, and then lots of local partners paid whatever a fair wage is by local standards.  So that means that they're tremendously efficient, which is great!  They have all of these very cheap programs all around the world.

Except that the central (i.e., Canadian) cost of administering cheap programs is no lower than the cost of administering expensive programs.  And same with fundraising: it turns out that a funny consequence of spending so little on programs is that they can't, actually, spend all that much on fundraising either, because the money for hiring fundraisers is eaten up by administering all of their programs.

After spending a few years learning about how Waterloo does fundraising (it was very funny having her quickly learn that, no, I really do know this language), it was eye-opening to see how different things are for "real" charities. 

There's a squirrel in the neighborhood this year that steal's someone's Fuyu persimmons, then comes over to partially eat it at our almond tree, then drops the remnants for me to deposit in our compost pit.

I missed out on all our performances last year.  This year only missing MOST due to funeral duties. I'll be performing tonight for a 5 minute snippet of our show tonight, plus the full show Thursday.

Preview Party - November 19
500 N Market St, Wilmington, Delaware 19801
11/19 (Preview Party - World Cafe) - 6pm (show at 7)

Actual Fringe Performances - November 20-23
2 E. 4th Street (3rd Floor), Wilmington, DE
11/20 - 7pm
11/21 - 9pm
11/22 - 5pm, 9pm
11/23 - 4pm

So I read the Maze Runner series by James Dashner, who hereafter I will not refer to as dipshit only because ad hominem attacks are only worthy when they're executed with style. And he doesn't deserve the effort. If you don't have the time for a 1400 word rant, I'll just cut to the chase: don't read these books.

Note; if one can spoil a flyblown pig, then yes, there are spoilers below, 

It's badly written, badly plotted, badly characterized, ultimately pointless, and worse, is a fucking Mormon parable. You read me right. It's the dystopian sci-fi flavour of Stephanie Meyer's pabulum, my friends: it's Twilight, for boys.

I was originally interested in the series because I read The House of Stairs as an impressionable youth. One of the scariest books one can read as a teen, I think, because of its basic premise of recasting the realities of adult life into an unknowable, unfathomable realm where you're forced to deal with people you don't know and can't trust, and where the rules are essentially unknown unless you break them. And then you begin to be warped and twisted by your survival instincts. How far can a person be manipulated to make them conform to expectations before they shatter, or rebel? A lot of who I am and my views on societies and group dynamics were shaped by that book. And I know I'm not alone.

So I was hoping Dashner might explore some of those same psychological themes in greater detail, and provide some interesting context around the characters and interactions and society that might make such a thing work. That's not what I got.

These books are so bad that I could probably write a full length "NaNoCriMo" about them, but as I do value my time I'll settle for three major points.

The characters are shit. Each character is crayon sketched from a pool of tired YA archetypes. Thomas, the protaganist whose shoulder we surf throughout the series, veers back and forth between heroic to idiotic precisely as the plot requires; he has essentialy no agency and no consistency -- except for his doubt (you see what I did there; except it's not what I did, the author did it, that's the way it's written).

There are a bunch of other boys who orbit around Thomas, playing one role or another, almost interchangably. I say almost, because the rules of YA ensemble fiction do require each group to have weak sidekick, a bully, a fighter and a reluctant leader to go along with the protagonist, but aside from the archetype defining beats in the plot that allow you to remember names, the characters are almost interchangable.

Dystopian YA ensemble fiction also requires a bunch of supporting characters who on one page add comic releif, the next page add dialogue colour, and on the following page bleed out messily. One can do this with style and panache, giving each character their own life and agency, then snuffing them out at intervals to give the reader an elevated sense of horror, or one can just dispose of them as needed in quite a matter-of-fact fashion and then write a few words about the protagonists's elevating sense of horror. Guess which we get.

And then there are the girls. Well, in book one, there's one girl. She gravitates towards the protagonist, as one might expect, and while nothing ever happens on the page, nothing ever really happens off it either. There might be a chaste kiss. But she's treated like a commodity to be treasured by the boys or manipulated by the world's arbiters in order to make the boys do what they're told. And also as another reason to add still more snarky and chafing dialogue. (Which was obnoxious to a ridiculous degree.)

Later in book two we discover there's a gender-swapped version of the main "experiment" where there are lots of girls and one boy, and while the group does encounter these girls enmasse, and there is a brief conflict set up to test Thomas yet again, it is revealed that their experiment was easier, and while there are reportedly more of them, none of their stories are told except in faint fragments.

Another girl is introduced midway through book two, and the instant rivalry that crops up between the two of them with the protagonist in the middle is as clumsily handled as it is needless. Actually, I'm thankful that there's so few female characters in the trilogy -- they are written so badly that if there had been more than a handful of scenes I probably would have given up on it. Okay, I guess that would actually have been good.

​The setting is shit. The author has clearly invested heavily in a highly leveraged position in a deus ex-machina factory. The world makes no sense. Here, let me try to explain it. 

There was a huge solar flare that fucked up the sun's temperature that ultimately rendered the tropical regions of the planet a desert wasteland. Second degree sunburn in minutes, we're told. We're not told about the conditions of the rest of the world. Except that Denver is apparently still habitable, and sunburn is never mentioned again.

This catastrophe caused the release of a weaponized airborne virus that causes people to gradually lose their critical thinking skills and go mad. Nevermind that such virus activity is implausible, the suggestion that a virus like that might be a useful weapon and thus might be developed is absurd. One doesn't develop a bioweapon that cannot be trivially countered by the "good guys" side. Oh, and some very small fraction of people are immune.

All of the world's governments have come together to create an organization to come up with a cure for this virus. Although instead of pursuing a biological method (Why? Handwave), they're trying to come up with a psychological one. Thus the need to put kids through extended psychological testing. 

So I'm to understand that a world that has technology for teleportation, telepathy, remote mind control, instant infection healing and much more, could not come up with a biological cure for an implausible weaponised virus.

And the organization is, naturally, given an infinite budget and is run without oversight by a bunch of seat-of-their-pants assholes very much on the "ends justify the means" range of the scale. While the rest of the world goes to hell, with "infected" citizens shipped off to concentration camps where they can slowly go mad, guarded by those who are immune, and cities gradually emptying out and then in watershed infections converted into hotzones.

The setting blows past seriously? and Really? and lands squarely inYGBFKM territory.

The plot is shit. Probably the worst indictment I can make is that nothing that happens in the books matters. None of the actions of the protagonists or the antagonists has any ultimate relevance to the setting at all. You read above that there are a small percentage of people who are immune to the virus. You would then correctly guess that one solution to the problem of a virus that wipes out humanity would be to get those folks together and allow them to breed. Which would happen anyway. Because that's what biological organisms do. They survive. 

And in the last two pages of the third book, our protagonist, with his designated female companion (whose rival for Thomas' affections tragically died merely one page earlier when a rock randomly fell on her, I shit you not), and a small handful of experimental subjects all of whom were immune all along, along with a couple hundred other immunes who were rounded up, teleport to a beautiful remote area on Earth to begin again.

You see, none of the experiments ultimately mean anything. None of the strife and struggling and plotting by the organization, none of the science, none of the research, none of the angry shouting and betrayal, none of it, comes to mean anything to the billions of people around the world who are infected with this absurdly implausible disease and will die. It's all just designed to test the protagonists, to see if they're worthy. 

I read these over the past couple of days, at first with interest but then with some disappointment. By the end of the first book I was dubious, and as I got to the third book I was scrolling through the text almost non-stop, reading as quickly as I could, not for enjoyment but just to see if the damn story would ever go anywhere. And it didn't. And I couldn't understand why he'd written it.

And I was making coffee this morning and thinking about just how fucking pointless the series was and stopped dead when I finally put the pieces together: it is just a parable about a blessed saviour who, tested by the evils of a foul world, proves himself just, and takes a small group of breedable companions away with him to a secret place to make a new society free of the ills of the old.

And then I threw up a little in my mouth, and came upstairs to write this.​

Edited to add: in the course of writing this I looked up Dasher, and it turns out he took his schooling at Brigham Young. This is my surprised face. Also apparently there's a movie out, which was financed by Temple Hill Entertainment, which also financed the Twilight movies. This is my other surprised face. 

My wonderful boys have broken my internets, again. 

They are going on a net diet. Starting Nov 28 when my data plan resets. Little assholes. I cannot wait until my contract with my current provider is done so I can go back to one that works better for us.  (Why are we on a shit plan? Because we moved to Darwin which is practically a third world fucking country at times and my preferred provider did not service the area I lived in.) 

Also, I got a fitbit for my birthday which has completely triggered my competitive side. (And shown me that no I really don't move enough on days I don't work.) So guess who is off to vacuum the floor and then pace the kitchen like a caged beast until the plastic red band on her hand starts to vibrate and set off flashing lights? 

Fang: I don't get to do any creative writing in my core extension class.  The next thing I have to write is about immigration.

Me: What do you have to write?

Fang: An essay from the point of view of an immigrant coming to Ellis Island.  And we have to do a bibliography.

Me: Did your teacher specify a year?

Fang: No.

Me: Well, if you choose a poor person coming over in the early 1900s, the conditions on the ships were terrible.  People huddled on the floor in family groups, not always enough beds or any beds for a transatlantic voyage, there were vermin, poor sanitation, little food ... you could tell some really gruesome stories.

At this point, Fang, who adds, quite correctly that the late 1800s also qualifies, is grinning like a jack-o-lantern.  Gruesome is his bag, baby.

Hey guys, no robitussin for me tonight. So I managed to shake loose some time to work on OPW's link-sharing features. The jump from the hack I had before to handling this... closer to properly... was a big one, but there's definite progress.

Here are some examples:

This strip has nonexistent semantic markup, which is geek-speak for "it's hard to embed it right," so I'm pleased with how they turn out now when you just paste a link to that day's comic page. I had to edit the title a little, and supplied my own description; it automatically picked the right image (the largest one, by area). You can also tap on the image to cycle through alternatives, if any decent ones were present.

Girl Genius looks good too. There was a problem with overlap— oops, I fixed it.

XKCD: 100A.

This one has an automatic summary, because they supply a proper og:description element. The best available image is pretty crap, though; reminds me that I need to add an option to remove the image entirely.

I also found a few links just now that don't work at the moment. Probably I need to specify a user agent string and then they will cooperate perhaps.

This is an iterative improvement; more are planned. Please do open issues via the bug button.

Thanks!