In my social media "folly" I've (the Married White Progressive of the post title) been attempting to reconnect to my roots in small town Connecticut in part as a way of having conversations with people who have totally different political views from my own.  This experiment has blown up in my face over the past week.

I'll admit that I may have been overzealous in my attempts to engage on political posts from my "friends" but I did always try to be polite when pressing for clarity on some stances that appeared innately inconsistent.

This anthropologist learned that a large number of people who post political content don't actually want to talk about it (I guess it's more emblematic to them than interesting) and aren't interested in adding to or adjusting their views beyond what they already think they know about the world.  I find this troubling because it doesn't bode well for democratic process (whether the people are progressive or conservative).  The people I've been speaking with seem to base their conservative politics largely on the "character" of people they feel haven't earned help because they are lazy or undereducated.

Here is where the bear trap snapped on my foot... I'm a social scientist.  We are a misunderstood lot of rag-tag academics.  We aren't scientists, per se. Social Scientists have done a poor job of convincing the public that you can actually study human behavior, culture, and society and come up with "facts". Additionally, since everyone makes observations about people in their day to day lives, people assume their experiences are as representative as the research of Social Scientists.  They're not.

This is where I began to feel like an a-hole. People I was engaging with I don't think understand that college professors are also researchers, not just "teachers". As I said to a friend in a heated and unsuccessful moment of weakness, "It's like me telling you that I know as much about nursing as you do because my mother has a long-term illness". Anthropologists are trained to think about their social position in relation to others they are interacting with.  I am way over-educated in relation to the folks I was engaging with.  When I spoke of the "facts" I have studied, they took it as me thinking I was telling them they were stupid or uneducated.  We were in the gray zone where social science analysis of patterns of poverty and poor communities was being looked at as my opinion as a progressive, just like their idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy was their opinion.  Frustration set in for me. There are things that are provable if you look closely at them.  My assertion of proof was taken as an attack on intelligence.  I had been called out with comments like, "you paid too much for your education" from folks who had joined the military and never completed college. I couldn't respond in kind because I think it would be wrong to tell this person that our public school had failed him and he never learned to make an argument where evidence built upon itself to a conclusion.  He was all over the place when we talked politics.  I always liked him as a person when we were in school together.  He was kind in a school full of pretty mean people. But it turned into a trap.  This social scientist's disciplinary insecurity (but these are FACTS!!! Why won't anybody LISTEN TO ME?!?!) turned into what I wanted to avoid (Anne has become an over educated, Brooklyn elitist who thinks she knows more than anybody else). I will say that through it all I never resorted to the name calling that was hurled at me, but in all this has been a failed experiment. If anyone knows an "over-educated" conservative who actually likes to talk about politics, send them my way.

Rapeseed in bloom, Huron County, Ontario. Photo (C) Sean M Puckett 2014. 

The name "canola" was chosen by the board of the Rapeseed Association of Canada in the 1970s. The "Can" part stands for Canada and "ola" refers to oil. Thanks, Wikipedia. I'm midly allergic to it & other plants related to Brassicae, so I have to avoid most commercial foods cooked with Canola oil as an ingredient. Which is most of them these days.

Rover is getting old.

She's 12.  (Actually, she's now 12.25.  I suppose that in the twilight of life, those fractions of a year start to matter again, much as they did when we were children.)

She sleeps through so much now.  And she's underfoot even more than before; she doesn't hear when warned to get out of the way, and then gets stepped on, or she forgets that 15 seconds ago she was exiled from the kitchen. 

And she doesn't have the bladder control she once had, meaning that the loveseat she used to sleep on had to be disposed of, despite my having owned it for 19 years.

Still, she's cute, she's enjoying her dotage, and she's just as snuggleable as ever.  I fear that the next few years of pet ownership are going to be tough.

Last night we set off on a mission of mercy. An old friend has a problem: someone keeps entering her apartment, taking shit, and wrecking shit.

The intruder is vindictive. They squeezed an entire tube of expensive eye cream all over her bathroom. They cut off the bottom of her pants. And they stole half her professional wardrobe, something she can't afford.

Our friend is older, so she feels particularly vulnerable.

This person is breaking in during the day, and there is never any sign of forced entry, so I strongly suspect building staff has something to do with it; she lives in a high-rise apartment building with a gorgeous view. Just the sort of place you're happy until some lunatic starts gaslighting you and you start to wonder if you're crazy, amirite.

So despite being a technophobe, she bought some security equipment, and asked us over to help set it up. And I spent three hours wrangling the gear— a security camera and a "cloud DVR"— which almost works at this point.

Everything works, actually, except for uploading the video "to the cloud." Or at least sending her pictures by email when the motion sensor triggers. Or something. Because if the only evidence is in the apartment, I have no confidence we'll catch the bastard.

Unfortunately the cloud bit is sticky. The email feature has no test button and doesn't seem to work. The "cloud push" feature is... what? What the hell is cloud push? The FTP feature is tempting, but I'd have to figure out a way for her to know it was happening and browse the results. The whole setup is a pain in the ass; somebody slapped as little code on top of Linux as they could possibly get away with. Mutter mutter.

Is there a drastically better solution for a simple task like monitoring the front door and capturing incriminating pix of whoever's coming through it?

Alternatively... does anybody know what the hell "cloud push" is?

'I Ain't Marchin' Anymore' by Phil Ochs.  Also, 'Santo Domingo', also 'Here's to the State of Mississippi', also 'Outside of a Small Circle of Friends' and so many more.

I am on a Phil Ochs kick because he was very passionate about human lives, about freedom, about not only his right to speak out, but our responsibility to speak out and beyond that, to act.  Where are the Phils of today?  The last one I remember was Bono, and that was a long time ago.

Jack is a cat of our aquaintance. (He lives here, in the house, and we're responsible for him. For the record his full name is Dr. Isaac Ezekiel "Jack" Jones. Our cats get names. But I digress.)

We're not sure of his specific provenance, except that he came from the cat rescue. He's a brown tabby of middling size with a few notches out of his ears and a slash on his nose. His colouration is different than other tabbies, though -- he has brown "points", like a Siamese. His ear tips are dark, his feet are dark, his tail is dark. I suspect, but don't know, that he's half Siamese.

I don't know all of the attributes of Siamese cats; I've never made their acquaintance in person that I can recall. But the rumours are that they're very talkative. Vocal. You know. Saying cat words and cat phrases. A lot. And repeatedly. But I think because Jack has some Siamese in him, that he is also predisposed to being vocal. Although not to excess. Except sometimes.

What it comes down to this: Jack mutters. 

He wanders through the house at times, asking questions of doors, of shadows, of doorways, of shafts of light, of furniture, of stairs, of landings, of the middle of rooms, of hallways, of closets, of foyers, of bathrooms, of bedrooms, of clutter, of dust bunnies, of the absence of dust bunnies, of almost everything.

Which is why sometimes you might hear me say "Jack, shut up!"  Because sometimes he will go on, and on, and on, and on. And talking to the muttering cat usually works to stop him muttering, at least for a while.

Because the question he seems to be asking, when he's muttering, is "am I alone? Where is everyone?"  

And sometimes, when we can say it truthfully, we'll answer him, "We're upstairs, Jack, in the bed!" 

And then he'll trot up the stairs and jump up on the bed and purr.

You'll probably see that subject line again.

I felt today the first flirtatious kiss of winter upon my nape. A chill, in the air; in the house. The temperature in the dining room was 18C this morning. I expect and prepare for a freshening outside as the days shorten even while they're still just longer than the nights. This is Canada after all. But inside, and first half September, it's not only unwelcome-it's always unwelcome-it's unexpected. Measures were taken; long sleeves adorned, fleece slippers retrieved from the lurking places of cats.

But I write today to complain of hunger. The hunger of "winter is coming." The furnace in the core of my self that banked for summer's heat is now remembering what it is to stoke and to demand fuel. The hunger that isn't slaked by a contented belly so much as by an inability to eat any more. The hunger that makes my jaws clench at nothing and my teeth ache to rend fatty flesh. And cheap chocolate. (That last bit may be triggering.) 

The hunger of eat, or die.

This is pretty much what I've been playing this year.

I played Dark Souls II through a couple times but got fed up with the non-Miyazaki nature of the storyline, which basically boils down to "jilted woman loses her shit." And some other random misogyny. Also while some of the levels are really great, others were really phoned in. Kind of like Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith in the first. So that was kind of a letdown. I really think Demon's Souls is the best of the three of them for environment. I'm really hoping Bloodborne (which is where Miyazaki focused his time instead of paying attention to DkS2) steers much more back in the DeS direction, and if there's a bit of Silent Hill horror in there that won't be a bad thing either. 

I bought Reckoning/Amalur/Kingdom whatever that thing that 38 Studios (the big clusturfuck in Delaware) made; it was $5 on sale and seemed like it might be a kind of fun sort of actiony RPG thing to pass the time with. I started it on hard mode, because I have low expectations for a US studio title. I wish it would actually get hard. I'm not even using magic. It's certainly got a big world, but it's just so effing boring after 60 hours. It doesn't have the drama of a Final Fantasy plot so it's mostly just grind through whatever step-and-fetchit quests you can tolerate and smack the baddies now and then.

Hohokum was very pleasant but doesn't have much replayability. It's kind of a "busy box" sort of game. Once you've pushed all the buttons and seen all the little cutscenes, there's not much more to it. I love the soundtrack, though. And the art style is super cute. I recommend this game highly as a diversion or something to haul out and get lost in when you're slightly altered. (I wasn't able to get the two apparently female figures to marry, though. That irritated me.)

Child of Eden I wrote about in another venue. Basically REZ, but with a video damsel to save, which really kind of ruins it for me. Not what I want in my techno rail shooter. At all. I'll keep poking at it, though.

I also played ThatGameCompany's Flower and Journey, which are mellow, score-less, exploration-driven, quest-type pastimes. They are games in that there are objectives and gradually increasing difficulty in completing them. But they seem to focus more on environmental enjoyment and just flying or wandering around in surreal, minimalist landscapes. Nice soundtracks and pleasant visuals, and some interesting play mechanics, but I didn't find them really compelling in any ongoing way. (Perhaps this is best signified by the fact that I forgot to write them up last night when I originally created this post.)

I just started American McGee's Alice (as a bonus pack-in to Alice: Madness Returns; I haven't played it yet) runs on the Quake III engine, which should give you an idea of how ancient it is. I actually died several times, though mostly from issues related to its remapping of a mouse view/keyboard strafe model to the controller. I started doing much better when I discovered the shoulder buttons would shoot as well, saving me from "claw" grip.

I also just started Mass Effect, which I've never played before and know very little about. Of course I'm playing as a woman; I always do when presented with a choice. I usually stay away from western shooters because of misogyny & patriarchy issues but reports are that BioWare did pretty well on this series so when the trilogy came on sale for $20 I decided to go for it. I'm just a couple hours in but it feels rather too linear for my taste. We'll see how it goes after 20 or however long it takes.

I picked up Trine 2 for a couple bucks, and while I have to say the visuals are really extraordinarily beautiful, the gameplay is wrenchingly dull. It reminds me of The Incredible Machine or Contraptions or other things like that where you have a bucket of tools and have to figure out what super secret combination of them will get you through the next screen. These kind of puzzles almost always devolve into "solve it our way or get stuffed." Yeah, sure, here's a sequence for ya, which number comes next: 6 21 3 11 15 6 _. I'll probably gnaw through it 20 minutes at a time just because I'm stubborn.

I loved Dragon's Dogma, almost everything about it, except that I think the damage equations are improperly coded with a logit rather than sigmoidal shape, so there's only a narrow range of player levels where you are evenly matched with your foes -- much higher than them and they are like paper, much lower and it's like punching granite. A sigmoid function, akin to what the Souls series provides, would provide many more opportunities for challenging interactions. I'd probably still be playing it if all of my characters didn't basically get to the point of "press X to win".  Special mention for the goblins in this game -- absolute best characterization I've seen in a foe in any game so far.

D mostly is playing Final Fantasy XIII-2, also known as "the RPG Westerners Hate Because It Doesn't Spoon-Feed You A Plot And It Has Non-Linear Gameplay." We're grooving on it pretty well, though I personally could do without the pseudo-Pokemon thing. 

When Mass Effect is done, there's ME2 and ME3, and when Alice is done there's Madness Returns, so my Winter videogaming needs are fairly well seen to, assuming I don't just burn through them all before the Solstice. I might consider Dragon Age Inquisition, but the previous titles have been problematic in some ways so I'll hold off until I know what I'd be getting into. Apparently Capcom is doing something called Deep Down but reports are it won't even have a female option for the lead so that's not going to work.

I'm looking forward to No Man's Sky, the procedurally generated galaxy explorer, and whichever of that or Bloodborne releases first will be the impetus for us to get a PS4 -- all of the titles I've mentioned I play on our PS3.

So that's kind of where I'm at for gaming!

Last night I mucked around playing Starcraft and watching games on YouTube for a couple hours. And then I uninstalled it.

Looking at how much time I actually spent playing, I didn't have a problem, unless you consider normal TV watching habits a much bigger problem. And it was nice being interested in a spectator as well as participatory sport for once.

But... nah. It's too much energy in the wrong place. And it's kinda played out, too. And my earlier efforts to set constructive limits— pushups between games, coding a One Post Wonder feature between games— were going by the wayside.

So I uninstalled the game. And then I watched half a movie with Roberta and worked on privacy locks for One Post Wonder for an hour and a half. Hooray for "default activities" that involve people and personal goals!

I don't expect to always be this productive. Relaxation takes many forms and not all of them seem purposeful or social. But hopefully my default activities on nights my daughter is home will expand to include things like picking up my guitar again.

Hey folks. So quiet and nice in here. Did everyone have a good day? Did you get some work done? Fit some fun in? Eat a good meal? I had some spaghetti and garlic bread. And a nice chianti. No fava beans.

Spoke to both parents today, coincidentally. That never gets old. Ever since they divorced (when I was like 12) I've loved those rare moments when I could say "mom" and "dad" in the same sentence. So... today I talked to Mom and Dad on the phone.

Side note: Some confusing things going on with posting. My last post's text showed up in the box when I hit "write". Here's hoping I didn't just edit over it by mistake. I am also seeing extra boxes under the main one and wrote a few sentences in them which then disappeared. Minorly, I miss having a spelcheck hadny!

I'm tired and still hoarse, so I'll leave you with a funny pic I just saw tonight.

xoxo