The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon.
No fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.
You might recall that there have been a couple of times in recent years where I’ve either been seen by a thing (Heartbreak High) or felt the need to tell someone who made a a thing that I saw them (Shoplifters of the World), but I certainly did not expect to see myself in Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
It’s no April Fools’ Day joke. Buried in a CNN report on massive new layoffs at various health agencies under Mine Furor and Wormwood, comes the news.
As I write this, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is shortly to start in on his fifth hour of talking on the Senate floor, an action he says is “disrupting business as usual”. It brought to mind a piece from The Bulwark by Jonathan V. Last from last week that I only encountered in the past day or two.
The month began with me pleading with the Red Sox to just let Rafael Devers be Rafael Devers. At issue was not just the then-potential move from third baseman to designated hitter but an apparent desire on the part of the organization that he become a more front-facing and extroverted kind of leader on the team. The month ends with me wondering if the training staff understands what’s gone wrong.
Much as I noted the other day my reticence to offer a pull quote from the very end of a novel, I dislike pulling from the very end of someone else’s blog post, but the fact is that it’s the very end of Winnie’s such about selfdom that I need to highlight.
Will Douglas Heaven for MIT Technology Review has a look at some research from Anthropic in which they relate a new ability to peek inside it’s Large Language Model to get some sense of how it does what it does. Three paragraphs gave me conniptions so forgive me while I have a short fit.
Word started spreading on social media early and by this afternoon the confirming news reports hit: Amtrak is pulling all of a certain line of railcars from service due to corrosion issues, impacting the Amtrak Cascades service in the Pacific Northwest seemingly more than any other region. Train trips here are reduced to just two lines a day, with everything else being served by buses.
It’s with a near certainty and small sense of frustration that I say there was something that came before, but memory issues preclude me having any definitive sense of precisely, or even imprecisely, what it was. All I know is that it existed—or, at least, I’m pretty sure it existed. Dependent, then, solely upon what’s actually been discoverable and/or recoverable, today stands in and serves as my twenty-fifth blogging anniversary.
Today on either side of watching the Red Sox play the Sultanes de Monterrey, I checked out an Oregon legislative hearing about amending and updating the old SB 110 allowing for financing a major league ballpark, and I just have a few things I’d like to communicate to all the players (no pun) involved about baseball in Portland.
In my post yesterday about the Severance finale, I made passing reference to a particular scene which I argued was reflective of the show’s political nature. Today, I wanted to say a little bit more about the conversation between Mark Scout and Mark S. that takes place entirely through alternating recordings on the same video camera.