This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own.

D&D Romance

Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a genre, but I’m not surprised. Pretty much every genre can be crossed with every other. See The Dresden Files for fantasy mixed with detective noir, for example. After a brief introduction, the author of the piece lists 6 books in the D&D Romance genre. I don’t hate on romance as much as I did before I read a few books in the genre, but these aren’t my cup of tea. That said, they may work for you.

As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.

A week ago Stella asked me, “Daddy, why is China fighting Ukraine?”

I told her, “No, China isn’t fighting Ukraine. Russia is fighting Ukraine.”

She thought for a moment and she asked, “Russia wants to take over Ukraine?”

After I answered in the affirmative she asked, “If Ukraine wins the war, does that mean they get to take over Russia?”

After I let her know that wasn’t the case, I did think about how it certainly seems fair play. If losing means losing your country, shouldn’t winning mean that you win the other’s country? And there have certainly been wars like that in the past, but I don’t think any modern wars have followed that pattern.

It seems that it’s time to look back at a year of COVID-19. Scalzi did it. Ars Technica did it. I’m not usually a huge bandwagon jumper, but I thought, “why not?” This has been a huge, disruptive event. It might be therapeutic to write about it.

It was 11 March (I believe) when the WHO officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. One of the first things I remember hearing about COVID-19 was the cruise ship that was stuck offshore because President Trump was so afraid of the numbers rising that he couldn’t let the folks off the ship. Turns out that was going to be a foreshadowing the likes of which we couldn’t quite understand at the time. My first inkling that maybe this was starting to become an issue in the US was in late February or early March when we went to visit relatives in New York City and they were against eating out because they were scared of getting sick. At the time, we thought they were just being a bit germaphobic. In fact, at the end of March we went to a restaurant for what we didn’t know at the time would be our last time to go out to eat for a year. (To date we still haven’t eaten out, not even for outdoor dining)

For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.

No problem!

But kill an elk? You are going to get convicted, you monster!

Jurors deliberated for about four hours before convicting Sam Carter on all nine counts he faced, which also included forgery and tampering with evidence.

Carter shot “Big Boy” the bull elk with his buckshot-loaded shotgun as it grazed on fallen crabapples, and then called in a friend and fellow officer to help remove it as horrified neighbors watched Jan. 1, 2013.

I love when newspapers predict things that are hilarious in hindsight:

Read this article about Questlove being stopped repeatedly despite being, well, Questlove!. A few choice quotes:

Questlove said his most recent stop was conducted at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge a few weeks ago following an appearance at the hip venue Brooklyn Bowl. Officers pulled over his driver, shined flashlights into the car and asked him why he was sitting in the back “like a don,” Questlove said. After showing the officers a copy of his new memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove said he was let go.

This is a good first step, but the City has vowed to fight, so it’s not over yet.

Miley’s twerking has been way over-exposed. I didn’t write a post about it because I couldn’t give a crap. She just seemed like she was either pulling an Andy Kaufman on us by looking absolutely ridiculous or she was doing a Bieber and losing her marbles.

However, I came across this p retty awesome post written by an African American woman sociologist on how the performance looked to her. These are the types of posts that make me happy that blogs exist. I learned about an experience I couldn’t begin to fathom since I’m neither racially black nor a woman. I didn’t read all the comments on the post, but there were some disagreements from other black women. I’d say you should probably give her more weight than the average blog, considering her PhD, but also remember that not everyone has the same experience - even people of the same race/sex.