I *am* starting to get a little concerned that ‘My Fat Senator’ is fatphobic. It would be inappropriate to poll visibly overweight people on the street to ask whether they felt targeted by the title and likewise unhelpful to ask the slim, scrawny, and shredded. I may change it to some tedious untitle like “Visual Congress” or “Representing Democracy” at rollout but for now please bear with me.

Let me tell you about a new website I’m starting work on. I’m concerned about how structurally undemocratic the United States Congress is. By 2040, 70% of the population is expected to live in 15 states. That means 70% of the US population will be represented by 30 Senators. That’s not enough to filibuster, much less pass a bill. Now there’s still a question of how those states will align politically—are California and Texas ever going to be on the same side of a fight?—but I think it’s worth being able to see how votes in congress actually reflect the population of the country. The purpose of this site is to make it visually obvious when a bill fails despite the clear will of the people. 

Using [ProPublica’s Congress API](https://projects.propublica.org/api-docs/congress-api/), I’m going to construct a dashboard that shows the senators that voted for and against a bill scaled by the percentage of the population represented (I’m debating whether senators should be directly or inversely weighted to population or if it should be toggleable). So a Senator from Wyoming (population 580,000) will be much smaller than a Senator from Texas (population 30,000,000). Stick a senator’s face on a circle, scale it by the appropriate factor, then drop them all into the Yea and Nay columns like gumballs into a vending machine. 

There’s room for a few more options like a Stack Your Vote mode where users can create custom vote counts so that they can visualize different groupings capable of securing a majority vote and how those reflect the population at large. It’d be trivial to spit out some basic data tables illustrating how the backing data is generated but I want to avoid recreating the entire congressional API since there are already websites that do that.

Limitations

It’s a neat idea and I think it’s informative but we can only meaningfully track votes that make it to the floor of the Senate. Senate rules effectively restrict the ability to call a vote on a bill to a handful of the senior leadership of the majority party and they only vote when they’re confident they can win (or they want to grandstand). This means that the controlling party can avoid going on the record voting down a popular measure by the simple expedient of not allowing a vote on the bill to begin with. It’s also worth noting that these rules are not required by the constitution and one might ask what benefit they provide.

Additionally, some initial data modeling show there will be some issues with the data that need to be cleaned up or hedged. For example, senators will have slightly different scales applied before and after redistricting and the available data doesn’t quite support that. I’d planned to write a job to pull the data I need into the database but I’ll have to make a strategic decision about the level of fidelity of the simulation.

Technical Dross and Front-End Nonsense

So I’m also using this project as a springboard to build something in [React](react.dev) and I have to complain a bit about the ecosystem. We use Angular on a number of projects at work which is notorious for its complexity and learning curve and I’ve heard for years that React is so much more lightweight since it’s *just* a view templating engine. I figured I’d walk through the React Hello World tutorial, drop it into the front-end of an Express or DotNet app and start cranking out views.  Then I get to the part of the official docs where React recommends people use React as part of a meta-framework that supports all of the other things you’d want a SPA to do. And there’s not just one but three recommended frameworks which each have their own tooling and approach. 

I will give you a moment to imagine the screaming fit I had at that point. Glass shattering, a flock of birds taking off from the roof of the building, the view shuddering outward from house to city to state.

And moving on.

Of the recommended frameworks, [Remix](remix.run) sounds the most compelling. The creator wrote a blog post where he emphasized the importance of directly exposing and using browser APIs instead of the next.js approach of wrapping them, and I think that’s got to be the correct approach. Browser API’s are increasingly well-developed and support many features that used to be the domain of third-party libraries; we should avoid pointless abstractions over them and the frameworks we use should support the acquisition of transferrable skills wherever possible. That said, I’m still a little torn between using one the remix stacks with an express back-end or ignoring the docs and sticking with a dotnet core backend with React as a templating engine. 

Dotnet is the tried and true back-end solution. C# is easy to work with, has a solid ecosystem (and a better package manager), and does a good job of staying out of the way. On the flipside, the front-end would necessarily be less sophisticated than one using Remix and will require rigging up more infrastructure than would be the case with the Remix stack.

Remix has some neat functionality with the way it handles the boundaries between front- and back-end, supports progressive enhancement, and data synchronization. The file-based routing system is interesting—I understand it pre-exists Remix—though I don’t know that it’s suitable to a larger application. Granting that, the sheer number of new libraries in its stacks would add a lot of time to reach the level of fluency I prefer to have with systems I work on. I suppose I could take the speed-run option and only learn what’s immediately necessary for my use case but it’s always a little unsatisfying to have a part of the map labeled “Here be lions”.

As with all such decisions, the only way to resolve it is with [quantum physics](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-splitter/id329233299).

The following includes light spoilers for Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers. The story’s mysteries are left intact but the second part might rob you of some of the impact of reading the story fresh.

What makes a good story? The True Literature types in academia have their citadels where they argue about how much middle class neuroticism, abstract symbols of the imagination, and whale semen constitute a Great Novel but the closest thing to consensus in genre fiction is that you have to convince a stranger to part with their hard-earned money and feel like they got a good deal. I’ve been thinking about Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers on and off for the last five years and I’m starting to think that I like it.

The Story

The Carpet Makers is a wild ride complete with carpets woven from hair, vast interstellar empires, body transplants, planets lost in wormholes, grumpy eunuchs, and more.

We start on a single world, a desert planet, where the men raise large families so they can spend harvest the hair of their daughters to weave elaborate carpets. Each carpet, the work of a lifetime, is sent to the spaceport to be done with as the immortal emperor dictates.

Word comes that the emperor has finally been killed after a reign of 100,000 years. The new president, his successor, arrives shortly thereafter to learn more about this planet which it turns out was hidden from the rest of the empire by the emperor. Odder still this isn’t the first mystery planet discovered since the emperor’s death.

Why did the emperor set all the industry of this planet to manufacturing hair rugs? It takes time for us to get an answer. Every chapter changes context and zooms further and further out to reveal more of the galaxy as Eschbach shows us the immense machinery and human drama created to process the rugs before giving up the secret.

How It Works (Some Spoilers Follow)

On my first reading, I was put off by the story’s frequent perspective shifts. After 6 or 7 rapid context changes it’s hard to stay invested in yet another minisode with characters unlikely to show up again later. (It’s worth noting that Eschbach is German and the version I read was a translation. Did it lose a rhythm and poetry that might have been more compelling in the original? I have no way of knowing.) By the end of the novel I felt a little put out by the lack of character continuity and was ready to toss it in the stack for redistribution.

What was the author trying to do though? I think the answer comes in a scene at the end when the new president pieces together the mystery of the carpets and wins the grudging respect of the emperor’s most loyal servant who takes him to a cavernous room filled with filing cabinets and pulls out a large folder detailing the entire saga of the carpet makers that was set into motion tens of thousands of years ago and then forgotten.

The president looks through the folder in growing comprehension and then, looking around the chamber in confusion, asks what’s in the rest of the cabinets? The eunuch looks at him and says a single word, “History”.

It’s a haunting moment because we’ve covered an enormous slice of time and space, seen ghastly horrors and terrible machines created to enforce the will of the emperor, and, just as we feel our perspective encompassing the full scope of it, everything we’ve learned is reduced to a single footnote in an immense history. For a moment the reader feels the weight of that history pressing on all sides.

I still have issues with aspects of the story that didn’t work for me but a lot of them probably aren’t relevant to what the author was trying to do. He wasn’t trying to write a story about the Return of English Magic or the Inner Life of A Small Town In Maine. He wanted to create a sense of awe at the weight of history and the depths of eternity.

So is it a good story? I’ve been dissecting it and arguing with myself about whether I like it for half a decade which is more than I can say for most novels so I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Maybe you will too.

What an absolute atrocity of a title.

In one of the later Heinlein novels (in what we'll politely call his "Incest Philosopher" phase and move on), the protagonists come to an unknown world and, eager for signs of life, they start scanning rivers and coastlines. Our kind of life needs to have water somewhere close by so it's usually a good bet to scan the edges of water. It's an obvious enough point but it hadn't occurred to me before then that you could excavate a map for insight and ever since I've enjoyed reading maps and trying to fit all the disparate pieces together.

I like starwatching--I'm working on memorizing the 12 zodiac constellations--so I use light pollution maps to find good lookouts. Some places look about like you'd expect. Texas, for example, has two gaping sores in Houston and the DFW metroplex along with a real bad rash south of San Antonio that I suspect corresponds to the Eagle Ford Shale Play.

New Zealand, on the other hand, is still more or less empty and enjoys some of the clearest and most beautiful skies in the world.

It starts getting interesting when you consider the stories the light tells. North Korea, for example, is also low on the light pollution scale but for altogether more horrifying reasons than New Zealand:

Consider the United States. No surprise the East Coast is densely settled, especially around the original colonies and DC while Chicago, the great transportation hub, outshines its rust belt neighbors. The transportation grid is visible under the light. Across much of the continental interior towns are consistently spaced about 30 miles apart. That was the distance a man on horseback could ride in a day and you can see the echoes of that traveler's journey in the web of lights wrapping the continent. There's also...a sharp dividing line straight down the middle of the country a good ways east of the Rockies. Nature doesn't care for straight lines as a rule so what's going on there?

My first thought was that we were looking at the western edge of the Mississippi River Valley (MRV), but the MRV forms a bowl structure that sprawls across most of the continent before funneling down to New Orleans where it dumps biblical quantities of sediment into the Gulf. It looks like this:

The second possibility is that it's an interstate. I-25, to be precise, a noble artifact of the Cold War runs more or less along the Mid-Western ridge of American light pollution. But correlation doesn't equal causation. Here is a physical map of the United States:

And now it come together. We've been looking at the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. While the Mountains themselves are further west, they keep moisture from passing easy for hundreds of miles. So that all makes sense.

But maybe, like me, you noticed the massive red and white sore in North Dakota of all places. North Dakota has a population of 3/4 million across the entire state. Why is it lit up like that?

A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark

If you are up in space looking down on America west of the Mississippi, one of the brightest patches of light at night is on the Great Plains in North Dakota. It’s not a city, not a town, not a military installation. What is it?

NPRRobert Krulwich

It turns out NPR's Robert Krulwich had the same question about a decade ago:

What we have here is an immense and startlingly new oil and gas field — nighttime evidence of an oil boom created by a technology called fracking. Those lights are rigs, hundreds of them, lit at night, or fiery flares of natural gas. One hundred fifty oil companies, big ones, little ones, wildcatters, have flooded this region, drilling up to eight new wells every day on what is called the Bakken formation. Altogether, they are now producing 660,000 barrels a day — double the output two years ago — so that in no time at all, North Dakota is now the second-largest oil producing state in America.

Imagine being a Dakotan when the oil rush started. It's a hot summer day, still but for the drone of the cicadas, when a dull roar announces a flood of F150s. An army of oilmen stream over the horizon and down every country road unfurling temp buildings and strip malls behind them.Roughnecks and rigs sprout over every oil-producing patch of land like the world's least organized ant hive. Night falls for the last time, it's dark, then a second day erupts as hundreds of whispering gas spouts flare like new stars.

I knew going in that one of the risks of starting an aggressive new posting schedule right as I was moving was that there was a good chance of it collapsing in under the weight of Necessary Tasks—as did in fact happen—but sometimes you just have to accept being your own Cassandra and dust yourself off afterward as best you can. I’ve arrived in Houston largely intact with my primary goods unpacked and a workspace established, and now it feels possible to think and plan again.

Any such planning will, of course, have to account for the Delta Variant which has taken on a new sense of urgency in the public consciousness. Cynically, one might imagine people finally recognized the dangers posed by having a novel virus spread across hundreds of millions of hosts, but we’re still deep in the trenches of the Information Wars and a growing contingent of people are now abandoning the germ theory of disease thanks to some highly compelling YouTube videos.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that modernity isn’t some absurd psych experiment left running from the days back before medical review boards.

Ministry For The Future

I finally picked up Ministry For The Future after hearing lavish praise heaped on it for the last year and it’s an engaging, if depressing, combination of didactic sci-fi and world-building with the occasional man-on-the-street snapshot of the human toll of climate change and a splash of eco-terrorism.

The Ministry was established by the Paris Agreement with the mission of pushing policies that account for the impact on unborn future generations. The idea is that creating incentives to behave in ways that regenerate and pay back ecosystem services could help direct the market to ends that are human-centered and less likely to result in the destruction of the biosphere upon which—and I can’t emphasize this enough—we are all dependent for our survival. It’s an idea so practical and sane that it feels impossible to argue with but of course the Ministry does not exist and few among the Leviathan feel much driven to action.

It’s August on the Gulf Coast so the air is supersaturated and it’s been weeks since l could wear a shirt outside without soaking in sweat. This is also the week the UN’s IPCC released its sixth report on the possible directions that climate change might go depending on the actions we collectively take. It has some surprisingly positive points—apparently nobody expected the sharp drop in the cost of renewable energy!—but the best case scenario still sees warming continuing through mid-century.

I’ve felt for a while like the gulf summer is getting longer and hotter but, having never bothered to take thermometer readings back in grade school, it’s hard to do more than grumble about how "it ne’er used to be this hot when I was a kid.” After the release of the IPCC report, I poked around for some numbers and the warming trend is pretty clear with the latest thirty-year average showing an extra week at 90+ degree heat. That’s a rolling average so the trends and currents are likely worse than suggested. It’s not a great direction for a region that routinely enters black flag territory and especially not for one sitting next to a giant liquid heat sink that likes to vomit up catastrophic squalls as a way of venting heat.

Jonathan Strahansuggested—and I agree—that we’ve entered a point in history where all science-fiction set from now into tomorrow must at least acknowledge climate change in order to be relevant. Perhaps it doesn’t affect the events of a story enough to come into play but it has to be lurking somewhere in the background shaping the sociopolitical calculus. Ministry tackles this challenge head-on and I see why it’s being called an Important Book but it makes for fantastically depressing reading. It also occupies one of those strange niches in literature that seem designed to convince the reader to stop reading. I want to read the book. It’s a relevant book. It’s an important book. And yet the very act of recognizing its importance pushes me to turn away from it. I don’t think I’ll finish it and I can’t help but wonder what other projects I’ll set aside.

I’m thoroughly in moving mode this week and feeling more than normally irritable because of the whole affair. I’ve moved a lot over the years—some quick back of the envelope math puts the lifetime value at around 23 so far—so I’ve got a good sense of how many boxes l need to buy and how to stagger the process so it doesn’t turn into a last minute race against the clock— Christ, was there ever a boy more fated to become a project manager? At least the ill-fated mariner got to harass wedding guests—but that has the unfortunate side effect of creating an extended in-between phase—call it the teenage phase of moving—where your home is partially dismantled, you’re sick to death of boxes and packing tape, and still there is more to pack.

I’ve always tried to keep myself relatively lightweight—a choice that fit in well during the college years when nobody had much of anything and seems more and more out of step as people acquire mortgages, Midcentury Modern furniture suites, and season passes to the Met, but my people have always been oddballs—but l am also very much a hobbit (perhaps branched off from old Bullroarer Took) so l have many books and a host of kitchen tools and very much enjoy creating a cozy home, and having it all in such disarray leaves me grumpy, scattered, and deeply introspecting into the arc of my life.

Here I could add some bullshit about the cycles of life, unto every moment a season, and blah blah blah, but I am just too grumpy right now to savor the sublime tension of life and will have to settle for savoring grumpiness.

Comparative Siblingology

From the “You think you’ve got it bad” department, after my recent overwrought retelling of meeting my long lost sister, fortune intervened and I discovered that a friend of mine is actually one of fifteen children spread across several continents. Moreover she met a brother for the first time only a few months ago right around the time the long lost sister was reaching out to me.

I was grateful to get to compare notes with somebody going through a similar experience. I don’t think most people are really able to conceptualize what it’s like to meet a complete stranger who is also deeply connected to you. I suspect most people try to put it into the context of meeting, perhaps after a great pause, their own sibling with whom they share formative experiences and deep nostalgia neither of which apply when meeting for the first time as an adult. My friend shared a similar experience to me in feeling no immediate rush of recognition or joy or any of the standard Disney trappings. Instead, in both cases, we met our siblings as strangers with an open and friendly curiosity about a life that might have been. Amusingly enough, my friend and I were both clearly the weirdos in the encounter.

If you’d like some sense of how the pandemic affected me, consider the following. A Houston friend called me out of the blue this week to ask if l’d be willing to drive him from New Orleans to an undisclosed location in Mississippi. Prior to the pandemic, I might have hemmed and hawed before weaseling out, but here I did my best Fear and Loathing Benicio Del Toro and agreed to drive him. Likewise, when The Long Lost Sister asked about getting lunch in Baton Rouge in the middle of the work week, my only response was, “I can make time, fam.” ( A white lie as I can most assuredly not fabricate time.) I don’t know how long this state of affairs will last, but for the time being a surefire way to turn me out for something is to invoke the Pact of the Pandemic.

In other news...

Overruns in Software Development and Life

An area I continue to struggle professionally is in creating accurate estimates of the time it will take to complete a given task. Let me correct myself though because this is actually an area l struggle with in every part of my life and I don’t feel like that was always the case, so why is this increasingly at issue? I get the sense a lot of people can relate so let’s consider a few factors.

Bliind Optimism: Time sounds so expansive when you describe it. A day is 24 whole hours long and when you consider how interminably long an hour in traffic or a poorly planned meeting lasts, it’s easy to imagine that a day is long enough to conquer the world if you set your mind to it. Perhaps compounding that effect, I still remember those perfect summer days of childhood where I could power through multiple books in a single day as part of a mind-blowing orgy of adventure fiction. Admittedly, I now see that as more reflective of living in an isolated unenriched environment, but the memories still exist deep in the substrata of my perception and what I consider achievable.

Split Efforts: Even if the day were as long as I want to imagine, I’m trying to slice the pie into ever more slices even though, and this bears repeating, I cannot manufacture more time. Those childhood days consisted of waking up, reading, eating, and occasionally shitting. Perhaps not a Humanist standard-bearer but a truly epic culmination of sloth for a species chat once had to learn useful things in childhood.

Contrast with today when the typical schedule for the day now includes meditation, writing, 8+ hours of non-stop mental labor, the gym, cooking, and whatever fragment of socialicing l can squeeze in. God only knows what adding a child into the mix would do.

Every new split also adds extra overhead as you try to track it, switch between activities, monitor and manage your stress levels and try not to reach complete exhaustion of the executive function which perhaps explains why many of my Saturdays find me in a light fugue state where I willfully refuse to do anything that requires real planning.

There are other factors to be considered but I think a fundamental tension that I and many of my cohort are dealing with is the need to balance career, health and fulfillment in satisfying ways. We all have lessons from the adults of our childhood on the dangers of being monomaniacs and try to live the opposite by working obsessively to be well-rounded as our humanities-centered educations exhort us to be, but that model of Renaissance Man generalist was always the province of the wealthy elite and achieving it without great personal resources will always be infinitely more challenging.

Travelogues and The Iron Dragon’s Mother

I finished The Iron Dragon’s Mother recently and I have a few thoughts. I’d never read Michael Swanwick and written him off as a member of the Tolkien Syndicate that once threatened to drown the genre, but there was so much buzz around this book over the last year that I had to check it out.

The Iron Dragon’s Mother is set in a very contemporary Faerie featuring both fae and Gilmore Girls, ancient prophecies and bureaucratic offices with secretarial pools, fire elementals and high speed rail, and, of course, an airforce of enslaved dragon cyborgs.

All I can say of the plot of the book is that it exists and the story generally remembers to circle back to it, but this isn’t a book for people who get especially invested in things like plot or character development. The protagonist is a dragon pilot framed for being unchaste and forced to run to clear her name. There’s probably something interesting in there about the insistence on sexual purity for women who fly weapons of mass destruction on raids to steal souls from human babies, but it’s the third volume in the set and everything else is secondary to the goal of exploring a hyperaware world where “Trickster” is an actual taxonomic classification.

I’m most reminded of travelogues like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun or Josiah Bancroft’s Senlin Ascends and fans of the style will find plenty to enjoy here. My problem with the travelogue as a form is that it so rarely becomes more than the sum of its parts. The author lays out a scene, rushes us through it—pay special attention to the light fixtures in this room, I’ve prepared some patter about their history which will never again impact the story— and then we’re on to the next set piece. It can be fun for a while but when nothing builds on anything else it becomes increasingly exhausting to wade through a whole novel that effectively reads, "More alarums sound!" for 300 pages.

If you are at all like me—and congruity has brought us at least this close in proximity—you have occasionally found yourself grappling with that fundamental question, “If I were lost in time and space and found by aliens, how could I give them enough identifying information that they could get me back to Earth?”

As the literature makes clear, any first contact scenario with advanced aliens must first establish the basic civilizational bona fides of humanity lest the aliens decide that the universe would be better off with us converted to feed stock, breeding stock, chattel for a joint stock company, or other forms of stock as yet undreamt of by Wall Street.

Unfortunately, first contact best practices are still very much in flux so I can only advise you to be charming but not sexy, fulsome but not tasty, helpful but not handy, and to circle back once you’ve convinced the aliens to help you get home. Under no circumstances should you become involved in alien politics unless they are relatively primitive in which case I advise you to review this essay’s companion series, “Pyramid Scheme: Six Easy Steps To TV and Air Conditioning.”

Now let’s assume you’ve made the initial inroads with the Glorkons and convinced them that humans are decent enough and they’ve agreed to open The Infinity Gate to drop you off at home; how do you describe our region of space well enough to have any chance of seeing the green hills of Earth again?

Let’s start with the basics. We’re looking for a yellow star about 4.6 billion years old with 8 regularly elliptical planets (4 small chunks of rock, 4 gassy monsters), an asteroid belt, and one dwarf that wanders in and out of the ecliptic. The star is expected to mature into red giant status down the line but for now is enjoying a comfortable middle age.

Of course, 4.6 billion years is meaningless if you don’t know how long a year is so we have to define that starting with a second. The formal definition of a second is how long it takes a cesium atom to do whatever it is cesium atoms do, but there’s just no way on (or off) earth that I’m going to remember that in a high-stress close encounters situation so let’s circle back to that.

The next astrofact is that our nearest celestial neighbor is Alpha Centauri sitting about 4.3 light-years away. Ah ha! The speed of light is a universal constant— at least it better be or I’m returning my copy of A Brief History of Time—so that gives a common point of reference but again how long is a year? Luckily now we can come at this sideways. The speed of light is 3e8 m/s and I might not have an official meter stick but I do have a literal human foot which is a static percentage of a meter so with a little math we can establish a common understanding of light-years and years. I encourage you to measure your foot now just in case.

So now we’ve established the age of our Sun, the rough structure of the system and the nearest stellar neighbor. Using our handy “light-year” measurement we can clarify that our galaxy is a spiral with a diameter of about 100,000 light years and two major arms, and we’re off in the periphery of one of those arms.

We’re assuming these are aliens with hella good star charts, of course, but it turns out that in this stupid big universe those traits still match hundreds of systems, so now we need to find more points of triangulation like galaxies and super structures. It might be worth mentioning that there’s a bloody great black hole sitting at the center of the galaxy spewing radiation like the eye of Sauron, but its honestly starting to look like the whole point of galaxies is to create black holes so that might not get you far.

This is usually where I give up on the process because when you start to look at galactic structures you find out that honored elder Edwin Hubble named the group of galaxies we’re most closely entangled with “The Local Group” and it would just be painfully embarrassing—having spent all this time endearing ourselves—to have to explain to these ultra-advanced aliens that we never got past calling our region of space “The hood” and at that point I’d go ahead and embrace my new life with the aliens.

You can discover Ursula K. Le Guin again and again in your life. As a child reading about Earthsea, as an adult reading about Hain, and always with the feeling that you might stumble into some heretofore unsuspected realm which, despite being wholly hers, had long lodged deep in your own mind.

For those of us growing up in the faerie lands, Le Guin helped introduce us to the subtler forms of magic. Are you facing the threat of a mighty dragon? Don't fall into the classic trap of opposing fire with fire and force with force and instead consider first that your wits may be your most valuable tool.

We know her parents were anthropologists and that she grew up steeped in the variety of human experiences, and, like the children of musical families, she had the virtuosity that comes from long and early exposure. Her gift--and I say 'gift' knowing full well the work it required to flower--was to write about people in a manner that was honest, insightful and kind--a combination I still struggle to master and sometimes despair of achieving--and she did more than simply project the patterns of contemporary Americana into a fantasy setting like so many golden age masters.

I reread the Earthsea books last month after a gap of many years and it's a tricky thing, rereading your formative stories as an adult. The people of Earthsea are distinctly non-Anglo and the magic of that world is more concerned with balance and self-mastery than explosive power and control all of which certainly strikes the adult in me as an inherent indictment of the Western socio-economic system, but I'm hardly peering through the eyes of a child here.

There's one story where I still feel some kinship to the kid who first read it because it haunts me with every passing day, and, yes, it's The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. I considered calling this post "Still Wallowing in Omelas" but it seemed painfully self-indulgent, kin to the troll who delights in telling others what a jerk they are. All the same, twenty years later I still don't have an answer to Omelas, but I'm trying and I'm searching and one of these days I'll figure out where they went, those ones that walked away, and maybe then I'll get a chance to tell Le Guin what her works meant to me.

(Cover photo Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch)

Dating in the modern world can be scary, what with your tinders and grindrs and the looming existential threat of climate change, so it's understandable that new couples wonder if their relationship is going to last. While nothing's certain, Authentic Love Scientists have prepared this short Couple's questionnaire to give you an early idea of what to expect from your new relationship:

1. Would you prefer to live in a large or small house?
2. Do you keep a budget?
3. Should we audit the Fed?
4. Which was most historically accurate: 1984 or Brave New World?
5. Was 9/11 an inside job?
6. What is foreplay?
7. You're at the grocery store and you forget one thing. Is it: a) toilet paper, b) spinach, or c) chocolate?
8. What was Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship to nihilism?
9. Do Black Lives Matter?
10. Who built the pyramids?

The Elsie landed in ocean comfortably deep, then they used the auxiliaries to bring her close to the shore. She floated high out of the water, as two-thirds of her tanks were empty, burned up, the water completely disintegrated in boosting us first up to the speed of light, then backing us down again. The engineers were already overhauling her torch before we reached final anchorage. So far as i know, none of them volunteered for the landing party; I think that to most of the engineers the stop on Constance was just a chance to pick up more boost mass and take care of repairs and overhauls they had been unable to do while underway. They didn't care where they were or where they were going as long as the torch worked and all the machinery ticked. Dr. Devereaux told me that the Staff Metallurgist had been out to Pluto six times and had never set foot on any planet but Earth.

"Is that normal?" I asked, thinking how fussy Doc had been about everybody else, including me.

"For his breed of cat, it's robust mental health. Any other breed I would lock up and feed through the keyhole."

Time for the Stars, Robert A. Heinlein

There's a pattern my team follows as we strive for consensus between engineering and management.

A client comes to us with a problem they want solved. Their gizmo processor is actually a team of 30 gizmo processors managing a bucket brigade of paper and they'd like to automate the process. So far, so good! We've automated dozens of gizmo processors over the years, so that's no worry, but here comes the curveball: their gizmo processors work with a team of external gizmo processors (Gizmogineers) at another organization (Gizmoco) that use an archaic gizmo processing gateway (Gizmauthorize) over which we have no control and integration must be done via a system of carrier pigeons (PidginSMS) bred by a proprietary genetic engineering firm (Genotaku) incorporated in Beijing.

Hey, if the job was easy, everybody'd be doing it.

So we sit down and start hashing out how exactly we can solve the problem. The project manager helming this Titanic lays it out with some keen whiteboarding skills. He's captained enough projects to know that initial whiteboard isn't long for this world, and he's also ready with a tranq dart when the engineer starts screaming and tries to flee the room.

Everybody take five and we'll regroup in twenty.

The engineer thinks we should ditch the project and go grow pineapples on his family farm in the Phillipines. There's just no way a properly designed system can function under these requirements. The PM acknowledges the challenges and, hey, maybe we pass on this one, but it won't hurt to spitball a few ideas and explore the possible...

Gizmauthorize's pigeon-based API is a clear concern. The pigeons themselves are remarkably reliable but there's a cost associated with retargeting them and there are non-negligible costs associated with cleaning up all the damn bird poop. If you tip it on its head, though, the retargeting cost is just another kind of latency, and bird poop disposal and server heat disposal can both be lumped under a generic "server administration costs" line item. Genotaku's licensing fees for PidginSMS are sky-high and sales negotiations are conducted through a Wizard of Oz-skinned chatbot which speaks only in riddles--seriously, what is their business model? Is this a China thing?--but that's the client's problem once we get the system set up. Make a note and move on. Now that we've got a basic idea of how we're going to ferry information between the two systems and the costs and limitations of doing so, the only pieces left are automating our client's internal Gizmo team and setting up an adapter to translate Gizmauthorize's Gizmo Processing Format (GPF, naturally) into the one our client uses.

There you have it, a few hours locked in a conference room and the team has moved from an incoherent set of business requirements to a well-reasoned layer of technical requirements wrapped around an incoherent set of business requirements. Management thinks the risk levels are clear enough to translate into contractual disclaimers and the engineer is still sedated enough to agree to work on the project.

And then the next client comes in with an idea for an image-recognition platform that can sort pictures for color-blind users and the cycle repeats.

Tolkien On Fairy Stories suggests the vastness of Faerie and, though I suspect I am both the unwary and overbold traveler he mentions, let us presume for the sake of time and argument that there are two forms of fairy story in general publication today--with the truest explorations of the horizons of that wild land so rare and incategorizable as to be beyond our capacity for easy examination.

The first of the two forms concerns itself with the trappings of fantasy muddled together with little concern for theme or symbolism. These stories dump a medley of mythological creatures down to fight and fuck and call it a day. In the bookstore, look for the covers of sexy people wielding knives and making out with vampires and you'll be in the right neighborhood. The shortcoming of the form (for those as care about such things) is that the fantastic, the brush with faerie, is nearly extraneous to the story. It adds little to the story aside from a dash of set dressing and, if the series is fortunate enough to run to a dozen volumes, the dressing starts to lose its flavor and the mystic becomes indistinguishable from the mundane.

The second form uses Faerie to add depth to its story and enhance the mortal themes already present. Frankenstein and Dracula are archetypal examples where the fantastic elements are central to the narrative and allow for a deeper exploration of the themes of Romantcism and Victorian sexuality. In this form, faerie and narrative are woven together so that they enrich each other and become more than the sum of their parts.

The Bear and the Nightingale gives us a fairy tale of Russia under the Mongol Empire. In rural Russia, the people are Christian but continue to celebrate their pagan ways and leave offerings for the spirits of the house and field. Vasya can see the spirits and grows wild learning their secrets. Her mother died in childbirth and, as is common in such tales, Vasya's father remarries so she will have a new mother, a devout Christian horrified to discover the rural peasants still leaving offerings to the spirits of the land. She sends off to Moscow--raised to rule as the Mongol tax collectors--for a priest to turn the people away from idolatry and then winter comes...

The Golem and the Jinni is set a little closer to home in late 19th century New York. Chava is a golem on the run from her creator, a mad kabbalist, and hiding among New York's Jewish community. Created to serve, she feels the pull of others' desires fights the compulsion to serve in order to live free and understand her own identity. Ahmad is a jinni who was--come now, I'm sure you know this story--imprisoned in a tin lamp by a mad Bedouin until released in New York by a young Syrian tinsmith. Bored by the world of people and unable to return home, Ahmad takes to wandering the streets where he and Chava are inevitably drawn into each other's orbits...

The Bear and the Nightingale's faerie elements reflect a tribal, pagan Russia transitioning to a unified, Christian state. The arrival of the Christian stepmother and the priest are each presaged by political machinations of the factions in a distant Moscow vying for control of the Rus state and using their vassal states as pawns in that game--the meat of our story is actually entirely secondary to the power brokers of Moscow--while the conflict between the Church's representatives and the nature spirits materializes the religious transformation. As such, the story's faerie elements arise directly from and enhance the historical context rather than being dropped into an unrelated story. If I were to point to a weakness, it would be that the nature of the faerie elements at play is ultimately arbitrary in its relation to the underlying story. Which brings us back to...

The Golem and the Jinni excels because of the multiple levels at which the fantastic elements echo the human narrative. As fantastic creatures living among humans, Chava and Ahmad personify the American immigrant experience at the turn of the 20th century. Strangers in a strange land, they are outcast from mainstream American culture although their cultural ties to the Jewish and Syrian communities give them a home. Their struggle is foundationally mythical and yet fundamentally human and inextricably linked to the time and place in which they find themselves. Chava is especially interesting as she reflects themes of both immigrant and woman as viewed through a feminist lens. She was designed to be an obedient wife--a role commonly ascribed to women at the time--and her compulsion to listen and serve the whims of others is a literalization of the socializing forces that frequently operate on women.

Have other examples of these kinds of fairy stories? Think this categorization is nonsense? Let me know in the comments!

There's a sublime sort of joy in making your New Year's Resolutions public and then nose-diving on addressing the most public of them (i.e. posting regularly on the blog). Well, joy or embarrassment, though I'd prefer to think I could more readily distinguish the two and yet here we are.

Journeyman Developer

Part of the problem I'm running into is that my initial notion of posting summaries of the areas I'm studying feel like I'd be retreading the material posted by other websites. Last week, for example, I spent a fair amount of time reading about (yes, and practicing) the use of positioning in HTML/CSS layouts. As I started writing my summary post, I realized I was doing a poor retread of the articles from A List Apart and CSS-Tricks. Here at Nonsenseless, we pride ourselves on doing only the highest quality retreads and possibly even adding some hint of originality to the subject matter like a chef adding a dab of oregano or a few spoonfuls of acid. I think a better way to go may be to shift the focus to:

1. Code Reviews

• Perforce semi-original, reviewing my own code is a mandatory part of improving as a developer and forcing the process into a coherent post should force me into thinking the process through as logically as possible. If I can't describe the refactoring logically, I'm probably not being logical.

2. Experimentation

• While a simple retread of the material seems uncouth and unhelpful, I've noticed that there's usually room for clarification in the fine detail of an article. In A List Apart's positioning articles, for example, it wouldn't hurt to play around with nesting positioning schemes to see the effect. My experience so far is that individual HTML and CSS elements and concepts are darn simple, and it's only when you start combining them that the complexity creeps up.

Down the road, I'd absolutely love to post original developer-oriented content that becomes the reference for solving a problem, but there's no sense getting ahead of ourselves.

Writing

While I'm happy to report solid progress on maintaining a regular writing schedule, the other problem I'm running into is a bottleneck between doing the initial writeup and then transcribing my chicken scratch into text files. I may have to bite the bullet and start doing my writing on the computer to begin with if I want to have any chance of meeting this set of goals.

On the other hand, if I pull it off and get the stories written and posts made, maybe I can bribe myself with a LiveScribe for Christmas >.>

General Life Updates

January continues its reign one of my favorite months. The weather is chilly to cold--no laughing now, Northerners, unless you suddenly feel prepared to take on 106 degrees of summer revved up to 100% humidity--and there are enough dreary, rainy days to foster quiet afternoons tea-sipping and navel-gazing--the two highest ends of human civilization. The hectic pace of Feasting and Good Cheer from the holidays has died down to a low-level feeling of good will, readiness to tackle Life, and, for New Orleanians apparently, a constant stream of parades and king cake.

We've been here a little over five months now, and it's still refreshing to encounter all these events that the city buys into in a big way. And being able to get to them easily. I really can't stress this enough, but we went to the David Bowie memorial the other week and it was incredibly easy to get to a trolley, hop downtown, and walk to the event.

Well, I say it was easy. The memorial itself was a magnificent trainwreck of pedestrians. For blocks in every direction, the streets were packed wall-to-wall with partiers spider monkeys mourners and it took an hour of aggressive walking to cross a couple of blocks, BUT that shouldn't detract from the general ease of getting to the trainwreck nor the spirit of the people crammed together in those streets.

As we slowly glammed our way through the crowd, one fellow yelled, "If anybody knew what the hell was going on, it wouldn't be New Orleans"; another jovial bearded fellow said, "The great thing about New Orleans is that its full of weird people. Weird people are the best people". Several people stopped to tell me my outfit was fabulous. It was a trainwreck, but damn if it wasn't a lively, friendly trainwreck. I felt more at home then than I have since moving here.

I would also like to take a final moment to mourn, not for David Bowie whose departure from this world was so beautifully orchestrated that I can only tip my hat in awe, but for the poor fools that tried to drive down St. Peter and Royal during the parade. At one point, we encountered two SUVs and an Uber driver parked in the middle of the crowd like beached whales.