Another orbit complete

Image not to scale

It is my birthday today, marking the completion of another full orbit around the sun for me. Life moves at you pretty fast, to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, so it kind of snuck up on me this year; I wasn't on the ball enough to plan much of a celebration. Though I am heading out to have a meal with my co-birthday celebrant Mack and a couple of Spuds shortly.

Anyway, now that it's here I've been reflecting on some birthdays past and find four of them stand out for whatever reasons:

• I don't remember which year this was, but I was probably still in single digits. My dad had organized party activities for me and my friends that included a treasure hunt complete with clues and half-dollar coins(? I may be misremembering/conflating that part with a thing before a Triple-A game at Hi Corbett Field) that must have taken him forever to put together. It was a lot of fun.
• Number 11, 1980, when Dad took my friends and me to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture at the Oracle View theater. I'd seen the film probably twice already, but even then I was ensconced in my Trekdom. That said, before the movie one of my friends had brought over his new starship Enterprise toy and wanted me to help him correctly place all the stickers and decals on it and I felt really bad when, after the movie, I found that I'd fucked them up by placing the decals as they would have been on the TV version of the ship rather than the movie version.
• I want to say this was number 13, could have been 12 or 14, when I had planned a big party and invited a mess of friends over but only two showed up. I was initially super bummed out, but my mom took charge and declared a new party plan and took the three of us to mini golf and pizza instead and it turned out to be a really good time.
• And number 30, when my late friend Scott (and others) roasted me with the requisite Logan's Run "carrousel" and "runner!" jokes.

This one is destined to be obscure, but that's more than ok. In the grand scheme of things, it's a day like any other day.

Which in this era means a lot of anxiety and fretting about the world.

Meantime, building off of Erik's post on his recent birthday about people sharing the date, I will again note that I share my birthday not only with Mack (and Elliot Abbott, son of my friends Dawn and Derek), but with three Hall of Famers (Jackie Robinson, Nolan Ryan, Ernie Banks) and five rather forgettable former Seattle Mariners (Yuniesky Betancourt, Dave Cochrane, Tommy LaStella, Rob Whalen, Guillermo Heredia). Also Grant Morrison, Norman Mailer, and an number of actors including Suzanne Pleshette (The Bob Newhart Show remains one of my favorites); Kerry Washington; and, of course, Paul Carr, who's character Lee Kelso, helmsman of the Enterprise, was killed by a power-mad mutated Gary Mitchell in the second Star Trek pilot.

Speaking of Erik, he just returned from Minneapolis and has a nice post up today about his visit that y'all should read.

Tagged History, Personal, Seattle Mariners, Posted on January 31, 2026 at 6:21PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Out of drydock

Well, that was fun. In a tear-one's-hair-out kind of way.

As you may have noticed, the site was down for about a full day. I broke it by fixing it. The nature of more complicated PHP/MySql platforms running on infrastructure that never stays the same means that when you want to add a new feature or adjust an old one, you run the risk of "version conflict." The issue that begat this latest round of repair was a mysterious database error that I could find no cause for. I decided to update the database to run on newer PHP. Probably fixed the error issue, but since it broke more of the site I couldn't tell for sure.

Anyway, in the end I upgraded everything, relaunched this ship from scratch, and if I've done it right, you all won't even notice anything is different. (Except anyone who might have signed up for updates through Feedrabbit. You all got spammed with the whole history of posts. Sorry about that.)

I know, though. Because I have less hair now.

Tagged Site issues, Posted on January 29, 2026 at 9:27PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The more you overtake the plumbing...

While the bot war has entered a lull—we'll need to wait until the calendar flips in order to see a good data benchmark to confirm that the mitigation efforts are consistently working—I've been spending some time addressing some collateral damage that's piled up since major war efforts began a few weeks back.

This site is built on a pretty great platform, but Internet infrastructure technology keeps changing and thus when I tweak one thing to address issue A, a second thing breaks causing issue B; in fixing issue B, I discover that what used to work as a fix doesn't anymore because PHP syntax has changed and now we need an update to the platform guts to satisfy that. But then we get a new conflict with issue C, because I built that section years ago when things were still running on PHP 5 and the upgrade is confused now. It's a little like the nursery rhyme about the spider and the fly.

Anyway, most of these headaches won't be evident to you the reader (I hope) unless you happen upon the site right at the moment I've broken something; most of this is under-the-hood stuff. But having solved most of the problems, one remains and it's annoying the heck out of me because I can't figure out what's broken. The back end keeps throwing database errors at me even though function doesn't appear to be at all impaired and everything renders fine.

I could just choose to live with it, I guess, but you know me—am I going to do that? No, of course not. Perfectionist brain won't allow it.

All of which is to say that:

• We may experience some downtime in the next couple of days while I attempt a rather extreme cleaning out of site guts in search of the gremlin.
• It may turn out that I'm better off upgrading the platform, which would be good but that always generates more unintended consequences.
• Meanwhile, in clearing up collateral damage I reconfigured my RSS backend so that it will work with my old email notification system despite Cloudfare stuff, so I'm junking that MailerLite daily email thing and you all should go back to getting single-post updates as they go live. (MailerLite was more trouble than it was worth, it's not intended for little stuff like this.) For the moment, there's no "sign up for email updates" button that works (the existing one still goes to MailerLite and will do nothing EDIT: The button now goes to Feedrabbit again as a functional stopgap), so if you want to add your name to the list, say so in the comments or email me a note.

Now, back to gremlin hunting...

Tagged Site issues, Posted on January 27, 2026 at 9:42PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Like human, like feline

Kuro-Raimei in a demanding moment

Being a guardian of three cats can be challenging, but generally my pride of felines is in good health and stays out of trouble. The other day I brought one of them, Kuro-Raimei, in to see Dr. S for her annual checkup and vaccinations. Like everything else, the exam and shots were more expensive than I'd become used to, but that's just how it is here in President I-Can-Bankrupt-Anything-I-Touch's America. A bigger exam bill isn't a big deal, though. (The rabies booster, that was surprisingly pricey, but it's the last one she'll need.) My vet isn't the cheapest one around, I could pinch pennies, but this isn't a negotiable area. Dr. S is the best there is and we will see no others before her.

Raimei passed her exam with flying colors, with one area of exception: her teeth. Two of her chompers are going to have to come out sooner rather than later. It's not a surprise, this is the second time this has been an issue for her and it's comical in a way, because Raimei has the same problem I've had with resorption eating away teeth from the inside out.

Me, I had implants put in to replace the molars I had to have pulled. Raimei won't have to suffer through that kind of procedure, she'll just have to make do with a couple of gaps. I wondered about being more aggressive in trying to keep her teeth clean—she does not like it, it's generally a losing battle to try—but Dr. S assures me that, like with my own molars, this isn't something one can address with regular brushing and flossing. Genetics + stubborn bacteria that get below the gumline. Shōganai.

It's going to cost me about $2k to have Dr. S extract the two teeth properly, and since Raimei doesn't appear to be in pain I'm going to wait until the summer to do it. First I need to see how much of a bite the taxman is going to take out of me.

Tagged Cats, Money, Posted on January 27, 2026 at 2:37AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Umpire diary

I worked a shift at the softball field tonight. Two games, both with teams I really enjoy. It was going really well for about an hour—I was feeling good, energetic, had managed to successfully switch my brain over from news outrage to facilitating a good experience for good folks and having some fun in the process.

Then there was an interruption. After which my focus was disturbed, I made a couple of bad calls, and generally went from having a great shift to one ruled by distraction.

I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of the interruption because the point of writing this now is to process my reaction to what was said more than the actual things said. Suffice to say the interruption was from a league office colleague and it turned from a jovial "hey, [name], nice to see you, what are you doing here?" to me considering quitting this gig in the space of about five minutes.

Most (not all) of those things said were, while not delivered with much respect for me or my fellow umps, reasonable in and of themselves; in fact, in large part the message delivered to me was more of a heads-up than a critical berating, but it reinforced the feeling that the league doesn't value me as it should and that it was treating my colleague the messenger even worse. I was, and remain to some degree, pissed off on his behalf.

I've no idea what prompted this interruption, I just know that they're going to be standard for us umps and refs now, at least for a while. It's been determined that we need to be policed, and I resent it. It may have nothing to do with me personally, which, really, is part of the problem—I dislike management types that take a one-size-fits-all approach to situations where context is everything.

Now, I am fully aware that I am overreacting. That I am taking things personally when I shouldn't. I am also aware that by nature I resist taking orders, I insist on things having justifications that make sense, I have very little patience for clumsily disrespectful behavior. I'm not exactly one to just take a metaphorical slap without just cause nor am I one to accept whatever's told to me without knowing some context.

And I have very little context here. Something happened to instigate my colleague being ordered to do what he was doing, and my impression is that he's not pleased with how it's playing out either. Whatever "it" is.

Anyway, there's nothing to be done about it, I'm going to continue to do what I do as an ump for the league just as I've always done it because I know my job and, not to toot my own horn overly much, I do it better than most if not all of my fellow umps and make it a priority to facilitate the players—the people who pay the fees and who we want to see keep coming back for more—having a good time and don't just go through the motions. If I can make it more fun for them, I figure that's part of my job.

So being given shit for wearing grey pants—which is very umpire-norm, frankly—instead of khakis—which are very much not, and that's a thing? Since when is that a thing?—and getting no acknowledgment that, for example, players know me by name and always like games I ump better than games someone else does is ... irritating. Maybe they'd all keep coming back season after season and paying the fees without my being there (they probably would), but I don't think it's out of bounds for me to say that it's an easier decision for them because I am there (me and maybe one or two other well-liked officials). Too bad the league apparently doesn't give a damn.

On the flip side, nearly everyone else on the field tonight, all the players in both games, quite independently of this other crap, went out of their way to say they were glad to see me and let me know I was at least appreciated by them. Boku no ichiban suki na senshu was there for the first game tonight as well, making me appreciate that sometimes a gig is worth having even if the people that pay you think you're a replaceable cog.

Given a couple of days to process/get over this thing, I'll likely pivot to ignoring it and just move on and it'll be fine. In the grand scheme of things it's pretty trivial, after all. And if not, if it gets worse or escalates to a point that it genuinely offends me, well, I don't need the gig. I could get by without it just fine.

Tagged Umping, Society, Posted on January 26, 2026 at 11:51PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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A mob execution

“It looks like nothing so much as a mob execution.” That's former Deputy Attorney General Harry Litman's description of today's violence—the most widely reported instance of it, anyway—in occupied Minneapolis, where once again ICE agents murdered an American who posed zero threat to them because fuck you, that's why.

The lies from DHS and the White House came fast and furious, just like last time. They described the victim, military veteran and VA nurse Alex Pretti, as a "domestic terrorist." They called him "an assassin." They described a sequence of events that did not happen. They made up a scenario that fit their preferred narrative despite the video evidence that shows the true sequence of events:

ICE agents violently attacked another victim, then Pretti comes to that person's assistance, then—while Pretti's back is to the agents—the agents pepper spray him at close range, then the agents wrestle Pretti to the ground, and while a blinded Pretti is flailing an ICE agent pistol-whops him in the head, then an ICE agent discovers Pretti had a holstered (legally registered and permitted) gun on his person and confiscates it, then one agent shoots Pretti, then other agents shoot Pretti, all while Pretti is struggling to even get to all-fours on the ground. Ten shots. To a disarmed, beaten and and blinded man sprawled face down in the street who at no time posed any threat to anyone involved.

Then some of the agents attempted to leave the scene. Then DHS denied local authorities access to the scene. Then the lies came spewing out.

Felon47 even tried to place blame on Minnesota officials, the same officials that ICE and DHS prevented from even approaching the scene, alleging that Mr. Pretti was menacing ICE agents and local law enforcement is at fault for failing to protect ICE agents. If I may quote Alan Tudyk's TV version of Harry Vanderspiegle, "this is some bullshit."

It now seems inevitable that, unless Congress acts swiftly, Minnesota governor Walz will, someday soon, have to deploy the state's National Guard to protect Minnesotans from the Federal government. And then the fireworks really start.

ICE is a terrorist organization and every elected official not in the thrall of Felon47 and his cult needs to be saying that loud and clear at every opportunity. DHS Secretary Noem needs to be impeached. DHS needs to be defunded. Investigations need to proceed unhindered, real ones, ones performed by state officials and not the corrupted Federal agencies, and the ICE and DHS agents (including Noem) who committed these and every other unjustifiable violent atrocity need to be prosecuted.

And Congress has to WAKE THE FUCK UP and demand every Republican who is currently collaborating with the fascist regime either (belatedly) honor their oaths of office and impeach Felon47 and his entire cadre of enablers or resign immediately. (I see that FINALLY, today Sen. Patty Murray is declaring she won't support the funding bill for DHS. FINALLY, Murray is calling on Republicans to join Dems in efforts to end the abuses. I know she was trying to be pragmatic before, but pragmatic's just not gonna cut it. Better late than never.)

If this is allowed to continue, we're gonna be smack dab in the throes of that second American Civil War Captain Pike told us about.

Some quotes from around the Interwebs:

Whatever one’s views of the circumstances that ICE agents confront, the gravity of these reflexive official lies to the American people can’t be overstated. The highest federal official immediately jumped in to defame and disparage the victim of an ICE killing. That is exactly how totalitarian governments react. It’s the sort of official dishonesty that can and should bring down governments. ... Taken together—the shooting itself and the federal response afterward—the episode screams out profound contempt for both the Constitution and the public it exists to serve.

...

Whatever one’s views of the costs to the country of illegal immigration—and all indications are that the people caught in the dragnet of the Trump surge have overwhelmingly committed no offense other than possible immigration violations—they pale in comparison to the shredding of the Constitution and the vicious tactics of federal law enforcement, cheered on by the highest government officials.

Members of Congress, every one of them, need to assess with the highest sobriety where they want to be now and what they want the United States to represent and portray to the world.

—Harry Litman

 

The murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti was not a mistake, or a tragedy, or a misunderstanding. It was a choice. The president of the United States and his regime saw what its masked agents had done to Renee Good and decided to do more of it, at a larger scale. Killing Alex Jeffrey Pretti was the Trump administration’s policy.

—Jonathan Last

 

Given DHS making up stories about what we can plainly see in the murder videos, we have to just presume every other death under their purview is also murder.

—Bob Schooley

 

I don’t agree with people saying ICE and CBP need “more training.” They’re doing exactly what this administration has trained them to—impose a reign of fear in blue cities. They don’t need more training. They need to be ripped up root and branch.

—Bill Kristol(!)

 

Thank you Alex Pretti for honoring and caring for veterans like me. You deserved better from this country and I am truly sorry that they failed to protect and honor your life the same way you have protected and honored so many of our lives. This veteran salutes and thanks you.

—@pissedoffarmyvet.bsky.social

 

I want all the right-wing fuckers of this country to see this. They claim to care about veterans, well this guy actually cared for veterans, and their votes murdered him in the street.

—E. Perkins (@hauntedpumpkin.bsky.social)

 

Donald Trump sees blue states as something like conquered territory. In his mind, he won them fair and square in the 2024 presidential election. The country is his. He owns it. And all its might falls on his political foes and those who resist him.

—Josh Marshall

 

Tin soldiers and Trump is coming

We're finally on our own

This winter I hear the drumming

Two dead in Minnesota

Gotta get down to it,

Icemen are cutting us down

Should have been gone long ago

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?

—DS9 writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe paraphrasing Neil Young

 

Cynics and defeatists share the same story as authoritarians do: that nothing is worth trying, the conclusion is foregone, hope is naïve, and attempts to resist are too small or futile. Don't listen to them. Do not give up. Try. A better world is possible. We will win. We must.

—Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Posted on January 24, 2026 at 11:25PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Psychoanalyzing a bigoted narcissist

I've got a lot of stuff to do here, from basic household chores to some minor work stuff to website repairs to eBay listings to leisure stuff like sketches, novels, comics, etc., and yet instead I'm allowing myself to go down a rabbit hole based on reading something in the news. Because I'm just that broken, I guess.

Not as broken as President Ralph Wiggum Palpatine, though. I mean, no one is as broken as that guy, which the world was reminded of this week when he made his latest bat-guano-crazy speech in Davos (my favorite moment of which was when he asserted that his Swiss hosts should be worshipping the United States because "without us, you'd all be speaking German"). 

But it's actually something from the big interview he gave to the New York Times a couple of weeks ago—you know, the one in which he said he was restricted in his actions by nothing other than his own morality—that grabbed me today. And it isn't anything new.

It's Felon47’s remarks about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its subsequent support measures that got me spinning out.

Everyone knows Felon47 is a racist. That's been clear for decades. Most of us also know that at the root of every grievance that broken human cesspool utters is fear and insecurity. Put those together and you get remarks like he gave the Times, such as "white people were very badly treated" by civil rights laws, and that the Civil Rights Act "hurt a lot of people." He couched this by saying what he no doubt thought was a mitigating context around affirmative action policies without actually mentioning affirmative action policies: "People that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination."

Part of this is, of course, him pandering to his base of wannabe Klansmen. He knows his strongest support comes from people who need to scapegoat their problems on an "other" and the easiest "other" to invoke is the one he's personally held in contempt for his whole pathetic life. But a lot of it is real, borne of a combo package of personality traits and disorders that make him devoid of empathy and have him believing that everyone in the world thinks like he does. Since he cannot conceive of anyone looking at the world any differently—everything is zero-sum, everyone is self-obsessed, anyone that has power abuses power—his view of civil rights laws is not that they are protections for the common good, but rather that they're weapons in a conflict.

"White people were very badly treated." This means, before the law, people with power and privilege—boiled down here as "white people"—were allowed to oppress people with less power and privilege—women, African-Americans and other minorities—with impunity, but after enactment they weren't. Disallowing oppressive behavior equals "very bad treatment" because everything is zero-sum, everything is about exerting power. If I can't exert a power over you, then that means you can exert that power over me.

The concept of equal treatment or the good of the whole doesn't compute, to him that's like trying to divide by zero. "People were unable to go to college or get a job" in his terminology means that before the law, white folks only had to compete with other white folks and thus the pool of college or job applicants was smaller, while after the law that pool was enlarged to include minorities, reducing the likelihood of the less-abled white applicant to get in/get hired. (Affirmative action hasn't been quota-based for decades, it's all about making sure women and minorities are recruited/considered with a goal toward proper representation, i.e. enlarging the pool.) He's probably not exactly sure why odds and ratios work that way (because math is so hard), he just knows that "his side" lost power, which by definition means the "other side" now has that power over him and "his side." 

Bigotry isn't the problem issue in his mind; to him, bigotry is a given and a neutral tool. The issue is who gets to wield the bigotry and to what degree.

That shows up in his use of "reverse discrimination." There's no such thing as "reverse" discrimination, you either discriminate, in whatever context, or you don't; A holds more value than B, B holds more value than A, or A and B are equally valuable. I discriminate between this piece of paper, which is a bulletin from the state telling me I have to now charge sales tax on services (a whole 'nother problem in my world), and that piece of paper, which is a receipt from the Post Office for mailing my latest eBay sale. Discrimination reveals that the former is important, while the latter holds no value to me. I don't "reverse discriminate" against the receipt. Felon47 doesn't get that. If a comparison doesn't fall in his favor, then it's "reversed." If no discriminating is done at all, then it's got to be unfair because his value should always be superior, and if it's not superior, that means someone else is superior, and them's fighting words.

If I can't oppress you, then it follows that you are oppressing me.

Because remember, not only is everything zero-sum, but everyone thinks about using power just like he does.

If African-Americans were given power, then, his thinking is, they would enslave white people as revenge, because that's what he would do. If immigrants were allowed to thrive, then they would subjugate the native-born, because that's what he would do (is doing, actually). If trans folks are given respect, that means less respect for non-trans folks and thus the trans community can better impose "their agenda" (which in his mind means turning more people trans, because his goal is to prevent people from being trans).

Every single thing Felon47 does follows this paradigm. "If I don't abuse my power, someone else will abuse me with their power." If the U.S. doesn't take Greenland from the Danes, then China will and thus diminish U.S. power. If tax policy doesn't benefit the super wealthy, then the super wealthy will be the oppressed class. If the president doesn't usurp power from Congress, then Congress will usurp power from the presidency.

Even tariffs—he genuinely does not understand what a tariff is, so he thinks that imposing a tariff on a country (a tariff isn't imposed on a country, but he thinks it is) is a means of directly taking money from that country for the United States. Zero-sum, exert (abusive) power to diminish their power over (and ability to abuse) you. In this case, because he is so stupid as to be uneducable about what a tariff is, it's a spectacular backfire, but the psychology is the same.

Anyway. None of this is news or really at all helpful in getting through these nightmare years, it's just something I needed to process to get it out of my head so I can focus on something else.

Like soup. I think I'll now try making a big pot of a winter soup since it's so bloody cold out.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on January 23, 2026 at 8:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Irredeemably Committing Evil

5-year-old Liam Ramos, who was abducted by ICE and renditioned to Texas after ICE arrested his father

ICE has to die.

I don't mean to suggest that the country shouldn't have a mechanism to enforce immigration law. I mean that the existing entity known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement is beyond hope of reform. It is completely off the rails, it is operating in a fashion that cannot be redeemed, and it must be dismantled.

That's true, of course, for the entire so-called Department of Homeland Security (the name alone should have been a a clue that it would abuse its power), but right now I'm focused on DHS's division of violent masked thugs that are told: "break the law at will, kidnap people, use children as bait, imprison said children many states away, and hey, if you murder a completely unthreatening lady out of anger 'cause you couldn't intimidate her, don't worry about facing any consequences."

It has to go.

Quoting our friend Craig Calcaterra:

Just yesterday afternoon [ICE agents] held a person down on the ground and, while they were completely helpless, sprayed a massive amount of pepper spray into their eyes:

Photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune

That stuff is designed to subdue a crowd of people from a distance. Doing what they're doing here stands a great chance of blinding this person. This is state-sanctioned torture, carried out in broad daylight against someone who is utterly powerless, for no reason whatsoever.

Later in the day it was reported that ICE agents are acting pursuant to a secret memo, released by a whistleblower, which purports to authorize agents to break into homes without a judicial warrant and drag people away. It's blatantly illegal—it's something straight of out a fascist's most intense fever dream—yet that is what is currently governing the rules of engagement and there is no one doing a thing to stop it despite its manifest unconstitutionality.

Finally, I saw a photo of a young child, a little boy no older than five, being taken away by ICE agents after his father was arrested. First, however, ICE agents apparently used him as bait to apprehend his own father. There was no effort made to find the child's mother. The child has reportedly been whisked, alone, to a prison in Texas. It's an open question as to whether he'll ever even see his parents again. A report about that all can be seen here.

There have been scenes and stories like this every day, but yesterday something broke in me and I was filled with a murderous rage. I feel so helpless. It all feels so hopeless. Twisted, hateful, and evil actors are using the power of the state to attack its own people for no cognizable reason and to no legitimate end. The attack is the end. It's immiseration, terror, torture, child trafficking, and even murder for its own sake, ordered by lawless and immoral people and carried out by an American Gestapo who have been told that the law does not and never will apply to them. They have been told to brutalize others because fuck them, that's why, and they are doing it with gusto while trying to foment riots so that they'll have the pretext to expand their violent campaign.

I had to close the laptop and sit in silence for a good long while after taking that all in. I feel like I'm losing my fucking mind.

 And that's not enough for President Ralph Wiggum Palpatine, who has ordered active-duty military to prepare for deployment to Minnesota. Which is illegal, a direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. In order to make such a deployment "legal," Felon47 would have to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would also be illegal as it can only be invoked to enforce Federal law, not defy it.

Those military commanders, as well as the individual soldiers, had best remind themselves of their obligation to refuse illegal orders.

I ask again, WHERE IS CONGRESS? IMPEACH NOW.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on January 22, 2026 at 5:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Casualties of the bot war

The ongoing war against the bots has been marginally successful, with bandwidth theft significantly down and many so-called "AI" pirate bots sent down a nonsense rabbit hole. Cloudfare has been a good thing and it hasn't cost much beyond my time. (It's also created a new way to waste said time, as I study the logs of what bots get sent down the labyrinth and what get stopped in their tracks and what suspected bots still get through the barriers.)

But there has been one purely negative side effect: I've also lost almost all of my legitimate traffic. Not, as one might first suspect, due to real people being treated as bots. Rather, because readers were coming here when prompted by email and now they're not.

I really didn't understand how reliant this site was on the email notifications. It turns out that nearly all of my traffic came from people getting those emails and clicking through. There are a couple of exceptions, including at least one that relies on an RSS reader (which is what I and Cory Doctorow recommend for everyone!), but the vast majority of you all are out-of-sight-out-of-mind types that need an email prompt. And the Cloudfare stuff made my previous email update infrastructure go all wonky, so I had to try something new.

Theoretically, the new system should work nearly as well. The same people get an email every day there's a new post. The differences are:

• The new system is much more likely to get intercepted by spam filters for reasons explained earlier;
• The new system goes out at the same time every day there's a new post to alert to, which had been in the morning but I've now changed, rather than right after I publish a post no matter what time it was;
• The new system sends HTML email where the old one sent plain text.

The last point is probably immaterial; the number of email clients that can't handle HTML is tiny these days, plus there's a fallback that goes out to them that links to the HTML version. The other two seem to be really serious, though, because only a sparse few of these newer emails have generated any visits.

Point two I've made an adjustment to, thinking that perhaps by sending the email in the morning people are getting it amidst a bunch of other emails and it gets buried or forgotten. So I've changed it to send at 3:00pm PST to see if timing makes any difference. Point one is a bigger problem, as it's up to the recipient to tell whatever spam filter is being used to allow email from *@starshiptim.com unhindered, I can't do anything about that from here. And I know some of my audience won't even know how to do that.

It used to be that most of my traffic depended on goddamn Facebook, but now incoming traffic from that digital scourge is almost nothing too thanks to the ever-changing algorithms over there that punish my links because I never use FB for anything else. So people that allegedly "follow" me there don't see my links nearly as often as they would under prior versions of their feed algorithm. And I'm not about to play Zuckerberg's game and placate that misinformation factory.

So, tweaks continue. I'd thank you for your continued patience, but it seems very few of you will actually read this, so I'd just be yelling into the void.

Posted on January 21, 2026 at 8:23PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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One year on

Today is January 20th (happy birthday, Erik, sorry it falls on a bad anniversary). That means it's been exactly one year since the current president—an improbable amalgam of Ralph Wiggum and Emperor Palpatine—resumed power and re-began his assault on the United States.

I could go into all the atrocities of the past week or so—of which there are many, not the least of which is Felon47’s demented letter to Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, in which he obtusely blamed the Norwegian government for the choices of an independent board unaffiliated with the state, claimed (again) to have halted wars that remain ongoing, pretended not to understand territorial rights, implied that the United States existed "hundreds of years ago" and landed boats at Greenland at the same time the Norse did in the 13th Century, and demanded NATO "do something for the United States" as if the common-defense alliance's purpose was to be some sort of patron—but we are all suffering from WTF fatigue, right?

Suffice to say, the outrages continue, largely unabated.

So, I figured it was time for another letter to Congress. I fully expect it to fall on deaf ears, but if enough of us deluge our representatives with demands for action, with pleas to rise to the occasion, with calls to fight for the continued existence of our republic, maybe we'll see some more leaders grow a spine and stand up to these fascist terrorists occupying the White House and the majority party in Congress.

I urge you all to make use of the link in the sidebar and send your own letters to your three House and Senate representatives.

January 20, 2026

Dear Sen. Maria Cantwell (D WA):
Dear Sen. Patty Murray (D WA):
Dear Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-7):

 

Hi again.

Just wanted to remind you all that over the weekend President Trump committed several more impeachable offenses and yet no one in Congress seems to be doing anything about it.

I say "seems to be" because I know how Congress works; I know that the minority party is operating at a significant disadvantage. But when I see Democrats go on television and/or speak to the press, very little of what they're saying rises to the reality of the moment. I see Chris Murphy demanding no masks for ICE agents, I hear Ritchie Torres offering a bill to make ICE agents wear QR codes, I read that Hakeem Jeffries declared that "we’ll figure out the accountability mechanisms at the appropriate time."

Milquetoast, small-scale pleas for reform.

Well, I have to ask, if what we've endured for the past year doesn't put us at "the appropriate time" right now, what the hell will it take to get there?!

I am pleased that you, Rep. Jayapal, are one of the few out there recognizing the calamity we're facing if action isn't taken. I am disappointed that you, Sen. Murray, have evidently dismissed the concept of not funding the government at the end of the month because it wouldn't immediately stop DHS from continuing its abuses. I'm not sold on the idea that a shutdown would help, but I don't see how it could hurt (and I'm aware I may be missing something there). No matter what, it's leverage. Just like the Senate had leverage last fall during the shutdown over ACA subsidies and then threw it away for nothing, this stance at least has the appearance of the same kind of capitulation.

DHS is a rogue operation, a sprawling and largely unaccountable behemoth of a department that never should have been created in the first place, a manifestation of paranoia and trauma inflicted by 9/11 and exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. A long-term goal needs to be the dismantling of the whole department and returning some of its functions to their former agencies while doing away with others, including ICE, and I want to hear that goal articulated by people in Congress.

Right now, in this moment, this country is on the brink of civil war. Donald Trump and his ICE Gestapo are firing on Fort Sumter right now in the Twin Cities. You all may not have the ability to use the current funding deadline to immediately strip this lawless militia of its resources, but doing nothing—even maintaining the status quo—is unacceptable.

We need to know that our Democratic leaders and our representatives—this is still a representative democracy, at least for now—understand that you don't "reform" fascism. You impede its workings, you refuse to fund it, you refuse to confirm its operatives, you oppose it however possible until you can crush it for good. And we're not hearing that. Again, Rep. Jayapal, you're on the right track, at least, thank you for that, but you're one voice and we need to hear the whole party speak up.

We need to hear every elected Democrat demand that everyone in Congress, most assuredly including Republicans, abide by their oaths of office and respect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Which REQUIRES CONGRESS TO REMOVE THIS PRESIDENT ASAP:

Article II, Section 4: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

"Shall be" isn't an optional phrase. This president, this vice-president, and the majority of this cabinet have all betrayed the Constitution and their oaths to it multiple times in the past year. This president, abetted by the vice-president and the cabinet, has engaged in bribery on a near-daily basis. This president, enthusiastically abetted by this vice-president and this cabinet, has committed multiple other high crimes, both criminally speaking and in the more fungible sense of damage to the nation—including but not limited to murder, abuse of power, betrayal of alliances and treaties, obstruction of justice, corrupt use of the military, piracy, kidnapping of American citizens and a foreign head of state, destruction of government property, illegal taxation, theft, and lest we forget, suppression of the Epstein Files which no doubt implicate the president in even more criminal behavior.

Every single member of both houses of Congress should be made aware, if they are not there already, that failure to impeach and convict equals a betrayal of their oaths. Sooner or later this regime will come to an end. If it ends with the United States surviving, then every Congressperson and Senator who refused to act in accordance with his/her oath will be remembered as a fascist enabler AT BEST and will be subject to consequences ranging from prosecution to ostricization to simply the end of political careers. If the regime ends with the United States transformed into a totalitarian state, then every Congressperson and Senator who refused to act in accordance with his/her oath will have lit the kindling that starts the second revolutionary war.

Milquetoast is insufficient. Small-scale reform is insufficient. Removal is required.

 

Sincerely,

Tim Harrison

Shoreline, WA

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Democrats, Democracy, Posted on January 20, 2026 at 7:38PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Umpire Diary

Last night I got home from my umpiring shift feeling pretty good. Today I woke up with one of my patented Sinus Migraines™, something I haven't had to endure in quite a while. I think the last time I had one I was working at Disney? Been a while, at any rate. (And by that I mean, last time I had one that wasn't brought on specifically by allergy—I get a similar reaction when exposed to the odor of spearmint. It's a weird, and as far as I know, unique to me allergy.) Regardless, it's a good thing I wasn't scheduled to ump tonight as well, it would have been less than pleasant as it's taken until... [checks clock] almost 11:00pm for it to run its course. Nasty fuckers.

But I'm OK now, more or less, so I'll try to recall anything of note from last night.

I had three games, all of which had at least one team I love to draw. Once again, Pitch, Please! was in the mix, as were the Seattle Squids. PP had a doubleheader, so twice the time trading barbs and such with them, and Brook made sure to give the proper response to my razzing him last week for "hitting like a pitcher" (i.e. striking out) by clubbing multiple extra-base hits.

One thing that came up that's a rarity, even in rec-league softball: I called a baserunner out for being hit by a batted ball. While another runner left from third base, the runner in question was taking off from second and the hard grounder smacked her right in the foot a few steps off of the bag (no runner on first). No complaints about the call of "runner out," but one infielder, a good dude named Wyatt, did challenge me for letting the runner from third score on the play. "It's a dead ball," Wyatt insisted, "he should have to go back to third!" With some real and some feigned confidence, I replied, "No, it's a base hit, so one base." Nevertheless, I wasn't 100% sure. Was Wyatt right? I didn't have the luxury of checking it out in the moment, so we moved on, but I did look it up when I got home, in Rule 5.06, Running the Bases:

5.06(c) – Dead balls:

The ball becomes dead and runners advance one base, or return to their bases, without liability to be put out, when:

...

(6) A fair ball touches a runner (or an umpire) in fair territory before it touches an infielder including the pitcher, or before it has passed an infielder other than the pitcher. The struck runner is out and the batter is awarded a base hit.

Well, that's not helpful. The vagueness suggests it's then umpire's discretion whether or not the runner from third would be allowed to score. Yay, me! However, when consulting a second source (umpirebible.com), I see that Wyatt was right:

 Section (6): A fair ball touches a runner or an umpire on fair territory before it touches an infielder including the pitcher, or touches an umpire before it has passed an infielder other than the pitcher; runners advance, if forced. The struck runner, if any, is out and the batter is awarded a base hit. (emphasis mine)

My bad, Wyatt. Something to remember for next time. Good thing it didn't factor into who won.

It was not a rainy evening this time around, so the field at Cal Anderson Park was not as free from interlopers as it was last week, but the shift still concluded without a BINGO.

Tagged Umping, Posted on January 19, 2026 at 11:53PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Academy points

The latest Star Trek series premiered this week, and as will surprise no one, I have opinions.

What might surprise some is that generally my opinions are positive.

From the moment it was announced, this new show—Starfleet Academy—was met with cynicism, or at least trepidation. Some of that comes from previous projects centered around the titular institution that never got very far along in a production process before dying at the studio. Some just comes from the idea that by its nature, a series set at Starfleet Academy will largely revolve around youngsters, and the derisive nicknames began flying around social media: Star Trek: 90210, Dawson's Starship, Ten Things I Hate About Starfleet, Hogwarts in Space, you get the idea.

For myself, I wasn't concerned about the potentially YA-focused nature of an Academy show; Star Trek's universe is vast and can support all sorts of shows. Besides, some of my most favorite TV series have been YA-centric, from My So-Called Life to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Freaks & Geeks. It's all about how its written.

Which is where my concern lay, because at its core Starfleet Academy is a spinoff from Star Trek: Discovery, a series that was... let's say problematic. I liked Discovery generally, but it suffered from writing issues throughout that annoyed me no end. As this new show was building off that one, and it was coming on the heels of the disappointing third season of Strange New Worlds, my expectations were low. But so far I'm pleasantly surprised. It's well done. At least, I think so; your mileage may vary.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, by placing the show in the far-future of Discovery's later seasons (the mid 3100s), thematically SFA can be about more contemporary 21st-Century issues—as established in Discovery, around the turn of the millennium an event colloquially known as The Burn happened, which effectively prevented interstellar travel for over a century and thus fractured the United Federation of Planets and plunged the various galactic civilizations into a kind of technologically varied dark age of isolationism and conflict. By the end of Discovery, the issues of The Burn had been solved and galactic society was beginning to interconnect again. So this new show exists in an era where the next generation has to clean up the messes of prior generations and where a regression in human (and alien) behavior has become something of an embarrassment in need of repair. So, climate change metaphors, political overtones recalling some of Felon47’s policies, things like that can be done in a way that would be impossible in other, more utopian Trek eras.

The characters, both the young cadets and the more mature adults, are all interesting in their own ways. The "legacy" characters imported from previous shows—Bob Picardo's holographic Doctor from Voyager and Jett Reno and Charlie Vance from Discovery—are delightful, series star Holly Hunter is as brilliant as one would expect Holly Hunter to be as Captain Ake, and the villain played by Paul Giamatti is fun in a completely over-the-top melodramatic sort of way. As for the young'uns, the main cadet, Caleb Mir, is played by Sandro Rosta, who thankfully has the acting chops to make him likeable and indentifiable while also being a young punk with a chip on his shoulder. With the rest there are some TV tropes used, but so far not to the point of being detrimental.

Mir and fellow cadet Darem Reymi suffer from too much machismo, both exuding the sort of manly-man competitive alpha-dog energy that I would hope would be extinct by the 23rd century, let alone the 32nd. They are clearly being set up to be the bully and headstrong tough guy types that initially hate each other but become buds, and the pilot episode (cleverly) contrived a scenario where they and their fellow core cadets have to work together in a crisis and learn to respect each other's skillsets. Then we have Cadet Genesis Lythe, the requisite nepo baby; daughter of a Starfleet admiral, she's lived her whole life in space and likes to verbally prank people. She's the one with natural leadership ability that takes charge. Our "outsider" character, a must in Star Trek casts, is Cadet SAM (short for Series Acclimation Mil, whatever that means), a "photonic" (read: hologram) that while programmed to feel 17 has only existed for four months. SAM is a delight, but I have many questions about her character that have yet to be addressed, not the least of which is, how does she exist and what sort of culture created her and why? We also have med student and oddly gentle Klingon Jay-den Klaag, who likes to birdwatch and has no desire to seek glory in battle. We've not seen much of him yet, but I like the concept.

The character I don't like much at this stage is Lura Thok, the "cadet master" and first officer of the Athena, which is both starship and, when docked on the Academy grounds, main campus facility. Thok is a Klingon/Jem'Hadar hybrid (something that also demands explanation at some point since the Jem'Hadar of the 24th century are all grown artificially), and thus has an overtly militaristic attitude and a hostile affectation. She behaves much like a drill sergeant, which I would also hope would be out of favor in the future but I might be able to headcanon as appropriate in a post-Burn society.

Most of these are supporting characters to the leads of Captain Ake and Cadet Mir, who have a relationship based in Ake's guilt for being part of a legal proceeding that separated Mir from his mother during the Burn times, an event that started Mir on a path of petty crimes in a lifelong quest to find his mom (played in a flashback sequence by the exquisite Tatiana Maslany, whom I hope we'll see more of). Ake is recruited to head up this new Starfleet Academy in part by Admiral Vance pulling strings to locate Mir and put Ake in position to free Mir from an alien prison, though the whereabouts of Mama Mir are still a mystery. The dynamic between the two is complex and it works very well, with Ake supporting and nurturing Mir while Mir works to balance his own agenda with being a cadet and learning to respect and forgive Ake for their past history.

So I like it. It's a strong pilot episode with a lot to work off of.

The one real problem I have, and I'm not sure how to mitigate it, is the use of contemporary language and slang in the scripts. One of the great jokes in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home revolved around Kirk and Spock trying to fit in with 1980s Americans by using profanity and doing it poorly because it wasn't part of their contemporary culture. Yet here in 3100-whatever, people are using 2020s slang terms all the time. It's jarring and takes the viewer out of the scene. And yet, I understand using it; it's unreasonable to think young 20-somethings would not use slang, and the alternative is to go the Battlestar Galactica route and invent made-up slang and swears, but that would also be jarring. Still, I don't think anyone of any age would be saying things like, "I'm [fill in the blank], bitch" in a thousand years' time.

Episode two brings more characters into the mix amidst a story centered on Vance and company's attempt to being Betazed back into the Federation; two children of the Betazoid president end up enrolling at the Academy (well, one does, the other enrolls in the Starfleet "war college," a remnant from the Burn years that we've yet to learn much about). It's a classic Trek episode with diplomacy and politics and smart dialogue with none of the failings of Discovery anywhere to be seen. A strong and promising start to a series I didn't think I would care for.

What'd you all think, fellow nerds?

Nerdy observations

• In addition to the prominent "James T. Kirk pavilion" and "Sato Atrium," the Academy grounds has a "Boothby Gardens" and the Athena has a wall of heroes with prominent names from Star Trek history. Amusing to me was "Admiral  Harry S.L. Kim," referencing the ensign from Voyager who appeared destined to never be promoted, a thing that was expertly parodied on Star Trek: Lower Decks; it would be hilarious if sometime later on we learn that that refers to someone else with the same name. Irritatingly, it also lists "Lt Julian Bashir," which, great, shoutout to Julian, but the dude never got a promotion? Come on. :) Oh, there's also "Cmdr Hugh Culber," which is nice but I presume all the names on the wall are memorials for deceased folk? Is Hugh dead (again)? He's still fine last we saw him in Discovery.
• Stephen Colbert voices the "digital dean of students," which means we hear his voice announcing various things in the halls. Sometimes funnyish, but is "hanger" also a term that will still be used in the 32nd century?
• Ake and her bridge officers are quick to consider and eventually implement lethal measures against the pirate crew that attacks the Athena in the pilot, and characters are seen to celebrate them (one joyfully declaring the casual obliteration of the pirates' ship "a teachable moment"). I'm hopeful that this sort of thing will be an ongoing sort of subplot of the show, a look at behavior that during the Burn era became acceptable and second-nature but will be recognized as something counter to what Starfleet and the UFP are supposed to be; this seems like a good area to utilize Tig Notaro's Jett Reno, someone who spent the majority of her life in the 23rd century, as a voice of conscience. I'm not confident in that, though, given that this is still an Alex Kurtzman-led show and he remains tainted in my head as a big part of the J.J. Abrams movies.
• A cover of the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" by Rufus Wainwright is played during the sequence where the Athena docks at the Academy grounds. It's just score, it isn't something heard by the characters, but it's still an anachronism that I could have done without.
• At the end of episode two, Betazed agrees to return to the Federation when they are offered to host the new UFP capitol/seat of government. Cool. But I am now wondering about any Vulcan/Ni'Var officials having to live on Betazed surrounded by telepaths who are comparatively hedonistic. I imagine it might cause people to think twice about running for a Federation Council seat. Human politician: "You would be great on the Council, T’Zal, you should run for a seat." Vulcan: "Perhaps, though I am reluctant to commit to lengthy residences on Betazed; it would tax my psionic discipline." Human: "Well, you've got the figure for formal events. Besides, it could be worse, the capitol could have gone to Delta IV." Vulcan: [silence for several seconds, then turns and walks away]
• Captain Ake continues the tradition of Starfleet captains that prefer paper books to reading on PADDs. She also wears reading glasses, an anachronism that might be explained away the James T. Kirk way (allergies) or the Kovich way (stylistic affectation). Unlikely that it would be the Pelia way (hoarding things from her Lanthanite youth) as she's too young at 422 to have been around when eyeglasses were a common thing.
• The look of the show is largely appealing, but there's a bit too much J.J. Abrams/Discovery creep with things being shiny. Also, the bridge of the Athena is impractically ginormous, and what's with the sort of heatlamp-like overhead lights?
• It's going to be a sort of drinking game with this show whenever they need to include a line explaining why the instantly-jumping spore-drive-propelled USS Discovery can't come to the rescue. We got the excuse that's it's undergoing a refit in episode one.
• Sadly, the tradition of pointed sideburns did not survive the Burn, it seems. The 'burns were burned?
• I've seen/heard a few Californians nitpick that for all the talk of Starfleet Academy being in San Francisco, when the Athena lands and docks on campus it's across the Golden Gate in Marin County (consistent with where The Next Generation placed the Academy). I can easily explain that away by saying the boundaries of the city of San Francisco have had plenty of time to expand and subsume other Bay Area territory, just as Seattle has annexed huge swaths of land since its inception! By 3100 Berkeley, Petaluma, Oakland, and Palo Alto are probably just neighborhoods in San Francisco. :)

Tagged Star Trek, TV, Posted on January 17, 2026 at 11:36PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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