deathmtn

Had a discussion today with the guy about how he had not been able to read earlier. We got hit a sticking about whether or not he had previously found it hard to tap out sounds. (It's a technique in which you tap as you make the sounds of each letter in an unfamiliar word.)

I said that there was a time at which he used to find it hard to do that. He disagreed. The distinction he makes is that, back then (six months ago), it was in fact easy for him to do; he just never wanted to do it. I argued that if you don't want to do a thing, in practice, it is a hard thing to do.

An hour after his bedtime, I'm still working, and I now realize that I do think the way he does. The thing I have to do is a task I think of as "easy". But I don't want to do it. And so, it's taking far longer than it would had I wanted to do it. In practice, it's hard.

The new Necrot is out. This is the only thing I've liked about the day so far. It's slightly more melodic than the last album. There's a Death (as in Chuck Schuldiner) vibe. Not every song has a solo, but the solos that are there seem a lot more melodic, like Big '80s Solos. They stand out a lot partly because of that, and partly because there's no rhythm guitar under them. Just bass and drums.

10-4-4-4-4-11.

Police shoot 13-year-old boy with autism several times after mother calls for help

These police offers cannot possibly be unaware of what's going with regard to protests about police killings.

Democracy works better when there is less of it

In The Wake Up Call, a new book on the pandemic, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge parse the most successful virus-fighting nations for clues. It is not big government that works, they conclude, so much as competence and trust. Their treatise might avert a lot of aimless state spending in the future. What the authors skirt, though, is that many of these governments also operate at some remove from their electorates. Singapore, with its “guided democracy”, is the obvious case, but there are subtler ones. Except for brief interludes, Japan has one-party rule. Taiwan has had a comparable model for most of its history. Even Germany has a constitutional limit on referendums and just its third chancellor since 1982.

Worth thinking about. I think the same thing can be accomplished by having strong democratic practices, but just having elections less frequently.

Via Toby: Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable

It turns out that most people express democratic values, but living in a complicated world in which people care more about more things than just their form of government, it is easy to see that given an orderly society and a functioning economy, democratic politics may become a low priority.**

The essay has a point and meshes for a basic explanation about why people are OK with authoritarianism in China: Because they're personally OK economically.

I feel like a big theme covering a lot of what I've learned in the past five years is "People don't care about things as much as they say they do." This applies to:

- Democracy
- Racial equality
- Music

Satellite image of the smoke layer in California. That is just an astounding amount of smoke.

35-minute run, 10 pull-ups.

Our pediatrician referred us to a cardiologist to check out an issue out of caution. We went today, and the tests and examination turned out well.

If it hadn’t, I imagined us living under a cloud of dread for years. Who knows, though, there are a lot of things you can do about child heart problems these days, so maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. Still, we’d have to be much more conservative in many other parts of our lives because of the US healthcare situation, which tangibly reduces the (purportedly paramount) liberty Americans can enjoy.

I looked up at what health insurance via COBRA would cost me, and whoa, that is a crushing amount. Via the Massachusetts Health Connector, I found health insurance plans that are hefty but doable, but I'm not that confident about what you actually get from them in practice because health care plan descriptions and tables have always been very hard to interpret for me.

An episode of the Daily about how Daniel Prude, a mentally ill Black man, was killed by police, who hid his killing as long as they could. Subsequently, there were protests. As the protestors ate pizza, the police attacked them.

A while back, there was a debate about police body cameras. It was argued that we shouldn't bother requiring them because they don't change police behavior. That might be true. But without them, in cases like this, no one would ever know that they murdered this man.

Had one of those work conversations in which I tried to make the case for working on another team for a while, then had to explain why, and because it was apparently a surprise that I wasn't satisfied, I even had to prove it.

Look, I just want to spend my time making something I think is good. I feel I have the ability to do that, but I can't do that under some conditions.

Increasingly, I feel like the conditions under which I can't do that are those created by large, shareholder-controlled companies and startups controlled by venture capital. That leaves starting my own company, which I have been thinking about, but as everyone knows, involves an indefatigable series of challenges.

I had a long day that also felt very unproductive, except for the personal work I did in the morning, so I did a truncated workout. 10 burpees, 12 pull-ups, 5 deadlifts @ 117.2.

I wrote a small post explaining how to make sure your Firefox add-ons do what they say they do and no more.

I finished my kids' cut of The 36 Chambers of Shaolin. (Released as Shaolin Master Killer in the west.) It's ham-handed, but we watched it today, and I think it did the job. The guy enjoyed it.

I cut out things that were A) likely scary to my specific kid (like dudes getting gored by spears) and B) too hard for a six-year-old to understand (like Ming vs. Manchu politics).

My main goal, however, was to make it way shorter. I partly got there. The original is about two hours. This cut is an hour and 20 minutes. I was really aggressive about cutting in the third act. The all of the "gathering the posse" and "making battle plans" stuff is gone, and San Te rides straight for the general for the duel.

I left in the trap procession in the first act because it introduced the general, and I left in the trashing of San Te's father's shop by the captain and subsequent escape to Shaolin. That I felt would explain the motivation for training at Shaolin. Those three scenes turn out to be a lot of minutes!

They were unnecessary, it turns out. The guy asked me "Is that a bad guy?" any time anyone showed up on screen. It was very Homer Simpson-esque.

In retrospect, I think I could have simply cut it down to the second (and best) act alone. It would work as a movie about just training to be a Shaolin monk. No backstory or motivation is actually necessary for most six-year-olds. "Here's some tough challenges, and here's this guy doing them" is all they need.

We spent four hours at the park today, which seems extreme, but it was time well-spent. The guy got a lot out of watching the various kids work with the big water apparatus, then got to get in there and do some teamwork with other kids on it. We got to chat with our friend Mary, and I also got a bit of reading in.

Sometimes, I feel it might be a good idea to enforce more "chill" time.

Via Hot Garbage: A gender reveal sparked a wildfire in California that's grown to 7,000 acres

I didn’t know that these gender reveal parties were anything other than a fringe practice, nor did I know they involved explosions.

Due to roofers, kid, the cats, I've gotten up an hour early than normal for the last seven days, but failed to actually go to sleep any earlier than normal. I hope I can fix that today.

I have no idea what to do with Patreon, now that I'm clearly not producing art very frequently, so I updated my Patreon page to note that.

I also subscribed to a really good comic on Patreon (and finding that is how I got thinking about Patreon), actually.

Deck lounging weather.