Forum - Metroland

As if Public Service Broadcasting decided to do Kraftwerk at Davos

Oasis Sky immediately became one of my daughter's faves when it showed up on Tidal a month or so ago. It's lovely.

They aren't sold in the US.

American appliances are sized differently. An American oven is typically 30" across, and can be 36." European ovens are 24". Can you buy 24" ovens in the US? Absolutely. They aren't what we're used to over here, though - you need that massive cavity once a year for the turkey because of course you do. American washer/dryers are also sized to do laundry once a week while European/Asian washer/dryers are sized to do laundry more frequently.

I'm on year 6 with a Miele dishwasher. I had a Bosch burst into flames, I had another Bosch last 13 months, I had four GE water pumps replaced under warranty in nine months and I've had a Miele that ate a whole goddamn cherry pit and just rattled it around for a week before finally cracking it and spitting it out.

You will not find a single appliance manufacturer whose entire online presence is defined by anything other than all the people who hate them. Meanwhile the conventional wisdom has come around to "things with lots of parts have more parts to break" as if that shit came down the mountain or something.

There are two chaebol appliance manufacturers. One is good, one is terrible. I have four appliances from the former and the one that came with the house from the latter has already failed - Samsung doesn't think that the ability to come back gracefully from a power failure is an essential function for a refrigerator. And there are two family-owned, privately-held appliance manufacturers. One is Miele, the other is Sub Zero-Wolf.

I can't remember if it's Season 3 or Season 4 of For All Mankind but the central drama is that some super-bitchin' asteroid full of McGuffinite breaks loose of the asteroid belt thanks to Jupiter and there's a mad dash to sling it into Earth's orbit except that will make the Mars base wholly and completely redundant so the Mars Teamsters (effectively) hatch a heist to sling it into Mars orbit instead. It's a delightfully tongue-in-cheek treatment of the fact that well ackshully, Mars' value is the novelty, not the real estate.

I quit social media cold turkey July 3rd. I pop in here sometimes and I cruise Facebook Marketplace for the pure insanity I have trained it to provide me. I am blissfully unaware of Musk's hijinks and that doesn't upset me.

The most realistic approach to terraforming mars I have ever read was a scientific paper in Analog suggesting that about a thousand times the peak Cold War arsenal of the US and USSR could be dropped on the caps, and hopefully within the thousand-year window of extremely marginally atmospheric atmosphere, someone might figure out how to retain it before it wafts away on the solar wind.

I'm something dumb like 150 hours into Surviving Mars. It's my kind of anthill. But there's a lot of hand-wavey tech.

I still hunt up Mars One swag from time to time.

Anyway, I know you already know all of that. It's a pity to see what's happening to Musk.

You know what? I had this conversation just today. SpaceX exists because Musk went to Roscosmos to find out what it would cost to hitch a ride to LEO and they gave him the fuck-you price. So he spent ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars reverse-engineering the Korolev Design Bureau. I think it's fuckin' hilarious that I was the only kid in a four-state radius who knew what grid fins were because I grokked Soviet nukes. I think it's more fuckin' hilarious that the only outfits to use grid fins are Soviet ballistic missiles and SpaceX.

I want you to imagine it's 1998. You're the CIA. And you just found out that an eccentric South African millionaire is trying to buy ICBMs from the former Soviet Union. How many case officers do you think were up Elon Musk's ass from the jump?

Edwin Land effectively disappeared from the public eye right about the time of Sputnik because Eisenhower said "Ed, we need you." Muthafucka went deep black for the rest of his life, designing the most gonzo batshit cameras ever seen by nobody. Howard Hughes was mentally ill, addicted to painkillers and on a downward paranoid spiral and still managed to steal a wrecked Soviet submarine.

SpaceX has never added up. Tesla has never added up. SolarCity has never added up. Musk is, by all accounts, a truly mediocre man whose principle life advantage is getting lucky. What has the United States government gained through the success of Elon Musk?

- massive investment and adoption of electric vehicles

- a viable alternative to the United Launch Alliance

- Global, undisruptable internet

- A jump start in renewable energy

The thing is? Elon Musk is a phony, and has never really given a shit about being a phony. He just wants the world to think he's a genius. And I think the more vital the various arms of Musk Inc. have become, the less actual control he has, and I think that fucking bugs him. And I think the fact that his luck has been extremely fortuitous to the interests of American foreign policy explains a lot as to how we got here.

You didn't have to say it was extravagant, my inner monologue says it every other minute. Not gonna lie, I'm having a hard time "arriving" because the inner voice is absolutely calling me a class traitor multiple times a day. It didn't help that my mother (coincidentally) disowned me over email roughly 30 seconds after I found out our offer was accepted.

'cuz it's fuckin' extravagant, dawg. I'm going from this to this without any steps in between. I could buy sixty five of my current microwave for the price of the microwave I'm about to buy. You apply that multiplier to a Honda Civic and you find yourself struggling to even know what cars you can buy for $1.5m. I remember when Veyrons were that much and that was bugshit and we should stop now but I don't think Koenigsegg will sell you anything that cheap.

No double oven because we've never had difficulty managing holidays with only one oven

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Okay, let's have a rich people diversion.

I've got this weird room that used to be a "cabana" or "porch that faces the pool". It got walled in back in '81, then they added a living room in '82, then they added a trophy room (!) to the living room and an office to the living room. Meanwhile their existing dining room became kind of another trophy room and this weird-ass former porch became this no-man's land with two doors in and five doors out and an indoor barbecue that never worked and is also falling over and there's an electrical closet they built a sauna in (a wet sauna!) and there's a weird little powder room off another door and through there is the garage.

Which sucks because it's the geographical and spiritual heart of the house and it deserves better. They put in three ceilings to try and make the room make sense but since there's zero right angles and less symmetry it never worked. Meanwhile I've got this falling-over barbecue with a chimney that's about 12 feet too short to draught and about 15 feet short of code and you can see daylight through one of the cracks so it's got to go? But what to put in its place?

I'd just about settled on "a window and enough of the brick to match the brick on the back side plus I'll build a barbecue into it on the outside to stay true to the idea" but two different architects have gone NANAWALL NANAWALL NANAWALL so you go "wtf is a nanawall" and I say

"a nanawall is the price of a sliding glass door, plus a window, plus twenty five thousand dollars, all so that you can't keep the mosquitos out"

And then you start looking at built-in barbecues (the extravagance!) and discover it's tough to buy one without a rotisserie, and the rotisseries all hold like 40lbs because apparently we're roasting suckling pig now?

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And that's where I went "I'll throw the damn turkey on the rotisserie before I'll buy a double oven and I don't even really want a rotisserie but now I'm intrigued."

Is it the super-bitchin' FlashExpress guy? I hear those are super-awesome. I looked at 'em long and hard when it was time to upgrade the last toaster oven that died.

So... I should have known this but I didn't? You can have metal in a microwave oven if it's grounded. Which opens up some possibilities. And I kinda knew this but I forgot, because we had one? Initial microwaves were dumbly expensive because they used to rotate the magnetron, not the food. Drawer microwaves are still expensive because they do.

A "speed oven" is an overhead grilling element, plus a microwave oven, plus a dedicated convection element with blower. Not only that, but it's all linked together in a burn-out schedule like a damn kiln. Not only that, but they've got temperature probes built in.

So while you could put a turkey breast in the microwave to cook the inside, then broil it for two minutes to sear the skin, then bake it for ten minutes to get it fully up to temperature then run five minutes of convection to get it crispy, you could also fold out five large, stab it with your temperature probe and pull up "turkey breast" on your phone and have the gadget do all that shit for you, comparing how the interior temperature is rising compared to its burn-out schedule. Is it going to be better than one you just bake? It bloody well better be is all I'm saying.

Let's be honest. I'm not putting in a goddamn double oven. I'm not giving up counter space to a microwave. I'm not giving up more counter space to a toaster oven. I'm putting in a thirteen thousand dollar stack of Miele because every appliance vendor I've dealt with in the past twenty years has been shit except LG and Miele, and Miele is hella more awesome than LG. And Miele doesn't sell microwaves. They sell speed ovens.

We decided to go induction because it's energy-efficient and cool and we haven't owned anything aluminum or non-stick since Clinton was president. But my wife didn't like the fact that everything lights up red except Samsung, Wolf and Gagganau. And Samsung is Samsung ('nuff said) and Gagganau is Bosch ('nuff said) and Wolf is made in America.

And I had to sit with that for a while.

But you know what? I turned a tiny amount of money into an obscene amount of money and now that I'm spending it, it's all going to

- a crab fisherman

- union electricians

- union HVAC guys

- union plumbers

...in order to restore a pedigreed architectural gem. And if that means I have to cook on boujie appliances... well, wherever the hell you are, _wage, fuck off.

About a month ago I was pruning a california lilac I now own. It's mad overgrown and halfway to blocking one of my, I think four, driveways. I felt something ow. I kept trimming and felt something else ow. I realized it was a hornet sting but it didn't hurt that badly. Then I got stung again ow. The next day I decided I could probably finish trimming the lilac ow. Another half hour and ow.

The next day we were -

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Okay, let's have a Rich People Diversion.

You know what rules? Toaster ovens. Because you can put bread in them, and put stuff on the bread, and it toasts it all together! This is great for sandwiches. This is great for Cheesy Toast. This is great for pizza - cold pizza in a toaster oven? Almost as good as cold pizza sauteed in olive oil (try it). This is great for many things. But you know what sucks? Toaster ovens. Because they're always cheap, they're always sized to reheat a cheap-ass frozen Totino's Party Pizza, and they take up more than half of your counter.

Let's get rich with it

At some point, some maker of thunderously expensive appliances, I'ma bet Miele, decided that the way forward was to throw a microwave in a convection oven in the wall and call it a "speed oven." So it's kind of a toaster oven? And it's very much a convection oven? And it's very much a microwave? And it's like five thousand dollars. But you know what? it's not on the goddamn counter. But! Since you've never heard of a speed oven, and neither have your friends, you will not be surprised to find out that information on speed ovens is thin on the ground. Look 'em up on Youtube and you will find delightfully relatable segments like "watch us spatchcock a cornish game hen in a merlot reduction in 20 minutes with the Miele Speed Oven." You will find zero answers to the question "can it make cheesy toast" (you will find a handful of people asking if it will work as a toaster oven back to 2010). It'll pop popcorn! It'll cook frozen pizza! Which from what I gather is what most rich people do with their "speed ovens." And if they want to venture further, it'll give you step by step directions to cook anything but cheesy toast.

The way the High End Appliance Gods solve this is by setting up "experience centers." You go to a shady-ass part of town and walk into a too-brightly-lit showroom where a woman in a pencil skirt and heels offers you perrier, or maybe to make you a macchiato out of their seven thousand dollar coffee robot. And they got shit plugged in and if you walk in with a bag of rye bread and some sliced havarti, they will look at you nervously and then try a few different ways to make cheesy toast because no one has ever asked this before, deviant Americans, why can't they just karaoke their way through a lobster thermador like the LCD touchscreen wants them to but you know what? A fuckin' five thousand dollar microwave toaster oven makes some bomb-ass cheesy toast.

but will it make gluten-free cheesy toast

....cuz see, wifey doesn't really give a fuck about clutter. Her parents are level 2 hoarders and she, like you, thinks spending five thousand dollars to reclaim four square feet of countertop is maybe kind of silly. So if she's going to be giving up her toaster oven (which she never heard of before she met you, something something petards something something hoisting) it better make gluten-free cheesy toast which, by the way, no one on the Internet has even thought of asking. And you know what? She don't reheat pizza. 'cuz she don't eat pizza. She don't toast sandwiches, unless it's gluten-free bread. So let's go back to the Experience Center, and annoy the shit out of them by asking if "dialogue ovens" will ever make it stateside (like, Miele has made a synthetic aperture radar microwave, apparently so you can parboil a fish in an ice block) but also by making slice after slice after slice of gluten-free cheesy toast without taking a single bite.

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And we're getting pretty successful with the gluten-free cheesy toast when suddenly your hands go numb. So let's chew some benadryl sleep melts, 'cuz we have 'em handy, because peanut allergies and children, and the flop sweat diminishes, and your hands are feeling a little less tingly, and your wife gets pretty mad at you when you sheepishly admit that you might have been stung by bald-faced hornets five times in the past 48 hours. You might even agree that yes, despite the fact that the Internet thinks you should live and let live because bald-faced hornets are a part of a functioning ecosystem, the fact that they're in the driveway means they're disinvited. And you agree that you'll absolutely get some pest control set up as soon as you've got the crawlspace re-insulated, we're working on it, frickin' HVAC has been dragging ass and your parts that were supposed to be here in early August are shipping October 3rd.

And in the meantime, you let the bald-faced hornets have the lilac.

But you don't let them have the driveway? Because c'mon man I'm like twelve feet from your hive. And it's all fun and games until you're just minding your goddamn business and one of the little fuckers stings you behind the ear and in the ten minutes it takes you to schedule someone to come out and nuke their hive tomorrow your palms get itchy, and you start to feel woozy and you see spots and you rationally decide to drive five miles home and call your wife and tell her to have the benedryl ready and by the time you're doing prophylactic measures like taking your blood pressure and measuring your pulse-ox your face doesn't fit anymore and you have the presence of mind to force your wedding ring off your finger 'cuz it kinda looks like this is going to be a real problem and by the time they actually see you at urgent care you're having a hard time walking but it sure seems like the benedryl is kicking in and they send you home with a five-day supply of prednisone for good measure and not only do you sleep off the next two days but the prednisone lowers your immune system enough to catch something that your last test verifies isn't COVID and so much for that weekend.

So now I'm mos def sensitized to bald-faced hornets, the question is whether to start desinsitization therapy now, or give it a few weeks to see if maybe my mast cell response will chill the fuck out on its own in a little bit because let's be honest, there aren't likely to be many hornets between now and say next March but goddamn it used to be badass to have such a high pain tolerance but the older i get the more it sucks.

Desolation Called Peace is great. It's the whole "courtly manners" schtick that Martine does so well combined with a first contact story.

I feel like I tried NK Jemesin at some point and she bugged me. I think it was a follow-up from Nnede Okorafor, who I also didn't care for.

I have added Ancillary Justice to my waitlist.

except the nineties sucked

We knew we were fucked the minute Smells Like Teen Spirit hit. It's like "okay, the jocks are going to take Soundgarden from us" but it was worse than that, we got fucking Creed instead.

Look. The 60s were inventive. All new forms of music were created. The 70s were reactive. Government was bullshit, America had lost its first war, time to put on a leisure suit and do some lines. The 80s were nihilist. Fuckin' Reagan was going to kill us all if the ozone layer and acid rain didn't do it first. But the 90s were straight bullshit and I will fight you on this.

70s nostalgia: Eagles, "Hotel California"

80s nostalgia: Bryan Addams, "Boys of Summer"

90s nostalgia: Smashing Fucking Pumpkins, "1969"

Jaron Lanier made the point that musical innovation stopped fucking cold with rap and the '90s brought us the fucking Fugees, the least innovative R&B act to ever win a grammy, which paved the way for NSync and Britney Spears. Music was a mutherfucking wasteland from like '92 to like the first P!nk album and you know it.

Lanier isn't entirely right - I'd argue that Trap and Witch House are innovative enough to warrant their own rankings but look into my eyes:

Taylor Swift IS nineties/zeroes nostalgia

And you wonder why people look longingly at vaporwave.

Oddly enough, never even heard of it, despite my love for Cornell Wilde.

Here's what's funny. I read all the John Christopher I could find when I was a kid. Which meant The Tripods, Empty World and Fireball because the school library was run by a devout Mormon who hid all sci fi and fantasy as aggressively as she could. For some reason she disallowed me to do a report on Joan of Arc, despite the book being in her library, and forced me to do one on Brigham Young instead (this was not beneficial to my attitude towards the LDS Church in general or Mormons in particular). So I was this many years old when I not only found out about Death of Grass but that Fireball is the first in a trilogy.

I wouldn't have even known about The Tripods if they hadn't been serialized in comic form in Boy's Life.

I finally read Starship Troopers and hated it. Heinlein was basically god to my family but I think he's got one, maybe two good books in him. He's just such a fascist. i reread The Forever War for the nth time to wash the taste of it out of my mouth and it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. I think I've read all three versions over the years but the first one is best and I don't think that one's available anymore.

Jim Butcher has this weird-ass series with airships and castles and talking cats'n'shit. There's two books in it. I have now read both. The first one was weird and okay. The second one was weird and okay.

There's also this weird-ass book about castles and airships(?!) where everyone is an elf or a goblin for some reason. The first one is weird and okay. The second one is weird and okay. the first one was basically "King Ralph, if everyone was a goblin or an elf" and the second one is basically "Sherlock Holmes, if everyone was a goblin or an elf." There's no reason for them to be goblins or elves, they just are.

There's this other weird-ass book that's basically "Sherlock Holmes, if all technology was replaced by magic, except that magic was genetic engineering, and autism was a superpower, and everyone is gay." It is better than the other weird-ass books mentioned here. I will also mention that going from that milieu to "Starship Troopers" is some whiplash.

I tried SPQR. It's fucking dogshit. There's this assumption among western historians that you must learn the Romans because they're the Romans and why wouldn't you learn the Romans and Fuck The Romans. If you can't tell me why I should give a shit, I won't. The nice thing about the Durants is they were objective about the Romans. Fuckin' nobody else is. Fuck the Romans.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is rough. The Origins of Totalitarianism is rougher.

Battle Cry Freedom is also shit. See: SPQR except for the American Civil War.

Gary Stevenson's "The Trading Game" is fucking spectacular. It's all about inequality. It's all about dragging rich people for being rich. It's all about the hollow pursuit of wealth as a hollow pursuit. And it really fucked me up that I made more money in less time than he did just buying and holding. Crypto is like a Game Genie for finance.

Johnathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" is shit. I think Haidt is a one-trick pony and he's started fluffing the conservatives.

A Memory Called Empire and a Desolation Called Peace are great fuckin' books. I like my space operas written by lesbians. They have so much more color. Also, let me just say that this new flavor of sci fi and fantasy where they aren't written by privileged white men? Fuckin' rules.

I read The Communist Manifesto. It takes no time at all, also jesus christ who worships this shit

The two that broke me were Red Plenty and Secondhand Time. Red Plenty sets you up for the bleakness, Secondhand Time rubs your fucking nose in it until it's ground down to the bone. Secondhand Time followed by the Biden debate followed by the Trump assassination attempt was just too goddamn much. It's one thing to watch stupid fucking Republicans cheering for totalitarianism and stupid fucking Independents willing to throw away the future on principle, it's another thing doing it while reading an oral history of people longing for Stalin while also describing all of their relatives murdered by Stalin.

- The Mercy of Gods by James S A Corey.

Appreciate the recommendation. It struck me as "The Expanse meets The Tripods."

this entire album rules

I would argue that the Clock of the Long Now is the antithesis of the TESCREALists - it supposes both a collapse of the civilization we know and a continuity of a humanity we don't.

What amuses me is the narrative everyone tries to wrap around it. I've never seen Brian Eno not mentioned when the fact of the matter is, the chimes are a random number generator but sure, get Brian Eno in there. I've only ever seen Ludwig Oechslin mentioned once - but he's the guy who actually did the calcs to make it a clock.

And really - there's no aspect of it that couldn't have been done 100 years ago. Great, it's got a giant torsion pendulum, those date to 1880 (and suck). Great it's got temperature-based reload, that's been around for 400 years. Nitinol compensator? Yeah that's a little slick but also, 60 years old and 100 years ago we just used electricity because nobody back then was going "we'll still need a regulator working when the morlocks and eloi are walking around."

I think the thing that annoys me is civilizations used to build these cool things to impress each other, and now richfux hide their shit in the desert.

I'm ready to print up Pelican Brief t-shirts

To clarify, this is the scenario I think they envision:

1) president crimes

2) Congress whines about said crime

3) Complications ensue; case goes before the Supreme Court

4) Supreme Court decides whether the President is Republican

When I say they "aren't setting precedent" I mean that they do not intend to create any case law that stands on its own. They absolutely want to cement their powers as the ultimate arbiters of all law and jurisprudence. Which means your ability to slow walk, obfuscate and delay will absolutely be dependent on the political makeup of congress and the courts.

Populist regimes around the world are doing a banner job of demonstrating why that "appointed for life" bullshit associated with the courts is a terrible fucking idea. I suspect it will go away a piece at a time. Fundamentally, the more parliamentarian our courts become the less sense it makes for them to be political appointees. Fuckin' run for election like every other choad.

The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent. They aren't. They're attempting to return the Republicans to power at any cost. What was noteworthy about Bush V. Gore was the amount of dancing the Rehnquist Court did around the precedent they were setting - they made great pains to write out any possible future outcomes because really, all they wanted was for Bush to win.

Logic-based political parties suffer from the requirement that their moves make sense and are a part of historical continuity. Allegiance-based political parties suffer from the fact that their only cohesion comes from affinity and opportunism. The Democratic Party is and has been a logic-based political party. The Republican Party started transitioning to allegiance-based after Eisenhower but really nose-dived into pure fealty with Trump. The move for the Democrats is to do Democrat things in order to maintain their Democratic base; the move for Republicans is to amp up the passion for their base.

The problem, of course, is that their base has peeled away from the middle. They end up in a doom spiral that has a very real chance of sucking us all down with them.

I'm making my way through Second Hand Time. It's fucking rough. The through-lines, though, are crystal clear:

1) There is no Russia only Moscow

2) Every republic except Russia hated the USSR

3) Muscovites prefer to dominate others - even if they suffer - over actually knowing their place in the world pecking order

I see a lot of Republicanism in it. The Republicans have cooked up this imaginary past when everything was great and the Blacks and Mexicans knew their place and if we just own the libs hard enough we can return to 1952. When a Trump administration with both wings of government fails to get any traction? It's because the libs aren't being owned hard enough. If they just believe harder they'll be able to return to a utopia that never existed, when they didn't have to deal with the fact that other people have feelings and that there is no "away" in "throw stuff away."

"Trump is king" is the logical end result. There is not a speculative fiction writer out there whose basis of government was anything other than "we'll have a one-world government run dispassionately by people we agree with." The complications of actually running a country aren't interesting to that line of thinking. (1) Make Trump King (2) Whatever Trump wants is good for the country (3) If you don't like it learn to suck up better.

The USSR was corrupt. The people who ran it were the ones who most benefited from the corruption. Then Gorbachev tried to root out the corruption and the USSR collapsed. The people who came out on top were the opportunists, the people who lost were the idealists, the people who were crushed was everyone else.

The Roberts court is at "theocracies are simpler." Your soldier? Needs to carry out his illegal orders in hopes he does it well enough to get a pardon so he'd best please the King. That's simple strongman logic, which is exactly what the Republicans want.