Antarctica Starts Here.

Not even on fumes, mind you. Entirely unpowered and moving by momentum alone.

I'd say that 2024 has been a hell of a year, but I don't have to tell you that. If you've been paying attention at all to everything going on chances are you're feeling a mixture of dread, resignation, frustration, and most of all weariness. Bone-deep tiredness, and you can feel each and every one of your cells marinating in it. Or possibly frying like a whole turkey in peanut oil. But trauma dumping is Not A Thing We Are Allowed To Do, so I'm going to not do that (and re-edit multiple times between now and the scheduled publication date to make sure). I wish I could say that I'm filled with holiday cheer but I'm kind of not right now.

I've been trying to sit down for the last week or so to write this article, but it's the holiday season so the whole world is running around madly. Businesses are trying to get everything wrapped up for the end of the year, which means lots of last minute fixing stuff, writing reports, meetings, and all of that sort of thing. I've spent the last two weeks doing just that, with a heaping dessert of testing and troubleshooting stuff right up until the final hour when holiday break kicked in. The fairest thing one can say is that, as long as nobody kicks things too hard they should be okay until after New Year's.

Lyssa and I spent Thanksgiving in Virginia with her family (my in-laws) a couple of weeks back. Two red-eye flights, one out and one back. My brother in law was generous enough to hook us up with a rather nice hotel room within walking distance of his house (which I certainly had not expected), so we didn't have to worry about renting a car. Also, urban Virginia being what it is, walking down the street to the supermarket or the drugstore is a thing that you can do without thinking too much about it. The climax of the trip was going to the Washington Capitals/New York Islanders game on Friday. I haven't been to a hockey game since I was a kid; a lot of the vibe and the overall presentation of the game has changed a great deal so in a lot of ways it felt like my first hockey game again. ¹ I wish I had more to say about Thanksgiving itself, but the simple truth is that I was too tired and too burned out to store a lot of it locally.

What I can say, however, is that Lyssa and I got sick a day or two after we got home. It wasn't COVID; we tested negative multiple times. It was, however, a cold that knocked us flat for a week solid. I wound up calling in sick at work for a couple of days because all I had it in me to do was sleep. Even after shaking the worst of it I've been dragging ass ever since. Decongestants and use of my inhaler have kept me on my feet but I can't say it's been fun. I'm just now starting to feel halfway okay physically. Inflammatory responses suck.

Speaking of getting sick, you've probably heard that the CEO of the insurance company United Healthcare got capped not too long ago. ² I'm not crying one bit for him because I've been fighting what amounts to a proxy war with another insurance company all year which ProPublica did an in-depth investigative report on prior to that. To clarify, ProPublica did not do an article about us but about the same insurance company and its professional obstruction partner which have been a knife in our ribs for much of this year. I haven't been told that I can write about this specifically so I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say that they damn well should be afraid because someone fed up with the vulgar joke that is the USian healthcare system finally took action. And having said that, I raise a toast with my fizzy water and move on.

I don't really play video games. I've never been particularly good at them because they're too passive for my tastes, for the most part. Also, and this is probably due to my ADD, I have a limited threshold for frustration and I prefer to save it for things like work and not shooting pixels at other pixels. I especially find games like roguelikes frustrating because of how random they are; I can usually only move three or four times before I get my butt handed to me. Rinse and repeat six or seven times and that's just not fun. That said, I stumbled across Rogule a couple of weeks back and was quite surprised to find that I was enjoying it. It's a roguelike but it's timeboxed; there's only one level to play through, either you make it to the end or you don't, and no matter what that's the end of the game. If you want to play it again you either have to wait for the next day or start a new browser. I think it's the first roguelike I've ever played where I didn't die almost immediately. Chris McCormick (the creator) made a different sci-fi themed roguelike called Asterogue which I find that I really enjoy playing. Enough so that I bought it (it's just a couple of US dollars) and I relax after dinner playing a couple of rounds on my phone. I haven't managed to beat it yet but I am getting pretty close to the seventeenth and final level. Hell, it's interested me enough that I've been reading a tutorial about writing roguelike games off and on and might give it a shot some time.

You've also probably heard about lots of drones being spotted over New Jersey this month, including over multiple military bases. I haven't been following it very closely because I've been trying to get stuff wrapped up, but suffice it to say that there's a lot of jetwash going around about it. Not only are there a lot of people who are simply full of shit going on at length and wasting bandwidth, there are a lot of people who made up their minds about such things long ago and are interpreting it through the lenses of their beliefs. There are also quite a few bots out there that are posting pretty much the same debunking messages all over the place (I say this because I've seen them post in places they shouldn't, like forums about mechanochemistry and benthic microbiology that aren't even talking about drone sightings). ³ Predictably, because the US government seems to hate China noises are being made about banning Chinese-manufactured drones from the country, alongside popular home network equipment manufactured by Chinese companies. ⁴ All I can say about the vast majority of reports is this: It's a basic tenant of stage magic that people rarely look upward unless something draws their attention there. If you're not used to looking at the sky after dark it's easy to mistake very common things for mysteries.

I would further like to point out that, if you're up to no good it makes no sense to follow FAA regulations for exterior aircraft lighting because it draws attention to what you're trying to do. That goes for drones as well as airplanes and other sorts of aircraft. To put it another way, if you're breaking into a building to spy on the occupants you don't have a band playing your personal soundtrack right behind you. Additionally, banning drones isn't going to help because they're quite easy to build from scratch (local mirror) (Wayback Machine). Also apropos of nothing I'd like to mention this enlightening talk from Defcon 23, Knocking My Neighbor's Kid's Cruddy Drone Offline (local mirror), because (attacking drones aside) it talks about what drones actually look and sound like at various easy to attain altitudes, which should hopefully inform some discourse back toward the direction of logic.

That's pretty much all I've got in me right now. As I write this it's Christmas Eve, it's going on dinnertime, Windbringer's running some library maintenance, and I need a break.