We were very excited about our purchase and receipt of the innovative Fjorden Camera Grip for our iPhone. The grip is a fantastic accessory for the iPhone, helping to create an authentic SLR camera experience with the convenience of using the phone in your pocket! 

Last year my wife got me a beer advent calendar. I finished them all on time, but it turns out drinking 24 days in a row, even if it is just one beer, is not something I really care to do anymore.

This year, I came downstairs the morning of December 1 to a tea advent calendar from Adiago Teas. I sound old just typing that, but then again, I am old.

So here are my tasting notes, updated periodically until we are done.

Cranberry tea - black tea with cranberries and raspberry leaves. Pleasant fruity tastes - pretty much delivers exactly what you would expect.

Candy apple tea - Much like cranberry tea above, delivers exactly what you would expect.

Citrus green - A green tea with lemon and lime flavor. A nice combination.

Chocolate truffle tea - A black tea with cocoa, chicory, dark chocolate and blue cornflowers. I really enjoyed this one.

Honeybush banana nut - The flavoring ingredients are apples, cinnamon, and cocoa. It wasn't a bad cuppa, but no hint of banana in it all to my palette.

Earl Grey- I've had Adiago Earl Grey before. It's obviously a classic flavor, and one they nailed.

Foxtrot - An herbal tea with chamomile and peppermint. It's not an unusual combination, and this is executed fine but it's not anything special.

Irish Breakfast - It's one of my go to teas from adiago.

Wuyi Oolong - This was a fabulous tea, maybe my favorite in the calendar. Top 2 or 3 for sure. It had an earthy aroma that reminded me of a long walk in a damp forest.

Jasmine Pearls - Another fabulous tea. A sweet, strongly floral flavor with a strong jasmine aroma.

Fruit Sangria- A really tasty and fun herbal tea that goes down nicely at night when you don't caffeine. Strongly fruity flavors, as you would assume by the name.

Chestnut tea - I wasn't super excited about this one, but it surprised me. The strong nutty flavor balances the dryness of the tea perfectly.

Peach oolong - Kind of hard to screw up a fruit oolong. This has long been a go-to nighttime tea for me.

Masala chai - Ginger and cloves - tastes like Christmas! Not something I would drink everyday, but tasty as a change of pace.

Green popcorn - A swing and a miss in my book. The popped rice nuttiness overwhelms the green tea base.

Pumpkin spice tea - Look, this pumpkin spice madness needs to end! I wanted to just skip this one but my wife insisted I need to be a completist about this. All I tasted was the ginger and cloves - not a hint of pumpkin flavor.

Gingerbread tea- So how many teas can we create by combining black tea, ginger, and cinnamon?

To be continued...

If you are writing a memoir before you are 30, you are either deluded, or you have seen some shit.

Emi Nietfeld has seen some shit.

Her very conservative parents divorced when she was 10 when her dad came out as trans and she changed her name to Michelle. Both parents had mental health issues, her mom's became a very serious hoarding issue after the divorce. 3 years later she was in a state psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide. She likes it there though, she got 3 meals a day, the heat worked, they had hot water, and it didn't smell like cat piss.

She went from institutionalized to placed with conservative foster parents that thought her art history homework (David) was porn, to essentially homeless at age 16, working on her Harvard application from her Toyota Corolla. She got into Harvard and graduates into a $200K a year job at Google. But this is not a happy story.

It's an indictment of the mental health profession that was happy to dope her up on her mom's word that she needed drugs. It's an indictment of those same child welfare professionals that never once followed up when she begged them to just come look at her mom's house. It's an indictment of the system that kept trying to send her back home. It's an indictment of higher education, of scholarships handed out by right wing organizations that allow them to brush off the millions crushed by the system. It's an indictment of her parents and everybody else that let her believe she was problem growing up, and that she could make her life better by changing her attitude. It's an indictment of you and I for letting this shit happen over and over and over again.

If it's not clear, this is a positive review. Even though I knew going in she graduated from Harvard and had worked at both Facebook and Google, I was still tense as hell through the entire book. I didn't even hit most of the high points above. She saw some shit, and survived to tell the story.

In "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All," Adrian Hon, the creator of the insanely popular Zombies, Run! app explains how every facet of our lives is being gamified in an effort to wring more value out of us, without actually paying us for that value.

As a video game designer and unabashed fan of video games, Adrian is not coming at us as a 21st century Ralph Nader. He genuinely believes in the power of games to educate and entertain, and also genuinely believes almost nobody is using that power ethically or effectively today. Leaderboards, badges, streaks, etc. in a workplace setting have limited and short term effects. At best, they are mostly useless. At worst, they are manipulatively extracting extra work from the workforce with no corresponding increase in pay.

He delves in the dangers of gamification at work and school, as the "players" have no actual ability to opt out of playing. In order to effectively keep score at work or school, employees and students are subjected to insidious levels of surveillance. In addition, if your job depends on "winning" the game, it's only natural that individual users will be motivated to take shortcuts. Think about that idea in terms of Amazon or food delivery drivers and the potential for this gamification being directly responsible for injury or death is pretty obvious. In fact, I'd assume it has already happened.

On a more personal note, a couple of weeks before reading this book I embarked on yet another attempt to become a runner. In looking for an app to guide me from couch potato to 5K runner, I first checked Fdroid for open source solutions. I didn't want a social network in the app, or leaderboards, or challenges, or a well told story of the zombie apocalypse (sorry Adrian!). I just wanted something to tell me when to run or walk. I ended up choosing the "Just Run" app. In fact, I have a Sansa Clip ready to go once I finish the build up of the couch to 5K program. Once I no longer need the app I'll be leaving the phone at home when running.

Adrian concludes the book with some ideas about how to beat back the zombie hordes, uh, I mean gamification of every aspect of life. All we need to do is unionize everybody, enact wide ranging worker protection laws, and generally shift the balance of power of employer to employee. I hope he is working on his next app title "Capitalism, Die!", because we'll need the help making that happen.

Blanton's Single Barrel checks in at 93 proof, and has a mild, but pleasant aroma of sweet honey, vanilla, with a hint of spice. A moderately bold flavor profile with of caramel, honey, and vanilla as the major players. The finish lingers, adding a satisfying pepper hint to the game. I am surprised that I read so much cynicism online about this classic bourbon, as I find it a quite pleasant libation.

Sally is in kindergarten yet she has a romantic interest in Linus?

That was the first Friendsgiving.

Why are so many parents okay with their kids ditching Thanksgiving dinner to go hang out with friends?

Snoopy is a kind of a dick to Woodstock.

Woodstock can't jump through the stationary bike wheel, but can jump through it rotating at a speed that would allow the spokes to slice him in half?

About 4% of the cartoon is dedicated to a sentient, violent lawn chair. What's up with that?

Nobody notices that Snoopy is mocking them with all the salutes.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, would ever trust a beagle with food.

Why does the Brown family own 10 toasters?

What happened to all the toasters? They are back to one with Woodstock manning it.

Snoopy is a dick, and a gun enthusiast with bad gun safety habits. He's a Republican, isn't he?

Snoopy's doghouse is a TARDIS - larger on the inside.

When they sit down there are 4 chairs on Franklin's side of the table. Seconds later as Linus leads the prayer three of the chairs are gone.

My son and I are trying to talk my wife into doing the Charlie Brown menu next year.

What exactly is Snoopy doing with a knife and fork? He's eating toast and popcorn.

Charlie Brown should have told Peppermint Patty to GTFO.

Peppermint Patty never does apologize.

The phone dial only has six digits on it.

So Snoopy had a turkey in the oven the entire time he was serving popcorn and toast to the kids?

Woodstock is eating roast bird. Nobody expects cannibalism in a kid's show.

The past week saw an abrupt change in the weather, with very cold temperatures coming in suddenly. While not bitterly cold, the quick switch from warmer temps made the change all the more jarring. Thankfully, the weather returned to more "seasonable" temperatures in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, at least for a short time. On Thanksgiving Eve, I took advantage of the weather to enjoy a cigar and bourbon on the deck — while running only one of the propane heaters!As an accompaniment, a grabbed a bottle of Russell's Reserve 10 Year Bourbon. I've had this bottle for some time but hadn't revisited it in a while. The aroma on this is, well, bourbon. It's got classic notes of vanilla and caramel. Sipping brings on more of the expected notes of caramel, vanilla, and oak. Like the kick at the end produced by the cigar, the bourbon has a nice, and lingering, rye kick in the finish. At just 90 proof, the Wild Turkey product is an easy sipper, that comes in bigger than its $40 price point. 

The discourse on Twitter and Mastodon, as Twitter slowly fails into irrelevance, has been fascinating. At this point, I’m mostly still on Twitter for the entertainment factor of wanting to see what Elon Musk will do next. Last night, he reinstated Trump. Maybe I should feel bad about watching somebody have an emotional breakdown in public, but fuck him. He’s a terrible person from a mining family in South Africa. He’s been profiting off the mistreatment of others his entire life.

The people gnashing their teeth over the failure of the “public square” are totally missing the point. A software platform owned by a public company with absolutely zero responsibility to society was never the public square. Yes, for a brief period of time we thought Twitter could be something really cool and enabling for the world, but then Twitter, Inc. needed to hit its quarterly targets, and they started shutting down the openness that made Twitter interesting and potentially world changing. People complaining about the lack of specific features on Mastodon mostly are too young or too new to social media to remember that Twitter started as a way to post from text messages. Almost every interesting feature of Twitter was created by its users and by third party apps when the ecosystem was open and allowed just about anybody to create apps that interacted with Twitter. That was all killed off 10 years ago, which not coincidently is when Twitter started it’s long slow fall to irrelevance. Mastodon, as an open source tool, will enable that sort of distributed creativity and I think we’ll see fascinating things coming from that community now that it has critical mass to make it worth an app developer's time to build new tools for it.

The green revolution in 2009-2010 in Iran was a watershed moment for Twitter, and may not have happened without it. However, I don’t think life in Iran is better today because of it. (I’m not a Middle-East scholar, so feel free to correct me if there were improvements not so visible from the West). Also, it was a one time thing enabled by the authoritarian governments of the world not taking the power of massive distributed real time communications seriously. That’s not a mistake they’ll make again. Trying to organize any sort of movement or protest on Twitter today would just ensure that the authoritarians would be there to break it up and bust heads before it ever starts.

However, the authoritarians also learned that they can use Twitter (and Facebook) to influence public opinion. It turns out most of us are not media savvy and not equipped to deal with an onslaught of disinformation pushed by Russia, China, the GOP, Fox News, corporations, etc. Russian actively interfered with the 2016 election in the US by using Twitter and Facebook to spread dissent and misinformation. The Republican Party did the same thing. It resulted in the election of Donald Trump and a prolonged and continuing attack on the ideas of equality and fairness that are supposed to make America great.

Yes MAGA hats, equality and fairness made America great, not segregation and the domination of life by racist, misogynistic, white males.

Some of us have made good friends because of Twitter, some people I know met spouses due to Twitter. However, how much of that happened in recent years? All my Twitter friends date back 8-10 years. Not much good has come from it recently, and pretty much nothing good has come from Twitter since 2016.

A worldwide communications platform that is free to use is a great idea, in theory. In practice, I think we’ve learned it’ll be undermined by authoritarian and corporate interests. Mastodon today feels very much like Twitter circa 2007. Stuff doesn’t work sometimes, and the social norms around using the platform are still developing. The decentralization should make it harder for it to become Twitter 2.0, as one billionaire having a midlife crisis can’t buy the platform. The platform is thousands of individual nodes run by different people. If it becomes a major success, it will be tens of thousands or more individual nodes. In that way, it looks more like email than Twitter.

However, it’s only fair to note that email is more decentralized in theory than it is in practice, as Gmail and Outlook Online control about 70% of the market. It’s entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that Mastodon will end up similarly if it achieves that level of success. It’s way too early to worry too much about it, though.

In the end, we all stayed in touch and stayed informed before Twitter existed, and we’ll all continue to do the same if Twitter dies tomorrow, or next year. I think its importance in society has being exaggerated, maybe on purpose, by interests that have a reason to see it succeed. I’m aware that disabled and other traditionally marginalized communities have found Twitter helpful in ways that me as a white dude don’t notice. However, I am also aware of the tremendous price they pay in exposure to abuse when on Twitter. I can’t say if it’s worth it or not. If they think it is, I’ll defer to that judgement. But I also do think we have enough other tools at our disposal in 2022 for those communities to adapt and thrive, and maybe be better off in a post-Twitter world.

So, to bring this ramble to some sort of conclusion. Twitter was really cool and maybe world changing for a few years early in its existence. However, that Twitter died by 2012, and it’s not coming back. Malignant interests such as authoritarian governments and corporations have been winning at Twitter for years, and I don’t see any reason to believe that will change under new leadership. At this point, I think the world is better off it Elon runs out of money to dump into Twitter, and he pulls the plug on the entire thing. Central control by a corporation eliminates any possibility of Twitter’s influence on the world ever being a net positive again.

Kill it with fire. It’s the only way to be sure.

Remember when you went out partying on your birthday night? We spent it wandering through the pretty lights at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. Then we went home, and I drank hot cocoa while we watched Celebrity Jeopardy.

With apologies to Sammy Hagar…

And speaking of Sammy Hagar, the dude is 75 years old and still killing it.

Sammy doing I can't drive 55 earlier this month

Apparently good clean living is not required after all. We should all hope to still be rocking like that at 75 years old!

Anyway, back to me. My dad (and my mother-in-law) both failed to survive their 54th trips around the sun. So that particular year has always been a little foreboding, and I’m happy to have made it all the way around Sol to start the next trip.

It was a good year. We did a couple of really great camping trips to Niagara Falls / Western NY, and Acadia National Park. We’ve now spent 100 nights camping since we bought the camper in June 2020. So at 33 nights per year we are spending almost 10% of our time camping, or about 15% of camping season camping. Now to work on getting that percentage higher! My job is portable, so in theory I could work from a campground. However, internet connectivity at the places we want to camp is generally not conducive to being productive online. I’ve thought about finding some cool mountain towns with co-working facilities that would allow us to camp for a couple of weeks at a time, with me working from the co-working places during the day. Maybe we’ll try that next summer.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my brain is not keeping up with my chronological age. My brain still thinks it’s 30, and that leads me to do stuff like going skiing for the first time at age 54, or take on class V rapids, or take a road trip for a rock concert. The good news is I managed to do all the above without hurting myself. I also stared down my fear of heights at Acadia by completing the Beehive trail, and had an absolute blast doing it. I am convinced I can handle Angel’s Landing at Zion National Park, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll get the chance to prove that next Fall.

So what’s next for me? More of the same, more or less. The holidays this year will be spent quietly, at home. We are planning a week long camping trip up the Natchez Trace in the Spring, starting in Natchez, MS. and ending near Nashville. I’m not sure if we’ll spend any time in Nashville or not. I visited the city back in 2018 and I’m kind of over the crowded honky-tonk scene. In the fall we are planning to fly out west and rent a CamperVan to explore the Grand Canyon and the National Parks in Southern Utah. In between those trips will be a lot of local weekend camping, because that is what we do now.

Now that we’ve decided to settle in Richmond I should also probably get off my ass and buy a house. But renting is so easy, and means I never have stuff to do on a weekend that might interfere with camping trips. A guy has to have his priorities, right? Fun in the woods is more important to me than real estate equity. Nobody ever dies wishing they had spent more time on home maintenance.

Well, maybe the guy that died in a preventable home fire…

Us, last weekend. I don't act my age, and hopefully I don't look my age either. BTW, we were headed out to an 80s tribute concert. We don't dress this way all the time. Although I will admit to doing my entire look from stuff I had in the closet.