#1

Autumn Leaves, 2024 Edition (So Far)

Every fall, it happens. My yard goes from green grass to yellow, orange, and brown leaves.

This is just the leaves in my backyard. As you can see, this tree isn’tdone, either.

I spent a large portion of my day using the dreaded lead blower. I’d use a rake, instead, but…

Leaf Pile #1

Leaf Pile #2

Leaf Pile #3

That’s just over half my yard in those leaf piles.

I had hoped to try and get the rest of the yard cleared today. Unfortunately, the weather has other plans.

Here’s That Rainy Day

Guess I’ll clean the INSIDE of my house today. I definitely know what the soundtrack will be.

https://youtu.be/xXBNlApwh0c?si=cYGZXznanxOQlO03

https://youtu.be/9pw2PGY7kBU?si=8c3Ox98ko0_ruIcZ

#1 #2 #3 #AutumnLeaves #HereSThatRainyDay #Kevin

Pirate Point is a new fanzine project for BattleTech with a focus on punk style and celebrating the voices of those who too often go unheard. Here’s the announcement by Versus and a link to a document covering what it is and how to submit your work:

Greetings skalliwags of the Inner Sphere and beyond. My name is Versus, and I’m here to announce a new community initiative to create a punk zine that celebrates BattleTech and its queer fandom. This is PIRATE POINT!

Our mission is to launch a biannual digital multimedia zine that features flash fiction, fan art painted miniatures, and whatever else we come up with in order to celebrate the creativity of BattleTech fans and promote a message of diversity and inclusion. We are a fan project in no way affiliated with Topps or CGL, and we are not monetized. In other words, this is all just for fun. PIRATE POINT has been organized by myself with help from the mod team at the Star League discord channel, the community who has previously staged the 2023 and 2024 Pride Anthologies.

PIRATE POINT will be focusing on promoting queer identity creators, but Allys are welcome to submit material as well. Submissions will open up in the next couple of weeks and close in February. Until then, I hope you have some neat ideas!

GO MAKE SOMETHING!

Pirate Point Launch Announcement: Issue #1 Submissions

https://scottsgameroom.com/2024/11/05/pirate-point-open-for-submissions/

#1 #BattleTech #PiratePoint

You must read this book if you own your home before beginning HVAC work. Sadly I made the mistake of doing my HVAC work BEFORE I read this book but luckily I was not too far off the mark. Most HVAC professionals sadly do not actually know the "whys" of what they are doing and simply offer cookie cutter solutions that do not fit what your house needs – especially an existing home.

Things to remember - If you want to do anything, ensure you also insulate your home! Ensure there are no leaks in or out of the home. Otherwise, all of the other work will have to use more energy due to leaks of air. - A ductless mini split is highly recommended to condition air around your homes - A ventilated dehumidifier is highly recommended to bring in fresh air & dehumidify it - Ensure you always run the ventilator in the bathroom / kitchen when you are using them - Water moisture is the #1 villain and try to not have temperature differences in surfaces that will cause moisture to develop - A manifold is a way to send hot water through a smaller plastic pipe such that less water looses heat as it stays in the piping - Try to prevent thermal bridges to ensure home is fully insulated

This is book #4 in the series, but it's not the fourth part. Apparently there's a short story, "Omega Night", and it contained both plot and character developments that significantly impact this book. However, even on the official author's website it's not listed between books 3 and 4. It's listed after the final book, among other "related works".

And the author doesn't really do a good job of recapping what happened, it's just an abrupt jump, and now Hope/Astra's angsting over a new crush that started during that book, freaking out over a danger to one of her friends that's due to events in that book, and a number of other sudden changes.

And these changes continue to casually come up over the course of the entire book, so that put a serious damper on my enjoyment of it.

Beyond that, the premise/setting was unique and somewhat interesting, but a lot of it felt like repeating "same song, different verse." Just marking things off a checklist. Astra has a crush that she doesn't want to act on (thankfully not the same one as at the end of book #3). Astra asks for advice, then ignores it in a way that could cause trouble for the one who gave it. Astra manages to get separated from her team (but thankfully not abducted this time). Astra makes mistakes and spends time berating herself. Important rules get massively broken but a loophole means it's okay. And the Perfect Defenses get destroyed via the most plausible method, which somehow no-one saw coming.

I did really like that, after introducing a terrifying Islamic terrorist supervillain in book #1, the author chose to introduce a character that showcases the more peaceful side of Islam. I wish the character was ongoing, but it doesn't look like he will be.

I really didn't like the friend drama for this book - it felt pretty contrived, but Astra was utterly poleaxed. Honestly, the number of times something relatively trivial knocks Astra so off her stride that she can't think straight for several days should probably be cause for serious concern among the team leadership.

Among the reasons I hated this book:

• Haidt pretends that he's going to argue for some position X, sets us up for an argument for X by explaining what he hopes to prove, and then jumps immediately to "and now I think I've shown that X" without actually making the argument. (In his section on "group selection", for example, he mentions in passing an important reason why group selection is typically considered a poor explanation for natural selection in animals like us, then promises to refute that reason and defend group selection, then he completely bypasses that reason entirely to tell us why group selection just feels right to him, then insists that he's saved group selection from its detractors.)

• He's utterly cynical about ethics and moral reasoning. "Glaucon [is] the guy who got it right," he says. "We are all self-righteous hypocrites." I mean, you can do that, sure. Say morality doesn't exist, or that it's just convention, posturing, superstition, or what-have-you. But you have to follow-through with this consistently and confront its implications. Haidt doesn't. He's just amorally cynical when he wants to be, and then ducks back behind something like moral realism when he prefers that perspective.

• When some study shows that, say, only 20% of subjects behaved ethically when they had the opportunity to do something unethically self-interested instead, he insists that this proves that nobody is really ethical and we're all in it for #1, instead of the conclusion the data actually indicate, which is that behaving ethically in the face of temptation isn't easy, and some people are better at it than others.

• He uses as evidence a lot of dubious "priming" studies and other such things that I doubt have held up well (that's probably not his fault considering when he wrote the book, but it made his failure to argue competently for his positions worse: I couldn't even trust the ostensibly more-rigorous studies he was citing).

• His rose-colored view of the moral sincerity of the American political right hasn't aged very well, and you can't help but roll your eyes as Haidt naively takes at face value that Republicans believe in respect for established institutions, family values, and the like.

• Haidt tries to disparage utilitarianism and Kantian deontological ethics not by offering arguments against them (except his haphazardly-argued-for assertion that we should "reject rationalism and embrace intutitionism" in ethics) but by trying to tar the developers of these philosophies as people who had Asperger's Syndrome and who were therefore unqualified to speak to the human experience! (Then, to make matters worse, he disingenuously insisted that wasn't what he was doing.)

Disclaimer: I rage quit at the half-way mark.

Haidt I think would argue that I have intuitively rejected his argument for irrational reasons and am now coming up with "rational"-in-scare-quotes reasons to reject it. But I went into this book sympathetically, hoping to find some useful perspectives that would help me understand the world better. All I wanted was for the author to meet me half way with some good evidence and good arguments to tie the evidence together. Instead he handed me a steaming turd.