Monica

Friday morning the Pennsic staff announced that Pennsic 49, postponed from last year, would be postponed again to next year. This did not surprise me; I figured a 50-50 chance this year was optimistic, given the uncertainties involved. Our camp had already been discussing the possibility of holding "Little Pennsic"; one person has enough land for our 25 or so vaccinated people to camp for a week.

A few hours later, Cooper's Lake Campground announced that they would be holding "Armistice" during the Pennsic timeslot, and that they need this event to succeed or they might not be around in 2022. As a business that relies on events -- except for this year, they no longer host plain old camping, only large events -- they are certainly hurting, but there was something about the language that felt off-putting to me. (More on that in a few paragraphs.)

The event announcement has the basic information: not an SCA event but designed to resemble Pennsic in most ways. No battles, but groups can "check out" list fields or archery ranges for their own use (and presumably at their own liability). Tents will be available for classes. Merchants are welcome. There will be some semblance of "land grab" for camping spots. You can register now (prices are higher than Pennsic). But they don't yet say anything about pandemic-related restrictions, like whether vaccines will be required and whether, even with vaccines, masks will be required. They'll follow state guidelines but, in April, nobody knows what those will be in July/August. That makes it hard for people to commit.

Pennsic has, over the last several years, felt more and more like a Cooper's Lake event and less and less like one controlled by the SCA, so in a way this is a natural step in the evolution of the event. For most events, the SCA rents space and is responsible for running the event; with Pennsic, Cooper's Lake has much more control, particularly over the financial aspects of the event. It's kind of a weird hybrid.

Pennsic has been at Cooper's Lake for about 45 years. The original Coopers (and Wilvers), who were friends of the SCA and shared its values, are gone. A new generation is running the campground now. They don't have that history and they don't share those values, so it's not surprising that they run things differently. The old Coopers could have said "hey folks, we're in trouble" and help would have flooded in from their friends in the SCA. The new Coopers have not maintained that close relationship, focusing on the business over the people (sometimes at the expense of the people), so it's hard to predict what will happen now. I think this is why I react to their plea the way I do; they moved from personal relationships to a business model, which is a valid decision for them to make, but this is the kind of appeal one makes with personal relationships. It feels out of place, given the changes in direction.

I suspect that when (if) Pennsic returns in 2022, the SCA will own less of it than it did in 2019. Only time will tell what Pennsic will look like in a few more years.

2021 is 29% complete.

The 21st century is 20% complete (and a smidge). Wait, wasn't the Y2K thing not that long ago?

You're welcome.

--

(The original version said 21% complete in the second line, which is clearly wrong. Fixed now.)

A year in, I find myself thinking back to the beginnings. In January of 2020 we had early reports, increasing in February, but life went on mostly as normal anyway. There was a local SCA event on March 7, and part of me wanted to stay home but our choir was performing and a friend was coming in from out of town to attend (and crash with us), and we went and had a lovely time -- and a healthy one, fortunately.

Purim was a few days later, and at the last minute I decided not to go to a large gathering. (They advised the elderly to stay home, but they didn't cancel.) Our Shabbat minyan met on March 14, but we moved into the sanctuary, where the 25 or so of us could spread out in a room that seats over 300. We didn't know then, but it would be the last time we met in person for more than a year.

Over that weekend, or maybe Monday, the state had some early rumblings of a stay-at-home order. It must not have taken effect immediately, because I remember going into the office on the following Monday, and taking some equipment home with me so I could work from home. Our office formally closed around Wednesday, I think, but it was a formality; we'd all decided by then that staying home was the wiser move. And soon there was a stay-at-home order from the state.

My choir had cancelled that week's practice, and the director cancelled through the end of the month, with the idea that we'd look at other options (outdoors? a really large space? the home we were practicing in was clearly out of consideration). We were so optimistic back then, despite the warnings we'd gotten from other parts of the world. It wasn't that we thought we were invulnerable; rather, we thought that with a little care, one could mitigate the risk without having to completely isolate. Ha.

Working from home required some adjustment, and I made another trip to the office (on Easter Sunday, when I figured no one would be around) to get a better chair and a less-bad keyboard. I didn't pick up my company fleece (which stayed at my desk because our HVAC was unpredictable), thinking we were heading into summer and we'd be back by winter. Our company announced that offices would be closed for a few months, and then a few more, and then a few more -- basically, each quarter they moved the date out another quarter. They've recently taken a bigger leap; we're closed through July at least, and we've been told some offices won't reopen and people will switch to permanently working from home, though we don't know which locations yet. (They'd signed a five-year lease for ours in January of 2020. I wonder what that cost.)

That first Shabbat with no minyan felt very strange. So did the next one, and the one after that, and Pesach especially (Zoom seder, set up before nightfall). That spring was supposed to be marked by celebrations for our long-serving rabbi who was retiring at the end of June. Yeah, that didn't happen. By sometime in June I was feeling isolated enough from the minyan, and the Conservative movement had put out that ruling about Zoom, that I started joining the minyan in a completely passive way, setting up the Zoom connection before Shabbat and just listening and watching. It's better than nothing, but not by a lot. As the months have gone on I've felt more and more disconnected from my community.

Origins (gaming con) was first postponed and then cancelled, and Pennsic was of course cancelled. But the quarantine brought some new opportunities too; Hadar's week-long summer seminar moved online, so I used some now-reclaimed Pennsic vacation days to attend. I've done a little online board-gaming, with mixed results. Dani and I now play games every Shabbat afternoon, always including a few rounds of Pandemic because, well. It's time to look for some more games that work well for two players; we could use more variety.

I've had more time to spend on Codidact, which is good, but also have limits to how long I can sit in front of computers in my office each day, so I'm also doing more leisure reading. I seem to be preferring shorter works; I don't know if that's a change in attention span or something else. Somewhere in there I read Survivors, the novel based on a TV show I enjoyed some years back. The novel is different. Terry Nation is kind of a bastard, authorially.

Last spring I grew some of my own food, for basically the first time, because we didn't know how bad the food shortages were going to be and I figured every little bit helps, even though it's not like we were going to feed ourselves just on my tiny garden ministrations. I'll do it again this year, with some changes in what I grow (to be determined), but still in pots. I learned last year that the sunny spots in May are not necessarily sunny in August or October, but I can move pots.

Things in the US are finally trending in the right direction, though it's a fragile thing and vaccines are racing against mutant strains. We're forever changed; I marvel that even now people talk about "going back to normal", as if there aren't going to be permanent changes. I don't know what all those permanent changes will be, but surely they will exist. We're not "going back"; we'll eventually move ahead to new ways of working and dining and interacting and living.

Shameless self-promotion:

As we know,[1] the evening meal for Purim starts with Wacky Mac, a dish that features four pasta shapes: wheels, shells, spirals, and tubes. What is less widely known is how we are to eat this ritual item. Like the Pesach seder a month later, the meal has specific requirements and specific meanings! And like at the Pesach seder, your child should ask you to explain why this night is different from all other nights and what the laws and customs are and what they mean. It is only because of the other celebratory aspects of this holiday that in most families the child is too inebriated to ask (and the parents too inebriated to answer). So prepare yourself now, so you can both fulfill the commandment and explain it to your child.

First, we must examine the symbolism. [...]

See the full article at Judaism Codidact.

Pass the wine! :-)

P.S. For the programmers, we have this question on type systems and the use of void -- more answers welcome!

Purim Torah uses the style of traditional torah but is, err, different. Some years ago Mi Yodeya began a tradition of accepting Purim Torah questions, which of course have to be answered in the same style, for a couple weeks a year. Last summer, active (or formerly-active) community members from there founded Judaism Codidact, which we hope will keep growing. It's off to a good start.

We've just opened a place for Purim Torah on the Codidact community. Because Codidact has the concept of categories, we can segregate it so it's hard to confuse with the serious Q&A. And because Codidact supports other types of posts besides questions and answers, we've set it up to support articles too, so that Purim-flavored d'var torah or talmudic analysis has a place.

The category is new so there are only a couple posts so far. I asked a question that arose out of yesterday's torah portion, which has gotten a good answer (that prompts more questions), and I just adapted my best-received past Purim Torah answer into an article on the ritual Purim meal and its symbolism. I'm looking forward to seeing what else shows up.

Perhaps some of you have questions or essays in this spirit to share?

This is oddly fascinating, even though I don't understand all of it. If I understand correctly:

A "short" is a bet that a stock price will fall: you promise to sell it on a certain date at a certain price, but you don't actually own the shares. On that day, the idea goes, you'll buy the shares at the lower price you expect and then turn around and fulfill your contract, pocketing the difference. I don't know if regular folks like you and me can do that, or if only investment funds and professional stock-market people can. There are some rules that are different for the big players and the little folks; I don't know if this is one of them.

So... some big Wall Street hedge funds (one often mentioned is Melvin Capital) placed vast quantities of shorts on a gaming-gear company that isn't doing well (GameStop). A bunch of people on Reddit observed this and said to Wall Street: hold my beer.

They bought the stock. Hundreds of thousands of people on Reddit bought the stock. At that scale, any individual participant doesn't have to buy a lot; you could play this game for $20 back when it started. And it's not like you can spend that $20 going out to a movie right now, so there was probably an untapped market of bored people looking for fun.

Did I mention that this subreddit bills itself as "like 4Chan for investers"? And did I mention that Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 42 million followers? That subreddit has way more than "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers now.

What happens when lots of shares of a stock start getting bought? The price goes up. The price for GameStop shot up from less than $20 to, at one point, $347. And I think it was higher; I was only able to find daily closing prices, and the hour-by-hour swings have reportedly been wild. There's some background information on CNet.

The stock price, of course, won't stay high. It's a ridiculous price for that company, and eventually the market will bring it back down. But in the meantime, those hedge funds holding shorts have lost billions of dollars -- remember, they still have to buy the stock on "short day", at whatever price is then current, and then sell it for $10 or whatever the bet was.

The Redditors and crew, meanwhile, have turned their sights to other stocks; Blackberry and AMC have been mentioned as other companies in trouble that investors have considered prime candidates for shorts. Stock exchanges and Robinhood have stopped trading at times or restricted purchases.

By the way, the people rallying against Wall Street have a song -- a sea shanty:

I don't know what a "tendieman" is (Google has been unhelpful), though I assume it has to do with tendering, in this case selling at the right time. Ryan Cohen is a major investor in GameStop who's recently been investing more and trying to change the company's business strategy, though I can't tell if he has an actual position there. (The song implies he's on the board.)

As far as I know, the people organizing on Reddit and wherever else aren't doing anything illegal. They're not insider traders with privileged information -- quite the opposite. They're just...massively trolling big investors who traditionally make a lot of money with these kinds of bets. Some of them seem to be in it for the laughs; some are trying to make money riding this (but a lot of them will probably lose money, including anybody who tries to join in now). The line between a movement and a mob can be fuzzy; I'm not sure which this is. I wonder what the other damages are going to be. They're pitching this as little people versus big investors, but will little people with modest retirement funds end up taking some of that damage in those funds too? Or are hedge funds more esoteric and not usually part of IRAs and suchlike?

Bizarre, fascinating, and unsettling.

Seen on Twitter:

We're excited to launch the #RenewDemocracy Challenge with avindman ! During a dark time, we need to showcase the best of our democracy. Share a short video about what democracy means to you & nominate 3 friends to do the same! Be sure to use hashtag: #RenewDemocracy (source)

A friend tagged me. I responded there, but it didn't fit in one tweet and I want to record it here too. I'll preserve the original structure, meaning some compact language to fit in individual tweets.

Democracy is a decision by a society to band together to support all, not just the majority & powerful. It means working together for common good, not bowing to thugs. It means freedom, not free rein to cause damage. It means using your voice not your fist. 1/4

Democracy means being able to chart your own course so long as you don't trample others. It means owning your body, your beliefs, your goals - and consequences of your acts - but no one else's.

It means offering a hand to a stranger in need who is also part of this society. 2/4

Democracy means working together w/people not like us to understand other perspectives - a necessary precondition to make decisions about how the public commons operates & what policies need to change. It means each voice counting, once. It means losing, or winning, w/grace. 3/4

Democracy means hearing diverse perspectives but not granting any one of them authority. Democracy is communal and consensual or it fails. Fearing the mob isn't democracy; neither is minority rule.

Democracy is complicated and essential for civil society. 4/4

And here I'll add: any constructive societal structure, including democracy, requires dealing with complex ideas, nuance, and context, far more than fits in a sound bite or a handful of tweets. It means learning and adjusting one's perceptions, not holding stubbornly to One True Way firm in the belief that all others are wrong and out to get you. It means holding contradictory ideas in your head and reasoning about them and their implications. It means thinking critically, and also not dismissing new ideas because they're new. It means having the humility to know that we don't know everything, even about ourselves let alone the others in our shared society, while having the courage and confidence to speak up when we perceive wrongs. It means having the compassion to care about others and not just ourselves.

It means recognizing that sometimes you'll disagree with those on your "side" or agree with those on the "other side". We talk in the US about left and right, but it's not a line, it's a canvas. We can't reduce our discourse, or our caricatures of either other, to binary positions -- either/or, in or out. People are complicated, and societies made out of people are complicated.

The polarization we see in our country today isn't just bad because it's divisive and too often violent. It's also bad because it erases all of that complexity in the middle, the stuff we need to be able to understand and engage with if we are to get along.

I made sourdough on Friday. On Thursday I already knew that my starter was especially enthusiastic that day, and the levain (the second feed, what actually goes into the bread rather than back into the jar for next time) bubbled up much more quickly than usual. This meant I made the dough at dinnertime, rather than around 9:30 or 10 like usual.

It filled the bowl and then some on Friday morning, but, as usual, deflated some when I turned it out of the bowl. After letting it rest I formed it into two loaves, which is what I usually do, and baked them a few hours later.

True to form, it expanded more than usual in the oven, too. It was light and airy and tasty, and I'm finally getting around to providing the photographic evidence. ( Read more... )

Somebody on Twitter asked:

What did you learn in 2020 (besides how to make bread)?

I responded there:

• To grow food in pots.
• To cut men's hair.
• To cook more new things.
• That my cat loves me being home all the time.
• More about community-building.
• How to set up a nonprofit foundation.
• To cut people w/no morals or human decency out of my life.
• And yes, sourdough.

I was up against a character limit there, but I'm not here.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, when staying at home was just starting to happen, I remember somebody asking: what will you do with this gift of time? I've had that in mind for most of the year. I miss seeing my coworkers, but I gained close to an hour back each work day in not commuting, and I gained a lot of flexibility. My team tries to work mostly normal hours for the sake of collaboration, but everybody recognizes that people have other demands on their attention too. The parents trying to work while their kids are at home attending school via Zoom gave me the opportunity to attend that mid-day (virtual) class or non-work meeting, and the flexibility to tend to things around the house while working. As one small example, sourdough -- it's a two-day process that doesn't require a lot of attention at any one time, but requires availability that wouldn't have been possible were I going to the office every day. Before this year, bread came from a store/bakery or out of a bread machine, only.

Both of us working from home is sometimes frustrating when one or the other of us has meetings, but we're also spending more time together throughout the day and that's very nice. We eat lunch together, every day, in addition to dinner. Sure, this means I'm not making things that I like but he doesn't (that I would have normally made for lunches at the office), but on the other hand, because I'm not limited to things that pack well, we're eating better, I think. Not always healthy, but less crap, more stuff made from scratch. I even grew some of it, which was new to me.

I only cut his hair the once. He held off for a long time back in the spring, thinking it would be possible to see a barber soon, but soon kept moving. He did a lot of it himself; I did the parts he couldn't see or reach. Men's hair technology sure is different from women's.

At the beginning of the year the evil deeds from people who should know better at Stack Exchange were still doing a lot of damage. It wasn't just what they did to me; they did some other nasty, bone-headed things early in 2020 and then throughout the year. A couple of the employees they drove out shared some things publicly after. (Pro tip: don't fire someone who knows about your dirty laundry without securing an NDA.) The folks there are majorly screwed up, and a couple of people I once thought decent folks in bad situations have shown themselves to be lacking in ethics and human decency. I'm well to be rid of their lies and malice.

Frustrating as it was to lose some good communities there, I've spent this year working to build the next generation at Codidact, and I'm very happy with where we are. We're building an open-source platform for Q&A and so much more, learning from those who have come before and building things that serve communities better. While our all-volunteer team is small and that limits us sometimes, we're flexible and responsive and working with our communities, and that shows. We have about a dozen communities up and running on our network now (including Judaism, yay! with some folks from Mi Yodeya), with more to come. Some of them are doing some novel things that weren't possible Somewhere Else. I'm the Community Lead, and while I had a fair bit of experience as a moderator on communities with varying characteristics, this role has allowed me to stretch and learn even more. It turns out this role makes me the most logical person to do "product management" and bug/feature prioritization and a fair bit of QA, too. Cool!

I'm now a board member; The Codidact Foundation was incorporated in November as a non-profit (I just got the confirmation letter from Companies House this week) and we'll now seek charity status. As soon as we can get a bank in pandemic times to let us open an account we'll be able to take donations and presumably get ourselves some better servers. This is all very exciting for me, and it's neat to be working with a worldwide team with quite a mix of backgrounds. Our major contributors include students and software developers and an ambulance dispatcher and a soldier and an accountant, among others.

Don't get me wrong; 2020 has been terrible in many ways. People close to me have died and I couldn't even be with or hug people, just be on Zoom. Friends and one family member are dealing with health challenges. The pandemic has greatly impeded my congregation (and so many others!). Nearly a year of not being able to socialize, go to restaurants, take in entertainment, hold conventions, attend Shabbat services, or do "normal life things" is wearing. Knowing that it's going to be at least many more months is sobering. (I'm going to call it now: I think Pennsic will be either cancelled again or severely hobbled and small.)

I'm glad to have the kind of job I can do from home; many people don't. And something I left off of that list on Twitter: I've learned how to work from home pretty effectively. I'd like some more human contact in three dimensions, but when (let's say "when", not "if") the pandemic is finally under some degree of control, I'll be able to get that from places other than work. I've learned more solidly that I could handle working for a company that's all-remote -- I suspected as much when I applied for such a position a few years back, but now I've seen it. And my employer has learned that remote works too; finally most of our engineering positions are now listed as "anywhere" instead of just the two cities in which we have engineering teams.

On the larger scale, 2020 has been a year of plague and violence and tyranny and unrest and hate and division. In the much smaller scale here at Chez Cellio, there has been good along with the bad, and I'm thankful for them.

Master Remus Fletcher, who was an instigating force in music in the Debatable Lands and at events across the kingdom and beyond, died on Friday. The obituary talks some about his SCA participation, and there'll be an AEthelmearc Gazette post.

This is such sad news. Remus encouraged music and was sometimes a one-person source of ambience. During events, if there was no other entertainment happening, he would sit in a corner and play. He was happy to put instruments in curious people's hands and teach. Some of the people he drew in went on to surpass him musically, but I never got the sense that he felt threatened by that -- he just wanted there to be more music. Before there was a Debatable Consort, Remus showed up at fighting practice every week with packets of photocopied music and a bag of recorders and the Consort grew from that. He was part of the Debatable Choir during its early days, and sang individually at events frequently.

Remus was friendly and welcoming to all. He encouraged people he knew to reach higher, to stretch, but he didn't judge -- he invited, never criticized. I will miss him.

When I've taken pictures of the chanukiyah in the past, I've usually been disappointed by how blurry the flames look. Photographing flames in a darkened room is apparently challenging -- it's not just me. I asked a question about it a while back on the Codidact photography community and got some interesting advice.

I've been experimenting this season. Here's one from tonight that came out decently well:

The camera settings were:

• Shutter speed: 1/90
• ISO: 1600
• Exposure: 0 (I don't know what this means; it's a scale from -2 to +2)

The other settings I have available are named:

• White balance: (scale of pictograms of sun, light bulbs, etc)
• Interval(s): scale from 0 to 60
• Focus: picture of flower, 25/50/75%, picture of mountain

I left those set to "auto".

I can make guesses (based on the scales) about white balance and focus, but "interval(s)" has me stumped.

Dear brain trust,

I have an Android tablet. As with my phone, I use it with my Google account. My account confirms new sign-ins or other access grants by sending a confirmation to my phone (so I have to say "yes it was me" there before the sign-in completes on another device). This is all good.

Google also sends that confirmation to the tablet. How do I disable that part, while still remaining signed in on the tablet? I want to use it, but I don't want it to be a source of trust. I've been through the Google security settings and I don't see a way to do this -- a way to say "trust it to be signed in but don't trust it to grant trust".