nosrednayduj

I forgot to blog that on Thursday afternoon I stood on a bridge over a highway, with a bunch of other people, and a sign that said "hands off our votes" in single letters each 3 feet high.

(Maybe my readers don't really care, but this is how I keep track of it.)

Also, after the shop charged up the 12 V battery they couldn't find anything else, and they told us that because it was "testing fine" they couldn't just replace the battery on warranty. Bah.

So there's this giant gaming convention called PAX, and PAX East is this weekend. I had heard of this before and been vaguely curious, and now that I have more time on my hands, I thought I would go. I decided to go for only one day, and to go for Friday to reduce the overcrowding that probably happens on Saturday. It was plenty crowded!

It was not exactly overwhelming, but close. The big money is in video games, and so a substantial amount of the convention is dedicated to video games, including videogame tournaments. There are enormous booths by computer manufacturers and game companies, which had lines for getting a demo of this and that. There were also some people who were selling boardgames, and a lot of Magic the Gathering stuff, and quite a lot of tabletop RPG kitsch like paintable miniatures and shiny dice. I didn't buy anything (except extremely overpriced food).

The open gaming area was more than four times the size of the room at Arisia. Interestingly, I only saw one person I knew, besides Perry who came with me. Maybe other people I knew were there and I just didn't see them in the 1000 other attendees.

Their game library is about 4-5 times the size of the NESFA library (which gets used at Arisia and Boskone) – but a lot of that was duplicates of popular games so that multiple groups could play the same thing. I did pretty well by just looking for the "looking for gamers" cones that people would put out when they wanted to play some game; I would walk up and ask if they were still looking for someone (sometimes they had forgotten to fold up the cone), and then inquire something about the game, and usually join them.

The first one Perry and I approached turned out to be a Magic the Gathering thing, which I had not realized because the box he was sitting next to said "Commander", and who knew that Commander was a type of MtG. (Well, not me anyway.) It was best for 4 players, and the two of us made 3, so we played for a little bit, with a lot of reminding me how the game worked. Then a couple of other people approached, and we decided that it would be better if we abandoned this game, and I bowed out, leaving Perry to play, since he has played MtG a bunch at Arisia. Of course he doesn't have his own deck and stuff, but usually at these things people have loaner decks.

I ended up playing about four other games, pretty much all of which I enjoyed. Too bad I don't remember the names of them :-)

I spent an hour just walking around in the booth area, and exploring the other floors where they had various big rooms and theaters with things going on. I didn't actually try to understand the things. There were board game tournaments, but I'm not really excited about a board game tournament. I want to play once, not multiple times. I suppose I could just lose!

After about 6-7 hours I was getting to be done. I had joined back up with Perry at some point and we had just finished playing a game with some people who had to go participate in an event, and I allowed as to how I was getting kind of tired. The noise was pretty oppressive, with hundreds of people all talking as they played or as they interacted with booth bunnies. There were later trains and we could have come home a couple of hours later, but after some discussion and poking at the game library we decided to hang it up for the day.

I might go again next year (is it every year? I don't even know that.) I don't think I would go for more than one day.

And then, on Saturday, there was No Kings. I went to two of them – one in my town where there were 300 attendees, and one on Boston Common, where there were tens of thousands. It was big. Probably bigger than the no Kings in October. I think it might've been the same MC as last time. Different speakers. One of the speakers had also spoken at one of the others I went to earlier in March, an Iranian woman from some peace organization.

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The main floor as seen from above. In the foreground is some area for eating the overpriced food, and some trucks, and behind is a section of the booths.

The dance was great. One of the callers was kind of too hard for my little pea brain, and apparently also for a number of other people's little pea brains, but there was a lot of stuff that I did understand in real time and able to execute, and there were a lot of good moments of teamwork, getting the whole square to do all the parts, and not just one person pushing, but really working together where some people understood some parts and were able to explain them well enough in tiny soundbites to get other people to understand other parts and really make the whole thing work.

I wanted to put my feet in the ocean this trip, since two years ago I had failed due to weather. Somebody said there was a nice restaurant on the beach that had its own parking lot (parking is always an issue) and we could go there. 6 people wanted to go, so we split into 2 cars, with one other person was assigned to my car to help navigate. The other car got going a few minutes before the two of us got going. The other person didn't really know where she was going, and was just using Google, which was fine, until it ran us into a traffic jam that seems to be being solved by the cars ahead of us making three-point turns and coming back the way from which they had come. When we got to the head of the line, we discovered that there were barricades across the road, so we made a three-pointer etc.

We called the other car, they had successfully arrived at the restaurant, and were giving us various advice about which roads to try, and we tried one and then we tried another and then we discovered there was another thing that was blocked off and then we went really far east so that we could get around it, and then we were on the south side and that should work, but it didn't, and there were cops everywhere and it was just a mess. Turned out it was a St. Patrick's Day parade. Nevermind that it was really pi day. Anyway, at some point the two of us realized that we weren't getting there in time to have lunch and get back to the dance, so we bailed and went somewhere else that was quick. Bummer. Sunday, there was not a St. Patrick's Day parade, and the two of us and one of the people in the rest of the group who actually liked this place a lot so happy to go again did succeed in going, so I got the beach view experience at this restaurant. And I got my feet wet.

But, since I didn't know that that was going to work out, on Saturday evening I said to some people "I want to go to the beach this evening after dinner" and a couple of them said "sure that sounds like fun let's do that". So we had dinner and we headed towards LAX because there's a giant parking lot on the beach very close to the airport. We dodged some airport traffic successfully and were heading towards the beach when we discovered a road closure with a lot of police activity. Didn't seem like a time for a parade. So we tried to dodge the closed road, and we discovered a giant amount of traffic. There's a lot of hills right near the ocean in some places, so we were able to see down to the actual beach from the road we were on, and there was this enormous crowd and a lot of lights and more police cars which seemed more like security as they didn't have their lights going, and a ton of traffic where we were, apparently trying to find parking and/or get down to the beach area with the crowd, and we were like "we don't really want to be here; we don't know what this crowd is all about, but we just want to walk on the beach", so another three-pointer. After about 15 minutes we got away from the horribleness and found a place where there was a beach, with less parking but we were able to park legally, and I got to get my feet wet on Saturday evening as well as Sunday afternoon. It was extremely foggy, so that contributed to the delay, because you couldn't really go fast even if it wasn't heavy traffic. Fortunately it's not like I had anything else to do that evening.

Here's hoping that traffic is not insane tomorrow morning when I am driving to LAX. There could be some excitement returning the rental car, because they have just opened, and I mean just, it was the first day when I rented my car on Friday, a new consolidated rental car center for the airport. I hope there are signs. I did see some signs when we were returning from the beach, though I'm not planning to go that route, so hopefully it will in fact work out.

We needed to get a hitch installed on our new Kia, and rather than ordering it and having our local shop do it, because they made a hash of installing the hitch on the Tesla, we decided to go to a place that does all hitches all the time (actually they do roof racks as well). But they were in Framingham, which is 23 miles away. I had the idea I'd bike home today and bike back to get it tomorrow, but then Valerie needed the Kia for a trip tomorrow morning, so I only went one way, and we just went and got it with two people and a car in the afternoon.

22.59 miles in 2:18. Average 9.7, because I'm slow, but also the roads were sometimes covered in puddles from melting snow, and you can't hit a puddle fast if you can't see for certain what's under the water, because it could be a 3 foot pothole. There were a couple of downhills I got to go fast because it was dry and clear, but there was a lot of being cautious. Also there was a bunch of icky traffic in Framingham.

Don't know when the last time I went more than 20 miles was. I suppose I could scroll back through my bicycle tags. Perhaps there will be many more now that there's less demands on my time, and it's warmer. Even if I have time, it's hard to bring myself to go more than about 10 miles when it's 30°.

(edit: It was June 12: https://nosrednayduj.dreamwidth.org/159443.html)

I spent the weekend at the Tech Squares annual square dance weekend, where I had a blast. There was dancing on ice skates, dancing to pre-recorded stuff from the 1950s, dancing to silly hacks that people invented, just regular plus dancing, higher level dancing, board gaming, jigsaw puzzles, chatting with people I only see once a year, chatting with people I see more often than that, decent food, and not enough sleep.

Somebody had brought a Rubik's 4x4 cube, and I learned that I have forgotten everything I knew about what to do with the centers. At some point I had edges and corners solved and was making progress on the centers, but slowly, because the thing I was doing did more than I wanted it to, so I tried to figure out what I needed to do to be more restrictive in what changes my moves made, and of course ended up messing it up completely. Then I repeated that situation, and then I got into a mess where I couldn't solve the edges, and the centers were still a mess. Then I gave the cube back. Maybe I will get mine out and spend some of my retirement re-deriving how to do this.

The new car went 220 miles and returned with 24% left in the batteries. It's "guess-o-meter" is moderately accurate.

I found out about the whole bombing Iran thing while I was away, but mostly was not looking at any news sources and stuck my head in the sand about it til I got home. Today I clicked around for protests, and I found one, this evening in Boston. I would say there were 200-300 people there. This one was also put on by the socialists, like a previous one. Some decent speakers. The MC was pretty good at getting everybody to cheer at the right times and he led us in a number of chants. After an hour of rallying we started marching. I don't know what the destination was, because after 40 minutes of walking, it seemed we were getting further away from the train station, and when it was 15 minutes away and there was a train in 20 minutes, I got my phone to give me walking directions and, like a dork, I just stuck it in my pocket and had it announce things like "your next turn is in 1000 feet". Walking is often faster than taking public transit, and more reliable (assuming your feet work, which surprisingly, after dancing them off all weekend, mine did). I'm sure I would've missed the train if I'd taken transit, even though I walked past a couple of T stations.

After meeting with my fidelity representative a couple of times, we have concluded that I have enough money in retirement + Social Security to retire (assuming that they fix the SS problem by 2033). So I am stepping back from the brink of the job market cesspool. I have toned down my LinkedIn profile, and written various announcements (like this one, not that any of you are going to offer me a job), and started replying "nevermind" to recruiters (none of them really had a job I wanted anyway).

I realized that it's been five months since my last Covid vaccine, and I'm about to go to two separate square dance weekends, the first in two weeks, so I went and got jabbed this afternoon.

Then I took the train into Boston for an action which was billed as a "Valentine's Day Vigil for Dignity and Freedom" (never mind that it's actually Abe Lincoln's birthday). They were having a vigil in support of incarcerated women, and protesting against a proposed a new women's prison. They say, correctly, that the money could be better spent on community support, in particular support so that people don't do crimes just to survive. Stop the pipeline. And a couple of "fuck ICE"s thrown in for good measure. They had some good speakers, many of them were young people. They had a chorus leading us in songs (starting with "this little light of mine"). At the end when it got dark they handed out little electric candles for the vigil part.

This weekend I am going to Boskone just for Saturday. I haven't been to Boskone in many years, but it seemed to have interesting things on the schedule. Decided to go just for the day rather than spending on a hotel room. Also not plugged into the volunteers and I probably would get bored if I were there all 3 days without filling time with volunteering. Next winter when there's no Arisia, we'll see if I go to more of Boskone.

Our new car discriminates against the polyamorous.

You can't have three key fobs. You can only have two. They are connected to the car because of course it's the modern keys with an entire computer inside them. And evidently they just have two slots in the car side of the computer to hold the paired key information. I think we would not have bought this car if we had known. But it's not something we ever thought to check. It's like, we didn't check if it actually had headlights, either. After all, we had multiple key fobs for our Prius, our Leaf, and our Tesla. We just thought it would cost $300 at the locksmith to get the third fob purchased and paired. But then we discovered that no, we cannot at all! The car also only has two driver profiles (where it remembers what you're seating is), but it has a guest profile. Which suggests that you should be able to have a guest key. But apparently not!

Even without supporting polyamory, you would think that people might have adult children who were living at home and needed their own key to a car, or caregivers whom they wanted to have drive children or elders to various places, or just to have an extra key because they are flakes.

It's too late, because we've already paid and done all the paperwork, so we will just have to leave our keys hanging on a hook so that we can take one when needed, and we will have to be careful about "can't just leave the car at the train station have somebody else pick it up without a lot of planning". We also learned this restriction is common with many models of Kia, so buyer beware.

Then, on the way home from action #6, where I stood in my town center with 90 other people holding various signs, the Leaf decided that it didn't need to provide braking normally anymore. So I had to really push hard on the pedal and it was making horrible noises. I guess we need to call the shop on Monday. And hope that it drives (stops) well enough to get to the shop. There is a shop in the center of town that we often use. We thought about going there and just leaving it but in the end decided to bring the car home instead.

Our town is more liberal, so there was more positivity towards our action than in neighboring towns, but we did have a few fingers and long beeps which usually mean "no" whereas a series of short beeps means "yes".

We bought a car! It is a Kia EV 6. I spent about 20 minutes sitting in the driver seat playing with my new toy. I have added myself as a driver profile. Unlike the Tesla you can't have an infinite number of them, it looks like there are only 2 plus a guest. Haven't tried out the guest setting yet. Valerie and I will be 90% of the drivers, so it makes sense for us to have the profiles. We will just rename "Jeff", who is apparently the former owner. We also need to acquire a third key, because when Ken does drive, he wants to have the key. Unfortunately the fob is enormous, and he may be sad because he has some special key carrying case that he constructed himself and I don't think this will fit.

It seems to have a navigation mode built in. I don't know if we need to pay extra for this, and therefore if it's going to become disabled sometime. I failed to find car play, but maybe I don't need it if built-in navigation exists. Anyway, we used it because we went to another stand on the overpass thing with sign made out of individual three-foot-high letters that said "WE STAND W/ MN ICE OUT". Lots of happy tooting. A few long honks which we assume are unhappy tooting, but we are far enough away we can't see thumbs up or down or middle fingers. We had some American flags that we were waving (it's our flag too!), but my hands get very cold, so even though I had good gloves, I needed to also put them in my pockets and let other people wave the flags.

I went to what might be the last Arisia. They are taking a gap year due to personnel issues at the top that I don't understand. It was pretty chaotic organizationally; everything was very very late in getting scheduled. I'm just a peon so I don't know anything. I did try to volunteer to help early on but nobody asked me to do anything, probably because it was more complicated to explain how or what than to just do it. Maybe they will get it together and actually have a 2028 Arisia, or maybe it will just fade into the distance. Last year when we had the same hotel it was too small. This year there were fewer attendees, and so the hotel was a good fit. Probably there was loss of money as a result though.

I volunteered in gaming and coat check again. I ended up playing more games than I usually do. I particularly liked a game called "Magicians Challenge". I went to a couple of sing-alongs and did the "summit Mount Arisia" challenge. Climbing 15 flights three times in a row (with descent in between times) is a good workout and makes your thighs very sore the next day.

They had two new events this year which were pretty popular.

In gaming, somebody had the idea to have a Yankee swap where you were supposed to bring a gift wrapped game (not new) and do the Yankee swap thing. (Google it if you haven't heard of it.) There were about 50 participants. I didn't participate, because I looked at all of our games and said "well these are good and I don't want to give them away, and those are crap and I don't want to inflict them on someone". I actually had one I could give away, because I've been trying to sell my friends copy of McMulti, which I believed was worth something, but I think that was only 30 years ago when I paid $100 for mine. Probably that would have been somewhat popular. A couple of games were stolen several times. So I didn't enter, but I was staffing the table at the time, so I got to watch. Someone had brought like 15 extra games "in case people came who wanted to participate but didn't have a game to give". So I could have participated, but I decided to just watch. At the end, there were a bunch of games that had not been opened yet because not as many as 15 extra people came, and people opened them and then took some, and there was also some informal trading among the participants who had a game that they didn't care about. And then at the very end there were like three games sitting on the table and somebody said "someone come take these games", so I grabbed one.

The other interesting new event was "night market" where crafters were supposed to bring small things and barter them with other crafters. Well I'm not a crafter, so I brought homemade cookies. I got a few random little kitsch things that I traded my cookies for. It was kind of entertaining to wander around. Unfortunately, the dealer's room, where people sell stuff, was primarily little kitsch things, and I wasn't interested enough to part with money for them. There were only two booksellers and there were no T-shirt sellers. I bought a few used books. I also got an old Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine at the night market where a bunch of things were being given away for free. We'll see if some short stories from 1994 are any good.

In an unusual step for me, I actually bought some art. I bought a print of this piece: http://www.clemensart.com/images/tunacookie.jpg . I've been enjoying the artwork by this artist about this cat and dragon for years, and decided that I like this one a lot and it needs to hang in my kitchen. You can see more here: http://www.clemensart.com/mlindex.htm

Unexpected, fast-track route.

Yesterday my great grandboss sent me a meeting request to "discuss some important business updates".

This is not my first rodeo. So I was not at all surprised when they laid me off in that meeting. I guess the "important business updates" are that they are trashing our entire product. Although they were a little cagey about exactly who was being laid off, giving the excuse that some people hadn't been told yet. I got some text messages from some of my coworkers so I at least know about some of them. I'll wait until tomorrow to ping the others for whom I have phone numbers.

I was also not terribly upset, because I'm pretty close to retirement age, and I'm reasonably well set up financially. They are giving me 18 weeks severance and paying out the full bonus from this past year. So I'd be okay for half a year anyway even if I hadn't been shoveling the max contribution into my 401(k) for the past 15 years.

They started the conversation with "these are difficult conversations to have" and I said "I've been laid off five times before, it's okay." I mean, I'm kind of emotional about it and I'm telling everybody, but generally I'm fine. I mean, in the computer industry, you have to have in the back of your mind, "I could be laid off today". It just fades into the back of your mind like "I could get hit by a truck today". Both things are true; being laid off is a little more likely.