The year? 1987. The creator? Douglas Adams and Infocom. The genre? Frustrating interactive text adventure. The platform? Amiga or Commodore or Apple or MS-DOS. The title?

Bureaucracy

My dad bought a “family” PC in 1987. His company offset some portion of the $3,700 outlay for the machine, with its dual 360K floppy drives, 4 color display, and stack of manuals that almost weighed as much as the computer. There were two pieces of software Dad included: Lotus 1-2-3 (for work), and …

Bureaucracy

Imagine, if you will, taking all the fun parts involved in changing one’s mailing address (or, these days, email and cell phone number) and chucking those fun bits in the bin. The parts that are left, make those into an interactive fiction game. Also, make sure there are no images or music. One needs no joystick, for the obvious reason and because one types their actions into the game.

Take all of that and give it to the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and see what happens. Which they did, except that Adams’ brought the game to Infocom after his inspiration from his own change-of-address misadventure.

The game is appropriate for all ages, though the more ennui through life experience one accumulates the better one appreciates the subtle nuances of Bureaucracy. Or, as Doctor Evil laid plain in Austin Powers, “The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. ”

The game play is common with interactive fiction: navigate a finite space, collect certain things in a specific order, apply those things at a place, and arrive at a fruitful climax. Few, if any, interactive fiction games included a need to deal with a hungry llama. This game is brave enough to call attention to the llama problem in video games. But, I digress ….

There is no AI here other than the mind of Adams when he created the game. The best tools to get through it are a pencil and sheets of graph paper and the “feelies”, a set of extra items included in the game box. Mine are packed away in storage, but [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)#Feelies][Wikipedia says that the /Bureaucracy/ included]]:
– A pamphlet entitled You’re ready to move! from the fictional bank Fillmore Fiduciary Trust
– A flier advertising the fictional magazine Popular Paranoia
– A welcome letter from the player’s new employer, Happitec Corporation
– A Fillmore “Better Beezer” credit card application form (each sheet of the triplicate carbon copy form had different instructions and questions)
– A very skinny pencil (similar to those provided at banks)

The user interface was common when the game was released but would be neigh unrecognizable to today’s youths — a command line text interface.

All that said, it is still a funny frustrating fun game to play. I have it, and the other Infocom interactive fiction games, on my phone and tablet and laptop and eReader and … Every so often, especially when I travel where internet connectivity is anything but given, I will break out my dot grid notebook and a pencil and fire up my emulator.

Here’s what anchor Lester Holt had to say on Wednesday’s “NBC Nightly News”:

“Remember that deep breath moment I spoke of on election eve? Maybe you can begin to let it out. No, this isn’t over yet. We don’t know who the winner is, and there may be plenty of twists and turns ahead. But we voted like we have rarely voted before. We defied predictions of mass chaos. The votes are being counted, not as fast as we want, but democracy is working. And we are proving once again that it is our voices that count. We are not statistical models. We are Americans. As we wait to hear who our next president will be, remember this: Bitterness and disappointment are not new to elections. We all know that losing is the worst. But our fight should be for a more perfect union, and not against each other.”

Via the Poynter Institute

As evening comes to eastern Tennessee the day after the U.S. presidential election, who won remains unresolved. Depending on the reputable source, Joe Biden has either 253 or 264 Electoral College votes. I’m delighted that Michigan, my former home state, went against D.J. Trump this time around. Tennessee, my current residence, as expected went for DJ.

It’s ok. I say this for me as much as you, Dear Friends. The last two nights I slept a combined 10-12 hours, my anxiety about the election outcome physically manifesting itself in me. I did not expect this. Yet there I was, trying to do deep breathing exercises at 02:00 while also trying to not grab my phone.

For those of you who voted for and support DJ, please try to understand that I fundamentally don’t understand your journey in supporting him. Maybe I don’t need to understand.

Know this: you are not my enemy and I am not yours.

Ah, but you see, voting isn’t enough. You’ve been told to vote a zillion times already, but you probably also know that there are massive attempts at fuckery afoot. You need to vote and you need to make sure your asshole state actually counted and certified that vote. That means, if you smell any voter suppression near you, NEVER shut the fuck up about it. Scream. Yell. Call your local leaders and tell any nearby journalist worth a shit. Donate to the ACLU and other legal aid collectives to help battle suppression in court. We’ve had to put up with a whole lot of shit for four miserable years, and we’re gonna have to put up with a lot worse if we don’t have our shit locked down. Don’t put up with Election Day fuckery, and don’t let anyone scare you. This country is run by fucking cowards right now. Force them to stand up for themselves and they’ll turn to dust.

Via Drew Magary on Defector’s Funbag

When my daughter told me one of her friends had just shared a video of a Trump caravan blocking traffic in Marin City, a predominantly Black community one exit from my house, my first reaction was hatred for the intruders. But then I took a deep breath, which for many reasons can feel like an act of courage these days, and thought about John Lewis and the many other people who spent their lifetimes fighting the good fight for voting rights and democracy. They didn’t respond to hate and intimidation with more hate and intimidation. They responded to it with a stiffened resolved, more energy, and more determination to unify the nation. I thought of my friend Cory Booker who has suffered plenty of hate (including via the lies of the president), but who resolutely refuses to hate back. And I was reminded that you don’t beat hate with more hate. You don’t beat divisiveness with more divisiveness. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t to suggest that I’m cool with militia-curious truckers trying to intimidate my friends and neighbors. I just signed up for a text message list and the next time the trucks show up, so will I. But not to hate. To lock arms with the people in my community who are on the right side of history and want to move the nation in the right direction. In the short term, that movement takes place in the form of voting. If anyone in Marin City was considering skipping election day this year, I’m pretty sure the caravan convinced them to hit their polling place tomorrow. And with 93 million votes already cast, they’ll be in good company. Yes, it’s endlessly sad and frustrating that we’re being led by someone so severely deranged that he supports the efforts of highway vigilantes trying to run his opponent’s campaign buses off the road. But we can’t let a handful of acts of intimidation scare us away from the polls. We need to use them as inspiration to make this a landslide. Donald Trump doesn’t get to define what these moments mean and he doesn’t get to decide who wins this race. It’s not his election. It’s ours.

Via NextDraft

On a muddy, stormy, and gray day I drove to the county election commission to cast my early ballot. The paved parking lots were fully occupied with the unparked voters patrolling the isles, shark mobile and ready to pounce on any vacancy. Uninterested in retracing indefinitely ending loops, I made for the overflow lot.

Hurricane Zeta rained on Chattanooga heavily for days. A mountainous area, the waters run down to the Tennessee River one way or another. In certain areas, say where the county election commission building rests, the man-made flat terrain makes the man-made overflow lot a mud pit.

Undeterred and with a voting zest I pushed my mid-aughts Japanese automobile over the curb for the overflow lot and into a spot sporting at least some actual grass. My wise choice in footwear, a pair of water-proof hiking boots, made short work of transiting the mud pit overflow parking lot. Excelsior! How I would eventually extricate said vehicle from the mud pit overflow parking lot was, at best, murky. First, vote!

The line I joined snaked around the paved parking lot. Behind me another nine voting soles joined the queue. That was the longest I saw the line that day because the polling place found its stride.

Yet the dude behind me didn’t wear a mask. Everyone in eyeshot, even the stereotypical anti-COVID voters, wore a mask. He kept his distance from me. I assumed he forgot to put his mask on, but after a spell it was clear he wanted to “make a statement”. Before I beseeched him to mend his ways he slapped his mask on. Confrontation avoided!

There’s not much more to tell about my voting journey: the line moved well; the parking lots, both paved and muddy, emptied; the county called in tow trucks to release cars from the mud lot; the voter line shortened; and I voted.

Then I, like so many before me, tried to remove my car from the overflow lot.

One key aspect to removing a vehicle from such a situation is that, once you get some momentum, one should not stop it for any reason. The cars towed out of the lot and the shortness of the voter line meant I had a fairly clear field of view behind me. One woman stood text to a vehicle off to my left, but otherwise I was free to move.

As I threw my car into reverse and carefully depressed the accelerator, the woman from stage left was considerably closer than she was moments before — not so close there was danger but close enough I had to account for her unexpected presence and would probably coat her with mud. I did all that and drove my car from the overflow lot.

All this to say, GO VOTEI Vote Biden/Harris!

I opened my WordPress app to dash off a comment that probably was better left unsent. Guess what appeared to me – an invitation to use WordPress’s God-fucking-awful block editor, Gutenberg. And it let me know they conveniently enabled it for me by default to be the default. Fuck!

This just in — Gutenberg is hot, hot garbage. It followed a boom in sites like Medium, sites that have since fallen on hard times and changed their business model two or three times since. Writers didn’t care enough about the block editor to stay with Medium. Block editing was all the rage, and the rage has passed.

Worse is WordPress injecting their garbage editor into my WordPress experience EVEN THOUGH I HAVE AN ADD-ON THAT EXPLICITLY INDICATES I DON’T WANT THIS!

Automattic and WordPress can fuck the hell off and go fuck themselves in the process. I literally decided three hours ago to stay with WordPress for my site and they pull this jack-wagon nonsense.

FUCK YOU, WORDPRESS!!!

BTW, I’m also displeased with DreamHost, my hosting provider, for letting Automattic and WordPress pull this bullshit on their customers. They, too, can go fuck themselves,

/me backs up site to move elsewhere

I cannot believe I am typing these words:

I will watch the VP debate.

There are two key reasons why I will watch this one and actively avoided the Presidential debate:

⒈ Both Trump and Biden are old; Pence or Harris might end up being president in the next 4 years, and

⒉ This one will presumably have two adults debating instead of a mental toddler throwing a tantrum and Biden.

Maybe I’m setting myself up for disappointment. Maybe there will not be a TV event with an occasional tidbit of useful insight.

Good times!

p.s. – also testing my Mastodon posting