Monday 5:43

New online Monday record! I could have shaved a handful of seconds without looking at the theme until I was done. 71-Across describes what you can do with the first word of all the four long Across answers (a common thing), so cast a spell, a net, etc. I could have just rushed the fill, since I did the puzzle mostly in order, but I had already solved all the theme answers, and I like to see what the relationship was, so I paused my solving for a few seconds to see. Monday puzzles are posted way earlier than other days of the week (this was up at 3:00 pm Sunday, usually it's 6:00 the evening before).

 Saturday 18:19 (1 Google)

I haven't written about this yet, but my father died two years ago, one day before his 80th birthday.

Obsession

Yeah, so I looked up TWIHARDS (33-Down).

A term for someone solely devoted to just one series seems limiting. What are you really into? Vampires and Werewolves? I think Buffy did it better, I think True Blood did it better. Want books? Bram Stoker did vamps the best, though there are legions of short stories about them, and Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf and Salem's Lot are pretty good too. But I'm not a snob about it. You like Twilight, that's fine, as long it's not your only thing. If you're into Philip Pullman, instant crush. 

<aside> Similarly, but not really, "Bernie Bro" really bothered me as a term. Yes, I really like Bernie Sanders, and I supported him in 2016 and 2020. But the whole "Bernie or Bust" attitude was totally misguided. It was clear to me that he would have crushed Trump in the general election, and this seems supported by the fact that once Hillary Clinton won the nomination, a significant number of Bernie supporters switched to Trump. Like Trump, Bernie spoke about how disappointed he was in the country, and that resonated with a lot of people. Even though what they were defining as the problems were wildly divergent, people care less about specific policy proposals than someone with authenticity (Trump lied constantly, but was still considered "authentic"), not a focus group-driven plastic model like Hillary. I don't think she's a bad person, but she completely misidentified the electorate. Bernie and Trump both got it, and it's sad that it seemed as if merely being populist was enough to win, because they really are almost polar opposites.

 <further aside> This sounds petty, but I think it's a microcosm of a larger problem with Hillary. When she moved to New York in 2000, she had to pick a team. She picked the Yankees, of course. I have no problem with that, and it makes political sense too, since they have more fans than the Mets, especially upstate. But when she was campaigning against Obama in New Hampshire, she donned a Red Sox cap. You cannot do that. How can you trust such blatant pandering? Baseball team fandom is about loyalty, where is yours? </further aside>

 </aside>

I kinda have a thing for girls into YA fiction, even if I'm not a giant fan myself. So anyway, I was at a party a while back. There was a pretty cute girl there, and even though we didn't talk much, I could just tell she was into YA fiction. The party got into a game of "I've Never." I'm not easily eliminated in that game because while I've had an interesting life, it isn't quite as debouched that the way the game usually trends. So it got down to just me and this girl, and I came up with the perfect question. "I've never read a book in the Twilight series." She drank, a little sheepishly. I probably could have embarrassed her further, but I didn't want to be that guy.

But it shouldn't be embarrassing to be a 30/40-something person into that sort of thing, although I think variety is key. I like "grown up" books too, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, Don DeLillo, etc. They certainly inform me better on the world than Tolkien ever could, even via a metaphor that he himself denies (LotR is sometimes viewed as allegory, with the Ring representing the atomic bomb, but Tolkien, himself more familiar with first World War, wrote it before that (though it attained much its popularity (inside the US at least) mostly in the 50's), and he specifically refutes that interpretation).

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." 

—C.S. Lewis 

My father never really learned this, which surprises me a bit, because he was, like me, a giant nerd. His childhood hobbies included coin and stamp collecting. But then he grew up and stopped. A wife and children can get in the way, of course, but I know plenty of gamers who manage to balance it all. I didn't need a father who shared all my passions (and we did have a few in common, like singing), I had a brother and a best friend, and eventually a whole subculture to be a part of, so I never really felt too isolated. Still, since he was once a collector, it always irked me that he never really understood my obsessions. Even though most of my Magic collection in the past few years has been digital (it's more the game, not the collection), collection (in my case, video games, Star Wars toys, baseball cards) is all about obsession, but whatever. I miss you, Dad.

 Tuesday (4/19): 6:26 (online record)

Like I said, I don't really track Tuesdays, but the app does. I did this a day late (happy 4/20), doing Wednesday's puzzle first, so maybe the warm-up helped. PLUSONE as an answer has appeared twice this week.

 Sunday: 16:34 (crusht)

"Cinemagrams"

This best my online record by something like 8 minutes, and it probably beat my previous offline record for Sunday. The theme was pretty easy: clues were apt anagrams of their movie answers, with the movie's year of release in parentheses. Since they're all famous, and 4/6 are precisely my generation, I was able to figure several out with few to no crosses. Nothing else was too tricky, and nothing else more than eight letters. Having both IPASS and PASSTO is a little tacky, but whatever. Crusht it.

 Friday: 13:40

I love triple-stacks, and this one's a pangram too. That's always a nice touch, and the fill doesn't suffer for it at all. Lovely work, and I think even Rex Parker might approve. (EDIT: No, he didn't. Haters gonna hate. Yeah, ENORM is dated, HARKS, IFA, HOTTO are all a little weak, but I actually think all the stack answers are good enough to wince a tiny bit on the crosses. I've seen worse words for less payoff. It's not as if the answers didn't work with their clues.) A touch on the easy side for me at least, as I plunked down 1-Across with no crosses, and 16-Across was a total gimme, the way it was clued "It's 'on a dark desert highway,' in song." An NBA MVP might trip me up at times, but even I know who Steph Curry is. 

 Saturday: 28:46

This doesn't LOOK like a Saturday grid, but my time indicates it played like one. You usually get a little more whitespace in a late week grid. This has more than it might seem, but only 4 clues longer than 9 letters. Nice job shoving Reykjavik in there. Re: 6-Down I've never seem the spelling "durag," I always thought it was do-rag (i.e. a rag that protects your do). Spellcheck also doesn't like it, but we've discussed what a P.O.S. that is. Wikipedia actually says both are acceptable (though the main entry is do-rag), and also offers dew rag and doo rag, with or without hyphen or space. Even among rappers who have sung about the headgear differ on the spelling. Of course, you could have just made the answer be DORAG by making the cross ORAL instead of URAL.

Edit: More about durag. The clue for this, was:

 "Anyone who has ever worn a ___ spells it '___,'" per a 2018 New York Times article.

Rex Parker (sometimes a little high on his "woke" horse) really really liked this clue because apparently, the Times using "do-rag" is somehow an affront, and this clue calls them out. Uh, sure. I mean, it's kinda funny if the Times Style specifies do-rag, yet they also published an article specifically on the spelling, and still don't use it. I wonder if Rex would have been enraged if they used the ORAL cross.

 Friday: 13:08

Chocotaco? Sounds hideous.

It's My Time and I Want It Now!

Call J. G. Wentworth! 877-TIMENOW.

I was asked to join a few Discords today. It's pretty ironic that a social media tool is called Discord, but whatever. I technically have a Discord, but I almost never use it. It starts up automatically when I reboot my PC, but that's like, once a month, and I usually quit right away. Spotify also autoruns on startup, which I almost never use. I know I can fix this in my settings, but I just don't quite have the spoons for that.

I never really paid for cable much. In my first place in the Bay, (2009) we had some Canadian satellite service that was pretty close to American TV, but I watched the Sopranos by downloading seasons on BitTorrent. We had basic cable as part of a bundle at my second place, and I got through Breaking Bad on that, but we decided to cut it, as Netflix and Hulu were becoming prominent. We ditched the CRT for a cheap flatscreen, and watched some movies via HDMI to laptop through that, and I never really looked back. Other than Breaking Bad or the occasional Jeopardy, it was so liberating to live outside of a schedule. The reason streaming services caught on (before that, Tivo did much of the same thing) was because it freed you from a schedule.

The trouble with cable was that it was never à la carte. I could get by on like 7-8 cable stations: ESPN, TNT, USA, FX, Comedy Central, MSNBC, maybe SYFY, maybe Spike or TBS or something. If I could pay for only those channels for maybe $1 each, I would. But the only option is 200 channels forced on me, most of which I have no interest in ever watching, and pay extra for that "privilege," not to mention you still have to abide by their schedule.

Now, with Twitch, we're back to living on someone else's schedule. Some streamers have VODs posted later, or port them to YouTube, but even then, it's not always "complete." Some of LSV's videos start after the draft, before the games. But watching the draft is the best part, and I could have, if I'd been there at the right time. You can turn on notifications, of course, and get your phone pinged whenever your favorite streamer goes live, and Discord can serve a similar purpose, though those seem like they are more like interactive blog/message boards. But I like my schedule. Even if I spend a lot of time at my computer, I don't want to interrupt my movie just because someone I like decided to stream right then. I made a reddit post this week that got 9000+ upvotes, and I got an e-mail every time someone commented on it. I get what they mean when some big thread has the almost meme-like "Wow, this blew up. RIP my inbox." Please, leave my phone alone. My inbox was already dead.

So anyway (hey, that's the name of the blog!), HBOMAX and Hulu and Netflix are great, because I can watch whatever whenever. Disney+ is also great, although they still do weekly releases of new series (makes sense from business standpoint. As a newer service, you want to attract new subscribers), while Netflix tends to drop the whole thing at once (while I don't like waiting a week for a new episode, but watching 6 episodes in a row, you can really lose focus. Pace yourself, if you actually want to watch the show).

Still, a lot of thongs are fractured. I'm not going to pay for Peacock, or Paramount+, or whatever media giant is trying to do their own thing. Disney, with its acquisition of Fox, has a MASSIVE library to draw on, but so far, they're capping their content at PG-13, and the only Fox stuff is Marvel-aligned (X-Men/F4 movies, but not Logan or Deadpool, or the 2 X-Men movies in which Wolverine says "go fuck yourself" (this is literally the only reason I can think they don't offer First Class and The Wolverine, but everything else is no worse than any other X-Men movie (On my old PC, I downloaded the MCU so I could have access whenever (but I had the R-rated stuff too, and I'd like it if they had the "Rogue Cut" of Days of Future Past))). Oh, and the Simpsons too. But you can't even get Family Guy. HBO at least has South Park. But there are always workarounds if you can't find what you want from a legit site, especially when it comes to movies.

Sheesh, this got long and winding, and ended up being more about TV and time than Discord/social networks. That's the way writing is sometimes, but usually it's bad writing. I honestly hate hate hate the whole thesis statement, hourglass model essay. I initially titled this "Being Social." It started out about Discord but went pretty far afield, and never really got back. The new title doesn't really work either, especially since I don't really get there until the third paragraph, but it tickled me, so I kept it. It's the same sort of problem I've had with the Black Hole essay, which still sits unfinished in a draft form (it's so outdated, I started it shortly after the whole thing with Aziz Ansari (remember that?)), because it keeps drifting, or leading into something else entirely, and I had a point in there somewhere but it gets lost in the weeds.

But as any writing teacher will tell you, it's important to just do the writing, even if it's bad. Because some parts are good. Even individually, the paragraphs aren't bad, they just don't flow that well together. Do I not have the time to get it all down and piece it together? Because I did have a point, but I didn't actually think about what it was before I started writing. I don't know. I waste a lot of time, but it's my time, and I want it now!