Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Barry, Season Four:
The final season of Barry is a misfire. While it works as a conclusion to the story, it leans too far into pathos and loses the careful balance of laughs that buoyed the previous seasons. A multi-year time jump in the middle of season kills most of the momentum.

Final Grade: C-

Jury Duty:
This is Rebecca's favourite show of the year -- a limited series reality show where a juror doesn't realize that all the other jurors are actors. Funny without being over the top, and ultimately pretty positive-spirited as well. On Prime Video.

Final Grade: B+

Quiz Lady (R):
This is a pleasant, throwaway comedy about a woman who goes on a game show to pay off her dog's ransom. The leads work well together and a guest spot by Will Ferrell is surprisingly reined in. On Hulu.

Final Grade: B

ZEF: The Story of Die Antwoord:
Part art show experiment and part interview, this is probably the weirdest documentary I've ever watched. The line between art and fact is wavy and matches the vibe of this South African rap group's shock music. It runs out of steam in the last 3rd, but is very cinematic throughout. On Prime Video.

Final Grade: C+

Easy Photos Day

Eating pizza from Rappahanock Pizza Kitchen in room #151 of the Appledore building at Skyland Lodge.

Visible stars from our area.

Breakfast unicorn. (Maia ate the pancakes faster than any food she's ever been given).

At the top of the 1.3-mile Stony Man hike.

Sunset from one of the Skyline Drive overlooks. Maia is accompanied by her new friend, Snikky Snake (not "Sneaky").

Ian runs amok during our lunch stop at Rady Park on the way home.

Despair Is Not a Long-Term Solution, Part II

I wrote this statement in a post-election essay back in November 2016:

"In Trump, I saw an erratic, ineloquent businessman with no experience in politics. His actions and words showed clear racism and misogyny, and he used fear to gather and excite his voting base. Subjectively, he gave me the impression that I would be wiser to interview the advisors he surrounds himself with to prepare for the day (somewhere in Year Two) when he got bored of governing."

Between his mediocre first term and his subsequent actions in 2021, it was clear to me that Trump did not deserve a second chance in office. I saw a volatile, divisive man with no concrete plans, one who consistently put himself above country and used his dangerous power and reach to erode public trust with falsehoods.

I'm disappointed that so many Americans lived through the same events I did and came away with such a different summation of the man. This dissonance is something we need to fix to be a functioning, united country again. We focus too much on being surprised by other people's beliefs, opinions, and priorities without raising alarms at the mechanisms that are shaping their viewpoints. Internet echo chambers and shortened attention spans (shaped by the modern "infinite scroll" web pattern) have pushed people to accept questionable information too blithely. As a result, two Americans learn about the same events and people with vastly different interpretations that cannot be reconciled.

We need to restore the nuance to every oversimplified "us versus them" story and reaffirm that the US is a united collection of citizens, not divided tribes of paragons and enemies. I don't have a solution for this (let's end racism while we're at it!), but identifying a problem is the first step.

I look forward to the day that the Republican Party puts forth another candidate I can take seriously -- a morally-upright, conservative candidate with real policies and respect for all Americans. In the meantime, I will continue get involved in my local community and exemplify the values I want to spread. I will continue being an ally to anyone that needs an ally. And I will continue voting in good faith for candidates who offer compassionate choices that lift the most Americans up instead of "punching down".

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Scrambled (R):
This is an estrogen-heavy comedy about a perpetual bridesmaid on a quest to freeze her eggs. It's well-done and funny but doesn't add up to a whole lot in the end. On Hulu.

Final Grade: B-

Line of Duty, Season Three:
The third season of this detective show layers on to bits from previous seasons, creating a nice mysterious web of connections that get revealed over the course of the season. Probably the best of the 3 seasons we've watched so far. On Hulu.

Final Grade: B+

Thelma (PG-13):
This is a light comedy about an elderly lady who gets scammed and decides to get her money back herself. It provokes thoughts about aging and needing help while still remaining funny, and features a nice co-star turn for an elderly Richard Roundtree. On Amazon Video.

Final Grade: B+

How to Die Alone, Season One:
The latest in the genre of comedies with witty dialogue about hyper-recent topics, this one has fun parts but is less successful as a whole. The main character's evolution proceeds in fits and starts and the season ends just as things get interesting. On Hulu.

Final Grade: B-

Mouse Day

Over the past two weeks, our laundry room began to smell progressively worse. I originally thought it was the carpet in the room we used to keep Amber in during the night time (to contain her old-cat bodily fluids) but by last Wednesday it was clear that something had died.

I traced the stench to this crack under the heat/air system using nothing but my finely-tuned nose.

I then used my dad's duct camera to navigate the inaccessible area until I found what appeared to be a tiny mole.

Not wanting to tear out the entire wall to get to the corpse, I initially tried a vacuum attachment with mesh wrapped around the tip.

This was unsuccessful (probably a good thing, as I was unsure whether the corpse had liquified yet). For my next attempt, I unbent a clothes hangar to navigate the cramped space (a series of left and right bends) and scoop the body out.

Success! It was a mouse, but one that had died fairly recently. Our most infamous mouse, Little Asshole, was never seen again after terrorizing us for months and then disappearing in March 2022. This new dead mouse could not have been one and the same unless there is a DARK-esque time-traveling cave somewhere in our basement.

Chad Darnell's 12 of 12

12 pictures of your day on the 12th of every month

5:43 AM: Morning Beat Saber workout.

6:11 AM: Showered and ready for work.

6:54 AM: Off to the bus stop.

7:07 AM: Bagel for breakfast.

9:52 AM: Reviewing documents about aerostats.

11:27 AM: Working lunch.

1:28 PM: Ian comes home from preschool.

4:23 PM: New weekly tradition: Nature Hike Tuesdays in Claude Moore Park.

4:29 PM: Off the leash.

5:35 PM: Dinner at Cafesano.

6:59 PM: Too tired to stand.

7:26 PM: Tonight's audience for a game of Satisfactory.

Review Day: Satisfactory (PC)

Satisfactory is the best game I've played in 2024 and will appeal to anyone who likes planning, digging holes on the beach, or Minecraft. It's a member of the "factory sim" genre, and plays out like a way-more-chill version of Factorio.

You play as the Pioneer, sent down to a pristine planet to harvest resources, mine ores, and send finished goods back up the Space Elevator (and in fact, one of your first major assignments is to build the Space Elevator). Your very first, simplest assignment will have you smelting iron ore into ingots and stamping them into rods and plates, while frantically chopping down enough wood to keep your electricity grid online. Assignments get more complicated at a steady, accessible pace until you have factories with dozens of machines, conveyor belts criss-crossing the world, and trains and drones carrying resources everywhere. Your power grid will evolve from simple biomass burners to automatic coal power plants to nuclear reactors, and late-game incorporation of alien technologies will take things in weird directions, with teleportation portals and volatile augmentations that spike your output while using exponentially more power.

The game is forgiving enough that you can play any way you want. You can choose to nerd out with paper and calculators to design a maximum efficiency factory or just wing it and build a factory that will get the job done eventually. You can load-balance your conveyor belts precisely to different machines or just dump the interim products on a conveyor belt and let it work itself out. Or, you can ignore the endgame entirely and be like the guy who built the Sydney Opera House from scratch in about 600 hours.

When you get tired of building, you can partake in some light exploration and combat (which is fleshed out enough to be engaging, but not so difficult that it's the point of the game). You might find rare resource nodes or mysterious artifacts that help in your factory. None of the major resources is limited and dying from wild beasts or a fall just respawns you.

The dopamine hits come from building something and making it work -- it's immensely satisfying to turn on a factory and see it start to spit out products from nicely-animated machines. It's equally rewarding to troubleshoot the emergent issues that occur when a factory isn't working quite right (this will be the more common case). Solving problems feels a lot like bug-hunting for software engineers and each playthrough is filled with AHA! moments, usually caused by earlier mistakes.

There's only a few flaws in the game: the controls can be a little finicky (and very rarely, buggy) but they're still way better than any of the finger juggling you have to do in Fallout 4 or Fallout 76. Also, the final phase of the game (Phase 5) feels a little underwhelming after the scaled complexity of Phase 4 -- where Phase 4 really felt like you had to learn many new things and run machines in parallel, Phase 5 can be solved with just a handful of serial machines. These nitpicks aside, Satisfactory is the only game that I've ever immediately started over (to try and be even more efficient with all the lessons I learned in the first playthrough). It will easily give you hundreds of hours of fun.

Maia loves watching me play this game and will choose it as a nightly activity over playing her own Switch games. She has built her own factories out of Legos and random items in our basement, and has become an expert helper in spotting machines that might be broken (based on the colors of their display lights or their animations). She's constantly creating paper diagrams of machines connected by conveyor belts and has learned the basics of pipeline fluid dynamics and how to calculate machine throughput. I can't wait until she has her own gaming computer and we can play together on a private multiplayer server.

Final Grade: A

Maia's Art Day

second grade art

The girl in barettes is Maia's best friend, Rahel.

A cat store full of tired mother cats and kittens.

A cat!

Stories from Maia's standardized testing.

"Peru is in South America. Peru has mountains and rainforests. I want to visit Peru because I want to see Machu Pichu. To get there, I fly on a plane."

"When I was in 1st grade I made a clay pot in art class. First, I put some clay on my finger. Next I pintcht the clay. Then I put both thums in the clay. Last I paneted the pot! THE END"

Stuff In My Drawers Day: Thanksgiving Turkey

I created this Thanksgiving Turkey in Ms. Paul's art class in first grade (November 1986).

This amazing work of art was made on the cheap, recycled paper of the 80s, not quite newsprint, but definitely susceptible to shredding as soon as you start erasing something.

I'm not sure why the turkey is so depressed, but it probably has something to do with the fact that someone stole its legs and replaced them with mutant carrots.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Only Murders in the Building, Season Four:
Better than the previous season, but never reaching the heights of the first season, Season Four goes all in on the meta-level humour, with the titular podcast being picked up as a feature film. Movie star cameos in previous seasons always felt a little forced, but works well here. On Hulu.

Final Grade: B

That 90s Show, Part 3:
I gave this show another shot during a dearth of treadmill-ready shows (interesting enough to get me on the treadmill but not so interesting that I want to keep watching after I'm done). Other than a few good laughs, this season feels more like a retread than a sequel with anything new to say. On Netflix.

Final Grade: C-

Babes (R):
This movie about two best friends' perspectives on pregnancy and parenthood is funny but not particularly memorable. It relies a little too much on raunchy dialogue for laughs.

Final Grade: B-

Key and Peele, Season Four:
Season four has a couple really strong, hilarious episodes pulled down by several middling, weird ones. Still worth a watch.

Final Grade: B

Cat Day

Introducing Tater and Ori, two 7-month-old kittens born on April 12, 2024 and adopted from 4Paws last Friday night.

Ori (nee Chicken Nugget) is the tuxedo girl, short for Oreo but also the name of a video game character that Maia likes. Ori is more timid and less of an open book but seems like she will ultimately get into more mischief in the long run.

Tater (nee Tater Tot) is the grey boy with a cool white lightning bolt on his right flank (not pictured below). He's all over the place and into everything and will stand on two feet to hug your petting hand.

The cats are fearless and took to our house immediately. They were roaming everywhere within the first 24 hours and Ori allowed Ian to pull her around in a wagon. Later, Ori fell asleep on the stairs with Maia while she wrote a book about the cats.

The cats have not slept with us in beds yet but they're totally at ease.

Maia has taken to cat ownership very responsibly, making rules sheets and a chore board for activities such as litter scooping and feeding.

It's nice to have the energy of young, affectionate cats in the house again!

Happy Thanksgiving!

End-of-the-Month Highlights Day

New photos have been added to the Life, 2024 album.

• Events
  • Weekend in the Shenandoah, F 11/1 - S 11/3. Stayed at Skyland Lodge. Hiked Stony Man and Millers Head. Visited the Big Meadows Visitor Center. Stopped by Rady Park on the way home.
  
  
  • Took the kids to the grandparents' on M 11/4 and also bumped into my sister.
  
  
  • Voted on T 11/5. Family hike in Claude Moore then dinner at Chuy's.
  
  
  • Date night at Local Provisions on S 11/9.
  
  
  • Family hike in Claude Moore then dinner at Cafesano on T 11/12.
  
  
  • Friendsgiving at Tammy's on S 11/16.
  
  
  • Family hike in Claude Moore then dinner at Fire Works Pizza on T 11/19.
  
  
  • Went to the HOA meeting on W 11/20.
  
  
  • Took the kids to the grandparents' on H 11/21 and also bumped into my sister.
  
  
  • Adopted two kittens, Ori and Tator, on F 11/22.
  
  
  • Family hike in Claude Moore on T 11/26.
  
  
  • Went to a community dinner event at Riverside on W 11/27.
  
  
  • Rebecca and the kids went to Thanksgiving lunch with Char at the Goodwin House on H 11/28. Started putting up Christmas decorations. Got sick for a couple days.
  • Put up the Christmas tree on S 11/30, followed by a family dinner at Burger 21.


• Projects
  • Started coding again in preparation for Advent of Code in December.


• Consumerism
  • Enjoyed watching Nobody Wants This and playing Satisfactory this month.
  
  
  • No amazing new music or movies.

November's Final Grade: B, a solid month