It’s already half way through the year (how??) so you may be wondering how Board Games Challenge 2026 is going. As I posted back in March, this is our project to play as many unplayed games from our large collection as we can this year, with the goal of maybe winnowing it down a little if we can identify games we don’t care for or aren’t even interested in playing at all.
First, here’s a couple of games we’ve played recently.
Cascadia is an elegantly designed tile layout game with a Pacific Northwest wildlife theme. It has a drafting mechanic where you take a tile that represents the environment at the same time that you take a wooden token that represents the wildlife, but the placement rules and scoring differ between the tiles and the wildlife. Without getting into too much detail, the challenge is finding the right pair of tile and token for your strategy, given that you only have four options. It’s a great game that gets a lot of strategic depth out of fairly simple rules – game design gold, IMO. Definitely a keeper.
Blokus Duo is also a tile layout game, but more about area control than forming patterns. This version is 2-player only, and basically whoever gets the most tiles out wins. You might be familiar with the multiplayer version, as it is more of a family game. In the 2-player version, it is much harder to get all of your pieces out. The game is also small and portable and doesn’t take up much table space, so it’s great for taking places. Here we are actually playing in a bar as you might be able to tell from the shot. Also a keeper.
the spreadsheet filtered by only games played
The basic problem that we’re having is that it’s hard to find a game we would want to get rid of! How far have we even made it in our challenge? Let’s consult the spreadsheet (remember, there was a spreadsheet?).
It’s got all the games in our collection, downloaded from BoardGameGeek. Whenver we play a game in 2026 I put in the date, and I count expansions if they were included. I even front loaded the spreadsheet by including a bunch of games we played over the holidays as played in January.
We’ve played a lot, yes? It’s just a little over 7% of our total collection, so I guess it’s not looking too good for getting through them all this year. We did identify one game that we decided to sell after playing it, and I also put up on ebay the extra copies of a few games where we owned two copies. So far three games have sold!
We might have bought a few more games, too, so not sure if this project is going to actually reduce our inventory by any appreciable amount. But it was worth a try, right? And it sure is fun to play board games!
I’m happy to report that I have returned to work at the company I started at in 2023, continuing in a Software Quality Assurance role, and working 100% remote.
It’s a career first for me to be rehired at a company where I’ve worked before. I experienced a different kind of onboarding, as I joined meetings where I knew many, if not all, of the people participating, and felt welcomed back. I had been away from the teams for 8 months, which frankly is the longest I’ve been out of work since the early 2000s.
It was not a career first for me to be onboarded 100% remote, as that was what happened back in March 2023, when I first joined there, after being laid off from a different company. At that time I got hired almost immediately after being out of work, and I felt like a “remote ’til Covid” God. This time around, I had a rockier road from one contract to the next, as I found it difficult to get interviews, despite applying to multiple positions week after week. In 8 months, I only got 3 interviews, not counting the interview my old company gave me.
I worried a bit about how tough it was landing a new job, and speculated in an earlier post that it might be because of my age (60th is coming up for me), or maybe because my late stage career plus the AI takeover means my expertise is becoming obsolete.
You can imagine my relief and my gratitude when the company that laid me off last year offered me another contract. This had actually been promised already as a possibility. Meaning, a large number of contractors had been laid off for budgetary reasons (a RIF, in other words), but I was told that if the company was able to hire again, they would prioritize bringing back contractors that had been let go. I knew for a fact that this had already happened with another contractor who was in the same boat as me, who had been rehired in January.
It’s certainly a good feeling to also be rehired, with the implicit understanding that brings that the company has my trust. The role I am hired into is simliar to what I was first brought on for – I will continue as an individual contributor in my specialized area of expertise. I’m not obsolete yet!
One thing I got out of this experience is an appreciation for the veracity of that old adage, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” As the job search dragged on, and I reviewed how to improve my odds at getting an interview, one thing that came up was to reach out to folks and maintain my relationships. We used to call this “networking,” and it remains as important as ever for career success. I can’t be completely sure, but I think reaching out just to touch base with my old colleagues helped out.
Truly, having a good support network is important to all aspects of living, especially in difficult times such as we are in.
Another thing I wanted to note is that people respond to positivity on social media more than to negativity, at least for me. I got a lot more engagement (likes and comments) with a positive post about getting re-rehired than I ever do with my doomposts over on Substack.
Anyway, I’m glad to be back to work finally, and very glad to continue in the 100% remote mode.
Thanks for reading and stay safe out there.
The view from my home office
Yes, the doomposting continues on Substack. You can check it out, and subscribe (for free!) with an email address, at this link: https://stevebarrera.substack.com/
We’ve been watching and enjoying a show called Younger, which ran from 2015 to 2021, and is now available on Netflix.
Succintly put, it’s like a Millennial generation version of Sex and the City. The latter show was based on the writing of Boomer Candace Bushnell (b. 1958), and was about a group of professional women in New York City, played mostly by Gen Xers, who remain fast friends throughout the trials and tribulations of playing the dating game. It was set roughly in the 1990s. The former, from the same Gen X creator and producer (Darren Star, b. 1961), has a similar vibe, is set in the same city in the late 2010s, and is about a group of mostly Millennials.
Which isn’t even quite true, as the characters in the show are an even mix of Millennials and Gen Xers. But the premise is that a 42-year old divorced woman named Liza, played by Broadway star Sutton Foster (b. 1975), wants to get back into the publishing industry after a long hiatus while she raised her daughter. She finds that it is impossible to get hired because of her age, so she pretends to be 26 years old, and then lands a position as an assistant to a marketing executive, a fellow Gen X woman who believes she has hired a Millennial.
It’s a sketchy premise, but if we suspend our disbelief and let the show run with it, there is plenty of fun tension and humor generated by the main character attempting to lead her double life. She ends up befriending a Millennial book editor at the company, played by former teen idol Hilary Duff (b. 1987), and running with her circle of Millennial friends. She hangs out with them at clubs and bars, and starts dating a hunky Millennial hipster guy.
I particularly enjoyed the show’s savvy with regard to markers of generational belonging. When you are born in a certain time period, you experience subsequent history at specific ages, and your memory of time is specifc to how the world looked, throughout time, to everyone in your age group. So Liza is constantly having to check herself while hanging with her Millennial friends, because she is supposed to recall the 90s and 00s as if she were 16 years younger than she really is, and doesn’t want to blow her cover and consequently her career.
The show ends up depicting a Millennial-Gen X generation gap, though notably Generation X is never called out by name. The term Millennial, however, is used frequently; in fact, the character played by Duff ends up becoming the head of her own publishing imprint called “Millennial Print,” targetting the younger generation. But the term “Generation X” never comes up, and at least once during the show, a Gen Xer is labelled as a Boomer. This is a common enough misrepresentation, and anyway we all know “Boomer” is just culture code for an older, out of touch person. My poor, forgotten generation!
That’s why I say this is a Millennial show, even though it isn’t. Like Sex and the City, it is racy, and has the characters rotating in and out of various romantic and sexual relationships. It is updated for the sensibilities of the current age, with more openness about being gay or bi or polyamorous. The Sex and the City sequel, And Just Like That…, tried to do that, too, but with less success (IMO).
Younger also ends up being a nostalgic look at life in the late 2010s. Can we really be nostalgic for the years of the first Trump administration? Well yeah, considering all that’s happened since. It was a time when Twitter was still respectable, and hashtags still had the power to cancel the un-woke. It was a time when it was conceivable that a young up-and-coming professional could live in New York City and make it in a still relevant web-based publishing industry. That doesn’t seem so possible now, as this article by a Millennial in New York reminds us: Ten Years In A Crumbling Industry
Younger might not be a show for everyone. It’s not the most brilliant thing on TV, but you might like it if, as I do, you like it when the popular culture is consciously generational. This show is definitely consciously Millennial. And it reminds us of how different the zeitgeist – or vibe as the youngsters call it – was, just 10 years ago.
If you’re a long time reader of this blog, you know that I don’t hide my partisanship. I am squarely on the liberal/Democratic/blue zone side of the partisan divide.
I have voted Democratic since 2004. In 2000 I voted Libertarian (oops) but after the debacle of that election and the subsequent unfolding of the Bush era, I came to the realization that Libertarianism is not a viable political philosophy, and that since I was more aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans, I should vote for them. Nothing the Republicans have done since then has changed my mind. If anything, they’ve only gotten worse and hardened my resolve.
There is this term “yellow dog Democrat” to refer to someone who will always vote a straight Democratic party ticket in any election. The term has origins going back to the nineteenth century, but here is an example of its use in the 1950s:
“We’re pretty much yellow-dog Democrats here,” said an Arkansan last week, explaining the state would vote Democratic even if the party nominates a “yellow dog.” – LIFE magazine, May 21, 1956.
The quote above was from a Southerner in a time when the Democratic party could still rely on the “Solid South” for votes. That would change with political realignment starting in the 1960s, when white Southerners started gravitating toward the Republican party. Arkansas did cast its electoral votes for the Democractic Presidential candidate as late as Clinton in 1996 (understandably), but hasn’t since then.
One of my online friends introduced me to the term “toaster Democrat,” which I believe he coined. He meant it in the same way: that he would vote for a toaster over the Republican candidate, if the Democrats nominated a toaster. It’s as if to say, “not only would I choose a quadruped over a Republican, I would even choose a lifeless kitchen appliance over a Republican.”
At this point I would say I am also a toaster Democract, and I feel vindicated in being so, because – here’s the thing – with the unhinged ways that the current Republican President is acting, it is literally the case that an actual toaster, a kitchen appliance useful only for making toast, would be a better President. This is not an exaggeration or a figure of speech: we would truly be better off as a nation if our President was a toaster, instead of the guy we have now.
With the complete devolution of the Republican party into a bizarre and disturbing cult dedicated to evil and destruction, I obviously could never vote for a Republican candidate for as long as I live. But here is the thing: I get why people are disillusioned with the Democratic party as well. They have delivered very little in the way of real change to help the common American. The truth is, it’s been relatively easy for me to support Democrats, because I am still (barely) middle class, and have done fairly well under neoliberalism, thanks mainly to getting into the field of Information Technology (this could change as AI takes over).
In my political alignment, I am pretty much a basic centrist Dad. I have been voting mainstream Democrat since I registered as a Democrat, with the only exception being voting for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. I get that Democrats need a stronger platform, and think they would do better with an economically populist vision in line with traditional (pre-Reagan era New Deal) Democratic policies: stronger worker protections, better social safety nets, more progressive tax structures to force the ultra-wealthy to pay for better outcomes for everyone else. Populism is the current zeitgeist and Democrats need to ride that wave.
But for now we’re stuck in this terrifying and dangerous equilibrium of having a depraved supervillain for President, with no one able to do anything to stop him. This Substack post explains the dynamic: Why No One Acts.
It’s basically a game theory problem where no one is incentivized to act because the risks are too high. And I am stuck (all us hoi polloi voters are) in the same trap. I have to vote Democrat, even though nothing will change.
But I can dream of a better world. A world where our President is a toaster.
I even made a picture of what that President would be like. Since I got some flak for using AI-generated images in my last post, I drew this one myself, with pencils. It took me over an hour, I’ll have you know. ChatGPT would have done it in like a minute, and it probably would have looked nicer. But I went with the hard way, so as not to consume precious natural resources and enrich the billionaire oligarchs a smidgen more. You’re welcome.
The desk is orange because I couldn’t find a brown colored pencil. Better an orange desk than an orange President, amirite?
I’m still on the job hunt, and finding it tough in this market. Prospects were really dry at the end of last year. I’ve seen a bit of a pick-up now that 2026 is moving along, but still no offer, and only two interviews in front of hiring managers so far, though I apply to a dozen or so jobs a week.
Anyone else out there who’s looking having the same problem? Or is it just me?
Here’s a couple of observations if you’re wondering what it’s like to be on the job hunt these days. On the applications, companies still ask all the EEO DEI-type questions – gender, race, veteran and disability status. Sometimes pronouns. The private sector did not get the memo that we’ve gone MAGA now, and woke is out.
A few times I’ve even been been asked about my sexual orientation! That’s one question to which I always answer “I prefer not to say.” What business is that of yours, I’m trying to get a job at your company, not have sex with it!
One thing that has become prevalent on the job search is AI. For one thing, there are a lot of postings for jobs where you are training AIs. They don’t promise you a lot of hours, and the rates they offer have a wide range, sometimes seeming too good to be true. I have ignored these kinds of postings. I’m not there (yet).
Sometimes when applying for a job, an AI chatbot will intervene as part of the process. Annoying. I have also been requested to do AI interviews as a next screening step. I started one once, and when I realized that it was supposed to be on camera, I bagged. But then a little later, I was requested to do an AI-driven “assessment,” also on camera, and since they were going to present my resume to a client, I acquiesced. It was a bit unnerving to be interviewed by a bot, but at least I have some experience at it, for later.
You know, for when the AIs take over. Gonna have to be able to appear compliant.
But seriously, I won’t deny it, I have leaned a little on ChatGPT for advice, and for help tailoring my resume. I’m no Luddite, I’m down with the AI revolution! ChatGPT even made me this inspiring image:
But I also won’t deny I feel a greater sense of uncertainty than I have in past periods of unemployment. There are a lot of factors that could be hampering my job search, as I enter what is probably the last decade of my life where I am in the workforce.
I was laid off in the midst of a shrinking job market, one that still hasn’t recovered. How could it with a gonzo administration in charge and WWIII looming over our heads? It’s just a bad time to be looking for work.
I am facing discrimination because of my age. Companies would rather have younger, more energetic workers that can be paid less. I can’t afford to backtrack on my rate at this stage of my life, though, with “retirement” coming around the corner.
Related to the above, my experience is too specialized. This is only natural for a late stage career, as it makes sense over time to focus on our strengths and area of expertise. But this could be also be understood as carving ourselves into a rut that is hard to get out of when that specialized expertise is in less demand.
I’m not trying hard enough. In the past, I have enjoyed periods of “funemployent,” but always bounced back into the workforce with relative ease. Maybe that’s not a realistic expectation deep in middle age.
AI really is taking over. My whole sector of the workforce – Information Technology – simply needs fewer humans, now that “agentic AI” is smart enough to do our jobs.
If you hadn’t heard, we own way too many board games over here at Morgantown Manor. If that were even a thing, I mean. You can peruse our collection on BoardGameGeek: https://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/sbarrera
If you see the same game appear more than once in the gallery, that is not a mistake. That means we own an extra copy (or two) of that game.
It’s kind of out of control.
In the interest of reclaiming some of our house space, I have been trying to sell some of the games on BGG and on ebay, with a slight amount of luck. It’s hard for me, though, to give up any of these lovely games. A little thing called loss aversion.
Aileen presented me with a challenge: let’s play all the games we never play, and anything we don’t like or don’t even want to play is a game we can get rid of.
We started the challenge yesterday, with three games in the “abstract” category – meaning they are just about logic with no theme like building a civilization or crafting things or something like that.
First we played the delightful Ingenious by the legendary Reiner Knizia. It’s all about placing your dominoes-like tiles next to similar colors to score the most possible points – but the trick is your final score is the lowest you have among all colors, so you can’t ignore any color.
Next we tried this game we have never played before called Da Vinci’s Challenge, a two-player game where you make a variety of patterns using just two types of pieces. The real challenge is noticing the patterns when they happen, because if you miss them there’s no takesies-backsies to score them on a later turn.
This game was a thrift store find. We get a lot of our games that way, which is kind of how we got into this mess in the first place.
Our copy of Da Vinci’s Challange had one already filled in score sheet –>
Looks like the kids crushed Dad pretty good, though we had to wonder if Dad was playing nice.
We finished the day’s gaming with a classic abstract called Qwirkle, where you play rows of tiles that either match in color or in shape.
Aileen says we get to count the games we already played this year, and I started a spreadsheet to keep track of them.
Yeah, it’s like that.
Looking forward to playing more games in this challenge mode, since there will be lots of games we don’t usually play, and many that we have never played (never played games are called the “shelf of shame” in our community).
Stay tuned for more board gaming posts this year, though I promise there won’t be one for every single game we play.
This month marks the 9th anniversary of this blog. I started it back in February 2017, partly in response to the ongoing political crisis. I had been blogging in the 2000s, back when the “blogosphere” was young, and then taken a break. But the situation in 2016-17 compelled me to get back into the habit of commenting on current events. You remember what was going on. What’s still going on.
I wanted the blog to be not just about current events, but about my experience in the midst of them. I had just turned 50 years old, and I would be writing from the perspective of a middle-aged man, who was in the later stages of his career, and in the early stages of building a life partnership with a significant other. I chose to name the blog In The Zeitgeist to evoke the idea of being present in a particular social and cultural moment. My understanding is that there are different kinds of social eras with different themes and moods. Ours is one of crisis.
The software I chose for creating the blog, WordPress, lets me have a collection of randomized header images when you view the site. If you refresh your browser page while reading one of my posts, the header image will change. For my header images, I decided I would have a simple rule: they all had to be pictures taken with my smartphone. In other words, they are images taken of life “on the ground.”
There are a couple of exceptions, which are pictures taken by other people on their smartphones, of me. But every header image is a real life moment, contemporaneous to when the blog was published, where I was there, in the zeitgeist.
I thought it would be illluminating to go through some of the images, and see the evolution of the blog, and of my life and our times, over the past ever-so-eventful years.
Below is the first image I used. Yes, I took this with my phone, while on the road, driving, of the car in front of me. Go ahead and smack my hand. The image introduces a major theme of the time period – the Resistance to the current administration, which sprouted immediately in the wake of the 2016 election, and hasn’t finished yet. Back in 2017 I still lived in North Carolina, and I wonder if this car is still out there.
Next is a shot of the corporate campus in North Carolina where I worked at the time I started this blog, a lovely site in the forested (and pollen-y) piedmont region of the state. I think the tobacco-free sign pegs it as fitting in with the current social era. Ironically, not far from that sign is where the smokers would congregate, just outside of the campus on the street.
You might notice this image is a bit larger than the previous one. There is a ideal aspect ratio for an image to be the header, but sometimes I make them a bit bigger if that helps the framing. There have been quite a few good shots I’ve taken with my phone that couldn’t become header images simply because they weren’t sized properly.
Next is another Resistance image from early 2017 – this one taken in Washington, D.C., at the Women’s March on January 21. It was at the time the largest protest in American history. I still remember the enormous size of the crowd and the intensity of the energy. The people were reeling from what had happened, and this event inaugurated their response to the tyranny that was starting to unfold.
I like the guy in the lower right with a thoughtful expression. Here’s a post to go with the image: Where the Baby Boomers Led Us.
As a rule, I do not disguise my partisanship in my writing, but I must still acknowledge the perspective of the Trump supporter. Not everyone saw him as a tyrant; some saw him as a savior (and apparently still do). Trump’s supporters are part of the zeitgeist, too, and are in the background of daily life, especially here in Pennsylvania, where I now live.
The next image is a photo taken in Scranton, PA, when we were travelling through there on our way to visit my sister in New York. That was back in 2019. This truck was parked prominently, visible from a restaurant we had stopped to eat at. Presumably it was there from the previous election year.
I moved to Pennsylvania in 2018, after landing a job in Wilmington, Delaware. I rented an apartment in a town called West Chester, and had a commute that was about an hour long. The office where I worked was in a gentrified area of the city along the banks of the Christina River, called the Riverfont. It was a nice place to go for a lunch walk.
Here’s a shot of the river (the building where I worked is not visible):
Sometimes when uploading a header image, I’ll crop it in a fun, or dare I say artistic way, as in the next example. You might wonder what this could possibly be a picture of, given my rule that header images are always taken with a smartphone. That is, they are always a photo of something in my environment. What is it?
I won’t keep you guessing; it’s a close up of the stage set at a Vampire Weekend concert, on their Father of the Bride tour. There was a giant globe behind the band. Photo taken on September 4, 2019 at The Mann Center.
I moved to PA in 2018, and then two years later, we were in the pandemic. There’s a number of header images that capture the pandemic as it unfolded, a progress visible in the public space as signs went up – both public service messages and protests by the people.
Of all the pandemic images, the one below is my favorite. It was taken in the summer of 2020 at a small Black Lives Matter protest in our community in Twin Valley, PA. Aileen is in her pandemic garb, holding a sign. Back then, people masked outside, just to be safe. Remember that?
Next is another pandemic picture, taken in 2020 a little later than the one above. Lockdowns were still in effect. Vaccines were not yet available. I figured since I shared a picture of Aileen, it was only fair to include one of me as well. I managed to get into my own shot thanks to the reflective properties of window pane glass. I’m taking a picture of a sign on a restaurant apologizing for being closed because of “the ban.”
Can you tell that I’m wearing a cloth mask, and that I have a glorious pandemic beard? My beard got really long that year. It got to be such a pain to maintain, as well becoming quite stinky, that I trimmed it back, even though I never stopped working remote after that – and still haven’t.
At the end of 2020 was a pivotal election. The next photo was taken on November 7, the day that major news outlets called the Presidential election for the Biden-Harris ticket. Aileen and I drove down to the Wilmington Riverfront (where I used to work, though by 2020 I was somewhere else) for a rally.
The picture is taken from outside a fenced in area. We didn’t actually get in to where we could see any speakers, I guess you needed an invite. We were with a lot of other people like us, outside the fence. Being surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd of supporters but separated from the actual politicians is kind of emblematic of what it’s like being a partisan Democrat nowadays – the party doesn’t really represent you, but you have no choice but to vote for them, given the alternative.
Life isn’t only about work and politics, you know, and neither is this blog.
Board gaming is a major hobby of ours, and a good number of the header images capture a game in play. I think this is the funnest of the photos, as it also captures our love of kaiju (giant monsters). The game is called Rampage, and the photo was uploaded in 2021.
Sometimes I do street photography – who doesn’t in this age, when our smartphones have such good cameras? This photo I liked so much I couldn’t resist making it a header image. It was taken at night in a parking lot in Wildwood, NJ, around Thanksgiving in 2021.
The years keep passing by.
Here’s another example of street photography – in fact, it’s on the street where we live:
Some time in 2022, a bunch of these signs sprouted up in our area. It’s not a very big sign (the shot is a close up), but it’s prominent from the road. I think someone is trying to program us all to behave better.
2023 started off rough. I lost my job, though luckily I found a new one pretty fast. Our sweet sunshine kitty, Princess Sashimi, got sick and passed away in May. This picture of her was taken in her last months:
Next is another well framed, artsy shot. It’s just the sun, high in the sky in the middle of the day, with some ovehead power lines in the foreground. What’s different, and is giving the sun that reddish halo, is this was in June 2023, when the air was smoky from wildfires in Canada for something like a month. It was quite a remarkable time; the burnt wood smell was always in the air, and it was just a little bit hard to breathe outside. A new kind of apocalypse for us to experience.
Theatre is a big part of our lives, as you might know from reading this blog. Every summer since 2021, Aileen has been working with students on a summer production, as part of a program called The Arts Bubble, which she started during the pandemic to give youth an arts outlet during lockdown. Their first show was Chicago.
I do have images from earlier productions, but for this post I’ve been saving up to show you this one, from City of Angels in 2023. Tiernan played Stone, a private detective. It was his first lead role and I was so proud of him. He is seen here in the middle of a musical number (on the left, seated). I just love the energy of this shot.
A good number of the header images are landscape photos, taken in various places, including the back yard. But also places I’ve visited. Of them all, this next one is the by far the loveliest. It’s a sunflower field that used to be near us, in Elverson, PA, but unfortunately has been replaced with some kind of commercial development. This is what it looked like at its peak in late summer:
Fast forward a year, to the fall of 2024. I was so excited when I finally got the chance to see the Northern Lights, which I’ve also wanted to do, and right here in Pennsylvnia! Now I don’t have to go to Iceland or wherever. In fact, that fall I saw two celestial phenomena for the first time in my life: the aurora borealis and a comet (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS). See: My Sky-Watcher Life List Gets Two Checkmarks in One Week!
Well, it’s back to the politics as 2024 was another election year. My country stupidly reinstated an extremely unqualified, felonious POS as the President.
This sign came up on I-476, which connects our town to Reading, PA. The phrase “Do Not Obey in Advance” is Lesson #1 from Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Someone must have been ready because this was up immediately after the election. The image is low res since I zoomed in and cropped it after taking the photo while driving (there I go again).
No time for regrets; in May 2025 we headed to France and Italy for a long planned vacation. I got to see Paris and Rome for the first time in my life, and we got to travel while there was still a chance.
Next up is the first example of a photo taken not by me, but by someone else; Aileen, in this case. It’s obvious why. I thought it would be amusing to have a picture of me playing a civilization game on my phone (I am literally doing that) while standing in front of possibly the most iconic monument from an ancient civilization on the planet. And you get to see what my regular, non-pandemic beard looks like.
Then it was back to the U.S. in June. Fascism was on the rampage.
Aileen and I went to the No Kings marches and rallies that year. By far the best attended one was the one on October 18. It felt like the energy level were back to where they had been at the Women’s March in 2017. The people weren’t going to take it any more. We attended two different rallies that day, and it was exhilarating to participate. After the rally in West Chester, we sat down to an early dinner. We were both dressed as clowns – a little bit of tactical frivolity.
Here we are at the restaurant, photo taken by a friendly customer using my phone. I thought it fitting to end the post with a Resistance image, just as I started with one.
Well, there you have it. 20 different header images that are included in the random rotation on this blog, roughly in order of when the pictures were taken. Little snapshots of life on the ground in the Crisis Era, from the perspective of an ordinary middle class IT worker guy.
It’s 2026, and time marches on. I haven’t yet posted any new header images this year, but I’m sure some eye-catching scene or special moment will come along. Until then, persist.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning, about the short Presidential administration of James A. Garfield, ended by an assassin’s bullet six months after his inauguration.
Garfield was famously a dark horse candidate, unexpectedly nominated because of divisions within the Republican party. This is covered in the series, as is his brief Presidency and its immediate aftermath.
The overarching theme of the show is the corruption of the Gilded Age spoils system then in effect, and how Garfield’s term helped instigate reforms, impressing on the nation the need for an independent professional civil service. This of course is a salient lesson for the current political age, with today’s civil service under assault by new corrosive forces of kleptocracy.
Is the series completely historically accurate? I haven’t done the research, so I don’t know. I did get the impression watching it that the writers took liberties with individual moments and interactions, but nonetheless I appreciated the broader theme and lesson as relevant. I was also greatly impressed with the overall production design – the costumes and settings bring the 1880s to life.
And the performances are exceptional. Michael Shannon is a principled and measured James Garfield, with Betty Gilpin as his steadfast and loving wife, Lucretia. Matthew Macfadyen is captivating as a delusionally aspirational Charles J. Guiteau, Garfield’s unhinged killer. And you don’t want to miss Nick Offerman as a drunken followed by remorseful Chester A. Arthur!
I highly recommend the miniseries for a binge watch, as it also has the virtue of being only four episodes long.
I was in a thrift store the other day (there are tons around here where we live in semi-rural Pennsylvania) and noticed that it still had the spots on the floor for standing in line while social distancing. Stickers to mark where to stand so you kept apart from the other shoppers, to minimize the risk of spreading COVID-19.
Well worn, as they have been there since presumably 2020, trod on by countless bargain hunters ever since.
Remember the pandemic, and that for a brief period we took social distancing seriously, and everyone (mostly) wore face masks in public, people working together to protect one another’s health? I remember being impressed by how resilient everyone was, quickly adapting to new behaviors like standing in line a few feet apart, or picking up items curbside. I remember taking inventory when I went out to the grocery store early in the pandemic – we got to over 90% of people masking in public.
There were always a few die hards who refused to comply with the simple public safety mandate of wearing a face mask. I suppose they imagined themselves to be resisters of tyranny, but with everyone else masking what they really were was free riders, benefiting from a safer environment by taking advantage of other people’s willingness to make a small sacrifice.
It didn’t take too long for even that short burst of cooperative spirit to come to an end. The pandemic got pulled into the partisan conflict that roils our nation, exacerbated no doubt by the Trump administration’s feckless response to the disaster. I documented the phenomenon from ground-zero, seeing as we live in MAGA-land.
But it still sticks with me that even here in MAGA-land, for a brief period, there was solidarity among the people. We were willing to work together, to follow a consensus of what needed to be done. We were united against a common threat, experiencing the coming together in the face of danger that forges a sense of community.
As I stood in line at the thrift store, looking down at the worn stickers on the floor, I actually felt nostalgic for the pandemic era. Of course, I did have it better than others back then. As a stay-at-home nonessential worker, I benefited in many ways from the lockdown. I’m sure other people who didn’t have it so lucky are very glad the lockdown era is behind us.
But consider the following. In one of my 2024 election post-mortems, I linked to an article in The Guardian that offered its own explanation for Trump’s victory. It argued that voters ditched Biden-Harris in favor of Trump because of the shock of having the benefits of the pandemic welfare state pulled out from under them.
I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.
Trump may have bungled the pandemic in 2020, but then Biden bungled the post-pandemic during his term! People were finally enjoying having a government that looked out for them, and then that all ended and it was back to “normal,” Democrats having apparently forgotten that for a great many Americans, “normal” sucked.
How to get back to big, interventionist government taking actions that are broadly popular? How to restore that sense of solidarity, that feeling of being a people united to a common purpose? It’s clear to me from the initial pandemic response that we are primed as a society for this to happen.
Our current Mad King is not a good leader for inspiring public consensus. He is only sowing more disunity and chaos with his authoritarian crackdown.
Could the Resistance fight against him be that Solidarity movement? I get that sense – the energy is there. The people have risen up in response to the brutality and lawlessness of the ICE Troopers in Minneapolis.
I have been heartened by the sense of hope uplifting folks who share my cause, and by Democrats in the Senate who have drawn a line against further ICE funding. But there is still not a movement at the national level to stop the administration from ignoring the U.S. Constitution. Can you imagine a nation-wide general strike, possibly the only option left to save democracy? It seems so unlikely, given that this country is vast and disorganized, assailed by powerful forces working against the people.
There is too much apathy, too many heads in the sand. The Mad King still has his loyalists – I see their laughing emojis in my Facebook feed all the time. They actually think what ICE Troopers are doing is justified. We are a fractured nation, with large swaths of people living in different realities.
Ex uno plures.
We are still waiting for a common cause, and for leaders who can bring us together.
Welcome to my first blog post in 2026, everyone. My last post was about what a &@(#!ng year 2025 was. We’re not even a month into the new year, and it’s even more &@(#!ed than the last one!
The pace of mind boggling, frightening and destructive events is hard to keep up with. If your feed is anything like mine, it is currently full of horror stories of what is happening with the ICE Troopers’ reign of terror in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Meanwhile, the international order is being cracked apart by offhand remarks from our leader, the criminal supervillain Lord Emperor the Orange One.
Reaction to these events has been split. Bizarrely, there seems to be a segment of the public that actually supports what the administration is doing. As I’ve written often before, in this Information Age, we are caught in a partisan political conflict, where shaping a narrative in the digital space is crucial to maintaining partisan solidarity in the fight. MAGA partisans have to twist themselves in knots to justify what the government is doing, even if that requires, in Orwellian form, disbelieving the evidence of one’s senses.
Aileen has been in the comments section of posts lately, arguing with accounts that support the MAGA perspective. She says that they are either bots or boughts. “Bots” as in apparently AI generated or operated accounts, and “boughts” as in profiles that might be run from an Internet accountfarm, where someone is getting paid to spread propaganda. If a profile looks like it might be a real person, then they could also be a “bought” in that they’ve bought into the regime’s narrative.
I personally wonder if there is any point in her investing time arguing with accounts that are either fake or are MAGA loyalists, though I suppose if there is even a small chance of changing a real person’s mind, it is worth a great effort. She is incredibly patient and kind in her responses, which is not something I could be. I am more of a “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” person. Aileen reports any account that threatens or insults her, and often sees the accounts deleted. Sometimes comments are deleted – programmed behavior, or a real person giving up?
Could it be that Aileen is the only real human being in the comments section, battling an army of bots like a lone warrior in a zombie apocalypse?
If nothing else, I’d like to think that her comments that calmly and rationally explain why what ICE is doing is wrong will get scrubbed and fed to the AI models, and add to the weight of bot account responses that are grounded in reality. Aileen has expressed hope that her efforts, being visible to anyone reading through the comments, might provide moral support to people like us, who uphold the Resistance narrative.
We believe that ICE is repeatedly violating the Constitutional rights of the American people, and Aileen is willing to take the time to argue that position, even if arguing mostly with AIs. And despite what the President might claim, she is not getting paid to do this. She is not a “bought.”
Aileen believes that naming things and taking meaning from names is an important part of the intuitive process. When she looked into the meaning of the name of the woman who was murdered by an ICE Trooper recently, she discovered the following
“Renee” means “rebirth.” “Nicole” means “victory of the people” or “victorious people. “Good” defines itself.
