Author: Nick Bergus

2022 In Review

I find the “good riddance to this year” trope, even in terrible years, unhelpful and uninteresting, and in light of some recent years, not particularly meaningful. Here’s some highlights of my past 12 months.

  • Finally took a letterpress workshop at Public Space One
  • Replaced 2,500 car miles with an electric pedal-assist bike
  • Hiked more than 100 miles, including in the Rocky Mountains and the Loess Hills
  • Added a redwing blackbird to my arm thanks to Nikki Powills
  • Had really meaningful and sometimes tough conversations with my kid who is now on the verge of adulthood
  • Ended my 1,010-day COVID-free streak
  • Engaged with friends and family for walks, meals and more

Onward.

Day 1,010

Getting COVID-19 isn’t inevitable, despite how much it feels like it may.

I knew the numbers were increasing, knew we had ticked from “low” to “medium,” but I was lazy. Maybe cocky.

There are two times in the past week I thought about wearing a mask and didn’t, and one of those probably caught me.

And so, after successfully avoiding COVID for 1,010 days, it got me.

In and Out of Character

Trump’s “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” that turned out to be a sale of licensed NFT’s when it seems interest is at best waned seems out of character for a presidential candidate. But is seems very in character for this particular former president.

There was, I think, a gap in the steaks and for-profit scam university because he had other, more valuable things to sell. But NFT sales con man is who he is.

Meanwhile at Twitter

There are many mockable things going on at Twitter, and this certainly isn’t the most outrageous, but a new gold verified badge appeared as they roll out a second iteration of Twitter Blue verification to differentiate the big players who might buy ads meanwhile legacy verified accounts, including government agencies, simply get a blue badge noting “This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”

Star Wars Imagined in the 1940s by Walt Disney

Inspired by Flash Gordon, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Walt Disney began sketching out characters for grand, animated space opera full of villains and magic warriors. No one outside Disney was believed to have seen them, until, recently, these drawings were found in George Lucas’s collection.

Imagined using AI from Midjourney.

Why Andor is Great and Rouge One is Just OK

Jamelle Bouie on Rouge One versus Andor:

[In Rouge One] We don’t actually get a sense of the interior lives of any of the characters, who, we know as an audience, are on the way to their doom. There’s no real attempt to deal with the psychology of rebellion. The movie is exciting, but I don’t think it quite works.

…

[W]hile “Andor” is billed as a show about the Rebellion, it is just as much, if not more, a show about the Empire. It is most interested, I think, in how the Empire works — in the bureaucracy of domination. Key moments take place within the Imperial intelligence agency, in scenes reminiscent of a John le Carré novel or adaptation (it helps that many of the actors are British, with the Received Pronunciation that we expect from Imperial officers in Star Wars). We see how paperwork in an office translates to brutality for ordinary people on the ground; how Imperial control is administered, and how dissent is repressed. We see why someone would join the Empire, find fulfillment in the Empire, seek to advance Imperial goals. It is a show that uses the idea of the “banality of evil” in exactly the way it was meant.

Exactly right.

American Exceptionalism Extends to Killing More People Walking and Riding Bikes

Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano writing for The New York Times:

Safety advocates and government officials lament that so many deaths are often tolerated in America as an unavoidable cost of mass mobility. But periodically, the illogic of that toll becomes clearer: Americans die in rising numbers even when they drive less. They die in rising numbers even as roads around the world grow safer. American foreign service officers leave war zones, only to die on roads around the nation’s capital.

…

Much of the familiar explanation for America’s road safety record lies with a transportation system primarily designed to move cars quickly, not to move people safely.

“Motor vehicles are first, highways are first, and everything else is an afterthought,” said Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board.

This is maddening because, as Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists puts it here, “We know what the problem is, we know what the solution is. We just don’t have the political will to do it.”