works of wanderlust

Month: May 2025

  • flick: idiocracy

    I jumped on the bandwagon and last night I watched a flick I haven’t seen in almost twenty years: Idocracy.

    And, boy, does that hit differently these days.

    You’ve seen the meme shitposting, no doubt. “Idocracy wasn’t an instruction manual, guys!” At least people are screaming it into the void on my social feeds as kind of the defacto answer to every other news article gurgling out of the fetid swamp of american politics these past couple months.

    I risk devolving into political rants here myself if I’m not careful.

    The crux of the film hinges on the opening sequence where—even before Luke Wilson and an almost unrecognizably vanilla Maya Rudolph (she’s really honed her vibe and her craft so well lately, don’t you agree) are hibernated into the grim and stupid future—two characters named in IMDB as simply “Yuppie Wife” and “Yuppie Husband” stand in for rational america opting to hold off having kids meanwhile the literal trailer-dwelling mouth-breather characters standing in for stupid america are breeding like its a race to the bottom.  There is no subtly or hinting that director Mike Judge sees some kind of devolution of humanity occuring by raw natural selection at work. Selection of the stupid by sheer overwhelming numbers.

    Jerry Springer eat your heart out (while may you rest in peace.)

    Fresh out of a biology undergrad and back when I first watched the flick back in 2006 or so I probably could have explained the genetics a little better, and maybe even argued against the premise using big science words. I wouldn’t be so lame these days. Satire as this was intended is meant to show us extremes… and extremes we are shown. 

    Spoiler: the dough-brained inhabitants of the remnants of twenty-sixth century america are watering their crops with off-brand gatoraid and wondering why there aint nuthin grownin. Plot ensues.

    Back in the twenty-first century real world we’re not quite living in idocracy, but the government seems to be filled with reality television personalities, irrational “i researched it mu-self” antivaxxers are arguing themselves into letting their own kids die of preventable diseases, and the stock market has become little more than a roulette wheel where the chips are crypto coins (that by the way are generally understood by the average person in a way best summed up by my father-in-law who legit asked me if he needed to download Minecraft to get started in bitcoin.)

    Idocracy is not an instruction manual indeed, guys.

    When it came out I laughed this goofball comedy off as ridiculous absurdist science fiction. Gawd, tho, if it didn’t hit like a sledgehammer smacking a warning gong when I watched it last night. Not an instruction manual, but satire-come-documentary of the moronic twenties perhaps.

  • media review: fallout

    Oh wow, I’m about a year late to the party but nothing says desperate for clicks like binge watching the latest streaming show and pumping out a ham-fisted review fifteen minutes later, huh?

    On the other hand, after my third playthrough of Fallout 4, dusting off the Fallout Shelter mini-game, and pondering if I would ever find anyone to play the Fallout TTRPG game I bought and for which I 3d-printed and painted a milkcrate full of minis, I finally settled into the couch to watch the streaming show starring Purnell and Goggins that debuted nearly a year ago now.

    If I still have to mention I am a bit of a Fallout fan here you haven’t been reading very carefully at all.

    And too, I’ll spare you the plot recap.

    There have been no shortage of universe-extending cross-over flicks and series this past decade or more. It used to be that video games were regarded as something of a culturally broke medium when it came to rich storytelling, so much so that I recall multiple times trying to justify playing them for story and citing the narrative complexity of titles like Final Fantasy VII and—um—maybe that was the only one there for a while. I’m sure there were more, but that was my go to. No, video games can tell complex stories and still be interesting as video games.

    Fallout, I do believe, started as a pretty bog standard franchise back in the first couple iterations, but the nuances of a retro-futuristic world of absurd atomic era fancies and frustrations was embraced with vigorous as more and better titles emerged. And some would argue with the release of Fallout 4 the series hit peak style, locking in a vibe and a backstory and a completeness of universe lore that exceeded even the higher bars for acheivement in this award category.

    I love Fallout. I will admit. The groove that it etches in your mind, a tragically optimistic juxtaposition of economic cynicism and techno-optimism. One is thrust into a world where war and corporate greed have been pushed to their very extremes, and where morality is blurred into a green and bloody smear as a result.

    It was with this sensibility locked into my skull that I pressed play on the television series. It had two jobs: mantain the vibe and tell an interesting story.

    A few minutes after I watched the end credits roll on the last episode of season one, I turned on my Playstation and loaded up Fallout 4. Again. The series had the energy of the game and I wanted to revisit the world, to spend a few more minutes poking around that crazy alternate universe. If that’s not a ringing endorsement of both, I don’t know what is.

  • technical shuffle

    For a guy who claims to be a strategic thinker and a web guru I sure did my own stuff in the wrong order.

    To be fair on myself this whole incorporating thing snuck up on me from around a corner and I’ve been adapting and reacting as best I can. And yesterday I found myself doing a whole pile of digital reorganizing as a result.

    I wanted to use this domain.

    Specifically, a while back I made 8r4d.com into my primary domain name. That is to say, while I own and manage about six domains at any given time, this one has been following me solidly through most of my career. When I opted to name my corporation along the same vein, I found myself needing to get some kind of corporate presence onto the top of it all.

    Problem is, I’ve been using it for other things.

    This blog, for one.  Plus I’ve got a whole load of homebrew projects running on various subdirectories and such. Also, the last thing I want is eight different wordpress installs running on the same server.

    My solution was a shuffle. I installed a fresh copy of wordpress at the top of everything, mucked around with my htaccess file to ensure the minimum amount of stuff broke, turned that same wordpress install into a multisite mode cms, migrated at least three of my websites into the new install as sub-sites (including this one which is running on a whole new installation today than it was when you read that post yesterday) and relinked up everything to seem pretty seamless. 

    I’m sure I’ll run into something quirky, but as it stands I now have a pretty robust setup to manage a corporate presence at the root of this domain and still keep all my little quirky hobby code running and managed.

    Y’know. In case you were wondering.

  • weekend wrap three

    How the heck is it already the middle of May? Didn’t we just do Christmas last week? I mean. C’mon!

    Next weekend is the long weekend, but this past few days have been a bit of a hectic hot mess. That’s okay, I guess. Everyone needs a hectic weekend here and there.

    This past weekend I…

    Alas, it is the week of the Big Show. The kid is performing as Rosie in her high school musical production of Mamma Mia starting tomorrow, so it’s been us doing late night pick ups at the theatre, transfers to other important things, and on and on and on.

    I met up with my former boss for lunch on Friday. It was pretty much the weekend for her. It started out as a chat message asking her if it was still cool I used her as a reference, and next thing I knew I was picking her up at her mechanic’s appointment and we were chowing down on a local Indian buffet.

    The upcoming show has us doing a few theatre parent chores, specifically we got put in charge of the concession, so it was off to Costco for our semi-annual visit and to score a bunch of concession-sized snacks to sell. Saturday morning is not the day for that, but our options were limited.

    This spun around and did a one-eighty and by mid-afternoon we were out in Sherwood Park at a dance competition. Oh, that’s right. In the middle of the high school main stage final week of rehearsals we still had dance choreography competitions to work around. Though the final sadness of it being her last ever didn’t ever really set in, what with the hectic hot mess and all.

    We stopped for dinner on the way home and it was… ok. Less ok for the price, but I’ll save that rant for another post.

    Mother’s day morning we made crepes before I rushed off to do my regular Sunday morning run club. Ten klicks sounds less impressive mid-spring when everyone else is training for marathons and such.

    We capped the mother’s day events off with a lap of the local dog park and a chill stroll in the masses and throngs with the same idea.

    Oh, and I paid for my business license. Woot. Excitement abounds.

    And that was that.

  • what’s in a name

    I have been inching towards some contracting work. Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed and in many ways I’m five steps ahead of myself here, but ultimately, all things being equal, my end game in this adventure is to start doing this kind of thing on the regular and actually get paid for it.

    I’ve officially taken a stab, and its an optimistic one, but if I’m being honest wih myself not even really a favourable one.

    That said, my guide on this adventure did politely inform me that if things proceeded to the next step I would need to do something much more than personal introspection: I would need to set up a business. Legit. Corporate registry, tax account number, bank account, government filing documents, legit.

    Not a big deal. It’s just time and money and effort. I can handle it.

    But what’s got me hung up is that when I do all that legit business stuff, I actually need to call myself something. I can’t just hang an Inc off my name and go from there. I need a business name.

    I wouldn’t say that I’ve been good at naming stuff, but I’ve certainly been prolific. I have registered dozens of domain names over the years and let nearly as many lapse, each a little project or business idea that I threw against the wall hoping it would stick. I have created funny and clever handles for social media accounts. I have given myself an artistic pen name and am currently writing a video game under a clever (and unregistered) studio name, though neither of those really encompass the tone of professionalism that I would hope to impart with a corporate registration name that someone would need to put on an invoice, you know?

    And is my way, I tend to trudge along with the bigger plan, ever forward, even while swatting at the air as it buzzes around me with these pesky little problems that need solving.

    What’s in a name? Everything, in many ways. 

    All those previous names I have mentioned were chosen to impart a sense of casual disconnectedness from my professional self, as odd as that might seem. I wanted to add a jagged edge to my art when I called myself “squwetchy” online for that. I used the name “pixelazy” for my photography for a while throwing a broad tone of just-a-guy-with-a-camera snapping photos into the digital ecosphere. My online coder-guy presense has always been wrapped in this very domain name “8r4d” a kind of throwback to the geekily trend of numeric hacker lingo that I secured in a domain name nearly a quarter century ago now. All of them are little slivers of me, but none are my professional self, and none of them convey a kind of marketable trust that even I would look at and go “let’s hire them…”

    So I have entered the realm of needing to tangle myself up with a very official, very long term, corporate identity. And I find myself thinking I may need to do that sooner than later. Even inching towards something might get you there eventually, right?