A Survivor Unclouded By Conscience

Today is Alien day; in the US, it's 4/26. As in LV-426, also known as Acheron, the ill-fated world that held Hadley's Hope colony.

So, today is the day that I choose to engage in the movie marathon. Running in chronological order, starting with Prometheus.

If I get as far as Alien 3, I'll be happy enough - Alien Resurrection isn't on deck for today. Maybe next week I will go into why I like that one the least.

What can I even say about the xenomorph that I haven't said before? It's beautiful in terms of how horrible it is. It's designed that way, and designed well.

It is unsettling - desperately unsettling. Its design and general body shape is close enough to human, but then takes several sharp left turns. The length of the head. The tail. The tentacle breathing tube things on its back. The way it moves around, which in the original 1979 classic was portrayed expertly by Bolaji Badejo, an artist and graphic designer who stood 6' 10" and could move like a monster. That secondary mouth - that horrible, awful secondary mouth.

You know what the worst thing is, though? I think?

No eyes.

You don't know how it hunts. You don't know how it sees you - but you know that it does. You know, because it knows where you are. Seemingly at all times. You can't run. You can't hide. It will find you. Sooner or later. You may hear it coming, but probably not. You don't see it until it wants you to see it.

There's certain books and comics in the expanded media that imply that the species can detect fear. Not just the secondary effects of that fear, but actually simply sense it. Which is useful if you are this kind of ultra-predator.

It is pure lethality. It is a distilled nightmare, the end result of both creation and evolution - first one and then the other and then the first one all over again. A pure killer.

One of the scariest things I had ever seen in my life, the first time I saw it, which was way younger than I really should have been. For a week I had nightmares - but then I stopped being afraid of the dark. I quite like it, now.

There was nothing quite like it, when it first came about in 1979. Then it was expanded in 1986 - because over and above the individual ant that caused so much damage on the Nostromo, we find the unity of the hive - and this hive has a queen. You thought the first one was bad? This one is smart. Maybe smarter than you. She can communicate mentally with her children, and she needs you to be their food as well as their crib.

The queen of Hell.

And why does this evil object exist? Why does this ultra-predator plague the universe? Why, specifically, does this branch of the hydra-like potential of the Engineer's black bioweapon plague humanity?

Because of Peter fucking Weyland and his stupid fucking quest to be a god, and the synthetic madman that he made to get him there.

Literally, a manifestation of our hubris and our greed, over and over again.

Appropriate.

Happy Alien Day.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Heartwarming - But A Warning

I've spoken about charity before now, right over here. tl;dr - I argued that, if a government could be trusted, that centralised charity fundraising and spending would be better than 166,000 charities that currently exist in the UK. That was back in November 2018.

Who could have known that, just over a year later, the beginnings of a pandemic that would literally redefine all of our lives would begin in another part of the world?

I digress, we'll come back to that.

This is Captain Tom Moore.

He was born on 30th April 1920, in Keighley in Yorkshire. That's near Bradford - I'd been through there myself in my college days, I think. He went through officer training school, fought in the Second World War as part of the 145th Regiment Royal Armoured Corps and - later - the 146th Regiment Royal Armoured Corps. After the war, he became an instructor at the Armoured Fighting Vehicle School at Bovington - yes, where the Tank Museum is now (and also Monkey World). He was awarded several medals, including the Burma Star, and he used to race motorbikes.

That probably isn't what most of you know this chap for, though.

Let me get you a more recent picture.

Captain Tom is currently raising funds for the NHS; he is walking the length of his garden - 25 meters - a hundred times before his hundredth birthday, which as of the writing of this blog will be in a week and a half. Having actually hit his goal, he says he will keep going, to raise further funds for the NHS.

Not that he has done terribly badly in terms of what he has raised already, literally at time of typing.

Yes, that is damn near £26 million. Quite a feat, for a man of 99 years of age, and a heartwarming and timely reminder that the people of this country are a giving and kind people, for the most part. You can hear it, every Thursday evening, if you listen: people applauding the workers of the NHS, for putting themselves at risk constantly, to save the rest of us.

But.

Why does a man who is almost a hundred years old have to walk over two and a half kilometres - that's a mile and a half in old money - to help fund our National Health Service?

See, I understand. We see what this guy is doing and it is a selfless and beautiful and courageous thing. He is doing something for the national good, and achieving something; but he is doing it because a need has been created and he is answering that need.

That need has been created by mismanagement and malice.

Look at your last payslip.

You should see an entry on there for National Insurance Contributions. Now, below a certain threshold, you don't pay anything toward it. Above a certain threshold, you pay a percentage on the amount you earn above that threshold. It's a somewhat progressive tax in terms of rate, though I would argue far more progressive in what it provides. Employers pay a contribution to National Insurance as well, which is frankly very smart - if your workforce has access to healthcare, you have a healthier workforce. Shepherds tending their flocks, hmm?

In 2018/2019, NI Contributions totalled around £136 billion. For scale - the NHS budget for 2017/2018 was £124 billion, out of a total of £808 billion spent by the government that year.

And yet, the NHS is underfunded. It isn't sufficiently resourced to provide the service it is expected to. In 2017, Chris Hopson - the chief exec of NHS Providers - stated plainly that, while funding had increased by 1.3%, demand had increased by 5%. Calls for further funding have been repeatedly made since 2010, and obviously, totally ignored.

Even when it is made patently obvious that changes need to be made, that improvements must be made, in order to prevent something awful happening. Like Exercise Cygnus in 2016, which wasn't widely reported on at the time, but that you can read about here. Spoilers - not good. I'll come back to that.

The NHS is not ring-fenced away from cuts to front-line services, which have been a feature of governmental policy for a decade. It is under constant pressure to reduce costs, to operate within a restricted budget put upon it by outside, while dealing with an increased need for its services. It was being set up to fail long before now.

Why would that be the case?

Well, the list of former and current MPs that have ties to private healthcare include - but are not limited to - Boris Johnson (current Prime Minister), David Cameron (former Prime Minister), Matt Hancock (current Health Secretary), Jeremy Hunt (former Health Secretary), Andrew Lansley (also former Health Secretary), Gavin Williamson (Education Secretary), Sajid Javid (former Chancellor of the Exchequer), Jacob Rees-Mogg ("Leader" of the House of Commons), to name but a few.

Before the pandemic ever hit, our government was stacked with individuals who had the means to make the NHS fail and were receiving money or had literal business ties to groups that would profit from that happening. Here's some sources on that, here, and here.

Not ideal. Especially when they frame that deliberate reduction in funding as "giving hard-working people back some money," as Sajid Javid did here, while he was still Chancellor.

Now, what was it I was saying about Exercise Cygnus? Oh, right - the results of it were supressed because it went so badly, and have only started to come out now as the current pandemic really starts to hit home.

The strategy to counter a pandemic wasn't implemented. It was clear from the exercise that we would need more ventilators. So obviously the government didn't accept the EU's invitation to their own ventilator programme - there was some kind of communication error, apparently, and it definitely wasn't deliberate because to go cap-in-hand to the EU would make them look like idiots - and instead went to James Dyson, Brexiteer who recently started moving his operations into the EU. That isn't going very well, really. So. Everything that you would expect.

The NHS was already deliberately starved and depleted. It was already hurting, before Covid-19 reared its head. Our government's response was too slow - way too slow - and frankly absolutely callous. A combination of mismanagement and malice, as previously stated.

That is why Captain Tom has walked so far; that is why he has raised so much.

Do not forget.

Yes: it is heartwarming. Yes: it is brave. Yes: it is kind. But it is happening because of deliberate actions, undertaken by individuals who had the power to respond to this crisis long before it actually bit down.

Later, they will attempt to control the narrative.

Once it is over - once we are allowed out of our homes, and we are hugging in the street, and relieved it is over, and that the bodies aren't piling up any more - it will begin. The gaslighting. The spin. The rhetoric.

You will, of course, have the people that say it wasn't as bad as everyone said it would be, and that we worried over nothing. Because the measures undertaken prevented the worst possible result, the worst possible result apparently couldn't have happened. We all know at least one person like this. They also think that Y2K never happened, not because of the countless hours of unforgiving work that people put in to prevent the emergency, but because it wasn't going to happen anyway. Basic ignorance, but what can you do. They aren't going to be the real issue.

The real issue will come from those who know that they made decisions that killed tens of thousands and put the rest of us at risk - to protect their ideology, to protect their investments, to push their agenda. To make the money happy. To look like they were right all along. To grab what they can and get out before the axe comes down.

They will point at people like Captain Tom, and at the many other charitable donations that are being made, and they will say, with a straight face and with totally soulless eyes: This proves that the NHS doesn't work. This proves that it must be replaced. They will hope to erase themselves as the source of erosion, and paint themselves as the saviours of the nation, by selling out our healthcare to private companies that have been lining their pockets for decades.

Be ready. It will happen. It is, in part, already happening: Matt Hancock, current Health Secretary, literally blaming NHS staff for the lack of PPE that it is his department's job to provide. Very quick to point a finger there, Matt. Why, what have you been doing? What magic trick will you seek to perform, to prove that you know better, to prove that you can do this job?

Oh, you made a little badge for the social care sector.

A badge that they actually have to buy. They have to pay money to wear this poxy little badge that you have made. No equipment, no allocation of funds for protective gear or respirators, no pay rises, no actual recognition, no help, no hope. Just a badge, that you are charging them to wear.

I think that says it all.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Some Casual Banter

Lacking any further inspiration I decided to do a casual ask of what people would want me to talk about - not a full blown Reader's Requests, but more of a... Pals Postulate?

I got some good ones.

The first one, though...

See I could have gone my entire life not knowing this existed. And then it was brought to my attention by the birthday boy - happy birthday Chris by the way - and now I have to acknowledge its existence, and so do you.

Thanks, r/crappyoffbrands - I guess.

Random Acts of Kindness :) - See, this is nice. This is real nice. Random acts of kindness are great. When the current state of the world is so cruel - and I am not looking at anyone in particular, but the government doesn't help (pick one, any one) - the kindness of strangers can be that little thing that makes your day. So a challenge for all my readers: be kind to someone you don't know in the next week. In a small way. Just try it. In whatever way you can, given our current pandemic scenario.

One thing that has made you happy (or smile) today. - This image of my villager in Animal Crossing surrounded by ill-gotten wealth.

Self isolation self care - Christ, uh. ...I don't know. ...do the things you need to do, don't be too hard on yourself if you don't or can't. Be kind to yourself. That's the important thing. Try and do something each day that you want to. Don't beat on yourself because of the state of the world. It's not your fault, and it is going to affect your mental state. Specifically if you are tired and lacking a creative spark, that's a trauma response. You can't just "oh well bugger it" your way through that. Be kind to yourself.

Favorite piece(s) of escapist fiction. - I find myself going through and reading comics and books that I already know, at times. Like I'll go back and read Lovecraft or Rising Stars or similar. I like watching movies I am familiar with, too, or chortling through old MST3K episodes. Remember that cheesy movie from the 80s/90s that is awful but that you kind of like? Bang THAT on. I like stuff like Empire Records, or Blues Brothers. Something with good music is a must.

Gardening (my potatos just started sprouting!) - I am AWFUL at gardening, which is probably no end of shame to my mother. Physically incapable of engaging in it for more than two minutes at a time, I don't know my Gardenias from my Chrysanthemums, I could probably keep a cactus alive but that's only fifty fifty... but I'm glad you are having success! Especially with potato - one of my favourite things ever.

Concellation, how to get over con cancellation blues - ...see... I have difficulty with this because I find myself having to cancel so much myself. Have done for years. It sucks. I don't really have an answer for it; not a good one, anyway. In the end I had to dial back my expectations of things I could do, health and budget considering. Though the thing that I would probably comfort myself with, over the current crop of con cancels and event cancels and stuff - I could use the money I was spending on that to, when isolation has been over for a week or so, rent a house for a weekend with the people I was gonna see at Con and have a RIOTOUS party. This shit WILL end, and when it does, it's going to be so sweet.

Having more time on ones hands, but suffering even more lethargy while everyone else seems to be learning new skills or doing fabulous buildy things. - Ah, two fallacies to defeat here. One: Not everyone else is doing fabulous amazing things or learning stuff. Sure, some people are, but a lot of people aren't, and - honestly, some people are just like that. They always have something going on. Two: You aren't a worse person because you aren't doing that shit. Everyone is on low ebb and low energy right now. We as a nation - as a SPECIES - are currently undergoing a combination of anxiety and depression brought on by external factors. As someone that suffers from both of those on a daily basis and has done since for over two decades, not being able to learn Italian when you are afraid for the health of those you care about and crushed by the state of the world isn't a crime, it's normal. Focus on what makes you feel better and helps you cope, not what other people are doing.

Glad it's not just me - See above.

Isolation meme's - I haven't really kept on top of these but I will present a couple below that I liked.

"This Is Us", An Article In The Washington Post - Yeah. Like I read this and just nodded the entire way through. I am very privileged insofar as my mixed race hasn't led to any actual problems in my life, really. But this is just... yeah. Accurate.

Favourite toy lines and when they bringing em back - Gawd. M.A.S.K., Jayce & The Wheeled Warriors, Centurions, Starcom, Transformers - all of those NEED bringing back, aside from Transformers, which only had a lull and never really went away. The current line is frankly amazing compared to G1.

Question people lack of commitment to Sparkle Motion. -

What is it about your 20's that screams, ' itll never happen to me/mine"? - Hate to say it but that isn't a 20s thing, that is a people thing. It's across the entire generational spectrum, even if it is mostly prevalent in your childhood years and bleeds out when you hit your mid-20s (because by then it HAS happened to you or yours). The majority of people fucking about in this current climate of nonsense are certainly old enough to know better. Most of the 20 year olds have been told they are essential and forced to risk their lives with no pay rise or protective equipment. They are keenly aware it may happen to them. They just don't get a choice - it is that or be made homeless and starve.

Isolation.... People who live alone in isolation.... How to cope and not go mental in isolation... - I count myself lucky insofar as I cope with being alone really well - I like my own company. I know other people that aren't so lucky. I don't really know the answer to this, aside from trying to make sure you stay in electronic contact with the people that you can. I know it isn't much, but it's way too easy to slip into not doing that, too, so keep it up. Voice-call people that you know would be okay with talking. Play games with folks. Download Virtual Tabletop, pay cards with folks. That's about all I got... oh, and listen to music literally as much as you can.

Best ways to represent passage of time in movies/series. - Okay, there's a lot of good entries for this one. But for propriety, I am picking Red Dwarf, Season 5, Episode 4...  Quarantine. When Lister is marking up the days on the chart, and turns around, with a fucking great black eye, looking awful. That's all of us right now.

Something light maybe - a list of the cutest baby animals?? The best reasons for day drinking? Ways to show you love someone? Most uplifting music of the last 3 decades? - The cutest baby animal is a Skunk, there is no contest, though raccoons and pigs are close. The best reason for day drinking is the song Never Forget You by the Noisettes. Lots of way to show someone you love them, all sorts of kinds of ways - touches, words, sharing music, gifts, thoughtfulness. All sorts of ways. The most uplifting music of the last 3 decades is a hard one but have some Hozier, because this song is amazing.

Eddie vs Thor - I think that given who asked me this, this is the Eddie vs Thor that you are talking about. But instead I am going to deal with Eddie Brock vs Thor, God Of Thunder. Thor wins that fight because Eddie Brock is a journalist and Thor is the God Of Thunder.

And now a personal statement.

My people. We can get through this. I know it sucks, right now. It does. But we can do this, and there might just be a better place waiting for us afterwards.

If any of you need me, drop me one. I'm here.

...also if any of your friends have patreons or kofi accounts or are selling art, take them up on it. We're all hurting right now.

Yes, that was a cheap plug.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

We Manufacture Those, By The Way

If there's one thing the movies of the late seventies through early nineties taught us - especially sci fi and horror movies - it's that we know exactly where humanity's enemies live.

No, not this one.

"But John," I hear you cry. I hear you because we're in space, and everyone can hear you scream. "But John. The bad guy in this movie is the aliens! Or the people that made the aliens! Or Ian Holm! Or humanity itself!"

A likely story.

So a little background. This is stuff that, if you like the Alien movies but you don't like Prometheus, you might have missed - but it quite cleverly frames how the entire universe came to be the way it did, and why things are done the way they are done.

This is Peter Weyland.

Yes, I am using his old-man picture, rather than the dashing flashbacks we are treated to in the TedTalk spinoff video and in the beginning of Alien Covenant.

So - we all remember the beginning of Alien, when the crew all wake up in those sleeping pods, blinking sleep out of their eyes, finding out where they are, how long they have been out. We remember Aliens, wherein Ripley's pod is discovered drifting in space, and she is all safe and secure inside.

Those sleepers exist because of Peter Weyland, because Peter Weyland had two wishes: 1) to live forever and 2) to meet the beings that made mankind. Literally, the technology was developed for him, and in part by him, to allow him to survive long enough to make this happen. This is because Peter Weyland - founder of Weyland Corporation - has a god complex, further shored up by him being obscenely wealthy.

He made his OWN life, obviously. The Weyland line of android synthetics, beginning with David. Why wouldn't a man believe he was god if he could create his very own servant underclass that was expected to be superior in skill and capability but inferior in power and importance?

And in part, Weyland's quest for those creators - that he fully believed existed - led to a colonisation program that spread mankind across the stars.

Of course we are perhaps more familiar with the merged company, Weyland-Yutani.

While the first AvP film features one of Peter Weyland's predecessors, the second (vastly inferior) AvP film features one Ms. Yutani, of Yutani Corporation - who takes possession of a piece of Predator technology. While the Alien vs Predator movies are of questionable quality, they do actually thread reasonably well into the canon of the rest of the movies (with the potential exception of Predator from 2018, which I haven't actually seen yet - perhaps I ought to change that tonight).

It can be inferred from the actions of the company during the movies that it is aware of both the Yautja (Predators) and the Xenomorphs by the time of the events of Alien. So it almost certainly knows just how dangerous interfering with beings like them can really be.

The company, of course, doesn't care.

In a world wherein you have multiple classes of people - and the Alien universe is one such universe, just look at how the shares are divided between the crew (half shares for the engineers, full shares for the people wearing uniform) - then one of the dynamics that comes about is risks taken being pushed downwards. It's why, when the stock market crashes, regular people suffer quite a lot. It's why, when a business goes under, the workers all get laid off and their pensions get raided, but the owner got to leave two weeks ago with a nice golden handshake.

If there's a catastrophic failure somewhere, it is always someone else putting in the work and taking the actual risk, so it will always be someone else that takes the fall.

So of course, Weyland-Yutani wants the creature. It wants everything it can get. Corporate culture has bred several layers of corporate individual who will do just about anything to gain a promotion or favour within the ranks, has been doing so since the mid-1980s. There's no end of individuals that will overlook the regulations, morals, laws, anything, in order to get a bigger cut of a pie - or a whole pie of their own.

There's always a Carter Burke.

Weyland-Yutani are the real bad guys. Without the immense hubris of Peter Weyland, none of this would have happened. Without a culture that we have cultivated as a society for almost forty years, shored up at every angle by individuals sympathetic to it and people defending it because it might one day profit them.

One of humanity's greatest enemies wears a suit, has an office, and talks about people dying as "collateral" and "PR".

Art imitates life.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

And The Ninja Is A Theoretical Physicist

I can't remember how long ago it was that someone introduced me to Ninja Sex Party, but it was a fairly long time ago. I had just started playing my favourite Pathfinder character ever so I think, about, nine years ago.

There's this band called Ninja Sex Party, right. And there's two people in the band - and one of them is called Ninja Brian, and he's a theoretical physicist, and the other guy is called Danny Sexbang, and this is one of their songs, it's called Dinosaur Laser Fight.

Okay, I say, and watch and listen.

Right.

Puerile? Yes. Nonsense? Yes. Infectious. Funny. Suspiciously packed with actual musicality, despite it clearly being a joke.

I must learn more.

I do learn more.

This is them.

Right?

Okay so their style is kind of poppy sexy funny haha whatever - but as I mentioned before. There's some genuine talent in here. Like Danny Sexbang (right, obviously) isn't just some guy laughing at his inability to last more than 180 seconds in sexual intimacy. He's an accomplished vocalist. He has a great voice, you KNOW I like great voices.

I only find out later that he's Daniel Avidan, of Game Grumps. But that's another story.

More and more, as their career as musicians progress, the music side of things comes to the fore. They fall in with a band named Tupperware Remix Party, who are futuristic superheroes from the planet funk (obviously). TWRP became NSP's backing band in 2015. They release cover albums - three of them so far - and those cover albums contain a wide selection of genuinely good stuff. Like, here's the NSP cover of Photograph by Def Leppard.

Right?

They don't work in isolation, either - Danny does vocal spots in a bunch of other songs. Ninja Sex Party plus Arin Hanson (internet shouter and animator) form a band called Starbomb that do a lot of video game parody stuff; Arin appeared as a vocalist on a TWRP track which also featured The Protomen (ALSO awesome), called Phantom Racer.

Danny gave vocals to this song by a band called Night Runner, called Magnum Bullets, which I have listened to once a day since this video came out.

Which...well where is this all leading me?

To my favourite Ninja Sex Party song, which is called, First Date.

Now if you go back and listen to the very FIRST NSP song I linked at the beginning here - you listen to that, and then... come and listen to this.

Just the sheer improvement between the two - the sheer development and evolution of the sound - you can't ignore it. Dinosaur Laser Fight is a fun bouncy rock-pop song about dinosaurs. First Date sounds like it could actually be a full-blown 80s style single release.

So the content of the song is still fun and jokey but it's less about penis jokes and the strange creature that stalks the band and tries to kill them. It's not the lyrics that matter so much. It's the melody, it's the instrumentation. It soars. It uplifts. It feels like driving with the top down. It feels like being Young And Alive, just like the song says.

It's great. It's feel-good. Danny gets to stretch his legs, vocally...

...and there is one part that I absolutely adore, that is probably not worth getting as worked up over as I do. But you all know I love a key change right?

"Let's kill five guys tonight! We'll share a cherry cola while we blast a savage drive-by!"

...key changes UP to the natural escalation of...

"Let's kill ten guys tonight! ...you know what, first date, let's pump the brakes on the murders..."

...then key changes back DOWN to...

"Let's kill five guys tonight! I'll take you back to your place and we'll craft a perfect alibi!"

And you don't get just how happy that makes me, how much that made me laugh the first time I heard it.

I have an entire playlist of songs on Spotify that makes me smile like an idiot, here it is.

This is one of them.

Just an excuse for me to prattle about some music I like, because, why not?

I know that right now everyone is getting hit pretty hard by the lockdown, and the pandemic causing it. We're all hurting. Look after each other.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Taking A Minute

I don't think I need to elucidate the ways in which we are currently experiencing... let's call it stress, as a people as a whole.

And what a year it has been, right? Like this whole virus has been simmering away while all sorts of other shit happens and then - well, then came the spikes. And now it's all that we have going on, because it has swept a hand across our expectations and our plans.

Which is odd for people like me who had problems with plans and expectations in the first place, but I digress.

A significant proportion of people have been told to stay home - either no-access or encouraged to stay there as much as is practical. Of course there's certain sectors where people still have to go out, and I have huge respect for them. And there's certain areas wherein people are just going out and doing whatever they want anyway, because there always is, but the less said about that...

So. A lot of people's social interactions and leisure time, significantly cut down. Folks stuck indoors.

And into this perfect storm of the UK going from "it will be fine" to "rationing is probable..."

...steps this little crew of goombas.

What timing.

Games. I talk about gaming a lot. How it can be a help, or a hindrance. In times like this, though - in times where people feel like they are cut off, need something to focus on that isn't the news or what is going on outside - what better time?

Especially something that rewards social play like Animal Crossing New Horizons does.

I haven't seen such an outpouring of people getting together, exchanging details, playing together, just generally having fun since the Summer of Pokemon Go. It's that, but inverted, but also kind of not. Because we're playing this - we're all doing this - and we're enjoying it, and we want everyone else to enjoy it too. For once we aren't yelling at each other about bad games or shitty takes. We're just having a nice time, which is what we all need.

It's a way to stay in touch, too. A way to be doing something other than staring at our navels and swapping text messages. I mean that's good, we should be messaging - but isn't it more fun if you can also send your friends a squid or a fruit they don't already have?

I mean, if you really need something to help handle stress that isn't so sunny or social... maybe you are more interested in what this chap has to say.

What a weekend.

Even more than that, though, we're seeing people pull together in online communities. People forming and joining groups, en masse. People livestreaming things. Bands streaming concerts - the Dropkick Murphys streamed an entire gig on St Patrick's Day. I was invited to a group called Concellation, which is where all the folks who regularly attend a bunch of conventions that are now cancelled hang out.

My RPG gamers are taking to online services like Roll20 and Discord, because we still want to roll the dice. We have so many means by which we can take the things we enjoy and move them online that we are almost spoiled for choice, and all we need is the will to do it.

Which is, in its way, really wholesome.

It's a time of uncertainty. That's the worst thing. The uncertainty. All of a sudden, people that don't usually struggle with anxiety or depression are almost being forced to experience the symptoms. All of a sudden, people that don't have conditions that would force them to be housebound are indeed housebound.

We're finding our way, though - and I admit to feeling a certain amount of relief... and maybe hope? ...that the solutions to a lot of the problems we face as nations rather than as individuals seem to lean heavily to the left of the spectrum.

Maybe some lessons will be learned. Maybe there will be the political drive and push to provide a safety net for people, despite it being an affront to conservative tendencies. Maybe people will remember that the solutions to these problems didn't come from letting people die en mass because they couldn't afford private care but by doing the best we could to provide for everyone.

Maybe I can hang onto that optimism, for a little while.

In the meantime: I have cherries to pick.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Ones That Make It

A lot of you may be familiar with this particular graphic, but if you aren't, let me walk you through it.

World War II was - as with many other wars - fought by numbers. Statistical analysis was very important in the planning phases of most operations over a specific scale, and in the provision of weaponry and equipment. It was a war won as much by the production line and the numbers game there, as it was the actual combat.

As strategic bombing became more and more important, and the wave method of bombing in particular, many studies were done into this particularly high-attrition method of conducting warfare.

The graphic above is based on hypothetical data, and is the bullet spread observed on returning bombers.

It was theorised by those who made the decisions that - if that is where the bullets are hitting the plane, then we up-armour those bits of the plane, yes? I mean that's a good conclusion, given the data available. 

Enter Abraham Wald.

Wald was from Cluj in Transylvania - that's Austria-Hungary, now Romania to you. He was a mathematical genius who was prevented from gaining any position in a university due to Austria's institutional antisemitism - and when Hitler's Germany came calling in 1938 he and his family fled to America.

Wald took a look at the data and stated that the proposed action was bullshit, and when asked why, he pointed out the data that had been acquired.

Where were the hits to the cockpit? The engines? The leading edges of the wings? How is it possible that the (at the time) highly trained and competent Luftwaffe pilots weren't hitting those? The answer is simple, and if you haven't got it by this point, you'll want to kick yourself:

The data was taken only from the planes that made it back.

In an alternate timeline, Wald never made it out of Austria - either he didn't make it out before the Nazis showed up or he was refused entry into the US for whatever stupid reason. So nobody noticed this particular point, planes were built differently, they got shot down more, and the war slowly, steadily shifted toward a potentially different result.

That is an example of what we call Survivorship Bias.

If ten people go into a situation, they all try the same method to get out, and only one of them makes it - to that person, this method worked. Because this is the person that came back to tell the story of how their method did the job and saved their life in the situation in question.

When people talk about how something was tough, but they made it through okay - well, great, but how many people made it with them? When someone brings up the Blitz Spirit, and carrying on with a stiff upper lip - well the Blitz Spirit didn't work out for the 40,000 people that died and the hundreds of thousands that lost their homes and livelihoods in London alone. Just shutting up and putting up gets people killed, in a lot of situations. Just those that aren't affected tend to shrug their shoulders and say: well, not ME.

If you take a thousand people, at birth; and you provide one of those thousand people with the privileges and good fortunes of a stable part of a country, supportive parents with a significant income that will let them take risks and push them into better academic and professional circles; then they will almost certainly, at some point, talk at length about how they started with nothing and how with some hard work and some graft, ANYONE could do it.

There's a statistic that claims that as you age, you become more conservative. There's another statistic that claims that people who own horses live longer than people who don't. Both of these are probably true, but miss out on two key points: that the greater your income or wealth, the more conservative you lean - and the greater your income, the better healthcare you can afford, leading directly to an extended lifespan.

Whenever presented with statistics, always query where they are from, how they were gathered, what might have been missed. Query what they are being used to prove and how that proof could be reinforced by - for example - asking a smaller sample size, or asking customers of a specific site or store. You might not want to believe a publication if they claim that 80% of people on earth believe the Earth is flat, if the magazine is Flat Earth Monthly, and they asked 200 of their own readers.

Oh yeah, and - if the xenophobes and the antisemites had their way - there'd have been a lot more downed bombers.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.