5jul2026

So, at last, I think I can post the assortment of linkies I've been wanting to clear off my screen for the past little while.

Because both f2tE and the wizard are awesome, they each (unbenknownst to the other) contacted someone on the local giveaway board that yes, they would like free Breyers, figuring that I would want them. Johnny-on-the-spot F2 immediately got half of them, and then, when the three people between their responses failed to pick up the second lot, the wizard was awarded those, which I happily walked over in 100+ heat index heat to pick up:)

Now I have lots of old horsies to paint, and while scrolling through old intros (yeah, I know, rereading one's own blog is the height of hubris, but sometimes my energy levels are very low indeed), stumbled across some linkies for model horse painting. Welp, that was still good, and plus I found more. Here are some resources:

• Daisy Stalls is transitioning to 3D printing models for others to paint, but her wonderful Japan-inspired fantasy is still up, and still fabulous. (I was pretty impressed with her tiny kanji on the furin paper tag, though I might've been tempted to make the maple leaves green (or a more purple red) to emphasize the otherwise summer (as opposed to fall, which is literally called red in Japanese) theme—I hang my furin year round, but they're really more of a summer thing:) Like, associated with the punishingly hot temps we are, in fact, currently experiencing.)
• Dee Jay Bee studios has also been doing some incredible work, especially the magnificent Enigma: yeah, this is where Breyer model horses join the fancier, artsy-fartsy doll making community with really expressive, personal and deeply heartfelt pieces
• Daisy & DJB are so good they're intimidating, so I was kind of heartened by MouseDeer studios (and is that not the cutest?) who has only two videos up, one of which is titled, I made this pony—and burnt him. Unlike the other two, who do what is called extreme customs, this artist starts from scratch, with a wire armature, and despite her being a newcomer to youtube, she's clearly very knowledgeable about horses, casually describing their anatomy, the conformation of the feral horses she chose as her model, and mentioning offhand that dapples tend to show up in areas of high vascularization, such as the flanks and belly (also in TIL, the ‘flank’ of a horse is not its hindquarters, but the underside part where the hind legs join the body). Her approach, both in sculpting and painting, is significantly different from the other two, but the outcome is still great; in other words, there's room for personal expression, even if one's technique is still relatively in the beginner stage.

Also, one of these youtubers referenced several doll artists w/r/t techniques, (and I failed to grab the links, but I imagine I'll rewatch these three videos again when I'm actually ready to start). The last round of this project was when my sister gave me her breyers 2–3 years ago: I made a cardboard spray booth for my hood and purchased some apoxy and paint, and got as far as sanding down some seams; this time I ganked a bunch of photos of a what looked like a suitably fun but not too difficult horse—a buckskin pinto with some very subtle dappling that the owner had lots of shots of, so I was able to get the front of the head, closeups of the eyes and ears (& muzzle), plus the usual body shots from a variety of angles. All of the modelers above discuss how photo reference is an absolute must, and oh my goodness, once you start looking there is a lot going on even in a relatively “simple” coat—occasional dark hairs around the eyes, ghosting on the margins of the pinto marking, black on one knee between the white and dun markings, aforementioned dapples on the shoulders, plus all these things shift from photo to photo—there's a reason working from life can sometimes be so much easier, but alas, getting flower pix refs is much easier for me than horsies:)

4jul2026

Happy 4th July to those of you into that—I can't say I am, much, this year. Some of the olds I read online are rather nostalgic, comparing this 250th to 1976, and yes, I'm old enough to remember that; our state won the license plate contest with what I myself also consider the best bicentennial design, and of course that's also when the mint started issueing bicentennial quarters, kicking off this whole themed coinage, which is awfully nice for the coin collectors, and why not? We've been doing fancy stamps for years, and I love that the post office does all different designs—it's fun!

Frankly that, and the excitement over the tall ships—because my parents were sailors, that resonated a bit—is all I really remember of 1976, though I have a vague sense of a lot of flag-inspired merch that I more or less appreciated. I was gonna try and do some flag inspired art, and even took reference photos yesterday, but I doubt I'll have the time, so I've dug out this lighthouse photo instead.

Lighthouses are hardly peculiar to the US—they go back to ancient times—but growing up in and amongst the great lakes, they are part of that historical nostalgia, and this one, at least, is in patriotic colours.

But onto the linkies.

Once again, I think I'll only have space for one, Rowan Ellis’ long form youtube essay on boredom. I don't want to spoil her essay, which for me was full of twists and turns, but one bit she was very excited (& that I would be) to try was a sensory deprivation tank: I live in a small town, and one of my sorrows is that at night I always heard distant traffic, which—sometimes, if I were very, very lucky—would calm enough at 3 in the morning that I would just hear the crickets, wind, or rain that I like. Then about a decade or so, the local uni enlarged their power plant and now I pretty much always hear that at night, it drowns out even the traffic noise.

And then there's the light pollution from the neighbors, which waxes and wanes as differing people move in and out. One of the reasons I love camping in remote areas, despite insects, lack of running water or even toilets (I was grousing about the latest trip, in which we had to pack out all the toilet paper, and the wizard reminded me I should consider myself thankful we didn't have to pack out our poop) is the attendant lack of noise pollution.

I'm bored relatively seldom, so long as I have adequate light, space, quiet and art supplies—and the energy and attention to do something with them. Ms Ellis claims her ADHD inclines her to easy boredom and restlessness; I (probably) have AuAHD, and can happily spend hours journalling or doodling, mostly because I can adjust the difficulty level to what energy I can bring to the activity.

Other disciplines, such as drawing, bead-making or traditional Japanese embroidery, that have a (relatively) higher minimum effort level (for me, anyway) I may often want to do but can't, most often because I failed to get enough sleep or am anxious about other time sensitive tasks I feel I should do first (e.g. watering the garden, financial record keeping).

Ellis’ sensory deprivation tank experience did not go well, for a reason I should have predicted, and felt badly that I did not: she has chronic pain, and distraction with relatively low stakes engagement—instagram, in my case—is one way to manage it. When I feel too tired to make even easy art, once again, I'm doing sudoku or looking at insta, because if I can't make art, at least I can enjoy other folks making art (or music, or helping homeless kittens, or showing kinder ways to treat their pets) —IOW, people being good: sharing their knowledge, helping the less fortunate, even just exuding joy.

Chronic pain (if poison ivy rashes are a fair comparison) is a drain on resource management, sort of like being poked with a pin (with, depending on the level of pain, at varying depths) at periodic intervals, which needless to say destroys your attention, and therefore, ability to do tasks that require intense concentration. Ditto, lack of sleep, there's simply not the depth of attention to draw upon. Anxiety over circumstances, also a drain on attention. People with chronic pain or fatigue (or anxiety), therefore, are gonna have to make do with low-quality distractions like their phones or casual games, not because they're crappy humans who can't be bothered to put the damn phone down, but because it's an effective and accessible tool for managing discomfort.

Extend that to other kinds of pain—such as a crappy environment or a lousy political situation—et voila, why people turn to maladapative behaviours. Those strategies may not be ideal, but likely are what's available. And with that said, why yes, given the dumpster fire the current administration is imposing upon all of us (to admittedly varying degrees) the best I can do for the holiday is shrug my shoulders and say, well, here's a rather pretty lighthouse.

(I know some people are getting their jollies laughing at the green reflecting pool or the pathetic ‘world's fair’ [& good on them—I expect a Randy Rainbow on these fiascos any day now], but aside from grinding my teeth over the millions wasted [I know, I know, not as bad the billions wasted on the assorted half-assed wars...] I can't help but fret over the latest plague going ’round our food supply cuz the administration cut the funding for monitoring & controlling such.)

So, have a maritime symbol of hope and care for sailors, instead.

3jul2026

Ooooo, linkies.

(One linkie. It got really long. More linkies next time!)

Between the heat wave, some truly aggravating poison ivy rash (just because my prior protocols with brushes in the past have been effective doesn't mean they were sufficient for 4 straight hours’ weeding—I highly recommend researching balls-to-the-wall levels of prevention if you attempt this!), wonky electrical service (to the point I couldn't run two concentrators at once, which proved not much an issue anyway since a) lampworking with rashes on one's wrists is kinda uncomfortable, and also, the concentrators themselves aren't too keen on running during a heat wave, never mind the would be lampworkers) I've been rather cranky and unproductive.

So while there are plenty of things I should be doing, at this point, I'm settling for what I can do—this rash has probably been the closest experience I've had to someone experiencing chronic pain—new rashes keep popping up, despite many washings, both of myself and every piece of fabric that could've possibly had urushiol rubbed onto it; the old ones are slow to heal, and while I have faith that eventually I'll get rid of the poison ivy symptoms, I have a better understanding (on a visceral level, I mean) why chronic-pain sufferers would try anything to cope, especially when one can't help wondering when it's gonna finally end (& I know mine will, a luxury many chronic pain sufferers don't have)—and my issue is not even especially bad; I'd say it's on the level of annoying.

So there's been a fair amount of pintrest, insta and youtube watching, mostly to distract myself from the itching and heat while I wait for conditions to allow for a more productive use of my time. Or, via Slate's agony aunt (advice) columns, reading this essay one of the columnists recommended as clarifying their thought processes, about Gauguin and being a great artist his authentic self by Daniel Callcut.

Gauguin's work fascinates me, and I mean that literally: I don't really like it, but I can't look away, because his colour combos, especially of his Tahitian women, are strange and intriguing. But as you dig deeper into his history those paintings front a more and more horrifying history: to start, Gauguin famously deserted his wife and children; then, leaning on the power imbalance between his white colonialist self and the natives, he had sex with all these native women he painted. Makes their passive poses just that much more awful: he was, in effect, painting their suffering.

That he inflicted.

Except wait, they were girls. Children. IOW, by modern standards, he raped them. (And this asshole had the gall to paint himself with a halo over his head, as if he were a saint. No, really.) But wait, there's more! Evidently not only did he rape these girls, he infected them with syphilis, too!

The teal dear is that Callcut's essay explores Bernard Williams’ concept of “moral luck.” —say you believe you can be a great artist, and you become one, thereby excusing, on some level, your assholish or outright heinous behaviour. Gauguin is a great example, because he wasn't just a selfish bastard, forcing his models into working for him (the way Klimt did for one that didn't wish to model while pregnant, or Mucha painted his anonymous models half nude, but certainly never did that, to, say, Sarah Bernhardt, who as the most famous actress of her day had the social clout to not even be asked such a thing); he actively was an awful person.

But Gauguin's moral luck (in pursuing “authenticity”) was good, so the essay goes, because he did, in fact, produce great art. But, what if you're mediocre and do all that crappy behaviour? The essayist, Daniel Callcut, notes that the philosopher, Williams, backed away from this concept of ‘moral luck’ justification later in his (Williams) life, but no-one—not the Slate columnist (closed the tab, sorry), the essay writer (Callcut), nor the philosopher who came up with the idea of ‘moral luck’ (Williams)—seems to have considered the hidden cost of Gauguin's art-making to society.

Sure, we got these painting with very interesting colour combos; but aside from the cost to the subjects (the abused and infected Tahitian girls) and Gauguin's family, what about the evil a society fostered that made it even remotely acceptable for a man to do this? How many unknown, equally (or more!) gifted women artists did we lose because of the idea of being a selfish, male, loner artist was (& still kinda is) the norm?

I'm hardly the first person to argue that great art(ists) are not worth the cost in moral hazards (howzat for a fancy phrase?) to society: we tend to look at what we have, because the fuzzy could've-beens are basically invisible. —I suppose this essay, which ends with a merely a caution to consider those costs—mostly to yourself and those unfortunate to be in your immediate orbit—angered me because I don't think that's nearly strong enough.

Great artists (and scientists) are not necessarily great people, but I think they owe it to their art and themselves to be the best people they can be. I made the decision, in college, to attempt to be a decent human being, because I did not think I could make art great enough to excuse the assholishness a single minded pursuit of art would inflict upon society.

But as I've gotten older, and seen the ruin of pursuing one's own interests to the exclusion of all else, I've become ever less convinced that being great at something excuses bad behaviour otherwise. (I suppose Ursula K LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" sums that quandry better than any other work I know...) It's not a scale, where you trade art tokens for cruelty. People can and do make art while being good humans.

What we need to do is valorize that, instead of the bad boy artist. IOW, bad boys make for an entertaining story, but at what cost do we push that narrative? Note, please, that I'm not saying that story can't be told. Only that I don't think privileging that narrative over kindness and sharing is a good idea.

And me? Welp, I'll continue over here, trying to be thankfull for the many advantages I have (itching and heat and wonky wiring and not being able to take advantage of the pool and whatnot aside, cuz I'm lucky to have A/C spaces, and health care and a beautiful community pool in the first place) trying to make good art while attempting to make the world around me better. Or at least, no worst.

3jun2026

Although the ‘no pain, no gain’ aphorism has (somewhat) gone out of style for weight training, two educators, Zoe Bee and LanguageJones, have recently made overlapping arguments for the opposing view with regard to learning.

I encountered Bee's video first, The Educational Seduction of Jordan Peterson. I didn't know he was even still a thing, assuming his assorted dietary (& other) antics had gotten him so completely discredited that he'd fallen completely off the face of the (online) earth, but evidently his university scam is still an ongoing concern? By scam, I mean that paying the several hundred dollar per year fee is not going to net you a diploma from an accredited university; it's going to give you access to slickly produced videos that promise to deliver knowledge in 30 minutes. Or 3 hours. Or 3 months.

This annoys Zoe Bee deeply as an educator, because these sorts of snake-oil claims deceive people into thinking there's an easy end run to getting good at something. It's much of a piece with get-rich-quick: a get smart quick, if you will.

Unfortunately, life doesn't work that way, and most disciplines worth pursuing take years.

LanguageJones takes a slightly different approach with his video, I did a PhD w/o knowing how to read. In it, he claims that that a lot of the work that even authentically motivated and hard-working students only makes the material more familiar, not more mastered. Thus, re-reading the chapter (or one's notes) are not really good uses of time—but that there are hacks which, while not eliminating the time and effort, will at least make it faster and more effective. He explains that he finds the protocols of two books, Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren's (1940s!) How to Read a Book and Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDanie's 2012 Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, which, used together, are very helpful for focusing on the sort of effortful (i.e. hard) learning that activates that deep knowledge available ‘on the fly’ so critical to language learning.

Vis a vis the kayaking conference I went to, it should be noted for persons who don't find 3 generations (or more) out-of-style formal la-di-dah-ish language, or the shallow self-help mode in which these books are respectively cast, that the writing can be annoying: just as my paddling instructor's relentless focus on non-negativity in language got really wearisome. Some things are just plain old failures, and in some contexts, I want to be able to say so without being guilted over my cultural choices—that is, I'm from Detroit, and take pride in a certain level of sarcastic pushback on the ocean of midwestern “nice” surrounding me.

In a similar way, while I can appreciate a nearly century out-of-date formality (I read Jane Austen for fun, cuz I like the language), modern self-help books and their breezy, skimalicious, lite writing style just grates. LanguageJones acknowledges this, but says overcoming such distaste is worth it. (So, of course, I feel much more comfortable with the content of the older book, not least because most of its precepts formed the basis of my high school “speed-reading” class, and stuff like summarizing the argument of a book in one sentence or answering the question why did the author write this particular book? are things I mostly do already; it's the annoying-styled one I still need to internalize, le sigh.

Same with the kayaking, despite the ‘no bad experiences, only learning opportunities mantra’—I learned plenty, and would even concede, especially when interacting with others, that praise is gonna be more helpful: ‘what would you have done differently?’ is a better framing than ‘you screwed up!’, even if I wanted to be able to say, I screwed up, because some things, like ramming the rather sharp prow of a kayak in your would be rescuerer's chest is a mistake I don't ever care to repeat, especially not on rough seas with forceful waves propelling said boat as opposed to the gentle tap on dead flat water that actually happened.)

But the larger point stands: learning stuff so it's truly available takes (a) time and (b) brainful, if not painful, effort.

Oddly enough, so does drawing peonies, especially the cultivars with multiple rings of petals, for which today's images serve as photo reference.

1jun2026

O hai.

I have been having this ongoing argument, erm, discussion about AI with f2tE, who like me is an artist, and moreover, one who, at least for the foreseeable future, is (at least somewhat) shielded from AI's disruptive effects.

F2’s feelings, which I have seen expressed with increasing strength and frequency elseweb, is that “AI” is evil, full stop, no exceptions; that it cannot be compared to other modern disruptions; that it is a order of magnitude (or more) dangerous than digital photography was to film, or computer art was to traditional, physical media.

Let alone painting, drawing and engraving when photography came in—it was gonna be the death of the visual arts!

Except not.

Grant you, the moral panics for (other) computer aided art making were not as strong, not least because people with some amount of talent still had to direct the computer to make the art or click the shutter (though given the lower barrier to entry, I'd say the photographers were more bent out of shape than the painters.) —But after the initial explosion of truly terrible designs/photos/art made with these tools, the dedicated users started pushing their boundaries, and that is how we get these splendid slo-mo videos of eagles grabbing fish out of rivers, all kinds of artists making “breyer horse models” or ABJ dolls for their adoring fans; and a slew of reasonably designed instructional materials for a ton of niche interests—because anyone, with a bit of effort, can make tutorials of their chosen passion with quite-average typing, editing, typesetting, design and photographic (or videographic) skills (now that most of this stuff is video you don't even need to talk, let alone write).

I've been making this observation for years, and the lowered barrier to entry is in my view unequivocally a good thing.

But AI slop! What is to be done about that?

I haven't really encountered anyone seriously defending the frankensteined melange of original creators’ works that AI is pouring out by way of “theft” of original creators (which I'd argue is more the problem of transferring the value of their work from workers creators to the capitalists—not exactly a new problem; where the orders-of-magnitude comes in is the efficiency, not to mention that it's now the white-collar artists, as opposed to the blue-collar artisan/workers historically targeted by these threats), but what I and some other defenders have attempted to make a case for is separating out the capitalism from the tool: wielded by sophisticated users, “AI”/LLM is brilliant for assisting radiologists in detecting patterns of cancerous tumours, or helping researchers identify potentially useful proteins amongst millions (or billions) of possibilities.

Or, say, by individual artists using their own work (or perhaps carefully curated [i.e. public domain or paid-for rights’] sources) as the seeds for ideas. I'd seen this sort of thing floated back when AI imagery was just getting going, but now that it's getting ever harder to differentiate it from “real” images, those edge cases are getting drowned with the ‘no, bad, absolutely not’ rhetoric.

But how is this moral panic different from earlier ones in which people were faced with the loss of their jobs (the luddites didn't hate the mechanized looms, they hated they were being cheated of their share of the profits—the mill owners’ greed was bad; the average person being able to afford cloth for more than two outfits, good) or sophisticated deceptions (people using whatever tools were available to hand to copy successful art/business models/technology is not at all a new problem, never mind cheating customers by whatever method is as old as the hills!)

Let alone the quandries people had to address after we (by which I mean the US) dropped atomic bombs on people? Radiation therapy saves lives, but nuclear energy can be—and is—deadly even when it's not being used explicitly to slaughter. (Perhaps the modern update would be drones—US using drones to kill people, horrific; the erosion of privacy we had before these tiny, invisible cameras is a problem that will only get worse; or even the drones’ spoiling the pristine quiet of nature with the mosquito-like whine of motors—all bad; Ukraine using drones in creative ways to defend itself from invasion, or my kayaking instructors using it as a teaching tool: I'd say, good.)

I mean, drone photography and videography has yielded some absolutely gorgeous, and, more to the point, previously inaccessible views of the world, the kind of thing once restricted only to big-budgeted situations like tentpole films, that could afford to hire helicopters or planes to shoot that sort of thing.

IOW, why does AI have people up in arms, but not drone technology? (Let alone nuclear power, which isn't exactly safe...)

Cynicism suggests unfamiliarity crossed with middle class concerns.

I'm retired, so AI isn't coming for my livelihood (though I'm surely invested in differentiating AI produced lies from “truth”) but I grew up in the aftermath of the atomic age. I don't believe tech can be hidden, any more than ‘security through obscurity’ is a robust protocol. The way forward is to come up with social rules (starting with laws) for how we use tech, and that's something we know how to do: no filling trenches with mustard gas. No dropping atomic bombs on people. Killing people with bioengineered viruses is heinous. All of these technologies are currently available, but the default assumption is that even the most evil of governments will refrain from using them.

No-one, so far as I can tell, is suggesting that we just stop collecting data, not least because given capitalism, it's simply not gonna happen. We have, however, enacted laws (however thin) to help protect people (combined, I would argue, with increasing comfort with the loss of privacy as the default of our modern world). Time will take care of the familiarity, so then the problem becomes, how do we regulate AI?

Laws are not by any means a perfect solution, but they are, I believe, more effective than tearing hair and declaring ‘this must not be!’

Perhaps the real problem is that, given the current political climate, people in general don't have a whole lot of faith in our legal and political institutions to protect us. That's a fair cop, but again, it seems to me the answer is to try and fix things, not wish new technology would go away: so long as the 1% stands to make money on tech, that's not happening. Far better to address the root problem, and I honestly don't know of any other method than by fixing the political situation. I mean, the alternative, revolution/civil war, has an even worse success rate.

So it was more than a bit interesting to listen to Hanfu Girl's observations about AI vis a vis western and eastern cultures. Hanfu has a website, but her most interesting work seems to happen on instagram, where she delivers short, pungent comparisons between western and eastern culture. The first one I encountered was the ways in which China (& Japan) emphasize the surface beauty of fabric over the fit on the body: someone focused on western tailoring traditions would ding the bunching of fabric under the arms of traditional Chinese dress, whereas the Asian textile aficionado might deride the way all the darts, armscyes and seams distracted and cut up the uninterrupted beauty of the fabric and its design.

Hanfugirl is in a relatively rare place of being able to speak to western audiences while being able also to access Chinese thought, and she points out that while novelty is prized in Western art, in contrast, traditional Asian art—and I'm no expert on China, but I can speak, a little, to Japanese traditions—you as the student are expected to copy the masters for quite a long time before being permitted to create your own stuff.

Add in the expectation of subtle feedback from the teacher, and voila, a model for using AI that's a good deal more positive (& in fact the one I've seen proposed by western enthusiasts): give it a prompt, correct it, rinse, lather, and repeat until something good starts to come out of it.

I really appreciated this, because I'm simply not a very innovative person—I come up with new ideas comparatively slowly, by trying the same thing over and over (and over) until enough mistakes creep in natural variation accrues to point me in a potentially interesting new direction. My job as artist is to use my judgement to recognize which variations are worth pursuing. I admit, the idea of speeding that process up by offloading a lot of the fumbling around to a machine that works many times faster than I can is an appealing one.

But to get there, we need to start thinking about AI as a powerful tool, rather than an unmitigated evil.

In the meantime, I guess I'll be making more of these little physical media doodles, cuz they're low enough barrier to entry, that is easy, for my molasses slow mind to handle.

4may2026

So I gather today is a sort of the big Star Wars day, (& may the fourth be with you!:) but alas, I haven't any linkies for that; but I do have one for the first Star Trek movie, which I'd argue paved the way for the SW franchise. Steve Shrives asks the question,

Is Star Trek: the Motion Picture actually a good movie?

The answer, of course, is still no, but it was kind of interesting to watch the take of someone who was too young to see it in the theatre, because, of course, that's where I saw it, and as much as I wanted it to be a good movie...it just wasn't.

What I was too young to have seen in the theatre—because my parents weren't movie-goers, wouldn't’ve spent the money to take us regardless, besides which at that point I hadn't discovered sf&f—was the 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey; I think I've seen this film in its entirety, almost certainly at some sf&f con, but I never made the connection between it and the turgid bits of the later film that unsuccessfully tried to cash in on its themes.

I do recall most Star Trek fen being rather disappointed with The Motion Picture, which absolutely makes sense: Star Trek is not and never has been anything like 2001, and trying to chop it to fit was doomed to failure. So one question Mr Shrives’ videoessay answered for me, that I never really understood before, was why the movie was so bad—something young-adult me just accepted as a sort of, oh well, too bad.

To be honest, my favourite iteration was the 72–73 animated series, which had the advantage of the original cast & director (and some of its best & most popular writers, David Gerrold, who wrote The Trouble with Tribbles, the story that originally hooked me, and D.C. Fontana) not to mention hitting at that early teen/puberty age that makes anything experienced then as “the best.” (Plus of course the feline M'ress, she was cool:) —None of the following series have ever managed to engage my interest enough to watch more than an episode or two: by then, I'd discovered the entire sf&f field, and even today, I feel it's difficult for any commercially made film (or tv series) to replicate the particularity and inventiveness individual authors can achieve, constrained as businesses are by the expense and corporate constraints.

And, I have to say, it's just so odd, the way people a generation, or two, talk about the era in which I grew up, because their lived experience, though related, is nonetheless different. Their off-the-cuff assertions are so often just nonsense.

IOW, I'm turning into my parents, but about stuff they didn't really feel was fit for grownups. (It's still really weird to me to see grown adults into this stuff, and I've had, um, at least three decades to get used to the idea...) In fact, now it seems mostly grownups (afict?) that are the ones getting excited about Star Trek (& Star Wars)—the kids have mostly moved on to new things?

Which to be sure, I'm absolutely fine with, the world would be dull indeed without those fresh infusions. —And, by the way, here's a birthday card for one of those young'uns.