Every year, between Christmas and New Year’s, I write a series of posts reflecting on the previous year. To do this, I typically scan through my blog to jog my memory. What I found this year is that… I kind of abandoned my blog.

One reason I quit writing so many blog posts is because I ran out of things to say. When I started blogging — we’re going all the way back to the late 90s, early 00s here — anything and everything qualified as a blog post. Funny exchange at the McDonald’s drive-thru? Blog post! Saw a traffic accident? Blog post! As time went on, I decided that I wanted to have something to say in my posts. I didn’t want them to be dry recordings of events like some sort of court ledger; I wanted to tell stories and be creative and even when writing about, say, Thanksgiving, I wanted to write something that had a little deeper meaning. After a couple of decades, I ran out of interesting things to say. This year for Thanksgiving, everyone who was invited showed up, the food was delicious, we all had a great time, and everybody went home. The end.

Unfortunately and perhaps sadly, it’s often easier to share those things through social media. I saw a killer sunset last night. I took a great picture of it and literally had nothing to say about it and so I posted it on Facebook. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to drop pictures and those disposable events that happen at McDonald’s drive-thrus. It’s a great place to say something when you have nothing to say.

Over the past several years people have moved away from blogs — both writing them and reading them. Writing 1,000 words about a trip to the zoo or a particularly delicious slice of pizza is one thing; getting someone to read those words is a different challenge. There are many reasons for this. One is because of the amount of content available to us today. We have news apps that take all the news from all the other news sites and summarize them because there’s so much news. Believe it or not, finding interesting and free things to read on the internet was once a challenge. Today, if I click on a web article and it takes more than two seconds to load, I close it and move to the next one. There’s no value to any one article because there are millions more waiting in the chute. All of this stuff is being pushed down our throats, and unless I’m screaming about my blog a hundred times a day, it all gets lost. In a world where Beyonce has a blog, it’s tough to get people to read about why I like ice cream.

The shift in how and where content is consumed has been pretty obvious if you’re a writer. The future is here. I would say I can listen to any album imaginable with the touch of a button, but I no longer need to touch a button to do so. There are so many great podcasts available today that if I only listened to the first minute of each one, I still wouldn’t have enough time in a single day to hear them all. We live in a world where I can stream nearly any movie or television show imaginable to my phone while riding i the car. That’s tough for a blog to compete with. People want bite-sized chunks of entertainment. People don’t want to spend an hour reading; they want to watch celebrities getting interviewed while eating increasingly spicy hot wings.

Google recent articles about blogging and you’ll find two types. Half of them have doomsday, clickbait headlines like “Is Blogging Dead?” and “Why Are People Still Blogging?” The rest of the articles (the majority, in fact) are about how to monetize your blog — how to “brand your content” and how to write blog posts that lead to sales. The type of blogging I do isn’t even on the radar anymore. It’s not even considered quaint. It just seems old.

If this sounds increasingly sour or spicy (the post, not the hot wings), I don’t mean it to. There are changes I could make and things I could do differently that, if all of this were a business, I would do immediately. What do you do when nobody wants the stuff you like to make? They say you can either change with the times or get rolled over. I’m having a tough time choosing between the two options.

This morning, as I log into WordPress, I see a bunch of errors at the top of my screen. Some obscure plug-in has failed. Again. I’ve said this before, but the more I am required to work with computers, the less I enjoy working on them. There was a time when nothing sounded more fun than tearing apart a computer and adding some RAM or upgrading a video card, and today that sounds awful. I come here to write, not to troubleshoot plug-ins and do upgrades and check for security patches and all the other nonsense that comes with maintaining a website. Maybe it’s me this morning.

Where does that leave me in 2025? I’m not sure. I’m having a good time dabbling on YouTube and I will always write because I love words. This blog post was starting to sound like the end of something but maybe it’s the beginning of something else. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, here are the rolls we had for Thanksgiving. They were tasty.

It all started with our neighbors — and it wasn’t even a Christmas display, it was their Halloween decorations. On Halloween Susan and I like to sit on the front porch and hand out candy to trick-ot-treaters. We love seeing all the costumes and hearing the kids laugh and shout “TRICK OR TREAT!” when they run up to the porch. This year, all of our young visitors asked us the same question. “Did you see the Beetlejuice house?”

We had a lot going on this year and didn’t decorate as much as usual. We put Mick Rib (my 6′ skeleton) and Slimer (from Ghostbusters) on the front porch, but that was about it. We didn’t have time to reassemble our 12′ skeleton and we didn’t put up any lights. We didn’t go all out. The people across the street, however, went all out. The house is on a corner and from our porch we couldn’t see everything they had put out, but we could see enough. There was a giant sand worm from Beetlejuice in their front yard. There were flashing lights and loud music. We had been bested, and I don’t like being bested.

“Just say the word,” Susan said, “and our yard will beat theirs for Christmas.”

I don’t think I said a word and I don’t think she was really waiting for me to. Within a week or two, box after box coverer in Chinese writing began arriving from Temu. Sure, Hobby Lobby, Home Depot, and all the big stores have Christmas decorations, but Temu sells them for pennies on the dollar. For just a couple of bucks you can purchase rows of plastic candy canes. For five bucks you can get strands of lights that will stretch all the way across your yard.

Susan spent about $300. I believe the term she used was, “we’re going Griswold.”

That’s how we ended up with a yard full of lights, candy canes, Christmas-themed signs, and three large inflatable gingerbread men. There’s the large one relaxing in the front yard, the ninja-themed one performing a flying karate kick near my office window… and then there’s Ginger McHoleHead, a 10′ tall gingerbread man guarding the entrance to our home. 10-foot-tall is just an estimate — the top of his head comes to the top of our gutter, and his top hat extends several feet above that.

Ginger McHoleHead likes (er, liked) to dance in the Oklahoma wind. He came with a variety of plastic stakes, none of which were able to withstand Oklahoma’s wind gusts. We ended up strapping him to one of our porch posts, which kept his belly affixed to the house but allowed his arms and legs to flop around as if he were trying to escape this house of holiday horrors.

Ginger McHoleHead was so large that he blocked our view of the street from the living room. The morning I noticed sunlight coming in the front windows again, I knew something had gone horribly wrong.

The paper-thin nylon this thing from Temu was made with did its best to hang on, but the Oklahoma winds proved too much for him. Either by accident or some form of sick holiday protest, Ginger McHoleHead flung his head down to the ground and ripped a hole in his own head on one of the ground spikes. While his original name was Ginger McHappyHat, this is when he was rechristened Ginger McHoleHead.

Ginger McHoleHead’s fan is still running in an act of futile defiance. On a good day his leg will inflate almost up to the knee, but other than that, he s a goner. If anybody really tall is looking for a Halloween costume next year, I’ll make you a heck of a deal on one.

And so, for now, his icing-covered brethren look on. The other two remain inflated but are secretly hoping for Christmas to hurry up and arrive so that they might make it to the attic and live to inflate another day.

Yesterday, I placed a large flat screen television out in the trash. It is, as far as I can recall, the first time I have ever literally thrown away a flat screen television.

The television was a 55″ model made by Visio — perhaps not the world’s greatest brand, but a decent brand as far as I am concerned. When Susan rented her condo space in Washington D.C. a couple of years ago she needed a television the living room and asked for some advice. I suggested going to Sam’s Club (who would deliver the television) and pick the largest one you could find for less than $400.

In an previous post I detailed how, after 13 months of ownership, the TV developed a problem with its display. This was not caued by overuse or abuse. If I had to estimate, in the 13 months we owned it we probably turned it on less than a dozen times. When we moved it back to Oklahoma from Washington D.C., it was repackaged in its original box surrounded by the original packing material. Despite all of that, something inside the TV malfunctioned and the screen began displaying static across the lower portion of the screen — not so much as to make it unwatchable, but more than a TV (especially one that was barely a year old) should show.

I contacted Visio and after providing some pictures and performing some remote troubleshooting, it was determined that yes, the TV was broken. and, more importantly, it was still under warranty. Visio mailed me a check for the price of the television and told me to keep the TV. Of course, a $400 TV with a bit of static at the bottom seems like the end of the world, but a now-free TV with a minor glitch seemed like something I could live with, and so I did for a few months.

That is, until last month when I turned on the television and discovered that the entire system was wrecked. It was as if the television would draw pixels to display pictures, but never undraw them. Within just a few seconds, the entire screen would be filled with a gigantic smear of lights and lines and colors — great if you’re into pop art, but pretty useless if you want to watch TV.

The solution came in the form of a Black Friday sale. Best Buy had a TCL 55″ flatscreen television on sale for $188. I think TCL is on par with Visio. It cost half as much as the one it replaced and was half the weight. After turning on the TCL television I was forced to login using my Amazon account (the options were to do that, or be limited to a limited set of features with no access to the app store). By the time I had jumped through all the required hoops including scanning for stations using my digital TV antenna and setting up all my apps (Plex, Pluto, Tubi) it’s possible I spent more time working on this television than I spent watching the last one.

That left me with one final dilemma… what to do with the old TV. These things are not really designed to be worked on, and I’m not sure who would even do it. It’s certainly beyond my technical skillset. None of my local “icanfixit” friends wanted it. With Facebook Marketplace full of $100 used 55″ televisions and new ones costing $188, a completely broken one doesn’t have much value.

And so, with little pomp and circumstance and less dignity, the television was placed by the curb for big trash pickup and recycling, next to a refrigerator that died and the recliner that broke. The whole pile is being monitored by a grinning inflatable gingerbread man from Temu, too dumb to know someday he’ll be in their shoes. In the old days an old CRT television placed by the curb there was always a chance that a neighborhood kid or a local scavenger would snatch it up before it made its way to the dump, but I don’t suspect anyone will rescue this one.

Two houses ago, I purchased my very first flatscreen television. The technology seemed like a miracle from the future at the time. It seemed unbelievable that I owned a television that could be hung on the wall. Roughly 20 years later, it seems just as unbelievable that I would be setting one out by the curb as trash.

For two weeks, my section at work has organized and is currently running an “electronics recycling and disposal event”. Our team has done roughly a dozen of these events this year across the country, but this is the first one we’ve done here in Oklahoma City. It’s also the first one I’ve directly been involved with one and, holy cow. It’s hard work.

It can be challenging to dispose of government inventory. It’s a bit complicated, but we can’t just throw outdated equipment away. All equipment is barcoded and not all items are disposed of in the same way. There’s also a lot of paperwork involved, and sometimes it’s easier to just stick old or broken items in a closet rather than do through the process. Our event is kind of a “forgiveness/reset” event. Our team has placed large Gaylord boxes (48″ x 40″ x 36″) all around our campus and invited organizations and even individuals to place old equipment into these boxes. This can be anything from computers and laptops to cables, docking stations, software… you name it. These boxes are being collected and transported to a central location where they have to be sorted depending on the type of equipment.

I have been floating between multiple locations this week which has given me a unique perspective on the project. On our campus, a steady stream of boxes are being delivered and picked up. There are a lot of buildings and only so many movers, so this has taken a lot of planning and scheduling — and, when things change, replanning and rescheduling. At that point in the process, nothing is sorted; that happens over at our offsite depot a few miles away. I was hoping by 2024 we would have robots or something to do this part, but no. A group of hard working people pull everything out of those boxes and resort them into different boxes. Every single item has to be touched.

There’s no way to fully convey the scope of this effort, but I’ll try. On Wednesday we had 40 of those gigantic boxes arrive for processing. Forty boxes in one day. Again, the boxes contain electronic stew. One by one, they are emptied. Computers go in one pile, monitors go in another pile, laptops go in another pile, and so on. We are getting tons (literally) of what we call “peripherals” which includes cables, speakers, keyboards, mice, and lots of random items. I hate seeing brand new items come through the process, but I also hate seeing the really old stuff go through. Yesterday we found a cassette player from the 70s. While I was out, someone said four Apple II computers arrived in a box. What four Apple II computers were doing on our campus is, like a lot of these things, a mystery.

Four days into the event, we have processed more than 40,000 pounds of excess equipment. As a lifelong packrat, it breaks my soul to see all of these things go through the system. I have seen boxes and boxes of brand new keyboards come in; the keyboards have to be removed from their boxes to be tossed into bins. While the keyboards are a few years old, they’re the exact same model that’s on my desk. Nothing that’s barcoded can be saved from the process. It’s all government property and will continue on its way to be resold or recycled. Occasionally we’ll find something like an old Walkman or radio that isn’t barcoded meaning it was probably someone’s personal property and those items may or may not end up in a pile near me, but at the end of the day it all has to go back.

One of the things I’ve been tasked with is taking pictures of the event… which is ironic that I cannot share them since they are taken on government facility. The picture at the top of this post is a stock photo, but multiply it by about a hundred and you’ll get a rough idea what we’re dealing with.

There may not be enough Advil and back pills to get me through this project, but we’ll see. It has been a fun and eye opening change of pace.

I found this plastic severed hand at a garage sale a few months ago. I think I paid a quarter for it and even before we were back in the car I had already got my money’s worth. I tapped Susan on the shoulder with it multiple times, walked around with with it hanging out of my sleeve and tried shaking people’s hands, and approached several people while holding it and asked them if they needed a hand with anything. Twenty-five cents well spent.

The next day, I hid the hand underneath Susan’s pillow in an attempt to scare her. In turn, she hid the hand in my clean clothes pile. I hid the hand in her car. She hid it in the microwave. The hand has been hidden many places and every time one of us finds it, we laugh. A couple of weeks ago, I opened my CPAP travel bag, stuck my hand inside to pull out a power supply, and jumped when I felt a bunch of cold, plastic fingers in the bottom of the bag.

The closer we get to Halloween the more times I expect to find the hand. That’s not what scares me. What scares me is, I have no idea where the hand is in the moment, and am sure I’ll find it any moment…

Over the past few weeks I’ve binged the first season of two shows: Fallout, loosely based on the video game of the same name, and The Acolyte, the latest live action Star Wars series. The first season of Fallout, which aired on Amazon Prime, had an estimated budged of $150 million, while The Acolyte had a budget of roughly $180 million. Fallout currently has a 90% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes while The Acolyte has an abysmal 31% approval rating. What did Fallout do so right that The Acolyte failed out? A lot, actually.

In science fiction stories authors create fantastic worlds that can have any rules they dream up, but one of the most important things is that once those rules are established, they are consistent. It’s perfectly acceptable for an author to establishes a world where aliens can breathe underwater… but if one of those aliens later drowns it has to be explained to readers or viewers why. These types of stories have to stick to the rules they’ve created, otherwise the audience may feel confused, cheated, or frustrated when the rules change.

Fallout does a great job of this. Its post-apocalyptic setting is established early on. Groups of people known as “vault dwellers” avoided the effects of a nuclear war by living in underground bunkers, while the land above (the “wasteland”) has become a dangerous place full of fiends and ghouls who suffer from radiation (and worse). The season’s overarching plot involves a vault dweller named Lucy who must emerge from her vault and face adversity to rescue her kidnapped father. In the first episode we are introduced to two more major characters, Maximus (a squire serving in the militaristic Brotherhood) and “The Ghoul,” an undead gunslinger who crosses paths with both Lucy and Maximus and is after the same thing (which just so happens to be, quite literally, someone else’s head). Throughout the season the show uses flashbacks to flesh out the backstories of these characters. By the end of the season a lot of what viewers thought they knew was wrong, but everything fits together nicely.

The Acolyte tries to do many of these same things and, ironically, fails at most of them. The Acolyte tells the story of Force-sensitive identical twins, Osha and Mae, who were being raised by a coven of witches. A group of four Jedi arrive on the planet, stumble across the twins, and ultimately are involved in a deadly conflict with the witches. As a result of the conflict the witches are killed and the twins are separated, leaving each one to believe they were the sole survivor. One of the twins, Osha, leaves with the Jedi and attempts to become one herself only to fail. The other twin, Mae, spends the next fifteen years training under a Sith Lord with the intent of murdering the four Jedi who visited her planet as a child. So far, so good.

One of the biggest problems with The Acolyte is that it takes place in a world that has already been established. The rules of the Star Wars universe were firmly established back in 1977 although, god love ’em, they’ve been fiddling with them ever since. In the original trilogy it was established what Jedi could (and couldn’t) do through the means of the Force, but new Jedi powers keep appearing. In this series, the Sith Lord referred to as “The Stranger” is able to perform a “mind wipe,” in which he is able to make characters permanently forget about the existence of other characters, and even wipe decades of memories from their minds. That’s new! The Shadow also wears a helmet made of “cortosis,” a metal that shorts out lightsabers when they come in contact with it and repels the Force from penetrating it. Neat. But where was this metal in every other Star Wars film? Why doesn’t The Stranger wear an entire suit of armor made from the stuff? Or wrap his fortress in it? Why can’t the Force penetrate the helmet through the eye slits we’re shown?

Another thing both series have in common is the use of flashbacks. In Fallout, flashbacks are used to give backstories to the characters and explain to viewers how we got to where we are. In the main timeline we know there’s been a nuclear incent of some kind, but later, through flashbacks, we learn who was behind it. We learn each of the characters’ backstories, and ultimately, their motivations.

Again, The Acolyte does this completely wrong. The next to last episode of the season is a flashback to events that has already been explained and in many cases shown to views. One of the biggest complaints about 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story was that it retold events that viewers already knew about. In 1977’s Star Wars, Han Solo bragged about making the Kessel Run in “less than 12 parsecs.” In Solo… we watch Han make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. But, like, great — we already knew he could, because he already did. We also see him win the Millennium Falcon from Lando, a fact that was established in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. If you told viewers it happened, you don’t need to go back and show us it happened, too. The Acolyte revisits entire scenes for the sake of showing us that Jedi was hiding behind a tree the entire time. It feels a bit like Back to the Future Part II when one time-traveling Marty McFly goes back and revisits the first time-traveling Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, except in this case there’s very little to be gained from it.

Finally, we have the characters themselves. While characters in a story should not be one-dimensional, they should have clearly established traits and morals and stick to them; and, if they don’t, those decisions should be justified. Fallout’s Lucy is a vault dweller who’s been raised on the Golden Rule. When forced to shoot, she’ll shoot, but she complains about being kidnapped and tortured by saying “that’s not nice!” The Ghoul, on the other hand, is on a mission. He’s unwavering from it and merciless, almost like The Terminator. When we find out why, it all makes sense. Maximus is a military grunt who dreams of earning a coveted position as a squire so that someday he might earn an even more coveted position as a knight. He was rescued by a knight as a child and wants to become one — end of story. That doesn’t meant that the character has to be simple, but it means his motivations are. Maximus’s story arc is about become a knight. Period.

In The Acolyte we have four Jedi who have been covering up an event and lying to the Jedi Council about it for 15 years. It was a death that, at best was a Jedi defending himself and maaaybe swinging his saber a fraction of a second too early, and at worse was an accident. I mean, this is Star Wars. Luke destroyed the Death Star which, according to the book, had nearly two million people on board. Two million! Obi-Wan killed a guy in a cantina and cut off another guy’s arm. Where was that mind wipe stuff then? Star Wars was a rough universe that often put characters in kill-or-be-killed situations. Worse than all of that, the show makes the Jedi look like a bunch of bumbling doofs. They can’t solve a murder, half of them are getting murdered by an angsty teen, another Jedi — who had nothing to do with the original witch attack, he just happened to be there — feels so guilty about the whole affair that he’s talked into killing himself rather easily. It just goes on and on. These aren’t the rantings of an old man saying “the Jedi aren’t acting the way I want them to” — these are the rantings of an old man saying, “the Jedi aren’t acting like they do in every other movie.” Somebody, Force mind wipe me!

Throughout its first season, Fallout told a complete story. We got a beginning, a middle, and an end of a story arc with lots of little stories throughout the season. At the end of the season, our characters are off on their next adventure. If the next season comes to fruition I’ll watch it and if it doesn’t, I feel satisfied with how the story ended. In the same amount of episodes, The Acolyte left viewers with more questions than answers. By the end of the season, one of the good guys has turned bad, one of the bad guys has amnesia, the ultimate bad guy has escaped, we learn there’s an even badder bad guy, and the events of this episode are covered up just like the previous events were, for reasons unknown. Bah.

Amazon has announced that Fallout has been renewed for a second season. I look forward to watching it. There has been no word as to whether there will be a second season of The Acolyte or not. These new Star Wars shows are being created for people younger than me BY people younger than me, and if they do end up making another season of that show, I’ll try and let them enjoy it while I go watch something else.