me resisting the urge to call custom relationships or relationship anarchy "LEGO bin relationships"
Stranger Things
Sade Olutola
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
d e v o n
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

#extradirty

tannertan36
Xuebing Du
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

if i look back, i am lost
noise dept.

Kaledo Art

No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap

oozey mess

blake kathryn

titsay

⁂
sheepfilms
🪼

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@sethpeck
me resisting the urge to call custom relationships or relationship anarchy "LEGO bin relationships"
Writing prompt:
Create a "how to" for anything in the style of this bottle of body wash
Whenever some dirigible-skulled armchair economist says they don't want their taxes to go to help people, or when they insist upon means testing, my instinct is to ask them why they want a bigger government. Let's expand on this idea. I'll use a favorite of the Chicago school crowd: highways.
A lot of highways are being expanded to accommodate increased vehicle traffic, but instead of the expansions being funded by taxes, they're being funded by contracts with private corporations who then collect toll revenue. So now there's a new administrative entity that takes payments, issues transponders, reads plates, etc. An entity that collects position information on its participants--information that would be unnecessary for them to collect if they weren't charging tolls. Of course, not everyone wants to pay toll revenue, so some people cross over the lanes. In order to mitigate this, they make it a misdemeanor crime to cross the line into or out of a toll lane. And a law without enforcement is useless, so they hire more cops to enforce it. So instead of approving a change that would cost a little more money through taxes, the libertarians have chosen the path that increased the amount of administrative overhead, installed cameras that photograph and track movement, and raised the number of cops on the highway. Such actions will invariably increase the number of tickets, altercations, and shootings unrelated to the enforcement of that particular law, as well as increasing the chance of tolls and fees being mishandled, embezzled, or discriminatorily applied. And in terms of impacting the economy, money spent on expanding a lane increases the total amount of expense of both the commuters, who still have to spend money on gas, tires, tolls, etc.; and the jurisdiction or administrative authority, who has to pay for maintenance. Such money would be better spent on a commuter rail of some sort. But even a commuter rail has its own enforcement mechanisms if fares are charged. Many jurisdictions don't offer free rides, so as it was with the enforcement of the toll lane, the jurisdiction has to increase the size of the authorities needed to collect fares and enforce against fare evasion. Now take this concept and apply it to any number of municipal, state, and federal programs: financial aid for higher education, school lunch programs, SNAP, TANF, universal day care. A healthy social program funded by increased taxes results in a smaller government; an underfunded program creates more government and authority. "Oh but Seth, those people don't want ANY social programs or government funded services!" Then they've chosen an even larger, more sinister, more shadowy government; one that exists only in secrecy, unelected by the citizenry, self-appointed and executing their enforcement of property rights without public input. Or, the entire populace has acknowledged, possibly tacitly, the responsibility of accommodating the collective needs of everyone without the existence of a formal state, a concept commonly understood by the name "communism".
Stacy's Guy
(Stacy's Mom sung from the perspective of Stacy's mom)
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
Stacy, he can't come over after school
(After school)
He's just using you to hang by the pool
(Hang by the pool)
He stole my underwear when i was on a business trip
(Business trip)
I'm missing a bra, some panties, and a slip
(And a slip)
I know he's not the little boy that he used to be
He's a hormone-driven pervert now
Stacy, can't you see?
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
He's all she wants
But he'll only make her cry
Stacy, you know it's true
He's just not the guy for you
I know it that he's not right
I'm staying away from Stacy's guy
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
Stacy, do you remember when he mowed our lawn?
(Mowed our lawn)
I had to come out with just a towel on
(Towel on)
I could tell he was a loser by the way he stared
(The way he stared)
And I had to tell him
"You missed a spot over there"
(A spot over there)
And I know that since your dad left I've been a little wild
But the last thing I need in my life
Is to date a fucking child
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye
He's all she wants
But he'll only make her cry
Stacy, you know it's true
He's just not the guy for you
I know it that he's not right
I'm staying away from Stacy's guy
Stacy's guy has got a wand'ring eye (he's got a wand'ring eye)
He's all she wants but he'll only make her cry (make her cry)
Stacy you know it's true
He's just not the guy for you
I know that he's not right
I'm staying away from
Stacy's guy, no, no
(Please dump him)
Stacy's guy, no, no
(He'll cheat on you)
Stacy you know it's true
He's just not the guy for you
I know that he's not right
I'm staying away from Stacy's guy
you ever walk by something and, in a moment of velocity-induced dyslexia, accidentally think you saw your name printed on it where normally wouldn't be
I haven't posted anything about Gallagher dying because I needed a few days. Not because he holds a special place in my heart, but because I was busy.
Gallagher was a comedian. He told jokes. One of my favorites was (and i'm paraphrasing here) "the back of the truck says 'Dodge' because the front of the truck says 'Ram'." He told other jokes and digged on politicians and relationships and airplane food like most observational humorists of his time, but weirdly this is the only one I can remember.
But for all his standup work, people went to see him for one reason: to watch him smash watermelons with a giant mallet.
You may not agree with me, but this was the ultimate distillation of humor: taking a thing and turning it into a disaster, destroying it completely with all of the channeled frustrations and worries of the audience. The watermelon could represent a billion things: a poor upbringing, an overbearing supervisor, an engine problem that defies repair. It appealed to every demographic category, every affiliation, and every background.
Not even The Aristocrats was this effective, because the obliteration of a large fruit had no overtones or undertones, was gone in an instant, and was only a joke on the audience of they dared to sit close to the stage without a poncho. It was catharsis and fruit salad, delivered by a guy wearing a Freddy Krueger sweater and a newsboy cap over his Bozo the Clown hairstyle, who made his audience listen to him rant for 35 minutes before getting to the thing that they all bought tickets to see.
Before the phrase "cancel culture" existed, he fell out of favor for some racist and homophobic comments. How often we see this happen among the people who gave our younger selves joy, and yet count ourselves lucky for being able to recover from the hate that we once held, sometimes unknowingly, while those in public eye sometimes never do. They should look to others, like Aziz Ansari, who found a slow way back, rather than languish in obscurity for the remainder of their days, or double down like Louis C.K. has.
Perhaps he invested his earnings wisely, and didn't need to keep performing as he got older. But there's a generation or more of people who won't even know who he was because of his own refusal to see certain people as anything more than something he could pulverize with a proverbial mallet.
Rest in Piece(s)
I see a lot of Addams family discourse but rarely two words about Pugsley
Like, sure, this boy will grow up with a disturbing number of skills and extracurricular activities under the belt of his shorts, being goaded into curiosity by his uncle, enabled by the butler, his limits tested by his sister... but also to grow up in a household with such a stellar father figure? What kind of man would he be?
writing prompt: a rogue, beneficent demon leaves the underworld, takes possession of a victim, reads their mind, and then does all the thing that their victim had wished they could do but had always been too afraid to try, like asking out their crush, going on an adventure, leaving their abusive spouse, or demanding a raise. the important bit: the demon never forces their victim to do anything that they don’t want to do. The extent of their domination is purely to give someone the guts to complete the thing they’ve not tried for fear of failure. They give their victim the freedom to follow through and go from there, and the demon only leaves once it feels its victim has gained sufficient confidence challenge #1: other demons begin to harass the protagonist demon for doing its job wrong challenge #2: another being hassles and scolds she protagonist for denying their victims free will
challenge #3: the demon takes possession of someone who wants to do terrible things, and then finds out it can’t leave until it gives its victim the confidence they need
Am I vaccinated? Let me tell you the TRUTH about COVID-19!! Everybody knows the COVID-19 virus is really a Chinese lab-created superflu that allows Bill Gates to track people via 5G. Specifically, it was designed to target white conservatives, reveals their locations, their Amazon orders and their Netflix viewing habits.
Developed by Dr. Fauci using money from George Soros and the DNC, it was (much to their chagrin) unable to differentiate Red Blooded Americans from others, and has been infecting everyone mostly indiscriminantly. Since this was resulting in too many false positives in the tracking program, people who were pushing the communist BLM/antifa agenda were just as likely to be targeted as the Qanon and MAGA crowds.
That's why no one has been drone-striked from the Starlink satellite fleet yet; too big of a risk that they'll accidentally kill liberals in on the conspiracy, or cause too much collateral damage, instead of the destruction of a Proud Boy base in their parents' basement. Instead, the space lasers have been much more effective at targeting people's lungs, requiring them to be intubated before they die. But it wasn't precise enough, and too many complicit liberals have been impacted by the attempt.
So the communists got Big Pharma to create the vaccines, which alter human DNA to suppress the tracking enzymes in the blood of those infected by the disease. There's a reason why the vast majority of people who have gotten vaccinated are leftists; they know about the original plan; vaccinate all the allies and their families, then let the lasers take care of the rest.
So yeah, of course I'm vaccinated. Why would I want to be the victim of a laser strike from the satellites? Why would YOU?
An Interview with Ford Ivey
(note: I originally published this in September 2001, back when I ran a NERO fan site, no longer maintained. I’ve kept the raw text and have provided here for perpetuity. I publish it here today, March 21st 2021, the day after Ford Ivey passed away. I have edited it for spelling and censored the former name for the current NERO Gadabari race.)
Blast from the Past
An evening with Ford Ivey
Older players recognize the name, but for those of you just joining us, Ford Ivey is often attributed with being the grandfather of NERO. Not twelve hours after releasing the first issue of NEROtics.com back in July, Ford offered me an interview in the future. Like I was going to say no. Seth Peck, NEROtics.com: How are ya? Ford Ivey: [laugh] I'm fine--and in much better health than the old days. I have lost 256 pounds. I'm weighing in at 244, and don't have diabetes nor high blood pressure any more, and the heart is a LOT healthier. SP: Wow--that's quite a change. Any secrets you wish to divulge? FI: Yeah.....surgery! [grins] Seriously. I had a gastric bypass. I was gonna die if I didn't lose weight. That was a year ago on July 5th. SP: Well, it's good to hear that you are in good health. FI: Well, it's good to be in good health. SP: As NERO gets larger and more and more newbies join the game, I hear more and more people asking about the origins of the game and "stories from olden days". Being a relatively new player myself, compared to the life-span of NERO, I find myself wondering also. How did NERO get its start? FI: Wow...big question. It started way back in 1986. I heard about a game in New Hampshire called "Midrealms Adventures". I heard about it about six months before I could get up to play it...and imagined what it would be like when I did play it. When I finally did, it was not a lot like what I imagined. It was a module based game--a few hours and it was over, and a marshal had to be with you all the time. I wanted a game where the players could be free to do what they wanted. SP: So what did you do? FI: I ran my own. At the time, I had just started a group for Friday night table-top gaming at a Boy Scout explorer Post in Newton, Massachussets, and we had available to us a Boy Scout Camp--Nobscot by name--and we decided to run a game of our own there. I had a group of 7 or so guys helping me. We wrote it, cast it, and ran it. We invited a group of 6 or so friends of one of the guys to PC it. SP: Did this game have a name yet? FI: Nope, no name. We called it "Weekend Warriors" for the first year or so. I ran a bunch of different variations on the game. I wrote the plots, bought the props, paid for everything, and ran them myself. SP: So how did it go? FI: The first game was pretty bad, to be honest. SP: [laughs] Care to elaborate? FI: Yeah--it was bad because we had very few costumes or props, we basically told the PCs where to go. We had some major problems with the PCs not picking up on things. It was amazing to us how much stuff gets missed when you are doing it for real rather than around a table. We had one point [where] we had gone to great lengths to make sure they knew that the "Ranger" character they met on the trail was a good guy and they could trust him. Well, he had been captured and was going to be sacrificed. We drug him out, proceeded to sacrifice him, knowing the PCs were watching, expecting them to save the guy--they didn't. They just watched. Poor guy had to steal a dagger, and save himself. They got to him as he was breathing his last--one guy got to him, and he said: "Beware the Dark Lord! Seek the Man of the Mountain!" When the other players got there, they asked him what he had said. He replied, "He said something about a man and a rock." SP: [laughing] FI: But we kept trying things, getting closer to the vision I had. Then, in November of 1988, we ran a game called "Shandlin's Ferry". It was the immediate ancestor of NERO. SP: how long did first several events last? FI: We did set up on Saturday and started mid afternoon on Saturday. Then we ran until Sunday afternoon. The Shandlin's Ferry game started at noon on Saturday and ran 24 hours. It was notable for several reasons: first, it's the game where we figured out how to do the NERO style play--players running around with no marshals. It was also notable because the founders of the game came together for the first time--Craig and Debbie Walton, Mike Ventrella, Heidi Hooper, me, Bob King--all of us were there. We decided after the success of that game to try and run what turned into NERO. Craig Walton came up with the name. Shandlin's Ferry remained on the NERO map, and what happened at that game became part of the NERO world. We even had a Shandlin's Ferry campaign in the Massachusetts chapter a few years later. That gave me a lot of satisfaction. SP: Speaking of the creators: I did some checking on the other LARP games (Amtgard, Dragoncrest, Camarilla) that are still being played today, and with the exception of the SCA, none of them have been around longer (although IFGS was starting the same time you were). Did you consider yourselves innovators in RPGs? FI: Did we consider ourselves innovators? Not at the time, I don't think, though we finally started to realize what we had done a year or so later. In retrospect, it was quite an innovation. It was a break from the old-style module based game, which was started at Treasure Trap in England--that's what Middle Realms was based on. The IFGS is a module-based game. Treasure Trap and a bunch of English games have been running longer than us or IFGS. Also, the ILF (Interactive Fiction Society) has been around quite a while. SP: What was your experience with RPGs prior to all this? FI: Wow. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons way back in the 70's with my brother. I owned everything they put out, all the way back to the three little book set. I made a huge jump into role-playing when I started a store--The Gamemaster. It's really the home of NERO. We got everything started there after NERO was set up. SP: Tell me about your store. FI: It was a great store--we had everything. It was upstairs at 444 Massachusetts Ave in Arlington, MA. We had six or so tables for gaming in the store in the front. They were well-used. We had everything that had to do with roleplaying, and most stuff that had to do with miniatures. I used to have mini-conventions there every month. A guy named Brian Reddington-Wilde helped me run them. He's a game designer of some renown nowadays in miniatures rules--runs a business called "Goblin Tooth Enterprises" SP: I've heard of them. Do you no longer run the store? FI: Nope--NERO took over the store. We moved it twice, and the store part of it got smaller every time. Finally, we just dropped the store part and got an office. That was after Mike Ventrella wrote the article about NERO that made it into Dragon Magazine. After that article, we suddenly had, like, 5,000 members. There was no WAY we were ready to handle that many people. I'm afraid that customer service suffered a lot then. We used to have huge games. In 1992, we ran what is now known as the "Brood" weekend--the first game run by Rob Ciccolini. We had over 700 players there, including something like 150 NPCs. That was at Camp Wing, a really cool place with an old stockade and everything. SP: How many chapters were there when that happened? FI: Chapters? None. We were trying to get a couple started. The first was a New Jersey chapter, which later broke away from us and became LAIRE. Then Georgia--they later broke away and became SOLAR. The first chapter that remained was PRO, in Pennsylvania. Another Georgia chapter formed about then, too. All of this was about late 1992 and early 1993. We didn't have ANYTHING ready to support other chapters, though we got REAL anal about them conforming to our standards. A big mistake, in my opinion. SP: I've read the 3rd edition rulebook and know how much different the rules are today--and I've heard a few stories about some of the different classes and races and spells. Can you try to convince me that Stone Elves aren't Vulcans? [grinning] FI: Naw, I wouldn't even try to convince you of that. [laugh] Have you read about Metamorph and Obliterate It's true: Obliterate used to be a spell like any other. SP: What was Metamorph? FI: It was a spell that took a small representation of something--say a mouse--and allowed you to turn someone into one of them. It got, as you can imagine, severely abused. We even had a Truth spell--you'd be amazed how people remember the same event in very different ways. We had folks who sincerely thought they were telling the truth, and whose accounts of things just didn't match other people just as sincerely telling us about the same event. [It] makes you sympathize with the court system. Did you know I hate modules? SP: [laughing] What do you prefer? FI: Need them for the game, but I hate 'em. I've only been on maybe 3 in my entire career. I prefer the characters playing themselves, and getting into whatever because that's who they are. I don't know--I love the social aspect of the game, and the big problems that land in your lap, and having to deal with those. Modules are good because we have a chance to do special effects and marshalled calls that we can't do anywhere else, but--I don't know--it's the most artificial part of the game. SP: So do you like massive combat encounters at the edge of town? FI: Lord, no. I prefer hanging out in the Tavern, telling jokes with bad accents, being with friends, and being a hero when something visits. Combat encounters? I like them sometimes, but I'm not out there for the combat. But then, I'm not typical. I love the ceremonial stuff, the Tourneys, the Pomp and Circumstance, the armor, the look of the thing, the chance to make myself a part of a great movie moment. That's what I like, and that's what I tried to give to other players. Though I found over the years that those things are not as valuable for many of the other players as they are to me. SP: Some of the other races, while not unseen elsewhere in other forms, pique the interests of many new players. Where did Biata come from? FI: They were based on griffins. In the early days, we were still feeling our way as to what we could and could not do in a Live game. Heidi had a cool concept for them that included some mind powers that, so it turns out, just can't be included in this type of game. They became a group of Northmen/barbarians sort of Shaman-type people. Their mind powers got severely cut back. You live and learn. SP: I also heard an interesting story about the first formal component ever placed in a treasure count. FI: What first component was that? SP: I don't know what it was, but something about how no one else knew either and it got passed around for awhile until someone became formal-capable. FI: Oh, yes. We put out components for several events before people knew what they did. The early ones were tags taped to tongue depressors and then covered with plastic tape to help protect them from the weather. When they got used, the sticks were supposed to get broken. BOY, did I get sick of buying tongue depressors. SP: No matter how much things change--some things remain the same. FI: Yeah, that's true. The Formal Magic system was a fairly late addition to the game--probably in our third year or so. It was a good idea, but took years before it became even close to balanced. [grinning] SP: How come Sarr can't purchase Waylay? FI: Oh, Lord...well, that's a touchy one. Sarr were supposed to be all blood-lusty and like that--when they did damage, they wanted to see BLOOD, dammit! So, they were restricted to using weapons that were bladed, no blunts. And you [since] can't waylay someone with a blade... SP: Wow, was that ever an emotional reaction! FI: It was a silly thing. The designer of the race (Jade LeBlanc, I think) had one concept, and they guy who was in charge of approving it had another. Guess who won. Like I said--both touchy and silly. SP: Tell me about the Mystic Wood Elves. FI: Lorne Lehrer created them. Cool race, roleplaying intensive. I actually was sort of not paying attention to them as they were created--I came to an event and this guy showed up with these horns and ears. I had no idea who or what they were. I love Mystics--it took me a few years before I finally got a fair idea of their culture and stuff. SP: I guess the "bigness" of the game caught you up in that, especially with the increasing number of members and eventually chapters. How did you deal with that? FI: Slowly. It took us a while to get the game together enough to really be able to run a multi-chapter game. We really started to get it together in about 1994, by which time we had maybe 5 or six chapters. When we got our permanent site in Ware, Massachusetts in 1994, we really started to pull it together. The most useful thing was the annual symposium in September every year. Everyone got together for a weekend there, and we got a bunch of stuff done--not as much on the rules and stuff as we hoped we would, but mostly it was good to realize that we were all one game, and needed to work together. SP: When you were still in the development stages, did anything get left out that you wished could get in? FI: I guess you could say that. In retrospect, there were a lot of things that I wish we had done differently, or better. I wish there was a true economy, for instance, trading and getting the stuff to make the things you need to adventure. It gives so many more dimensions to a character--the closest NERO comes is the Formal Magic System and the components it takes to do the spells. But in general, no--we changed the bloody game ALL the time in the first few years. Heck, the first xp/bp ratio was: first level: 1 = 1; second level: 2 = 1, and so on. We made it a lot steeper, then had to make it steeper yet the next year. I think we needed to make it even steeper than that. The power scale is too steep, too--as in, the power of older players as compared to the power of a new, entering character. But now we're getting into game design, which would take forever. SP: (The current formula is (n^2 +5n)/2 xp/bp where n is your level.) Like Roddenberry and Gygax you've gone off to do other things. tell me briefly about your new project. FI: The Isles? Well, it's taking all the things I learned over the years and applying them to a new game. It's an attempt to solve the problems. I think it succeeds very well. Quiet combat, a real economy, and a bunch of skills that are very useful to the characters that are not combat related. SP: Do you have any other stories you wish to share? FI: A million or so. [grinning] I have been doing this a long time. I couldn't begin to cover the stories that it would take to do this justice. SP: I guessed. How about just one favorite? FI: How about, instead, I tell you why I do this? What "moment" do I do it for? It's those times--when I'm sitting in the Tavern, all the check-ins done, the cabin assignments finished, all of that stuff--the game is well underway, people involved in doing what their characters want to do, involved in the plot of the weekend, or on-going stuff with their group. All of them, standing around, weapons glinting dully in the candle light, talking low, in character, people gambling for gold in the back, [Gadabari] bellowing and laughing--all of it seems real. For a while, you're there. In that spot, in that reality, and it's those times I feel like what I did--what we did--really meant something. SP: Thank you for a most magical discussion! FI: Magical? [laugh] Well, you're welcome.
You're going to pick up your godson from their stepdad when you see your brother-in-law's longtime-nemesis parked outside the Buffalo Wild Wings, so you walk in with your guard up, and stepdad's there with four hotties (one of whom is your uncle's ex-girlfriend's sister), they'd just beat the shit out of a black dude, and he says to you "oh I met your dad's old girlfriend, seems nice"
Inspired by a reddit post
So after reading this same "there's a whole other world you didn't know about and now you're a part of it" interaction for the 5422678th time in fiction, I'm fucking over it.
Stop writing about boring Everymen who grew up with no access to fantasy or conspiracies or adventure fiction in their lives.
Give me the characters who enter the dimension of magic or the geopolitical underworld with at least a passing understanding of fiction and the hero's journey.
"I'm sorry, Jill Smith, but we're running out of time and you're the only one who-"
"Yeah yeah, find the lair and drink from the chalice, I get it, I saw The Last Crusade just like everyone else in the nineties."
Thanos was fucking wrong
In the real world, the 10% wealthiest and most mobile population is responsible for 50% of total resource expenditure and even more of the total pollution.
In a fictional or real universe where intergalactic travel is possible, the traveling population would be part of that 10%, and the ratio of resource expenditure needed for large populations to achieve FTL speed is much, much higher.
So rather than accept that his culture was largely responsible for the problem and step back, Thanos hid behind this fact and said "well we'll just halve the population."
And yet, he had the power in his gauntlet to rewrite reality and could have just doubled the amount of accessible resources in the universe.
His motivation was entirely political: he didn't want to be called out for being a gigantic part of the problem.
Translate that to today, where we have fascist leaders suggesting that overpopulation is a problem while they cater their laws to benefit people with jets and yachts, burning out forests and melting glaciers to make room for more real estate in a global climate that's becoming increasingly less hospitable for living beings.
Team Thanos isn't an astrological sign or a wizardry house. It's a genocidal political agenda, and it's held by the worst people in the world under no public name.
Timidity and Arrogance, or what we learn over time
Yesterday I was doing some dev testing and I found an error during my workflow steps. I checked the logs and it was an error message I was familiar with: other testers had reported it, and while we knew what the problem was, we couldn't determine the cause. It wasn't happening in production, and they could never reproduce it with exact steps in testing environments, despite the error happening pretty regularly (a couple of times per day).
Several of the architects had explained it as a race condition: two users manipulating the same data at the same time. The error thrown was on purpose: our system was designed to handle the race condition to prevent data loss. But there was only ever one user, and we couldn't replicate it to work every time, it was dismissed as a quirk.
But here I was, suddenly able to see what it was, in real time....so I investigated it. And I found the steps that replicated the problem, every single time. Turns out the problem was environmental and behavior-specific. It wasn't happening in production because (a) the production servers are running on better technology (memory, processors, network speed, etc) than the test environments, and (b) the actions of users were much slower than my testing. I had to commit action A then immediately start action B in order to replicate the problem; automated testing suites do something similar. If I paused at any point during testing--to check email, go to the bathroom, answer a question--for more than ten seconds, the issue wouldn't reproduce.
I checked logs and event chronology. I could reproduce this every time if I timed it right. And the chronology told me exactly what it was trying to do at the moment the data change and caused the failure.
I looked up the method that was changing the data. It was a method I had written. It is a very simple method, of singular focus: it hadn’t been changed since the original check-in.
I wrote it seven years ago; eight months after I’d started working with the application, five months after the finalization of my divorce, and five days before I met my first non-monogamous partner.
Our pre-date talks and our first date discussions about relationship philosophies had been very logical. I didn’t want to experience the kind of loss that a traditional breakup or divorce entail, ever again. They had just had a recent breakup and weren’t looking to get into anything too deep. We could make this work, we thought. We both came from highly-educated backgrounds (them more than me), with rational mindsets, and with similar goals in mind. We came to early agreements and started this experiment in ethical non-monogamy together.
We hadn’t ready any books on the subject, or attended any discussions with others. We would meet many people over the next several years. We had many exciting experiences, got into arguments, had heated emotions, broke up, got back together, and slowly molded the dynamic of our relationship that didn’t look like what it did when it started, but is now something that works well for both of us.
I think back then, working within a system for which I didn’t have very much experience, making assumptions that my existing experience would be sufficient and that my minor actions would not have many, if any, downstream impacts.
When one firsts get started with a new project, philosophy, strategy, lifestyle...an individual often goes in with either overconfidence (arrogance) or a lack of confidence (timidity). Timidity comes from fear, being worried about having something to lose: a job, a relationship, an opportunity. Arrogance comes from clout, but it can also come from a sense of entitlement.
It turns out this minor change in our system, this method I’d written seven years ago (that went through review, approval and testing) was done in ignorance of triggers: automated database processes that fire whenever records are added, changed, or removed. Triggers are generally avoided these days because they hide functionality, and if a system that isn’t well-documented, people unaware of them can create negative experiences through even minor actions, however well-intentioned or needed those actions are. But sometimes triggers are still necessary.
And it turns out, as it did with this one method I had written, that the consequences of those triggers can lay dormant for a long time--so long that even after years of experience, seeing the consequences of those actions suddenly appearing, the initial impressions reading reports about them can be of denial or doubt.
I dismissed the concerns of those who had reported the negative behaviors, because they were minor or not happening for everyone. But here I am, seven years after I made a change that couldn’t possibly break anything, with a broken thing on my plate that can’t be dismissed, and now I have to fix it.
In the last seven years, I’ve gone through phases of both timidity and arrogance. On the other side of both is humility: a hard lesson where one learns to be both skeptical and accepting of the consequences their actions might commit, and, through purposeful work, to be proactive about the actions and changes they partake, rather than just assuming that everything will be okay and nothing bad will happen, regardless of the environment or the behavior of those working in it. One learns assertive and solution-oriented phrases: “That doesn’t sound like something that I would expect to happen, but let’s investigate it to be sure”, or “This change was made back when our development process was less mature: let’s rework the change using our current processes and see if we can assess all the impacts.”
Now, when we engage in change with humility, development sounds and feels more like therapy.