The issues involved are interesting. I generally think AI should not be trained on human artist’s work without the prior consent of the artists. But my understanding (and I am not a lawyer) is that if the labels win this case, it would not increase the protections for artists, it would increase profits for the labels. So the suits are not automatically a positive for me.
Also: because of my digital archive and research, I updated some of the locations in the original post to reflect that. Thanks for your patience.
Swiss-cheese memories
When I wrote the first draft I just guessed the details based on my memory of events. Since they were 22 years old, those memories were not accurate. What I remembered was: taking pictures of the sunrise, then giving up driving for a nap while Caleb drove, then some time later, in the daylight, waking up to the car running at maximum speed and getting a picture.
Left to right: Jake, Caleb, Brian (me, the author)
After wrapping that up, we pulled into the closest town. According to the map, the closest town to the Idaho-Montana border was Superior, and I vaguely remembered a diner there.
I do remember Jake saying we should fill up the tank as we drove into (a) town and assumed it was the same one we had breakfast in. According to my memory, the next major event was, of course, running out of gas, and Jake going off with the old couple in the RV. I had no idea where we were when that happened; we were just “somewhere in Montana”
Those were the events, in roughly the order they happened, but my first draft had them all happening before noon on 20 July 2002, in western Montana. That’s not right!
Start with what I know to be true
For a starting point, I knew that we pulled over to take pictures of the pre-dawn mountains, and a simple Google search showed that sunrise in Montana on 20 July was at 5:46 AM. Roughly that placed us on the map, give or take.
Sunrise on the Idaho-Montana border.
I had pictures from that trip. Digital pictures that were saved in my Photos library and therefore available right on my iPhone. Those photos followed me, from my old iBook back in 2002 down through the years and many laptops and phones, to my current iPhone 13 Mini. Gotta admit that’s kind of cool!
The camera was an Olympus Camedia C-220, Zoom (yes that was its name). It did not have location or time data capability; consumer electronics did not have that feature back then. I added location data later, in iPhoto on my Mac when Apple added that feature, and I tagged them by date taken, but beyond that the only information was in the pictures themselves.
Back to my photo library, where a search for “Montana” revealed a picture of the speeding ticket! OCR on my phone is a miracle when it works. This was a huge score. So much good info preserved there, including the time the ticket was written: 10:25 AM. This told me that we had continued for at least five hours after sunrise. That means we were a minimum of 400 miles east (assuming 90-100 MPH sustained) of the Idaho-Montana border on I-90, which puts that speeding stop about 50 miles west of Billings.
Triangulating from there
Stranded in Montana… but where?
Next, comparing the odometer in both of the pictures referenced above, we put 295 miles on the rental between the two pictures. So, where did we run out of gas? I found another image from that day in 2002 of me, standing next to the trunk, with a gas can on the ground (Caleb or Jake had taken the picture; probably Caleb). On the right edge of the frame is an exit sign: Exit 5something.
The exits on I-90 in Montana are numbered low to high, west to east, and I knew our gas stop was closer to the eastern border than the western. Looking at a list of exits for that highway, I found only one viable candidate: Exit 544, for Wyola, MT. I looked it up in Google and used Street View and confirmed: that was absolutely the same place. I even clicked down to the bottom of the off-ramp and saw the sign I clearly remembered: No services.
No Services
Wyola is less than 100 miles by car from Billings, and the maximum range on that Subaru Legacy was more than 300. Where did we last fill up the tank? It couldn’t have been Billings. We must have stopped somewhere else west of Billings for lunch or something else. Where were we when Jake reminded us to fill up while driving in? 320 miles west of Wyola is Butte, and it’s hard to imagine three guys on a road trip not stopping in a city called Butte. Right? That’s where we had our lunch.
Finally, to satisfy my curiosity, I looked at restaurants in Butte to see if I recognized one. I found an Annie’s Cafe, which very much feels like the kind of place we would choose, but the user-submitted pictures do not ring a bell for me. Change is inevitable in two decades, yeah?
PostScript: Full Chronological Order
All events listed occurred on 20 July 2002
5:30 AM – We pull over just past the Idaho-Montana border, near Sohon, MT, and take pictures of ourselves and the sky before sunrise.
9:00 AM – We stop in Butte, MT (hehe, butt) for breakfast and gas.
10:00 AM – Approximate time we pegged the speedometer at over 120 MPH indicated, west of Billings, MT.
10:25 AM – Montana State Trooper pulls us over and cites us for “Exceed(ing) the posted speed limit by (more than) 25 MPH” @ 92.5 MPH. Fine paid: US$40.00, cash
11:30 AM – Approximate time we arrived in Billings. Jake reminded us to fill up the tank. We did not.
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM – lunch break in Billings. Establishment unknown.
1:30 PM – Approximate time we ran out of gas, at Exit 544, near “No Services” Wyola, MT.
My 85+ year old dad, who has been staying with me while his apartment gets asbestos remediation, watches a lot of TV. In the nearly three months he’s been here (insurance has been dragging their feet, don’t ask) he’s probably watched more TV and movies than I have in the prior five years I’ve lived here alone.
His tastes tend to run to action thrillers, spies and snipers and bounty hunters and cops and firefighters, although sometimes he branches out to simple comedies or family drama. He absolutely does not like sci-fi, fantasy, or superheroes, though, despite them being action-y spectacles. He’ll watch them if I put one on, but it’s not his favorite.
Because our tastes don’t always align, I don’t often make recommendations for him. Probably my biggest win in that area was putting him on to Hacks, on HBO Max, with Jean Smart. He loved it and is now recommending it to other people, too. If you like old cranky people and young smart-asses, you’ll love it, too. And that’s the biggest reason I thought my dad would love it, which he did.
Tonight, I went downstairs and he was doing the scroll-to-find-something-new and he had stopped on a comedy.
“Are you looking for a comedy to watch, dad?”
“Yeah, I thought I was in the mood for something funny.”
He was on Hulu. I laughed. “What do you think about… vampires?”
“Oh, I don’t like those horror things, blood and guts don’t do anything for me.”
I laughed again, leaned in close, put my hand on his shoulder. “What do you think about… funny vampires?”
He arched his eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Funny, sexy vampires, in fact.” I motioned for the remote, and scrolled through to the search, typed in “what we do…” and clicked the top result. “Oh, and it’s kinda-sorta British humor. Well, New Zealand, which is close.”
“Yes. Just give it one episode. Watch the pilot, and if it’s not your cup of tea, you can go looking for something else, no strings attached.” I hit Play. “One episode, that’s all I ask.” I watched as Guillermo introduced himself to the camera and chuckled, then went back upstairs.
It is very much not like what dad normally watches. It’s weird. But it’s raunchy, and funny, and it’s one of the most amazing TV shows out there. It’s a Top 10 show for me, clearly.
Upstairs I texted my sister to give her the update. She loves this show, too. Her immediate response: “Keep me in this loop please!”
Just about a half hour later, i went back downstairs. On screen, Nandor, Laszlo, and Nadja were floating in the air outside a window, where inside some cosplayers were arguing. Guillermo said something, and Nandor hissed at him. “Please, Guillermo, you’ll frighten the virgins!”
Dad chuckled.
“Well you made it to episode two!” I said.
“Yeah, it’s OK,” dad said.
He was hooked. Nothing could have made me happier.
For the longest time, I did not own a car. I didn’t own a car for more than two decades. I used public transit or made use of short-term car rental services like ZipCar, or relied on friends and family to pick me up, or I rode my bicycle for short trips. It was fine, really; when I was employed, I could bus to my office, and I could check out a motor pool car if I needed to drive for work. And when I wasn’t working… where did I need to go, really? I could still use the other options, I just did them less often, because I had no money.
But in July 2016, however, I got a decent-ish job working at a call center for a major US bank. The call center was over 18 miles by surface streets, and since my schedule (after training) was a very early shift, public transit did not have any option to get me to the call center on time. I needed a car.
My cousin was looking to upgrade to a newer car, and I bought her used 1996 Honda Accord for cheap. It ran, almost everything on it worked, and it got me to work on time, and that’s all I cared about. I’ve tried to keep up the basic maintenance on it, and it’s served me well, with only minor hiccups here and there.
I have insurance, the car is legally registered, it uses a moderate amount of gasoline, and it only leaks a little oil. I’ve driven it to the beach and back several times. When a prospective employer asks if I have reliable transportation, I am comfortable saying yes. As long as I keep the fluids topped up, I often joke, it will probably outlast me.
For all of those reasons, I did not pay any attention to cars as a topic. I paid no attention to car makes and models, or trends in cars, or prices for new or used cars. I gave zero thought to what kinds of cars I liked or might buy, assuming I had money to buy a car, which I nearly always did not.
My last several jobs were either contract work, with expiration dates, or positions I took out of desperation, keeping a hope of finding something better. I was unable to save up enough money for a down payment and never felt secure enough to take out even a short car loan. That situation has shifted, though. I like my new job, and I can dream a little that maybe I’ll still be there for the foreseeable future. I can think about the possibility of planning to examine the options of perhaps getting rid of the ancient Honda… and replacing it with something newer.
Last night I started figuring out some things. What is a decent price range for a reliable car for me? How will it impact my budget? What will gas, insurance, and maintenance cost? How long will it take to save up a down payment, and is it worth it trading in the Accord? What is my credit score and how does that affect the interest rate and how much money will my credit union loan me? Should I buy a hybrid vs a gasoline car?
I started a spreadsheet to start tracking some of this stuff, because of course I did. I’ve got a first draft of what years, makes, and models interest me, just to get a feeling of what’s out there. It’s a start. Stay tuned for posts where I share some of my research and ask you, my readers, for your advice. Thanks in advance!
Red-haired Caleb was in the backseat, sleeping. I was in the passenger seat, enjoying the music and looking out at the vast empty Montana prairie in front and on either side of us under the late afternoon, early evening summer sun. The car smelled of junk food and sweat. It was Day 2 of the trip, still early in the morning, a day after we had left Portland in a rented car.
Jake, dark-haired, features sharp, was driving, hunched forward, hands gripping the steering wheel, face suspiciously blank.
The car, a 2000-ish Subaru Legacy, lurched a bit as the engine backfired. The blank expression on Jake’s face shifted almost imperceptibly into worry.
I turned the music down a bit to facilitate conversation. “Everything OK?”
“Could you check the map and see where the closest town is?”
I reached down into the footwell and picked up the paper road atlas. Omnipresent portable GPS was still a decade away. It was the afternoon of 20 July 2002, and we were about fifty miles east of the Montana-Idaho border on I-90. It hit me. “We didn’t get gas, did we?” Jake glanced over at me, and nodded. I craned my neck and saw the gas gauge, needle dead on empty, the orange gas pump-shaped light on, steady.
Gleefully wasting gas
Three hours earlier, I had been resting in the back seat, having driven through the night on one of the first shifts of our epic road trip. We had all gotten out of the car to take pictures of the famous Montana Big Sky at sunrise, marking our progress toward our destination, Mount Rushmore, formerly The Six Grandfathers (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe to the Lakota). We stopped in Butte (hehe, butt) to get gas and breakfast. At some point over the next few hours, I had laid down in the backseat to get some rest, Jake taking shotgun for Caleb driving.
I got maybe 20 minutes of rest before I heard my friends giggling, the engine at full speed. Jake was leaning over toward Caleb, holding my digital camera to get a picture of the pegged speedometer without obstructing Caleb’s view of the road. I laughed, sat up, and we commemorated our breaking in of getting the rental to an indicated 120 MPH. Caleb and Jake explained that we were taking advantage of the Montana freeways’ lack of speed limits, a plan they had hatched shortly after we had crossed into the state and without consulting me, the person financially responsible, on paper, for the car rental.
Somewhere between Missoula and Bozeman, we hit maximum speed.
Legal intervention
Around 10:20 AM, east of Billings, a state trooper pulled up behind us, red and blue lights flashing. Caleb panicked; he wasn’t yet 25 years old and technically not a legal driver for this car, at least as far as Hertz was concerned. After we pulled over, with the trooper looking into a car filled with the detritus of three white guys on a road trip, he asked the question all cops ask: “Do you know how fast you were going?”
We learned that Montana did have speed limits on its freeways. In 2002, the posted limit was 75 MPH, and the trooper ticketed us for exceeding the limit by 25 MPH or more; his radar clocked us at 102.5 MPH, according to the ticket. I still have a picture of the ticket, which I won’t post because it shows info about Caleb I’m sure he doesn’t want on the internet. We pulled $40 from our gas fund and paid the officer immediately in cash. The ticket was our receipt, and we continued into Billings.
As we were coming down from the high of speeding and the stress of legal entanglements, and as we looked for a place to eat that would meet our agreement (no fast food chains, only local establishments). We made another stop, to top up in Butte. Then we got lunch in Butte, because all of us were men and could not resist a city called Butte. As we pulled in to town, Jake reminded us “We should fill the tank before we leave!” But we did not.
The consequences of forgetting
Now, 300+ miles and almost five hours of freeway driving after filling up in Butte (hehe, butt), and an hour past Billings, as we neared the Montana-Wyoming border, we faced the consequences. The car’s backfiring increased in duration, jolting Caleb awake. After we explained to him the situation, he shared our worries. The map showed a possible exit ahead, Exit 544, and a town named Wyola. We coasted to the top of the off-ramp on fumes. Down below us, at the bottom of the off-ramp, a sign mocked us: “No Services”.
This is what it looks like when a car is out of gas.
We used the universal signal of car trouble: hood and trunk up, emergency flashers on. I worried that we had created a new problem with the car, thanks to incomplete information: I thought fuel injectors were damaged by running empty. We joked about Jake’s luck, and how he always seems to land on top of things. Except this time; he was driving when he noticed we needed to fill up, and was driving again when we failed to fill up. Unlucky.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if some bus full of the Swedish Bikini Team pulled up to take Jake to get gas?” Caleb joked. “That would be more his luck.”
Rescued
Not too long after, a large recreational vehicle pulled up alongside, and the nicest little old lady leaned out the door. “You boys having some trouble?” She was wearing a plaid shirt and faded mom jeans, not a silver bikini.
She and her husband, whose names I have sadly forgotten, took Jake up to the next exit, who knows how far away. Caleb and I held down the car, Caleb eating some of the cheese we had stashed in a cooler in the trunk, despite his lactose intolerance. Maybe an hour later, the kindly old couple returned Jake to us with a can full of gas. We tried to pay the couple for their time and effort but they refused. “Just pay it forward,” she told us. “We’re happy to help.”
The car ran fine after we topped up the tank, with no trouble with the injectors, for the rest of the trip.
I try to go for a walk every day. I have kept my streak going for a while. Sadly, my Apple Watch, which tracks similar exercise-related things, does not tell me how many days in a row I’ve gone for a walk. I could probably dig that information out of the app’s colorful, well-designed graphical user interface, but I just know that I’ve been doing it for a while with very few breaks. The breaks are when I’m sick; not much else deters me.
The health benefits are good; I know that a couple of years ago when I would go for a walk I would quickly get out of breath and that doesn’t happen any more. My heart rate rarely gets out of Zone 1 unless I try to do a little jog.
I have mentally mapped out routes through my neighborhood, keeping to side streets as much as possible. The routes include laps around a park nearby so I can walk on soft grass if I want (or stop at a public restroom or get some water if I need to). I can tailor the routes to be anywhere from 25 minutes long to over an hour. It’s great.
One of the major benefits, though, is the mental break. Especially for the past 7 months, I’ve spent all my time at home, rarely leaving, because I was unemployed. Going outside gives me a new viewpoint, literally, and the habitual movement allows my mind to wander.
Wandering minds are creative minds. Walking, it turns out, is good for thinking.
On today’s walk, as on nearly every other walk, I had headphones in and listened to podcasts. Today’s was this week’s episode of Accidental Tech Podcast, where three friends talk about various tech news and developments, mostly focused on Apple and the ecosystem surrounding Apple products. They do wander into other topics, though, and a frequent one is cars and car news, since the podcast they started first was called Neutral and was entirely about cars.
Casey, in the aftershow of this week’s episode, told a truely astonishing story about a car failure that I do not want to spoil. If you have any interest in cars, as I do, you owe it to yourself to listen and marvel at Casey and his wife’s terrible luck. Everyone is fine, except for their car, an otherwise-bulletproof 2017 Volvo.
Listening to that, though, reminded me of many past car-related stories, and since I’m trying to post something here daily, I realized that I could mine those stories for future posts. It would make a nice break from all the D&D I’ve been posting here lately. Gotta keep up with my theme, which is that I write about whatever the fuck I want and don’t have to stick to any single topic because this is my place on the internet.
I was able to remind myself of that topic by asking Siri on my Watch to remind me about it when I got home. This feature is amazing for me: the act of making the reminder helps me remember, and then getting another reminder when I get close to home helps seal it in my short-term memory, which is otherwise like a fine Swiss cheese.
Look forward to posts about that, and other topics, in the days to come, but for now, I’m thankful I can still move around, and that my body and my mind work together to keep me living a creative life.
Had a good day, good first week at the new job, spent some time with dad tonight.
But just super tired. Trying to think of 500 words that work together in order, along with punctuation, to make a blog post tonight, is hard. I’m literally just typing this out as a typing exercise to see how quickly I can hit 500 words. Maybe it will turn into something, maybe it’ll just take up space. Trying to turn off my inner critic and just type whatever comes to mind right now. I’ve said right now a couple of times now and part of my brain is trying to tell the rest of my brain, my sleepy tired brain, that that’s bad and I should stop. Not gonna stop, though, got a simple goal, an easy goal.
Type until the number of words is 500. Or maybe I should type it as five hundred, because that’s twice the number of words and will get me to that goal faster. In fact, I shouldn’t type contractions; I should not type contractions because this will also help me reach my goal faster. Is this making sense? You see what I’m going for here. Sorry if this isn’t entertaining, sometimes I just have to show up and let things happen without trying to make it into something good.
Every good writer I have ever heard talk about the process of writing has said that you just have to finish the story. First drafts are supposed to be bad because you can fix it when you re-write it, but you will not know what needs to be fixed until you try to tell the whole story, start to finish. I understand that advice on an intellectual level but have always had a hard time implementing it. I know, I swear I have talked about this before but hey, it’s a theme, a blog theme for me.
Gotta keep writing. Keep going.
Dan Harmon once said that if you’re feeling writer’s block because you are afraid you are going to write shit, then turn that into your motivation. Write the shittiest shit that ever was shat, just to show your dumb afraid-of-writing-shit brain that it is right. The goal then is to just get writing and once you are in the process of writing, once you have started, it will give you permission to keep going and you will see that writing anything is better than writing nothing.
Maybe I am explaining this wrong but that is how it came out. If I were to do a second pass on this blog post I would go back and fix it, or I might actually look up the exact quote and find out if it was in fact Dan Harmon who said that and not some other writer. Maybe I said that and now my brain is so tired it is refusing to believe I could say something smart like that and is instead attributing it to Dan Harmon?
Who knows, man, I am now over 500 words. I win again.
Over on r/DMAcademy, a subreddit for Dungeons Masters to ask and give advice to each other, u/AstreiaTales asks the question “Do you, DMs, let your villains plots get foiled?” They give a number of elaborate examples, but ultimately state that their players want to feel like superheroes at the finale of a long arc, being outnumbered and outgunned because the villan powered up and is on the verge of completing their big, bad, evil plans.
But the user also understands that tabletop role playing games are about making reasonable choices, and are sprinkled with bits of chaos and randomness, and they’re unable to reconcile those two ideas. So they’re asking for advice in finding the balance.
Here’s my answer. I’ve given the short version of this to my players and I try (I hope I try) to reinforce that during every session.
I lean more towards choices and randomness, and I do that by abandoning the whole idea of being the sole storyteller. It’s not my story. The story is what happens at the table, when everyone is there, choosing and acting, influenced by the dice.
As a Dungeon Master, I don’t write stories. I don’t write plots, where this happens and this happens and then the big finale happens. If I tried to do that, the characters and dice would quickly intervene and send the whole “plot” crashing into unknown territory.
I write characters who live in a world and have goals. I write situations, and decide who and what would reasonably be involved, and what people would have to reasonably overcome in order to achieve those goals. Then I put those situations in the path of my players.
My players write characters who live in a world and have goals. When we’re all sitting at the table, we make choices for our characters, and then play out the results, including some randomness so that we can all be surprised how things advance.
I’m not a novelist. I’m not even a showrunner, dictating how this season is going to play out over the course of the campaign. If anything, I’m one writer with slightly more responsibility for filling the world with interesting things and people, in a writer’s room with the rest of the writers, bouncing ideas, breaking stories into beats, and shaping a story that we can then share with others once it’s all played out.
My play style is heavily influenced by the tradition of improvisational theater, short and long form, as documented by many but primarily Keith Johnstone and Clive Baker. Everyone on stage (or at the table) has responsibility to bring up the parts of the story they want, and to allow everyone else to interact with them. No offer of a beat or line or imagined element should be refused, but everything is incorporated into the evolving story.
If the players want a big flashy battle with a big bad evil guy, facing incredible odds and overcoming the challenges heroically, then they can, through their choices and actions and exploration and interaction, nudge the story in that direction themselves.
Do my villains get to achieve their ends, or are they foiled by the players’ characters? That’s what we’re playing to find out. Everyone gets to be surprised. My villains might end up frustrated by an anticlimactic fizzle; if so, it means the players played well and had luck on their side. That’s the story of that game.
This may not be everyone’s style, but this is my style and my players love it. They trust me, and I trust them, to help move the story toward whatever is going to happen next.
If your players truly want big epic high-stakes conclusions to stories, then encourage them to play that way. If they don’t want that level of trust, then you’ve answered your question for yourself: you write the plots, figure out what happens when, and lead the players through the story beats. If they complain, then maybe try it my way.
This won’t be 500 words but I still wanted to post something.
Played D&D tonight. I gave the players a combat that wasn’t just hitting enemies until their hit points fall out. And they seemed to enjoy it but it did drag a bit and become a bit of a slog. Took the whole session and ended on a low note of the bad guys getting away with the information they were there to get, thanks to a crafty evil badger.
The bad guys also set a blazing fire at the start to draw the heroes away from their target, some log books and notes and receipts. They also dropped a few hints as to what they’ve been doing, and left behind casualties and stragglers that the party can loot.
It was a success but could have gone better. I’m always hard on myself for technical issues but I should realize that those are going to happen regardless.
Still, it was fun, and I got to challenge the party. They’re hitting 5th level and they are now ridiculously capable. It’s only going to get harder from here on out.
Lessons learned: I did not need that many enemies for the plan to work. They were spread out and did not cluster in one spot, so fewer of them would have meant the combat ran faster, mostly because I would not have to keep track of so many different statblocks and actions.
Essentially I don’t have to plan much for next session, since I already drew up the plans for what would likely happen next, and I guessed correctly! Yay, me!
Seriously, though, I love this game. It’s my favorite thing to do.
