Rob Favre

If I had the money appropriated for cheese price supports...

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Moving day

Aug 18, 2019
4 min

Moving day

The shadow has been looming for months. But it’s just a few days away now, and there’s nothing in my power that can change it. I wouldn’t want to change it even if I could, not really. I don’t want to stop it from happening. But I wouldn’t mind the ability to push it down the road, just a little. Not forever. Maybe take these couple of days and spin them into a couple more. I feel this pressure, a need I can’t pin down. It scurries and hides whenever I shine a light to see wh

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Avengers: Endgame thoughts

Apr 28, 2019
3 min

Avengers: Endgame thoughts

When I sat down to write this, it was going to be a review. But I hadn't gotten too far into it before I realized that it was something else. (Also maybe important - there are some spoiler-like substances in this post. If you haven't seen the movie yet, proceed with caution.) A review implies some intellectual distance on the part of the reviewer, some impartiality that lets the reviewer critically weigh the merits of the object of the review. But I'm not sure I'm in a positi

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The world's worst books

Dec 22, 2017
4 min

The world's worst books

I posted a couple of my thoughts about Ready Player One earlier; short version - I wasn't a fan. But there was a silver lining to having read it - I got to experience the immense satisfaction of listening to 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, a podcast that critiques and dissects Cline's book. It was a joy to listen to the hosts' growing frustration with the book's determination to subvert any tension it manages to accidentally build, the tortured prose, the sociopathic protagon

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It's time to repeal the 2nd amendment

Oct 12, 2017
2 min

It's time to repeal the 2nd amendment

I am numb over the events that happened in Las Vegas last week. I am numb that I now seem to be able to take in stride that hundreds of our fellow citizens can be mowed down like chaff, and we mourn and lower the flag and have moments of silence, and then carry on with our jobs and homework and football games, shaking our heads and hoping that it doesn't happen again. It always happens again. A moment of silence and a prayer and a lowered flag is perhaps all we can do when tr

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The flaw in flawless fictional worlds

Aug 17, 2017
3 min

The flaw in flawless fictional worlds

I recently finished reading Ready Player One. It had a couple of cool ideas but it felt like I was reading fan fiction, the tone was all over the place, and I basically skimmed all the parts with dialog because each time the characters spoke I hated them more. But, whatever. Ernest Cline has sold thirty trillion books and has Steven Spielberg making his book into a movie. I have... none of those things. He must know something that I don't. But beyond the basic problems I had

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Who needs civilization, anyway?

Jul 27, 2017
3 min

Who needs civilization, anyway?

I was reading a review of some works by Paul Kingsworth, and it got me thinking about the idea of civilization. I haven't read any of his work, so all I have to go on here is what's covered in the review. He is part of the "Dark Mountain Project," a loose collection of writers and thinkers trying to grapple with the impending "ecocide," as industrial civilization consumes and destroys itself in a cataclysm of greed and consumption. Their manifesto claims that they aim to prom

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Unless

Jun 3, 2017
4 min

Unless

The problem with taking a kids' book and adapting it into a full-length motion picture is that there's not enough stuff in most kids's books to fill out a 100-or-so-minute running time. So you get a lot of musical numbers, side plots, and extra characters. Or, in the case of 2012's The Lorax, you get additions that so completely miss the point of the original book that they end up hollowing out the value of the story, leaving behind an empty shell. I loved The Lorax when I wa

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Why Monopoly is a failure that we keep playing

Mar 30, 2017
3 min

Why Monopoly is a failure that we keep playing

I think it was back in college when I first came to realize that Monopoly was a terrible game. I had grown up playing it, of course, like any good red-blooded American. My family invented our own special house rules, like every family did. At one point I lost a game by landing on Ventnor Avenue, which was owned by my brother. He had improved it by building something like 5 or 6 hotels, which I'm almost sure is not technically allowed under the rules. When my wife and I starte

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Antibodies

Feb 19, 2017
2 min

Antibodies

So, news flash: the USA is sick. Due to some interesting "quirks" in our electoral system, we've somehow managed to elect a narcissistic, deluded toddler to be our chief executive. That's the good news. Even though almost 3 million more people voted for his opponent. Democracy! Hooray. I'm not going to attempt to make a list of the jaw-droppingly stupid, corrupt, and inappropriate things President Trump has already done in his first 30 days in office, both because it would ma

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Consumer product engineering: the thankless task

Sep 28, 2016
2 min

Consumer product engineering: the thankless task

Something bittersweet happened last weekend. Poor longsuffering Shadowcat, my wife's 2006 Saturn Ion, was finally sent to live on a farm. After 115k miles, she just wasn't running right, and the mechanics haven't been able to do anything. The last resort was basically replacing her engine, which, no thanks. Farewell, Shadowcat. We will miss you. On a happier note, meet Nightcrawler: * Our first-ever brand new car, and he is very shiny indeed. And has a lot of technology that

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Respect, real and otherwise

Aug 27, 2016
3 min

Respect, real and otherwise

Early on in my career, I lived in perpetual fear of software engineers. I realize that most of us probably do, of course; the low-grade perpetual miasma of fear that programmers control pretty much every part of the modern world, and that maybe one day they'll just decide to turn off the internet and the ATMs and the Ubers, and then where will we all be? No, my fear was much more specific. When I was hired as a user experience designer right out of graduate school, my job was

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Old games and memory

Jul 16, 2016
4 min

Old games and memory

One of my friends at work brought this thing in to the office a few months ago. A bunch of us gathered around and talked while trying to wrangle a twenty-five-year-old game console into working on a one-year old HDTV, and talked about our favorite games. Everyone over a certain age had stories of their big conquests in Super Mario Bros., or Zelda, or Contra, or Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. Everyone under that age probably listened mystified and thankful that they had been bless

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What has to happen

Jul 11, 2016
3 min

What has to happen

The new post was sitting there in my drafts folder, 80% done, needing just a little cleanup and a closing paragraph before I posted it. It was going to be an Onion-style fake news story about private citizens owning nuclear weapons, and an NRA-style organization that defended their right to use them even after many people were killed by them. Then last week happened. I'm not going to pretend I'm equipped to untangle the knot of race, history, fear, police militarization, and

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Hello world

Jun 19, 2016
1 min

Hello world

I have been struggling with the problem of what to put into this first post. So much pressure. If I make a bad first impression, what will that mean? Will I drive readers away? Will I be laughed at? Will I offend someone? Then I took a deep breath and let a single, serene thought wash over me like a meadow-scented breeze on a cool spring morning: It doesn't matter. Nobody is reading this. Plus, you never want to set the bar too high. From here, the quality of this site

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