The Latest Lamentations from the Lawn of Lud, the Luddite from Ludland....

Another month has arrived-



Rivet Rivet Rivet!

And with it, an overdue post about the big event of the  month, happening toward the end of next week:





Ha. Superman ducks when they throw the gun at him. I, meanwhile, get done in by online Kryptonite.

This entry is cursed, so I'm going to stop even trying to write it.

First I dictated the following, my phone died, I thought it was lost, then discovered it was saved in a weird place in my phone mail app:

Most people get cards and presents and cakes for their birthdays. Every other year, I get a bill for $375 and a massive bullshit requirement from the state of New York. They time attorney registration renewals to your birthday, and being born in an odd numbered year, it is once again my turn.

In addition to the requirements of payment, verification that I don’t owe child support, separate submission of my anonymous reporting of my contributions as into lawyering for poor people, I have to certify that I have spent at least 24 hours sitting on my ass learning stuff. The rules for this have gotten comparable to understanding the blue lines in hockey over the time it has been required.

There are now  separate specific course requirements of between one and four hours apiece for ethics, cybersecurity, and diversity/inclusiveness.  Some programs include these extra hours as part of their longer curriculum offerings, while others you have to ferret out on your own. Most of these, you have to pay for, anywhere from just under 100 bucks for a short session for well over $400 for something taking up most of the day- unless you’re invited to speak. Then your attendance gets comped, and you get extra credit for preparation time. I did one of those a year ago, but was not invited back to do it again this year. (The kids downvote my evaluations because I don’t use PowerPoint.)

When I got my renewal form, I pulled out my certificates and found out: one, I was missing one of them; and two, even accounting for it I was still a few credits short. Fortunately, a coworker had gotten an invite to a free one credit cybersecurity offering put on by a local title company, and one of my bar associations offered an online video one to take care of all but a few credits of the rest. Plus, under the “blue lines in hockey” rules, I could still apply a few unused credits from the previous cycle to make up my full 24. All I needed to do was log in to

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That's as far as I got when the phone died. Short version: the cybersecurity one required me to click on an executable file to attend their seminar, where the first thing they told us was DON'T CLICK ON EXECUTABLE FILES.

The Bar Association one for the remaining credits had the opposite problem: I couldn't download the accompanying file of written materials because of a mismatch between the email address I signed up under and the one on the computer I was watching it on. Fortunately, I cleared that up the next day, and I'll be set with my hours as soon as the title company sends me my one-credit certificate. Or Vlad the Hacker sends me the ransom note. Whichever comes first.

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What crashed all of that, written (and then some) half an hour ago, was trying to download this picture of the MORE famous member of the Birth Class of 1959:




Yup, finally saw it. We weren't going to spend 40 bucks to see it in a cinema, or half that for an on-demand streaming, but when Redbox offered the disk for a buck ninety, we gave the girl a try.

The first few scenes? Utterly insufferably cheerful. But then Our Heroine starts having dark and deathly thoughts, and the film turns into a remarkably prescient parody of All The Pink Things.  It really worked as an origin story, the co-stars and cameos were dead-on, and it's amazing that Mattel allowed all the subversiveness. Amazing, that is, until you count the over billion dollars made by it. My only disappointment is they haven't come out with the Ordinary Barbie promised at the end of the film, predicted to make Mattel another mint.

Maybe for Christmas.

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That $1.90 rental may be becoming a thing of the past, though, which was my Luddite Lamentation even before my phone and laptop started eating my words.

We still hang onto the allure of the actual physical disk of entertainment, be it CDs for audio or DVDs (and the occasional Blu-Ray) for film and television.  They're compact, clearer than their streaming counterparts, and unlike the vagaries of online services, you own what you buy.  But those Buys won't be from Best very soon:


 Best Buy is checking out of the DVD business.

The consumer-electronics retailer will phase out sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs both in-store and online in early 2024, according to industry sources familiar with the company’s plans. Best Buy made the initial decision to end DVD sales nine months ago, according to one source.

Best Buy confirmed Friday that it is ending sales of DVDs. “To state the obvious, the way we watch movies and TV shows is much different today than it was decades ago,” a Best Buy spokesperson said in a statement to Variety. “Making this change gives us more space and opportunity to bring customers new and innovative tech for them to explore, discover and enjoy.”

This follows the Netflix shutdown of the mail-delivery service of such media that made their name a quarter century ago.  It's a sad end to a form of entertainment that was reliable, of much higher quality than streaming alternatives, and gave you the permanence of a product that you could see, feel and even resell if you chose to. When you "buy" a movie on Amazon Prime or something similar, your purchase is nontransferable and only as permanent as the service's rights to the purchase are. Shows and films come and go every month, and the increase in royalties and residuals under the writers' strike settlement (and a likely similar end to the actors' walkout) will make these disappearances more common and sudden.

For now, at least, the studios are still planning to make them, and Wally World, at least, is still planning to sell them. That's good, because one of our most reliable go-to's for DVD content is our library system. We can usually find anything except the most popular recent releases within a 20-minute drive to a branch, at worst having to place a (free) order to have one delivered from South Boonie Library to a closer branch in a day or two.  A lot of families who can't afford eight different streaming services use the library as their only way to see decent entertainment when and how they want to, and it would be a shame if the physical DVD's library availability went the way of the cassette audio tape and the VHS cartridge.

Even if that does happen, though, we still have hundreds of video disks to hold us over until the player breaks, a backup old one in the cellar, and a service contract to fix either if they do fall apart.  It's not stopping us from watching roughly half our evening entertainment over our internet connection, but if vinyl LPs could come back, maybe these will, too.

Maybe we can get Barbie to put a player in her Real World Dream House:)