Of Laziness and Dentistry

I am 35 years old. This is very young, given how long I expect to live, but it is still a rather long time to go on this planet without seeing a dentist.

Now, I can't say for sure that I never saw a dentist before. My memories from seven years old and earlier are pretty hazy. But I certainly don't ever recall going to a dentist.

It's not like you wouldn't think to send someone like me to the dentist. One of my two front teeth is a snaggletooth: it juts out at a nontrivial angle that is quite noticeable. It's the kind of thing that really accentuates the fact that I never had my teeth looked at, even though it's never really bothered me beyond preventing me from whistling loudly.

(In fact, when I dream, my self-image has the same snaggletooth. I also wear glasses, though I'm beardless and am able to travel much, much faster than my real self can manage.)

In Alabama, this wasn't that big a deal. Going without dental care wasn't that uncommon where I grew up. But here in Maryland it's almost unheard of, so it stands out much more than it would if I lived elsewhere.

So I grew up not going to the dentist, and as an adult I just continued not going. I didn't really care about cosmetics, and my teeth never really bothered me, so I just continued not going. Over the years, people have said: you should go to the dentist! Who knows how bad your teeth are at this point! You must have so many cavities! I can't believe you haven't been to a dentist in 35 years! But I've been too lazy to really do anything about it. I guess I figured that at some point I'd buy insurance and then I'd eventually go to a dentist.

When the Affordable Care Act was passed, I bought health insurance for the first time. I didn't bother with dental insurance, though. It just seemed like an extra expense that wouldn't do anything, given that I never went to the dentist. Time passed. I didn't take any new steps.

And then Trump became president.

There are many things I could say about Trump, but the item that is most relevant to me is his insistence on dismantling the Affordable Care Act. All of a sudden I realized I had better take advantage of insurance now, just in case I don't have access to it later.

So last week I went to the dentist.

Note the sideways tooth in the lower left.

They were surprised to learn that I had no teeth pain. Apparently most people who go 35 years without seeing a dentist only come when a problem occurs that has them in intense pain. They took x-rays, examined my mouth, and basically just said how lucky I was to have such good teeth.

My non-wisdom teeth are all fine, with the exception of a small chip in one tooth, which they said they will leave alone and just keep watching as I come in every six months for checkups and cleaning. One of wisdom teeth never came in. Another came in sideways, but is apparently fine in every way and not causing any problems. Another came in normally, and the last is angled poorly. This last tooth is the only one with a cavity, but since it is a wisdom tooth, they said they might just extract it rather than do anything with the cavity.

So: 35 years without a dentist and the only tooth with a problem is a wisdom tooth. I guess that's pretty lucky. Now my only problem is that they made me promise to brush my teeth twice each day and floss daily. I guess this is what everyone does; it's just not something I'm used to yet. We'll see how it turns out when I next see the dentist in six months.

Review: Dark Lord's Answer

Dark Lord's Answer by Eliezer Yudkowsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Dark Lord will answer whatever question you most need answered, but the answer you receive might not appear good in itself. The Dark Lord's Answer will always be instrumentally good, but your conscience may cause you to hesitate before following through with the implementation.

Yudkowsky does an excellent job of setting up a fascinating story here, but he fails at following through. The genre is rational fiction, but good rational fiction should not be as explainy as this is. At times, the text just isn't light enough, and a reader who isn't already familiar with economics might consider the book too preachy. I'm reminded of bad educational video games from the 1990s; it's a lesson wrapped up in a shell of entertainment -- except it's not entertaining if you don't want to learn the material.

If you are already moderately knowledgable about economics, then this is an interesting read. The setting is great; the characters are great; the way the characters solve problems is great. But after finishing the too short text, all I can think about is how I wanted the story to be more about the Dark Lord, and less about the intricacies of the main problem that the Dark Lord solved in the book.

If you like rational fiction, read this book. It's short and it has great ideas that make it worthwhile. If you already know some economics, then you won't get too put out by the explainy sections, which is a bonus.

But if you don't know economics, then this book will feel as preachy as Ayn Rand, but without the length nor inanity. If you haven't read rational fiction before, then this is not a good starting point. Try The Sword of Good by the same author instead.

I give it three stars because I liked it more than most short books, but it's at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to rational fiction.

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Review: Pact

Pact by Wildbow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this world of magic, most battles between practicioners are not won by strength of magic alone, but by rule-following, whether it is to gain the favor of a god that will allow you to perform some great feat; to gain the favor of the local spirits so that the things you want to happen become easier while the things you don't become harder; or to gain the favor of fellow practicioners, who may help or harm your ability to perform in any battle. But there is one group that stands apart: diabolists.

Diabolists call upon the power of demons to achieve their ends, but everything has its price. Deals with demons often have grave consequences, sometimes quite literally. When a practicioner battles a diabolist, the question is not who has more power nor who has gained more favor; rather, the question is: how badly does the diabolist want to win? Because if your desire to win is great enough, you can always enact one more pact with a demon strong enough to make you the victor.

I enjoyed J.C. McCrae's writing in Pact. He did an excellent job of creating a world of fantasy that isn't quite hard fantasy, but that nevertheless adheres to rules that are strongly hinted at. In several parts of the story, it becomes apparent that an observant reader could potentially figure out how the main characters would get out of situations by thinking hard enough about the hints included earlier in the story. This is not common with most fantasy stories, and I truly appreciate that Wildbow has written Pact in this way. Even so, I would not quite call this hard fantasy, mostly because many of the rules of how magic works in this world are only just specific enough to make the mysteries solvable and the drama sensible. Maybe we can say this in the hard-ish fantasy genre. It's rational fiction-adjacent.

If you like stories about deals with the devil, where wishes are granted a la The Monkey's Paw but you won't like how they come true, then Pact is definitely for you. The story defies conventions in ways that I can't say here without giving spoilers, so don't expect it to be like other fantasy stories in this vein, but this is to its benefit. When a character in Pact is shown to be holding the idiot ball, it either makes complete sense why that is, or you may find that things are not quite what they at first seem. For these reasons, I strongly recommend Pact to anyone interested in hard fantasy.

However, there are a few problems. The most glaring is the grammar and typographical issues, which isn't quite at the standards readers might be used to. There are several places where typos may temporarily take you out of the story, and there are two or three sections where Wildbow could really use an editor to change the pacing or cut a significant number of paragraphs that don't add enough to the flow of the story. But the story itself more than makes up for these small issues, and I truly do recommend the book to others regardless.

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On Live Music

Photo from Krysti Marie, a fellow concert-goer.

Yesterday, I went to Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, a touring concert that celebrates 30 years of music from the Legend of Zelda franchise.

As a longtime fan of the series, I've been excited about going for quite a while. I bought tickets for (literally) the best seats in the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. I replayed several games in the series over the course of the past year. I listened to my favorite Zelda songs during my commute to work. But it's not like I did these things just in preparation for the concert; I am a sincere fan of Zelda, having played every non-CD-i game in the series. I've watched every single substantive commentary on Breath of the Wild at least once, including the several hours of streaming done by the Nintendo Treehouse and the two hour analysis from GameXplain. So you might well expect that my experience of the concert would be extremely positive.

Unfortunately, I found the experience disappointing. This isn't because the concert wasn't good. Nearly everyone around me in the theater raved about it, not just by clapping enthusiastically and exclaiming loudly how happy they were when their favorite game of the series came up in the concert, but also by several people after the concert coming up to me organically, wanting to talk about the experience with a stranger they had experienced this event with.

No, my disappointment was not with the quality of the concert, but with the concept of listening to live music itself. This was my first time going to listen to a concert for the purpose of listening to the music. I think I may have sat in a park while music was playing or went to support a friend as they played a small venue, but I've never actually gone with the intention of actually listening to the music being played.

As I sat in what very well may have been the best seat in the theatre, I found myself realizing that the songs I was hearing were songs that I already listen to. Those songs I played during my commute to work were nearly identical to the ones being played at the concert. It's then that I realize that I've already been listening to these songs this entire time, and if I closed my eyes to hear the music, all I could think was "this feels just like I'm on my way to work".

I'm not sure what I was expecting. Lots of people have favorite artists, and they often love to go to live concerts where the artist plays a song that they already have a better quality version of on their phone. What are they getting out of such events? I honestly am not too sure. It can't be the music, as the music is better in recorded form. Is it the company?

To be fair, it was fun to see people cosplaying as various Zelda characters. But even though I do love Zelda, I don't really identify with this crowd at all. For me, playing Zelda is primarily an experience in isolation. Even when it comes to multiplayer Zelda games, I've strongly preferred playing with close friends over the trolls that join public online games of Tri-Force Heroes. I don't see myself acting as a fan in the same sense as the way others were acting at that concert. Perhaps it is because I'm more comfortable being more reserved. Maybe I'm just not as into fan culture. But if being in a group with other fans is what people get out of live music events, then it just isn't for me.

Yet when I mentioned these thoughts aloud, I got back the objection: "That's not what live music is about. Live music is better than recorded music." And here is where I am most confused. The symphonic performers at the concert I went to were quite good. They were so good, in fact, that it reminded me exactly of the recorded versions I'd heard dozens of times before. Their sameness in sound is part of what made the experience dull for me.

Would I have preferred if I could have heard more errors in their performance? Or maybe what I would want is some kind of improvisation?

When I look to something like Michelangelo's David, I'm impressed. But when I look at recently made statues of similar realism, I am unimpressed. I think this is mostly because the skill needed to create such a statue in the past is nothing like the skill needed to do so in the present. Yes, there is still skill in the posing. But the David required working around the good parts of the material, understanding how to scale up the dimensions realistically, understanding the center of gravity, understanding the proper width of needed hidden trusses. Meanwhile a modern statue can be made by scanning a model, scaling it up, and having a laser cut each part perfectly from a piece of marble that is predetermined to perfectly work with those cuts. It still takes skill, but of a different sort. And if you try to do it the old way, it just seems silly to me. Why not take advantage of modern methods to make the finished product better?

So it seems to me with live music. Being able to record multiple performances and edit them into a final product just seems better to me. Sure, mp3s are lossy, but if you use a lossless format and high quality headphones, then I suspect you get the best experience. Far better than live music, which requires you to have to go somewhere in public (ugh, the traffic) and doesn't have the amenities that you may have at home (when I asked for a cola, they said they were out and offered diet cola instead).

With all this said, I do want to say that most everyone else enjoyed the concert. And the venue was pretty good. Having in-seat service is a big plus, even if it was fairly expensive. So if you're considering going to Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, then you shouldn't use my experience as a strong reason not to go.

But the Warner Theatre did run out of dessert before the concert even began, and there was the lack of non-diet cola in the VIP room. All in all, I think I can confidently say that I never intend to go to a live music event again, and if I do, I probably won't do it at the Warner. It just isn't for me.

I think I'll stick to plays instead. I'm looking forward to when Hamilton comes to the Kennedy center.

An Unusual Place

At Animal Charity Evaluators, we have a monthly "water cooler" meeting. We all get together on Skype and talk for an hour about non-work topics. It's a team-building exercise that supposedly helps teams that only work together remotely.

This month, the topic was "a favorite place", and each team member talked about some wonderful place that they had been to. Some spoke of gorgeous landscapes, others of meeting wild animals up close, and still others of self-built structures in the middle of nowhere.

When it was my turn, I decided to speak about a half remembered memory from when I was young. I had only just started to drive on my own, and, being the adventurous sort, I tended to go wherever fancy took me. Often I would go down a dirt road just to see what was at the end, or take a few wrong turns on purpose to see if I could get myself lost.

On this particular occasion, I was driving along a state highway in Alabama, just north of Saraland, where I grew up. The highway had double lanes going in each direction and the sides were covered with dense forests. Traffic along the road was continuously 55mph or higher.

As I drove along at the pace of traffic, I noticed a small clearing on the side of the road. It was almost invisible, and was gone in a moment, so I nearly missed seeing it. I certainly missed any opportunity of stopping at it; there's no way you could know it was there unless you knew in advance where you were going. So I turned around at the next exit, retraced my route and slowed, pulling over at the clearing.

The clearing was literally just big enough for my car to park. Any less of a clearing would mean I'd need to park on the shoulder of the road. The forest surrounded this area just like it did any other, but there was a trace of a path leading away from the road here, into the woods. It was unmistakenly a path, even though it was overgrown with young trees, vines, and brush of all sorts. The woods on either side looked untouched for decades, but the path before me appeared like it had once been cut down completely, and had only overgrown since then.

I went back to my car to gather my walking stick, which I kept with me just for adventurous situations such as this. I used it as a blunt machete, hacking my way through the brush, following the trail as best I could.

Eventually, I reached a clearing. The ground was set in concrete, so no brush could overgrow the area. A pedastal, also of concrete, stood in the center, and atop it lied a statue. It was about the size of my torso, and it depicted a naive american in a sad repose. I can't recall what the statue was made of, but it was clearly quite worn.

The pedastal that held it had a plaque with a date of 1950 or so. It said that the statue above it was placed on this spot a hundred years earlier, in 1850, to commemorate the a tribe that had been forced from this place during the trail of tears. To the side was a picnic table, also made of concrete. None of this looked as though anyone had seen it in decades. There were no other visible paths leading away from the clearing.

This memory is from nearly twenty years ago. At the time, I had no camera. No mobile phone. No GPS. I wonder if the local government is still aware of it. Clearly, they made an effort to create a clearing for it in the 1950s, presumably around the same time that this state highway was constructed. But it looked almost as though since then it had been left untouched.

The next time I return to Alabama, I would like to revisit this statue, mostly because I tried to find a photo to accompany this blog post and was unable to find a reference to this monument on the internet. Perhaps when I do, I can upload a photo to the wikipedia page of whatever tribe it commemorated.