KD^3C^3 - 20240324 You'll feel glorious, generous, gleeful and great

Are daffodils wildflowers? I see a lot of them popping up on the side of the road. Why am I asking you?

A thing in my possession: 10 Books from Canada
A few years back I made a post on a message board looking for books that had the same vibe as the TV show The Rockford Files. I like the Rockford files as a show where it’s a cunning guy solving mysteries that the cops won’t touch. I was recommended the Ben Perkins mystery series, which is about a guy who does PI work on the side from his normal job of being the head of security for a fancy gated community. He does the PI stuff for beer and car money, because he also likes classic muscle cars. I read the first one digitally, though Archive.org, and enjoyed it. But the reading experience of going through a website with a mid tier UI at best wasn’t great. Sadly the books have been out of print for quite some time, and they were never block busters so they aren’t easy to come by.

Occasionally I would drop the author’s name into eBay hoping to get lucky. And get lucky I did! A few weeks ago I found the whole series on auction with a starting bid of 75 cents. What a steal! That 75c was actually lower than eBay’s regular minimum bid, which I quickly realized was because it was listed in Canada. So 75c was actually 99 Canadian Cents. I checked the shipping, and yup it was shipping from Canada, and the estimated shipping to my neck of The Woods was 30 Canadian Dollars (I think they call ‘em Loonies.) 30 dollars was a lot for shipping, but if I bid a dollar, I probably wouldn’t win, and for the nine books in the series, it still came out to about 3 bucks each. Which is what I’d probably pay at a local used bookstore if I stumbled on them there. Of course I’m writing about them now, so it’s already a forgone conclusion that nobody out bid me. Which means I paid one Canadian dollar plus 30 for shipping to have these used paperbacks mailed to me

I got to learn about Canada Post, which is their postal service, and tracked the package until it made its way into the USPS. At that point tracking stopped, because I guess you have to pay extra for the USPS to tell you where it is. The books apparently cleared customers though, because after 12 days in transit they showed up at my mailbox. I was hoping the shipping price I had paid was exaggerated a bit, because I felt bad the seller had to go to all the trouble of mailing these books for one single Canadian dollar. But they must have been fine with it, and the postage paid on the label was exactly what I was charged. The seller even gave me a bonus book (which wasn’t a mistake, because it had a slip of paper with “bonus book!” written on it.) I’ve got a beach trip coming up in May and these will now be a perfect companion.

Poorly Organized Thought on Surveys:
I got a call from the State Health Department and CDC this week. Actually two calls. A couple weeks ago I got a call from an unknown number, and unlike 99% of the time when that happens, they left a voicemail letting me know I had been selected for a state health survey. So when the same number called back I was excited to answer. 

I think telephone surveys are one of those things that feel like a relic of a bygone era, but from what I understand they’re actually still pretty common and relatively useful for large scale data gathering. So I was happy to take some time out of my day and answer some questions. 

The survey taker was surprisingly talkative as she asked my questions, which surprised me, and even weirder, occasionally gave some mild commentary to my answers. For example after she asked me my gender, and I said male, she dismissively responded “I know, but they make me ask anyway” which I’m guessing was due to the sound of my voice, but was put into stark contrast when she later asked if I was transgender. So the people who wrote the survey knew it was a good idea to include that possibility, but the survey taker didn’t seem to share that idea. In another place she made it very clear that I could refuse to answer any questions that I wanted to, right before asking me my household income, but not right before asking me if I had taken illegal drugs or had sex for money in the past year. I guess she thought would only find one of those questions too personal for me to tell a stranger. 

The whole time I was taking the survey, I couldn’t help but also think about how the survey was constructed, why certain questions came in a particular order, or which ones (if any) were tied to the specific things being studied. Generally, the farther afield the question seemed, the more I figured it might be relevant. For example, there were questions about heated tobacco products, which at first I thought were the same as vapes, but it turns out are slightly different, because (as the name implies) they heat tobacco directly. I honestly answered the survey taker that I had never heard of these products, and as such had never used them before. Nor, as was asked, do I ever smell tobacco smoke through the walls from my neighbors (which I don’t have.)

Also, I mentioned the “sex for money” question above, but it wasn’t just a yes or no thing. They listed out 5 different activities, of which having sex for money was just one of the options, and then asked if I had done any of the five things in the last year. I’ve heard of this technique in surveys before, where when you’re asking about something where you are afraid the participant will lie, you couch it with other possibilities to present plausible deniability. The other options in this case were things I can’t remember very well because I was distracted thinking about how I recognized the question technique. It’s the same as those social media messages that say something like 

But it turns out you can apparently do some statistics if you ask this question to a large enough sample size to get useful data and even get a pretty good estimate of how many people like cats or whatever.

At the end of the survey they gave me information on how to look up the results when they get published, but also that it won’t be for at least a year or so. Who knows if I’ll remember by then!

Stuff I'm Playing
I picked up Helldivers 2 to play with some friends and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a squad based shooter where you drop on a planet full of giant bugs, shoot them all and then accomplish a task. But also its’s got friendly fire always on, and you will accidentally kill your squad mates, pithy by shooting them dropping a bomb on them or having a turret shoot through them to hit some bugs.  But if you go into it with the right attitude it’s a lot of fun and accidental deaths are just part of the dark humor that permeates the rest of the game. It’s the sort of thing I would never want to play with strangers however. I don’t need people yelling at me for playing bad. I do that well enough on my own, thank you very much.

I’m trying to get through old games I put down for whatever reason, so I’ve been spending some time with Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, which is an RPG from the early 2000s where you play a vampire in a modern day city and have to deal with all that. There’s lots of political intrigue and solving problems though talking instead of killing. Because you can’t actually kill a lot of people without causing problems and breaking the Masquerade, the rules that keep vampires a secret from the public. Which will get you in serious trouble. It’s a fun game, but has a lot of the junk from games of that period. You don’t always know what to do, or where to go, so you wander around and in the process discover new different stories you might not have encountered otherwise. I do still have to pull up a game guide occasionally to make sure I’m not way off base, and it’ great that there are still guides on gamefaqs.com that someone wrote in 2005 to help me out.

This Weeks Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Buttload of Cats

Here's a picture of a cat