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L.A. Trade Show journal #4
At the show · Wed, 16 Sep 2025. 5:30pm

Today has been the trade show. AWS Summit - Los Angeles. The show's now winding down for the day. People started disappearing around 3pm, presumably to try to beat the traffic home, though the show formally goes through 6pm. This has been my first chance today to catch my breath.

I only got to the show just after 10am. I was busy with other tasks, time-sensitive ones, working in my tiny hotel room on the children's chair at my combination nightstand/desk. I had intended to get to the show at 9 but that didn't work out. So at about 9:55 I zipped up my bag, rode the elevator down to the ground floor, and... walked across the street.

The walk from my hotel to the LA Convention Center (Sep 2025)

The walk from my hotel to the LA Convention Center (Sep 2025)

That's right, my morning commute today was a walk across the street. Okay, it was kind of a walk across two streets because I had to get to the diagonally opposite corner. 🤣 This is the entire reason why I booked that tiny hotel room knowing it was tiny— and paid a pretty penny for it. Because it's Right. Here.

Minutes later I'd picked up my badge and registration and was ready to hit the show floor.

At the AWS Summit in LA (Sep 2025)

Traffic at our booth was steady across the day. That was frankly a relief— from a value-for-our-dollar perspective— from last week's trade show, where we had stretches of an hour or more with no meaningful conversations in the booth.

Things did get busy for me in the middle of the afternoon when I had three scheduled demos in a row with different customers. One brought a group of 9-10 people, ranging from devops engineers to a devops lead, to a manager and a VP. And they kept me busy, firing tough questions at me from all sides. I think I did pretty well, though. I look forward to us moving to the next stage with them.

Throughout the day I also saw, and chatted with, a few customers I've been working with for years. It was great to see them "in 3D" again... especially because some of them I've been working with for over 4 years and don't think I've ever met f2f. Plus a few people who stopped by the booth recognized me from portraying Jenkins at the other trade show last week even though I was "Clark Kenting it" today.

Well, the show's winding down now, but the day's not over. My company is sponsoring an after-hours reception at a bar a few blocks away. "Grab a drink and some snacks with us and wait for the traffic to die down before going home," we've been encouraging people all day.

It's a nifty way of framing the event. I don't know, though, how much of a turnout we'll get. Many people have already left to beat the traffic. And I don't blame them. I know if I were on the other side of the table today, I'd value getting home by 5pm to have dinner with my family over having a free drink of two on some company's dime and then getting home at 8:30.

canyonwalker

L.A. Trade Show journal #3
Downtown · Tue, 16 Sep 2025. 9:30pm

I'm at my hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It's the Moxy hotel, in one of the newer high-rises downtown. Actually a lot of the high-rises downtown are new to me. The last time I stayed in downtown LA was in the early 00s, and there's been a building boom since then with new hotels and residential towers.

I knew when I booked the Moxy that the rooms here are small. Like, tiny by US standards; and more like what I saw at salaryman hotels in Tokyo. But still I didn't expect it to be quite this small....

Watch on YouTube

I have to squeeze past the foot of the bed to get to the other side. The only furniture in here is two tiny nightstands and a kid-sized chair. One of the nightstands is meant to double as a desk— and that's what the tiny chair is for.

Also, the gal at the front desk who checked me in gushed about my elite status (Marriott Titanium) and the upgrade they had for me. It's an upgrade to a City View room. Except the city view is a view of the convention center, two major freeways, and a freeway interchange.

One big plus, though— and this is the primary reason I booked at the Moxy— is that the convention center is right across the street. I won't have a long trek tomorrow to/from the show, which will especially be good if I need to make the trip twice.

Update: The longer I spend in this room the worse its design gets. It's like the designers didn't even spend 2 hours trying to stay in this room, even as a solo traveler, for even a few hours, let alone a full night. In addition to the problems I identified above, there's pretty much no horizontal surface onto which to place things. Need to lay out clothes to change into? Lay them on the bed. Need to open a briefcase to find something? Have to lay it on the bed. I do not like using my bed as a workbench, but here I have to! Hanging clothes is silly. The only places for hangers either (a) leave my clothes dragging on the ground because they're so low, or (b) have my clothes hanging over the front of the TV because, yes, that's where the hanger hooks are. And the lighting in this room is terrible. It's like living in a dive bar.

james_davis_nicoll

A selection of Dozois' best, from the first half of his half century career.

Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois by Gardner Dozois

dorchadas

I'm pretty sure I've used that subject line before for this exact reason. Or, nearly this exact reason. Last night I prepped for work and went to go make a salad to bring in--as I usually do because I'm not paying $20 every day for a sandwich, or even $10 every day at the work restaurant--and when I picked up the lettuce there was a purplish liquid that had dripped out onto the container below it, so I threw the lettuce away. And then it turned out that we didn't have any more lettuce in our CSA, so I was left without the means to make a salad. Hmm.

Long story short, I went for soufflé pancakes:

I used to go there all the time, but

sashagee doesn't like it. We don't really have a lot of overlap in what foods we like--we used to have more, but the pregnancy changed her food tolerances and in ways mostly away from the foods I want to eat--so my main chance to go to places like this are at work lunches. I got the matcha panckakes.

They tasted exactly the same as I remembered. Emoji La

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Some kind of Spanish guitar remix of the Kingdom of Zeal theme

canyonwalker

L.A. Trade Show journal #2
Burbank · Tue, 16 Sep 2025. 7:30pm

My flight down to LA this afternoon was uneventful. We did leave late as I predicted. It's funny how I can look at a few simple facts in the public record and predict such things with more accuracy— or perhaps more honesty— than the airline itself. Anyway, once we started taxiing I nodded off to sleep and then slept for most of the flight. That was surprising as I never used to be able to sleep, at all, while flying, let alone on a flight in the middle of the afternoon.

Landing at Burbank airport instead of LAX provided exactly what I expected it to. I mean, aside from the novelty of exiting the plane onto the tarmac. And enjoying a beautiful, mostly not-smoggy view of the San Gabriel Mountains just north of us as I did so. Tiny, outdated, hole-in-the-wall Burbank airport is fast. I walked into the terminal at gate three and didn't have far to go to get out to the curb to catch an Uber.

My first stop this evening has not been my hotel downtown but rather dinner with a colleague, Sandi. She suggested Smoke House in Burbank. It was a short ride from the airport— though with afternoon traffic and surge pricing the fare was almost $40. 🥵 (Sandi later said she could've picked me up on her drive over there. I told her I could've tipped her $40. 🤣)

I'd looked up the Smoke House online when Sandi suggested it last week. From their website it looks like a modern, concept oriented restaurant. Y'know, the kind of place that serves a messy food that used to be cheap— i.e., barbecue ribs— but does so in a pretentious, upscale environment with a bunch of microbrews on tap at the bar... and two-thirds of them are IPAs.

Well, I was wrong. Smoke House is not a 2020s era concept restaurant repackaging old fashioned food. It is a genuine old school steakhouse that's been there for decades. It's all 1950s inside, with dark wood paneling and overstuffed red vinyl booths. Black-and-white photos of movie stars and producers line the walls. This is a place where movers and shakers in film & TV have been coming to make deals over martinis for decades.

Was I impressed by any of that? No. But standing beneath a portrait of Walt Disney in one of his impeccably tailored dark suits starting glancing down at me with his typical half-sneer— I mean, he even had the courtesy to stub out his cigarette before this photo was taken— I did suddenly feel underdressed. As I arrived a few minutes before Sandi and had my suitcase with me I gave serious consideration to dodging into the men's room and changing from shorts and sandals into trousers, black leather shoes, and a sports coat.

Meeting at 4:30 for dinner was a bit early. Sandi and I agreed to go at a leisurely pace so we'd be hungry by the time our entrees arrived. We started with chatting up the waiter since the place was dead at 4:30, then had a couple of drinks, ordered a small appetizer to share, then finally our mains— we both chose the prime rib, though she wanted hers well done 😣 and settled for medium-well when the waiter politely told her "No" 🤣— and finally dessert.

It's weird going out to a restaurant with a woman who enjoys all the same stuff I do (except for that well-done nonsense) and can put it away. Man, if Sandi were younger, and we were both single, I might ask her out on a date. Except for that well-done nonsense. Red flag right there. 🤣

james_davis_nicoll

The Central Plaza Mansion tower offers palatial 900 square foot apartments for a mere ¥35,000,000. It is a deal too good for the Kano family to turn down... although they should have.

The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

canyonwalker

L.A. Trade Show journal #1
SJC Airport · Tue, 16 Sep 2025. 1:30pm

Today I'm headed off to Los Angeles. I'll be staffing my company's exhibit at AWS Connect tomorrow.

Travel to LA from here is fairly easy. I'm even flying through Burbank airport on this trip, which is so... cozy 😅... that it's fast to navigate and avoids all the hullabaloo of LAX. Well, it should be fast. But I'm flying Southwest, which means...

I'll book this Southwest flight... and it's delayed

I'll book this Southwest flight... and it's delayed

Yup, my flight is delayed. It looks like we're going to be 15 minutes late.

Thankfully I've arranged my schedule so being a little late this afternoon isn't a problem. I'm traveling in the afternoon rather than late at night— so a late flight doesn't mean getting to the hotel at midnight or later. I'm also not trying to jet in to LA tomorrow morning at dawn to work the show same-day.

Ditto on the return trip: I'm not trying to rush home late tomorrow night. Partly that's because airlines don't even seem to offer late evening flights to SJC from LAX/BUR anymore. But partly it's because my company is hosting an after party tomorrow evening. I've got to be a gracious co-host and be there for my customers and prospects. Which means I'll stay over Wednesday night and fly home Thursday morning.

All told, I'll be back a whiff under 48 hours after leaving.

dorchadas

Took Laila to Hebrew school yesterday, and afterwards we went to the Ravenswood Artwalk, which had been in the phone calendar for months but which I had totally forgotten about until I saw a poster that it was that weekend.

sashagee drove down and met us nearby, and we walked along and looked at the booths. We didn't go into any of the studios to look at the art, since we thought that Laila wouldn't have a good time just being inside while I held her and we looked at art (or listened to music or whatever), so we just stayed outside, got some food at the food trucks--I got a brisket sando,

sashagee got mac and cheese, and we got Laila some empanadas. We asked her which one she wanted and she said "beef" and when we told her we'd get her a beef one but which other one did she want, she said..."Beef."

We got her a beef and a sweet corn one. She barely ate any, but at Hebrew School she had three mikans, a handful of grapes, half an apple, and some pomegranate seeds already so I'm not surprised she wasn't that hungry. She'll probably eat the rest at dinner anyway.

The reason I'm making this post, though, is because when we got back from all of that the internet was down. Alright, fine, I called in and they said there was an outage, but I can tether things through my phone, so I tethered my iPad to my phone and played games with Laila. And then I called at 3 p.m., and at 5:30 p.m., and then after

sashagee left for a birthday party at 6:30 p.m. the internet was still down. I told Laila that the TV was broken and she accepted it, especially when we were still able to watch Bluey on the tethered iPad, and I put her to bed and went to bed early. At 9:30 p.m. the internet was still out, but at least at that point when I called the support person told me that the problem was a cut fiberoptic line and that's why it was taking so long to fix.

At 11:30 p.m., before I called again, I decided to get on the wifi and found that it worked. I went and checked on Laila and she had fallen out of her bed onto the squishmallow on the floor and was still fast asleep. I picked her up, put her back into bed, kissed her on the forehead, and went to sleep.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Seven Lions - Nepenthe

james_davis_nicoll

The Young People review Michael Swanwick's debut Nebula finalist stories.

The Feast of Saint Janis & Ginungagap by Michael Swanwick

james_davis_nicoll

Need More Surface Area? Why Not Build More?

Five Artificially Layered Planets and World Cities

james_davis_nicoll

If not friend, why friend-shaped?

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey

canyonwalker

Hawk broke a toe bone in her foot. She stubbed her foot pretty hard against something in the house Sunday evening, and her little toe went one direction while the rest of the foot went the other.

"I think I broke my toe," she said, based on the pain.

"It doesn't look broken to me," I observed based on the lack of things dangling and odd angles and the minimal swelling. "Maybe you just stubbed it hard."

Nope. She broke it. That was determined conclusively this morning when she went for an x-ray at the urgent care clinic. She was already going there for a regular doctor appointment, and since it's a basically everything-in-one clinic her GP sent her downstairs to radiology after her regular appointment.

Fortunately the break is small. The bone is held in its (mostly) correct place by the soft tissue. She's going to hobble around for the next two days until an appointment with a trusted podiatrist, one we've both seen before for foot problems. In fact, this is the doctor I went to for a second opinion— a swiftly correct opinion, unlike previous doctors I'd seen—when I broke pretty much the same bone in my foot umpteen years ago.

Unfortunately the injury is big enough to jeopardize plans. For one, Hawk has foot surgery— for another foot problem—already scheduled in a few weeks. There's a chance this could force a delay in that. We'll know more when she sees the specialist on Wednesday. He's the one who's doing the surgery.

This broken toe also jeopardizes our weekend plans. We've got a trip to Phoenix planned, flying out there on Saturday and coming home Tuesday (two days off) to celebrate our anniversary. We booked 3 nights at resort hotels with splashy pools. We may still be able to use the splashy pools, albeit with minimal splashing, but this injury will cancel our additional plans to do some hiking in the desert as the summer heat gives way to high temperatures in the mere 90s.

james_davis_nicoll

100 lair entries in two succinct pages apiece, from Aboleth's Sunken Lair to Wyvern's Nest.

Bundle of Holding: Dread Laironomicon

canyonwalker

Saul Gone is the finale of the Better Call Saul series. I finally watched it a few nights ago after pausing right at the end of the series for four months. This episode is interesting because it features Jimmy being at the height of his Saul Goodman persona, the swashbuckling lawyer who's about to get his own sentenced greatly reduced, and then, on the spur of a moment, throwing the Saul Goodman persona away and taking full responsibility for everything he did. That makes the title "Saul Gone" a double entendre. Saul is both gone away to prison and gone away as a persona.

Jimmy is at his swashbuckling best as Saul after he's apprehended by police in Omaha, where he was foolishly and pointlessly committing thefts. After being extradited to Albuquerque, federal prosecutors there read him a list of the crimes they have ample evidence to prosecute him for. "Life plus 90 years," the lead prosecutor says as he tots up all the likely sentences. Then he offers Jimmy a deal of just 30 years in a plea bargain to avoid trial. It would seem Jimmy will be lucky to see freedom again before he dies of old age.. Uh-oh,... "Better Call Saul"!

Swashbuckling as Saul Goodman, Jimmy tells the assembled prosecutors and victims' families that he, too, is a victim. He recounts the night he first met Walter White and how Walt kidnapped him, took him to the desert, and made him kneel in front of an open grave with a gun to his head. I'm a victim, too, Saul explained, asserting that everything he did from that point forward was in fear of being killed if ever he refused Walt.

The lead prosecutor sees through Saul's story. "You expect a jury to believe that?" he sneers. Saul responds that it takes just one juror [to believe a story and give him a mistrial]. Saul taunts the prosecutor about his unblemished record— having never lost a case, would he want to lose this one? He exploits the man's ego. And after a long night of negotiation, he's whittled his plea bargain down to just 7½ years.

Jimmy's well crafted plan goes out the window when he gets to court. He sees Kim Wexler sitting in the audience area— and he recognizes that the plea bargain story he's told the court would jam up her up. Apparently he's lied about her involvement in Howard Hamlin's death— though exactly what lies he told happened off screen. He begs the judge to address the court. He starts his story from earlier in the episode about Walter White holding a gun to his head over an open grave in the desert... but then says that everything he did after that, he did willingly.

The court room becomes a zoo with Jimmy's co-counsel demanding the record be stricken, the prosecutor demanding he be allowed to continue speaking, and the judge demanding order. But when it's all done, Jimmy's told the version of the story that has him taking responsibility for things. Including driving his brother, Chuck, to suicide. ("That's not even a crime," his co-counsel chides him.) "And my name's McGill, James McGill," he concludes. Saul's gone.

james_davis_nicoll

2014: Creationism is banned in British schools, the first same sex marriages in the UK are conducted, and Canadian Mark Carney helps the UK navigate challenging times. What ever happened to Carney, anyway?

Poll #33620

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 73

View Respondents

Which 2014 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
70 (95.9%)

God's War by Kameron Hurley
25 (34.2%)

Nexus by Ramez Naam
10 (13.7%)

The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
5 (6.8%)

The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann
1 (1.4%)

The Machine by James Smythe
3 (4.1%)

Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2014 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
God's War by Kameron Hurley
Nexus by Ramez Naam
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
The Disestablishment of Paradise by Phillip Mann
The Machine by James Smythe

canyonwalker

Buzzfeed had a listicle in my newsfeed this evening, "People Who Work Night Shifts Are Sharing Things "Day Shifters" Don't Understand About Their World, And As A Day Shifter, I'm Intrigued". I'm a sucker for Buzzfeed listicles (lists of pithy responses in Reddit threads that are turned into articles) and I worked second shift for three summers years ago, so I figured, Hey, I'll play! Here are Five Things of mine:

1) Second Shift requires some adaptation. The second, or "swing", shifts I worked were 5pm-midnight, 5-11pm, or 4pm-midnight. The exact hours varied by job and year to year within one of the jobs (the company changed its hours). Working second shift puts you out of sync with the rest of society, though not as badly as third shift. That's because I could still manage daytime hours for appointments, shopping, etc... though it did take more careful planning and some adaptation. For example, if I wanted to go out for "dinner" at a restaurant, it was at 3:30pm before work. My effective dinner, after getting off work, was almost always some cooked straight out of the freezer at home at 1-2am. Virtually nothing was open after midnight, nor even really after 10pm, in the places I lived.

2) Second shift can be busy... or quiet. In one job I worked, a call center, the whole department was staffed during second shift, meaning there were a few dozen employees plus 2-3 managers. Second shift there entailed constant, steady work. Though the rest of the company was dark at those hours... so breaks in the lunch room or outside the front door were alwasy eerily quiet. At the other job I worked I was there as part of a 24x7 rotation in case something went wrong. And since I was the only person there for most of my shift, either it was something basic I could diagnose and repair on my own, or I documented and left it for the fully staffed M-F 8-5 crew.

3) You can't come home and go straight to bed. One of the biggest things people misunderstand about working second shift is thinking, "Oh, it's just 'til 11 or 12, that's like a slightly late evening." NO IT'S NOT! It's not "just like a slightly late evening" because when you get off shift and arrive home at midnight or almost 1am, you can't just go straight to bed. You're up. You've been working. You need a few hours to wind down before you can sleep! I was routinely going to bed at 3 in the morning. Sometimes, if I got involved in reading a book after work, I'd be up until 6am.

4) Switching shifts is hard. The third year I worked second shifts, I did that 3-4 nights a week and also had 1-2 days of first shift on the weekends. Switching 1st to 2nd wasn't hard, but going from 2nd to 1st always messed up my schedule. I'm glad I was young when I did that.

5) I was warned off working third shifts. Not that I ever considered shift work after summer jobs in college, but one of the third-shifters at the 24x7 place I worked was a quiet warning. There were two guys who worked the 11pm-9am shift, Ross and Gene. Ross had only been doing it for a year or two; he was hard up in a slow economy, and the work paid well. But Gene had always been working third shift. He looked to be 60... but one night during our shift overlap he and I were discussing his plan to go back to college to finish his degree, and I learned he was only 40. The man clearly looked 60! Everyone around the office whispered, "Yeah, you age fast working third shift!"

james_davis_nicoll

So, yesterday, the wheelchair ramp on the Rt 8 bus I was on developed a bug. Or the system that detects if it is deployed did. The ramp retracted correctly but the bus thought it had not, and would not move.

Ha ha! I pick my routes to maximize alternatives in case of break-downs. I just disembarked and talked over to the LRT. Which, I discovered, was having a minor service delay.

My contingency plans can handle two delays, but not three. Good for me there were just the two. It did mean I was only a little early for work.

On the way home, just after I disembarked from the LRT, an SUV cut the LRT off so the SUV could reach the parking lot ten seconds earlier. If the train had not stopped, I'd have had to stick around, both as a witness and because the accident would blocked the sidewalk between me and the stop I needed to get to.

Less than five minutes after the LRT near-miss, three SUVs tried to turn into the same lane at the same time. I don't think they hit each other but there was a short discussion between the drivers before they all left. I'd have had to stick around for that as well, because it would have blocked the route my bus uses.

canyonwalker

I've been pretty sanguine about the layoffs at my company this past week. I'm surprised how sanguine I've been about it. That makes me wonder, why am I so sanguine, this time? And yes, it's "this time" because this isn't the first layoff we've had this year. We had one in January that also impacted my team heavily. And while there were none in 2024, there were two in 2023 and one in 2022.

I think an obvious dimension of the answer for why I'm so sanguine is that, after all of these rounds of layoffs, I've become numb to it. Each one of them has hit my department, along with others. Each one has resulted in the dismissal of decent workers who were getting the job done, along with some who weren't. It's always when good people get whacked that I take it harder. This time there were more good people whacked, as a proportion of those dismissed, than last time. That tells me I should be taking it harder. And that's where the numbing effect comes in.

It's possible I'll be less sanguine about this layoff as take more time to think about it. The effects of January's layoff got worse and worse for weeks as flawed planning and execution became clearer and smart, capable people chose to quit because they lost faith in Management. (In the tech industry we call the latter brightsizing, a play on words against the euphemism "right-sizing" that Corporate America created to put a positive spin on the term "downsizing".) Within two weeks every seasoned manager in my department quit.

Indeed I already see reason for growing alarm over this layoff. This layoff hit the sales team hard. Cutting sales people is a pretty extreme thing in business. Sales people generate the revenue! I mean, cutting development staff has consequences, too, but those consequences often take 12-18 months to materialize. Cutting sales staff means a hit to the company's numbers next quarter.

And it's not like Management was just "trimming the fat". We were already running lean. When you make significant cuts to a team that's lean, you're not just trimming fat— or excess capacity. You're trimming muscle. You're dismissing good people who were doing work that counted. And the people left can't just "pick up the slack". They weren't slacking.

Management even acknowledges that they cut people doing real work. They've told us to think in the coming days and weeks about what we won't do because it's just not high priority enough. And while they've phrased that with empathetic words and intonation, and framed it to imply that we individual contributors have agency, it's starting to stink like 5 day old fish.... Why are they asking us to figure out what work gets cut? That should have been part of their strategy in planning the layoff!

james_davis_nicoll

Bureau of Sabotage agent Jorj X. McKie is assigned a legal and ethical trap: a planet of victims, who, whether rescued or left to their impending doom, present a danger to the ConSentiency.

The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency, volume 2) by Frank Herbert

canyonwalker

Episode 6.12 of Better Call Saul is entitled Waterworks. It's the second-to-last episode in the series. The final four episodes of BCS are structured as a flash-forward to Saul's life after the events of Breaking Bad. It's an interesting end cap to BB as BCS was a prequel to BB. Now, with these final four episodes it's a both a prequel and a sequel.

While the idea of a wraparound prequel/sequel is interesting, BCS's execution is lacking. The first two of these four episodes were so off-putting that I simply got up and walked away at the start of the third. The opening credits of ep. 6.12 started rolling and I decided I didn't care anymore. (Cue the Seven Deadly Words: Why do I care about these characters?) It's only now, 4 months later, that I decided to see how it ends.

Episode 6.12 isn't the end. That would be 6.13. But 6.12 helps get us there. And it takes too damn long doing it.

In Waterworks we see Kim's new life. She divorced Jimmy/Saul after their con against Howard inadvertently got him killed by a drug lord. She announced her intent to divorce in ep. 6.09. Here we see that it was official. And Jimmy was a jerk about it, treating her like crap at the time.A character who previous was partly sympathetic, even while also flawed, turn into an all-out jerk is a key reason for uttering those Seven Deadly Words.)

At the end of the flash-back scene where Kim gets Jimmy to sign the divorce papers, she meets Jesse Pinkman, portrayed by a visibly aged Aaron Paul. I saw flashback because even though this scene is in the timeline of the main BCS series, it's a jump back from these jump-forward episodes... and because Aaron Paul is now, like 18 years older than he would've been playing an age-appropriate Jesse Pinkman.

"How do you do, fellow kids?" - when a character is unbelievable (Sep 2025)

"How do you do, fellow kids?" - when a character is unbelievable (Sep 2025)

The scene is so bad. Paul is so visibly too old to be playing a much younger Pinkman. He even sounds like an old man rather than the early-20-something Pinkman. It's like that parody scene from 30 Rock where cynical producers try to cast Steve Buscemi as a teenager. The writers here would've done better to leave clearly middle-age Aaron Paul out.

Anyway... I was saying the episode was too long. In Kim's new life approximately 5 years later she's living in a small town in Florida with a guy named Glen (unclear if they're married or just BF/GF). It's a completely banal existence. She works at a sprinkler company named Waterworks doing marketing. Her colleagues and friends are all dull people. They spend the day gossiping about trivial stuff and worrying about whether Miracle Whip™ tastes as good in a tuna fish salad as real mayonnaise.

I felt genuinely sad for Kim, previously a talented and driven lawyer, living such a stultifying life. I know I would go crazy in such a situation. And while the episode could've made this point in a few minutes, they stretch it out 3x as long as it needs to be. They took it from "Wow, I feel sad for Kim," to, "Now you're just torturing us."

Ep. 6.12 also picks up on a scene that was left as a cliffhanger at the end of 6.11. Saul is robbing a cancer-stricken rich person whom he and his buddies/patsies in Omaha have targeted in their identity theft scam. Not content just to steal the innocent man's identity and financial data, though, Saul starts robbing his house. WHY? As I've noted before, Saul doesn't need the money. He is just being evil now.

This robbery scene also goes on too long. Not only does it become painful for us viewer, but Saul gets trapped by complications from being in the victim's house too long. These complications ultimately lead to Saul's assumed identity as Gene Takavic unraveling. He is recognized as Saul Goodman, fugitive wanted on charges of drug dealing and felony murder, and flees ahead of the police.

Profile

lowbeyonder

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Page Summary

canyonwalker - A Day at the AWS Show
canyonwalker - Wow, this is a Tiny Room. And a Poor View.
james_davis_nicoll - Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois by Gardner Dozois
dorchadas - Fuwafuwa time
canyonwalker - To Live and Dine in LA
james_davis_nicoll - The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike
canyonwalker - Off to LA for 48 Hours
dorchadas - The system is down
james_davis_nicoll - The Feast of Saint Janis & Ginungagap by Michael Swanwick
james_davis_nicoll - Five Artificially Layered Planets and World Cities
james_davis_nicoll - Spread Me by Sarah Gailey
canyonwalker - Broken Toe!
james_davis_nicoll - Bundle of Holding: Dread Laironomicon
canyonwalker - Better Call Saul Finale: Saul Gone
james_davis_nicoll - Clarke Award Finalists 2014
canyonwalker - Five Things about Working the Night Shift
james_davis_nicoll - Transit
canyonwalker - Why so Sanguine about this Layoff?
james_davis_nicoll - The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency, volume 2) by Frank Herbert
canyonwalker - Better Call Saul 6.12: Waterworks

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Applied Theology

Reading

A Day at the AWS Show

Wow, this is a Tiny Room. And a Poor View.

Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois by Gardner Dozois

Fuwafuwa time

To Live and Dine in LA

The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

Off to LA for 48 Hours

The system is down

The Feast of Saint Janis & Ginungagap by Michael Swanwick

Five Artificially Layered Planets and World Cities

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey

Broken Toe!

Bundle of Holding: Dread Laironomicon

Better Call Saul Finale: Saul Gone

Clarke Award Finalists 2014

Five Things about Working the Night Shift

Transit

Why so Sanguine about this Layoff?

The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency, volume 2) by Frank Herbert

Better Call Saul 6.12: Waterworks

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January 2024

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