The other day I watched a moving video of a woman recounting some verbal harassment and stalking she recently experienced in a store from another customer, simply because she was wearing a mask. She was understandably emotional about it because she masks to protect a family member who has cancer. Thankfully it ended well enough; the store took it seriously and removed the harasser.

I went into the comments to leave a supportive comment and thankfully saw many others doing the same. I kept going though, and saw some pretty disheartening ones. One person said they would never actually say something to a masked person, but they would feel sad that they are so “brainwashed.” It was a pretty tactless comment which a few others tried to engage them on, but they doubled down in subsequent comments, referring to COVID in part as “an illness that isn’t deadly - never was.”

I made a rookie mistake of deciding to reply to that.

I mean, what a callous and ignorant thing to say. Over 1.2 million have died from this in the US. Over 7 million have died worldwide. I also pointed out that death is not the only bad outcome from this virus. So many people are experiencing long-term illness or disability after an infection. This is all happening with the backdrop of a crumbling healthcare system in the US.

We went back and forth with a few comments. They claimed that COVID hadn’t killed more people than the flu and that the death counts were exaggerated. They brought up the “died from” vs “died with” talking point and claimed that “they” had changed how deaths were counted, so broadly that it included people who died in car crashes.

These aren’t new talking points, of course. They go all the way back to 2020 and I’ve heard them before. I don’t know why I continued at this point. In retrospect, I probably should have dropped it there. Still, I decided to ask if they had a source to cite for their claim. I was pleasantly surprised when they responded with one, the 2022 CSTE Revised COVID-19-associated Death Classification Guidance for Public Health Surveillance Programs.

The document itself mentions that it is not guidance on how the cause of death is assigned on death certificates:

“This revised guidance is intended for STLTs preparing reports for situational awareness and public health response. It is not intended for use by physicians or other healthcare providers assigning causes of death on death certificates. Standard guidance on how to report COVID-19 on death certificates has been made available throughout the pandemic and is available at the CDC NCHS Reporting and Coding Deaths Due to COVID-19.”

It also links to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) for that cause of death guidance. That’s the same part of the CDC which reports the COVID mortality data and their Provisional COVID-19 Mortality Surveillance currently shows ~1.23 million deaths where:

“COVID-19 was listed as an underlying cause of death for 87% of these deaths. For the remaining deaths, COVID-19 was listed as a contributing cause of death.”

This all seemed to be backing up my point so far. Yes, interim guidance changed as the pandemic progressed, but was there evidence that NCHS numbers we have now were exaggerated? I wasn’t seeing it based on this one source they provided, so I asked them.

That’s when I got the response I should have anticipated (and should have made me bail on this effort sooner):

“I suggest you use ChatGPT to find the answers to your questions. It will help you explore the data and ask clarifying questions and support with source data. Basically every country falsified their death toll...”

So the answer was “No,” they didn’t have evidence the numbers were exaggerated. I told them I’ll stick to the evidence, not asking spicy-autocorrect for answers when it’s been trained on all sorts of texts, including misinformation.

On the contrary, research has shown these numbers are likely undercounts, not overcounts:

• Excess natural-cause mortality in US counties and its association with reported COVID-19 deaths and the Guardian article about it
• How are COVID-19 deaths counted, and what does this mean?

I guess I don’t entirely regret posting those comments. Hopefully if there are other people reading it who think “it’s not that big a deal,” they might reconsider. It soured my mood the rest of the day, though.

Obligatory xkcd: #386 Duty Calls.

I re-watched Tomorrowland for the IndieWeb Movie Club May selection chosen by Tantek. I think I initially watched it around 2016, also on his recommendation. I recalled it being visually captivating and OK overall, but unfortunately the story did not stick with me so I didn’t remember much of it going into this re-watch.

No major spoilers below, only brief description of an establishing scene which I don’t think spoils anything.

I’m still left with an “It’s just OK” feeling about it. The moral of the story is decent and hopefully inspiring to people: let’s dream, imagine, and work towards a better future. But it also felt a bit cliche in the ways it sets up and communicates that. For example, early on there are scenes of Casey in high school being taught about wars, climate change, authoritarianism, and everything wrong with the world, all from cynical teachers who sound resigned to it as if nothing could be made better. Driving that point home, they persistently ignore her raised hand until finally she asks, “Can we fix it?” Sure, doomers exist, but every teacher? Maybe I’m expecting too much from a family-friendly PG movie, but it seems like it could be communicated with more nuance.

The storytelling felt a bit clunky in the ways it jumped between action scenes and dialogue and I found the resolution a bit underwhelming.

Still, Casey’s optimism and adventurous spirit is welcomed. It is nice to see a teen girl character portrayed like her. I hope she is inspiring to young people.

Here are some quotes I liked from the movie and other tidbits:

• “Can it just be fun?” – young Frank responding to a question of why make something
• “What if there’s nothing there? What if there’s everything?!” – young Casey referring to traveling in space
• “It’s hard to have ideas and easy to give up.” – Casey
• I love to try visiting links that are shown in movies to see if they have easter eggs or still work. Props to Disney for maintaining blastfromthepast-houston.com that’s shown in this movie. There are no easter eggs, though; it just redirects to disney.com.
• The end credits animation done by yU+co was lovely

IndieWeb Movie Club is a monthly blog carnival where a different host suggests a movie, people watch it, and then write about it. Next month’s film is Mary Poppins. Feel free to join in!

Edit: here is Jo’s post about the June IndieWeb Movie Club.

I’ve been working on re-writing my rather old (2011!) bio on the about page. In one of the drafts, I mentioned that there was a chapter of my life when I promoted concerts and I basically got into it by accident. I continued, “I should blog about that at some point,” which is also a phrase I recently said to Al and Joe. I’m still having a hard time with the bio, but I can at least do the thing I said in that draft instead of keeping it in the backlog.

I grew up around Indianapolis and got into the alternative Christian music crowd through my church’s youth group. First it was my friend Dave’s band, New Generation. Then it was attending Cornerstone Festival, which became an annual tradition. Then there was the Sonshine Inn (archived link). It was a small Christian coffeehouse that had concerts on weekends, usually more for the adults (read: not punk, emo, or alternative enough for us 😀). They asked us if we wanted to start hosting Tuesday night events geared more towards the youths that we were at the time. We called it Club Z, because it was the ’90s, man!

I had no experience, but it was easy enough to get started since I knew some local bands. It was almost always donation based, because they wanted anyone to be able to come. It made the whole thing pretty easy. No contracts, just “Do you want to play? It could be for 6 people or 30.” It was a really fun time and I met some people there who became lifelong friends.

In late spring of 1999, my friend Tim was contacted about booking a Five Iron Frenzy (FIF) concert. It was really last-minute since another date had fallen through. He asked me if I was interested in taking it on. FIF is one of my favorite bands, so of course I was interested. I was nervous, though, because this was quite a step up from little coffeeshop shows. We would need to get a venue, sound system, and handle all the logistics.

I felt a lot better after talking to their manager. They weren’t requiring a guaranteed payment since it was so last-minute (I think it was two months at most) and would take a percent of the ticket sales. They really just needed a date since the rest of the route was set and they were recording the shows for the live album, Proof That the Youth Are Revolting.

With the help of several friends, we ended up pulling off a pretty successful show. It was no money-making venture, but we didn’t lose money either! It ended up being about as easy an introduction into “professional” concert promotion as I could have hoped for. It’s pretty cool that parts of that show are on that album. They also let fans sign up as “official background vocalists” and printed their names in the liner notes of that album.

After that, I realized maybe this is something we could do more seriously. We gave it a name and kept at it: Frontline Productions. I really liked the idea of bringing in bands that might not otherwise come through Indianapolis. Especially around that time, it seemed that most bands either came to nearby Chicago or Cincinnati instead of Indy. Since we had a good connection with FIF after that show, we got to book several of their Indy dates in the following years.

We kept promoting shows for several years on the side. It was often for love of the music rather than making money, otherwise it wouldn’t have continued as long as it did. We’d make money sometimes and lose other times, but thankfully it tended to balance out. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the people who volunteered lots of time and energy to make those events happen.

I think our last show was in late 2006. I need to look up the specifics. I want to work more on archiving those shows, posters, and photos in the past events section here on my site. I have added some with the tag #frontline-productions as I remember them, but there are many more.

I’ll leave you with this video of Five Iron Frenzy at Cornerstone 1999 (not a Frontline show). They came out dressed as the glam metal band Stryper and referenced their song “To Hell With the Devil.” They also played “The Final Countdown” as the lead in to the song. The audio on the album is much better, but it’s a blast seeing this again. I love these goofballs.