Are Male Content Creators Obligated to Talk About Abortion?

Published: June 27, 2022 Medium Essays
Photo by Free Walking Tour Salzburg on Unsplash

The morning after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade to end 50 years of legalized abortion, a new video appeared in my YouTube feed.

Daniel Batal and Roberto Blake recorded a livestream at VidCon in Anaheim, California. The first in-person gathering of YouTube content creators since the pandemic started over two years ago. The topic that their channels have in common was growing on YouTube in 2022.

The timing looked bad. Never mind that abortion and content creation are unrelated topics. Neither Batal nor Blake would make abortion-related videos on their channels, as it wasn’t a suitable topic for their respective audiences.

I figured someone would virtue signal off that video to condemn them on Twitter. That did happen but in two different ways.

Read my essay and follow me on Medium. Your support is greatly appreciated.

“If Abortion Was Legal, I Would Have Aborted You” — Mom

Published: June 24, 2022 Medium Essays
Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

As a child growing up in the 1970s, my mother told me frequently that she would have aborted me if abortion was legal in 1969. Four years before Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal throughout the United States.

My parents got friendly during Thanksgiving weekend in 1968. After the New Year, they knew that they had — in today’s vernacular — an “oopsie” baby. An unplanned pregnancy by an older couple (my father was 34, my mother was 29) with an older child (my brother was 13).

The doctor told my mother that she was expecting twins.

A day after my maternal grandfather’s birthday in early August, she delivered a ten-pound bowling ball in one hour. I was so big and came out so fast that she needed 250 stitches. The latter she would hold against me for years to come.

My father stopped drinking and got a vasectomy. My mother started drinking and became an alcoholic.

Read my essay and follow me on Medium. Your support is greatly appreciated.

When Is A Bug Not A Bug in Python?

Published: June 18, 2022 Medium Essays

Photo by Alan Emery on Unsplash

While writing a chess program in Python as a learning exercise, I had two separate functions for converting a position from an algebraic notation string, 'a1', to a tuple, (97, 1), and vice versa. I later merged the two functions into a static method for the Board class. The code works. I should have left it at that and move on.

I found any interesting situation when refactoring the code to work with @functools.singledispatch and @staticmethod in a class. The code worked but I was using the wrong single dispatch decorator. When is a bug not a bug?

Read my essay and follow me on Medium. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Silicon Valley Auto Show Postponed Until 2023

Published: June 12, 2022 YouTube Videos

The Silicon Valley Auto Show got cancelled due to the coronavirus in 2021. The 2022 show was scheduled for January at the San Jose Convention Center, and later postponed to July at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Not anymore. This year’s show got postponed to February 2023 at the Santa Clara Convention center. Not because of the coronavirus, but supply chain issues.

Read more “Silicon Valley Auto Show Postponed Until 2023”

The Incompatible Type Assignment Error in Mypy

Published: June 1, 2022 Medium Essays
Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash

I’m writing a chess program in Python as a learning exercising. Not surprisingly, mypy, the static type checker, complained about my code with yet another incomprehensible error message. Here’s a quick-and-dirty fix for the incompatible type assignment error.

Read my essay and follow me on Medium. Your support is greatly appreciated.