Happy Halloween!

Well that's just pitiful. In the last year I made a Halloween post and one about Revensils, and now I'm doing sort of a combination of the two.

It has not been that slow of a year, but I am that poor at sharing. Anyway, have a happy Halloween! May you find and share some joy, whether it's in the form of tricks, treats, quirky humor, vengeful cutlery, or any other bit of fun!

REVENSILS!

Chunky Milk Productions presents our 2021 48 Hour Film project: REVENSILS!

We weren't nominated for any awards with this movie, but I couldn't be more proud of it or more happy remembering the weekend we dedicated to its creation.

Copious amounts of laughter and joy were poured into its making, and we've gotten to hear additional laughs and joy as we've begun to share it with friends and family.  Enjoy, share, and as usual you can pick up some related files and read some of my long-winded production notes by visiting:

https://chunkymilkproductions.com

and

https://penduin.net/48hfp

Happy, Hopeful Halloween 2020

MMXX, a quaint old-fashioned way to write 2020.  We had a fourth pumpkin ready to participate, but it was literally too rotten from within.  So, basically perfect.

 

Here at home, Kim's decorations are cute and fun, but in the big picture it's been an ugly, rotten four years.  The silver lining is we all finally have a chance to throw ourselves a competent lifeline.  Please do your part to make the future less awful.

And, truly, have a happy Halloween.

Pets with Pets

 Book has his own pet now.  He hasn't told us the frog's name yet, but we see them play together most nights.

Granted Book is an indoor cat and this is an outdoor frog, so their interactions are about like everyone else's in this socially-distant world.

Stuck At Home 48

While everybody is stuck at home, the 48 Hour Film Project has hosted an online-only, no-physical-collaboration series of filmmaking weekends!

You can see everybody's entries here:
https://48hourfilmproject.online/

...and Chunky Milk's entries (as well as our other movies) here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLkCUWFYoTe8R5dBdcX-zx12vXFuxdIVo

Enjoy!

Welcome Home

When we got home from Europe last week, naturally, we were very spent and tired.  Those symptoms joined others and we found ourselves very sick in the days following our return.  Sick enough that we called the clinic wondering if we should be tested for that little bug we've heard one or two things about.  But, we hadn't been to China (only an international film festival, with teams from all over the world) and we weren't short of breath (and, we suspect, the tests and facilities just aren't available...) so we were not and still have not been tested.  Whatever we've got is either about the worst cold we've ever had, or ... well who knows.  But, we're sequestered away just like everybody else.  My hermit-like tendencies and compulsive hand-washing have prepared me fairly well for what life has turned into.

Anyway, so we came back and felt lousy.  Such is life.  I took a couple more days off work, Kim somehow kept working but from home.

Then, Saturday morning, a valve near our water mains failed.

Our basement was still in a sorry state from having drainage put in, from months ago when it was being flooded from the outside.  The maybe-salvageable carpet was rolled back and bins of packed-up stuff were shoved over to the walls where that flooding had not hit.  Such placement put it all right in the path of being flooded from the inside.

That's all the sides, right?  Outside and inside?  Is there anywhere else from which water is going to invade our basement?

Oh, I complain.  I sure did (mainly in cough/wheeze form) as I cut, rolled up, and carried out soaked carpet and foam, while barely feeling well enough to do so.  But, I'm glad I had help (who was also barely well enough for such labor) and we're glad it all happened after we got back instead of while we were away.  We're glad a plumber and someone from the city were able to come that same day to get the valves fixed and the house's water running again.  We're glad we hadn't yet redone the basement, only to have it trashed when this happened.

And we're extra glad that Autumn ran downstairs and started meowing in a strange, attention-drawing manner.

One just has to laugh at life sometimes.

Life has been busy throwing curve balls lately, not just at us (though I have omitted a couple of doozies) but in general.  Luck be with you, everyone.  And since that clearly can't be counted on, let's try and be good to each other, all right?

Last Days in the Netherlands

Got some more pictures to share from our last week or so in the Netherlands.  While in Rotterdam for Filmapalooza, these two showed up and we hit the town together.

Mike and Allison are always fun to hang out with; behind us is the Erasmus bridge, which is striking (and a bit of a schlep!) day and night.

Allison found a brewery tour (and her instincts led us to get there on time, while the rest of us were content aboard a bus that would have taken us completely the wrong way).  La Trappe Trappist is a monastery and a brewery with a great history and (and a very engaging tour guide).  Their beer is just as good as their social and environmental conscience.  An example of religion being used correctly!

Looking down at the main floor at Filmapalooza.  The theater used for the event seemed to have been (and in fact was) tailor-made for film festivals.  Extensive talent gathered there that week.  ...Also us!

Now permanently moored as a museum and hotel, the SS Rotterdam is where the awards ceremony took place.  (In case you're wondering, we got our city trophy, but no additional honors.  :^)

Kim and I spent a couple of days back in Amsterdam after the festival.  We saw, among other things, a house-turned-museum with some very interesting art and history (and the perfect small trickle of guests; we effectively had the run of the place and could explore and learn at our leisure, unlike some other tours we'd taken).

We also got to stop in at the Brouwerij 'Tij, a brewery and taproom built onto/into a (no longer working) windmill - the tallest in the Netherlands.  It used to be a public bathhouse, and the steam machines, tile, pipes and drains all came in handy when it became a brewery.

There's plenty more to share and lots more photos to sort out, but these last few posts have been our Dutch adventures in a nutshell!  We were glad for the chance to travel (and got back just before the covid-19 travel bans started happening...) and had a great time in the Netherlands.  We will be snacking on souvenir cheese and chocolate for a while.  :^)

Filmapalooza!

Chunky Milk Productions.  Two goofs who met in college and made silly videos for the campus variety show.  These two goofs:

They, these decades later (with help from a couple more goofs) made a very silly short movie indeed.  This movie:

It screened locally, and then, these months later (along with 150+ other amazing shorts) screened here:

So...  Yeah I'm still more or less at a loss for words about that.  We got to meet and chat with Mark Ruppert, who began and runs the 48 Hour Film Project.  We got to gather in Rotterdam's gorgeous city hall and hear from an official whose title I can't remember.  Best of all we got to see a whole lot of super-creative movies.  In fact I think I'll just fill out the rest of this post with some highlights.

Book Clubbing:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/en/san-francisco-ca/films/39160

Dates Camp:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/en/leeuwarden-nl/films/42082

Le Vynelle:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/en/paris-fr/films/40514

Everything Rises:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/taipei-tw/films/40582

Garbage:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/en/rotterdam-nl/films/39450

One Last Game:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/en/seattle-wa/films/37617

The Coup:
https://www.48hourfilm.com/en/asheville-nc/films/37514

Everything at the festival is well worth looking up, but of the screenings I made it to, these are a handful of my favorites. 

Next Few Days in Amsterdam

Holland!  We took some tours and learned a thing or two about some Dutch icons.

Saw a working lumber windmill, saw how (and why) clogs are made.  Saw some ingenious machinery, large and small.  Tinkerers and improvisers turned vast swamps into farmland, and enabled travel and trade on a scale never seen before.  My kind of folks!

They are also quite serious about cheese.  Mmmm, Kaas.

We also visited a zoo and museum of microorganisms. 

After about a week in Amsterdam, we took a train to Rotterdam for Filmapalooza.  The hotel wireless is lousy enough and the festival busy enough to make my blog updates even spottier than they might have been.

First Few Days in Amsterdam

This is a rainy city, but a beautiful and interesting one!  We took a candlelight canal tour, learned a great deal about the royal palace, checked out a new art installation which is currently taking over the oldest/biggest church, and have plenty more stuff on our loose docket.  Just as importantly, we've had time to just relax and wander, getting a sense of the place, its layout, its public transport, all that fun stuff.

Today we dropped by the Blender Institute!  I've been using Blender since the Not A Number days, to do everything from 3d animation to editing movies (which of course is why we're even in the Netherlands :^) so getting a tour of the studio was pretty amazing for me.

We also played a part in correcting one of Google's many lies.  When looking for "blender", it took us to the old office from years ago, not the sleek current studio.  But as it happened, we were given a tour by the exact right person to go in and get that fixed.

That same fellow had to get a selfie with me, due to my Slackware shirt.  His girlfriend is, like me, a long-time Slackware Linux user, and, another small happy coincidence, Slackware and I are both Minnesotan.  :^)

The Big 101000

See that?  I really don't see what the cultural fuss is about turning 40.  In binary I won't need another bit 'til i'm 64.

Well, the house gave me a present this year.  Not mice, like when we moved in.  In early spring we had water come into the basement.  So did plenty of others, which meant the waiting list to have people come out and put in drainage tile took us to yesterday.  Today they're taking care of under the stairs, where...  Actually let me show you under the stairs as of two days ago:

Yes, this house came with a pool!  We just didn't know it until it started spilling up through the carpet.  Somebody in 1980 saved themselves a couple hundred bucks by not running drainage there or in the crawlspace, so now we get to spend a few thousand fixing it.  In the spring and summer, we wet-vacuumed and carried up bucket after bucket of water, until I rigged up and cat-proofed an aquarium pump with a long tube snaked into the furnace room's drain.

Today, we learned that the entire wall leading to those stairs had never been set up with drainage.  That had always been a possibility, as it isn't technically an outside wall due to the odd split-level-ish main floor.  But it means more work.

This all seems fitting, though.  Turning 40, doing something responsible for the home, soothing cat-shaped embodiments of cowardice and anxiety (Book and Autumn, respectively) as jackhammer sounds and vibrations fill the house for two days, and paying through the nose for the privilege.

It could be far worse, after all.  For what these guys are charging, you couldn't get me hunched in that crawlspace with a jackhammer.  My 40-year-old back hurts just thinking about it.  Or maybe that means a storm is coming; at least the rain won't end up on the floor now.

The Chair

For the fifth summer in a row, some friends and I made a short film in a weekend as part of the 48 Hour Film Project.  We were, and are, pretty proud of last year's effort (The Smell), but didn't think we'd be able to live up to it, let alone win any awards from the festival.  We do this for fun, after all, and because we love the process.

The Chair:
http://48hourfilm.com/minneapolis-mn/films/37166
(Watch before reading; spoilers below.)

Well, we did win some awards.  Including the big one, Best Film!  We were thrilled and genuinely shocked.  It still feels surreal.  Since that wild night, we have been accumulating stories like this one, pasted from a multipart text message Mike sent to the rest of us:

I was filling in as an usher tonight at work... a guy who's a bit distracted walked up to me to have his ticket torn. He looked up at me and blurted "the chair! You're the chair!"
It was really busy and there were people all over the place in the lobby. I smiled and said hi, yes I was in The Chair. The dude lost his mind! He was like... " I love that movie! You're hilarious! Holly Cow! you work here?" I was like... thanks yeah, I work here. He then told all these strangers in the lobby about how I was in this "funny movie that just won an award"

Well that piqued the interest of everyone waiting to get into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This guy is telling the lobby of people all about our film and the puppets and how they have to go out to the 48hr film project website to see it. Then two other groups of people step up to say hi and to tell me they had seen the film and loved it! Then!!!... two actors from the runner-up film who lost to us are in the lobby and they come to say hi and say how great they thought the our film was! Needless to say I a little overwhelmed by all of this! What a wacky night! It's really fun that this film is connecting with people 😊

We've had some time now to detach from the movie and examine it, and think about why and how this really strange little film of ours has resonated so well.

Perhaps I've thought about this too much, but here's what I've come up with:
For such an outlandish movie, there's a lot of relatable honesty in The Chair.  Life, metaphorically, is constantly putting chairs in your bedroom door while you sleep.  You can't understand it; problems you've already solved keep coming back.

Wouldn't it be fun if the nonsense that gets in your way was caused by some misfit puppets?  And speaking of, they just want to put on a show, to take their shot and make their mark.  That's all they ever wanted, but they never got the chance.  What percentage of human life does that describe?

But say you get lucky, and you're offered a deal, a map for moving on.  Build the stage, do the show, and life will quit haunting you with recurring obstacles.  So you do it, you put in the work.  You even find some joy and pride in it.  Then what?  Well, it's never enough.  You're stuck with that metaphorical chair.  Forever.

But if you can let go of the anger that comes with that, there's still charm to be found, and fun to be had.  Embrace the nonsense, sing an ad-libbed song, stumble towards harmony when you can, and have a laugh before life fades out.

Book Might Be A Cylon

Happy Holidays!  (by your command)

Thankful

I have plenty, and I'm surely thankful for it.  I also surely wish everybody had what I have.

I'm thankful that my home's water and heat and preposterous amounts of computational power are all available anytime I want them.  I'm thankful for shelves full of books, for anytime I need to unwind and/or sharpen up my brain.  I'm thankful for a garage full of tools and scraps, for anytime I decide I need to create or augment or fix something.  Things!  So many things.  Perhaps too many.  But I'm thankful for having so much literally at my fingertips.  Kim wanted to remove an unusual-shaped security screw recently, and I didn't even need to leave my desk to hand her the tool and bit she needed.  Everybody deserves agency like that.

I'm thankful that I went to school before Columbine and all the shootings since.  Anybody who complains about the cushy lives of modern children callously ignores the truth that a generation has now attended school on a goddamn battlefield.  Kids get interviewed on the news after each of these commonplace tragedies, saying things like "it always felt like if, not when", and I'm at a loss to imagine something more heartbreaking.  I'm thankful that I still have a voice and a vote, I have a set of elected officials to harass, I have fists to clench and feet to march.  I'm thankful that I, that we, still have the chance to reverse insane mistakes and oversights that have been made.

I'm thankful that even as the macro scale of human society is thrashing around in chaos, cracks are forming in the corrupt disorder, and daylight is reaching some of the layers of dirty lies and secrets.  Whether or not we can figure out how to sustainably live in mega-societies, we may at least be fumbling our way through to exposing and removing toxins, both literal and figurative.  Hope is sometimes reduced to a terrifyingly small flicker, but I'm thankful that it feels as though it may be growing brighter.

I'm thankful that I have not gone numb; there is a paralyzing amount of worry to take on, and my wife and I each find it challenging to keep anxiety at bay.  But we've got each other, we've got supportive friends and family, we've got laughter, and sarcasm, and enough disposable income to drink the good liquor.  I truly am thankful for all the bright spots.  I married one, we've adopted some fluffy ones, and we're friends with and related to plenty more.  Speaking of which...

I'm thankful that this year, Kim and I got a new niece and a new nephew!  I'm thankful that they have committed and loving parents and grandparents, good stable homes and everything a person could want by way of family.  Right from the start, these children have all doors open to them, just as I did, and just as all children should have.

Clearly I'm ill at peace with the state my home planet and nation are in, but that takes nothing away from the things I am truly glad of and the real gifts that I have been given.  I am thankful.  As we all deserve to be.

Happy Halloween

Sure, we live in an upside-down surreal hellscape.  We inhabit the darkest and dumbest timeline, where my collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories has been rendered unreadable since they describe such idyllic worlds.  In this so-called reality, even the most gruesome and psychologically-scarring Halloween celebrations are nowhere near as frightening as reading the news.

...But I'll be damned if I'm not going to craft decorations and carve jack-o-lanterns!  These are joyous moments, not to be surrendered!  We will not cede agency over the spooky and/or cute stuff that surrounds our tiny corner of this planet.

Tonight, we fight to reclaim fiction.  Our myths, our ghost stories, our haunted houses deserve better than to be novel distractions from a heartless dominion.
On November 6th, we fight to reclaim non-fiction.  Our streets, our states, our nation deserve better than to be further befouled by power-hungry and hate-fueled madmen.

Happy Halloween, may it bring you glimpses of a more idyllic world, and may we claw our way there together.

Late Late Thirties

So, the last of the thirties is upon me.  In hex, that's "27".  In binary, no new bits are needed, so really by all accounts except for base-10, there's nothing scary going on numerically.  Anyway, here's a brief post to celebrate that another trip around the sun has gone by and I'm still here.

Firstly, a dad joke.  I'm not a dad, unless cats count, but still.  I'm middle-aged and appreciate cheesy humor.

My family got together recently and celebrated a bunch of fall birthdays.  I made the amateur mistake of giving others gifts I myself wanted to receive -- I didn't bring anything.

(That's an entirely true story, but I still want to sincerely thank my various relatives!)

Secondly, something the aforementioned cats gave me today.  I saw a magic trick!

I was feisting with Autumn using a flyswatter (we buy them actual cat toys; it's not our fault they prefer mundane objects and trash) and she ran around the corner.  Immediately she came back around and pounced the flyswatter again, except she had magically turned into Book!  I had to do a double-take and everything, it was pretty spectacular.

Magic trick not pictured, since I didn't know it was coming.

These two mostly get along now, but for a good while there was no chance whatsoever that one of them could magically turn into the other without at least a big hiss giving it away.  Little Autumn's big temper has come a long way, and her bigger-but-younger brother is comfortable enough to do silly things like this now.

Life around here is pretty nice.  One could drive himself crazy thinking about politics or even his own age, but taking it easy and maybe having a nice drink later seems like a much better plan.

BIOS Cheat Code: SVM on Lenovo Legion Y720T

Occasionally I post things so specific I wonder if anybody but a future me will ever find them helpful or even mildly interesting.  This is perhaps the most esoteric one yet.

I recently got a nice new desktop computer.  Normally I wouldn't bother mentioning the make and model but it's relevant: this is a Lenovo Legion Y720T-34ASU.  It's a big beefy machine with much more plentiful and faster CPUs and GPUs than I've ever owned.  It's ridiculous how much computing power this thing has.

Also ridiculous is that the BIOS disables (and doesn't even surface an option for) virtualization.  KVM, SVM, AMD-V, whatever you call it, the tech is present in the CPUs but unable to be tapped due to an embarrassing and idiotic oversight by Lenovo.  For Lenovo's part, they claim that with Windows 10 Pro, virtualization can be enabled anyway.  I wouldn't know; the first thing I did with this computer was to put Linux on it so that it would actually be useful.  Regardless, omitting this BIOS setting in any modern computer borders on criminal neglect.

Now, I don't need to run VMs very often, so it took me a while to run into and trip over this oversight.  A flurry of posts and attempted support calls later, I had resigned to running VMs remotely on my old beater computer, and doing the old-fashioned X11 remote display routine.  Made me shake my head, but in a pinch, if I needed a virtual machine, I could deal with it.

Then, this morning, there was a reply on a BIOS hacking forum I'd posted to.  Some very clever and kind person figured out, somehow, a way to bypass the limited BIOS interface and enable SVM by force.  They'd done this sort of thing before, enabling locked-away features on various hardware.  I'm hoping this person can teach me to fish, so to speak, because I'd really love to know how they figured this out.

Here is the discussion where all this took place:
https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Request-Bios-unlock-for-Lenovo-Legion-Y720T-34ASU

For the sake of multi-basket egg distribution, here are the steps:

• use a Lenovo Legion Y720T-34ASU (AMD)!  (any other model is a risk I would not take!)
• extract genius239's rar file to a FAT-formatted USB stick (most are already formatted this way)
• verify the USB drive contains EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI folders and file
• (if that rar becomes unavailable, search for how to make a GRUB EFI Shell bootdisk)
• reboot and hit f12 at the Lenovo splash screen to enter the boot menu
• choose your USB drive, UEFI mode (not legacy)
• at the prompt, enter "setup_var 0x145 0x01" (no quotes, zeroes)
• that's it!  ctrl+alt+del and boot normally.

And just like that, I could run 64-bit VMs at full speed.  (Or, you know, at all, in VirtualBox's case.)

It's still on Lenovo to deliver a BIOS update that fixes this properly.  Changing any BIOS setting or popping the CMOS battery will clear this change and it will have to be re-applied (which is actually good news to anyone who messes up and gets into trouble, but still).

Happy Independence Day

Now's as good a time as any to make sure you're registered to vote.
https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/
Just because you were before, doesn't mean you are now.

Happy 4th.

The Smell

Chunky Milk Productions strikes again!  We made a movie in a weekend, our fourth in as many years.  And this time, we made the "best of" screening, and even won Best Use of Line.   :^)

For way more behind-the-scenes rambling than any sane person would ever read, and for various downloads etc, visit my personal website:
https://penduin.net/48hfp/2018

Our drawn category was "silent film", and the required elements this year were:

• An illustrator named Sonny or Sunny
• The line "I wish I knew"
• A tie (of any sort)

...We won Best Use of Line with a silent movie.  That's exactly the weird sort of thing I love about these projects, and it felt pretty sweet to pick up an award, even such a minor one.

End of Another Era

Today the internet as we know it begins its official retirement from being a powerful tool of individual voices.  It is being actively repurposed to serve instead as a tool of late-capitalist and autocratic forces.

Not that the internet hasn't been in decline as it is.  Not that long ago, nobody could even take a stab at how many significant entities there were on the internet.  Every university, every business, every city, every artist, every enthusiast.  Protocols kept springing up - telnet, email, usenet, FTP, gopher, IRC, HTTP -- there were many ways to use the internet.  Now, you can count off a small handful of for-profit companies and account for an enormous percentage of the internet, both in terms of traffic and ownership.  Non-HTTP (well, HTTPS now) traffic is actively blocked as some kind of scary unknown.  Where there was once a young and curious power widely distributed to anybody with some basic technical chops, there are now giant silos of control, a select few in charge of nearly everything.

Today, the (ill-gotten, illegitimate, incompetent) US government has made the situation much, much worse.

ISPs, gatekeepers of the final mile of the internet, are now free to return to the corrupt practices they were dabbling in before the FCC's Net Neutrality rules were enacted just a few years ago.  Comcast (or any internet service provider, but they are the ones who bought the current, illegitimate FCC) can now treat any internet traffic any way they like.  Somebody tries using a competing service like Amazon Prime or Netflix?  Maybe slow those streams down, unless somebody pays a little extra.  Somebody's going to a site which compares service across various providers?  It's legal now to send them a censored or altered version of the site.  Somebody's accessing a blog which points out the devious practices ISPs are now allowed to employ?  Maybe just return a 404 Not Found instead.  All legal as of today.

ISPs will tell you people like me are chicken little, crying about a non-falling sky.  We had years of no Net Neutrality rules before and everything was fine!  (Well, during those years, the diversity and distribution of information and leverage on the internet dried up, consolidating into the few giants we have now...)  If I was crying wolf about Citizens United, saying a great deal of money will now be spent lying to us, then I'm doing it again now.  Nah, we don't need regulations protecting citizens from greedy monopolies.  How silly!


I've become less and less convinced that even sweeping electoral victories will be able to wrest democracy back from the GOP - authoritarians do not play by the rules, and we've seen over and again the willingness to lie, cheat, and steal every seat, every gerrymandered district, every judicial appointment, every drop of power to the point where there are essentially no legitimate positions or institutions left.  I'm not sure how that can be repaired.  "Money is speech" really did a number on this nation; I'm an optimist at heart but I have a hard time imagining a full recovery.  One thing that hadn't been systematically corrupted was the internet; damaged though it may have been, there was still technically a level playing field, some small venue in life where money did not have a direct exchange rate with power.  Until today.

The US House of Representatives could still put the kibosh on all this and restore Net Neutrality.  86% of the US population is in favor of those protections.  It's not even partisan.  In this day and age!  86%.  But, that would require several Republicans to do their job, and represent the will of their constituents.  I've called mine, and I hope you'll call yours, begging to restore Title II protections and Net Neutrality, but I'm not going to hold my breath.  We know what we're dealing with here.  An irredeemably-corrupt party at the apex of their hostile takeover of what once resembled a republic.  Even with the most inept leadership imaginable, they've managed to chop up and sell off the entire government to the top bidders.  The internet, though a big deal to me, was just one tiny part of all this.

Of some small consolation is that when the United States is officially over, when every last drop of jingoist marketing value has been squeezed from its corpse, I'll at least still live in Minnseota, which is a beautiful place.  We've got our troubles too, but I think we might pull through, more or less intact.  My also-beautiful home state of Wisconsin has got an uphill battle, as it was the testing grounds for the national GOP takeover, but we're already starting to see the rats flee the sinking ship there.  Wisconsinites are no slouches, and you can't fool all of the people all of the time.  It will be tough, and there is a huge amount of damage to be undone, but I hope and think they'll figure things out too.

Things are likely to get worse before they get better, but my hope is that in that time, as more of the voting public will have grown up having active gunman drills in school where I had tornado drills, as the racists and the homophobes and the other piles of fear and ignorance die off, maybe we can overwhelmingly and legitimately get rid of the currently-invincible, infinite-money-wielding autocratic fascists after all.  I just hope there's something left to save.