It’s done! Here’s what I’ve got left:

• 2 cups of rice
• 2 cups of chickpeas
• 1 egg
• 1/2 pound tofu
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 1/2 cups butter
• 1/2 pound green chile
• 10 bowls worth of soup

Oversaving

I shoud have eaten more. I conserved food at the start because I was thinking that I really wanted to be sure food lasted until the end. I conserved food at the end because, holy shit, I lost five pounds in two weeks.

I ended the diet at 189 pounds, 11 pounds less than I started.

And that’s too damn much weight in a month. My mood was bad. I was feeling kinda crappy. I had 9,000 calories left at the end. That puts me at about 1450 calories a day. I bike most days around ten miles. Three times a week, I go up and down 24 flights of stairs when I go to work. I take frequent walks.

I read that if you’re inactive, the floor should be 1200 calories. If you’re 190 centimeters tall and don’t drive, I think the floor is 1600 calories. I could have had another bowl of soup a day for the last week, had some more beans and dirty rice, and I’d have been a pound heavier and felt worlds better.

How the ingredients went

Mayonnaisse

I had exactly the right amount. Three days before the end, I used the last of it to make some egg salad. Before that, I used it for salad dressing. I was surprised at how little difference it made when I skimped.

Cream

It goes in potato leek soup. I mix it with blueberries and sugar. I put it in omelets. I could have definitely used more. I was really surprised at how 25% of the cream was about 75% as good in these dishes.

Fruits and Vegetables

All were just about the right quantities. I ate them relentlessly the first week and a half, and any more, they would have spoiled. I really wished I had more lettuce for salads. Salads would have been a better use for the mushrooms (which I finished off with a pretty bad stir fry) and tomatoes (which I finished off eating straight toward the end of the second week).

Potatoes, Onions and Garlic

I had the right quantity, and these were the backbone of my diet. These were the soups. These made up most of the deluxe hash brows that I had five times in the first three weeks.

Chedder Cheese

I love cheese. In a way, this is the thing I most worried about running out of. My hash browns put a huge dent in the first couple days. But the second and third week, I barely touched the cheese. I was terrified of having none less. I kept a couple ounces, which I dubbed my “emotional support cheese”. The last day, I had dinner really late, and was not feeling good. I ate the emotional support cheese while I made my final meal of tofu and rice.

Butter and Sugar

I had way more than I can have in a month. My original plan was for a weight-maintaining 2400 calories a day, and it included flour, three types of sugar and other things for baking. I wanted to lose weight, so I cut everything but sugar. Except for occaisional fruit, I had nothing to eat it with. So I would have liked to cut sugar and get more cream instead.

And I was so afraid of running out of butter. There’s no oil in this diet, so I cooked everything with butter. It went in my rice. It was on my omelets, melted into my hashbrowns. But that still just used a little over half my butter. I could have managed with 2 1/2 cups.

Green Chile

I have about half a pound out of two. I should have used it less sparingly. Some more green chile rice would have been nice this last week.

Eggs

24 was about right for the last two weeks. I’ll try to be a little more conservative with these because they’re getting expensive.

Rice and Chickpeas

I should have added some canned or frozen vegetables to help season these up for the last weeks. I really wanted to figure out how to make rice balls. Having those on hand as a snack would have been nice.

Wasabi Peas, Blueberries and Olives

Speaking of snacks, these were good to have on hand.

Conclusion

It was a cool experiment. I had a lot of practice planning meals. I’m convinced I could eat on a tiny budget if I need to. I got a reminder to take better care of myself in terms of eating enough. (I gained 35 pounds in a year and a half, so I’ve gotten reminders about eating too much.) I got a good illustration of my overconservative resource strategies.

I’m going out for some Italian tapas later, and I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ve got one week left! I’ll post another recipe, which is basically taken from a Youtube cooking video.

Crispy Tofu

• 1/2 pound tofu
• 4 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 2 tbsp corn starch
• 1 tbsp garlic salt
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1/2 packet of onion soup mix
• 2 tbsp salt

Cut the tofu into flat slabs and then rip the slabs apart into roughly cube-shaped chunks (ripping increases the surface area for better picking up of spices and better cooking).

Soak these chunks in salt water for 10 minutes. Then take them out and drain. This dries them out. Pour soy sauce and onion soup mix on the chunks and let them sit for a little.

Pour nutritional yeast, corn starch and garlic salt into a bowl and roll the tofu around in it. Fry for 15 minutes. I boiled some rice with stock, garlic salt, nutritional yeast and butter and mixed them together.

One more week

I blogged in four chunks, but this diet really has only three phases. The first ended on day nine when I ate the last of the fruit. The second ended on day 19 when I cooked the last of my potatoes and onions.

By the second week, I was worried I’d run out of food. I’m no longer worried. I think I could probably last two weeks on the remaining food, but it wouldn’t be fun. My main concern is no longer, “Will I run out of food,” but, “can I keep losing weight?”

I weighed in at 194 this morning. I’ve been eating one bowl of soup and something else (egg salad, tofu listed above) each day.

I’ve been saving the blueberries and about half the cream for the last week. I thought I might be discouraged by now, and it’d be a nice dessert-y snack. I still have sugar because I don’t have much that goes with sugar.

I wasn’t sure there’d be any point to any of this. And there is some.

Cooking very often for three weeks will make you more efficient than cooking sometimes for three years. I’m faster and meal prep and cleanup than I was when this started. For a lot of the time, I was not only cooking everything I was eating, but I was cooking more food that I wanted to freeze before it’d spoil. Lots of people have to cook for other people and already cook this much, but I didn’t.

I think a lot about food waste. I can afford more food than I can eat, but I’m aware a lot of people can’t, and it weighs on my conscience. This was good practice eating with almost no waste. Two of the apples went bad before I could eat them, and two of the eggs cracked. Beyond that, there’s been almost no waste.

Related to that, it’s been really good practice for meal planning. I planned food four weeks ahead, and mostly, I did a pretty good job. I’m going to get to the end without being reduced to eating meals of only rice.

Next week, I’ll write up a summary of my experiences from the whole thing.

I’m halfway through my diet, and here’s half a recipe:

Half of a Starchy Soup

• 4 yukon gold potatoes
• 1 tbsp butter
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 onion
• 8 cups of broth
• 2 bay leaves
• seasonings: rosemary, garlic salt, pepper
• some other stuff

Peel the potatoes and cut them into about half dollar sized bits. Dice the onions into little bits. Melt the butter and crush the garlic onto a large frying pan or a wok. Add the onions and cook for about five to ten minutes until the onions are clear. Dump the onions into a slow cooker. Also dump the potatoes and everything else in.

If you add a pound of lentils and some cut carrots, that’s a lentil soup. If you cook up six leeks with the onions, that’s potato leek soup. Add six cups of cooked chickpeas and half a cup of green chile, and that’s green chile chickpea soup. (The last two soups are best if you hit them with an immersion blender).

Halfway There

I have trouble tracking my calories at this point because a lot of the food that’s gone isn’t eaten, it’s just been turned into soup. I feel like I mostly planned pretty well, but I didn’t predict well. At the start, I thought I’d be eating salad the second week and potatoes the third.

The lettuce was starting to wilt in the first week, and the potatoes have been looking a little worse for wear this last week. So the salads were done early, and the soups have started early. So there’s a fruit and salad week followed by three soup weeks. I’ll have made four soups before this is done. Each one is food for three to four days.

I’ve got one soup left to make (chickpea green chile). I’m waiting until I have some freezer space from the first three soups. My goal is to hit the fourth week with eight bowls worth of soup, two pounds of tofu, some chickpeas and rice, the blueberries and a little bit of cream.

I weighed in at 195 pounds this morning. That’s one pound less than last week, which was an encouraging but also worrisome 4 pound drop from the start of the diet at 200.

I had a lot of moments of worrying. I look at all the things that are gone, and I still have half the diet left, but from where I’m standing now, I think I’ll have enough food to make it to the last day.

I’ll start with a recipe:

Deluxe Hash Browns

• 2 yukon gold potatoes
• 2 oz. cheddar cheese
• 1/2 onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp flour or corn starch
• 3 tbsp green chile
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 2 tsp oil or melted butter

Peel the potatoes, cut them into thumb-size chunks and boil them for 10 minutes. I recommend doing this in advance to lots of potatoes. You can keep them for about a week and make these hash browns, roast potatoes or boxty from that start.

Preheat oven at 400 degrees.

Shred the potatoes and the half onion. Combine them with the green chile. Toss the mix with nutritional yeast, melted butter, the flour or corn starch and spread flat on parchment paper on a cooking sheet. Season to taste. Shred the cheese and keep it by.

Cook for 10 minutes, turn it with a spatula and cook for 10 more minutes. Turn it with a spatula again, add cheese and cook for ten more minutes.

Let cool and eat.

The green chile and cheddar cheese remind me of the green chile hash browns at the Frontier Restaurant in Albuquerque. However, I’ve made this with mushrooms, pecorino romano and pepper, and whatever I had on hand. Onions were originally one such experiment, and I liked them so much I consider them an essential ingredient.

The Diet

I’m a week in. I’ve eaten 10k calories (about 1400/day) the first week. I was chasing food that would go bad if I didn’t eat it fast. I ate the bananas, the oranges and most of the apples. I had one pound of tofu and six potatoes that I’d gotten a few weeks earlier than most of these groceries (which I mostly bought on the first of February). I made hash browns for three days and fried up the tofu and had it with 3/4 cup of rice I’ve cooked up.

This second week, I have the rest of the apples, the mushrooms and the tomatoes that will go bad if I don’t eat them. The leeks and carrots aren’t looking their best. I’m planning a couple frittatas, some big batches of soup and a lot of apples.

My initial plans are a little too simple and seem optimistic about how fast vegetables spoil. I wish I had more lettuce to make this part of “salad week”, but it was looking like it’d spoil if I didn’t eat it. I’ll make a lot of soup and freeze half for the final week.

I weighed in this morning at 196 pounds. I experience a lot of odd weight fluctuations, and that’s a big drop from 200 a week ago.

I’ll write in another entry next Saturday, when I’m halfway done.

I’m trying a weird experiment. I’m getting a bunch of food, and I’m pledging to eat nothing but that food for the rest of the month (it’s February, so that’s four weeks).

I call it the “Shipwreck Diet” the idea is that it’s like I was on a shipwreck, and this food was the only thing I could salvage. I got the idea while reading Devolution. In it, a bunch of people are cut off and surrounded by hungry bigfoot (it’s a fun book). The book gets pretty detailed about how they budget food while they’re stuck in place, and it seemed like an interesting challenge.

Some of this is that I want some chance to reset how I think about food. Food scarcity has been a basic fact for most people for the world’s history. I’m slowly dieting. I’m 200 pounds now, and I want to be 180. I keep getting down to that weight and then gaining it back in some years of stress eating. In this case, if I overeat one day, I feel the consequences in a really immediate way.

I’m really good at keeping to strict rules like this. I tend to be pretty successful at diets. My problem has been that I can’t bear to be under strict eating rules forever, and I don’t eat in a very healthy way when I don’t have rules.

So, I’m trying a base of 50,000 calories for the month. This comes out to about 1800 calories a day. I should be 4-8 pounds lighter at the end of the month.

If I was a better planner, I’d have a full meal plan, and I don’t. I have some general guidelines. I’m thinking of this as “fruit week”, “salad week”, “starch week” and “soup week”, because a lot of this food doesn’t stay good for four weeks.

The list

• 10 cups rice
• 8 cups chickpeas
• 4 cups of lentils
• 24 eggs
• 28 Yukon Gold potatoes
• 8 onions
• 6 leeks
• 8 bulbs of garlic
• 2 head romaine lettuce
• 30 carrots
• 4 cups of mushrooms
• 20 bananas
• 12 apples
• 30 clementines
• 5 cups butter
• 1 cup of mayonnaise
• 1 cup of cream
• half a cup of corn starch
• 5 pounds of tofu
• 2 pounds of cheddar cheese
• 2 pounds of chopped frozen green chile
• 4 cans of olives
• 2 pounds of wasabi peas

You can see from the list that I’m a vegetarian, but not a vegan. This contains the ingredients for a lot of my favorite soups. I really like crisply tofu.

Not on the list

Spices

Soy sauce, salt, pepper, Orrington Farms Vegan Broth Base, hot sauce will all be in a lot of foods. They have negligible calories and last a long time, and I don’t want to deal with the record keeping.

Diet Soda

One vice at a time. I don’t want to list 50 liters of store brand diet cola.

What Could Go Wrong

Something could spoil. I love eggs. If those two dozen eggs break, I could survive, but it’d be hard. If the garlic goes bad, that’s probably the number one thing that’d make me give up the diet. I’m also worried I’ll end up with the wrong things. Maybe I’ll suddenly realize that I’ve eaten all the fiber in the first couple weeks, and I’ll spend the last two weeks hungry and constipated. Maybe I’ll pace myself badly and just be hungry. Maybe I’ll take all the easy things and spend the last week trying to figure out how to make a meal of corn starch and leeks.

I don’t completely know what I’m doing.

So that’s it

My plan is to write up an update every week, so I’ll let you know how things are at the end of fruit week.

I’m spending a lot of my time on this hobby, so I thought I’d write up a quick description. I’m often in a hurry and summarize it as “Werewolf on Acid”. Here’s a little more detail.

Blood on the Clocktower

At the beginning of the game, each player gets a token with a role printed on it. You pick a role, look at it and hand it to the storyteller. You don’t show anyone your role.

How It’s Like Werewolf

Your role is either good or evil. Most players are good. One of the evil players is the demon. The evil team usually knows who they are. The good team usually doesn’t know.

There are day turns and night turns. Each day, the good players can nominate a player to execute and vote on that nomination. Each night, the demon chooses a good player to kill.

The good team wins if the demon gets executed. The evil team wins if there are two players left and one is the demon.

Where It Gets Weird

Every role has a special ability. The good team often has abilities that provide information, like the Empath who the storyteller tells each night how many of their neighbors are evil. The ability might be a material edge, like the Monk, who can protect one person every night. These roles with helpful abilities are Townsfolk.

There are also good players with inconvenient abilities called Outsiders. For instance, the Drunk thinks they’re a townsfolk, but their role doesn’t work. A drunk Empath would get frequently misleading information about how many of their neighbors are evil. A drunk Monk would think they were protecting people, but the people wouldn’t be protected.

The evil team has special abilities, too. The demon can kill someone each night and also gets “bluffs”, roles that the good team isn’t using this game. The other evil roles, called minions have abilities that make the good team’s life more difficult, like the Poisoner, who can make one good player’s ability malfunction for a turn.

Core Concepts

Almost Nothing You Know Is For Certain

Your townsfolk abilities tell you information, but you could be drunk. You could be poisoned. There are people who are good but seem evil and vice versa. Information is never absolute but only a clue.

Anyone Can Say Anything

A really frequent question is, “Can I tell people my role”. The first answer is, “not right away, but soon”. The storyteller collects the roles and has a few minutes of bookkeeping while they set up the game. When this is done, the storyteller will say, “I have been murdered in the night. It is now the first day.”

Now that it’s the first day, you can tell people your role. If you’re the Monk, you can say you’re the Monk, but

1. The Monk is a favorite target of demon players.
2. Anyone else can also say they’re the Monk.

Mostly, the good players want everyone to know what’s happening, and the evil players want to sow confusion. However, there are exceptions. There’s a good role, the Ravenkeeper whose power is activated by being killed by the demon. A Ravenkeeper might claim to be a Monk to tempt a demon to kill them.

Death Isn’t the End

In Blood on the Clocktower, most players get killed during most games. When your character is killed, you can still talk. You can still vote one more time (this is called the “ghost vote”).

Most powers stop working at death, but dead players are very much a part of the game. When a team wins, the players on that team win whether they’re alive or not.

Some Terms

StoryTeller

This is someone who knows everything that’s going on and decides what information to give. When drunk or poisoned characters get wrong information, the storyteller decides what wrong information they get.

At the end of the game, the storyteller describes what everyone’s roles were and summarizes everything that happened during the game. This is one of the best parts, because all the confusion during the game gets cleared up and all suspicions get confirmed.

The Grimoire

This is a thing the storyteller carries that contains all the information about the current state of the game. Typically, it looks like a big book with a fake inside which holds all the tokens.

Script

There are lots of roles, but only twenty or so are typically used during one game. A script is a list of roles during a game. A group will typically say, “Does everyone want to play Trouble Brewing?” and people agree on a script.

The examples in this description are all Trouble Brewing examples.

In Summary

The two big elements of the game are about logic and social deduction. You usually can’t win completely on logic. All the townsfolk powers together – in most cases in most scripts – won’t tell you absolutely who the demon is.

Oddly, the game seems to attract fairly shy people. I think people like having a framework to talk and even mock up conflict.

Almost everyone tends to find their first few games confusing. I suggest you just relax. Usually, nobody remembers who wins or who loses.

So I’m going to a store, and I’ve got sunglasses on. I’m what I call “floating”. My mind isn’t on what my body is doing right now. I’m composing some of this article. I’m in the store. I talk to the clerk I start home.

On the way home, I drop back into my body. I realize I don’t have my sunglasses.

I had them on my way to the store. I ask my autopilot if he put my sunglasses down. He says, “Why are you asking me? You’re the one with episodic memory.”

The autopilot has fucked me again. It can do a lot of things. Mostly, keeping track of things isn’t one of them. My most common advice is to not float, to always be present and aware of my immediate surroundings. It’s easy, neurotypical people explain to me like someone telling a one-armed person how simple ladders and shovels are.

If there is an article that tells you as an ADHD person how to stop floating or how to get your autopilot to keep track of stuff, put this down and read that article. All I can do is contain the damage.

Try to go easy on yourself. You have to face that there are things you don’t have. Medically speaking, the thing you don’t have is enough oxygen to your frontal lobe. More immediately, the thing you don’t have is your phone. Where the fuck is your phone?

I have directed immense amounts of shame and anger at myself. I’ve hated my autopilot with a fury, berated it for forgetting my phone. It’s not helpful. If you tell your autopilot, “remember the phone, the phone, the phone”, your autopilot with obsess over the phone, take it out of your pocket, put it back, take it out of your pocket, put it back, take it out of your pocket, and you don’t know where that was because remembering things isn’t what your autopilot does.

So I’ve been like this for over fifty years. My possessions now fit into one of four categories.

Homebodies

Homebodies don’t leave your home. I’ve got a tablet. It’s great. It can fit into my backpack. It doesn’t go into my backpack because I don’t want to buy two or three tablets a year. My portable tablet goes to my office to my living room to my bedroom.

I don’t know where my tablet is now, but I do know it’s in my house because it never leaves.

Commuters

Commuters are either at your house or at your work and nowhere else. I find it helpful to group commuters in boxes. I have an essentials box with my work badge, my dongle (my work has high security), my mask, my perscription glasses and my headphones. My tech box has a mouse and a macro keyboard. These things and my laptop go to work and nowhere else.

People who have to go to multiple places have more trouble with these items. I’m lucky that my work is in one building. If I still was in college, I’d have multiple classrooms to lose things in. I don’t miss textbooks.

Offerings

There are things that you need to carry sometimes that are pretty cheap. Gloves, sunglasses, reading glasses are all offerings. I accept that I’m going to lose these all the time and have learned to accept I need to get new ones regularly.

Talismans

In time, you can train your autopilot to immediately pull you in if a specific thing is missing. A phone has the added benefit that it typically has a GPS and you might be able to find it by Googling “find my phone”.

You need to carry your talisman in the same place, and you need to carry it all the time or your autopilot will decide it’s okay to ignore it. If I’m outside and the phone isn’t in my left pocket, something is wrong and the autopilot hits the alarm. If my phone breaks, I carry the broken phone. If it’s a quick jaunt and I don’t need my phone, I carry the damn phone anyway.

Autopilot gets way worse with multiple talismans. If you have a phone, keys and wallet, can you make your wallet and keys part of your phone? Can you stop carrying any one of those things?

So those are my categories. Sometimes a thing will move. I really wanted to listen to music whereever I went, but headphones became “commuters” after I left them in movie theaters twice in two weeks. Maybe my vision will get worse and my glasses can be a second talisman, but right now autopilot takes off my glasses when I’m not reading, and I’ve lost four pairs, which is why perscription glasses are commuters and only reading glasses go to the store.

Habit can make you slowly better at tracking some things. I’ve had the same two pairs of gloves for two years. It feels weird to ride a bike without gloves unless it’s summer, so I walk out, get ready to ride my bike, get off and find my gloves. I’m doing even better with my bike helmet. I’m hoping one day I can keep track of sunglasses.

I work in web development, and I’m struck, often, by what a needlessly painful career it can be. Many developers have a lot of felibility over their hours. Many developers can work on their own with a lot of freedom over how they work. There’s an element of problem solving and endless challenges. However, it’s also painful because we make it painful.

I started web development in 1996. I’d predicted that client-server hypertext engines would be big (by which I meant bigger than NewsNet, not bigger than television). I saw one and got obsessed.

In most other careers, I could be a comfortable, smug bastard firmly entrenched in my art. The web changes really fast. Very little I learned in my first couple years is particularly useful. Getting schooled by developers who weren’t born when I learned the basics of NCSA HTTPD has long since ceased to be a new experience.

My big consolation is that this progress makes idiots of us all. You have to learn so many things in this business, and those things go obsolete, and you have to learn a bunch more things.

And people’s confidence in you is a precious resource. You need your manager to believe you know things so that they’ll fight for you. You want other developers to believe in you because you’ll have to fight for your ideas. If developers disagree, the confident- sounding developers will get their plans approved.

So, unfortunately, we tend to punish each other for having to learn things. It’s human nature that knowledge, once learned, seems obvious. It is really easy to look down on people who are struggling.

My best example, because it’s happened so often, is when I’m talking with other developers about whether to hire a candidate, and someone will say, “The candidate had never even heard of react webhooks.” Or lets say had never published Kafka events, created a Docker container, published a Kubernets pod, I’ll nod for a moment and then think.

Wait a second. We learned to do that in March. Were *we* unhirable until a couple months ago?

Sometimes developers will openly mislead each other. One example from decades ago was when I needed to create a graphic user interface in Perl (I told you, it’s decades ago). I asked three people about it, and I got the same answer, “You can use Perl/TK. It’s super easy.”

I used Perl/Tk, and it wasn’t super easy, but it wasn’t too bad. I wanted to talk about some quirks about it.

But I couldn’t.

I didn’t know anyone who’d used Perl/Tk. I didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who knew Perl/Tk. Everyone who assured me it was super easy wanted to sound like they were familiar with it, but none of them knew a damn thing about it.

So developers are constantly hitting things that confuse them, and they constantly feel a level of imposter syndrome. And most of us are on some level making it harder for each other. We’re suppressing empathy to project confidence.

So here’s my suggestion:

Look stupid.

Never present a guess as knowledge.

Own mistakes as quickly, loudly and clearly as possible. Do this for the big mistakes you’re afraid of getting stuck with. Do it for the small mistakes you might get away with.

If you think something you can’t prove, be very clear that you can’t prove it.

When you’re telling somebody something you’ve learned, include where and when you learned it. People might think it was obvious to you.

When you don’t know. Say you don’t know.

And try to remember a few things about unfamiliarity that people tend to forget:

Context is really important. You can have three pages of documentation that is completely accurate that is nonetheless no help because it requires context.

Because of this, dealing with multiple unfamiliar things is exponentially harder than dealing with one thing. My first time dealing with a modern Javascript framwork, I was dealing with ES7, NPM, Babel and AngularJS.

I could look up documentation on AngularJS, but all the examples used non-transpiled Javascript, so they didn’t resemble my code. I could look up examples of ES7, NPM or Babel, but none of those used frameworks, so they didn’t look like my code.

One of the reasons PHP stayed such a success is that many sites documented the basic elements: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP as one technology – the LAMP stack.

Also, when you’re looking at lots of unfamiliar things, it becomes much harder to spot familiar problems. I can’t count the number of times I’ve circled a piece of code five times, trying to find out which piece of a new technology was tripping me up, when the problem turned out to be something I solved a million times. It reminds me of being in a dark and unfamiliar room and being frightened seeing your own jacket on a coat hanger.

Now, there is a cost to constantly admitting ignorance. It can take longer to build trust. Other developers are much quicker to express doubt if you make it clear you sometimes doubt yourself. But, ultimately, people want to work with people who make them feel better, and they’ll be happier talking to someone who is more honest with them.

I simply haven’t seen anyone get this right, even though the facts are public record. I’m going to make only one short leap, and I’m going to explain that former President Donald Trump was part of the plan to invade Ukraine.

This goes back to the phone call that got Trump impeached. What everyone remembers is that Trump tried to extort Ukranian President Zelensky for an investigation into Joe Biden that had no foundation but would have cast doubt. And sure, Trump did that.

But it wasn’t his first request. Trump’s first request was this:

I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it.

So Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity firm that provided evidence that Russian hackers were behind the DNC hack, which the FBI investigation later confirmed. There was a conspiracy theory that Crowdstrike was hiding evidence about the election on a server, and that server was hidden in Ukraine.

This theory is crazy. Crowdstrike is an American firm that both Republicans and Democrats have contracted with. It has the same Mad-libs nature of later Qanon conspiracy theories. “CIA director Gina Haspel sprained her ankle in Germany trying to hide a server that has voter fraud evidence.” “Italian satellites altered ballots for the DNC.”

By the way, where did that theory come from? Here’s Fiona Hill from the impeachment hearing:

Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.

So, Trump withheld $214 million in funding (illegally, the funding had been assigned by congress), and his first condition was that Ukraine open an investigation incriminating Ukraine itself.

Where was this supposed to go? After Ukraine opened the investigation, Trump was going to deny funding because there was now suspicion that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. I can’t prove that for a fact. I can just point to decades of financial negotiations that Trump has had with lenders, employees and federal agencies. Trump always withholds payment whenever possible.

Trump didn’t succeed, though. A group of whisteblowers testified about the call. Trump fired them and slandered them. They left government and spent the last few years being chased by death threats from Trump’s most active supporters for their substatial role in thwarting Putin’s advance.

Trump’s attorney general said that he planned to leave NATO in his second term. If he had his way, Ukraine would have lost its funding, NATO would have loast its biggest partner, the Trump administration would have continued its constant fight against sanctions against Russia. Trump would have dismissed the brave Ukranian resistance like he did our Kurdish allies he also abandoned, “They’re not angels”.

I got this book as a present almost a year ago. I tried to read it twice. Don’t make too much of that. I haven’t had a lot of patience this year.

It’s a short little thing, but in a way, the story is even shorter. It seems to be a short story that’s stretched out to a small novel. The extra time goes into a very detailed description of the setting and of the thought processes of the narrator.

For me, the book survives purely on the narrator’s voice. He’s so positive and optimistic. He’s in a situation that could throw another person into the deepest depths of depression (and has), but the main character spouts joy with every paragraph. His positivity seems sometimes refreshing, sometimes psychotic but always infectious.

The setting is gorgeously detailed, and I wanted to see it. (It would be a great subject for a VR experience).

The plot is very short and simple. I could lay it out in a couple paragraphs. There are a lot of details that aren’t fleshed out, but this seems true to the character’s life, and the world seems consistent as it’s presented.

If you’re reading this, have patience, relax and listen. It’s the voice and not the events that will, ultimately carry the story.

Americans put a lot of desire and energy toward joining some very limited group of people. Two million people writing novels hoping to be one of 10,000 professional authors. One million high school football players hoping to be one of 1,696 professionals.

The Olympics repeats the pattern again. There are 327 thousand competitive swimmers in the world. Maybe twelve of them will get a medal in something.

This is an artifact of globalization, mass media and, I suspect, profound loneliness.

In the world of Sultan’s Child, daeva are a source of much of the world’s malice. Daeva (singular and plural) have no physical presence. They can’t touch or be seen, but they can communicate and subtly manipulate things in the physical world.

Daeva are ghosts of things that never lived. They are more numerous than living creatures. They are not evil, but they are almost always insane. It might be more accurate to say they are madness.

These are the basic phases to reading Project Hail Mary.

• This is just the Martian again.
• I’m remembering why I loved the Martian.
• Holy Shit this isn’t just the Martian again.

I’ve been forever trying to puzzle through Republican hysteria. There are a thousand articles trying to explain the Trumpist mindset, because it’s baffling and immediate. Here are the basic tenets of Trump-era conservatism as I see it.

• Everything important was accomplished by straight, white men.
• You deserve to be wealthy. You aren’t because people are stealing from you.
• A cabal of others is trying to take away your way of life.
• Your world is simple. People who act like things are complex are trying to fool you.

This is subject to a change if someone catches an error in my math or finds a reason the moons as listed couldn’t keep a stable orbit or life couldn’t be supported with these things.

There are five moons in orbit around the world of Sultan’s Child. None of them are as big as Luna, Earth’s satellite, but together, they can exert rare and powerful tides.

Despite these being multiple moons and appearing in a fantasy novel, they don’t have an over-arching supernatural signifigance. I just thought five moons seemed perfectly likely for a planet roughly Earth-sized.

Kah

Kah is the biggest and slowest of the moons. It’s just over half the mass of Luna and farther away, making it look a little over half as big in the sky.

So I’m ADD. I got it from my father, who never realized he had it and probably would have considered it a bullshit diagnosis. For a while, I did, too.

In my thirties, I had a therapist, and I was talking about trouble I had in school, and she asked me if I’d ever been tested for ADD. I hadn’t. She gave me a test, which involved concentrating on a single blinking light. I did what I always do when I have to concentrate on a single point. I closed one eye and covered the other so all I could see was that one light. With nothing else to see, I noticed the light blink about 75% of the time, which registered as borderline.

I’ve had a bit of a slump in my reading since I read the fun summer blockbuster in book form that was Max Brooks’ Devolution. I’m reading through Or What You Will by Jo Walton. One of the books I read every night I read aloud to my wife every night. That’s how I’m reading Or What You Will, and I’m about 90% through.

The book is a fourth wall shredding narrative about a character who’s worried about a writer. The character isn’t a specific person but a favorit archetype of the author’s. It’s like if the selfish, super-competent wise-cracker who appeared as J in my Flash in the Pan or Ada in Inhumane Resources were one distinct person.

The writer is writing a new book without this trickster archetype, and the character is not happy about it. I was pretty sure I’d read this story before, and I was wrong.

We’re back from getting my son his second corona virus vaccination shot. He’s fifteen, so he became eligible three weeks ago.

The quarantine reminds me a little of when my son got leukemia when he was two. Then, too, we worried about germs constantly because my son had a compromised immune system.

Ironically, after the first few months (in which he got pneumonia twice), my son managed to get through sicknesses that knocked down my wife and I. After the tenth warning about his “compromised immune system”, I said, “The only compromise his immune system has made is with Satan!”