Well, I did it. It took me literal years, but I beat Youngblood. Not because it was difficult, more because it was … boring. The game picks up in the 1980s, where you play one of BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters, Soph or the Jess (the one I played), living in Paris and taking on the Nazis. It’s a co-op game though you can play it alone, with your sister being AI controlled.
The game’s not bad. The gameplay itself is pretty much identical to the previous games in the series. The guns are mostly the same, but can be upgraded, which I enjoyed. You can steal in or go guns ablazing. The enemies are difficult and you can tell that MachineGames understands how to make a good FPS fight.
My main issue is that Paris is a “hub” and so all of the missions take place in the same locations, which are all well thought out and look great, but the repetition gets annoying after a while. Wolfenstein as a series is linear, and part of the fun is going to all of the new locations. Even New Colossus, which had a hub of the submarine, kept advancing the plot through interesting locations. Youngblood feels like MachineGames ran out of plot ideas and (probably) was pushed into making a co-op game because it was popular at the time. But the plot suffers because of it. The game isn’t as fun or weird as the first two games of the trilogy, and Soph and Jess just aren’t very interesting characters. The concept of guerilla style fighting in the streets is cool, but it just gets old fast, and not enough new gameplay concepts are introduced to keep the series fresh.
SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT:
I will say, I did appreciate the moment when they finally reunite with BJ and he reveals that he has learned of a dimension where the Nazis lost World War II. This was a huge gripe of mine with the new Wolfenstein trilogy: it sucks that the Nazis won the war. I know, the fact that they won means you get to experience killing Nazis in different decades, but it always fundamentally bugged me. It’s just historical fiction, so I shrug it off. But now the game acknowledges that BJ’s universe is different from ours. It’s kind of a corny twist, but I liked it.
The game also ends with this revelation that Hitler had a doomsday device that BJ accidentally activated, which is slowly killing (their) Earth. The scene is clearly a setup for Wolfenstein 3, which will maybe? get made? Nobody is sure. Youngblood didn’t sell well so they’ve either canned it or are waiting to release it. I hope didn’t can it; The New Order and The New Colossus are excellent games (the former is in my top ten for sure) and the series deserves a wrap up, especially since Youngblood feels like a side story, a la The Old Blood. I’m hoping we get some BJ Blazkowicz in the 90s action, trying to get his family through some portal into our universe.
All in all, Youngblood was fairly average. Good fights hampered by a lackluster story and a strange lack of humor and weirdness which permeated the first two games. Hopefully it didn’t do too bad and MachineGames gets the go ahead for Wolfenstein 3.
This is a continuing quest to visit and rate every park in Portland.
SE 16th Avenue and Harrison Street Neighborhood: Hosford-Abernethy Website
In 1891, William Sargent Ladd decided to subdivide his east Portland 126-acre farm into the very unique and confusing diagonal streets we know as Ladd’s Addition. He then died two years later. Ladd’s is arguably the most unique and iconic street layout in Portland, right up there with that Lombard Street in San Francisco, or Bourbon Street in New Orleans. But those are just streets; Ladd’s Addition is a whole street structure. It’s a richer part of Portland, and in the center is Ladd’s Circle, which is just that, a circular park with some benches. There are also four rose gardens in the cardinal directions.
People often gather at Ladd’s Addition to start something else, like runs and stuff. I often run around Ladd’s Addition myself, because it’s level and interesting and a lovely part of town. It’s also fun to get lost in, and it’s one of the few bits in Portland with alleyways! I’d love to live there, if someone would just give me a million dollars to afford a house.
But this is a review of the circle! And the rose gardens, I guess.
Aesthetic: Roses are pretty, can’t lie about that. But the actual gardens aren’t, to me, very aesthetically pleasing. In fact they kind of stick out and are virtually unusable as the roses are packed in each diamond. The circle is more open and is a nice centerpiece to the street structure, but other than that it’s not especially gorgeous. 6/10
Function: The gardens grow roses. The end. The circle has some benches to sit on and contemplate life, but that’s about it. There’s some space to lay down for a picnic if you want. 4/10
Sketchiness: Ladd’s is pretty bougie so there’s not a lot of homeless wandering through. I do see a few pseudo-sketch people lying in the grass in the warmer months. (When I say “pseudo-sketch,” that falls into a territory where I’m unsure if the person is homeless, or just a grungy Portlander.) 8/10
SE 17th Avenue and Taylor Street Neighborhood: Buckman Website
Colonel Summers is definitely one of the best parks in Portland. It’s in a great location, it’s got a multitude of things to do (basketball court, meeting space, swings for kids, splash zone, tennis court, baseball diamond though I think people usually play kickball there, and a community garden), and to me it always feels larger than it actually is. That little kitty-corner square of park in the top-right of the map always fascinated me too. When I first moved here I really had no idea where this park was, even though I had passed by it many times–eventually I realized that the brunt of the park was behind the tennis courts.
Pedalpalooza stops here frequently and there’s always something going on at the park in the spring and summer months. Now, it’s cold and most everyone is gone.
Aesthetic: It’s a lovely park, maybe a bit cramped in spots but the community garden adds an interesting twist on what might have been an otherwise normal park. Honestly, my only gripe is that I wish the houses in the NW section weren’t there, so we could have more park. (To be fair though, they’re on an uphill slope; the park is kind of constructed around the hill.) 8/10
Function: This place has lots to do in a smaller space. There’s plenty of activities in the warmer months and with basketball and tennis AND base/kickball, lots of places to do sports. 9/10
Sketchiness: The park itself can vary in sketchiness, but none of it is really drug deals or anything of that nature. It’s more just homeless people sleeping on the grass or in cars around the perimeter. But lots of people sleep on the grass so it’s not a big deal. There’s also a van on the 17th Ave side which has been parked there ever since I moved to this part of town. It has people sleeping in it but they don’t bother anyone. In fact in the summertime they set up a little station where you can wash your hands, which is neat. I’d say low-to-moderate sketchiness. 3/10
My dad’s been in and out of the hospital since last week (around 11/22). The issue (according to my mother): a gallstone had lodged in his bile duct and began backing up bile. My dad already takes a lot of painkillers for his feet; the nerves of his feet and legs were damaged over 20 years ago due to a lack of blood flow (and a wrong diagnosis from a doctor, but that’s a whole other story). So the pain, he thought at first, was indigestion, as he was dealing with nausea and vomiting. But it got worse and eventually he had to go to the hospital, where the discovered and subsequently removed said gallstone. Just one, it seems, plus a “lot of gunk,” which refers to inflammation from infection. See, the bile had backed up so much that it was seeping back into his liver. That’s not good. There was so much that they had to install a drain to get it out. Doing so caused his gallbladder to spasm as it returned to its normal shape, which my dad was not a fan of.
Since then, he’s had some issues with his blood pressure and some fluid collecting in his lungs and around his heart. It sounds mostly like his body just working to get itself right after the gallbladder draining. The fluid’s been drained and his BP has returned to normal. He also had a water leak in his hospital room, an errant fire alarm, and a woman in a nearby room whose fall protection alarm kept going off. Plus having to wait to even get into the hospital due to the rampant RSV infections around the country. The American healthcare system in action.
He’s doing better since and my mom believes he’ll be able to go home today (haven’t heard from her yet). My understanding is that he’ll have to keep wearing the gallbladder drain (which, I think, it’s kind of like a smaller ostomy bag for his gallbladder–a gallostomy bag, we’ll say) until his gallbladder is healed enough for them to remove it. Dad is vehemently against surgery, and I don’t blame him, he’s been through some big ones. But it’s either that or a constant concern that his gallbladder will back up and become infected again.
My dad is 80 years old, my mom 75. They’ve been married for 56 years. Back then, you got married in your late teens/early 20s. During that half a century they’ve experienced all the ups and downs and trials and tribulations. And that’s not even mentioning me and my two brothers compounding those trials x10. Eventually everyone and everything dies. It’s the only constant in the universe. It’s inevitable, and yet completely unique each time. My dad’s told me numerous times that he’s at peace with dying. He knows it’s coming. But in moments like this I realize that there’s a difference between being at peace with the concept of dying, and actually dying, which I think, no matter what, is going to be scary. But it’s not a contrast; it’s a complement. The peace and the fear. There’s something kind of depressing about not being afraid to die, you know? Life is so weird and miraculous, and then you’re just going to leave it at some point. Why wouldn’t you have some trepidation about that?
In all honesty it’s a miracle that my dad’s been alive as long as he has. Or rather, it’s a miracle of medicine and doctors and surgery. It’s no miracle of God. If anything, God had his grubby paws out, waiting to snatch him up over 20 years ago. Or when he had throat cancer about a decade later. Science is the thing that keeps him around. I’m more thankful for science than I am for some deity in the sky.
Anyway, that’s an update on that. Dad’s doing alright, mom’s hanging in there. Still waiting to hear on if he’ll be released from the hospital today. It sounds likely.
‘Twas a foggy November evening at the Portland International Raceway when a gaggle of people gathered together to do a run. I was one of those people! The Turkey Trot is one of the Hood to Coast-affiliated races and despite being a bit of a pain in the ass to register for, the run itself went swimmingly. I mean, I ran, I didn’t swim, but you know what I mean.
I had signed up for this the same day that I finished the Tar’n’Trail 5k race at Mt. Tabor. I don’t have a blog post about that, but I did write about it in Ye Olde Newselettere, which you can read here, along with some other stuff about my life, including my (now failed) attempt to do a Movember fundraiser. In short: the Tar’n’Trail kicked my ass because of a variety of reasons, but mainly A) that I was in the middle of my Couch to 5k training program when I ran it, and B) IT WAS VERY MUCH UPHILL. Look at these stairs!
Stairs from the Tar’n’Trail run. I HAD TO GO UP THIS. It was required!
The race vibe itself was awesome though. A smaller group of chill people, one of the race volunteers prior to the start acknowledged the Native American land on which we were running, and afterwards I got sugar cookies and booze. A++ in that regard.
Following that race, I took a day off, and then the day after, I started Couch to 5k again, right where I had left off. I am determined to finish this Zombies, Run program, even though I honestly don’t think I need to keep doing it. But anyway: running so soon after running a mostly uphill 5k was a bad idea. My feet were seizing up in a weird way–not like they were constantly curled, but the opposite, they felt like they were seized upwards? I don’t know how to explain it. But my shins hurt a lot about five minutes into the run and so I had to stop. Thankfully, my shins felt better a few minutes after stopping, which meant that the pain was muscular and not any sort of stress fractures or things that would be More Bad.
So, I took a couple of days off (still walking though) and then tried to run again. Shin splints. I took a few more days off, tried to run: shin splints. At this point, I was a week away from the Turkey Trot, and I thought to myself, “By gum, Josh, you’re going to have to not run for a whole damn week.” So I didn’t, I just walked.
Then I had to go get my Turkey Trot bib. This was a pain in the ass. First, the bib was at a running store in Tualatin. For reference:
The southwest section of the Ross Island bridge in Portland is an absolute nightmare to navigate by car. It’s one of those places where sometimes in order to get to where you need to go, you have to merge from a far left lane into a far right lane when three other roads are bringing cars into that whole road. Plus one street has two roads right next to each other, heading the same direction, with a stop light at EACH of them which alternate I think for merging into one road. If that sounds confusing: it IS confusing. I ended up taking a wrong turn because I was trapped in my lane and had to double back over the bridge and drive over it again so I could finally get out onto I-5. The I-5 part was fine. THEN, I got to Tualatin and my exit, which was another absolute mess. It’s times like these that I honestly kind of miss Boise roads, because Boise is such a sprawling city that the roads have room to breathe. The Connector is a dream compared to the intricately and confusingly packed roads of Portland.
But, I got there, finally, and entered the building. A woman at the front of the store handed me a coupon for the store, but only for right then. Like, once I leave, the coupon ends.I suppose if I went back into the store immediately after leaving, the coupon would still be good, but why would I do that? I get my bib; no issues there. Go to get my shirt and the guy there looked me up and down and sheepishly said, “Sorry, but the largest men’s size we have now is Medium.” I said, “Maybe I could get two and stitch them together.” He laughed politely and explained that everyone sized up when they got there for some reason. He gives me a Medium sized shirt. Great.
I grabbed a couple of free protein bars (which were as good as protein bars can be) and a free can of Celsius energy drink (which was actually pretty good). A woman next to me was lightly complaining about, I think, the shirt situation. I wasn’t really paying attention because I still get weird remnant covid anxiety in public indoor spaces.
As I’m leaving, the woman who gave me the day-of coupon said, “Good luck at the race!” I barely glanced at her and replied, “Thaaaanks” in a way that wasn’t meant to be sarcastic or mean, but feels like it in hindsight. There was a Best Buy in the shopping center area; I genuinely thought to myself, Is there anything I need from Best Buy? The closest one to me at home is in Clackamas, so, you know, it was an honest thought.Side note: Firefox wants me to correct Clackamas to “Blackamoors,” which sounds racist and (looks it up) might actually be racist? and (looks it up some more) oh god is definitely, absolutely racist.
The traffic back to Portland was a mess because it’s always a mess, but more importantly, I left at around 4pm and so it was rush hour time. I ate a protein bar on the drive; maple donut flavored. Not too bad! Protein bars are always, at max, about 80% good. This is just how protein bars work.
The next day, work, work, work, and then after work, I drove to Portland International Raceway up at Historic Vanport for the race. I should mention that while I have GPS on my phone and all that, I don’t enable mobile data, so I oftentimes just have the list of directions from Google Maps, rather than a voice telling me when and where to turn. This, it turns out, is annoying, but whatever. The place was packed with cars trying to get in. Moreover, people were trying to park at the main lot, which was farther away. I, on the other hand, parked at the Delta Park & Ride Trimet stop, which was closer to the venue as far as I could tell. I suspect some people wanted to park farther away because they were WASPy types who were afraid of their car getting broken into by nefarious types who use public transportation.
Once parked, I chug my Celsius energy drink, hoping that the 200mg of caffeine within will help my body race while not absolutely destroying my sleep when I get home. (Spoiler: it kind of wrecked my sleep a bit.)
Every time I go to the Christmas lights display out here, it’s foggy, and this year was no different. It truly is lovely, though my camera didn’t do a great job of showcasing this.
The race is a run/walk situation, so there are food carts selling things like pizza and beer and stuff that you probably don’t want to eat right before running. There are musicians, which, props to them for playing in the cold. A keyboardist, a drummer, and then after the race I noticed there was a third guy playing drumming on buckets. I don’t know. It felt very much like a “Oh shit we should have musicians for this” type of last minute concept.
Then, I unlocked a serendipitous achievement: the 5k was supposed to start at 6:45pm, but was pushed back to 7pm due to traffic. In that fifteen minute span, my stomach began to rumble, and for the first time ever running a race, I took a shit beforehand. My stomach had been weird all day and I was joking to myself on the way to the race that I was going to get the “turkey trots” at the Turkey Trot. And then I DID. Serendipity! If the race started at 6:45, would I have pooped my joggers on the raceway? In an alternate universe, yes, probably. There is nothing like navigating a porta-potty shit in the cold, damp, foggy evening though, I gotta tell you.
And then, the race! It went well! Most importantly: my shins did not explode. I was shocked. I expected them to give out on me about five minutes into the race, but I guess the adrenaline of a race plus the 200mg of caffeine kicked my body into high gear. The track was a joy to run around (even if it was a bit slick). Lots of festive lights, including the whole gamut of “Twelve Days of Christmas,”Brief tangent: the Genius lyrics page for this song has a representation for each verse. Are these for real? Am I to believe that “Eleven Pipers Piping” refers to the eleven apostles? What do pipers piping have to do with apostles? Why do Christian songs always have this weird-ass symbolism? where each one was a visual display of each verse of the song, except for Ten Lords a-Leaping, which for some reason they had the visual display of a lord leaping and the words “Ten Lords a-Leaping” above it, I guess so that people knew for sure that this display was Ten Lords a-Leaping. There was also some dinosaur lights on display for some reason. (That’s the Keep Portland Weird that I like.) Also, I forgot to get a photo of it but there was a display of a reindeer that looked like A) it had shapely women’s legs and B) it was giving birth. I’ll let you fill that image out in your mind’s eye.
At the start of the race I ran a solid 7 minutes straight, without stopping to walk, which is a big improvement. I also was able to get in several shorter runs in between walking. My end time was 48:56, which is a :48 second improvement from the Tar’n’Trail run. Granted, this run was completely flat and didn’t have a section with a million stairs to climb, but still. Improvement is improvement, and I’m proud of what I accomplished.
After the run I got a medal that looks like a punkin pie!
mmm, can’t wait to eat this medal.
I then went home and nursed my pinky toe, which now has a big and terrible blister on it.
Lastly, the next day (today) I signed up for yet another 5k. This one’s in February so I have some time. My plan is to take the next couple of weeks off from running just to recuperate, though I will continue to walk often. And then, back into regular runs until January, when I’ll either just do my own 5ks or sign up for a virtual race, since there doesn’t appear to be any official 5ks in the Portland area that month. February will be the Providence Heart to Start, and then March is the Shamrock Run, which I will be returning to after six years away.
This is (hopefully) an ongoing series of posts within the world of my D&D campaign setting, Avo. Peruse the wiki.
From a lecture by Professor Cerapham di Lien at the Conjuric Academy in Valwyria, 13 Midspring 3308. Transcribed by Lenna Whirk, St.B.Est.
We’ve all heard it before: word your wishes carefully. We know that the more powerful the thing wished, the worse it will backfire. There are many, many stories out there of your local country bumpkin discovering a monkey’s paw in the fields, making a wish to become rich, only to discover that the treasury in Neven has been completely emptied of its gold. Or the chance meeting between a prince and a dao, or a djinni, and making a wish to marry the most beautiful princess in the world, only to find out that the princess’s father is a tyrant warlord, and the marriage has incited his anger, leading to a decades long war that ends up getting both the prince and princess killed.
If the latter example sounds like a joke to you, you need to revisit your Letoran history books.
So, why does wish come with some sort of cost? It is the only spell in our canon that does so, and the cost is exponential; the larger the wish, the more the cost. In addition, there’s a roughly one-third chance that if you cast wish, you may never be able to cast it again! Why is that? You’d think that after thousands of years, we would have been able to come up with some way of circumventing such an issue, yes?
Well, the answer to this is somewhat fascinating because, in essence, wish is the only arcane spell bound to divine reaction. Note that I did not say it is a divine spell. This is surprisingly rare; most spells of a divine nature do not cross into arcane territory unless the caster has specialized in such weaving; spells of healing, for example, are simply untouchable by plain wizards, no matter their skill with magic. And while wish, intrinsically, is strictly arcane in nature (and, in truth, is unknowable by divine spellcasters unless they specialize in arcana), extrinsically, wish, and spellcasting in general Post-Catastrophe, is bound by the divine law. To cast it is to dip into the divine karmic balance which was codified during the Catastrophe. It is, in essence, a request to the divine will.
Before the Catastrophe, spellcasting was at its height of power, and many of those spells beyond our ken today, of the renowned tenth through thirteenth grade, were sufficiently powerful that the only way they could be cast successfully was if sacrifice was woven into the spell itself, whether intended or not. One such spell, reality warp, was a twelfth grade spell which, when cast, fundamentally changed the nature of reality within a certain range. One could, for instance, exchange up for down, left for right. One could make rocks edible, or make a tree turn a body into thin strands the closer one approached it. And these are the things we are able to comprehend! In truth, reality warp was capable of changing reality into something so fundamentally and completely foreign to our minds that it could make the viewer–or taster, or smeller, et cetera–go mad, instantly, with no recourse. One story goes that a wizard who cast this spell went so mad that her brain literally melted and seeped out of her own nostrils. In short, the sacrifice was one’s own mind, and the chance of this happening was roughly equal to 25%! Imagine, casting the fireball spell and having a one in four chance of it exploding in your face instead. The Age of Magic was extraordinary.
Obviously, since it was the gods who hold dominion over reality, a spell capable of fundamentally changing it was not ideal, in their eyes. So it was that during the Catastrophe the gods suddenly and irrevocably revoked our jurisdiction over these grades of spells. Gone were the days of wizards holding the ultimate power over the worlds in which they lived. Spells were since curated, so to speak, by the gods, to ensure that mortal beings could not devastate the world on their own.
However, within the upper echelon of spell grades lies the only outlier to potential world devastation: wish, and with it, the potential for danger. Why the gods left this spell within our grasp is unknown. Based on my own research, there are two rising and competing theories: one is that wish was granted to mortals by the trickster gods, such as Asmodeus, Cyric, or Tymora, but in doing so, they warped the spell into its current incarnation for the express purpose of their own pleasure; that they, in short, enjoy seeing mortals bite off more than they can chew. The other theory is that the truth may lie within the primordials, whose kin, the genie, are sometimes capable of granting wishes outside of the purview of the gods, which may mean that the wish spell itself is beyond the purview of the gods, and instead is something that they are beholden to as much as you or I. This is a dangerous thread of thought to tread, however, for if the gods hold no dominion over wishes … who does? Surely not the forever-chained primordials!
I trust the answer will never be laid cleanly before us by the gods, as distant and unseemly as they are. All we know about wishes is that the larger the scope, the worse off it will be for you in the long run. So please, students, should you ever be able to grasp the upper echelon of spell grades, remember the words, tried and true: word your wishes carefully.
This is another post about coffee. What did you think it was about? Pervert.
In order to really appreciate this post, you’ll first need to watch this video:
As I stated in my last post about coffee, I use pour over. I dabbled a bit in French press and wasn’t im-pressedkill me now, but that’s mainly because there is a surprising amount of technique involved in brewing French press, including timing and all that nonsense. Pour over is easy: you just put the grounds in the top thingy and swirl hot water around in it and it makes coffee. Easy, right?
Well, yes and no. Yes, you can make coffee that way, and if you buy good beans and don’t grind them too fine, you’ve basically made a decent cup of coffee. Which is what I’ve been doing for years now. I’ve been purposely “diluting” my coffee because I don’t want to drink too much caffeine (sort of, keep reading); thus, 15g of coffee in my big Powell’s mug, which holds about a pint of liquid. Every so often I would check websites to see the ideal coffee-to-water ratio, and it seemed more or less like I was spot on, except for doubling the water.
In my mind (which, to be honest, works poorly sometimes), adding double the water just meant that I was extracting more coffee. Perhaps not as much caffeine, but perhaps more than you would get in a typical 8oz mug. Right?
Then I started down the James Hoffman rabbit hole. Lots of intensely noodly nerding out about coffee. Things I hadn’t really considered. Using a scale to measure your water! Testing the best scale! Hell, he even has a video about making coffee soda. The man does it all, coffee-wise.
But this most recent video was sort of an eye opener to me. First, because I use a plastic V60 (or whatever cheap equivalent mine is). In the video, James says to heat up your V60 with hot water beforehand for a more even extraction. What! I had never thought of that. He also says to rinse the paper filter; I know this is in part to get rid of the “paper” taste but I’ve never really tasted paper with a dry filter, but whatever, I’ll do it now anyway.
Moreover, that video has a surprisingly detailed time scale for brewing a good pour over, and I just had to try it out. At first, I thought I would scale it up for my 16oz Powell’s mug, my beautiful, beautiful baby. But the calculations meant using around 30g of coffee, which was too much, both for preferred caffeine content, and for my coffee bean rationing, which I try to keep at around 15g/day because specialty coffee is expensive. So I decided, instead, to scale down to an 8oz mug.
This morning I brewed a cup using James’sI want to go on a brief tangent here: for most of my life I thought you shouldn’t put an ‘s after a word that ended in s, and that it should just be an apostrophe alone. But that’s not the case! An apostrophe without an s is for plural possessives. The difference between “The whale’s day” (singular possessive) and “The whales’ day” (plural possessive). James is singular (as far as I can tell) so you have to put the ‘s even if it means you are saying Jameses. English: very annoying. method and the results were excellent. A much fuller, richer, and nuanced cup of coffee than I was brewing previously. Yes, a large part of that had to do with water and over-extraction, hence the title of this blog post: bigger is not always better.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Josh, ‘bigger’ usually refers to comparing the size of things, like, say, ‘That elephant is bigger than a bicycle.’ I think what you mean is ‘More is not always better,’ because ‘more’ usually refers to volume, like, ‘There is more water in this mug than in that mug.’” Well listen here, you little shit. “Bigger is better” and it its inverse are time-honored phrases, plus there’s alliteration in there which people like! Okay! Get off my back!
So anyway, if you brew using a pour over technique, I recommend trying out James’s method. His “pulse” method of water introduction I think is what makes the whole thing work. If anything, it feels more … kind to the coffee. I’m getting a little new agey here, but one of the things I genuinely appreciate about making coffee in the morning is how it feels like a little ceremony, one that involves patience and repetition, and one where it honestly feels like being kinder to the beans makes for a better tasting coffee. I like to think that concept can be extrapolated to the world in general.
I’ve been meditating for a week now, using Medito’s 30-day challenge. It’s been pretty great. For me, meditating can be difficult not because I’m easily distracted (I am, but not when I’m meditating), but because meditating tends to dredge up whatever energy I’m holding onto or trying to push away. So when I’m done I often feel melancholy or sad, which makes me feel like I’ve failed the meditation, which is trying to get me to acknowledge and let go of thoughts and emotions.
But lately I’ve come to realize that this is all part of the plan. Some things are easier to let go of while meditating, while others require some purging, so to speak. And lately I’ve been finding myself both feeling depressed and acknowledging my depression, almost as it from a third person perspective, which feels different than normal. Normally I feel bad about myself when I get depressed; now I am able to compartmentalize it, in a way. Not the right word — I give compassion to myself for how I am feeling.
After I meditate I write a little bit in a journal which is meant just for after meditation. It’s another one of those notebooks I’ve had forever (2016 in this case) but barely write in. Another acknowledgement: I have to stop buying notebooks. But I write how I feel or just whatever thoughts come to me, and then I write down three things that I’m grateful for. That part is the hardest, because for some reason I decided in my head that the three things have to be different each morning. A couple of days ago I realized I was doing that and very kindly told myself that they don’t have to be different things and, in fact, they could all be the same three things if that’s all I could think of. The idea is not to think about it or give that many rules to it; I only picked three things because it seemed more beneficial than one, but writing ten things every day sounded like a chore.
Anyway, the holidays always tend to make me depressed for reasons that go to the therapist, not to my blog. Suffice it to say, it’s nice to be able to acknowledge that without wallowing in it. I can’t say that every day will be like this, but it’s good to know that they do exist, and that the feeling of them will pass. My higher brain telling my lizard brain that things will be alright. It’s good.
I’m getting tired of people having strong opinions over things that one should not have strong opinions over. It feels like trivial opinions are competitions now, and having the loudest argument for your opinion means you won. There’s something about today’s society that makes people should “PINEAPPLE DOESN’T BELONG ON PIZZA” from the fucking rooftops as if they were trying to appease Jesus Christ himself. This is the de facto thing people are writing on their dating apps. Pineapple does/doesn’t belong on pizza.
Dudes: who gives a fuck? Who actually cares?
Having strong opinions about banal shit is the new “small talk.” People claim to hate small talk but don’t mind arguing about pineapple on pizza until their face turns red.
I think it’s the internet’s fault. More specifically, I think it’s content creation’s fault. Content creation has given people this concept that they must be making content all the time, and then paying them just enough to make it seem lucrative to have content. The byproduct of that is that everyone makes videos about everything because there’s a chance it might go viral and suddenly you’re making lots of TikTok money. It’s the new lottery: if you play long enough, there’s a chance you might become rich and famous. That chance is astronomically small, but playing it absolutely and always benefits the company that is providing the service. Your TikTok video may not go viral, but people will scroll past it to the juicy advertisement that nets Tencent about … ten cents.
Thus, it is ultimately worth it for corporations for you to have the biggest, dumbest opinion possible, and that plus the need to generate content constantly means that you will scrape the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with something that is appealing enough to a viewer to net you another viral lottery ticket.
We’ve coined this “the hustle,” but it’s really just making money for big corporations and them (potentially) giving you a sliver of that money back. Yes, a precious few people make a lot of money on Twitch and YouTube. But the signal to noise ratio is astronomically low. And yet, since we see people being successful, we assume that being on Twitch or YouTube will make you successful eventually. It won’t, not just on your content alone. A lot of those successful people had contacts or networked their way into success. Or were just rich already and bought it.
All of that is to say: please reconsider your strong opinion on bullshit. Nobody cares if Marvel is better than DC. That is not an opinion that should raise your heart rate. Pineapple on pizza? Who cares. Dogs on the couch? Who cares. Just live your life and worry about the bigger stuff.
Side note: I encourage every single one of you who may happen to read this to please curate your social media feeds and try to weed out overly negative people. The video game content industry is a big offender for this. Your life will be better if you don’t surround yourself with constantly negative people. I promise you.
Look at the absolute monstrosity I made this morning for breakfast:
What you’re seeing here is:
hashbrowns
cheese (taco seasoning flavor, it’s the only shredded cheese I had)
deli sliced honey ham
two eggs
MORE hashbrowns
toast with blackberry jam
I have notes. You have notes, I’m sure. Turns out, two small potatoes make more than enough hashbrowns. I won’t make that mistake twice.
I woke up at 6am todayJowers was a big fan of this. An hour earlier for food? Count me in! She seemed to say. as part of my new scheme to see if I can survive off of seven hours of sleep at night, and actually did things instead of lay around in bed until 8:30.Side note: I’m trying to refrain from apologizing for the good things in my life. Like this, for example. Sleeping in. Being able to work from home regularly. It’s a privilege and I’m glad to have it, but I won’t apologize for it. I know other people have it worse; other people have it better, too. Life is life, enjoy what you have and don’t envy what you don’t. Cleaned and organized my bedroom up a bit, started laundry, meditated and wrote some positive intentions, and then, an impromptu decision to make hashbrowns. I haven’t made hashbrowns in ages and I am always bad at them. This time was olive oil, maybe too much for the first batch and too little for the second. Yes, I washed the starch off of the potatoes. Yes, I drained the starch water out. Yes, I dried the potatoes afterward as best I could (with a paper towel pressing the raw potatoes in a strainer). In the end I still had a bit too much moisture but they were still fairly crispy and tasted better than they looked, except for the second batch (the one on top), which I put too much salt on. The entire thing was overly salty. Salt should not be white so you can see it better on things, you know? Like pepper, pepper is doing good work. Pepper’s like, “Here I am, mister!
Over the years I’ve gotten slightly better at cooking. Not a gourmet chef by any means, but good enough to make myself breakfast. I make myself a lot of breakfasts (as opposed to just pouring a bowl of cereal, which I also do often). The best breakfasts are potato-related, usually fried up chunks of potatoes with garlic salt. Simple and effective. I cook in olive oil now instead of butter, just for health reasons, and olive oil is not but not the same. Butter is where it’s at. Bacon grease? Even better. But a doctor told me once to stop cooking in bacon grease because my cholesterol was a little high. She told me this as I was cooking bacon. So I switched to olive oil, except for eggs; I’ll be damned if I ever cook an egg in oil. Take that, Gordon Ramsay.
The truth is, I cook because I’m broke most of the time. Like now, I had to pay a few bills that pop up every year (like the hosting for this very site!) and after that I had just enough for some groceries. I’m at that fun point where I’m not broke enough to need food stamps or anything, but I don’t make enough to live 100% comfortably. American capitalism in a nutshell. It’s ultimately good though. Learning how to cook is good. I haven’t done any baking though because baking scares me. Baking requires preciseness. At least with cooking I can burn the hashbrowns but they still taste good and like hashbrowns. You put one extra teaspoon of baking soda in your bread and suddenly it’s … well, I don’t know what. Extra poofy? I really don’t know baking very well.
Re: meditation, I highly recommend doing it. I use the Medito app which is free, but not paywall free. Totally free and supported by donations. This, to me, is the way to go. There’s something about a meditation app that has a free bit that you can use but pushes you to buy the full app that irks me. It feels very … not meditative. Thankfully Medito does not do that, and comes with lots of meditation practices. Thank you very much, The Netherlands, for bringing meditation to us in a way that feels good and not like icky capitalism.
Meditation is great. I started meditating in grad school; I needed two extra credits to be full time, so I took a weightlifting class and, immediately after it, a meditation class. We sat in a gym room used for jiu jitsu and the instructor turned off the lights and we just sat in there for a whole hour. Some people slept; the instructor was fine with that. “That’s just your body telling you you need to sleep,” he would say. I learned later that we were basically doing vipassana meditation, which is apparently one of the hardest kinds of meditation as it doesn’t focus on anything besides your breathing. It’s not like a meditation where you focus on peace or destressing yourself or things like that. Instead, you just sit and experience your breath and let the thoughts and feelings you have come and go and, most importantly, you don’t attach judgment to them. It’s harder than you think. I oftentimes find myself feeling fine and then realize I’m in some thought spiral about something. But the point is to, if you get to that point, just realize you’re there and re-focus on your breath. It’s all about the breath.
I used to meditate at night before bed, but that just made me sleepy, so now I’m trying it in the morning after I’ve woken up and had a glass of water. That’s another thing I’m doing: glass of water right after I’ve woken up. I hear about this one a lot. Helps wake you up and whatnot. I’m down for that. You can never drink enough water.This is untrue in the technical sense, but you should still strive to drink more water. It is very difficult to drink enough water to develop water poisoning. This footnote is just for the pedants out there who like to be right about stuff.
I often think about people who don’t meditate, or go to therapy, and when you ask them why not they give you a reason that is the very reason why you should meditate, or go to therapy. “Oh, I can’t meditate, my brain is too all over the place, I’d never be able to concentrate,” they say, as if the moment you start learning to play guitar you should be expected to play a flamenco.
The point of anything is to be bad at it at first. Jake was right:
So do yourself a favor. Meditate, five minutes a day, for 30 days. Do it at work on your break. Put your phone down and close your eyes and just listen to your breathing for a while. Listen to the constant breeze of life that enters and exits your body. Be thankful that you exist. Because you deserve to exist, to be here, to be present, and to be counted.
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been writing something in this blog every day. This is to keep up the habit. Don’t expect constant daily blog entries. Again, I’m using this to stave off my Twitter addiction. It’s going well, although I’ve found that without something like Twitter to mindlessly scroll through, I’m not sure where to go to see things. My brain wants to check Twitter/social media because it’s constantly infused with content, and I’m trying to remind myself that I don’t need to do that every five minutes, especially when I’m watching a movie.
