How matchfixing in cricket and the creation of naughty market supply on the internet are related
On the oversupply of naughty materials online, and how to destroy a community of passionate participants. Expand on this. It's okay if it's 500 words or less.
People have started leaving their houses more to get fresh air during covid, that's good news
Talk about how the lack of commute, coworkers and lack of socializing opportunities have forced people to leave their houses and talk to their neighbors explore their communities. While one of the impacts of Covid is to force people out of cities, because it's not a good idea to be in a crowded place in the middle of a pandemic, the other counteracting affect has been to push people into neighborhoods and communities where people hang out. Because if you're not going to work and you're not seeing friends and family you still need the social connection and community, and people are finding that in their town centers and main streets. This could turn -- and I really hope it does -- turn Americans, at least in the north if nothing else, into more social creatures.
Turn the above into 500 words.
Turn the above into 500 words.
Writing should be a generous act. I'm selfish about it. I'm sorry
Writing is about the readers and the writer communicating to make them understand things, for their convenience. I write for my own convenience, and in that sense I'm a selfish person. I need to change that.
Write a couple of hundred words expanding this. 15-minutes maybe. I understand it's ironic that I talk about being generous to the readers while rushing this post, but that's how things be, I'm not good enough for this and certainly don't have the discipline and gumption.
Write a couple of hundred words expanding this. 15-minutes maybe. I understand it's ironic that I talk about being generous to the readers while rushing this post, but that's how things be, I'm not good enough for this and certainly don't have the discipline and gumption.
An amazing time of the year to walk outside in the evenings
The walk I had from Medford to Brookline was so amazing. There was love and romance in the air, the cool almost chilly air the leaves turning a little red but still drunken with summer, the runners the bikers the young kids playing in the streets, unshackled of their scholarly timetables but shackling their parents now. The scenery in brookline great old houses places anyone would kill to live. Expand the above to fill five hundred words. It'll be good don't worry.
Starting paused projects, finishing cleanup, heavy brunch, laundry, a long walk to Brookline, veggie dinner [Sun 30]
This was a an amazingly productive day.
Got up at 9am, showered wrote a little bit, got ready for the day. Boiled a large amount of water, dipped dozens of teabags black and green into it, and dropped in several cups of sugar. Cleaned my kombucha jars divided the starters so that there wasn't uneven distribution of yeast, and started a new round of kombucha! Exciting times!
Mopped all the rooms in the house, and used antibacterial spray on our empty room to make it smell nice and clean. Everything was spic-and-span, so did the first step of my new and exciting planting project where the plant babies were planted. I'm not sure if they're going to be alive and thrive but I did almost everything I could and bar minor errors which I hope I don't get punished for I'm fairly confident I controlled most of the regular variables.
Set a couple of loads in laundry in the background. Meanwhile fried some garlic and onion, tons of salt and spices, threw in two eggs made a mushroom omelette that was mostly mushroom. Put it on two sliced pieces of bread with lots of texas pete hot sauce. So insanely good, much better than I imagine it was going to be!
Wrote a bunch.
After getting my clothes out of the dryer and discovering they were still a little cold, packed away the more dry pieces and hung out the colder pieces all about the room. Packed by belongings for a trip, co-ordinated with JD and set off for Brookline. On foot. Didn't want to take the public transport because covid, didn't want to bike because I wouldn't get any walking done that way and I hadn't done a long walk in a while.
The trip was fairly uneventful. Cool scenery, lovely lovely wind, such an amazing time of the year to walk outside. I should write a post on that actually. The route was scenic. Harvard students are back on campus and I saw everyone was being very careful and socially-distancing really well. It was cool to see things get back to almost normal while people are still mindful of the fact there's a mad pandemic raging about and acting accordingly. We're not caged up but we're not lunatics who deny the existence of the silent killer that is picking off the illest among us.
The route was one I had never taken, now I understand how the bridges between cambridge/somerville and boston/brookline connect. Didn't see too many other long-distance walkers but so many runners and bikers, it was great to see. There's parts of memorial drive next to harvard/MIT that were blocked off to cars and it made me feel real good as a pedestrian and a biker.
At JD's place we made green bean burgers with avocado cheese and tomato. It was good, I did the dishes. We watched an episode of kimmy schmitt and I made them watch schitt's creek. They went to bed at 10, I was up until 12 checking out my favourite plant forums. Then I had trouble going to sleep because the moon was huge and the moonlight got right into my eyes. Couldn't sleep due to the moon for an hour or so. Listened to conan o brien's interview with Jameela Jamil in his podcast, what an amazing woman, it's a must-listen.
Got up at 9am, showered wrote a little bit, got ready for the day. Boiled a large amount of water, dipped dozens of teabags black and green into it, and dropped in several cups of sugar. Cleaned my kombucha jars divided the starters so that there wasn't uneven distribution of yeast, and started a new round of kombucha! Exciting times!
Mopped all the rooms in the house, and used antibacterial spray on our empty room to make it smell nice and clean. Everything was spic-and-span, so did the first step of my new and exciting planting project where the plant babies were planted. I'm not sure if they're going to be alive and thrive but I did almost everything I could and bar minor errors which I hope I don't get punished for I'm fairly confident I controlled most of the regular variables.
Set a couple of loads in laundry in the background. Meanwhile fried some garlic and onion, tons of salt and spices, threw in two eggs made a mushroom omelette that was mostly mushroom. Put it on two sliced pieces of bread with lots of texas pete hot sauce. So insanely good, much better than I imagine it was going to be!
Wrote a bunch.
After getting my clothes out of the dryer and discovering they were still a little cold, packed away the more dry pieces and hung out the colder pieces all about the room. Packed by belongings for a trip, co-ordinated with JD and set off for Brookline. On foot. Didn't want to take the public transport because covid, didn't want to bike because I wouldn't get any walking done that way and I hadn't done a long walk in a while.
The trip was fairly uneventful. Cool scenery, lovely lovely wind, such an amazing time of the year to walk outside. I should write a post on that actually. The route was scenic. Harvard students are back on campus and I saw everyone was being very careful and socially-distancing really well. It was cool to see things get back to almost normal while people are still mindful of the fact there's a mad pandemic raging about and acting accordingly. We're not caged up but we're not lunatics who deny the existence of the silent killer that is picking off the illest among us.
The route was one I had never taken, now I understand how the bridges between cambridge/somerville and boston/brookline connect. Didn't see too many other long-distance walkers but so many runners and bikers, it was great to see. There's parts of memorial drive next to harvard/MIT that were blocked off to cars and it made me feel real good as a pedestrian and a biker.
At JD's place we made green bean burgers with avocado cheese and tomato. It was good, I did the dishes. We watched an episode of kimmy schmitt and I made them watch schitt's creek. They went to bed at 10, I was up until 12 checking out my favourite plant forums. Then I had trouble going to sleep because the moon was huge and the moonlight got right into my eyes. Couldn't sleep due to the moon for an hour or so. Listened to conan o brien's interview with Jameela Jamil in his podcast, what an amazing woman, it's a must-listen.
Deep cleaning the house, baby shower, grilled cheese, end of the 'kraut [Sat 29]
The whole day we cleaned the house. ND PK and I. We cleaned the living room, moved around furniture and rearranged various appliances in the kitchen. We finally cleared out PK's old room, moved a mattress into it and threw out the hold bed and unwanted furniture from his new room. I took many trips to throw out trash. We threw out a nasty table in our kitchen that I couldn't stand because it was so dirty and dank. Replaced it with our dining table, and put a nice cute reading table in our living room instead of it.
ND broomed the house multiple times and rearranged our plants. PK and I spent several hours cleaning all of our fridge. The freezer is still quite a mess with unidentified leaves sticking to the surface since at least 2013 but that's a project for another day. PK said it looked like a hotel fridge, at which I made no comments, rolled my eyes and gave ND the look.
We watched a bunch of hindi movies -- hungama among others after the cleanup. ND also watched several other hindi movies I was in and out between writing etcetera.
There was an online baby shower that we threw for SMD, who used to be sk's coworker because they're due in three weeks. We played baby shower games got caught up etcetera, the last time the group had talked like this was in March or April when I was still in VA and we were ready for this to go on forever. For some reason those times still feel more innocent now.
In the evening PK tried making grilled cheeses for himself and ND. I helped him make them by...doing them myself and teaching him how to do it. Had a small slice of the grilled-cheese which I ate with the remaining sauerkraut. I freakin' finally finished the sauerkraut in the fridge after three weeks moving uncomfortably close to four. It was great but I'm going do be trying other fermented foods for a while. Also it was an awful idea to have fried it with beans and bamboo in tonnes of oil.
Talked to friends, slept at around midnight maybe. It's Monday evening and I'm getting caught up on a LOT of posts. End of the month and everything. Should really straighten my habit by now, it's been a year already.
ND broomed the house multiple times and rearranged our plants. PK and I spent several hours cleaning all of our fridge. The freezer is still quite a mess with unidentified leaves sticking to the surface since at least 2013 but that's a project for another day. PK said it looked like a hotel fridge, at which I made no comments, rolled my eyes and gave ND the look.
We watched a bunch of hindi movies -- hungama among others after the cleanup. ND also watched several other hindi movies I was in and out between writing etcetera.
There was an online baby shower that we threw for SMD, who used to be sk's coworker because they're due in three weeks. We played baby shower games got caught up etcetera, the last time the group had talked like this was in March or April when I was still in VA and we were ready for this to go on forever. For some reason those times still feel more innocent now.
In the evening PK tried making grilled cheeses for himself and ND. I helped him make them by...doing them myself and teaching him how to do it. Had a small slice of the grilled-cheese which I ate with the remaining sauerkraut. I freakin' finally finished the sauerkraut in the fridge after three weeks moving uncomfortably close to four. It was great but I'm going do be trying other fermented foods for a while. Also it was an awful idea to have fried it with beans and bamboo in tonnes of oil.
Talked to friends, slept at around midnight maybe. It's Monday evening and I'm getting caught up on a LOT of posts. End of the month and everything. Should really straighten my habit by now, it's been a year already.
Sleep troubles, phone annoyances, hacky lunch mediterranean dinner, horror and comedy, rushed writing [Mon 31]
This is the evening of the same day, I'm finally caught up with these journal posts, I was running behind all this month and it was bad particularly this weekend because it was such a busy and hectic schedule. Today was uneventful, so hopefully I can end this quick and write a few more fluff pieces before closing out the month. Might keep dummy entries to complete tomorrow, it won't be too many though.
Got up at 8, though I woke up a lot earlier to use the restroom and couldn't go to sleep because the window right in front of my eyes doesn't have a blind and the suns and the moons all shine brightly outside it. It's a freak of nature. That I was late to sleep the previous night made me groggy and sleepy the entire day. It sucked.
Had phone troubles in the morning...my phone won't charge, and when it does charge it only pretends to while secretly not charging so that means my laptop's not getting the charge while my phone's losing its charge to the wire. It was hell really in the evening I somehow got it to charge thinking of taking it to a repair center. I'm told it's a lint in the connector problem and should be a relatively simple fix, we'll see.
Work was super duper slow because my mind was not in the right place thanks to very patchy and shortened sleep. Didn't go for morning OR evening walks because first, I needed to get caught up on these posts and second, I was still tired from the evening before.
For lunch we made rice with chickpea-flour based curry...cut in all the vegetables in the fridge and threw then in the 'stew'. It was an amazing use of existing vegetables, and not bad at all.
Finally finished the journal for today after feeling like a zombie all day long, can't tell you what I was up to really it was bad.
After work did some writing, talked to JD, watched a bunch of youtube videos and we spent a solid hour figuring out what we wanted for dinner. Ultimately we agreed we wanted to order in from this place called Grico in back bay. It was amazing, the eggplant-based appetizer I was specially excited about was a massive disappointment but the wraps were pretty good.
After dinner we sat down and watched a couple of kimmy episodes, an aahat episode, the one I've written about a couple of posts earlier, and a tonne of trailers for hindi movies. We were not impressed. We started this series about a mother-daughter duo produced by a mother-daughter duo, the mom's a big star in India I remember her from my childhood but couldn't get into it. It was too much. We watched a ted video and the group called it a night. I spent an hour or so looking at various online forums and then rushing to complete the posts so i may have a respectable number for this month.
It's 12.08 of September, I've already got drafts for a few posts going, going to dummy them up and fill them tomorrow.
Good day, good week, good month. More productive and 'serious' than previous months for sure.
Got up at 8, though I woke up a lot earlier to use the restroom and couldn't go to sleep because the window right in front of my eyes doesn't have a blind and the suns and the moons all shine brightly outside it. It's a freak of nature. That I was late to sleep the previous night made me groggy and sleepy the entire day. It sucked.
Had phone troubles in the morning...my phone won't charge, and when it does charge it only pretends to while secretly not charging so that means my laptop's not getting the charge while my phone's losing its charge to the wire. It was hell really in the evening I somehow got it to charge thinking of taking it to a repair center. I'm told it's a lint in the connector problem and should be a relatively simple fix, we'll see.
Work was super duper slow because my mind was not in the right place thanks to very patchy and shortened sleep. Didn't go for morning OR evening walks because first, I needed to get caught up on these posts and second, I was still tired from the evening before.
For lunch we made rice with chickpea-flour based curry...cut in all the vegetables in the fridge and threw then in the 'stew'. It was an amazing use of existing vegetables, and not bad at all.
Finally finished the journal for today after feeling like a zombie all day long, can't tell you what I was up to really it was bad.
After work did some writing, talked to JD, watched a bunch of youtube videos and we spent a solid hour figuring out what we wanted for dinner. Ultimately we agreed we wanted to order in from this place called Grico in back bay. It was amazing, the eggplant-based appetizer I was specially excited about was a massive disappointment but the wraps were pretty good.
After dinner we sat down and watched a couple of kimmy episodes, an aahat episode, the one I've written about a couple of posts earlier, and a tonne of trailers for hindi movies. We were not impressed. We started this series about a mother-daughter duo produced by a mother-daughter duo, the mom's a big star in India I remember her from my childhood but couldn't get into it. It was too much. We watched a ted video and the group called it a night. I spent an hour or so looking at various online forums and then rushing to complete the posts so i may have a respectable number for this month.
It's 12.08 of September, I've already got drafts for a few posts going, going to dummy them up and fill them tomorrow.
Good day, good week, good month. More productive and 'serious' than previous months for sure.
On Kimmy Schmitt
Unbreakable the tv show, created by Tina Fey and her husband, acted by Jane Krakowski, one of Fey's co-stars from the amazing 30 Rock, whose main actors include Ellie Kepmer [Erin from the Office] and Titus Burgess who plays Tituss [he's played the same character with the name and all in a couple of other productions] is a pretty good tv show. It's about a young woman who escapes from a creepy religio-cultist moves to NYC and lives with a loving roommate and a crazy landlady. I watched the first series -- season for Americans, don't know why I'm calling them series now, guess it's got to do with the fact that American 'seasons' are 22+ episodes while British ones are much shorter so it feels more 'right' to call them series -- right as it released many years ago. I missed 30 rock, I missed the office and the golden era of tv comedies. It was a pretty good show it didn't entice me enough to follow the later seasons.
Several months ago I caught the new choose-your-own-story movie produced by Netflix, based on the series. I made it to twenty minutes maybe, no complaints, didn't know enough about the later seasons to understand what was happening and how Kimmy had ended up getting engaged to --spoilers-- and planning on marrying, Daniel Radcliffe who plays a British royalty of some sorts. It was too weird, to tiring to make the decisions when I didn't know the proper context, so I gave up.
JD and AD have been watching the series throughout. They're in the final few episodes of the final season of the series and I watched a few episodes with them in the last two days. It's not bad, at all, can get rather funny at times. It's too quirky for me though and I can't see Krakowski in any other role besides Jenna from 30 Rock. She plays a much -- maybe not thaaat much but certainly accounting for real years -- older person here, and it doesn't feel right.
Still, some solid episodes in there I see. If you're looking for a low-key series to start, this is a good one, despite a very heavy premise.
Several months ago I caught the new choose-your-own-story movie produced by Netflix, based on the series. I made it to twenty minutes maybe, no complaints, didn't know enough about the later seasons to understand what was happening and how Kimmy had ended up getting engaged to --spoilers-- and planning on marrying, Daniel Radcliffe who plays a British royalty of some sorts. It was too weird, to tiring to make the decisions when I didn't know the proper context, so I gave up.
JD and AD have been watching the series throughout. They're in the final few episodes of the final season of the series and I watched a few episodes with them in the last two days. It's not bad, at all, can get rather funny at times. It's too quirky for me though and I can't see Krakowski in any other role besides Jenna from 30 Rock. She plays a much -- maybe not thaaat much but certainly accounting for real years -- older person here, and it doesn't feel right.
Still, some solid episodes in there I see. If you're looking for a low-key series to start, this is a good one, despite a very heavy premise.
The deathly letters
This post started as a potential fiction, with the first two paragraphs as an intro of sorts to the inspiration behind the story. It's grown so long by the time I'm writing this line, I've decided on turning it into a review of the inspiring piece and write the actual story/fiction piece I was gonna work on later.
It was inspired by this episode of Aahat. Great premise, poor execution, and an extremely disappointing ending. The three of us watching came up with five possible other ways the show could have gone, each better than the last, all of them better than the actual approach. Such a great germ of an idea, if it's not a book already it would make for an intense interesting psychological thriller, an entire book of it. In any case, here's some crappy version of it, hope to make it into a longer piece someday. Or maybe copy it over to the Khyaak's story because the 'slippery slope' is an amazing approach to turn a legitimate normal but a little desperate person into a total psychopath, and then explore actually he was a psycho all along it was just that he hadn't been validated in exploring that side of himself. Shit, maybe I should turn this post into a review of the episode and the exploration of possibilities than actually writing a short story. Let's do that here.
So here's what the story was: there's a guy who loses a job, is behind on his rent payment and a lot of pending payments. He can't find a job and his expenses are catching up real hard. He doesn't know what he needs to do to straighten his life. He gets a mysterious letter from someone with a message: if this certain guy at so-and-so hospital in some room dies within three days from now, you get Rs 5k. He thinks it's some random-ass letter from a crank and ignores it.
Later when he's looking at a newspaper [the circumstances behind how he comes to look at the newspaper are important for the episode because he's shown it by a friend who as it happens orchestrated the entire scheme] he discovers the man in his letter has died. He receives a suspicious 5k in the mail in a few days, enough to pay his bills and have some money to spend irresponsibly and unwisely.
Then he gets a second letter, about a different guy in the same hospital. Now he's a bit curious because since it worked the first time maybe there's something to it. He calls the hospital to check up on the person, they tell him he's serious but stable. Later they inform him that the second-letter guy has passed away too due to complications. He receives a shipping of another bag of cash soon after.
Now he feels he's invulnerable, because of all the free money he's getting, he figures he's tricked the system. He starts blowing it on booze and smoking, and gambles like there's no tomorrow, only to lose all of his new money and to get into deep debt. In the episode it's a big gangster who -- spoilers, orchestrated the thing with a friend slash coworker of his to turn him into an assassin -- lends him the money. The guy's not too worried, he has a feeling he's getting another letter and another envelope stuffed with cash.
And lo and behold he gets a third letter. But this time the guy's in stable condition and won't die. The pressure from the gangster goes up and he feels his options are limited. He goes to the hospital to check up on the guy, to evaluate his chances of making his money, finds himself alone, and murders the guy. He is immediately handed an envelope of cash by a stranger when he gets home.
In the reveal we find out its all a scheme by the ganster to turn him into a murderer. It was unsatisfying and a little...vanilla. There was no bigger conspiracy, no deeper mysteries no psychological drama.
Here's the ideas we came up with: maybe he was making the letters in his mind, he just wanted to kill people. Maybe he has dissociated personality disorder, his other personalities are killing these people and leaving the letters for him. Maybe there's a deeper darker conspiracy than blackmailing someone into being a hitman just because you tricked them into killing sickly old man, possibly political in nature. Maybe they show more of the desperation in his life, and why he needs to money and why he has to kill people, instead of the mob boss just making him to it. Maybe his landlady, who disappears in the end of the episode, is somehow involved with it. Maybe his entire family, all the people he knows are hitmen and murderers and one of the tricks in not getting caught is having a clean 'innocent' mind, and it's an initiation into his family business. Maybe there's supernatural being involved, maybe he's the victim too, besides being 'forced' to kill people through blackmail. The possibilities are endless.
What a waste of a good concept.
It was inspired by this episode of Aahat. Great premise, poor execution, and an extremely disappointing ending. The three of us watching came up with five possible other ways the show could have gone, each better than the last, all of them better than the actual approach. Such a great germ of an idea, if it's not a book already it would make for an intense interesting psychological thriller, an entire book of it. In any case, here's some crappy version of it, hope to make it into a longer piece someday. Or maybe copy it over to the Khyaak's story because the 'slippery slope' is an amazing approach to turn a legitimate normal but a little desperate person into a total psychopath, and then explore actually he was a psycho all along it was just that he hadn't been validated in exploring that side of himself. Shit, maybe I should turn this post into a review of the episode and the exploration of possibilities than actually writing a short story. Let's do that here.
So here's what the story was: there's a guy who loses a job, is behind on his rent payment and a lot of pending payments. He can't find a job and his expenses are catching up real hard. He doesn't know what he needs to do to straighten his life. He gets a mysterious letter from someone with a message: if this certain guy at so-and-so hospital in some room dies within three days from now, you get Rs 5k. He thinks it's some random-ass letter from a crank and ignores it.
Later when he's looking at a newspaper [the circumstances behind how he comes to look at the newspaper are important for the episode because he's shown it by a friend who as it happens orchestrated the entire scheme] he discovers the man in his letter has died. He receives a suspicious 5k in the mail in a few days, enough to pay his bills and have some money to spend irresponsibly and unwisely.
Then he gets a second letter, about a different guy in the same hospital. Now he's a bit curious because since it worked the first time maybe there's something to it. He calls the hospital to check up on the person, they tell him he's serious but stable. Later they inform him that the second-letter guy has passed away too due to complications. He receives a shipping of another bag of cash soon after.
Now he feels he's invulnerable, because of all the free money he's getting, he figures he's tricked the system. He starts blowing it on booze and smoking, and gambles like there's no tomorrow, only to lose all of his new money and to get into deep debt. In the episode it's a big gangster who -- spoilers, orchestrated the thing with a friend slash coworker of his to turn him into an assassin -- lends him the money. The guy's not too worried, he has a feeling he's getting another letter and another envelope stuffed with cash.
And lo and behold he gets a third letter. But this time the guy's in stable condition and won't die. The pressure from the gangster goes up and he feels his options are limited. He goes to the hospital to check up on the guy, to evaluate his chances of making his money, finds himself alone, and murders the guy. He is immediately handed an envelope of cash by a stranger when he gets home.
In the reveal we find out its all a scheme by the ganster to turn him into a murderer. It was unsatisfying and a little...vanilla. There was no bigger conspiracy, no deeper mysteries no psychological drama.
Here's the ideas we came up with: maybe he was making the letters in his mind, he just wanted to kill people. Maybe he has dissociated personality disorder, his other personalities are killing these people and leaving the letters for him. Maybe there's a deeper darker conspiracy than blackmailing someone into being a hitman just because you tricked them into killing sickly old man, possibly political in nature. Maybe they show more of the desperation in his life, and why he needs to money and why he has to kill people, instead of the mob boss just making him to it. Maybe his landlady, who disappears in the end of the episode, is somehow involved with it. Maybe his entire family, all the people he knows are hitmen and murderers and one of the tricks in not getting caught is having a clean 'innocent' mind, and it's an initiation into his family business. Maybe there's supernatural being involved, maybe he's the victim too, besides being 'forced' to kill people through blackmail. The possibilities are endless.
What a waste of a good concept.
Seven reasons you might actually be an insta-influencer
- You love bargaining. But instead of offering lesser money to people, you offer no money, and instead promise to feature your counterparty on your feed because just the eyeballs and the attention is going to get them so much attention they won't be able to keep up with the new business, that's the best thing you could do for them really it's so much better than money.
- You reflexively comment on photos with #nofilter and #realasitgets or whatever it might be to suggest that your photos and that of your friends are actually the 'realest' and the most authentic ones while everyone else is faking it, but of course you wouldn't put it that way because that's what haters do and if there's one thing you most definitely don't want to become, it's a hater.
- Speaking of haters, you are surrounded by them. People who tell you being featured on your instafeed is not a valid form of payment, people who tell you to get a real job because you have a family to feed and this certainly ain't paying the bills, people who are competing with you people who think there's a moneytree in the influencering industry and just want a piece of the pie everyone every goddamn one of them is a hater trying to bring you down but you aren't gonna stoop to their level because you're as chill and real and honest as it gets.
- You start your conversations with, 'as you saw in my insta story from the other day', or 'as I said in my insta post from last week', and if people haven't caught up with the latest and greatest updates of your life you make it a point to walk them through the last three weeks of your feed and open the floor for any questions.
- Your life is documented completely in your instastories and insta posts and instamaps, your friends are right up there, you socialize with other influencers and it's become such an integral part of your life you can't imagine anything before it or anything after it. This is your world now.
- You put 'instagram influencer' in your resume, in your linkedin, on your website which is just a thinly-veiled ad for your insta account and your blog which is literally the text version of your insta but without hashtags, and all the posts there point to your insta accounts anyway.
- You have more than a thousand followers several hundred of whom you suspect to be scammers or russian election-manipulation bots, you don't have a job because that's not your journey at this point in time and you have a benefactor kindly supporting your lifestyle though for some reason they're barely ever featured in your posts.
9 Reasons you won't make for a good doctor
- You faint at the sight of blood, any blood.
- Or any bodily fluid for that matter. Including your own. And not excluding those involved in uhh sexual scenarios. Which has got you into all sorts of embarrassing situations. The sort where your partners think they are so good at sex they killed you but are not sure which one's the important point: the proof of the ultimate sexual prowess or the fact that a potentially dead person lay in front of their naked bodies.
- You get terribly self conscious at the sight of naked body, yours or anyone else's. You uhh get into a competitive mindset and not in a good way. Which means every time you see a clotheless body you find yet another thing to be disappointed of yourself at. Your ego couldn't take looking at all those underclothed sick people.
- You're terrible with precise hand-based skills, which was unfortunate for that frog which ended up in front of you back in high school biology practicals after which they allowed you to do it in simulator, and everyone who has known you thinks it's not a good idea.
- You are terrible with long words with confusing origins, confuse them for each other and it's not that you cannot memorize long words or series of complex instructions but you have this incredibly mystical confusing ability rather curse that makes you forget everything you force learned right as the exams end.
- When you went to the astrologer that one time they shrieked in horror after looking at the crystal ball and told you in no unclear terms you should do anything anything even become a bank robber as long as you did nothing remotely related to healthcare.
- You have weak arms, so you won't be able to saw off patients' body parts when you invariably get them infected and have to get rid of the limbs. It's a certainty at this point and it would be embarrassing to invite others in your operation just to saw limbs off of people.
- The white lab coat doesn't go well with your face. Sooo.
- It's hard work and youre lazy. Such as the writer for this who is ending this to order dinner even though it's coming in an hour.
10 Reasons I prefer the numbered lists over other space-filler posts
- I don't need to think too hard to come up with titles, they're self-referential and refer to the fact that I'm writing those mostly to reach the post-count goals I've set for myself without feeling to bad about the whole think, unlike other formats which make me more conscious about cheating.
- They're real easy to fill up the page with. A two-line break after every point means most of the point is going to be empty place that's going to look a lot more impressive per time spent writing it versus a more compact essay or reflection. There's other formats that I could play around with, but it's the least space-efficient and that's the way I like it.
- The points can be short and they still occupy a large space so it's quicker to finish the post.
- They can be easy to write the funnies with because I don't need to think of an entire scenario, just a one-time throwaway line or joke will go a long way for the readers, and the hardest I'll refer to a joke in the later points and the readers (in my mind anyway) go wild.
- It gives me hope, when I know exactly when a piece is ending I can go ahead more confidently aware fully that it won't be as bad as I fear and it'll be long gone before I ever will have known it existed.
- Some points don't even need to be related to the topic and that makes writing easy and I guess making writing easy means the writer can be lazier and put in less commitment, not sure that's what I want to tell to a close friend or a sister but right now that's how things are...
- Can always go back and change the title and the number associated with it if I have a really hard time coming up with the number of steps for so-and-so, though I've been told the longer they are and the more elaborated the ridiculous chicken-killers.
- It's like junk-food snacks...easy to make and easy to consume, and even though it won't give you true nutrition and sustenance it's a good idea to get yourself checked regularly!
- Who doesn't like crappy templates formats from late 2000s and early 2010's amirite people?
- I have quite a lot more experience writing those so they come easier quicker to me, when I need to do a journal entry from scratch I actually need to think about people interacting their motivations and why and how things would workout. Arlington is not for you.
Productive clean day, morning walk, dominos, writing, late night, and weekEND finally [Fri 28]
I write this on a Monday afternoon because weekend happened obviously, this is the end of the month and it's the right time to freak out, after this I have three days worth of posts... Saturday Sunday and Today. The good news is I'm 'covered' up for the other posts. The badnews is I might not make it with all the posts. It's wild. I'll try either way, the quality's going to go down from the very low level it's already at and I won't give a shit about it because I'm doing this just for the numbers I don't have it in my to write well. I'm not a very generous writer....it's a dream to become one...A generous writer is one who cares for their readers and works their pieces accordingly that's not me right now because all I have cared about in this blog ever is ME ME ME and the number of posts I make.
I woke up way way too early and waited for half an hour for the restroom to clear which made me a little mad because the whole point of waking up early was to not have to waste my time on doing pointless things. Anyway eventually got the toilet situation figured out and went on a walk to the nearby walk. There was a yoga class happening in there all out doors which made me feel excited.... hope people are as eager about doing things outdoors as the days go by in the winter too. That way we'd know for sure that we can beat the elements and convince ourselves that it's not just the modern heating and cooling of building that sustains the human civilization but the human willpower and tenacity.
For lunch I had cucumbers from the weekend before. This is important for later.
Work was amazing, I had a review with my manager that went great. Rested with the roommates in the living room for while before getting into a marathon of a meeting. After finishing it felt really light and free!
In the evening got involved in cleaning the house...specifically PK's old room and taking SM's old belongings down to the basement. It would have taken me maybe 8 trips to do that so I divided it into multiple 'steps', and it wasn't too bad really.
PK and ND went out to eat, I used that opportunity to write, rest, talk to friends family etcetera. Was hungry didn't want to make anything or eat anything regular. Went to Domino's for a pickup, a large veggie pizza demolished half of it real quick and wrote a bit more. BY then PK and ND came back we talked a bunch watched tv [schitt's creek] and got the funnies. Got real hungry after this and finished the rest of the pizza. ND and I were talking about things until 2 which was wild for a friday for me. Went to bed at 2.30.
Something I may or may not remember to write later considering the time pressure I'm on, so I'll say this... The American restaurant between us and Domino's was really poppin', outdoors seating live music and people really happy to get out of their prisons and hang out with their near and dear ones in a relaxed and safe environment. It'd be a cool place to hang out with friends in the near future. It's probably the closest cool place to us. Funny how I'd never noticed it until a late pizza run on a Friday night out of desperation after running out of every other alternative.
I woke up way way too early and waited for half an hour for the restroom to clear which made me a little mad because the whole point of waking up early was to not have to waste my time on doing pointless things. Anyway eventually got the toilet situation figured out and went on a walk to the nearby walk. There was a yoga class happening in there all out doors which made me feel excited.... hope people are as eager about doing things outdoors as the days go by in the winter too. That way we'd know for sure that we can beat the elements and convince ourselves that it's not just the modern heating and cooling of building that sustains the human civilization but the human willpower and tenacity.
For lunch I had cucumbers from the weekend before. This is important for later.
Work was amazing, I had a review with my manager that went great. Rested with the roommates in the living room for while before getting into a marathon of a meeting. After finishing it felt really light and free!
In the evening got involved in cleaning the house...specifically PK's old room and taking SM's old belongings down to the basement. It would have taken me maybe 8 trips to do that so I divided it into multiple 'steps', and it wasn't too bad really.
PK and ND went out to eat, I used that opportunity to write, rest, talk to friends family etcetera. Was hungry didn't want to make anything or eat anything regular. Went to Domino's for a pickup, a large veggie pizza demolished half of it real quick and wrote a bit more. BY then PK and ND came back we talked a bunch watched tv [schitt's creek] and got the funnies. Got real hungry after this and finished the rest of the pizza. ND and I were talking about things until 2 which was wild for a friday for me. Went to bed at 2.30.
Something I may or may not remember to write later considering the time pressure I'm on, so I'll say this... The American restaurant between us and Domino's was really poppin', outdoors seating live music and people really happy to get out of their prisons and hang out with their near and dear ones in a relaxed and safe environment. It'd be a cool place to hang out with friends in the near future. It's probably the closest cool place to us. Funny how I'd never noticed it until a late pizza run on a Friday night out of desperation after running out of every other alternative.
Out of a lifetime of time
You have discovered what appears to be an ordinary room. But as soon as you enter the room, time stops for you. When you leave the room, time picks up right where you left off. What do you use this room for?
Source
So what did you do?
Nothing. Went there on days when I was running late and homework was due soon. It actually improved the way I think about time, which is the opposite of what you'd expect. If I have to use the room, I'm losing my real life hours you know compared to others, it's like a dream but an expensive one. Say you're lazy with a homework, and don't complete it. Your teacher asks for it and you say you don't have it. And they say okay I'll give you unlimited time to do it, but the time you take to finish this homework I'll take off from your lifespan! That's a crazy deal right?! Like sure Stats sucks, but I don't want to be losing hours and days off of the end of my life just because I hate it so much. I'd much rather just work on it like everyone else is, and submit a crappy version. I'll fail or whatever, worse case scenario but that's not the end of the world, I can work harder next time and improve. It's about improving! And the room is about cheating, it was insane, it was such a dangerous tool thank god someone told me about similar concepts and I could figure it out.
Yeah wow good for you. Did anyone else know about it or was it just you?
Yeahhh, haha there's... a few other people knew about it, from previous years, and my year too. It was. It was a little depressing really, I don't know if you want to hear their story but hollywood could make a solid horror movie out of it and people would dismiss it as being too ridiculous and scary haha.
Yeah? Wow could you give me the shortened version?
Okay sure let me know if you're feeling uncomfortable because I don't want to bore you or scare you with the details but basically bad things could happen if you were not careful with how you'd be using it. So there was this guy in our year...not too bright but not too stupid either... he didn't study very hard for the exams and he did alright. Anyway he finds out about the place and he's over the moon right because he can think of all the wild things he could do in there. He sets up a tv with a cd player don't ask me how I saw it, the couch was very uncomfortable, and a video game console too. He would spend hours and hours in there watching porn and jerking off until he felt like a ragdool, all weak and confused. When he hung out with us -- and we didn't know that's what he was upto because we'd have helped him obviously -- he was always tired and low on energy. We thought maybe he was into drugs or something but he was not in the right company for that, you know. And the worse he got, it became harder to manage for him, so he would retreat into the room more often. His assignments would be done, and everything would be fine...like he wasn't a total disappearance, but he looked tired and spent... And confused dazed. He had huge dark circles around his eyes. His hair became messy and uncontrolled, they had to talk to his parents about it, he left for his home for a couple of weeks.
OH? what happened? Was he okay later?
Yeahhh, he was okay later, he's doing alright right now, has a wife and everything. He's not doing too bad. He's traumatized from those days though. So we find out later that in our last two years of high-school he spent a total of three years in there all by himself. Three freakin' years, all alone, playing video games and sleeping and jerking off and what not it was wild. So he's now three years older than we are biologically. We felt real bad about it. He was the one who told the school about the room actually, he considered it a curse on people with low self-control, the people who should least use it are the folks who'd use it the most you know. So they boarded it up and everything now nobody talks about it anymore. It's wild though. You should hear stories from him, when he gets real drunk and talks about his time in the room it feels like he went through a war, he's truly traumatized. It must have been worse than the worse prison sentence, the hardest part would have been knowing you can get out and accept reality at any point but you don't want to because you've discovered a cheat a hack and you want to keep using it because it gives you an edge over everyone else. You know. Shit.
Source
So what did you do?
Nothing. Went there on days when I was running late and homework was due soon. It actually improved the way I think about time, which is the opposite of what you'd expect. If I have to use the room, I'm losing my real life hours you know compared to others, it's like a dream but an expensive one. Say you're lazy with a homework, and don't complete it. Your teacher asks for it and you say you don't have it. And they say okay I'll give you unlimited time to do it, but the time you take to finish this homework I'll take off from your lifespan! That's a crazy deal right?! Like sure Stats sucks, but I don't want to be losing hours and days off of the end of my life just because I hate it so much. I'd much rather just work on it like everyone else is, and submit a crappy version. I'll fail or whatever, worse case scenario but that's not the end of the world, I can work harder next time and improve. It's about improving! And the room is about cheating, it was insane, it was such a dangerous tool thank god someone told me about similar concepts and I could figure it out.
Yeah wow good for you. Did anyone else know about it or was it just you?
Yeahhh, haha there's... a few other people knew about it, from previous years, and my year too. It was. It was a little depressing really, I don't know if you want to hear their story but hollywood could make a solid horror movie out of it and people would dismiss it as being too ridiculous and scary haha.
Yeah? Wow could you give me the shortened version?
Okay sure let me know if you're feeling uncomfortable because I don't want to bore you or scare you with the details but basically bad things could happen if you were not careful with how you'd be using it. So there was this guy in our year...not too bright but not too stupid either... he didn't study very hard for the exams and he did alright. Anyway he finds out about the place and he's over the moon right because he can think of all the wild things he could do in there. He sets up a tv with a cd player don't ask me how I saw it, the couch was very uncomfortable, and a video game console too. He would spend hours and hours in there watching porn and jerking off until he felt like a ragdool, all weak and confused. When he hung out with us -- and we didn't know that's what he was upto because we'd have helped him obviously -- he was always tired and low on energy. We thought maybe he was into drugs or something but he was not in the right company for that, you know. And the worse he got, it became harder to manage for him, so he would retreat into the room more often. His assignments would be done, and everything would be fine...like he wasn't a total disappearance, but he looked tired and spent... And confused dazed. He had huge dark circles around his eyes. His hair became messy and uncontrolled, they had to talk to his parents about it, he left for his home for a couple of weeks.
OH? what happened? Was he okay later?
Yeahhh, he was okay later, he's doing alright right now, has a wife and everything. He's not doing too bad. He's traumatized from those days though. So we find out later that in our last two years of high-school he spent a total of three years in there all by himself. Three freakin' years, all alone, playing video games and sleeping and jerking off and what not it was wild. So he's now three years older than we are biologically. We felt real bad about it. He was the one who told the school about the room actually, he considered it a curse on people with low self-control, the people who should least use it are the folks who'd use it the most you know. So they boarded it up and everything now nobody talks about it anymore. It's wild though. You should hear stories from him, when he gets real drunk and talks about his time in the room it feels like he went through a war, he's truly traumatized. It must have been worse than the worse prison sentence, the hardest part would have been knowing you can get out and accept reality at any point but you don't want to because you've discovered a cheat a hack and you want to keep using it because it gives you an edge over everyone else. You know. Shit.
Breaking into the headmaster's office
Based upon real events that I heard happened a long time ago.
9.20pm
Secret mission log, I'm making this so we can have a total record of what happened in case anything goes wrong. If things go write we will use this as a tool to repeat this...adventure.
There's three of us, I won't give out our names but we're all twelfth graders and we're going to sneak into the Principal's office to retrieve a piece of evidence that could get our friend in deep deep trouble. Reliable sources have provided us with copies of the front door but we're unsure if there's any protection inside the building. We're still in ouro dorms right now, wearing our masks and leg protection and shoe inserts to increase our heights so if we do get seen they will be thrown off the track. All of us are also wearing shoes two sizes too big for us to avoid detection and identification later on. We're going to the office in regular casual dress and changing there.
10.10pm
Just took off our casual clothes and put them in the backpack, now we're laced in all black with creepy balaclava mask that will clearly telegraph our intentions to anyone looking at us. We have plain-clothed guys and girls on the lookout at the perimeter, we each have tiny bluetooth earbuds in our ears and are on constant call with them. We planned this out, so we can tell by the voices what's happening where exactly. We have developed entire code-language just for this purpose, there's no way that can go bad.
Our next step is to open into the door and retrieve the documents.
10.30pm
Successfully opened the door, no secret alarms or tripwires were detected. We are kindof sure there's security cameras all around the building so we haven't dared using our flashlights, lest we give the hint something bad happened. We are in the lobby and looking for the right combinations to the main door and trying to locate the documents. Unclear as of right now if the documents are located in one of the higher-security drawers. We might have to get violent in that case which is less than ideal.
No report from the recon teams, everything seems to be in order.
10.42pm
A member of principal's staff seems to be coming this way, our recon team is distracting them with idle chitchat while buying us time, they can't spend too much time doing that because it might seem suspicious, so our time has been limited.
We're still in search for the location of the drawer containing the documents. Our 'grunt' has discovered similar documents lying on the desk, so we think they may be outside.
11.01pm
This was the wildest thing that's ever happened to me! The staff member came in, and we hid in the supply room hoping they wouldn't come there, and they didn't! They went to the common area, blamed the poor office assistant for being disorganized and left. Thank god! Now that they're gone, we're free to explore the area. We want to spend a couple of minutes waiting for our recon teams to inform us that the staff is out before we get out. It's getting really sticky and hot in here and one of the other idiots wants to badly pee. I told them to pee in the dorm but they said they didn't have to. So pissed. Har har.
11.18pm
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. We're running away, one of us is hurt, their feet is a bloody mess. So we came out of the closet prematurely, and the staff realized they had forgotten to lock the door and rushed back in, heard the noise and investigated. We had just found out the location of the documents, and it wouldn't have been very clever to pick off just the document of interest so we picked up a large collection of the files and ran away, through the window. One of us literally broke the window with the hammer(!) they had with them and ran away, someone else had the shard of glass cut their feet, hopefully they're going to be fine.
12.01pm
The wound is not too deep but it's quite long, the bleeding has stopped, they can walk almost normally. When the staff went out shouting for guards we were long gone in our dorms. The trail of blood ends at a few dozen feet from the office. We've burned the documents, and put the ash on plants in the housemaster's garden, so they won't suspect a thing. The bloody trousers have been disposed of. I don't know how wise it is to drown blood-soaked trousers in a strong alkaline solution, but the chem nerds say it's going to get rid of the blood, and possibly the trousers as well so we'll see.
Hope there's no much trouble coming ahead. They can't get to us that's for sure, there's nothing identifying us, and besides the would we are unlikely to get caught. They don't even know it was someone from inside the school and not some random thieves from outside!
9.20pm
Secret mission log, I'm making this so we can have a total record of what happened in case anything goes wrong. If things go write we will use this as a tool to repeat this...adventure.
There's three of us, I won't give out our names but we're all twelfth graders and we're going to sneak into the Principal's office to retrieve a piece of evidence that could get our friend in deep deep trouble. Reliable sources have provided us with copies of the front door but we're unsure if there's any protection inside the building. We're still in ouro dorms right now, wearing our masks and leg protection and shoe inserts to increase our heights so if we do get seen they will be thrown off the track. All of us are also wearing shoes two sizes too big for us to avoid detection and identification later on. We're going to the office in regular casual dress and changing there.
10.10pm
Just took off our casual clothes and put them in the backpack, now we're laced in all black with creepy balaclava mask that will clearly telegraph our intentions to anyone looking at us. We have plain-clothed guys and girls on the lookout at the perimeter, we each have tiny bluetooth earbuds in our ears and are on constant call with them. We planned this out, so we can tell by the voices what's happening where exactly. We have developed entire code-language just for this purpose, there's no way that can go bad.
Our next step is to open into the door and retrieve the documents.
10.30pm
Successfully opened the door, no secret alarms or tripwires were detected. We are kindof sure there's security cameras all around the building so we haven't dared using our flashlights, lest we give the hint something bad happened. We are in the lobby and looking for the right combinations to the main door and trying to locate the documents. Unclear as of right now if the documents are located in one of the higher-security drawers. We might have to get violent in that case which is less than ideal.
No report from the recon teams, everything seems to be in order.
10.42pm
A member of principal's staff seems to be coming this way, our recon team is distracting them with idle chitchat while buying us time, they can't spend too much time doing that because it might seem suspicious, so our time has been limited.
We're still in search for the location of the drawer containing the documents. Our 'grunt' has discovered similar documents lying on the desk, so we think they may be outside.
11.01pm
This was the wildest thing that's ever happened to me! The staff member came in, and we hid in the supply room hoping they wouldn't come there, and they didn't! They went to the common area, blamed the poor office assistant for being disorganized and left. Thank god! Now that they're gone, we're free to explore the area. We want to spend a couple of minutes waiting for our recon teams to inform us that the staff is out before we get out. It's getting really sticky and hot in here and one of the other idiots wants to badly pee. I told them to pee in the dorm but they said they didn't have to. So pissed. Har har.
11.18pm
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. We're running away, one of us is hurt, their feet is a bloody mess. So we came out of the closet prematurely, and the staff realized they had forgotten to lock the door and rushed back in, heard the noise and investigated. We had just found out the location of the documents, and it wouldn't have been very clever to pick off just the document of interest so we picked up a large collection of the files and ran away, through the window. One of us literally broke the window with the hammer(!) they had with them and ran away, someone else had the shard of glass cut their feet, hopefully they're going to be fine.
12.01pm
The wound is not too deep but it's quite long, the bleeding has stopped, they can walk almost normally. When the staff went out shouting for guards we were long gone in our dorms. The trail of blood ends at a few dozen feet from the office. We've burned the documents, and put the ash on plants in the housemaster's garden, so they won't suspect a thing. The bloody trousers have been disposed of. I don't know how wise it is to drown blood-soaked trousers in a strong alkaline solution, but the chem nerds say it's going to get rid of the blood, and possibly the trousers as well so we'll see.
Hope there's no much trouble coming ahead. They can't get to us that's for sure, there's nothing identifying us, and besides the would we are unlikely to get caught. They don't even know it was someone from inside the school and not some random thieves from outside!
Firefox android is fucked up now
I use exclusively the Firefox browser on all my devices, mobile or otherwise.
Firefox recently had an update for android that pretty much nukes all the add-ons I had going up, those that included custom adblocking -- or any ad blocking at all --, those that limited my time on certain time-wasting news sites and those that completely blocked by access to many sites particularly those that are orange-colored and have tech news etcetera. Now the whole wild world is open to me and I feel like an individual running around in covid times without a facemask, maintaining less than six feet and breathing right into people's faces. Its wild I'm a little disappointed. I do like the organization that makes the browser a lot, and they promise that the addons will eventually get added to it, but what a hassle it is until then. My protective shell is gone I'm exposed to the elements of the wild, it's just me and my courage and willpower now.
There were hints and clues of course. There was related news on the tech sites for months, I for some reason thought that would never bother me anyway and if it did I'd somehow sneak pass the changes. And then the browser in my old phone suddenly got the new version, I thought it was just the old crappy phone being crappy and nice phones didn't get the weird version.
It's not just the addons...the ability to customize the browser has been limited too it seems...I can't change the homepage anymore configure photo loads and a tonne of minor annoyances. It's not a power user's phone anymore it seems and I'm hella pissed. I would hate to live in a world where no one is in control of their mobile phone browsers. The scary weird world that is completely dominated by ads is getting closer to me. I've avoided it thus far thanks to all the protective tools now I'm afraid of turning into one of those ad zombies myself. ZOMBIES ZZZOOMBIES eeyaahooo eyaaaOoooo. etcetera etcetera.
Firefox recently had an update for android that pretty much nukes all the add-ons I had going up, those that included custom adblocking -- or any ad blocking at all --, those that limited my time on certain time-wasting news sites and those that completely blocked by access to many sites particularly those that are orange-colored and have tech news etcetera. Now the whole wild world is open to me and I feel like an individual running around in covid times without a facemask, maintaining less than six feet and breathing right into people's faces. Its wild I'm a little disappointed. I do like the organization that makes the browser a lot, and they promise that the addons will eventually get added to it, but what a hassle it is until then. My protective shell is gone I'm exposed to the elements of the wild, it's just me and my courage and willpower now.
There were hints and clues of course. There was related news on the tech sites for months, I for some reason thought that would never bother me anyway and if it did I'd somehow sneak pass the changes. And then the browser in my old phone suddenly got the new version, I thought it was just the old crappy phone being crappy and nice phones didn't get the weird version.
It's not just the addons...the ability to customize the browser has been limited too it seems...I can't change the homepage anymore configure photo loads and a tonne of minor annoyances. It's not a power user's phone anymore it seems and I'm hella pissed. I would hate to live in a world where no one is in control of their mobile phone browsers. The scary weird world that is completely dominated by ads is getting closer to me. I've avoided it thus far thanks to all the protective tools now I'm afraid of turning into one of those ad zombies myself. ZOMBIES ZZZOOMBIES eeyaahooo eyaaaOoooo. etcetera etcetera.
On Meateating
11/21/2019:
Copied from here.
I'm not a vegetarian. As in, I don't go around telling people I'm vegetarian and don't avoid meat like I'm allergic to it. I'll eat little bits of meat once in a while and be reminded how much I don't enjoy eating meat anymore. As I've told everyone who will listen, if you pay attention, most meats have no flavour. If it's about the flavor that's just spices. It's about the texture that's just the method or cooking, you can have anything cooked like that taste similar. If it's about the indescribable quality that's the fat in the meat, add as much fat in any food with the spices and it too will taste good. In any case, there's not much about meat that I crave or miss.
08/30/2020:
I am STILL not a vegetarian. I just avoid eating meat. If there were a party where there was nothing else to eat but meat, I'd try some, if the choice was between death and eating meats there's no question which option I'd rather prefer. And if someone made an amazing dish from an amazing cut of a really tasty animal, I'm always down for a bite or two or three.
Here's why I'm not a vegetarian. If you tell people that, people take it as a challenge, to convert you into becoming a meat-eater. They'll try to coax and convince, argue for this and that and make it their personal project to get some meats into you. It's fun, it's not exciting, and when they do it by hook or by crook it's annoying. Eff that shit.
I'm not into meat replacements either. I don't like the taste of meat, why would I put so much effort and money -- and boyoboy those meat replacements are so expensive -- to get a second-hand shitty copy of the perfect thing that I ignore.
Besides, when you're strict on defining yourself with such labels, it becomes difficult to be flexible. If you eat a meat once just to try the heck, people will try convincing you that your vow has been broken and you're not a vegetarian anymore. Vegetarians will argue you're not the true vegetarian they thought you were. And you begin considering...if I've already eaten meat might as well go all the way and start eating it on a regular basis.
That's...that's not why I don't meat. It's not because of vow or definitions or labeling. I don't like it, I can't digest it well, and the animals they come from are so mistreated these days I don't care for all the stress hormones in their bodies to get to me. That is all.
Copied from here.
I'm not a vegetarian. As in, I don't go around telling people I'm vegetarian and don't avoid meat like I'm allergic to it. I'll eat little bits of meat once in a while and be reminded how much I don't enjoy eating meat anymore. As I've told everyone who will listen, if you pay attention, most meats have no flavour. If it's about the flavor that's just spices. It's about the texture that's just the method or cooking, you can have anything cooked like that taste similar. If it's about the indescribable quality that's the fat in the meat, add as much fat in any food with the spices and it too will taste good. In any case, there's not much about meat that I crave or miss.
There's an
exception though. Goat meat, barbecued over coal. Goat brain,
fire-roasted tongue and ears. From Pushkar's in putalisadak. The meat
has the flavor no vegetable can even come close to. I wouldn't eat it
every day of course like people eat chicken and rice every day, I treat
it as a treat, for special occasions. What do I miss about home the
most, I've been asked many times. Goat sekuwa and good sweet mangoes, I
reply every time. Oh yeah and my family, I guess, I'll add, almost as an
afterthought.
08/30/2020:
I am STILL not a vegetarian. I just avoid eating meat. If there were a party where there was nothing else to eat but meat, I'd try some, if the choice was between death and eating meats there's no question which option I'd rather prefer. And if someone made an amazing dish from an amazing cut of a really tasty animal, I'm always down for a bite or two or three.
Here's why I'm not a vegetarian. If you tell people that, people take it as a challenge, to convert you into becoming a meat-eater. They'll try to coax and convince, argue for this and that and make it their personal project to get some meats into you. It's fun, it's not exciting, and when they do it by hook or by crook it's annoying. Eff that shit.
I'm not into meat replacements either. I don't like the taste of meat, why would I put so much effort and money -- and boyoboy those meat replacements are so expensive -- to get a second-hand shitty copy of the perfect thing that I ignore.
Besides, when you're strict on defining yourself with such labels, it becomes difficult to be flexible. If you eat a meat once just to try the heck, people will try convincing you that your vow has been broken and you're not a vegetarian anymore. Vegetarians will argue you're not the true vegetarian they thought you were. And you begin considering...if I've already eaten meat might as well go all the way and start eating it on a regular basis.
That's...that's not why I don't meat. It's not because of vow or definitions or labeling. I don't like it, I can't digest it well, and the animals they come from are so mistreated these days I don't care for all the stress hormones in their bodies to get to me. That is all.
On healthy hiking foods
It was about this time last year when we went to Mr. Modadnock in NH for the first time. We stopped at a Market Basket on the way to get our supplies for the hike. I was trying to uhh look like I was a healthy eater etecetera so I grabbed a bunch of colorful cherry tomatoes, baby cucumbers, baby carrots and a bunch of handheld fruits and veggies for the hike.
The gang made fun of me, but when we went uphill later that day, everyone was refreshed by how hydrating the veggies were, they had electrolytes too, and it was so convenient. Everyone agreed the fruits-veggies diet for a hike was a good one.
Back to this year, last weekend when we tried going to Modadnock again but we didn't get in due to covid restrictions, we went to a different park. Same situation: a bunch of handheld fruits and vegetable, and same response. Everyone was impressed by the 'innovation', and decided that's what they were doing for their next hikes.
It's a great idea really, they're not too expensive, won't give you a sugar rush or overload with sodium and most certainly wont make you thirsty. Easy to bite into easy to carry and you could carry just a bunch of vegetables/food instead of carrying foods and water separately. They're 2-in-1.
They're going to be my staple hiking diet going forward. Forget the stupid granola bars or high-caloric food targeted at hikers. If you're doing tens of miles of hiking everyday maybe you do need all those extra calories, if not the healthy hiking foods are your perfect hiking friends.
The gang made fun of me, but when we went uphill later that day, everyone was refreshed by how hydrating the veggies were, they had electrolytes too, and it was so convenient. Everyone agreed the fruits-veggies diet for a hike was a good one.
Back to this year, last weekend when we tried going to Modadnock again but we didn't get in due to covid restrictions, we went to a different park. Same situation: a bunch of handheld fruits and vegetable, and same response. Everyone was impressed by the 'innovation', and decided that's what they were doing for their next hikes.
It's a great idea really, they're not too expensive, won't give you a sugar rush or overload with sodium and most certainly wont make you thirsty. Easy to bite into easy to carry and you could carry just a bunch of vegetables/food instead of carrying foods and water separately. They're 2-in-1.
They're going to be my staple hiking diet going forward. Forget the stupid granola bars or high-caloric food targeted at hikers. If you're doing tens of miles of hiking everyday maybe you do need all those extra calories, if not the healthy hiking foods are your perfect hiking friends.
Milestone post: More post this year than all the posts from previous years except last
When this gets published this will be my 750'th post this year.
That means if you added all the posts from every year before the last, the whole 12 years between 2007 and 2018 inclusive on one hand, and the number of posts I've published this years, I'm actually a little ahead numbers-wise. And I'm most definitely certain quite ahead word-count wise.
This is quite an achievement for me and my plan to make writing a basic habit, something I feel uncomfortable if I don't do every day. I know it's been a rough trip there's so many complaints of 'low quality' (live with it), 'catching up the posts' (so I don't have to look like a lazy butt who writes in spurts instead of being the good boy who writes twice thrice a day), and the 'article counter fudger' where I'm writing down words without them making any sense because I want more words on my name. And I'm here! I've lied and befuddled hoodwinked and confused the hella' out of everyone and everything to get here. I'm the king of the world, so to speak.
The next step like I've said in the past many many months is to start improving my writing, now that I've convinced myself and everyone reading that I do have in me what it takes to be a writer: a hunger, desperation. A need, desire, a habit of attention-seeking, not for itself sake but towards some form of creation or another. I have gotten into a routine, proven that routine work can get you to great heights. Now I need to channel that energy and power, the lessons and leanings within them to improve my learning.
My first strategy has been, will be to read all those magazines targeted at writers and improve the base techniques. Don't overuse these kind of words, this set of words goes with the other ones real well, clear concise communication, all of that. By making my 'regular' words come out within that context, I'm learning to write more for myself than an employer of owners of companies I've worked with.
My second strategy haven't actually begun it yet but talked to the right people and it's clear at this point that it will happen, is to start doing writing workshops with people. Critique workshops rather, we write during a set time and critique and comment upon one another's work. That forces the writer to think clearly about the reader they'll be having in front of them, and also a hundred thousand more, a million more and they just want to be told a whole lots of life, happily and ignorantly.
That means if you added all the posts from every year before the last, the whole 12 years between 2007 and 2018 inclusive on one hand, and the number of posts I've published this years, I'm actually a little ahead numbers-wise. And I'm most definitely certain quite ahead word-count wise.
This is quite an achievement for me and my plan to make writing a basic habit, something I feel uncomfortable if I don't do every day. I know it's been a rough trip there's so many complaints of 'low quality' (live with it), 'catching up the posts' (so I don't have to look like a lazy butt who writes in spurts instead of being the good boy who writes twice thrice a day), and the 'article counter fudger' where I'm writing down words without them making any sense because I want more words on my name. And I'm here! I've lied and befuddled hoodwinked and confused the hella' out of everyone and everything to get here. I'm the king of the world, so to speak.
The next step like I've said in the past many many months is to start improving my writing, now that I've convinced myself and everyone reading that I do have in me what it takes to be a writer: a hunger, desperation. A need, desire, a habit of attention-seeking, not for itself sake but towards some form of creation or another. I have gotten into a routine, proven that routine work can get you to great heights. Now I need to channel that energy and power, the lessons and leanings within them to improve my learning.
My first strategy has been, will be to read all those magazines targeted at writers and improve the base techniques. Don't overuse these kind of words, this set of words goes with the other ones real well, clear concise communication, all of that. By making my 'regular' words come out within that context, I'm learning to write more for myself than an employer of owners of companies I've worked with.
My second strategy haven't actually begun it yet but talked to the right people and it's clear at this point that it will happen, is to start doing writing workshops with people. Critique workshops rather, we write during a set time and critique and comment upon one another's work. That forces the writer to think clearly about the reader they'll be having in front of them, and also a hundred thousand more, a million more and they just want to be told a whole lots of life, happily and ignorantly.
Amazon delivery haul, grilled cheese with sauerkraut, broken kitchen power [Thu 27]
Having been out early on Wednesday due to be extra tired, sleep schedule was all fucked on in the morning. Got up at 2.30 am couldn't go back to sleep until 5, and then obviously couldn't get up at 7 for my morning walk. Ended up being up at 8, rushing things in and starting work in a hurry.
Due to the lack of sleep, that's what I'm going to guess because I'm not sure what else it could have been, I was on low energy despite keeping myself fed on PB crackers, nuts and a whole lot of water. Didn't want to write, didn't want to do anything productive. Maybe it was the weather too because it was gloomy all day long, work was alright I made a few changes and talked to the coworkers but didn't really feel like it.
Got delivery of batteries and connector from Amazon, and connected my hub with my laptop so now I finally have a proper work setup with a laptop, keyboard and a screen. Freaking finally. It should improve my work habits by a slight amount, the slight amount that was causing me inconvenience due to lack of a resting place for my hands while typing.
After work I cleaned the spare room a little bit, made a really juicy grilled-cheese with sauerkraut dipped the entire thing in hot sauce it was yum and I do like the contrast of sour and spicy with the fattiness and cheesiness of a grilled cheese. After overloading myself with fat and carbs I rested for a bit and tried writing something, anything really in the evening.
Roomies were playing around in the kitchen and we found ourselves on the tough side of things in the evening when the power in all our appliances was gone, so no more fridge, microwave or oven. It wasn't too bad because fridges are designed to hold heat for as long as they can but we were still pretty disappointed. Luckily roommate pK had to go out on a trip later in the evening, and he bought extension cords, so we connected our fridge to an outlet in a different room using two very long extension cords.
It was about 9/9.30 in the evening I was tired of all the food and tired and confused because of the day-long low-energy situation not to mention the lack of sleep, so I decided to take a minor nap at 9.30 in the evening. And promptly fell asleep. Got up at 1.30am, brushed cleaned up and went back to sleep.
Due to the lack of sleep, that's what I'm going to guess because I'm not sure what else it could have been, I was on low energy despite keeping myself fed on PB crackers, nuts and a whole lot of water. Didn't want to write, didn't want to do anything productive. Maybe it was the weather too because it was gloomy all day long, work was alright I made a few changes and talked to the coworkers but didn't really feel like it.
Got delivery of batteries and connector from Amazon, and connected my hub with my laptop so now I finally have a proper work setup with a laptop, keyboard and a screen. Freaking finally. It should improve my work habits by a slight amount, the slight amount that was causing me inconvenience due to lack of a resting place for my hands while typing.
After work I cleaned the spare room a little bit, made a really juicy grilled-cheese with sauerkraut dipped the entire thing in hot sauce it was yum and I do like the contrast of sour and spicy with the fattiness and cheesiness of a grilled cheese. After overloading myself with fat and carbs I rested for a bit and tried writing something, anything really in the evening.
Roomies were playing around in the kitchen and we found ourselves on the tough side of things in the evening when the power in all our appliances was gone, so no more fridge, microwave or oven. It wasn't too bad because fridges are designed to hold heat for as long as they can but we were still pretty disappointed. Luckily roommate pK had to go out on a trip later in the evening, and he bought extension cords, so we connected our fridge to an outlet in a different room using two very long extension cords.
It was about 9/9.30 in the evening I was tired of all the food and tired and confused because of the day-long low-energy situation not to mention the lack of sleep, so I decided to take a minor nap at 9.30 in the evening. And promptly fell asleep. Got up at 1.30am, brushed cleaned up and went back to sleep.
New discoveries near oneself
You are showering one morning when you notice a tattoo on your body that you're quite sure you don't remember getting. What is it, how did you get it, and what does it mean?
Source
"Yeah well I know that, yes yes I see it too, do you remember if I told you about this, did I call you? You know anyone I might have been with when I got this, " I ask him on the phone. He is having too much fun with this and I'm pissed as hell. Pissed at myself first of all and most of all but he's not making it any easier. He's trying to savor the moment by making me recount the moment I discovered this and what I'm going to do with it he wants to know where I got this from too, he said he'll keep checking with me until we find out where that came from. Too much fun at my expense I'm not happy.
"Like I told you earlier, I discovered this morning when showering okay I didn't see it before because I'm never checking the back of my ass for tattoos I might have gotten at some point in the past and completely forgotten about it. And no it's different from your magical mystical symbol that unites the universe or whatever because it's a goddamn flower a flower I don't even recognize looks like something from a desert or maybe high-up mountains. No I don't know never been there anywhere and don't even knot the flower...well yes but I'm not an not an expert okay, I've told you the same story twice already at this point you should be able to play it back to me better. Yeah yeah I need to check with other folks to see if...if yeah yeah if they know any better, okay okay I"ll keep you occupied I'll keep you informed as long as someone gives me something anything related to it. Alright, alright yup yup I'll see you in a couple of months okay bye"
Friends are lifelong, some friends you've had since early childhood, the sad dangerous thing about them is the jokes last your lifetime too all of eternity you will hope it's gone away from everyone's psyche everyone's forgotten about it and then bam they will jump it upon you and your family who knows even your wife and kids someday when you least want it out. You cant teach your kids the virtue of honesty and non-drinking when you discover after unknown time what appears to be a tramp-stamp on your rear. It's not respectable. Not the tattoo I mean, things are fine with that, but lacking any memory of acquiring it. Is it possible, and it's going into strange creepy industrial category now anyway, but someone discovered an inlet port and is sending what their designs and ideas through the machine to check if it can theoretically get printed. They wouldn't be so stupid.
I call the guys in the West Coast. Just in case, because that's where I was several months ago and I want to rule out all of the potential sources.
I tell them the first thing about my ass and they're jumping with excitement. A lamb's ear flower apparently they're shouting, they're asking if I still have it and I'm a little pissed because they seem to be a lot more into it than I ever was and that make sme wonder if they asked to secrete or synthesize it.
Source
"Yeah well I know that, yes yes I see it too, do you remember if I told you about this, did I call you? You know anyone I might have been with when I got this, " I ask him on the phone. He is having too much fun with this and I'm pissed as hell. Pissed at myself first of all and most of all but he's not making it any easier. He's trying to savor the moment by making me recount the moment I discovered this and what I'm going to do with it he wants to know where I got this from too, he said he'll keep checking with me until we find out where that came from. Too much fun at my expense I'm not happy.
"Like I told you earlier, I discovered this morning when showering okay I didn't see it before because I'm never checking the back of my ass for tattoos I might have gotten at some point in the past and completely forgotten about it. And no it's different from your magical mystical symbol that unites the universe or whatever because it's a goddamn flower a flower I don't even recognize looks like something from a desert or maybe high-up mountains. No I don't know never been there anywhere and don't even knot the flower...well yes but I'm not an not an expert okay, I've told you the same story twice already at this point you should be able to play it back to me better. Yeah yeah I need to check with other folks to see if...if yeah yeah if they know any better, okay okay I"ll keep you occupied I'll keep you informed as long as someone gives me something anything related to it. Alright, alright yup yup I'll see you in a couple of months okay bye"
Friends are lifelong, some friends you've had since early childhood, the sad dangerous thing about them is the jokes last your lifetime too all of eternity you will hope it's gone away from everyone's psyche everyone's forgotten about it and then bam they will jump it upon you and your family who knows even your wife and kids someday when you least want it out. You cant teach your kids the virtue of honesty and non-drinking when you discover after unknown time what appears to be a tramp-stamp on your rear. It's not respectable. Not the tattoo I mean, things are fine with that, but lacking any memory of acquiring it. Is it possible, and it's going into strange creepy industrial category now anyway, but someone discovered an inlet port and is sending what their designs and ideas through the machine to check if it can theoretically get printed. They wouldn't be so stupid.
I call the guys in the West Coast. Just in case, because that's where I was several months ago and I want to rule out all of the potential sources.
I tell them the first thing about my ass and they're jumping with excitement. A lamb's ear flower apparently they're shouting, they're asking if I still have it and I'm a little pissed because they seem to be a lot more into it than I ever was and that make sme wonder if they asked to secrete or synthesize it.
Go on with this, things will improve
I've planned on averaging four posts a day more or less for many months. I'm running behind on the schedule. And I'm above pressing 'publish' to only increase the number of daily posts so it looks better on paper. We're stuck then. No inspiration, and I don't feel like writing always, but I do need to and I can't talk about the usual things. What to do what to do.
At times like those I've found a trick that'll always get me writing, the words flowing. That's to setup a timer, for ten minutes maybe fifteen minutes if I'm feeling creative and to let the words just come out from my unconscious out in the paper or the screen, unedited unhindered by my conscious mind. Often it's crap, and othertimes it reads like a 'stream of consciousness' that it is. Not fun, often repeating slogging lame tired and reusing the same tropes over and over.
But sometimes I'll get golden. An idea or thought I'd never considered before not even imagined on nights that I have trouble sleeping and need to occupy by brain with strange thoughts and longwinded fantasies a lot of which involve me micromanaging a city or managing people and the politics of everyday workplace. Those are the times when all those 'spare' thoughts and ideas I don't give much consideration come to me. Even then I won't have these amazing ideas that I get when I force myself to write without a prompt or a guide and just fifteen minutes on the clock.
Those are rare. Oftentimes it's posts like these where I write about things I know best aka procrastinating things I care about, the importance of being up on your shit something which I am rarely and always wish would get better at, and other minor nonessential diatribes you could honestly do without. There are way too many autobiographies by young people who haven't lived enough to write about these days they're all repetitive they all make the same jokes and have the same pattern of 'oh this happened so lets go back to my childhood when so and so did what and omigod you wont believe' you know how it is. That style was cool and burning red ten years ago that's when I should have published these essays edited and professionalized them into a book now I'm trite boring and don't have anything that's new or interesting. But if things were different, I could have gotten somewhere. There's hope, I maybe unintelligent untalented hack but there's a future where I could thrive. These are the chances that make me strive for greatness.
Greatness is often incidental accidental, you will extremely likely not get there if you're actively avoiding it, but you could think about things and manage and organize and just be prepared for fate to wash over you and take you into greener pastures. Luck favors the prepared mind, and by writing I'm preparing myself for that great opportunity.
At times like those I've found a trick that'll always get me writing, the words flowing. That's to setup a timer, for ten minutes maybe fifteen minutes if I'm feeling creative and to let the words just come out from my unconscious out in the paper or the screen, unedited unhindered by my conscious mind. Often it's crap, and othertimes it reads like a 'stream of consciousness' that it is. Not fun, often repeating slogging lame tired and reusing the same tropes over and over.
But sometimes I'll get golden. An idea or thought I'd never considered before not even imagined on nights that I have trouble sleeping and need to occupy by brain with strange thoughts and longwinded fantasies a lot of which involve me micromanaging a city or managing people and the politics of everyday workplace. Those are the times when all those 'spare' thoughts and ideas I don't give much consideration come to me. Even then I won't have these amazing ideas that I get when I force myself to write without a prompt or a guide and just fifteen minutes on the clock.
Those are rare. Oftentimes it's posts like these where I write about things I know best aka procrastinating things I care about, the importance of being up on your shit something which I am rarely and always wish would get better at, and other minor nonessential diatribes you could honestly do without. There are way too many autobiographies by young people who haven't lived enough to write about these days they're all repetitive they all make the same jokes and have the same pattern of 'oh this happened so lets go back to my childhood when so and so did what and omigod you wont believe' you know how it is. That style was cool and burning red ten years ago that's when I should have published these essays edited and professionalized them into a book now I'm trite boring and don't have anything that's new or interesting. But if things were different, I could have gotten somewhere. There's hope, I maybe unintelligent untalented hack but there's a future where I could thrive. These are the chances that make me strive for greatness.
Greatness is often incidental accidental, you will extremely likely not get there if you're actively avoiding it, but you could think about things and manage and organize and just be prepared for fate to wash over you and take you into greener pastures. Luck favors the prepared mind, and by writing I'm preparing myself for that great opportunity.
Morning walk, evening walk, eventful walks, early passout [Wed 26]
Writing this the morning of the day after tomorrow [friday] because this day was too tiring and I slept too early, which messed up my sleep schedule for the next day when I slept too early too so it's finally come to this, the third day!
In any case, I got up at 7am, got my morning chores done, shower cleaning etcetera by 7.15, and took fifteen minutes to get ready for some reason. Out of the house on my morning walk at 7.30 ish. Went to the bike trail to trader joe's halfway there and came back, listened to the office ladies podcast on the way. Good walk felt good about myself the whole day.
Work was productive got a lot of PR's and merges yadda yadda yadda.
For lunch I heated up some of my 'kraut salad from back when oh dear I'm embarrassed to admit how old it is, but hey it's fermented and safe to eat forever and I stored it in the fridge so don't me complaining my homies. Shredded a tonne of cheese, added it to two layers of my flat breads from Aldi. Dipped it in some yogurt 'sauce' and it was yum.
Wrote a bunch of posts here and in the journal during work and the few minutes after work between work being over and getting ready to go on hike-out with AB, my friend from Tufts who I reconnected with relatively recently.
I've been having problems with my phone..it won't charge properly, so that made me wait a few extra minutes before leaving, and the phone's original charger will work extraordinary well sometimes and then just...not...work at other times, it's strange and unpredictable and frankly a little annoying, but that's how it is, gotta live with the world. I've looked it up online they say it's got to do with lints getting into charging ports, don't buy that wholly.
Walked to the Fells Reserve on foot, a pleasant 45-minute walk it is, an otherwise unpleasant mostly-uphill bikeride that would have been which is why I preferred the foot over the machine. On the way, I saw the cutest most 50's ice-cream truck which was adorable it also had one of those bell-ringing things. Is it possible now that people don't go out anymore and kids are in the houses all day long ice-cream trucks are making a comeback?
On the intersection by the brazilian place there was a minor accident involving a motorbike and a car. I thought it was no big deal...and kept walking...until I saw a police car come in...and then another, and another, and then an ambulance, and finally a firetruck.
Got to the Fells, waited by the benches at the parking lot for fifteen minutes while looking up ways to setup my own computer cluster -- not worth it it seems -- met by AG, and walked for the next two hours. Talked about family, career future plans, travel yadda yadda yadda. She kindly offered to drop me home after the walk or else it'd have been 45 minutes of walking back home after the 3 hour trip, would have been rough. Got home, talked to the bois a bit, and got ready to write. Wanted to rest for some time, so laid down on the bed.
Next thing I remember, I'm getting up at 2.30 in the morning with lights on in my room, unable to get back to sleep.
In any case, I got up at 7am, got my morning chores done, shower cleaning etcetera by 7.15, and took fifteen minutes to get ready for some reason. Out of the house on my morning walk at 7.30 ish. Went to the bike trail to trader joe's halfway there and came back, listened to the office ladies podcast on the way. Good walk felt good about myself the whole day.
Work was productive got a lot of PR's and merges yadda yadda yadda.
For lunch I heated up some of my 'kraut salad from back when oh dear I'm embarrassed to admit how old it is, but hey it's fermented and safe to eat forever and I stored it in the fridge so don't me complaining my homies. Shredded a tonne of cheese, added it to two layers of my flat breads from Aldi. Dipped it in some yogurt 'sauce' and it was yum.
Wrote a bunch of posts here and in the journal during work and the few minutes after work between work being over and getting ready to go on hike-out with AB, my friend from Tufts who I reconnected with relatively recently.
I've been having problems with my phone..it won't charge properly, so that made me wait a few extra minutes before leaving, and the phone's original charger will work extraordinary well sometimes and then just...not...work at other times, it's strange and unpredictable and frankly a little annoying, but that's how it is, gotta live with the world. I've looked it up online they say it's got to do with lints getting into charging ports, don't buy that wholly.
Walked to the Fells Reserve on foot, a pleasant 45-minute walk it is, an otherwise unpleasant mostly-uphill bikeride that would have been which is why I preferred the foot over the machine. On the way, I saw the cutest most 50's ice-cream truck which was adorable it also had one of those bell-ringing things. Is it possible now that people don't go out anymore and kids are in the houses all day long ice-cream trucks are making a comeback?
On the intersection by the brazilian place there was a minor accident involving a motorbike and a car. I thought it was no big deal...and kept walking...until I saw a police car come in...and then another, and another, and then an ambulance, and finally a firetruck.
Got to the Fells, waited by the benches at the parking lot for fifteen minutes while looking up ways to setup my own computer cluster -- not worth it it seems -- met by AG, and walked for the next two hours. Talked about family, career future plans, travel yadda yadda yadda. She kindly offered to drop me home after the walk or else it'd have been 45 minutes of walking back home after the 3 hour trip, would have been rough. Got home, talked to the bois a bit, and got ready to write. Wanted to rest for some time, so laid down on the bed.
Next thing I remember, I'm getting up at 2.30 in the morning with lights on in my room, unable to get back to sleep.
Choosing the perfect villain
Your old villain quit over creative differences, so you've put yourself in charge of hiring a new villain for your novel. What questions do you ask? What does the new villain's resume say? Write this scene as if it were a job interview.
Source
Okay now that we've put you through the wringer, so to speak, hahaha, do you have any questions for us before we pack up for the day? The recruiter should reach out to you in a couple of days, we have one or two more interviews this week and we'll be all set.
Could you tell me more about the last person in the job, and why they quit?
Sure, sure of course! So we had a classic mythological monster evil person sort of situation, you know the type, and since the novel was situated in Kathmandu, and it's also their place of origin, we thought they'd be most culturally suited for the role. They would be the most identifiable to the readers and be able to reflect the culture's concerns and uhh you know deepest fears. So that's how we started out.
As the novel grew, it evolved into a sort of piece where they were doing all the evil things to get ahead career-wise within the novel, but the marionette they had chosen to manifest themselves through, we discover they're quite bloodthirsty themselves. The...the fall guy so to speak, the human who was supposed to have been a normal guy who's put through intensely traumatic event was supposed to have bad things happen to them as a result of the stress and be forever affected. As it turned out, they began enjoying the evil tasks right through them, didn't even have the good manners to wait until the controlling master was gone before fully manifesting out that side of them. And started committed evil tasks on the side, with no prompting or guidance whatever. So from the reader's point of view, this human who they were maybe supposed to identify with turns out to be the real villain you know. Because a mythological monster you can tell by looking at them they're evil, it's expected out of them. But an innocent young man who's a loser and doesn't have much else happening... well maybe you do expect them to do...uh other evil things but not necessarily be a serial killer and murder people for fun. Which is what happened. So they turned out to become the true villain of the story. Our original mythological monster was not happy with that, not okay with living a side role and asked for a renegotiation but where we were in the story that was unlikely to work out. We asked them to wait at least until the next novel but they said they had other offers on hand and quit.
I see, so would my position be on the side, and I wouldn't be the main villain of the novel?
Great, that's another great question, you're doing great keep those coming. I can see that you're starting to see yourself in the position and care about being proactive about it. So with regards to if you would be the main villain or not, since the original person in this position quit, the story has taken a different turn. As I told you earlier, the protagonist sort of took the role of the villain. But now we still want to humanise them, sort of a flawed hero situation, and show that while humans can be evil in a boring sense of the word, the supernatural creatures around can be much more evil. SO we're thinking torture, blackmail murder of near and dear ones. A punishment of sorts for the evil acts commited, if you will. Of course, your ultimate goal will be much larger and complicated but that's where we'll be starting off from.
Okay, that's great to know, yeah since I'm just starting out in the industry was hoping to find that perfect role that takes me to the next stage and it seems like this could be it! Another queston, do you think this is going to be a one-off thing or is there a possibility of a sequel?
Excellent question! SO we are aware that this is the era of sequels. But to put resources into a sequel you have to make sure the first work is a big hit, so I'd say a lot of that depends on you and how much potential you show for future works. If we can successfully titiliate the readers and give them a taste of horror and comeuppance then I'd say at least two or three sequels following. And we could change worlds and go into the monster realm and that'd be its own thing so I could imagine a whole long arc happening. Sooo. Yeah!
Great, I've been asking you a lot of questions, and this is going to be the last one. So how do you foresee my role evolving. I ask because you mentioned the person in the earlier role and how he became more of a sympathetic and less villainous as the story evolved. DO you foresee something here too?
No, no worries these have been really revealing questions, impressive really. As I've alluded to earlier, no, this villain is not going to go mellow as things go on, rather we're thinking of just escalating things, taking them to higher demonic realms and turn this into a horror story completely. So no, that wouldn't have to be a concern.
Source
Okay now that we've put you through the wringer, so to speak, hahaha, do you have any questions for us before we pack up for the day? The recruiter should reach out to you in a couple of days, we have one or two more interviews this week and we'll be all set.
Could you tell me more about the last person in the job, and why they quit?
Sure, sure of course! So we had a classic mythological monster evil person sort of situation, you know the type, and since the novel was situated in Kathmandu, and it's also their place of origin, we thought they'd be most culturally suited for the role. They would be the most identifiable to the readers and be able to reflect the culture's concerns and uhh you know deepest fears. So that's how we started out.
As the novel grew, it evolved into a sort of piece where they were doing all the evil things to get ahead career-wise within the novel, but the marionette they had chosen to manifest themselves through, we discover they're quite bloodthirsty themselves. The...the fall guy so to speak, the human who was supposed to have been a normal guy who's put through intensely traumatic event was supposed to have bad things happen to them as a result of the stress and be forever affected. As it turned out, they began enjoying the evil tasks right through them, didn't even have the good manners to wait until the controlling master was gone before fully manifesting out that side of them. And started committed evil tasks on the side, with no prompting or guidance whatever. So from the reader's point of view, this human who they were maybe supposed to identify with turns out to be the real villain you know. Because a mythological monster you can tell by looking at them they're evil, it's expected out of them. But an innocent young man who's a loser and doesn't have much else happening... well maybe you do expect them to do...uh other evil things but not necessarily be a serial killer and murder people for fun. Which is what happened. So they turned out to become the true villain of the story. Our original mythological monster was not happy with that, not okay with living a side role and asked for a renegotiation but where we were in the story that was unlikely to work out. We asked them to wait at least until the next novel but they said they had other offers on hand and quit.
I see, so would my position be on the side, and I wouldn't be the main villain of the novel?
Great, that's another great question, you're doing great keep those coming. I can see that you're starting to see yourself in the position and care about being proactive about it. So with regards to if you would be the main villain or not, since the original person in this position quit, the story has taken a different turn. As I told you earlier, the protagonist sort of took the role of the villain. But now we still want to humanise them, sort of a flawed hero situation, and show that while humans can be evil in a boring sense of the word, the supernatural creatures around can be much more evil. SO we're thinking torture, blackmail murder of near and dear ones. A punishment of sorts for the evil acts commited, if you will. Of course, your ultimate goal will be much larger and complicated but that's where we'll be starting off from.
Okay, that's great to know, yeah since I'm just starting out in the industry was hoping to find that perfect role that takes me to the next stage and it seems like this could be it! Another queston, do you think this is going to be a one-off thing or is there a possibility of a sequel?
Excellent question! SO we are aware that this is the era of sequels. But to put resources into a sequel you have to make sure the first work is a big hit, so I'd say a lot of that depends on you and how much potential you show for future works. If we can successfully titiliate the readers and give them a taste of horror and comeuppance then I'd say at least two or three sequels following. And we could change worlds and go into the monster realm and that'd be its own thing so I could imagine a whole long arc happening. Sooo. Yeah!
Great, I've been asking you a lot of questions, and this is going to be the last one. So how do you foresee my role evolving. I ask because you mentioned the person in the earlier role and how he became more of a sympathetic and less villainous as the story evolved. DO you foresee something here too?
No, no worries these have been really revealing questions, impressive really. As I've alluded to earlier, no, this villain is not going to go mellow as things go on, rather we're thinking of just escalating things, taking them to higher demonic realms and turn this into a horror story completely. So no, that wouldn't have to be a concern.
Lights out
Too much pressure, yesterday was tiring due to several hours of intense walking and strange sleeping patterns today was a tiring day gloomy sad cold pathetic depressing, didn't leave the house all day long it's almost eight now need to go on a walk at least if only for half an hour. More importantly, here's the fact that we don't want to admit: the kitchen fuse is gone, blown, kaput, vaporised, burned. No more fridge for the rest of the day possibly parts of week, no more toasts no more microwaved goods we have to live like what animals now how will we even survive. What will we do how will we make it.
Last winter I was all set on buying full-spectrum light for the room to a avoid the gloomies winters get me the gloomies always unyieldingly I'd figured out a weapon against them I thought. Didn't have to last year because spent December with TD, january was mostly at friends houses bidding farewell, February gone, March was barely spent in Boston and straight in July as summer was about to end! Summer was ending! And now it's almost the next winter. It's been rainy once awhile, cloudy unexpectedly sad so cold annoying to plan clothing-wise because you put in heavy clothes to avoid getting cold and it gets sweaty and uncomfortable, you pretend nothing's up and it's freezing outside. Shut the windows for right now, it's bound to get worse.
The election's in everyone's mind right now there is complete acceptance of the possibility that things may go the right way and half of this fucking country would rather be enmeshed in delusion and lies than to admit they are in the wrong that they need to change their lifestyles and beliefs and shitty attitudes towards literally everything else. The meek defense -- that this is not how they are, they are being manipulated by external forces, that they are being taken advantage of -- doesn't hold true anymore, you can lie only upto a point and that point is way way behind us, we're past the horizon. It's out in the open all naked and we've seen what people are capable of we've seen the values and beliefs they hold dear to themselves and what they prioritize and what they don't and everyone knows, America got lucky very lucky and is quickly running out of luck. People want to shut their eyes and years and shout out loud pretending it's not happening pretending this is normal and things are going to revert to the mean after the one-off strangeness. It's not going to happen, this is the future this is the past and this is the present. This is what this country has been it's been exposed now the festering nasty infection no one wanted to admit was there and it's awkward. It's awkward we smelt it we felt it but they wouldn't listen they would deny, external this is not me maybe the dry-cleaners maybe this maybe that, no I feel fine really don't accuse me of anything I haven't done anything bad. Americans screwed it up real bad, for the whole world and there's no going back ever. Once the trust is gone it's never coming back. The world has changed permanently. They'll complain and shout and moan and even threaten with their guns, nothing's changing. It's all over.
Last winter I was all set on buying full-spectrum light for the room to a avoid the gloomies winters get me the gloomies always unyieldingly I'd figured out a weapon against them I thought. Didn't have to last year because spent December with TD, january was mostly at friends houses bidding farewell, February gone, March was barely spent in Boston and straight in July as summer was about to end! Summer was ending! And now it's almost the next winter. It's been rainy once awhile, cloudy unexpectedly sad so cold annoying to plan clothing-wise because you put in heavy clothes to avoid getting cold and it gets sweaty and uncomfortable, you pretend nothing's up and it's freezing outside. Shut the windows for right now, it's bound to get worse.
The election's in everyone's mind right now there is complete acceptance of the possibility that things may go the right way and half of this fucking country would rather be enmeshed in delusion and lies than to admit they are in the wrong that they need to change their lifestyles and beliefs and shitty attitudes towards literally everything else. The meek defense -- that this is not how they are, they are being manipulated by external forces, that they are being taken advantage of -- doesn't hold true anymore, you can lie only upto a point and that point is way way behind us, we're past the horizon. It's out in the open all naked and we've seen what people are capable of we've seen the values and beliefs they hold dear to themselves and what they prioritize and what they don't and everyone knows, America got lucky very lucky and is quickly running out of luck. People want to shut their eyes and years and shout out loud pretending it's not happening pretending this is normal and things are going to revert to the mean after the one-off strangeness. It's not going to happen, this is the future this is the past and this is the present. This is what this country has been it's been exposed now the festering nasty infection no one wanted to admit was there and it's awkward. It's awkward we smelt it we felt it but they wouldn't listen they would deny, external this is not me maybe the dry-cleaners maybe this maybe that, no I feel fine really don't accuse me of anything I haven't done anything bad. Americans screwed it up real bad, for the whole world and there's no going back ever. Once the trust is gone it's never coming back. The world has changed permanently. They'll complain and shout and moan and even threaten with their guns, nothing's changing. It's all over.
चुत्था साला देशबासी
चुत्थो नै हुँदो हो देश त
मर्ला नि देशभक्ति नि
चुस्ने नै हुँदा हुन् राजाहरु
भाग्दा नै हवून् रंक पनि
लाज साज जब उड्यो आकाशमा
चरासरी
घरभरी रुवाबस्सी अनि ख्वांकख्वांकती
अनि ब्यस्त हाम्रा हांकुवा
गोजी भर्न दिन-रातभरी
तब के गरुम् र ख्वै
अँधेरमा भक्कानिंदै भागाभाग
कस्को दोष हो र ख्वै
दरिद्र नेता मात्र होइनन् र हवई
माथी जसले पुर्यायो तेस्को थाप्लोमा
भाग्य को टीका लगाई
लालसलाम
अनि सलाम् नमस्ते भाई
म चैं लागे, आउंदै गर्नु
सहने जति सहनु अनि
जोत्तिन तात्तिन सुध्रिन घिसृन पिल्सीन भुट्टीन लुट्टीन ठग्गीन
आऊ, जसरी भएपनि...
नियम कानुन सरकार देख्न
बुझ्न सिक्न
के छ र फर्किन लाइ
कि त ठग्न कि त ठग्गिन
फर्कने त कालो बाकस मै हो
चुत्थो नै रैछ हौ देश, चुत्था साला देशबासी
मर्ला नि देशभक्ति नि
चुस्ने नै हुँदा हुन् राजाहरु
भाग्दा नै हवून् रंक पनि
लाज साज जब उड्यो आकाशमा
चरासरी
घरभरी रुवाबस्सी अनि ख्वांकख्वांकती
अनि ब्यस्त हाम्रा हांकुवा
गोजी भर्न दिन-रातभरी
तब के गरुम् र ख्वै
अँधेरमा भक्कानिंदै भागाभाग
कस्को दोष हो र ख्वै
दरिद्र नेता मात्र होइनन् र हवई
माथी जसले पुर्यायो तेस्को थाप्लोमा
भाग्य को टीका लगाई
लालसलाम
अनि सलाम् नमस्ते भाई
म चैं लागे, आउंदै गर्नु
सहने जति सहनु अनि
जोत्तिन तात्तिन सुध्रिन घिसृन पिल्सीन भुट्टीन लुट्टीन ठग्गीन
आऊ, जसरी भएपनि...
नियम कानुन सरकार देख्न
बुझ्न सिक्न
के छ र फर्किन लाइ
कि त ठग्न कि त ठग्गिन
फर्कने त कालो बाकस मै हो
चुत्थो नै रैछ हौ देश, चुत्था साला देशबासी
On Tenoch
Tenoch is a Mexican place in and around Boston, three brick-and-mortar outlets and a couple of food trucks, known most significantly for their mexican-style sandwiches called Tortas. For someone who doesn't know what Tortas are I can describe them in one word: heaven.
Nice thick bread fried in butter slathered all over, thick creamy delicious bean paste spread thickly inside the cloud-soft buns, and all the tasty meats and veggies inside. Heaven! When you bite into one of those, all that spiced butter comes out oozing in your mouth. Damn.
I've never had a disappointing experience in the place, ever. Maybe once or two times I've had a 'normal' experience out of the dozens of times I've been but every other time it's exceeded the already high expectation. At the fear of repeating myself, it's heaven!
I went there a few weeks ago, tried the chichharron for one last time, it used to be my favorite. Mightily disappointed with the meat. It could have been a particularly bad day there, or that I haven't had meat in a long while and I'm so over it, but that was such a bleh. And their chips and avocado, so very bleh. They didn't even put a napkin in the takeout bag.
Back in normal times Tenoch was the only food truck I went out to eat lunch for -- otherwise it was homemade meals or something close by for me. I've never gone wrong with them. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say it's one of my favourite places of its kind.
Nice thick bread fried in butter slathered all over, thick creamy delicious bean paste spread thickly inside the cloud-soft buns, and all the tasty meats and veggies inside. Heaven! When you bite into one of those, all that spiced butter comes out oozing in your mouth. Damn.
I've never had a disappointing experience in the place, ever. Maybe once or two times I've had a 'normal' experience out of the dozens of times I've been but every other time it's exceeded the already high expectation. At the fear of repeating myself, it's heaven!
I went there a few weeks ago, tried the chichharron for one last time, it used to be my favorite. Mightily disappointed with the meat. It could have been a particularly bad day there, or that I haven't had meat in a long while and I'm so over it, but that was such a bleh. And their chips and avocado, so very bleh. They didn't even put a napkin in the takeout bag.
Back in normal times Tenoch was the only food truck I went out to eat lunch for -- otherwise it was homemade meals or something close by for me. I've never gone wrong with them. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say it's one of my favourite places of its kind.
Improved habits, productive workplace equals productive workday, evening walk and semifinal hustle [Tue 25]
Woke up early, didn't exactly go out on a my morning walk but might as well have...did morning chores and got in the mindset of proper order etcetera. Also wrote a couple of posts here.
Work was quite productive, big meeting with our director first thing in the morning. Did the rest of the project work throughout the course of the day. Had bob's red mill oats with peanut butter freeze-dried strawberries, cranberries nuts and a little bit of added sugar. It was yum and not as overwhelming as I've found in the past.
Over lunch I set up my workstation, I talk about that in one of the previous posts. Basically set my screen and keyboard, get my work laptop to be on level with my eyes. Almost set it up for standing up, realized there'd be no good place for resting my hands and the trackpad situation wouldn't work so it was back to sitting thing. Still don't have a good way figured out to rest my hands as I write this I'm thinking of putting couple of more books on my table.
Work between lunch to workday end was productive, got my work journal written, planned for work blog, and thought of points to write up a 'package' aka documentation of all the work I've done to make a point for my promotion.
Chilled a bit after work, the heat was oppressive. Had rice-sauerkraut-cheese wrap for early dinner. It was damn filling and didn't taste half as bad now that I'm not eating it two meals every day. Probably one more meal and I'm freaking finally done with that.
Went on a walk to porter square at the worldfamous pharmacy, my bluetooth earbuds ran out of battery right as I went in. Bought some supplies I needed using the same trick I've been using the last few days. There's one more opportunity for me to use it, thinking of a good usecase for it.
Got back, cleaned up the room a bit, talked to roommates for about an hour or so, went into my room as roommate PK started watching the RNC convention, did a bunch of research on upcoming projects. Wrote a couple of posts for here. Wanted to get to bed early so getting up in the morning would be easier... in bed at 11.30, must have slept not that long after midnight. If I can pull this on to 10.30, I can definitely get up at 6am, which would give me 3 hours before work. What an incredible thing that'd be, I could do an hourlong walk, write three maybe four posts and get nice workouts done all before starting work in the morning!
Work was quite productive, big meeting with our director first thing in the morning. Did the rest of the project work throughout the course of the day. Had bob's red mill oats with peanut butter freeze-dried strawberries, cranberries nuts and a little bit of added sugar. It was yum and not as overwhelming as I've found in the past.
Over lunch I set up my workstation, I talk about that in one of the previous posts. Basically set my screen and keyboard, get my work laptop to be on level with my eyes. Almost set it up for standing up, realized there'd be no good place for resting my hands and the trackpad situation wouldn't work so it was back to sitting thing. Still don't have a good way figured out to rest my hands as I write this I'm thinking of putting couple of more books on my table.
Work between lunch to workday end was productive, got my work journal written, planned for work blog, and thought of points to write up a 'package' aka documentation of all the work I've done to make a point for my promotion.
Chilled a bit after work, the heat was oppressive. Had rice-sauerkraut-cheese wrap for early dinner. It was damn filling and didn't taste half as bad now that I'm not eating it two meals every day. Probably one more meal and I'm freaking finally done with that.
Went on a walk to porter square at the worldfamous pharmacy, my bluetooth earbuds ran out of battery right as I went in. Bought some supplies I needed using the same trick I've been using the last few days. There's one more opportunity for me to use it, thinking of a good usecase for it.
Got back, cleaned up the room a bit, talked to roommates for about an hour or so, went into my room as roommate PK started watching the RNC convention, did a bunch of research on upcoming projects. Wrote a couple of posts for here. Wanted to get to bed early so getting up in the morning would be easier... in bed at 11.30, must have slept not that long after midnight. If I can pull this on to 10.30, I can definitely get up at 6am, which would give me 3 hours before work. What an incredible thing that'd be, I could do an hourlong walk, write three maybe four posts and get nice workouts done all before starting work in the morning!
Securing the nomination
A knock on your door reveals a stranger who hands you their business card, claiming they are The Lesser of Two Evils. Write a scene or story that reveals what happens next.
Source
Mandip opened the door. Outside was a man several incles taller than him, wearing a bowler hat and dark shades. He had dark suit and trousers on, and a bluetooth dongle attached to his left ear. He looked like a character straight out of Men In Black.
'Is your name Mandip...Thapa,' he asked, checking at a business card on his hand.
"Yes, yes it's me, I'm Mandip Thapa. Yes, what can I do for you," Mandip said. What was this about the strange man and his chewing gum he didn't have any package or suit and clearly couldn't conceal a weapon anywhere, if he had to he could definitely take on this man, all those years of taking Karate classes would finally pay off. A quick jab or a kick at the man's neck, he'd run back bolt the door run upstairs call the police and everyone else he knew. As long as the man didn't have a machine gun or a rifle, his neighbors could come help him without fearing for his life. He would go on the window and shout for help until the police arrived.
The man in dark suit handed Mandip the business card.
"Yee... yeahh, how can I help you?, " Mandip said without looking at the card.
The man forwarded his right hand at Mandip's reluctant hand. His shake was tight and confident, Mandip's felt as if he angling for the quickest disentanglement and escape.
"I'm the Lesser of Two Evils", he said in a monotone.
"Ohh yeahh...uhhh... that's...just how...can...I", Mandip said mumbling through the words. He looked at the business card, it said "Lesser of Two Evils".
Silence.
Mandip scrounged up the courage finally. "What can I do for you," he said.
"You have a choice to make, and I'm here to tell you that it's not as difficult as you're making it out to be. Make the choice that's less bad for you, the uhh lesser of the two evils. I am here to support you for it, " he said.
"Is this about the... nomination...or something...else?" Mandip said, his voice trailing off at the end.
"The nomination. One choice will have you make less than ideal compromise but you can negotiate later and improve your standing as you prove yourself. The other choice will give you a minor win in the short term but youre going to be compromising on all your ideals and values, disappointing the people who've backed you and trusted you. And all for what, for an uncertain seat that if you do somehow win, what will you do with all by yourself. It's fun to climb mountains, but remember you're going to be there all alone at the peak, in that thin air. You'll have trouble breathing up there Mandip ji, and your well-wishers won't be there with you to help you out", he said in a matter-of-fact way.
Source
Mandip opened the door. Outside was a man several incles taller than him, wearing a bowler hat and dark shades. He had dark suit and trousers on, and a bluetooth dongle attached to his left ear. He looked like a character straight out of Men In Black.
'Is your name Mandip...Thapa,' he asked, checking at a business card on his hand.
"Yes, yes it's me, I'm Mandip Thapa. Yes, what can I do for you," Mandip said. What was this about the strange man and his chewing gum he didn't have any package or suit and clearly couldn't conceal a weapon anywhere, if he had to he could definitely take on this man, all those years of taking Karate classes would finally pay off. A quick jab or a kick at the man's neck, he'd run back bolt the door run upstairs call the police and everyone else he knew. As long as the man didn't have a machine gun or a rifle, his neighbors could come help him without fearing for his life. He would go on the window and shout for help until the police arrived.
The man in dark suit handed Mandip the business card.
"Yee... yeahh, how can I help you?, " Mandip said without looking at the card.
The man forwarded his right hand at Mandip's reluctant hand. His shake was tight and confident, Mandip's felt as if he angling for the quickest disentanglement and escape.
"I'm the Lesser of Two Evils", he said in a monotone.
"Ohh yeahh...uhhh... that's...just how...can...I", Mandip said mumbling through the words. He looked at the business card, it said "Lesser of Two Evils".
Silence.
Mandip scrounged up the courage finally. "What can I do for you," he said.
"You have a choice to make, and I'm here to tell you that it's not as difficult as you're making it out to be. Make the choice that's less bad for you, the uhh lesser of the two evils. I am here to support you for it, " he said.
"Is this about the... nomination...or something...else?" Mandip said, his voice trailing off at the end.
"The nomination. One choice will have you make less than ideal compromise but you can negotiate later and improve your standing as you prove yourself. The other choice will give you a minor win in the short term but youre going to be compromising on all your ideals and values, disappointing the people who've backed you and trusted you. And all for what, for an uncertain seat that if you do somehow win, what will you do with all by yourself. It's fun to climb mountains, but remember you're going to be there all alone at the peak, in that thin air. You'll have trouble breathing up there Mandip ji, and your well-wishers won't be there with you to help you out", he said in a matter-of-fact way.
On losing Keys: lost and found, in the same place
I hadn't lost a key in a decade. I lost things all the time and in college stopped doing that. Yeah there was one time I lost my bag with my passport, and then the time I got robbed in Ghana but that was it, for a really long time. Never lost small things or even misplaced them. Because of my bad history with losing things I was very careful about remembering the proper location for things and not letting them go anywhere else.
So I was in great agony last week when I lost my pair of keys. They were inside the house for I used them to enter the apartment, and they were in my room, that much I knew but besides that no clue. I searched everywhere to no avail. I was angry disappointed at myself. Didn't go out for several days for the shame of having to borrow keys. Yesterday I borrowed roommate PK's keys and got a copy made at an absurdly inflated price from a vending machine at the nearest 7-11. I was desperate.
When I went to bed last night I heard my (new) keys fall down from under my pillows. I wished hoped that it was the fate met by the previous pairs of keys too. This morning I was eager to discover my new keys hanging around with their old friends. Alas it was not to be and they were there lonely and sad.
A little earlier today, after I got back from my evening walk I put the keys on top of my dresser on a pile of books I evicted from my desk in favor of the new screen. I saw the keys fall down into the chasm between various piles of books. Didn't give it much thought then. Later wanted to make sure the keys were there and checked in and guess what, my old pair was right there chilling. So I've found my old pair after wasting an embarrassing amount of money for a single bit of key in one of those startuppy machine that's taking keysmiths out of business. I'm mad, at myself at the world and the economic system that empowers those with capital to infinitely leverage themselves into infinite wealth as the rest of us beggar and serve them. And the system of governance that not only allows for that but actually protects and nourishes those forces. It's a fucking kleptocracy that's what it is.
Anyway, I'm happy the keys are found. And that's not even the entire story, I'm hiding key details -- hur hur hur -- from here out of embarrassment and will reveal as things become clearer going forward..
So I was in great agony last week when I lost my pair of keys. They were inside the house for I used them to enter the apartment, and they were in my room, that much I knew but besides that no clue. I searched everywhere to no avail. I was angry disappointed at myself. Didn't go out for several days for the shame of having to borrow keys. Yesterday I borrowed roommate PK's keys and got a copy made at an absurdly inflated price from a vending machine at the nearest 7-11. I was desperate.
When I went to bed last night I heard my (new) keys fall down from under my pillows. I wished hoped that it was the fate met by the previous pairs of keys too. This morning I was eager to discover my new keys hanging around with their old friends. Alas it was not to be and they were there lonely and sad.
A little earlier today, after I got back from my evening walk I put the keys on top of my dresser on a pile of books I evicted from my desk in favor of the new screen. I saw the keys fall down into the chasm between various piles of books. Didn't give it much thought then. Later wanted to make sure the keys were there and checked in and guess what, my old pair was right there chilling. So I've found my old pair after wasting an embarrassing amount of money for a single bit of key in one of those startuppy machine that's taking keysmiths out of business. I'm mad, at myself at the world and the economic system that empowers those with capital to infinitely leverage themselves into infinite wealth as the rest of us beggar and serve them. And the system of governance that not only allows for that but actually protects and nourishes those forces. It's a fucking kleptocracy that's what it is.
Anyway, I'm happy the keys are found. And that's not even the entire story, I'm hiding key details -- hur hur hur -- from here out of embarrassment and will reveal as things become clearer going forward..
Workstation set up finally
I ordered a nice screen and a mac keyboard from me from work a few weeks ago. We eyes and wrist were hurting due to improper sitting it was just not working. They came in last week I had been lazing around all this time waiting to install. The combination of procrastination and boredom finally hit the spot today and I got the setup running during lunch today. There's still a usb hub that needs to get here -- I ordered it out of pocket because I've made work waste too much money already -- so after that I'm in the full workmode.
To check how things would be I setup my laptop atop a mountain of books and tried standing up during work... an improvised standing desk of sorts. The problem with that was, there's no space for my hands to rest as I type so it's weird. Even after my keyboard is here the Mac magicmouse is still missing, so I can't swipe around or change windows, so I'll still have to use the mac touchpad to move the pointer. It's not perfect yet, getting there.
My productivity is going to go up, for sure. It's a question of for how long and if it'll last.
To check how things would be I setup my laptop atop a mountain of books and tried standing up during work... an improvised standing desk of sorts. The problem with that was, there's no space for my hands to rest as I type so it's weird. Even after my keyboard is here the Mac magicmouse is still missing, so I can't swipe around or change windows, so I'll still have to use the mac touchpad to move the pointer. It's not perfect yet, getting there.
My productivity is going to go up, for sure. It's a question of for how long and if it'll last.
Houseguest
Grocery list v1
Things to shop at aldi
-2 dozen- 4 dozen eggs
a large turkey
6 pounds of tomatoes
5 5lb bags of potatoes
3 20lb lags of rice
-2- 4 loaves of cheapest bread
50lb bag of flour
2lb block of butter
2lb of mushroom
green veggies
-4- scented candles, make that 6
4 room freshners
all the mac-n-cheese boxes
4 gallons of milk
Grocery list v2
Things to shop at -aldi- Whole Foods
-2 dozen- -4 dozen eggs- 18 eggs
-a large turkey- organic free-range chicken
-6 pounds of tomatoes- 2lb tomato
-5 5lb bags of potatoes- 5lb bag of organic russet potatoes
-3 20lb lags of rice- 20lb bag of organic latest year basmati rice
-2- -4 loaves of cheapest bread- 2 loaves of 7-grain bread, 1 italian bread
-50lb bag of flour- 10lb bag of Finely Milled King Arthur Organic Wheat flour
-2lb block of butter- small box of Kerrygold butter
-2lb of mushroom- 1lb Shiitake Mushroom
green veggies
-4- -scented candles, make that 6- 2 nice scented candles, 1 sandlewood
-4 room freshners- we don't need them
-all the mac-n-cheese boxes- 2 boxes of Anne's mac n' cheese, for me
-4 gallons of milk- 1 gallon A2 organic whole milk
4 bars of ghirardelli chocolates, 80% dark
1 tin of Danish cookies
a little bit of compassion and kindness for your loving mother-in-law, the doting favourite gramma of your kids
Things to shop at aldi
a large turkey
6 pounds of tomatoes
5 5lb bags of potatoes
3 20lb lags of rice
50lb bag of flour
2lb block of butter
2lb of mushroom
green veggies
4 room freshners
all the mac-n-cheese boxes
4 gallons of milk
Grocery list v2
Things to shop at
green veggies
4 bars of ghirardelli chocolates, 80% dark
1 tin of Danish cookies
a little bit of compassion and kindness for your loving mother-in-law, the doting favourite gramma of your kids
A pecker of woods, 7-11 trip, CVS hustle [Mon 24]
I write this at 2.40 of the next day. The title got written at 8am, and then I sort of zoned out, got busy with everything else. Things are looking good, more organized. Got a nice screen in my workstation need a mouse too and I'm all set!
Got up early in the morning, trying to live up by my new rules now, didn't go out on a walk but spent the time productively otherwise writing right after getting up. Work was very very productive, I zone out here and there but it's been good recently. In addition to my super-duper secret journal, I've been considering adding a 'work blog'.
Had too much of peanut-butter cookies and nuts to eat proper lunch. Did have a muffin for breakfast because no one else is helping me get rid of it and I'm a little mad. It's not great, they've used crappy fat and it shows but wasting food is uh shitty gotta finish that muffin eventually. Zoned out over lunch, nothing good came of it. Should plan lunch walks to freshen up in the middle of the day.
Wrote in my personal journal, wrote here and checked out a bunch of youtube videos at the end of the work-day. Intended to go out on a walk right after working but things were traspiring so let things settle down for a bit. Got quite busy chatting with people on snapchat too, I'm starting several writing groups because the ones I've been a part of are all dead.
At 6-ish asked to borrow keys from PK because I lost my second set of keys over a matter of two weeks -- hadn't lost a key in a decade almost before this -- inside the house. Walked over to 7-11, without my phone. Saw a cool and colorful little woodpecker pecking a hole into a tree on my way, spent a considerable time looking at gazing at that. At 7-11, used their expensive keymaking machine to get myself a copy of the houskey -- had a copy of the apartment one from way before. Saw they had a deal on the pizzas, 2-for-2 and got those for 'dinner'. I should be ashamed but am not really. Who cares it tastes good and I eat 'em once every couple of month anyway.
Just realized the whole bulk of this post I'd already written at 8am just forgot to post, so continuing from here at 3pm almost. The beginning might look a little weird with two starts because that's how it came to be about. Live with it.
After getting my keys, collected my phone since it was charged, walked up to cvs, spent half hour on searching for things I needed. Ended up getting micropore tape and a packet of epsom salt -- don't need it and don't know what to do with it, hopefully I can figure out a good use. Used their membership thing to get a discount, paid fifty cents. Cancelled it immediately, walked back, got my goodies took a bunch of photos of them, showed them to all my friends through viber. Read a little, wrote a lot, organized the posts, and went to bed at 12. Slept maybe in twenty minutes.
Got up early in the morning, trying to live up by my new rules now, didn't go out on a walk but spent the time productively otherwise writing right after getting up. Work was very very productive, I zone out here and there but it's been good recently. In addition to my super-duper secret journal, I've been considering adding a 'work blog'.
Had too much of peanut-butter cookies and nuts to eat proper lunch. Did have a muffin for breakfast because no one else is helping me get rid of it and I'm a little mad. It's not great, they've used crappy fat and it shows but wasting food is uh shitty gotta finish that muffin eventually. Zoned out over lunch, nothing good came of it. Should plan lunch walks to freshen up in the middle of the day.
Wrote in my personal journal, wrote here and checked out a bunch of youtube videos at the end of the work-day. Intended to go out on a walk right after working but things were traspiring so let things settle down for a bit. Got quite busy chatting with people on snapchat too, I'm starting several writing groups because the ones I've been a part of are all dead.
At 6-ish asked to borrow keys from PK because I lost my second set of keys over a matter of two weeks -- hadn't lost a key in a decade almost before this -- inside the house. Walked over to 7-11, without my phone. Saw a cool and colorful little woodpecker pecking a hole into a tree on my way, spent a considerable time looking at gazing at that. At 7-11, used their expensive keymaking machine to get myself a copy of the houskey -- had a copy of the apartment one from way before. Saw they had a deal on the pizzas, 2-for-2 and got those for 'dinner'. I should be ashamed but am not really. Who cares it tastes good and I eat 'em once every couple of month anyway.
Just realized the whole bulk of this post I'd already written at 8am just forgot to post, so continuing from here at 3pm almost. The beginning might look a little weird with two starts because that's how it came to be about. Live with it.
After getting my keys, collected my phone since it was charged, walked up to cvs, spent half hour on searching for things I needed. Ended up getting micropore tape and a packet of epsom salt -- don't need it and don't know what to do with it, hopefully I can figure out a good use. Used their membership thing to get a discount, paid fifty cents. Cancelled it immediately, walked back, got my goodies took a bunch of photos of them, showed them to all my friends through viber. Read a little, wrote a lot, organized the posts, and went to bed at 12. Slept maybe in twenty minutes.
More organization coming here to the ole' blog
Observant reader [singular, because it's just you] will notice a few new changes in the blog. Most noticeably, on the lower right side of the page below the archives in the sidebar I've added a few links recently. It's been mostly for my reference so I can follow proper patterns, but now I've added a link to labels pages. I've been tagging some of my posts for the last year, particularly those under the 'On' label, and now I've unified them all under a single page. The idea is to create pages around a certain thought or 'thing', and keep updating them over the years, so it's an archive of how my thoughts on certain topics are evolving. Will eventually get around to tagging story threads also, so you can go to all the disparate pieces of what in my mind is one large piece from a single point. Finally, my long-term plan is to tag all the posts going forward, so you can filter out by the topic out interest. If these organizational posts are boring, you can just read the numbered lists as I know you do.
This is good stuff, it'll allow me to compartmentalize how I think about writing here. And let me organize my thoughts better. Better organization means better idea of what I'll be writing about which means better flow of ideas and that means better reads.
Or so I hope. It could go either way. Knowing myself it might actually make my writing even crapper as if that's even possible. Ah well.
This is good stuff, it'll allow me to compartmentalize how I think about writing here. And let me organize my thoughts better. Better organization means better idea of what I'll be writing about which means better flow of ideas and that means better reads.
Or so I hope. It could go either way. Knowing myself it might actually make my writing even crapper as if that's even possible. Ah well.
On Couponing
8/24/2020
This will be short because I'm not into couponing it seems to me to be a hobby of more financially limited and desperate individuals. I have however found a way to save a not significant amount of money on small purchases from a major pharmacy, which I have always considered to be absurdly expensive. So absurdly expensive, in fact that even a twenty, thirty percent discount from those outlets end up being more expensive than regular sale prices at major stores like walmart, or even target which isn't specially known for being very cheap.
With the discounts and couponing, the prices become a lot more reasonable, attractive aggressively actually, so that's something work looking forward to. It's not the moneysaving that excites me but the act of 'hacking' the system while buying something. Which is the point of couponing from the retailer's point: to make their customers have 'fun' while shopping there, convince them they are getting an absurdly good deal they shouldn't be telling anyone else about because what if they find it and it no longer exists.
I can safely say the deal I've discovered is better than those, though alas it won't last for a long time and the total amount I can make use from this is not that much. Still it was fun while it lasted and I got a bunch of supplies for my ongoing hobbies for what could.
More on this in the future.
This will be short because I'm not into couponing it seems to me to be a hobby of more financially limited and desperate individuals. I have however found a way to save a not significant amount of money on small purchases from a major pharmacy, which I have always considered to be absurdly expensive. So absurdly expensive, in fact that even a twenty, thirty percent discount from those outlets end up being more expensive than regular sale prices at major stores like walmart, or even target which isn't specially known for being very cheap.
With the discounts and couponing, the prices become a lot more reasonable, attractive aggressively actually, so that's something work looking forward to. It's not the moneysaving that excites me but the act of 'hacking' the system while buying something. Which is the point of couponing from the retailer's point: to make their customers have 'fun' while shopping there, convince them they are getting an absurdly good deal they shouldn't be telling anyone else about because what if they find it and it no longer exists.
I can safely say the deal I've discovered is better than those, though alas it won't last for a long time and the total amount I can make use from this is not that much. Still it was fun while it lasted and I got a bunch of supplies for my ongoing hobbies for what could.
More on this in the future.
Recipe: How to make a perfect hard-boiled egg
Boil water in a pot until it's seriouly bubbling, keep it covered. Add a little salt to it. As you look at the bubbling pot of water ponder all the decisions you have made in your life, the fights you've found yourself in, the people you've angered disappointed and cheated on. What's this life about if not for enraging things, justling particles together with energy until they're so excited they want to escape the countainer with the ferocity of a lion escaping its cage after it's been forced to wear a tutu and dance a ballet at a popular new york city dance production.
Turn of the heat after the water starts to violently boil. Perhaps that's a metaphor for life, if things start boiling too violently it's not a good idea to add heat to the mixture but rather take it away and let the situation cool. Talk to the parties, make them understand each other like the pot gets to know the water, and the water salt. How the saline mixture will work to heat up the eggs you will be putting but in the meanwhile cool itself up. Look at the positive side of things. When people get together sure they can froth each other up and just increase in anger, but some of that can be absorbed by cooler parties, decreasing the average head level of the system as a whole.
Put two eggs you took out of the fridge when you started boiling water into the pot. Right, I didn't tell you to take the eggs out of the fridge in the step for boiling water. That was to encourage you to read the entire recipe in one reading so you get a good sense, how you know what to anticipate. Besides, use your common sense you put an egg that's coming right out of your cold fridge straight into a pot of boiling water there's a good chance it's going to break due to thermal shock. Besides it would take one hell of an eternity to took the eggs through since now they need to be warmed up from a lower temperature and the water ain't getting any extra heat. That's another life lesson: anticipate what is to come in the life and generally put it in the back of your head...sure you're taking the cooking steps one at a time, but doesn't mean you have to go in blind with no clue of wht's about to happen.
Let the eggs sit in the water ten minutes covered, maybe twelve. Run cold water from the tap over the eggs and the pot, and peel. Think about meditating or yoga, some sort of workout because it's tought time for everyone and putting your bum down, going for groceries to your lab once in a while is not going to cut it. There needs to be more physical and mental exercise for the peace of mind and body. Consider meditation and yoga the cold water of your life, that's going to stop the garglingwargling and all the heat of the anger inside you and will lead you to be peeled -- that is, shed your outer harder shell and expose your softer more understanding tasty good to look at friendly, useful side to the world.
Your eggs will have boiled perfectly, a little wet in the center but fully cooked and solid. Dip it in salt and chilly powder and enjoy. Or in an egg sandwich. Or the other million ways to consume a boiled egg.
Really, all the lessons of life can be found in cooking eggs.
Turn of the heat after the water starts to violently boil. Perhaps that's a metaphor for life, if things start boiling too violently it's not a good idea to add heat to the mixture but rather take it away and let the situation cool. Talk to the parties, make them understand each other like the pot gets to know the water, and the water salt. How the saline mixture will work to heat up the eggs you will be putting but in the meanwhile cool itself up. Look at the positive side of things. When people get together sure they can froth each other up and just increase in anger, but some of that can be absorbed by cooler parties, decreasing the average head level of the system as a whole.
Put two eggs you took out of the fridge when you started boiling water into the pot. Right, I didn't tell you to take the eggs out of the fridge in the step for boiling water. That was to encourage you to read the entire recipe in one reading so you get a good sense, how you know what to anticipate. Besides, use your common sense you put an egg that's coming right out of your cold fridge straight into a pot of boiling water there's a good chance it's going to break due to thermal shock. Besides it would take one hell of an eternity to took the eggs through since now they need to be warmed up from a lower temperature and the water ain't getting any extra heat. That's another life lesson: anticipate what is to come in the life and generally put it in the back of your head...sure you're taking the cooking steps one at a time, but doesn't mean you have to go in blind with no clue of wht's about to happen.
Let the eggs sit in the water ten minutes covered, maybe twelve. Run cold water from the tap over the eggs and the pot, and peel. Think about meditating or yoga, some sort of workout because it's tought time for everyone and putting your bum down, going for groceries to your lab once in a while is not going to cut it. There needs to be more physical and mental exercise for the peace of mind and body. Consider meditation and yoga the cold water of your life, that's going to stop the garglingwargling and all the heat of the anger inside you and will lead you to be peeled -- that is, shed your outer harder shell and expose your softer more understanding tasty good to look at friendly, useful side to the world.
Your eggs will have boiled perfectly, a little wet in the center but fully cooked and solid. Dip it in salt and chilly powder and enjoy. Or in an egg sandwich. Or the other million ways to consume a boiled egg.
Really, all the lessons of life can be found in cooking eggs.
Early day, replanned hike, nursery trip, beach, hurricane and rest finally [Sun 23]
Regular readers of the blog will remember that friend V is an early bird and likes to start plans for everyone early in the day.
We had planned to leave at 7am, got up at 6.40, woke up ND and called V who informed me he was getting close to my house. Hurried up and packed, dressed up for the hike, and when I got out of the house at 7.05 everyone had already socialized and ready for the hike.
ND and I got into V's car. He had come with his jahaan S so it was the four of us, while in the other car were NS and her jahaan AB. Plus the smallest cutest dog in the world -- and I'm really wondering here if I should use initials for the dog here, because if someone were to unravel my identity in these posts the initials wouldn't be protecting me at all or anyone else for that matter but giving away the cute doggo's full name while withholding everyone else's does seem to be a bit unfair -- M! Who is SO unbelievably full of energy.
We stopped by at Market Basket to get breakfast and supplies for the hike. I got two bottles of seltzer, doritos, wachusett chips, carrots cucumbers tomatoes peanut butter crackers and muffins. Everyone else got reasonable breakfast items like egg and turkey sandwich and coffee etcetera. I'm not a big fan of muffins generally, specially in the morning the sweet is a bit much but heck we'd be walking all day long so why not!
After a little confusion caused by lack of cellphone signal in rural new hampshire we got to our destination the Mt. Monandock state park parking lot and realized we messed up real good for they were registrations only and we didn't make any. It was my fault partially since I looked it up and saw online they needed reservations assumed it was only for parking and not entrance into the park. The nice rangers forwarded us to a nearby park at Miller State park.
After covering ourselves with bug repellents and using their surprisingly pleasant hole toilets we began our walk at 10am. The original plan was for 9, but the shopping trip and the redirection delayed us by an our. Wasn't too bad.
The first twenty minutes of the hike are intense unending uphill climb which scared the bejeesus out of all of us but it got easier. And folks started taking it easier too, it was less of a hike and more of a stroll up a mountain really we rested at ten different places conservatively our pace was relaxed and what would take maybe fourty-five minutes of serious hiking for me, and I'm not a very good hiker, took us a good hour-and-half maybe two hours. We were at the peak, where we ate our carrots and cucumbers and tomatoes and doritos and the nuts NS had brought. We found out dog M doesn't like carrots or any other raw vegetables and he absolutely loves loves loves peanut butter and anything containing it. After spending fifteen sunny minutes in our first location we moved to a spot that claimed to be 'boston view' but we didn't see it. We were there until 1, talking about texas versus the northeast, AB's poison ivy sting, the driving styles of texan in new england the waze app places to live cheap towns good towns housing and appliances.
We headed down a little after 1, AB projected we'd be down in twenty minutes, it took us a little less than hour probably. It was so much quicker phew. S hurt her legs on the rock but not seriously so fortunately. We planned on going to a lake of some sorts after the mountain but agreed finally to go get momos in Malden and eat them at the Nahant beach.
Headed out for Malden, met again at a nearby gas station where a large part of the team got peach tea with lemonade, apparently it's really good. ND changed vehicles and it was the three of us -- V, S and I. Since we were the slower team anyway, being as our drivers were less experienced in these roads, we decided to take it easy and went into a plant nursery that also had the cutest overpriced knicknacks and vases. I wouldn't buy them necessarily but they'd be great inspirations for DIY projects. S bought two vases for her indoor plants. S and I talked about indoor plants, I told her about and showed her the pics from NP's place and she was amazed. Lots of plant talk happened.
We were so behind the earlier party we decided to skip Malden altogether and meet them straight at Nahant as they collected our momos. Ordered from our cars and drove towards Nahant. We got there barely three minutes before they did, despite them having spent a solid 40 minutes to go out of way collect momos get ice-creams and caught up with us.
The weather was already bad but we didn't give it much thought. We collected our blankets and plates of momos and walked over to the doggy beach to eat. Within five minutes we were caught in a terrible terrible hurricane whipping up the water blowing sand at our places and into our achaar. It got real scary real quick. We gathered ourselves and ran into the safety of our cars. Waited for a couple of minutes, realized it wasn't the way to go, and set off for home. Took us an hour to get home, V dropped us before heading his way despite us having come literally from in front of their place.
Caught up with everyone end the end of the weekend, took a nice little nap, a cool shower wrote a bunch, and went to bed a little after 12.
We had planned to leave at 7am, got up at 6.40, woke up ND and called V who informed me he was getting close to my house. Hurried up and packed, dressed up for the hike, and when I got out of the house at 7.05 everyone had already socialized and ready for the hike.
ND and I got into V's car. He had come with his jahaan S so it was the four of us, while in the other car were NS and her jahaan AB. Plus the smallest cutest dog in the world -- and I'm really wondering here if I should use initials for the dog here, because if someone were to unravel my identity in these posts the initials wouldn't be protecting me at all or anyone else for that matter but giving away the cute doggo's full name while withholding everyone else's does seem to be a bit unfair -- M! Who is SO unbelievably full of energy.
We stopped by at Market Basket to get breakfast and supplies for the hike. I got two bottles of seltzer, doritos, wachusett chips, carrots cucumbers tomatoes peanut butter crackers and muffins. Everyone else got reasonable breakfast items like egg and turkey sandwich and coffee etcetera. I'm not a big fan of muffins generally, specially in the morning the sweet is a bit much but heck we'd be walking all day long so why not!
After a little confusion caused by lack of cellphone signal in rural new hampshire we got to our destination the Mt. Monandock state park parking lot and realized we messed up real good for they were registrations only and we didn't make any. It was my fault partially since I looked it up and saw online they needed reservations assumed it was only for parking and not entrance into the park. The nice rangers forwarded us to a nearby park at Miller State park.
After covering ourselves with bug repellents and using their surprisingly pleasant hole toilets we began our walk at 10am. The original plan was for 9, but the shopping trip and the redirection delayed us by an our. Wasn't too bad.
The first twenty minutes of the hike are intense unending uphill climb which scared the bejeesus out of all of us but it got easier. And folks started taking it easier too, it was less of a hike and more of a stroll up a mountain really we rested at ten different places conservatively our pace was relaxed and what would take maybe fourty-five minutes of serious hiking for me, and I'm not a very good hiker, took us a good hour-and-half maybe two hours. We were at the peak, where we ate our carrots and cucumbers and tomatoes and doritos and the nuts NS had brought. We found out dog M doesn't like carrots or any other raw vegetables and he absolutely loves loves loves peanut butter and anything containing it. After spending fifteen sunny minutes in our first location we moved to a spot that claimed to be 'boston view' but we didn't see it. We were there until 1, talking about texas versus the northeast, AB's poison ivy sting, the driving styles of texan in new england the waze app places to live cheap towns good towns housing and appliances.
We headed down a little after 1, AB projected we'd be down in twenty minutes, it took us a little less than hour probably. It was so much quicker phew. S hurt her legs on the rock but not seriously so fortunately. We planned on going to a lake of some sorts after the mountain but agreed finally to go get momos in Malden and eat them at the Nahant beach.
Headed out for Malden, met again at a nearby gas station where a large part of the team got peach tea with lemonade, apparently it's really good. ND changed vehicles and it was the three of us -- V, S and I. Since we were the slower team anyway, being as our drivers were less experienced in these roads, we decided to take it easy and went into a plant nursery that also had the cutest overpriced knicknacks and vases. I wouldn't buy them necessarily but they'd be great inspirations for DIY projects. S bought two vases for her indoor plants. S and I talked about indoor plants, I told her about and showed her the pics from NP's place and she was amazed. Lots of plant talk happened.
We were so behind the earlier party we decided to skip Malden altogether and meet them straight at Nahant as they collected our momos. Ordered from our cars and drove towards Nahant. We got there barely three minutes before they did, despite them having spent a solid 40 minutes to go out of way collect momos get ice-creams and caught up with us.
The weather was already bad but we didn't give it much thought. We collected our blankets and plates of momos and walked over to the doggy beach to eat. Within five minutes we were caught in a terrible terrible hurricane whipping up the water blowing sand at our places and into our achaar. It got real scary real quick. We gathered ourselves and ran into the safety of our cars. Waited for a couple of minutes, realized it wasn't the way to go, and set off for home. Took us an hour to get home, V dropped us before heading his way despite us having come literally from in front of their place.
Caught up with everyone end the end of the weekend, took a nice little nap, a cool shower wrote a bunch, and went to bed a little after 12.
Right on time
Write a scene that includes time travel.
Source
This was the stupidest superpower ever and there were so many out of them.
What good can going back ten seconds ever do. It's not like you could chain those ten seconds into minutes hours days and week either. Everyone just talked about how you'd never die, just turn back to the time before you were dead and poof! That was true, so very true, as long as you were dying a death quick enough that undoing ten seconds would help with anything, and slow enough that you survived or didn't pass out for a couple of seconds to take active decision to turn time and take the necessary evasive action. Bullet at your head? Dead, no time to think about not being dead. It was as if someone needed to complete a quota of handing out superpowers and half-assed through the last remaining ones because they didn't feel like superpowers should be handed like candy. This wasn't a superpower, it was a minorpower at best.
You're on a flying plane and there's a loud bang and it disitegrates in the air. What the flying fk would you achieve by turning the time. Bupkis. They made timetravel the solution to all of everyone's problems it was all a scam by some weirdos with investment in the time-travel industry probably. Sell people the equipment and protective gear but avoid giving them enough ability to actually make a dent in the reality.
Someone had suggested playing the market. Over the course of ten seconds that was so outlandishly stuid he refused to consider that a real answer. It was the time between you pressing a button and your UI reacting, and the server in your broker responding to that. Unless you already had billions of dollars in equipment and already could see the future in a sense using all the fancy equipment and had the infrastructure to run up big trades and price swings in ten seconds you were nobody and nothing.
And yet.
This was the eighty-third time he was doing this. Rush into the room, have a bunch of guns pointed at you, the giant security guys come rushing at you. Look around note the number of people and the way they respond. Zzzzippp. Go back. Repeat. Make a map of where everyone is, and there reactions. The same ten seconds over and over and over again. Memorize the people and placements, quickly compute the shortcut representation of it that took days to memorize and practice, go back, give them one single word, and then RUN. Barge, rather into the door. As easy as that. He had practiced this a thousand times without using timetravel. Rush into a room filled with actors who pretended to set to kill you, make a mental map, return represent repeat. Two months of hard work for a cool five million and no one would ever guess his involvement because what he didn't tell anyone was he had also practiced pushing away his handler at the exact moment in the rush. The task would be complete, and the assassins would have no idea about their guide. He was the real talent, the eyes and ears of the plan. They were cheap hired goons.
Source
This was the stupidest superpower ever and there were so many out of them.
What good can going back ten seconds ever do. It's not like you could chain those ten seconds into minutes hours days and week either. Everyone just talked about how you'd never die, just turn back to the time before you were dead and poof! That was true, so very true, as long as you were dying a death quick enough that undoing ten seconds would help with anything, and slow enough that you survived or didn't pass out for a couple of seconds to take active decision to turn time and take the necessary evasive action. Bullet at your head? Dead, no time to think about not being dead. It was as if someone needed to complete a quota of handing out superpowers and half-assed through the last remaining ones because they didn't feel like superpowers should be handed like candy. This wasn't a superpower, it was a minorpower at best.
You're on a flying plane and there's a loud bang and it disitegrates in the air. What the flying fk would you achieve by turning the time. Bupkis. They made timetravel the solution to all of everyone's problems it was all a scam by some weirdos with investment in the time-travel industry probably. Sell people the equipment and protective gear but avoid giving them enough ability to actually make a dent in the reality.
Someone had suggested playing the market. Over the course of ten seconds that was so outlandishly stuid he refused to consider that a real answer. It was the time between you pressing a button and your UI reacting, and the server in your broker responding to that. Unless you already had billions of dollars in equipment and already could see the future in a sense using all the fancy equipment and had the infrastructure to run up big trades and price swings in ten seconds you were nobody and nothing.
And yet.
This was the eighty-third time he was doing this. Rush into the room, have a bunch of guns pointed at you, the giant security guys come rushing at you. Look around note the number of people and the way they respond. Zzzzippp. Go back. Repeat. Make a map of where everyone is, and there reactions. The same ten seconds over and over and over again. Memorize the people and placements, quickly compute the shortcut representation of it that took days to memorize and practice, go back, give them one single word, and then RUN. Barge, rather into the door. As easy as that. He had practiced this a thousand times without using timetravel. Rush into a room filled with actors who pretended to set to kill you, make a mental map, return represent repeat. Two months of hard work for a cool five million and no one would ever guess his involvement because what he didn't tell anyone was he had also practiced pushing away his handler at the exact moment in the rush. The task would be complete, and the assassins would have no idea about their guide. He was the real talent, the eyes and ears of the plan. They were cheap hired goons.
A severe complaint from a lifelong macdonald customer
To: coroporatecomplaints@mcdonald.com
From: angrybeaver7442@instantmail.org
Subject: Serious complaint from a longtime loyal fan
Dear McDonalds corporate complaints team,
Hope you're doing well. I'm doing alright. Wish everyone there is in the best of health in these difficult times. I'm writing to register a complaint I have about one of your locations and to request you to start a disciplinary action against the accused and guilty parties.
My incident started seven days ago, Saturday the 17th. I had a bit of a cabin fever at home, considering I hadn't left the house in over two months not even for groceries or food, I ordered everything in and talked to people on videochat all this time. I didn't see a single human being in person save for a deliveryman or two on rare occasions when I'd assume they had left the building only to find they dillydallying about or talking to the cute building manager of ours. I understand they're young and they were wearing masks and all but does she really need to flirt with literally every young man that comes to the building because if she does she should consider doing that outside the building we don't want foreign germs to be chilling inside the stale air of our building. They had masks and all but you know how these microorganisms are they'll take any chance to make a new home. Anyways this is not of your concern I have already registered a concern to our building's management several times over email and have yet to hear abck from them. I believe it's the same buliding manager who might be checking the email accounts for complaint and it's conflict of interest in there, her ignoring all the complaints made against her. If this keeps up I might have to escalate it to her superiors and let them know of the original complaint, and the fact that she is ignoring complaints against her there's a clear conflict of interest happening in there it's a form of corruption really and they need to do something about this. I'm telling you all of this to put you in my mindset when I visited your downtown location so you have the context right.
I was feeling hungry and wanted to have an in-person human interaction for a change, so I drove downtown which by the way I never do because of the traffic but there was no way I would be taking the train these days. I figured finding parking would be easy as a cake but it wasn't so simple and the traffic was not as lowkey as I imagined so I'm already stressed out. After parking underneath the park in that big lot I stroll about in the gardens to get some fresh air only to be chased by these crazy large dangerous geese that gangup on ayone they see as week and smaller than them. Found a bench away from the birds eventually to discover that the sewers had leaked somewhere nearby. Everything that could go wrong had done so up to that point.
I was feeling a little hunger so I decided to visit your downtown location to get some fries and burger, my mask o and fully distancing, only to realize there was a long line that extended outside the store. That's my first problem. We may be in crazy sick times but surely you guys can afford to open an extra counter or two in the more popular outlets so the patrons don't have to wait outside in the sickening humidity and heat, smelling lie a bag of urine-soaked cotton balls. It felt like an hour, the person in front of me said it was barely five minutes. I guess some people have less of a tight schedule than I do and don't understand the true value of time.
As it was my order, the menu overwhelmed me. Boy your menu has gotten complex over the years hasn't it. I remember back in the good old days when you had six items on the meny and you said hey order 4 and they knew exactly what you meant, now you need to specify this and that without so-and-so and ohh don't forget to give me packets of that sauce because your employees don't see to have the basic manners of giving packets of sauces with orders to their customers. I was being overwhelmed and the lady at the counter got awfully rude had pushed me to make my decision faster because there were too many people waiting behind me. I thought, chill out lady I waited for a really long time they can too but she wouldn't budge, she said I could order when I was ready but would have to let other people do so as I figured out my plan. So rude!
In the rush to make a good decision, I panicked and ended up ordering a large fries a couple of burgers and even a dessert. My order totalled twenty-five dollars. Twenty five! In your establishment, can you imagine! For that money I could go to a real restaurant and get high-quality food served by generous hosts and servers who are smiling all the time and not be surrounded by people stinking of piss and homeless individuals. Anyways I panicked hard and gulped down when I received the order, it must have been several thousand calories. I was fearful.
It was a good day, I walked to the park and started eating, i have to commend on the taste and quality of your wares, almost to the point of a fault really because somehow I ate through the entirety of the order and only after gulping that large sweet drink of yours did I feel completely full. It was wild, so much guilt and that is most definitely not going to be good for my health. Remembering that I'm already a bit obese, that meal which would have lasted me two or three days normally I chowed down in a matter of fourty-five minutes, that is going to cause me some serious damage in terms of self image and possibly to my cardiac health. That concern has led me do severe stress, lack of proper sleep and even consideration into using anti-depressants.
I do not intend to sue you for I don't believe a society should be run on the basis of everyone suing everyone else. However, I do want you to reprimand your employees for forcing your customers to make rash decisions that go contrary to their health. Give them a nice talkin, threaten them with firing etcetera just so they let people like me evaluate the pros and cons of our orders and make decisions that are good for our healths.
That is all I have to say, thank you for reading so far into my complaint. I do like your product a lot. Keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
-Disappointed
From: angrybeaver7442@instantmail.org
Subject: Serious complaint from a longtime loyal fan
Dear McDonalds corporate complaints team,
Hope you're doing well. I'm doing alright. Wish everyone there is in the best of health in these difficult times. I'm writing to register a complaint I have about one of your locations and to request you to start a disciplinary action against the accused and guilty parties.
My incident started seven days ago, Saturday the 17th. I had a bit of a cabin fever at home, considering I hadn't left the house in over two months not even for groceries or food, I ordered everything in and talked to people on videochat all this time. I didn't see a single human being in person save for a deliveryman or two on rare occasions when I'd assume they had left the building only to find they dillydallying about or talking to the cute building manager of ours. I understand they're young and they were wearing masks and all but does she really need to flirt with literally every young man that comes to the building because if she does she should consider doing that outside the building we don't want foreign germs to be chilling inside the stale air of our building. They had masks and all but you know how these microorganisms are they'll take any chance to make a new home. Anyways this is not of your concern I have already registered a concern to our building's management several times over email and have yet to hear abck from them. I believe it's the same buliding manager who might be checking the email accounts for complaint and it's conflict of interest in there, her ignoring all the complaints made against her. If this keeps up I might have to escalate it to her superiors and let them know of the original complaint, and the fact that she is ignoring complaints against her there's a clear conflict of interest happening in there it's a form of corruption really and they need to do something about this. I'm telling you all of this to put you in my mindset when I visited your downtown location so you have the context right.
I was feeling hungry and wanted to have an in-person human interaction for a change, so I drove downtown which by the way I never do because of the traffic but there was no way I would be taking the train these days. I figured finding parking would be easy as a cake but it wasn't so simple and the traffic was not as lowkey as I imagined so I'm already stressed out. After parking underneath the park in that big lot I stroll about in the gardens to get some fresh air only to be chased by these crazy large dangerous geese that gangup on ayone they see as week and smaller than them. Found a bench away from the birds eventually to discover that the sewers had leaked somewhere nearby. Everything that could go wrong had done so up to that point.
I was feeling a little hunger so I decided to visit your downtown location to get some fries and burger, my mask o and fully distancing, only to realize there was a long line that extended outside the store. That's my first problem. We may be in crazy sick times but surely you guys can afford to open an extra counter or two in the more popular outlets so the patrons don't have to wait outside in the sickening humidity and heat, smelling lie a bag of urine-soaked cotton balls. It felt like an hour, the person in front of me said it was barely five minutes. I guess some people have less of a tight schedule than I do and don't understand the true value of time.
As it was my order, the menu overwhelmed me. Boy your menu has gotten complex over the years hasn't it. I remember back in the good old days when you had six items on the meny and you said hey order 4 and they knew exactly what you meant, now you need to specify this and that without so-and-so and ohh don't forget to give me packets of that sauce because your employees don't see to have the basic manners of giving packets of sauces with orders to their customers. I was being overwhelmed and the lady at the counter got awfully rude had pushed me to make my decision faster because there were too many people waiting behind me. I thought, chill out lady I waited for a really long time they can too but she wouldn't budge, she said I could order when I was ready but would have to let other people do so as I figured out my plan. So rude!
In the rush to make a good decision, I panicked and ended up ordering a large fries a couple of burgers and even a dessert. My order totalled twenty-five dollars. Twenty five! In your establishment, can you imagine! For that money I could go to a real restaurant and get high-quality food served by generous hosts and servers who are smiling all the time and not be surrounded by people stinking of piss and homeless individuals. Anyways I panicked hard and gulped down when I received the order, it must have been several thousand calories. I was fearful.
It was a good day, I walked to the park and started eating, i have to commend on the taste and quality of your wares, almost to the point of a fault really because somehow I ate through the entirety of the order and only after gulping that large sweet drink of yours did I feel completely full. It was wild, so much guilt and that is most definitely not going to be good for my health. Remembering that I'm already a bit obese, that meal which would have lasted me two or three days normally I chowed down in a matter of fourty-five minutes, that is going to cause me some serious damage in terms of self image and possibly to my cardiac health. That concern has led me do severe stress, lack of proper sleep and even consideration into using anti-depressants.
I do not intend to sue you for I don't believe a society should be run on the basis of everyone suing everyone else. However, I do want you to reprimand your employees for forcing your customers to make rash decisions that go contrary to their health. Give them a nice talkin, threaten them with firing etcetera just so they let people like me evaluate the pros and cons of our orders and make decisions that are good for our healths.
That is all I have to say, thank you for reading so far into my complaint. I do like your product a lot. Keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
-Disappointed
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