But since I’m dying, I’m making it into an archived copy. I mirrored everything with the wget command. Soon, I’ll shut down flak and move the archived copy into place.

Late on the night of November 14th, 2021, I went to the local emergency room. I had a blood pressure of 55/37 and a pulse of 220. I had a heart attack at some point. I’m not quite sure when that happened. They admitted me for a hospital stay.

One of the first things they did was an arteriogram, and they found blockage in one artery. They thought they would be able to treat it with stent placement during the procedure, but it was too severe for that. They had a surgeon consult with me about doing an open heart procedure. It would be a single bypass. If I refused the procedure, my life expectancy would be about 4 and a half years. So it seemed reasonable to go ahead with it.

On Thursday, I went in for surgery. It was miserable, but I survived it. By Monday afternoon, I had recovered sufficiently to be released from the hospital, so I went home and finished the recovery process there.

During my hospital stay, I was also diagnosed with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. My ejection fraction was between 25 and 30 percent. They told me that they would probably want to place an ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) if my ejection fraction didn’t improve. It never really did. The best it got was 30 to 35 percent. So in February of 2023 I went in for an out patient stay to have a subcutaneous implantable cardioverter defibrillator (SICD) placed.

Fastforward a few months. I’m sitting in my recliner, eating some plantain chips, when all of a sudden, I got shocked. I jumped and screamed. Still, it only happened once, and I’m thinking: this is no big deal. A few weeks later, in August, I received another shock. It only happened once, so again, I’m like “no big deal.”

On September 11th, the situation changed. I felt “off” all evening. I was shocked once, and I kept feeling like another one was coming. So I went to the ER. My ICD device fired while I was on the ambulance and when I was being wheeled into the ER. They kept me for a couple days, ran some tests, told me to follow up with cardiology, and sent me home.

A week later, I was back in the ER with the same complaint. I don’t remember whether there were multiple shocks. The same thing happened: they kept me for a couple days to make sure I was stable, ran some tests, sent me home, and told me to follow up with cardiology.

On the first Friday of October, I kept feeling “off”, as though I was going to have a heart episode. The device didn’t fire, but I went to the ER anyway. When I was in the ambulance, they told me that I was in VTac (ventricular tachycardia), and they shocked me. I was shocked several times by hospital staff while they tried to get me stable. This time was a little different. The cardiac electrophysiologist decided that it was time to do a cardiac ablation. They performed that procedure on the following Monday or Tuesday, and I went home in the middle of the week.

Things seemed ok for the next couple of months. Then, on the night of February 1, 2024, I started receiving more shocks from the ICD. I went back to the ER. That night, my ICD shocked me at least seventeen times, and I was also shocked several additional times by paramedics and ER staff. If you’ve ever taken a physical beating that has left you sore for days, you know exactly what I went through that night. I took a beating or two of that sort when I was younger, and that’s exactly how being shocked more than twenty times felt. Every movement of my upper body hurt for the next several days, including just shifting around in bed. The day after I landed in the emergency room, they sent me to a much larger university hospital in Portland. That hospital stabilized me, switched out my ICD for another device, and sent me home a couple days later.

I spent the next few months in a state of total mental paralysis that I suspect was some kind of PTSD. I kept feeling like I was going to have heart episodes and waiting for the next shock. The new device they placed when I was in Portland had some pacing functionality, so I’m pretty sure I avoided some shocks. When I saw my cardiologist in the summer of 2024, she told me that the pacing functionality barely succeeded keeping me out of a round of shocks. She and her boss wanted to do another cardiac ablation.

At this point, I started wondering just how much life I had left. I bluntly asked for an estimation of my life expectancy and was told maybe ten years with the ablation and the defibrillator. The point of the ablation was to act as a “band-aid”, to calm the heart and hopefully keep me out of the emergency room and from being shocked repeatedly. I agreed to yet another procedure, and it was done in late August.

Less than a month later, I received multiple shocks from the ICD. I went back to the ER. I was shocked at least nine times that night. They stabilized me, kept me for a couple days, and told me to follow up with cardiology.

So I followed up with cardiology. And I bluntly asked the life expectancy question again. “Obviously, the cardiac ablation did not work. How much life would you estimate that I have left?” “Maybe two years, but I honestly don’t know.” At that point, I asked them to disable the defibrillator. I was tired of getting multiple shocks and not knowing when they would come, tired of landing in the ER. Realize that in one year, I had ended up in the ER and hospital 5 times for the exact same problem. My prognosis without the defibrillator was a few months.

But at first, I wasn’t going to let it stop me. In December, I started a cardiac exercise program. Basically, they monitored my heart while I exercised. That went well for a few days. Then one day, my blood pressure bottomed out and my heart rate spiked during a session. During the next session, I felt “off” afterward. A couple days before Christmas, I was riding my stationary bike at home for a while. At some point, I started feeling like I was about to have a VTac episode, so I stopped. I spent the next few hours in agony, until I was finally able to sleep.

It gets worse. At this point, even doing trivial tasks became a burden. I’d start having heart palpitations and become winded while bringing in a couple bags of groceries or doing the dishes. This part of the story is told more completely in an older post: Reason 666 Why US Health Care Is So Fucked: The Testing Obsession!.

I’m basically terminally ill. I got a referral to hospice, and I’ve been on that program for several months. I still have heart episodes. I can back them off with morphein, which I use very judiciously. But I expect that at any time, I could have an episode strong enough to land me back in the ER. At that point, I’d most likely just die naturally.

I am afraid to so much as go for a walk, because the last thing I want is to die in the middle of the sidewalk, or worse, be discovered by paramedics and accidentally receive medical intervention.

A while ago, I started investigating Oregon’s Death with Dignity program. Not because I want to die. I don’t. But I’d rather die in a controlled manner than die in pain and be found unresponsive in the middle of my floor by my girlfriend. I want to live, but I’m strongly opposed to my few remaining possibilities for medical treatment (I’ll get to that in a moment). No, I am not a burden to my family. They’re glad to care for me. In fact, it is going to be bad for them when I’m gone. Especially in this hellworld that the US has become under a second Trump Presidency with a stacked Congress and Supreme Court, as well as a crazed billionaire and his wrecking crew actively destroying the government. I’m sad to leave them, and I worry about how they’ll make it without me. I’m angry that I have severe heart failure that started when I was in my early forties. I’m too young for this, but here we are, and here is what I’ve chosen.

So let’s talk about my scant options for treatment. I could have my defibrillator reactivated, and maybe have a couple more years. If I do that, I expect many more ER visits and more painful and unpredictable shocks. I already said no to that. Another slim possibility is a heart transplant. I am not interested. I’ve explained my reasons more fully to people who are close to me, but they basically boil down to the fact that an organ transplant requires a full commitment to the process, and I’m not willing to make that commitment.

A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to a university doing clinical trials using stem cells to repair the heart. It seemed really promising. Unfortunately, they are in Germany, and they only accept German residents. So that wasn’t an option.

So anyway here I am, planning for my upcoming death. And I don’t have enough nice things to say about this process. At every point, the choice is entirely mine. From the beginning of the process all the way until I consume the cocktail of meds that will end my life, I can decide not to proceed, or I can decide to wait to fill the prescription, or whatever. This is my choice all the way.

As it was put to me: “Chris, you’re dying of heart disease. You can choose to just let it naturally run its course. Or you can choose a controlled exit. Either way, if you choose medical aid or you choose to let it run its course, you’re dying.”

Likewise, if you throw enough silicon at the problem, and train it with the knowledge of every human artist, it can give you “art” for the asking. It’s even getting iteratively better at doing this sort of thing, unlike our monkeys, the overwhelming majority of whom ignore the paint and simply fling their feces at the unfortunate canvas for the LOLs.

I’d argue that art is the product of creative labor by sentient beings. That automatically rules out monkeys and clouds of silicon. Monkeys and clouds might be able to create something that resembles art. They might be able to create a bit-perfect duplicate of actual art. In the case of silicon, that product was created by complicated calculations, and in the case of the monkeys, it was created by pure random chance. But in neither case was there intent. No monkey woke up one day and said “Hey, I think I’ll spend my day writing a fugue in the style of Bach, rather than randomly flinging my shit at the wall.” Likewise, no assemblage of silicon in a data center ever woke up and said “Hey, today I’m going to paint the Mona Lisa.” I think the real point that I am trying to make is that art requires intent, and AI by itself has none. It is not sentient. It is not conscious, it has no ego, no will. It cannot make art unless told to do so, in which case, it is merely a tool.

I’ll grant that humans can use generative AI to create art. Maybe. For a loose definition of create. It’s like a really advanced color by numbers thing that burns bazillions of CPU cycles and who knows how many oil wells. I assert that it doesn’t matter whether art made by prompting generative AI is art, because there are just so many reasons it isn’t worth the trouble.

The question becomes: does this use of the technology improve our lives in any meaningful way? I’d say that it does not, for any of the following reasons.

The resource expenditure to train LLMs is astoundingly high. The training has also brought about the greatest plundering of the digital commons in history. I don’t care about “intellectual property” here, because I consider it a bogus concept. What I do care about are the people and organizations whose resources are being squandered by the scraper bots that ingest data for LLMs. I have no doubt that this post of mine will be ingested by some LLM. That same LLM might well plagiarize me when making an anti-LLM argument. It’s just all grist for the corporate overmind.

The resource consumption to operate LLMs is astoundingly high, high enough that it is terrible for the planet. Furthermore, it leads to centralization. There are open source LLMs that you can run locally, and I have done so. It’s apparently not as good as the commercial offerings, or so my friends who use that stuff tell me. My understanding is that generative AI is primarily a cloud service, rather than something that is being built into consumer devices. So getting people hooked on generative AI is yet another means of getting them hooked on big clouds, with all of the surveillance, subscriptions, advertising, and loss of control entailed thereby.

Humans have been using tools to make art for thousands of years. I don’t have a complaint against that in the general case. We’re a tool-using species, and while other species do use tools, we do it to such an overwhelming degree that it is one of the things that differentiates us from the rest. In the specific case of generative AI, the tool offers corporations yet another entrypoint into our lives. The camera made it easy for people to make pictures, but it didn’t require a subscription to use it. If you had your own equipment, you could even develop your own film without being dependent on some company to develop it for you. This was totally feasible and hardly unheard-of. For instance, my high school had a dark room. Once digital cameras came along, it became even easier. Yet again, these devices did not require a subscription service to operate. In order to make art with AI, you will likely sign up for a subscription service or the free tier of a service, and in both cases, the service provider gets your product and can control what you make with generative AI. That doesn’t sound too artistic to me. In fact, it sounds Orwellian.

Centralization begets learned helplessness. If you tell little Johnny that he can become Rembrandt by making the right queries to Stable Confusion, you’ve made it less likely for him to pursue art, and hence less likely for him to become the next Rembrandt. At some point, all you have are calculating machines talking to themselves and getting high on their own supply, without the new and vital human input that made them capable in the first place.

Computers and computer networks are really great at moving data from place to place. They are also great at flooding a target with unwanted data. This is another drawback of generative AI. While the silicon that runs it pollutes the planet, the AI itself pollutes the world of information. The Internet is still, with reference to human history, very new. Language has been around for what, tens or hundreds of millennia? Writing has been around for between 5 and 6 thousand years. On those comparative timescales, the Internet may as well have been invented yesterday. We’re still struggling to deal with the flooding of misinformation on the Internet by bad-faith actors. Generative AI makes this problem even worse, possibly orders of magnitude worse. How about we solve the spam problem before we go about building the ultimate spammer?

It’s also a grift. Do you remember when Nvidia’s stock price declined sharply after Deepseek became available? Shortly after that, Dear Orange Leader Kim Jong Donald announced that under his administration, the United States would invest an astounding $500 billion in artificial intelligence. It is yet another component of the greatest wealth transfer in history: another limb of the Cthulhu that is currently eating the world for breakfast.

Quoting from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

Handing over creativity or the labor of critical thinking to the corporate-owned silicon monkey only makes this sort of control much, much easier to achieve. Generative AI could well become the ultimate tool of “reality control.” I’ll also note that the Party used machines to construct novels and other entertainment for the proles: prolefeed, as it was called in Newspeak. Orwell not also predicted the telescreen and forever wars, but also foresaw generative AI!

You know what I say? Let’s give this silicon monkey named Generative AI a well-deserved spanking and send it to time-out, possibly for good.

Then, out of curiosity, I went looking on the Internet to see if anyone had made any commentary on that piece. What I found was plenty of unabashed nerd-bashing. But I’d argue that billionaires seeking wealth, power, and status are not nerds at all. They are not of my tribe.

A nerd tends to not give a fuck about things like wealth, status, and power. They pursue intellectual interests for the pure joy of it. Many obsess over those interests. Nerds do things like write free software, such as GNU and the Linux kernel. Some are obsessed with math, or physics, or breaking into computer systems just for the hell of it. Some of them are into lock-picking. Games of the mind are popular. Nerds with a linguistic bent might take interest in constructed languages like Esperanto, or Lojban, or the much newer Toki Pona. Some are even interested in languages from mythical worlds, like Tolkien’s Quenya or the language of the Klingons from Star Trek. They’re often into science fiction, fantasy, or both. Maybe they play D&D in multi-hour stretches. With all of these interests, they don’t have the time, the drive, or the ambition to build a capitalist totalitarian hellscape.

People like Thiel and Musk are just poseurs. They’re probably into science fiction or fantasy, though if they watch Star Trek, they probably fantasize about being fascistic Cardassians or hypercapitalistic Ferengi. I’m convinced that Thiel jerks it to the fantasy of being Sauron whenever he reads Lord of the Rings. The dude is obsessed with Tolkien, as seen in his choice to name companies Palantir, Mithril, and Rivendell. Some of them might even be obsessed with programming. Bill Gates was at one time. But the difference between Bill Gates and nerds is that Gates was primarily driven to make money and used it as a means to that end. My point in all this? Don’t let these billionaire poseurs coopt our culture.

I nearly blew a gasket. No, no, no! This thing is basically a read-eval-print loop, where the reader reads English queries and statements, the printer responds with English statements, and the evaluator is some huge pile of complexity including neural nets, statistical models, and a bunch of other things I am too dumb and too sick to understand. It doesn’t think; it makes statistical predictions based on past input and training. To invert Descartes famous statement “I think, therefore I am”: “It doesn’t think, therefore it isn’t.” It has no ego. It cannot feel emotions either, so if it expresses them, they are just fake and based on mathematical models and statistical predictions. Without an ego, it cannot have a personality. I was chilled to the bone to hear my friend, who is very technically capable, anthropomorphizing it to the degree he did.

A few days later, another friend tells me that there are actually people who are “in relationships” with AI. If they can make human-like robots, probably the most popular application would be the AI-powered sex bot. I see this coming, pun not intended. Its every word, sound, or motion during the sex act will be mathematically predicted, and probably trained over time to appeal most to the owner’s particular turn-ons. Every orgasm will be fake: faker than Meg Ryan’s in When Harry Met Sally. Unlike a real partner, it won’t feel anything. It won’t care about you, because it is incapable of caring. It won’t be with you through thick and thin, because as soon as you can no longer afford its monthly subscription, it will just be a lump of simulated flesh. A relationship with this thing will be about as fulfilling as a parasocial relationship with some camgirl on Only Fans.

One wonders what the subscription model for this thing will look like, because as surely as the sun rises, there will be one. Is there an ad tier and a premium tier? If you can only afford the ad tier, then foreplay is basically listening to it read off ads and try to sell you shit you don’t need. Will there be subscriptions that limit the kind of sex acts you can perform with it? Will there be jailbreaks of the AI prompt? Imagine a world in which your friend tells you that he got his artificially-limited sex bot to give him anal using some tricky prompt engineering.

Don’t forget that everything will be recorded and sent to the manufacturer. It will give those companies deep insight into your most intimate activities and communications. Your sexual behavior will be used to train future versions of the AI.

Due to tech’s penchant for overpromising and underdelivering, I cannot say for sure that Stepford wives / husbands are coming. If they are, it won’t be sexually – unless you count fakes – but they will have a subscription model and lots of yummy surveillance features.

While I’m on the topic of Seig Heilin’ Eugenics Boy Elon Musk, why does this little freak have to ruin things by naming his garbage after it? Examples include Tesla, starship, and now “grok”. Of course I’ve written about my campaign to eliminate the useless and now reputationally damaged letter x from the English alphabet.

One more loose thought: if you want to know all you need to know about the AI bubble or crypto ponzi schemes, I’d suggest the 1841 book Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

• Mass deportations, revocation of legal status, “accidental” deportation of people who are in the US legally, and international students being “disappeared” for exercising their freedom of speech or who knows what, really. That was such a long sentence because it’s a horror show within the horror show.
• The unaccountable wrecking crew led by the eugenicist, Nazi saluter, and Swasticar salesman Musk is making massive cuts to government and usurping the power of Congress. Note that Eugenics Boy was not elected and went through no nomination / confirmation process.
• Antagonizing of allies like Europe and Canada, while being cozy with dictators like Putin.
• Threatening to invade, uh, Greenland and Canada. I can’t make this shit up, and the writing staff needs to be fired.
• Filling the government with unqualified yes men like Pete Hegseth.
• Trying to rewrite history.
• Declaring a state of emergency where none exists, so that Dear Leader can invoke the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act.
• Governing by Executive Order.

But what was the thing that got Obama and Harris to speak up? Not one of the horrors listed above. No, it was the tariffs, and I suspect the only reason they spoke up about that is because it has put the stock market in freefall.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump Administration walked back the tariffs. It has already happened at least once.

Presumably the stock market will start going up again, because so much of the world uses Microsoft and other US tech, and US cultural “products” are so wide-spread. At this point, some form of status quo returns. All of the people speaking out because the stock market is crashing (including Obama and Harris) will go silent again, and the horror show will continue.

I used the modifier “some form of” to describe status quo, because the US has pissed off most of the world. Eventually, it will not end well.

To my mind, Silicon Valley is basically the modern equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I ain’t talking about homosexuals or sex of any sort at all. For what it’s worth, the mythical Sodom and Gomorrah weren’t wiped out for sexual practices either; they were destroyed because of how they treated strangers and the poor. Silicon Valley is the source of the wealth of most of today’s oligarchs. It is where the surveillance panopticon is built. It is the source of the insurgent wealth that is destroying the USA right now: the same insurgent wealth that is a clear and present danger to the world. Like all of the evil cities that preceded it, such as Nineveh, or Babylon, or Rome, Silicon Valley’s days are numbered. Woe betide it, for someday, all will curse it, and it shall be called Silicon Desolation.

Texas Democratic Representative Al Green showed us what to do last night, when he was booted from the chamber during Trump’s speech. All of the remaining Democrats should have followed his example. Maybe give it a few minutes, and then let someone else raise enough ruckus to get booted. Keep on doing that, person by person. They could have dragged the address out interminably, making it effectively impossible for the autocratic scumbag to deliver his address.

But no. The Democrats are the party of spinelessness. This is not the time for politeness. This is not the time for holding signs or dressing in pink or whatever ludicrous weaksauce excuse for “protest” is proposed by the nutless mavens of decorum and submission.

I urge you to call your legislators. Ask them why they weren’t making a ruckus like Al Green did. Ask them how much obeisance is too much for them. This will only work for Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. Yes the latter do exist, and they need your support if you are living in their district or state. I’m going to be doing that this morning: calling my state rep and both senators, all Democrats.

For me her name was Niyati. We met when we were in the eighth grade. I was 13. She was very tall, with long dark hair, a small frame, and a voice that made my heart tremble every time I heard it. I concluded that she was totally out of my league, so I never gave her any indication of how I felt.

Then I spent the next three decades and more unable to get her out of my head and my dreams. I was born to love her.

This might be my last blog post ever. I feel like I don't have long left on Earth. And if I had one message I'd want to leave to the world, it would be this one.

Cynicism about the future is part of why the world is in the shape it is in today. Cynicism is what leads people to reflexively cede their power to oligarchy, or religious bodies, or whatever outside social forces you care to name, without questioning it or realizing that they have made a choice. “There's nothing I can do, so I may as well do whatever Johnny down the street is doing.” And if you live under capitalism, Johnny is mindlessly consuming while paying no attention to the fact that he is enriching the very people who are burning the world. And at least here in the US, there is a one in three chance that Johnny didn’t even bother to vote.

While cynicism has this chic veneer of counterculture “cool” unorthodoxy, it is the ultimate in conformism, sapping us of our inner strength by denying our free will. It is the handmaiden of surrender. No wonder corporate media has been pushing it for decades. News and advertising are its breeding grounds.

Sometimes, ceding one’s power to outside social forces is a reasonable thing to do. Or at least a rational thing to do. But it should be done mindfully. You usually have choices, whether or not you like any of the options.

What is unacceptable is just silently acquiescing to the status quo in a spirit of “I'm so helpless” cynicism. Things keep getting worse and worse, cynicism grows, and there are fewer and fewer options. It’s a vicious cycle. You can perhaps help break that cycle by believing in the future and making choices with care.

I’ll end with a quote from the song Something for Nothing by the band Rush. It’s from one of my favorite albums of all time, 2112. If you haven’t heard the album, I highly recommend it. The first track, 2112, is about a society where everyone has surrendered their power to computers and the minders of said computers. Sound familiar? Elon Musk and the rest of the tech oligarchs want to take us there, with their LLMs and their Neuralink and such. Something for Nothing is the last track on the album, and it is an excellent complement to the first.

What you own is your own kingdom,
What you do is your own glory
What you love is your own power,
What you live is your own story.

In your head is the answer,
Let it guide you along
Let your heart be the anchor,
And the beat of your song.

You don't get something for nothing,
You can't have freedom for free.

[1] No, I’m not talking about the Greek philosophical school. That was non-conformist and all about living outside of the system, not surrendering to it. What I mean is cynicism in the contemporary sense, somewhat tinged with apathy.

[2] The bacterium that causes tetanus.

With Elon Musk making the Nazi salute to Trump and Trump’s crowd, I think it’s a mighty fine time to improve English orthography. Eliminate the letter “x”. It is utterly useless, and all of its uses can be replaced with either the cluster “eks”, “ks”, or the letter “z”. I.E., after removing x from the English language, the name Xerxes would be spelled Zerkses. Boxing Day would be Boksing Day, and X-ray would be Eks-ray.

Of course, now we have a little problem. The letter x is frequently used in mathematical equations. I’d suggest replacing it with χ, but that one is already used in statistics, so maybe it would cause some confusion. I wonder if צ would work? Someone with a better grasp of knowledge in the fields of mathematics and linguistics might suggest something better.

Another sticky problem: X-rated films. It’s funny that this took so long to occur to me, since I’m one of these people who regularly has seks on the brain. Maybe the prudes at the MPAA or whoever operates these rating systems could use M for mature? Or F for … fucking. Yeah I like that one better. Rated F for fucking! Rated LOF for Lots of Fucking!

You remember how Prince changed his name to that symbol, and everyone called him “the artist formerly known as Prince”? Because they couldn’t pronounce the symbol. If we can eliminate the letter X from the English language, everyone might start doing as I do and referring to Musk’s social media company as “the company formerly known as Twitter.” Musk named one of his kids X (seems to be his favorite spawn, too), so with X disappeared from the language, it would henceforth be appropriate to refer to the kid as “Symbol-boy Musk”.

All of this seems like a lot of work to troll one overgrown manchild , but it would be funny, and it would eliminate a nearly-useless consonant. A few years ago, I would have told you that q was the most useless consonant, but now I’m saying x.

This episode of Chris’s blog has been brought to you by every letter in the motherfucking alphabet that isn’t x.

• I have heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HF REF).
• I had my defibrillator turned off after my last ER visit, because I do not find being zapped multiple times a night and going to the ER with the same complaint 5 times in 1 year to be acceptable. And after my last cardiac ablation, they proved that they cannot calm down my VT episodes. The one thing that would fix my issues, a heart transplant, has too many drawbacks for me to consider it viable.
• The symptoms I had earlier in the week, the ones that brought me to the ER, are signs of end-stage heart failure.
• Low blood pressure is common in patients with HF REF.
• I am on multiple medications that lower blood pressure, among them metoprolol and entresto. Both have a possible side effect of – DING DING DING – abnormally low blood pressure.
• I am on a diuretic furosemide, 20 mg as needed, which also has a possible side effect of … abnormally low blood pressure.

The med side effects and symptoms of end-stage heart failure and HF REF are things I’ve validated from multiple legitimate online sources.

Quoting from the linked site:

Using data from the University of Florida Election Lab, a new analysis by the Environmental Voter Project shows that 85.9 million eligible voters skipped the 2024 general election, far surpassing the 76.8 million ballots cast for Donald Trump or the 74.3 million for Kamala Harris.

If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98.

As in most US elections, the real swing voters in 2024 were those deciding between voting or not voting…and they overwhelmingly chose to stay home on Election Day.

So why is that a thing?

• 2. Voters" and nonvoters" experiences with the 2024 election

Here are the reasons listed on that page for why more than 85 million [1] people sat out the election.

• 35% say thinking their vote would not make a difference was a major reason why they did not vote.
• 31% say that not liking politics was a major reason.
• 18% say it was that they are not registered or not eligible to vote.
• 17% say a major reason was that they did not care about the outcome.
• 15% say voting was inconvenient.
• 8% say a major reason was they forgot to vote.

Those numbers don't add up to 100%, obviously, because some people had multiple major reasons for not voting. I think it would surprise some people that apathy toward the outcome is close to the bottom on that list.

The top reasons for not voting were that people feel that their vote would not make a difference, and that the non-voters disliked politics. Furthermore, I'd argue both are legitimate problems with the status quo, and that they should be fixed. I don't know how to fix them.

The collapse started with nuclear and biological attacks. The country was in the process of recovering from those. But humanitarian efforts were being thwarted and government relief workers were being murdered by a party of hyper-survivalists that formed around the writings of a guy named Nathan Holn. I think you could basically boil Holn’s philosophy down to hyper-masculinity plus might makes right.

The whole thing seemed implausible to me, because I’d lived through the Oklahoma City bombing, September 11th, the hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and so forth. In all of these events, the country was more-or-less unified after the disaster. No fuckin’ way is any of this scenario going to happen. The American people come together after these things; they don’t kill relief workers.

Fast forward to late 2024. One day, I woke up to a news story about hurricane aid workers being harassed by – you guessed it – survivalist militias. Here are a few example articles from the time.

• FEMA workers change some recovery efforts in North Carolina after threats | AP News
• Witnesses saw armed group harassing Helene aid workers in Tennessee, sheriff says | AP News

And now, in early 2025, we have Trump wanting to eliminate FEMA completely: Trump proposes “getting rid of FEMA” while touring disaster areas | AP News.

In The Postman, the catalyst was nuclear and biological attacks. While those are still plausible threats, a more likely scenario for our time would be natural disasters brought on by climate change. But any of those scenarios is just a catalyst. The collapse in the book happened because people with a certain philosophical outlook actively sabotaged relief efforts.

What seemed far-fetched to me in 2011 now seems at least possible, though hopefully not probable.

• Episode: The Return of the Archons (Landru)
• Episode: The Apple (Vaal)
• Episode: For The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky (the Fabrini Oracle)

I always found the first two of them kind of implausible. And being an incurable romantic, the third was just sad, because McCoy finds and loses love. But at least the premise of “The World Is Hollow” actually made a bunch of sense. The AI in charge was maintaining a static society in order to protect a large group of people who were making a millennia-long space voyage at sublight speed. It was ready to rebuild an advanced society once it arrived at its destination. And ya know, you gotta keep people from too much incesting and stuff. But the first two? Those planets were just full of bumpkins who got gaslit by computers thousands of years ago, and they seemed so implausible.

Or at least, that’s how I viewed these types of episodes until ChatGPT and friends came along. Now, I idly wonder whether it would be possible for a large language model to gaslight large numbers of people into worshiping it. Especially if they ever succeed with projects like Musk’s Neuralink. Combine some top tier automation, a large language model, and a bunch of Neuralink chips, and you get Landru and “the body” from Return of the Archons. Or Vaal and the “feeders of Vaal” from The Apple.

For that matter, the original Star Trek wasn’t too keen on AI of any kind, even when it wasn’t gaslighting oodles of yokels into calling it God. For instance, there was Nomad from the episode The Changeling. That was another computer Kirk talked to death, just like he did with Landru in Return. And let’s not forget M5 from The Ultimate Computer.

As Trek fans have been doing for the last 6 decades, someone thought up an in-universe theory to explain the original show’s take on AI. I believe the person’s name was J.P. Hailey. They used to hang out on alt.startrek.creative and possibly other Trek-related Usenet groups back in the 90s or so. Essentially, the theory was that humanity went through some sort of an AI crisis back in the early-mid 21st century. We came out of it on the other side. Because of course we did; Trek fans are nothing if not humanists and incurable optimists: optimistic in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Anyhow, that crisis, whatever it was, left humanity with a deep distrust of, and enmity toward, artificial intelligence. A similar theory showed up in one of the original Trek novels, Memory Prime. So Maybe Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens deserve more credit for that theory. Who knows.

Doomsday AI scenarios have been a staple of science fiction fandom for a long fucking time. They even made it into popular culture with the Terminator series and so forth.

But what I find really compelling is this notion that an LLM, top tier automation, and Neuralink could be used to create a planet of machine-worshiping yokels like the ones on Beta III in Return of the Archons. It would be especially easy to sell in the face of an impending apocalypse.

“Joy to you friend, peace and contentment will fill you. You will know the peace of Landru.”

So I was thinking about it this morning, and I came up with the most fabulous seed (pardon the pun) for a novel.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have this daddy and little girl kink going. Donny even insists that Daddy Vladdy call him Ivanka.

Of course, Trump is stupid enough to do some of this in Twitter DMs. Because of course this mother fucker is nothing if not stupid, am I right?

Putin is an actual autocrat, with a strong grip on power and control of a large nuclear arsenal. He probably gives zero or negative fucks about what the world thinks of him.

Trump, on the other hand, wishes he could be like Putin. He’s not there yet and hopefully never will be.

The other thing about Trump is that he is a narcissist. He deeply cares about what others think of him. This is why he has spent four or more decades cultivating the skill of media manipulation. He would care if his little secret became public knowledge.

If Trump gets out of line and doesn’t serve Musk or Putin, both of them have receipts. We know that Musk and Putin communicate regularly, and they’re probably on friendly terms. They might even tag-team their puppet.

“Oh Daddy Vladdy! Can your little girl Ivanka play with your big ICBM today?“, Trump slowly typed in a Twitter DM with one hand, as the other stroked his aging and gradually stiffening toadstool.

“Only if I can invade your territory like it was the Ukraine”, replied the thoroughly unaroused Russian despot, as he played along in order to accumulate more compromat and satisfy his beta’s kink.

This was sent to Clear Channel stations shortly after the September 11 attacks, and it suggested songs that were not appropriate to play on the air. Read through the whole list. It’s funny as fuck, and terribly sad at the same time.

Two of the most inspiring songs of all time, Imagine by John Lennon and Get Together by the Youngbloods were on the no-play list. I want both these to be played at my memorial service.

“Everybody get together, try to love one another” wasn’t a message our corporate overlords wanted us to hear right then. It usually isn’t, unless they can turn some profit from it. After all, the 34th of the Ferengi rules of acquisition says that “war is good for business”, and the 35th says that “peace is good for business.”

Of course with George Bush II’s sycophants trying to spark off another Holy Crusade, “imagine no religion” would be off the table. Same with “brotherhood of man” and “imagine there’s no country”, and “the world shall be as one”; such incendiary lyrics! Let’s not even get started about “imagine no possessions”, while Georgie was telling everyone to go shopping.

1. After riding a stationary bike for 20-30 minutes last Saturday the 21st, I started feeling like I was going to have a heart attack.
2. That I am perpetually fatigued. Simple things like doing the dishes, cooking, and carrying in a couple bags of groceries are leaving me exhausted.

So the receptionist dutifully notes down my issues. “We’ll have our triage person get back to you.” An hour or so later, I get a call from someone in scheduling. “Your doctor says you need to go to the hospital.” Of course, I’m thinking this is complete and utter bullshit, because that day I was feeling just fine. Same for the day before. But we (GF and I) talked ourselves into going to the ER anyway.

They ran a bunch of tests on me. “Your heartrate is normal. Blood pressure is worryingly low.” I didn’t think to mention that I’d popped some xanax before heading to the ER; that might have explained the low BP. I did a bunch of sleeping. At some point, my girlfriend wakes me up. “They want to hold you for observation and do a bunch of tests on you, including a CT scan on your brain.” And I’m like what the actual fuck? Brain? Whut?

The reasoning is that maybe my low blood pressure was due to a brain tumor. Maybe it is, but realize, I have a heart condition that is basically terminal. The last thing I care about is whether I have a brain tumor to go along with it. Metaphorically, suppose I was eating a slice of birthday cake made from rat faeces laden with hanta virus. Am I actually going to give a shit that the chef used some plutonium in the icing? Nope.

I’m a huge believer in science, though I think the obsession with medical testing is harmful to science. Hell, this is pretty much true of all data. We’ve got data. We have so much data that it’s coming out of our ears and assholes. What we don’t have enough of is logic, intuition, and critical thinking.

Worth mentioning that while I was in the ER, I got myself a referral to hospice, so I’m on hospice now. Hopefully I can live out the next months, years, weeks, days, or whatever I have left in some degree of comfort without playing this revolving door hospital game.

Recently, I discovered the life-changing magic of textured vegetable protein A.K.A. TVP. It’s cheap, easy to store, and easy to prepare. So I had this thought the other night. Can I find some dried vegetables online and make a filling and delicious soup from them with TVP for protein? To answer that question, I went online and bought me a 2 pound (smidge under a kilogram) bag of dried vegetables. These were sold as “dehydrated vegetable flakes for making ramen or simple vegetable soup”.The mix I bought contains the following:

• dehydrated sweet potatoes
• dehydrated butternut squash
• dehydrated carrots
• dehydrated cabbage

And yeah, turns out that I can make a quick and tasty soup out of these and TVP. Can you boil water? Can you throw shit in a bowl? Then you can make this soup, and you can customize it to taste.

• Re-hydrate TVP per package directions. Probably “pour one cup of boiling water over one cup of granulated TVP”. That ratio seems to be universal. I used one cup of TVP for this initial batch. Put it aside and let it sit a while.
• Boil more water. The directions on my bag of soup veggies claim six cups of water to one cup of veggies. I suspect that either the OCR program on my phone is high on meth or the manufacturer’s directions are incorrect. Either way, this comes out fine for soup. So I boiled nine cups of water since I was going to use one and one half cup of dried veggies.
• For flavor, add bouillon to the boiled water. I use Herb Ox vegetable bouillon (I’ve used that brand for years). Despite the name, there’s no ox in it (thank $deity), and the ingredient list says it’s vegan. Add bouillon to taste and let it dissolve.
• Add dried veggies, and let sit for 15 minutes or so.
• Add TVP and stir.
• Season to taste. I threw a bunch of chili powder in mine because I really like chili powder. I thought about adding some other seasonings, but I was hungry and lazy.
• Stir once more and serve.

This made quite a bit of food. I had a large bowl this morning, and so did my girlfriend. I had another large bowl this afternoon. There is still some left in the container, but it’s mostly broth.

It would go very well over some brown rice, but I didn’t have any made. It’s quite filling on its own, however. And hey, not having any grain is better for my blood sugar. I’ll probably be playing around with other thickening agents. E.G., I have some ground flax seed that I’ve used for similar purposes. Or maybe masa flour (like I used to use sometimes in chili) would be good. Anyway I think I have a strong base for some quick and tasty food.

Here’s the backstory. I got permabanned for hate speech in r/politics on reddit.

I think that if everything does not fall apart before 2028, we will have elections. But I also think there’s a pretty good chance that things will fall apart. That cold civil war we’ve been fighting since April 14 of 1865 might very well turn hot before 2028.

I’ve been reading Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor. Essentially this is a memoir of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

Thus far, I’ve had a few take-aways.

It is easy, and I mean super fucking easy, for one’s humanity to be stripped away. I generally have an optimistic view of human nature. But take a person and put them in hellish conditions, and oftentimes you will see the bestial aspects of human nature appear in short order. It’s not that humans are evil. We’re fragile.

Do read Ngor’s book, because he makes this whole human fragility point well and clearly. For that matter, I’ve read some memoirs of World War II concentration camp survivors and they make the same point. Anyway reading Ngor has me really rattled right now. So much so that I’m barely coherent.

Another take-away from Ngor is just how fucking quickly a place can turn from relatively normal to hell on earth. I say relatively because pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia had its share of problems, including a military dictatorship under General Lon Nol, following a coup against Prince Sihanouk. Oh, and it was also getting bombed by the USA during the Vietnam War. But compared to the hell instigated by the Khmer Rouge, it must’ve been paradise.

I can hope that if we do have a civil war here in the US, it won’t be anything like what happened in the Cambodian killing fields.

After all, there is an aspect of Cambodian culture that directly contributed to the situation. Here’s Ngor:

All that beauty and serenity was visible to the eye. But inside, hidden from sight the entire time, was kum. Kum is a Cambodian word for a particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge – to be precise, a long-standing grudge leading to revenge much more damaging than the original injury. If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is kum. Or if a government official steals a peasant’s chickens and the peasant uses it as an excuse to attack a government garrison, like the one in my village, that is kum. Cambodians know all about kum. It is the infection that grows on our national soul.

And here’s Ngor again, many pages later, telling us about the “Communism” of the Khmer Rouge:

I said, ‘But you make a mistake if you think the communists control their own revolution. Look at all the confusion when everybody had to leave Phnom Penh. All the unnecessary suffering, like the patients having to leave the hospitals. That costs the Khmer Rouge popular support. So does the lying. I tell you, the people at the top of the Khmer Rouge, like Khieu Samphan, are highly educated, but the people under them cannot even read and write. They don’t know where their revolution is going. They don’t even know they are communists.’

‘Of course they do.’

‘No they don’t,’ I said flatly. ‘When have you ever heard them mention the word “communist”?’

‘That’s true,’ said the paediatrician after a moment’s thought. ‘But then what are they?’

‘ Kum-monuss ,’ I said, and they all laughed. It was a play on words: kum, a long-standing grudge that finally explodes in disproportionate revenge, and monuss, meaning people. ‘That’s what they are at the lower level,’ I said, ‘ “revenge-people.” ’ All they know is that city people like us used to lord it over them and this is their chance to get back. That’s what they are, communist at the top and kum-monuss at the bottom.’

I have the impression that the inequality in pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia was at levels that my readers and I could barely fathom. Here’s Ngor once more:

The purpose of our outing was to gather wild foods. In Cambodia we have a humorous saying about food: ‘Eat anything with two legs except a ladder, anything with four legs except a table, and anything that flies except an airplane.’ The point is that when you live off the land you cannot be particular. The Cambodian peasants, who are geniuses at living off the land, sometimes eat termites for protein, though there are many other foods they prefer. Until the rains came – the rains arrived later in Battambang than in eastern Cambodia – there were no termites above ground anyway.

The mention of peasants who were geniuses at living off the land is, of course, a reference to the living situation of pre-Khmer Rouge peasants. At this point, Ngor – who was relatively well-off before 1975 – has been forced to adopt some of the survival strategies of those pre-Khmer Rouge peasants.

The USA isn’t Cambodia. But I’m sure we could make our very own hell.

I was capturing traffic being sent to my Raspberry Pi today, attempting to debug a SIP problem. And I noticed a really weird packet from someone’s Google Home Max on my network:

IPv4 source address: 10.4.20.172
IPV4 destination address: 255.255.255.255
UDP source port: 9487
UDP destination port: 9478
Data bytes as hex: 34373666366636373663363534653530343535663435373236393633356635373631373936653635
Data bytes as ASCII: 476f6f676c654e50455f457269635f5761796e65

So this is a packet containing a 40-byte payload, and the 40 bytes just happen to be ASCII hex digits. That string of hex digits looks suspiciously like even more text encoded in hex, and it is. The original string was: GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne.

Every minute or so, this device sends out a broadcast packet to UDP port 9478, containing the rather enigmatic string GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne encoded in hex.

That begs some questions. What the fuck is a Google NPE, and who the fuck is Eric Wayne?

For clarification, the line labeled “data bytes as hex” is the 40 byte raw payload of the packet, represented unambiguously as 80 hex digits. Then that 40 byte raw payload is a string of ASCII hex digits that decodes to GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne.

After I made that original post, a friend speculated that perhaps NPE stood for “null pointer exception”, I.E., from Java. That theory holds a lot of water, because Google writes a lot of Java. But what does it have to do with Eric Wayne? Is Eric so bloody incompetent that his code is always throwing null pointer exceptions, so everyone calls him NPE Eric Wayne? I hope not! Is some component of the Google Home Max crashing every minute with a null pointer exception, and Eric is the guy who is expected to fix it? Maybe this is a debugging aid that got included in the published software by mistake. All I have is speculation for now.

It’s worth telling the backstory. The other day, I stumbled into a conversation on the Fediverse about someone who is fairly well-known in tech circles: Justine Tunney. The person who started the thread described her as “toxic”, and when asked to clarify, gave some examples, including this choice tidbit from her Wikipedia page:

In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.

That made me curious, so I went and did some digging. I turned up two articles about her involvement with Occupy Wall Street: this article from The Daily Beast and this article from The Nation.

Essentially, Tunney hijacked the Occupy twitter feed and tried to position herself as some kind of leader of the leaderless movement. She also dissed David Graeber, the now-deceased Anarchist intellectual and author, whom I deeply respect. Wow, this person sure does have one hell of an ego. The Daily Beast article also contained this tasty morsel:

Justine Tunney works for Google. Every day that she feels like it, Tunney goes to a playgroundlike office in Chelsea in Manhattan and eats her meals from the free gourmet rooftop cafeteria. She does her job and little else. On the beach in Puerto Rico this summer, at the wedding of two fellow Occupy veterans, she was working so hard on an algorithm designed to improve cloud computing that she lost track of time and got a sunburn.

“They basically bought my soul,” she says. But Tunney doesn’t seem to mind. “Google is the one company I don’t hate. I think Google is actually doing things that are making the world a better place.”

By now, I’m triggered. I used to work for Google! How does someone who wants to replace the elected government with a technocratic CEO and worships a behemoth with painfully sharp class distinctions manage to consider themself any kind of democratic socialist? That’s when I decided to write about my own experience in some depth.

Google has a very sharply delineated two-tier work force. There are the engineers and other highly intellectual sorts on top. I was in that group when I worked there, though I was on the low rungs of the ladder. Justine Tunney is certainly in this class and quite successful. At the bottom, there is everyone else: the people who make the wheels turn and serve the needs of the tech nobility. It reminded me of The Cloud Minders, an episode of the original Star Trek.

The perks of Google engineers are pretty widely known. There is the free food, all of the toys, massages, even laundry service. Aaron Swartz, another person I really respect, described the environment as infantilizing when he visited Google headquarters.

I love telling this story about the coffee machine. One day, I was working in my cubicle when my teammates mentioned that they were going over to the Android building to get coffee. They asked me if I wanted to come with, so I said “sure, why not.” “But what’s so special about the Android building, other than that the Android OS is developed there?” “It has a $15000 coffee machine!” I went, and I had a cup of coffee. And you know what? I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between that cup of coffee and coffee that I have had from some convenience stores.

I like talking to people and hearing their stories. I’m a natural-born listener, and I probably would have excelled in psychology or the ministry, though I doubt there are many churches seeking a minister whose every third word is fuck and who is pervy. As for psychology, I am sure that no one wants a shrink who will tell them that life is indeed kind of pointless and at times terrible. Anyway, I met people from the servant class. I treated them with warmth and humanity (I hope), and I listened to them.

I remember one woman who worked in one of the cafeterias, preparing all of that free food that Google was famous for. She went to work early and left late, every day. There was no playground-like office for this woman, and in fact, most of her work was done on her feet. She was also paid substantially less than even the most junior of Google’s engineering staff. She always sounded very fatigued when I talked with her.

That’s when I realized it. I was working in a medieval hellhole, complete with nobles and serfs. The only thing that was missing was droit du seigneur, AKA jus primae noctis. That’s when I decided that I could not work there in good conscience as a self-respecting socialist.

Last night, we went out for a meal to celebrate my girlfriend’s upcoming anniversary with her other partner. They wanted sushi, so we went to a local sushi place that had an all you can eat deal. They ordered the all-you-can-eat sushi, while I had vegetable tempura. Each of them ended up getting one more plate of food than they could eat.

As we were getting ready to pay, we were told that we weren’t allowed to take the leftovers home. We said that’s fine, but could they at least give them to someone? A needy person, one of the staff, whatever. The waitress responded with a no, followed by a very offended “You all know there’s a $12 excess waste charge? Don’t order more than you can eat.” My response was, “What are you going to do? Throw it away?” I followed up with a lovely poetic socialist tirade. How is it that there are empty bellies in a country where food is discarded? There are empty homes, yet people go homeless. We literally paid $12 to throw away food.

Somebody tell me this is peak capitalism and the madness will be over soon.

I’ve always wanted to try psilocybin, I.E., magic mushrooms. I put out a few queries to see if anyone might know of a source. No one did. However, taking mushrooms is legal here in Oregon, if done at a licensed establishment under the care of a facilitator. There just happens to be such an establishment in my city. I called them up. “It’ll be $1000 for a four hour trip with a dose of 18 to 25 mg of psilocybin.” This is way out of my price range, but a dear friend offered to foot the bill. I set up an appointment with the Salem Psilocybin Center. I told them that I had an upcoming surgery and that I’d like to take psilocybin prior to it. They were great. They found an open slot for me on Saturday the 24th of August, nearly a week before my scheduled surgery.

First of all, there is a lot of paperwork to sign: consent forms and the like. Realize that even though I might be the smartest motherfucker in the room, I am still blind, and therefore functionally illiterate. They use DocuSign. I was kind of hopeful, because I’ve been told that DocuSign’s accessibility has improved over the last few years. I tried unsuccessfully to sign all of the paperwork with multiple web browsers on desktop computers. Then I tried with the DocuSign app on two separate smartphones: my Android and my girlfriend’s iPhone. I had the most success with the smartphone app, but at the end of both attempts, I was told to either draw my signature on the screen or upload a photo of my signature. Neither option is particularly workable without help. Realize that I live with two other blind people, so I cannot get help from my immediate circle. They sent someone over to help me fill out all of the paperwork, and I’m glad of it.

One of the things I had to sign was a transportation plan. And in fact, the center offers the option of picking up a patient and returning them to their house! Wonderful! I won’t have to worry about how I’m going to get there. Someone came to fetch me on the morning of Saturday the 24th. I recall that one of the songs playing in his car was Truckin’ by The Grateful Dead. It’s a favorite. Then I hear the iconic lyric: “What a long … strange trip it’s been.” I cackled and observed that it was very apropos.

When I got to the center, I met my facilitator. I was taken to a room with some very comfy sofas. Another person from the center came in with the dried mushrooms in a little disposable cardboard bowl. There were either 7 or 9 of them. I don’t remember exactly how many. The other person and my facilitator watched as I consumed all of them. Apparently they need a second person to administer the dose, to make sure that there is no funny business. There was an almost ritualistic quality to the whole thing. I munched the mushrooms, which I found quite tasty. I’m a huge fan of culinary mushrooms, and these had a strong and earthy taste reminiscent of the mushrooms I love to consume for food. I remarked that when I was in college, I knew this woman named Alina who was a vegetarian, of Chinese descent, and who gave the best and most lyrical description of mushrooms that I have ever heard. She called them the meat of the Earth. I was also told the name of the mushroom strain I was taking: Shakti.

Once I had finished consuming the mushrooms, my facilitator helped me become better acquainted with the comfortable sofa. It was powered, with various settings! We found what was best for me: lying slightly reclined with a pillow for my head. I was also given a blanket. It was like being in a warm, cozy nest. The facilitator started some music playing. It was soothing and meditative. One might describe it as New-Agey kind of music.

I couldn’t keep track of time, but at some point close to the start of my trip, I began to feel some effects. I’d describe them as euphoric. I could hear every note of the music in slow motion. I felt as though the sofa was melting into me, or I was melting into it. The same held for the music. It was part of me, and I was part of it. I’ve had similar experiences in drum circles and at some Pagan rituals in which I participated.

Some time after this, the dreams began. I call them dreams, because I can’t think of a better term. I was dreaming wide awake. And I knew that I was in control as they played in my mind. I never lost touch with reality, not even once. I dreamed of people I had loved. I dreamed of places far away, of distant times and imaginary lands. People who know me know that I’m a fan of The Lord of the Rings. As I dreamed, I recalled a line from The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” I found this line incongruously hilarious and amazing, for reasons I know not. I dreamed that I was such a hobbit, living in my cozy little hole under a hill. I fondly recalled a father figure, someone who read The Hobbit to me when I was a small child of perhaps seven years. He used to call me his little hobbit and refer to my room as my hobbit hole. I had other dreams of possible futures and possible pasts, all pleasant, some of which are much too personal to put down in writing. This dream sequence played for most of the rest of my trip.

I took a bathroom break about an hour before my trip was supposed to end. This helped guide me back to the here and now. Over the next hour, the dreams slowly dissipated into consciousness of the world around me. At the end, I was left feeling better than I’ve ever felt, or at least, the best I’ve felt in a long, long time. I had an amazing period of mental clarity, lasting several hours. This was when I started to gain some insights into my own problems and circumstances.

I found the answer to the existential question that I had been pondering for the past couple of weeks, the same question that had given me some encouragement to start down the psychedelic path. Yes, I have a death sentence, and yes, I have some idea of how much time is left on my clock. I also have an amazing gift. I can choose to keep on playing the game, or I can choose to refuse treatment, thereby bringing the end of the game nigh. I have free will. I control the gameboard and the piece. Fuck it; I may as well keep playing. At least for now. One day at a time. I am also very fortunate to have so many people in my life who love and care deeply for me.

I took 10 5 mg oxycodone tablets Saturday in a botched attempt to end my own life. It was an act of pure, unadulterated rage. The logic, if it can be called that, went something like this. I am hurting. I cannot hurt the system that is hurting me. So instead, I’ll deprive it of the opportunity to hurt me anymore. And perhaps I’ll also send a message. Obviously I failed. I spent Saturday afternoon in the ER. Sunday morning I puked for hours. I’ve spent good portions of the last couple days in bed, listening to Star Trek. I’ve also had dull generalized aches and pains. When I cough, my ribs hurt.

So how did I get here? I get a check every month from Social Security. It’s $1090, barely enough to live on, but I manage. This month, I only got $395.80. So I called Social Security on Thursday the 29th of June. “Apparently Medicare premiums were withheld from your check. We don’t know why.” So I called Medicare. “We didn’t withhold anything, because your premiums are paid by the state of Oregon.” (Which I knew already). “You should call your local medicaid office.” So I called them. “We don’t know what’s going on either. We paid Medicare. We called Social Security. We’re looking into it, and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

Tomorrow came and went. I waited till Wednesday and tried Social Security again. “We don’t know what’s going on. I’ll get somebody else to look into it, and we’ll get back to you by Friday.” Friday came, with no return call. Realize that by now it’s been over a week since I first made anyone aware of what was going on.

I made one more call to my local Social Security office. “We don’t know what the problem is, but I’m sending a message to our processing center and hopefully you’ll hear from them in two weeks.”

By now I’m really pissed. At the end of the day, I started thinking. What if the local Social Security office is just uninformed? Maybe I’d get somewhere by calling the national office. So I did just that. I spent two hours on hold, listening to the most obnoxious cheerful muzak endlessly looped, and then someone answered my call. I repeated my story for the umpteenth time. “Yeah, this makes no sense. I don’t know what the problem is.” This was followed by a bunch of clicking as the dude typed on his keyboard. Five minutes later, he raised his voice to me. “You called our office earlier today?” “Yeah, I talked to someone here in my city of residence.” “Well, there’s a message out to our processing center. You just need to wait.” Dude was really fucking condescending and hostile. I hung up the phone. I’m surprised I didn’t lose my shit then and there, but the pump was primed for it.

This society is so fucked up. We literally have billionaires, people with more money than God, and you’re telling me that you’re gonna treat me like shit and kick me around over $700? Fuck you.

Back in June of 2018, I bought a Motorola G6, an Android phone, through Amazon. Yeah they’re a terrible company, but that’s a topic for another rant. We didn’t do our research. This device was sold as a “Prime Exclusive”. Essentially, that means that it came preloaded with Amazon bloatware, and that the bootloader was locked. Ok fine, whatever. I was working at the time, and I really needed the phone. I was on pager rotation too. I could – and did – write it off as a work expense.

Fast forward 2 years to September of 2020. That was when my Moto G6 stopped receiving updates, even security updates. In a sane world, I would’ve just installed a third-party ROM like Lineage and gone about my business. After all, I had managed to add years of useful life to a previous phone by doing just that. But recall that my Motorola has a locked bootloader. Motorola does have a website that will let you unlock the bootloader on their devices, but they wouldn’t give me an unlock code, because the phone was sold through Amazon and locked to Amazon. I do still have it around here somewhere. If someone wants a ticking time bomb, I’ll gladly sell it. Addendum: I called both Amazon and Motorola. Both refuse to unlock the bootloader on it, even though it is well out of warranty and hasn’t received software updates in over 3.5 years.

Fast forward to May of 2023, when I decided to buy an iPhone. Essentially, I did it because I got tired of hearing my girlfriend Deedra complain every time I borrowed her phone to scan printed mail and other items. I bought it off Ebay, as open-box. It’s cheap, I don’t have a lot of money, and I’d rather not pay premium prices to Apple for something brand new. Their phones do at least have great accessibility. The details on this phone claimed that it was an unlocked iPhone 2022 SE. But I was asked a bunch of customization questions, including “select network”. What the hell. So I left AT&T selected.

A few days later, my phone was delivered. I have a pay-as-you-go SIM card through jmp.chat. This is great for someone who very rarely uses cell service. They charge $7 a gig and are data-only. But that’s fine, because I already use jmp.chat for VOIP service, so data-only is perfect. I call over SIP and text over XMPP, and I cannot recommend this service highly enough. And while the $7 per gig sounds high, it isn’t, when you consider that I only use cell service for hailing ride-share, GPS programs, and the very occasional phone call. It’s much cheaper than paying carriers significant amounts of money each month for service I barely use. So I pop the new SIM card into my “unlocked” iPhone. Well, actually, Deedra does it, because she’s better at that sort of thing. And the phone refuses to accept my SIM card! My unlocked phone is locked to AT&T.

They have a “device unlock” page on the web. So I tried that. It failed with a message saying that my phone could not be unlocked because service was cancelled during the 14-day return period. WTF does that mean?

I spent a few hours that day dealing with AT&T, trying to get my phone unlocked. I talked to their script-reading customer support people over the phone, and then I took it in to not one, but two local AT&T stores. At the second store, the person I spoke with intimated that it might have been stolen. “Ok fine. If it’s stolen, I have the phone right here in my hand, and I’m perfectly happy to give it to you and also give you the receipt from the place where I bought it.” “Oh no, that won’t do. You need to get a refund from Ebay.”

I didn’t have the spoons to fight with the seller on Ebay. I told them I’d expected an unlocked phone and they sold me a locked one. And then they tried to tell me that I’d intentionally bought a locked phone. Well maybe I had. After all, I left the AT&T box checked. Maybe I was confused. Not enough spoons to fight this.

One of the people I spoke with at AT&T also told me that they could unlock my phone if I had AT&T service for at least 60 days. What the hell. I’ll sign up and then get my phone unlocked! I’ll be out some more money, but I can live with it. So I do that, and for the next couple months, I pay AT&T somewhere around $100 per month for service I barely used. I think I used like 442 megs of cell data in 2 months. And no cellular voice or text, because I already have VOIP that can work over cell data. Once 60 days had passed, I tried unlocking again. They still refused to unlock my device. I cancelled my service. Fuck these clowns.

More months pass. I’m perfectly ok having a wi-fi-only smartphone. I can at least dial 911 on it if I need to, because phones without cell service can always be used for emergency calls here in the US.

Then in February I landed in the hospital for a week. Not only that, but they transferred me from my local hospital to a university hospital in Portland. Thankfully hospitals tend to have excellent wi-fi service, so I was able to make calls, listen to audio streams, and so forth. Yeah, that’s great. After nearly a week’s stay, they discharge me. And I realize that what I really need is cell service. I could theoretically borrow some money from a friend and pay for a very expensive Lyft to get home. I could even hail Lyft over hospital wi-fi. I’ve done it before; works fine. I don’t want to be riding in a Lyft for over an hour with no way to call my family and such. If the Lyft driver drops me off at the wrong corner, I don’t want to be stumbling around unable to get help. Long story short, I end up sweet-talking the hospital into getting me a cab, and I got home in one piece.

In March,I get this bright idea. I’m going to try one of these phone unlocking services. The one I ended up trying was Doctor SIM. After doing some initial checks, they tell me that “Your phone is not reported lost or stolen, and it does not have any outstanding bills, but we cannot unlock it via the basic unlock service”. I paid $256.95 for their premium unlock service, and this morning, I get a message saying that they still can’t unlock my phone and they’re refunding my money. They did in fact refund it, too!

My next bright idea was to buy a mobile hotspot. So I do that. This one is actually unlocked! It’s a few years old, but that’s ok. When I got it, I realized that it took a micro SIM, but all I had was a nano SIM. So I ordered a SIM adapter. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the SIM to fit into the hotspot even with the adapter. Three people – including one with sight – tried and failed.

Ok, I’ll order a new SIM card. I do that, and it arrives. We break it down to a micro SIM and try to put it in the hotspot. It breaks, giving me part of a SIM card and a piece of plastic lodged in my device. After some man-handling, I pried the plastic bit out, but I’m pretty sure I destroyed my hotspot irreparably in the process.

At the end of March, I decided to file a complaint against AT&T with the Better Business Bureau. AT&T followed up with me, and I got a call from someone in the office of the president of AT&T. I spent half an hour to an hour having a fruitless discussion with him. I’ll try and paraphrase it.

Me: So I have this phone, which is apparently not lost or stolen. However, it is locked to AT&T and AT&T refuses to unlock it.

Him: I can’t unlock the phone, because it isn’t fully paid off.

Me: So the phone isn’t fully paid off, yet I bought it from a third party? Isn’t that the moral equivalent of (unknowingly) buying fenced goods?

He never gave me a direct answer to that question, just a bunch of corporate deflection.

Me: Ok then, so the phone isn’t fully paid off. Can I just pay the remaining balance on the thing and get it unlocked?

Him: No, because you weren’t the person who originally purchased the device from us. If you had the account info (including the passcode) for the customer that bought it, we’d let you pay it off.

Me: You won’t let me pay you the remaining balance on this device, but you’re more than happy to let me use it on your network?

Him: Yes.

We eventually looped back around to “How is this device not considered stolen?” It devolved from there, and I wasted my time.

At this point, I have a few more options to try, but I’ll probably end up pawning these devices. The Motorola is essentially e-waste, thanks to Amazon, and the iPhone isn’t usable as a cellphone unless I want to pay AT&T’s prices.

Yes, I fucking hate smartphones.

Post scriptum October 2024: I gave the iPhone away to a person in need via the Buy Nothing group on Farcebook. The old Motorola is still with me, in my closet, awaiting a fitting end at the local ewaste disposal facility. There’s still time for anyone who believes in locked down devices to buy it from me!

Today, when you say the phrase "electronic mail", there's a nearly 100% probability that you are actually talking about Internet Mail: messages in a standard format exchanged using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). As recently as the 1990s, that statement did not hold true. There was a huge diversity of systems described by the phrase "electronic mail".

One of the first services I used through a modem was CompuServ. I had an account there for a few months, and was it ever expensive. CompuServ had email service. Users could exchange messages among themselves. It was mostly a silo, except for an Internet gateway. If I recall correctly, my CompuServ user ID was 72714.2172. So I could be reachable from the Internet with the email address 72714.2172@compuserv.com. There were a few other walled garden online services like CompuServe: GENie, Prodigy, and AOL. I'm fairly certain all of them had mail gateways to the Internet.

Around the same time, I started using local bulletin board systems. Many of these were linked in a store-and-forward network called Fidonet. Essentially, each board in Fidonet peered with other boards. They'd call one another in the wee hours of the morning to exchange electronic mail, files, and echomail. Echomail was basically a many-to-many messaging system. Think Usenet, or forums if the forums were distributed across multiple machines.

Most email sent over Fidonet was between fidonet users, but like CompuServ, there was a gateway from Fidonet to the Internet. When I realized this, the first thing I did was send myself an email message from a local BBS to my CompuServ account. It took days to arrive!

There were dialup services used exclusively for email. For instance, in 1993, you could buy a monthly subscription to ATTMail or MCIMail, and the only thing these two provided was email. According to Wikipedia, MCI Mail also offered "email to snail-mail" service. My fuzzy memory tells me that these services used a protocol called X.400. That was telco stuff, so likely a lot more convoluted than SMTP. At least by the 90s, both services also had an Internet gateway.

Then there was UUCP, another store-and-forward network for exchanging files, electronic mail, and Usenet articles. Initially UUCP was used by Unix machines. I'm pretty sure that by the 90s, there were also PCs running MS DOS on the UUCP network. I used a few MS DOS bulletin boards where the sysop was obviously pulling a UUCP feed. Again, there were gateways from UUCP to the Internet, so that hosts reachable over UUCP could exchange mail with hosts on the Internet.

See the pattern? As late as the 90s, there was this huge diversity of email systems and protocols. Through gateways and radical interoperability, the Internet bridged them. That's how email won. For many people like me, email was the very first Internet service we used, even though we didn't have full Internet access.

When it comes to open-source or personal use code, the most correct answer is always: because I wanna. Do your thing. You really don’t have to justify your choices to anybody. A “give zero fucks” attitude is a thing worth cultivating in life sometimes.

Now that my brief rant is done, those are actually some questions that have interesting answers.

• Remember a bunch of precedence rules! Here’s where cognitive load comes in.
• Insert parens aggressively when you’re unsure of precedence. Now you have an infix language with useless parens all over the place, and it’s hard to read.
• Just use a Lispy syntax!

Yeah, I prefer option 3. It’s so much easier for my little brain.

So why Fennel, specifically? Fennel is basically a Lispy veneer on top of Lua. I could have gone with another Lisp. I’m a fan of Chicken Scheme, for instance. That one compiles to C. But I wanted to experiment with Fennel, because I think Lua itself has some desirable qualities.

The cool thing about Lua is that it is aggressively portable. It basically runs on anything recently modern with a C compiler, and by recently modern, I mean the 1990s. It’s also very lightweight. It runs on my wireless access point. That’s what I call portable! LuaJIT, an alternative Lua implementation, is blazingly fast if you need that, though it is not going to be as portable as stock Lua from PUC Rio. There’s a fairly large community around Lua, and users have produced numerous extensions over the years. A Lisp that compiles to Lua gives me the syntax I love with the advantages of Lua.

• HTMX Homepage
• My houseweather script
• Indoor conditions in my apartment, in real time.