I'm still alive. There's a chat now?

I'm halfway through the extended version of American Gods. I read the original version a while ago and I'm loving the revisit, but I'm also easily distracted and the book is so thick it's almost a cube so my dedication is waning.

I also have a friend who wanted to start a comic book book club and we're starting with Sandman, so my break from Neil Gaiman is... Neil Gaiman! It's interesting because you can see him trying out the literary tools he perfected years later.

Spoilers

I'm in the south and recently went on a "church tour" with my wife. We found our fair share of hellfire and brimstone evangelicals, but we were also pleased to find a strong counter culture of small and actually loving churches.

In that tour, I really started to believe that the sin of man was in the fact that we only have half of what it takes to be gods. We ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but we don't have the immortality required to put good and evil into context.

To me, that defines the center of Christian love - we all have our own beliefs, our own habits, and our own lives, and we all want to weigh the world on the scale of good and bad. The good Christians that I know can see the limitations of their judgement, put little stock in it, and can lean into being in a community with people who are different.

This is the value of empathy to me. It's not the distanced condolences of sympathy, but an earnest desire to understand the feelings of a person whose life you haven't lived, but which rhymes very neatly with your own. Empathy is not the enemy, it's the belief that you wield god's judgement of a person's value.

I SURVIVED!

It was beautiful when we were in the mountains and snowed the day we left. Your weather is weird.

Nice. Right now we're wall to wall, but I'm not sure how well our camping plans will pan out (we're Southerners and it's cold there). I'll hit you up if we get pushed to Denver early.

Going to Devner at the end of the week for 11 days, then coming back and starting IVF. It'll be a nice break before the real shit starts.

Also, at some point on hubski I doubted kleinbl00 on how expensive children were. Looking at the IVF charges and how that's just for a pre-kid, I'll eat my humble pie.

Also, the greenhouse is on hold - looking at the planned area in the summer, it's completely shaded in by the now leafy trees. I'm considering fixing up our shed as a new project instead.

If you like History and Prose, the Memory Palace fits neatly in the middle of that venn diagram.

If you liked Serial, try S-Town. It's like a modern day Faulkner novel, but a documentary podcast.

I will never not watch this.

So good. I'll take this into account, but I think the greenhouse got back burnered. We found a squirrel's nest in our shed and a ton of holes chewed through the eves. That'll probably take precedence.

I have a VR headset and I 100% think it's the future of consuming certain types of digital content. I also think there will be VR drugs that use light and sound to stimulate the brains of users and create super addicting experiences for a few.

But some of this conversation feels a lot like the second life conversation, especially things like VR Chat. It's neat, but it just isn't "there" yet.

Oh man, now I love books. That enthusiasm is infectious!

Just reading through it, I was thinking about a big book we have that's the complete genealogy of our family going back to the 1600s. It's in fine shape now, but it's definitely something I would pay to have nicely and artistically bound, because I want it to last generations.

My gut says, if you could find a clean way to put Ancestry reports in a book, you would have a real business.

oh yeah, I'm building it because we just got new windows and those are the old ones they took out. 100% free.

I am, however, trying to figure out the roof, which I'll have to buy, and this site looks great for that. I really want the steep side that face the sun to be able to lift for air flow, but that might be too much for this project.

This is super neat and it's interesting to hear about the component parts. Maybe I missed this, but why bookbinding at all?

There's that well off to the left (not pictured) the cap of which isn't quite flush with the foundation. I think I need to raise the whole thing to account for that height difference, so I figured I would add a floor. But I could probably accomplish the same thing with a ramp. Then I could fill the dirt in with rocks and make a primitive french drain.

Thanks.

And I'm building it on a weird pseudo-sidewalk in our backyard that is the remnant of a filled in pool. It makes a great foundation, so I think I'll use that, build a plywood floor, and use mason block to level out the parts over earth. There's also a huge sump pump well that I'm trying to re purpose into some kind of rain barrel, but that's a much bigger engineering issue.

Thanks, I kind of reached a breaking point last month and I'm just bringing it up as much as I can. It makes a lot of people feel awkward, but I figure that's just part of making it acceptable. Plus, a bunch of people will talk to my wife about it because she's a woman, which she's super over, but not me because dudes don't talk about it. I'm getting in the habit of inserting myself in those conversations, which is interesting in its own right.

we're on month 18 of trying to start a family. Medical intervention started at month 12 and if things don't happen this month then we're going to start much more intense medical stuff. It's a really weird situation to be in - the mix of taboo and rarity, combined with being the gender that it "shouldn't effect" and the fact that I'm not great with my feelings make it hard to deal with.

I'm also building a greenhouse - so that's cool.

I still need to figure out some aspects of the footer, mostly how to minimize contact and potential rot, how to make a drain under it, and how to deal with the roof, but those are all fun challenges.

How on earth do we counteract this? How do we define "legitimate news source" without also limiting the accessibility of the press?

I have no answer to this, but the thing I immediately wondered about was the "a little help from my parents" section of that post.

How much of their post was enabled by that little bit of help? How much was that little bit? Was it down played because we as a nation have a very weird relationship with the story of the self made man.

The narrative has always existed, the economy has just made it more noticeable.

Name: Ish

Location: Durham, NC

Age: 32? 33? somewhere in there. Definitely not 34.

Current preoccupation: Fertility, and that all the scare tactics you heard as a kid weren't necessarily true.

Previous preoccupations: Board games, video games, basic economics and history.

We're 3 years into the 30 year ARM with a credit union that adjusts every 5 years at a consistently reasonable rate (not max every time). Thanks to a few windfalls and moving from a real estate boomtown to a real estate mehtown, we've already managed to pay off about 1/5 of the mortgage, I just keep putting money into it. My 401k is stocked and has a steady flow, we have a stock portfolio, and I just can't think of a better way to diversify, so I guess house it is.

The bot thing is interesting. It gives me a lot to think about. I work for an ecommerce software company that makes a nifty bot for sellers. It looks at a product, finds that product for sales on amazon, and sells it for a penny less. This ensures our sellers are the ones that you're buying from. A lot of people use these pricing bots and they compete all the time to the benefit of the consumer. The problem comes not from the bots, but from the person that thinks they know what they're doing on setup. They forget to put a minimum, or to put in noncompete clauses with known "price cheats" and this will cause the market for that item to flash crash. It usually resolves itself quickly, but it costs the sellers a lot of money and, if they really bugger it up, it can put them out of business. It's kind of scary thinking the same basic premise is our economic underpinning.

Hello new work music.

Those horns on Can't Hide are great.

Did UNKLE do a song for True Detective? The second his voice came in that show just slammed into my mind.

EDIT: It was Leonard Cohen

"they're running out of reasons for you to not put your money under the mattress."

I feel this. I just had a bunch of stock vest in the company I work for and I want to sell it off because I don't want that many eggs in that basket, but I have no idea what to invest in. Everything just seems on its head crazy right now and I don't want to deal with the risk. The only thing I can think to do is put it towards the mortgage so that, if it comes to it, we could refinance and lower our payments.

I was was also going to ask here if everyone who was hot on ETH is still hot after the latest bubble, but that's not an investment as much as a novelty for me.

Very interesting stuff. Tangentially related - I've always wondered how a currency with a half life would work, where the longer you sit on it the less it's worth. Would that be enough to keep currency in circulation, or would it just create an industry of individuals who just launder old money for new?

I've started my Hubski lurking again, on and off, seems like the music thread is a pretty good entry point.

Everybody wants to be famous - superorganism -

Oh, Heart - Tank and the Bangas -

Breakdown - Handsome Boy Modeling School -

Believe - Benjamin Booker -

Pretty fascinating. I like shows like primitive technology for showing what really early construction looks like and even on to the middle ages, and shows like grand designs to show some of the more novel modern construction methods, but I haven't spent much time learning about the middle times, where people have access to high quality tools, but not necessarily access to supply chains or industrial production. Really neat.

https://griffinmcelroy.bandcamp.com/album/the-beast-the-water-music-from-the-adventure-zone-amnesty-2

The adventure zone sound track is just fun.