Sitting in the train on my way to Berlin (again). I am trying to use as much of my "summer" as I can, given that I was robbed of two weeks of holidays with my family due to COVID. So every weekend in September and October is planned with travels. I hope I am superhuman (vaccine + COVID = 2000U/ml antibody titer right now).

While all this travelling is happening, I am having a very mixed time. Managed to go to a single Burn this year kiezburn, which is the German/Berlin version of a local burn, named after the Berlin Kieze, which is just another way of saying neighborhood, but it's smaller than a neighborhood, usually. So instead of a camp at a burn, they call them Kiez at Kiezburn.

I mentioned briefly in chat (and promised steve a small update, so here it is) that it was probably my toughest burn. I had a tough burn before, which was just after my weed-induced psychosis, but that was obvious why. This time, I went quite stable in my mind, not expecting 5 days of dread.

I often deal with a specific feeling of loneliness. Even though I am surrounded by people, friends, I feel alone. The reasons for it are not clear to me. I always wish to be part of a "group", a crew, a gang, a swarm, whatever you call it. But I never am. I always end up swimming between swarms. Being a connecting link. Introducing people from one tribe with the other. But I never really felt part of one. My strongest relationships tend to be 1-on-1 relationships with people that are not directly connected to each other, spread across countries, cultures, and social bubbles.

The only place I always felt like I belong was the burn. Any burn. Whether it was MidBurn in Israel or Borderland in Denmark. I always felt like I "found my people". This was the first time I didn't feel like it. I felt like a foreign squirrel amongst fish.

One particular dynamic kept repeating. I probably didn't choose the right Kiez/camp for my first time at Kiezburn. The camp consisted of the main organizers of the burn. Which meant that they knew each other for a looong time and throughout the whole burn it was hard to disconnect from the organizational part of the event, and just be. So I went out to find me some peers, which wasn't hard. Nearly every day, I met one person or groups of people I felt comfortable with or found interesting and asked if I can tag along. It went well, at first, until, I was forgotten. People would leave (as a group) to another place, or something, without letting me know.

I did cross my mind that maybe they don't want to have me around. But all of them went through the effort to find me on social media after the burn and kept contact. So I guess it wasn't that. I kept wondering why this would happen over and over. Add a little bit of alcohol, FOMO, and I end up feeling like crap every night when heading to bed.

I got to talk to one person I met, who was also part of such a group, and I asked her what she thinks happened. She said that she always had the impression that I "know everyone", which lead to the assumption that I am not part of the group. Or rather, that I am "fine without a group". I have heard this a few times over the years, and I always wondered where this impression comes from. Either way, it is the opposite of what I actually feel like.

This is a small excerpt of what made this burn tough. There was also a lot of miscommunication with a former lover/friend from Israel that joined me for the burn. But I learned my lesson. Never take responsibility in planning a burn for anyone but yourself. Why the heck do I keep maneuvering my self into positions where I am responsible for shit??

Long rant. Anyway. Off to Berlin for a psychedelic research conference :) If you are interested, there are live-streaming tickets and the program is quite nice https://insight-conference.eu/program/thursday/

It's been a rough couple of weeks. I contracted covid. I am pretty sure I got it from an exercise class I took. I was masked for the most part, with the exception of drinking water, but not everyone was. Lots of huffing and puffing. Not the best idea on my part.

My wife ended up getting it too and my youngest child. We have all been quarantined. it ends on Thursday. My kids have started a new school and are having to join remotely at first. It's not ideal. Our childcare provider can't help us so we were back to home schooling two kids, watching a third and trying to run our two companies while being very sick.

Breakthrough infections are more common than people think. The symptoms are also very real. I have never been so tired. My head ached, I coughed a lot and my brain was foggy. There were two days where I must have slept 16 hours. It was debilitating.

Luckily the kids are all doing well. My wife was also very sick. We are recovered though. Hopefully, my wife and I are now superhuman.

Fun weekend project. I've had this bass since I graduated high school in 2000, and I recently bought a vintage Modulus to replace it. So I decided to turn it fretless. My local luthier wanted $400, and I thought that was too expensive. I couldn't buy an off-the-shelf P-Bass fretless neck, because this Japanese made "Lyte" model was discontinued in the early 2000s and the neck pocket is 1/8" narrower than a standard P-Bass (and anyway they cost ~$250 plus you still need to do a set-up). So I decided to do it myself.

Here's the before:

Took the neck off, ripped the frets out, and gave it a rough sand:

Glued some thin strips of maple veneer into the fret slots (I chose maple so the lines would really pop against the rosewood):

Trimmed and sanded the fretboard with 150 up to 2500 grit:

Finished it with linseed oil:

And then bolted it back on with a new set of flatwound strings, no set-up required:

Plays beautifully, and only cost me about $80 ($50 in supplies plus $30 for a heat gun and a pair of flush cut pliers).

This morning I just learned that I'll need to fight my previous landlord in order to get my security deposit back. In an unsurprising turn of events, my psychotic hoarder ex-housemate played their role perfectly and trashed the place before skipping town. My lawyer thinks I have a strong case, which is the first good news I've gotten since I was driven out of the house by the aforementioned ex-housemate.

Does anyone know of any quiet, walkable mountain towns with affordable real estate? I suddenly find myself inspired to own my own place.

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in

what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once

discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater

importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article

on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the

article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.

Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and

effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then

turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was

somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page,

and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In

ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything

they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means

untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against

evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it

almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Michael Crichton, April 26 2002

I am experiencing an epistemological crisis.

A little unpacking here - the "% q/q saar" for "q3 21" means "quarter over quarter Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate" in this case for "GDP growth" for the United States. If you're curious, "q3" is July 1st through September 30th. So this isn't a "forecast" per se until you realize that this is Barclay's best educated guess as to what the Fed is going to say Q3 2021 was, at 10am on November 24th.

This graph reflects one group of analysts guesstimating how another group of analysts will describe our now economy three months from now. if you want to see more, pay half a million dollars.

Notice how far removed we are from, you know, facts on the ground here. And recognize that there is a financial incentive to pay Barclay's a half million dollars to guess what the Fed's gonna say in November because "what the fed says in November" is far more important than "what's happening" to financial markets.

Crypto went down yesterday, ostensibly because hurr durr El Salvador or some shit. Except

(1) volumes were light - like $4b on Binance, a heavy day is $12b, lightest I've ever seen is $1.2b

(2) All the moves were related to quick dumps on big exchanges, a hallmark example of market manipulation

(3) the dumps coincided nicely with the East Coast waking up so that it'd be in the financial news

The great thing about crypto is it's stripped naked of all the SEC pretense. You can see the front-running and boiler rooms out there in the open. But only if you look. And nobody looks. So obviously this is "the market", whoever that is, freaking out about El Salvador. It certainly isn't a deliberate move by large financial institutions to control the narrative.

I'm four pieces from done. That sentence will make sense some day. Cast three pieces on Friday, investment mixed up thin as water, hardened into something softer than packed powdered sugar. Managed to cast it anyway, despite it crumbling in the caster. Figured I fucked up the water ratio (which is tough, I do this stuff to the gram) so paid extra attention yesterday. Shit came out like spackle. Hardened up in 5 minutes, it's supposed to give me 10.

Called Rio Grande, "they've had no problems." Called my father-in-law, "you must have screwed up the tare. Twice." Called up my buddy the caster, who goes through 50lbs a week, "yeah it's garbage. I'm having to switch after 15 years. I've had like two bad bags in a row, my other buddy has had three." That's 250lbs of garbage investment. Used to be made by an American company in Kentucky. That concern got sold to the Italians, who OEM it out of an office in New Mexico, but it's manufactured in Turkey now. So I'm switching to another Turkish investment, that's repped out of New Jersey. I lucked out in that I'm only paying a dollar a pound to have magic plaster shipped to my door.

And I mean... there's a jewelry consultant who charges $250 an hour to tell you what you're doing wrong. He hasn't figured out my techniques for getting photopolymer resin to get along with platinum cure silicone. The largest jewelry supply house in the world (owned by Berkshire Fucking Hathaway) is straight-up LYING to their customers.

My diet has fallen apart. Once you get past the "eat nothing but raw vegetables forever" they're straight-up out of justification. They've also stopped responding to me. It's the 80/20 rule through and through - most lardass Americans will function on their diet simply by not eating elephant ears with gravy but the 20% that require a little expertise? "have you tried broccoli?"

AND IT'S EVERYWHERE. A colleague who should know better is presecribing Iver-fucking-mectin for COVID. Fuckin' parable of the jeweler's pliers, man. I've spent most of my life in weird little corners of knowledge where there's depth but eventually you get to know everything and everyone and you realize just how small and specialized things are. Scratch an old person and you'll get archaeological folklore that often gives you an edge over teh new hotnezz.

But I mean... half a million a year to tell people "fed be bummin'?" NO SHIT.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the bias results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others". It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from people's inability to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their level of competence.

I shouldn't know more about casting than a guy who charges $250 an hour having spent what? 15 months fucking around in my garage? except the only thing anyone casts anymore is wedding rings. And wedding rings are EEEEEEZZZZZZZZZEEEEEEEE goddamn it. My dad made one with a candle, plaster of paris, a coffee can, a string and a blowtorch.

Half a million a year. These are the guys that run the economy.