You ever have one of those weeks where you're just like: yeah. there might be a right-wing conspiracy?

I don't think Infinite Jest is itself depressing, but you'll want to avoid some of the books that came after. After reading Oblivion I didn't feel surprised that he killed himself.

From the wiki:

In general, Marshall Boswell claimed that this was Wallace's "bleakest" work of fiction. In Oblivion, he "uncharacteristically" provides "no way out" of solipsism and loneliness. Boswell further suggested that the collection "repeatedly undermines many of the techniques for alleviation" from loneliness, like communicating through language, that Wallace presented in Infinite Jest. "Oblivion," he writes, "remains unique in Wallace's oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism."[26]

Fuck if even Brooks is seeing the light, maybe there is hope?

Chances are I'll still be in town doing the same old thing next April too. Keep us posted!

Implemented an algorithm from a paper, got invited out to drinks tonight by the author. Makes this a real pubski, rather than a labski, day for me!

Also, met with my adviser to discuss human patient data, kept calling our samples "animals". Old habits die hard?

Do they freeze alright? Their parent cells are so finicky that somehow I doubt mine would be happy with a drop of DMSO in solution.

And making microglia:

I made an embryoid body!

~2 months until I have the final cell type I'm looking at.

A month and a half of treating, sorting, maintaining, and cleaning my cells every day to finally get the CRISPR knockouts I'd been working towards:

Now to do this 6 more times.

One of the genes I'd been trying to knock out was in a tricky region to sequence. I asked my adviser if I should spend a month debugging the PCR (after a post-doc had tried and failed for a month), just show the protein had disappeared by an antibody assay, or sequence the whole genome and look at that one gene afterwards.

They said sequence the whole genome.

The golden days we live in. Time to start making designer babies.

Nom nom nom

I'm getting chunks of human brain today!

Thu / Sun both work for me, keep us posted

I'll be around, I'm down for a pubski in meatspace.