Dude you just hate everything and have done for years. The smug thing is you look out, decide the whole world and everyone in it sucks, and then instead of thinking "huh, maybe this is a function of my well-earned chronic depression" you go "it must be because everything is terrible and I'm the only one who has cracked the code." You're literally sitting there going I wonder if I can bait anyone into fighting about... the existence of culture.

I'm not going to tell you to watch Ferris Bueller. I'm not going to tell you to watch Back to the Future. I am going to point out that you took a discussion of a movie you've decided to never watch and used it to shit on everyone who ever has just to give yourself that little edgelord troll-hit of endorphins so... yeah. Good talk. What else haven't you seen, read or heard that you need to pronounce condemnation on? We'll start a list and whenever you have the downzies we'll post something!

Guys, it's not a big deal.

Sorry I left in a tizzy.

I'll try to finally make it to shitting all over the recent optimistic fusion news within another week or so.

Glad to be back though, but I'm still on twitter 😬

As of two days ago, I'm officially and completely employed by the company.

This was somewhat in the air (not on the ground level but legally) because I signed my work contract all the way in July, and I'd only arrived into Belgium to work in December. I'm not sure what the actual issue was, but now I have a new contract, and it's all good. I even got paid my first salary!

The social secretary (who runs the documents for my boss in the background) did a great job by giving me a higher-status position legally, which prompted higher pay for fewer hours. (Apparently all of that is not for my boss to decide directly, and is instead governed by employment rules of Belgium and/or the EU.) All in all, it's a significant bump to my available funds, and it's welcome even more so now that I think I have a good shot at celebrating Christmas and New Year in New York in 2023 → 2024.

Hearing a fair amount of Russian in Brussels. Mostly from women. Some of them were discussing the happenings in Ukraine from the position of (what sounds like) having fled the country. Hearing other people speak openly of the war and its consequences in my native tongue is somehow affirming, but also chilling: in as much as it feels like the war is that much closer to me, that much more observable, than it ever was when I was in Russia.

Having no money worry is a big relief. Being able to plan out more, and sooner, upgrades to self is a bigger relief still.

Whelp, I think Consequence 1 is that the State Department and CIA will never let Russia be a world power again. The fact that the neocons allowed Russia to regain enough power to place a useful idiot in the oval office will forever inoculate the Gray Men from allowing politicians to set policy. The CIA gets their teddy bear back - "destruction of the Former Soviet Union" has been on their wishlist since they checked off "Destruction of the Soviet Union". I don't know that they'll succeed but between the Magnitsky Act, the Bucket'O'Sanctions and the half-tithe we're spending to decimate the Russian military five times over, I know it's rough for Russia.

I think it will take several electoral cycles for Teh Crazeh to burn itself out in the Republican Party, but burn itself out it will. People forget: the number one requirement for Republicans has been LOYALTY since Newt Gingrich and we've seen the logical outcome of that. The era of Mitch McConnell is over; Democrats gained more seats than gerrymandering could protect, and Biden has nominated more judges than Trump as anyone with any character basically went "four more years" during the Trump Era. You can see this playing out in the Boebert Vs. Green debacle as the former nearly lost to a progressive Democrat while the latter handily beat her centrist challenger - Boebert now has to worry about actual voters while Green has to worry about even crazier morons to her right primarying her.

I think the cost of opportunism has been demonstrated for all far and wide. You can be Jason Miller? But all that's left for you is stand-ups on a hated network for old people whose only advertiser is a coke-addled pillow salesman. When all the world is leaning into ESG and everyone around you had a choice between ethics or opportunism, your scarlet letter is never going away. You know how Snowden shocked the world with all his revelations about the NSA? Ten years previously all that shit was called Total Information Awareness. Know what drove TIA underground? The whole country going "oh fuck not John Poindexter again." And that was effectively before social media, an era before teenaged citizen journalists could supercut your transgressions while bored. You can no more get history off the internet than you can get piss out of a swimming pool, and the whole of the Trump Posse Baby Ruthed the fuck out of that watering hole.

I think Jared Kushner is now Our Man in Riyadh. I think MBS went "I am the despot now" and the CIA went "fine, we see how well flattery works, we've got our own Donald Trump now." People forget - Donald Trump went "Jared is going to fix the Middle East" and by damn if Jared Kushner didn't somehow normalize relations to the point where you can fly direct from Riyadh to Tel Aviv now. Do I think Jared Kushner had anything to do with this? No I do not. The man's COVID solution was Facebook. But I think MBS doesn't give a shit about Palestine and the CIA went "we'll fund that emotion" and here we are. Will he still turn up drowned off the Canary Islands like Robert Maxwell? I sincerely hope so. But not while he's still a useful idiot. At its most cynical level, the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi sent a message to the CIA as to how MBS intended to run the country, and from a CIA standpoint, it wasn't particularly expensive or damaging - compare and contrast with Iran.

As far as consequences for Donald Trump? Whelp, he's likely got federal charges lined up against him, his extremely shady taxes are public, and at least two states are lined up for criminal and civil charges related to a smorgasbord of shady shit. And there is no disinfectant like sunlight.

I think he's got five, six years of ignominy left. I don't know if he'll ever serve time. I know we'll be talking about it until he fucking dies, which is extremely tedious, but objectively speaking, the man is a historical figure. He matters more than George Wallace, Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon. He's up there with John Wilkes Booth as far as I'm concerned.

We have been worried about a man like Donald Trump since before he was born. It has always been up to question what would happen if a legitimate challenge to democracy were to arise - how fragile is the republic, really?

I believe we have our answer.

One thing about our Mennonite form of government: it doesn't move quickly. There are many faster, more agile implementations of democracy in the world and while they're clearly better at coming up with things like universal healthcare, they also give you things like Brexit and Hugo Chavez.

Which is not to say it won't happen again. But a whole lot of Donald Trump's maneuverability was due to the element of surprise. You can attack Pearl Harbor twice but it won't do nearly as much. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme? And Donald Trump was what happens when George Wallace or Huey Long don't get shot, frankly. I don't know what that means for the future? But I know it'll be generations before anyone allows another Donald Trump to happen.

I'm sure there are people who can make open relationships work. I'll just say that in the 30 years I have been peripheral to the polyamorous community I have never once met one. More than that, nobody griefs quite like polys. Every anecdote I have about a bad breakup - every single one, except with the guy who is a diagnosed sociopath - involves a joint decision to fuck other people. The bitterest humans I know are the ones who tried to make open relationships work.

Quoth lil:

If monogamy is not based on the desire and joy in being together, then it’s control.

"Monogamy" can be substituted out of that sentence with no difficulty whatsoever. Polyamory, chess, bass fishing.

"I want to explore my sexuality" is a very, VERY different statement than "I want to explore my sexuality with you." Recognize that she is saying "I am offering you no commitments" and that is literally all she is saying. Recognize that she is laying the groundwork for "I owe you fuckall behaviorally speaking" and gird your loins for it. You will suck at this. I say this because I know you.

Your best move is to say "come find me when you've figured it out, because you matter to me more than I matter to you right now and I'm not going to put up with that."

Li'l story. I've known my wife since 1994. She literally gave me my dorm key. And within a week she was dating this other guy. Dated him for five years. Married him. Stayed married to him for two years. Then got sick of his shit and kicked him out. He was literally the only person she ever dated.

And we started dating, and she said a few things about having never really dated, and wanting to maybe figure out what that looked like, and I was kinda cool with it, and she had a party with a group of friends, one of whom, like me, wanted to date her earlier but couldn't, and I thought "I owe her this" and then I immediately thought "no, no I don't" and came right back to the house having left and kicked his ass out.

We'd been "dating" for two weeks at the time. That was more than twenty years ago.

A serial monogamist who was married for six years doesn't need to figure out her shit at your expense. You can be cool with it? But you won't be happy about it. And she won't respect you.

CANCEL AWAY FUCKERS

bfx, the important thing is to have fun now, to deepen your relationship now, and continue being honest and open about fears and feelings. “Now” is all that’s real.

I went through three long relationships and two (too) long marriages before I stumbled across my current partner and and for the first time didn’t want to be with anyone else.

I was sixty-fucking-three when I got it, that monogamy is just wanting to have the best time with someone you like — not externally imposed.

Prior to now in my life, monogamy was just another word for controlling. If monogamy is not based on the desire and joy in being together, then it’s control. Good for her that she’s exploring her feelings about sex and sexuality. She may want to do more exploring than you feel comfortable with - if that’s the case, figure out the roots of your discomfort- which is probably insecurity, which leads to control.

Still, time with others is time not with you.

Having a “relationship” or an imagined “future” with someone does not replace the necessity of also having to have a life.

GUESS WHAT MOTHERFUCKERS

MY VISA IS COMING

TODAY OR TOMORROW IT DEPENDS

BUT UH

YEAH

GOOD TIMES

Update:

GOT MY PASSPORT

COOL VISA INSIDE

NOW PLANNING MY ROUTE THE FUCK OUT OF RUSSIA

Update 2:

Boarding the bus into Helsinki in two hours. Probably will not update y'all when I get to my hotel in Brussels. Probably the morning after. Today is gonna be a long day... literally.

Thank you for all the support.

Holy shit this is amazing. It's like he's doing an impression of Doug Balloon but without realizing he's the target of the parody.

To his great credit, Trump reinvented the G.O.P.

...as archetypal Italian fascism...?

He destroyed the corporate husk of Reaganism and set the party on the path to being a multiracial working-class party.

Which races, exactly? Anglos, Saxons and Protestants? Scots-Irish and Muscovite Slavs?

To his great discredit, he enshrouded this transition in bigotry, buffoonery and corruption.

aaaaaand fascism. Let's not disregard the fascism, shall we?

He ushered in an age of performance politics — an age in which leaders put more emphasis on attention-grabbing postures than on practical change.

Ohhhh I dunno, some of us will never forget Terry Schiavo or the original October Surprise.

The left had its own smaller version of performative populism. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became a major political figure thanks to her important contributions to Instagram.

The Green New Deal was not a legislative package but a cotton candy media concoction.

...much like the New Deal, except without passing.

Slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the police” were not practical policies, just cool catchphrases to put on posters.

I have boots older than ICE, that shit could be abolished tomorrow and the world would breathe a sigh of relief. "Defund the Police" should have been "Demilitarize the Police" and you know it and things would have been fine.

That year, after progressives appeared to cost the Democrats several House seats with randy talk of socialism, moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger roasted the left and was one of those who helped pull the party back toward the center on crime and other issues.

...who? The former spook who won suburban Virginia by 5 points? That I legit had to look up?

Biden rejected the performative style of the populist moment while harnessing some progressive ideas.

LOL you mean the guy who used executive actions to pardon marijuana offenses and relieve student debt by edict?

Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago.

...which is why they've all been completely silent over the past week.

Peak wokeness has passed.

...maybe you made it up

There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation.

SHOT

I was a skeptic of the Jan. 6 committee at first, but I now recognize it’s played an important cultural role.

CHASER

That committee forced America to look into the abyss, to see the nihilistic violence that lay at the heart of Trumpian populism.

But remember, it's multicultural "Trumpian populism."

The election of 2022 marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us.

Yep it certainly wasn't about abortion.

Though the results are partial, and Trump acolytes could still help Republicans control Congress, this election we saw the emergence of an anti-Trump majority.

Because while 4/5ths of the country didn't vote for Trump in 2016, they are also 7-year locusts and it's taken them a while to claw their way out of the sand.

According to a national exit poll, nearly 60 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump.

...'cuz it wouldn't be the New York Times if they weren't linking to polls that have been useless for a decade or more.

Almost half of the voters who said they “somewhat disapprove” of Biden as president still voted for Democrats, presumably because they were not going to vote for Trumpianism.

Shit SURE has changed

The single most important result of this election was the triumph of the normies. Establishmentarian, practical leaders who are not always screaming angrily at you did phenomenally well, on right and left: Mike DeWine in Ohio, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. Workmanlike incumbents from John Thune in South Dakota to Ron Wyden in Oregon had successful nights. Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin had the quotation that summarized the election: “Boring wins.”

"Here are a list of elected officials nobody is talking about that I can cherry-pick to prove my point."

Americans are still deeply unhappy with the state of the country, but their theory of change seems to have begun to shift. Less histrionic media soap opera. Less existential politics of menace. Let’s find people who can get stuff done.

©2020 David Brooks

The telling election results were at the secretary of state level. The America First Secretary of State Coalition features candidates who rejected the 2020 election results and who would have been a threat to election integrity if they had won Tuesday. Most either lost or seem on their way to losing. Meanwhile, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who stood up to Trump’s bullying, won by a wide margin.

Thereby surprising exactly no one except the establishment pundit class and those who still humor them for some reason.

Because Democrats restrained their more extreme tendencies while Republicans didn’t,

I love how "extreme tendencies" on the left is things like healthcare.

On abortion and many other issues, the median voter rule still applies.

Let's elide the fact that 80% of the population agrees with democratic policies so we can ignore who the extremists are, shall we?

To be clear, I am not saying the fever has broken within the minds of those in the MAGA movement.

Oh hell no. Nor will he talk about their numbers or their sources of funding.

I am not saying MAGA Republicans won’t unleash a lot of looniness in the next Congress.

Because then who the hell will you ask diners in Cleveland about?

I am saying voters have built a wall around that movement to make sure it no longer wins the power it once enjoyed.

Bothsides it again, David.

I am saying voters have given Republicans clear marching orders — to do what Democrats did and beat back the populist excesses on their own side.

chef's kiss

There are two large truths I’ll leave you with.

Only two? c'mon David you've got some words left!

The first is that both parties are fundamentally weak.

This is why over half the country wants a third party to vote for yet the Democratic Socialists elected one state office and Libertarians won zero.

The Democrats are weak because they have become the party of the educated elite.

The Democrats are weak because they require a stance against corruption in order to retain their voter base.

The Republicans are weak because of Trump.

The Republicans are weak because they've practiced demagoguery and fascism for long enough that eventually, a fascist demagogue captured the party.

The Republican weakness is easier to expunge.

My favorite quote of this election: "You can turn away from Trump and lose the primary or you can turn towards Trump and lose the general."

If Republicans get rid of Trump, they could become the dominant party in America.

something something active shooter drills something something abortion something something debt something something

Second, the battle to preserve the liberal world order is fully underway.

While populist authoritarianism remains a powerful force worldwide, people, from Kyiv to Kalamazoo, have risen up to push us toward a world in which rules matter, practicality matters, stability and character matter.

No thanks to the New York Times, which is far too busy rewarding pithy phrases like "from Kyiv to Kalamazoo."

As Irving Kristol once wrote, the people in our democracy “are not uncommonly wise, but their experience tends to make them uncommonly sensible.”

Great thing about David Brooks? You always know he's quoting out of context. For one thing, he wasn't writing, he was speaking. For another, he was speaking before the American Enterprise Institute, a group that can be referred to safely as, shall we say, "fans of conservative politics." Finally, he was addressing them on the occasion of the end of mutherfucking communism. This is an arch-conservative thought leader, doing a victory lap in front of his biggest fans, and what did he have to say?

The common people in such a democracy are not uncommonly wise, but their experience tends to make them uncommonly ­sensible. They learn their economics by taking out a mortgage, they learn their politics by watching the local school board in action, and they learn the impossibility of "social engineering" by trying to raise their children to be decent human beings. These people are the bedrock of bourgeois capitalism, and it is on this rock that our modern democracies have been built.

But a society needs more than sensible men and women if it is to prosper: It needs the energies of the creative imagination as expressed in religion and the arts. It is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than experiencing one's life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.

The whole piece is worth worth reading. It's an old-school conservative saying "let's be careful of our victory laps." This lolbrooks drivel? This is an old-school conservative saying "we're still relevant." The former is thought-provoking. The latter is a lie.

Shit. That situation sucks. That's all there is to say. I'm in the waiting room for radiation oncology at Henry Ford Hospital ,Detroit. I''m getting Radiation treatment 3of4 for arecurrent glioma. Been surviving it for over ten years now. No cure for gliomas either. We've been managing this shit for over ten years now. Not all of ithas been terrible eitherthough. I'v e had some amazing times with my kids

and family. Times that are farmore amazing as I didn't think knewthey were guaranteed. I heard a hopeful statement about situations like ours. "It doesn't always get worse."

It's true.

I No one's disease is the exact same. Only by keeping fears at bay can we get our best result. I hope you guys find yourselves feeling better soon. I also work hard to live by ," It's rarely as bad as you think it will be and rarely as good as you think. Lastly, I've learned to recognize and discard related fearful thoughts that pop into my head. Listening to your random fears will drive a person to make terrible decisions.

Also , sorry as my typing is shit. My last two surgeries f-ed up my left field of vision. navigating a keyboard by sight is super tough.

When my dad was diagnosed with myeloma I told him I didn't know what to say. He said there's nothing to say about it.

Rather than talk about our feelings, which my family never really did, we just continued shooting the shit and joking and sending each other the equivalent of cat pics for old people.

Despite myeloma being incurable, it's treatable and some people last a long time and you kind of cling to the hope that this case will be one of those. Despite the statistics.

When the melonomas appeared though, every conversation became incredibly weird and difficult because we both basically assumed we were just waiting for him to die, which he did quite soon.

Sorry for making this about me and again, I'm not really sure what to say to you. The death in life sucks. Not sure about your relationship with your mom is like, but I hope you can avoid my situation of being weirded out talking to each other.

CCP has everything locked down so tightly, outsiders generally will never know the extent of censorship and totality of clampdown exerted. There were no results searching for mentions of Sitong Bridge Beijing on weibo or anywhere inside the great firewall recently. There are hundred or thousands or more police posted on bridges across China...

And anyone who's spent time in China will be aware of the pervasive chàbuduō attitude.

A mixture of a very pragmatic response to a situation, combined with meh, good enough, but it goes a lot further. It's also a very sharp, double edged sword.

Cable won't reach? Drill a hole in the door, feed it through... very pragmatic|meh good enough. Can't afford to buy and process vegetable oil, gutter oil..., so pragmatic|meh good enough.

Can't be bothered to follow to strict chemical/biological waste disposal procedures, dump it in the sewer.

chàbuduō also means if you can get away with it, you definitely should.

Now I'm not saying they were so slapdash with their attitudes, that a dangerous virus being experimented on for gain of function, funded by the US (because they aren't allowed to) - only co-incidentally the very virus that caused a worldwide pandemic killing millions - could have been exposed to the outside world accidentally because some fuckwit threw a virulent bat's carcass in the dumpster out back that one time because Joe Chao mixed up the labels on the infected/uninfected cages, or someone tore their protective clothing, or spilt a vial and just used a mop to clean it up because ... chàbuduō.

But that is exactly what happened.

Then the CCP machinery kicks in to cover it all up, now no-one will ever know the difference ... chàbuduō | meh good enough

There's an assumption (backed by propaganda and revisionist history) that history has been one long steady arc towards progress when in fact (1) nobody focuses on anything but western European history (2) it's had fucktons of fits'n'starts.

"labor" vs. "child labor" became a thing in the Victorian era because pastoralism and artisanism were wiped out by enclosure and mass-production. The Luddites weren't complaining about technology, they were complaining about wealth concentration and the unchecked evolution of Victorian squalor. That's what prompted Communism - Engels wandered over to the UK and went "whoa holy shit industrializaiton and capitalism are a massive step back for ordinary people" and Marx went "seize the means of production" which is a meaningless concept in a preindustrial society. But because we've been at the foremost of industrial society from the get-go, we naturally presume it is an unalloyed good and matchstick girls would have died of cholera even if they weren't drinking their own shit in Whitechapel.

Computers and devices are an environmental hazard, one we're adapting rapidly to either deal with or be defeated by. Social media is 20 years old and has radically changed politics and society but I mean, high schools are 100 years old and radically changed politics and society.

Fundamentally? If you're a bad parent, you're a bad parent. The challenges change but the need to respond to them doesn't. That "we" has always fucked up their kids, parents have always rebelled against the "we."

The "child labor laws" thing is a total non sequitur. I was ten hours a week at a toy store from 4th grade, got social security statements and everything. You can have child actors on stage for anywhere from half an hour (newborns) to 4 hours per day (teenagers) no problem. they can't work full shifts until 16 which... c'mon. Okay, they can't manufacture explosives. But I mean, c'mon.

I have an uninterrupted social security history going back to age eight. That doesn't include paper routes, mown lawns, short-order cooking at the ski area or fixing cars. And none of the regulations have changed from when I was a kid.

You're wrong about all of it, but – like I said, if you feel like telling me to go fuck myself, that's fine by me.

If ever you have forgiveness in you to share my way, I'd be delighted.

Until then, I'm bothering you no longer.

I’m always honest with you guys, so I’m gonna be upfront here. I tried creating another account, baseballninja, but I have no idea how to activate it. So I found the password to an old account. I wrote all this last night, but here I am now. It’s been what, two years now? I don’t know. Time has lost meaning.

I’m here to pontificate about baseball, maybe cartoons like Ninja Turtles or some shit from time to time, but mostly baseball. I fell in love with it last year. Twitter is a cesspool of angry people and so many bots it’s not funny. Reddit is a hell hole. I don’t even fucking get discord, so here I am, because I’m lonely, my life is a disaster, and every day I go to bed alive is a small miracle.

If you want to know where I’m at, here’s a dump for you. It’s greyed out, cause shit gets really real, really quick.

Mental Health

I think dimensia is starting to kick in. I get confused and lost easily, have a hard time remembering words and events, and other shit.

I suffer from OCD, real, fucking, bad. We’re talking losing on average 2-4 hours a day just to hand washing and showering and shit. There’s times where I lose an hour just to a single hand washing session cause I just can’t get it right. The doctor I went to see for it, cause he was free at the time, accidentally made it worse. The coping mechanisms he taught me were for PTSD, a way to rationalize through your fears. Turns out, doing that shit makes OCD worse. Now that I know better, I’m trying to find a specialist for OCD here in the city, but wouldn’t you know it, no one is taking on new patients. Ever. No matter who I call, I get told to check back in three to six months. I’ve damn near given up.

My friends and social life

One turned into a red piller. Another is about to be homeless and there’s nothing I can do to help and I don’t know if I can bear to watch. Another is, I am starting to suspect, in some weird white nationalist uber conservative church and doesn’t fucking want to admit it. Another I’ve stopped talking to because they went shit crazy. Another lives literally 10 hours away. The Baha’is around here rarely do anything in person and the in person events they do are often when I’m working. Everyone else works when I’m free and vice Vera. My own fucking family never calls or texts unless I call or text first. I text friends memes to stay in touch. Outside my coworkers, my only socialization is with my wife, and for so many reasons that puts a strain on our relationship but we’re trying to manage.

My Career

I work at a pet store now, cause I can’t get a job anywhere else, and you’d think being a germaphobic animal lover who hates corporate America would make it hard enough, but worse, it’s in a baaad part of town. We’re talking having to have locks on our bathrooms because people use them for drugs and prostitution. We’re talking about witnessing people beat their own pets and children in front of God and everybody. We’re talking about a murder happening literally right next door cause two shoppers got into a heated argument during the holiday season. We’re talking serious tragic and fucked up homelessness. On and on I could go, the stories I could tell, you wouldn’t fucking believe me. They happen, I tell people about them, and no one ever fucking believes me except my coworkers, cause we’ve fucking seen it all. If one of you guys got a text from your roommate that said “Hey, you can’t come home right now. There’s an active shooter situation at our apartment complex and the police won’t let anyone in or out” you’d probably think it’s sensational or some shit. For the people I work with? That’s like the fucking weather report.

For real, I’m as kind as possible to as many people as possible at work every single day. Partly because I’m in so much pain, it brings reality into a new perspective that I want to do everything I can to keep other people from feeling what I feel on a daily basis. But also? I kind of don’t wanna get shot in the face cause I pissed off the wrong customer.

I’m in a dark, dark, dark place. There’s been some storms I’ve had to ride out and my m sure there’s more to come. I’m only here cause honestly, I don’t even fucking know what to do anymore. I’m not looking for help though, I don’t want sympathy or pity or support. I literally just want a safe corner of the internet to say shit like “This series between Boston and Baltimore has been insane and I can’t wait to see what happens next” or”here’s a list of catchers I think are amazing” or “I love that The Pirates give up on seasons so early, cause then they bust out the rookies and I love watching rookies hustle.”

So I’m back. I’m sorry and not sorry. I’ll warn you though, a lot of days, I’m just a ball of emotion. Put up with me or don’t, I don’t care, I’m gonna ramble about baseball anyway.

And if you’re blocked, it’s cause I barely have the energy to make it through the day, I don’t have any to put up with you. Doesn’t mean I hate. Doesn’t mean I think you’re a bad person. I’m just really, really tired.

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I’m literally watching tonight’s Baltimore/Boston game while I wait for the ability to post. So here are thoughts.

Adley Rutschman is amazing. I have a special place in my heart for Jonah Heim and Tyler Stephenson though.

Boston’s City Connect Jersey is hideous. It looks like it belongs to some European Team. The Padres Jersey is worse. The Brewers and Angels have some cool ones though.

I’m surprised that Boston and Chicago White Sox both had seasons that fell apart. After Baltimore’s rough previous few seasons, this one was so fun, even if they don’t get a wild card slot. Can’t wait for next year for them. Or The Rangers.

I don’t care about pitch clocks, but I’m so glad they’re banning the shift. 4 men outfields and such were just stupid. Why even call them positions if they’re not gonna stick to them?

Players I love to keep an eye on. Jonah Heim. Oneil Cruz. Jonathan India. Keston Huira. Ryan Mountcastle. Way too many. On I could go.

Shohei deserves MVP.

Mancini being trade to Houston was a tragedy. Him being a bench player is a literal crime.

Is Kansas City even a real baseball team? I don’t think I’ve ever paid them even the remotest attention.

Fucking baseball. One of the few things that make sense. I’m glad I found it.

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Woke up to use the bathroom and the wife’s Angels game was just starting. I sat down to watch a bit. Logan O’Hoppe is making his major league debut. He’s a catcher. I’m a sucker for catchers. I love catchers. So much ride on them. Watched a few innings. His first MLB at bat was a clean single, maybe he’ll be okay.

I'm off for three days and you guys start talking about EV charging. Literally doing 1200km in two days in a 66kW Hyundai. A few points to add to the discussion:

1) you charge where you park. You top up in quick breaks when you need to go further. Nobody wants to fastcharge, so we expect it to become a much smaller part of driving than gas stations are now. Over here we expect just 13% of all EV charging to be at (highway) fast chargers. Imagine if you could fill up your car with water. Would you really opt to fill it up at a random industrial parking lot you could also drop a hose in it on your own driving lane and at work for half the price? How about your employer realizing they could make money by offering you free charging when you allow them to use your car as a battery storage? Opportunity charging, which is that you charge when your car is standing still anyway, is the inevitable way forward.

2) The US is dearly lacking in both fast and destination chargers. Range anxiety disappears once those two are remotely reliable - I know this from first hand experience and from a bunch of studies done on the Dutch charging station network, which happens to leave every other country in the dust. As soon as it's a common sight for there to be a charger in a parking lot, people stop complaining. Because I already have the luxury of a dense and reliable network of destination and fast chargers, I almost never have to worry, and I also almost never fastcharge. Colleague of mine has a charger at home and at work and he's never even used a fastcharger. Because if you leave full and can charge at your destination, that's two charging stops eliminated. So a <car range> mile trip both ways is made possible by just one charger at my destination, that happens to also be a decent way to make money for businesses with a large energy connection. Tesla drivers love their Superchargers, but normal people will avoid them if they can. And if you do need them - for most people, as soon as your EV can do 100+ kW of fast charging, which is "most new models and probably whatever first model upper class people will buy", nobody minds the stops because you'll be ready to drive another 150-200 miles right when you're done taking a piss or grabbing a coffee. Especially when you factor in that charging is cheaper per mile than gas.

3) What will drive the change in chargers? Well, the business case for EV destination chargers is decent. The case for rapid chargers is VERY good as soon as you hit a certain level of daily users. There is less overhead and less insurance than a gas station. It never needs refills, and you can basically just plop one down and wait for your investment to pay off. Even a small station can draw traffic, or can boost sales. The number of rapid chargers that aren't Tesla has doubled in less than eighteen months over here. We fully expect every supermarket, DIY store, McDonalds and Starbucks (any place that you will park at for more than 20 minutes and that owns the land it's on) to follow suit.

4) Smart charging capabilities have been made mandatory on all public slow charging stations here. The collective energy use of EVs will be a hit on the grid, but it's in the form of "small spikes in many places", which is something that grids are in theory perfectly capable of handling if dimensioned correctly. The real problem that will fick things up are heavy vehicles. They consume a factor 10-15 more energy than cars per km and require near 1MW chargers if you want to top them up along the way. The energy use of industrial zones can easily increase by TWh's if adopted widely, which is not the case of personal vehicles. And the TCO, which is nearly always the main driver of any EV adoption rate, however is good enough that the trucks will be here before the infrastructure is upgraded.

5) I still dream of a V2G system of energy brokerage whereby we can delay daily power use with cars and home batteries. The realities are complicated, and the rise of EVs seems to be going just a bit too fast for V2G to catch up. My city is one of the first to realize what you guys are theorizing about.

But it's the result of one incredibly entrepreneurial dude who's been at this problem for 8 years. Wider adoption... I don't know. I hope so.

this was also a long time coming

Worthy of note: those numbers are bullshit. The counts per rev on the motors isn't vaguely right, there's a 9:1 gearmotor between the motor and the ballscrew, and the ballscrew calcs aren't even incorporated. And uhh obviously the motor and the ballscrews aren't even physically connected.

But that's the software, cheerfully controlling a servo motor to a tenth of a micron.

The backlash of the gear motor is under 3 arc minutes, or under 0.05 degrees. The backlash of the GT2 belts is 2.7 arc minutes, or also under 0.05 degrees. two of the axes are 4mm/rev ballscrews, one of them is 2mm/rev. .1 degree at 4mm/rev is 0.0011mm, or 1.1 microns.

The machine originally used closed-loop control via Heidenhain glass scales that were totes stolen by the brigand that sold me the machine. With that closed-loop control the machine managed 1-micron precision. I can buy Mitutoyo scales that will work with a module for the servo pack that will get me to within 0.01 microns, or "a coronavirus." I don't think it'll take that. To assume mirror finish for any waveform you need half the wavelength. Visible light starts at around 370nm, so half of that is 185nm, or around 0.2 microns. The motors, for their part, are 24-bit encoders, so 0.0013 arc minutes per pulse or 0.077 arc seconds. 0.073 nanometers per pulse at which point you acknowledge you're measuring absolute fucktons of noise. 4600 pulses just in the combined backlash of belt and gear motor.

But I've taken this creature from "is it possible" to "do I want it."

I got the motors to wake up yesterday. They appeared in SigmaWin and I could jog them. I choked up like I was watching the end of Babe. I've got at least one dead servopak; I paid $190 ea for them because the local guy told me they were $3k and fuck him. I could buy another for $190 used or $400 new out of China or, apparently $1100 out of any scrupulous North American distributor who isn't giving me the fuck-you price. I found this out when I inquired about getting mine fixed and was told they won't fix it if it'll cost more than 70% of the new price or "around $800."

Here's a $4500 mill. Like that surface finish? Here's its stepper motor. A B C D, baby! Mine have 1500 parameters, life-cycle monitoring and not one, not two, but five thousand-page manuals. Which allow fancy moves like this fucking voodoo at 3:30.

I'm literally at "the plane flies." It's not ready for passengers? I wouldn't take it across the Atlantic? But the proof-of-concept has proven out and this fucker IS GOING TO WORK.

this was a long time coming

I defended my phd late in June.

Got the patent process rollin', so now the waiting game begins.

Dunno what to do with the rest of my life, but I'm taking the rest of the year off if possible. From mental health to just plain figuring stuff out, it'll be a good thing to do.