2025-04-18 22:30:00
I'm a pathetic, soft-skulled, domesticated shell of a man. A city-dwelling weakling who'd perish within 15 minutes of being dropped into the wild.
I eat clean. I work out. I take every biohacker vitamin known to man. And yet, I'm always slightly sick. Year-round allergies. Mystery sore throats. Chronic congestion. A body stuck in perpetual beta. An AI-generated template with broken links.
And it's not my fault. Civilization did this. Processed foods turned us into narrow-jawed, mouth-breathing homunculi.
My ancestors cracked open mammoth bones with their teeth just to suck out the marrow. I take Adderall at 7am and sip meal replacements at noon because chewing gives me jaw fatigue.
And even though chewing is boomer behavior, sexual selection hasn't gotten the memo. Women still want square jaws and hunter DNA. So I mew and chew tactical gum just to LARP as reproductively viable.
My ancestors had alpine-adapted noses and lungs with the vital capacity of a wood chipper. I, meanwhile, have nasal passages designed like a startup: lean, sleek, completely dysfunctional. And my lung capacity is optimized for playing Minecraft.
My narrow airways cause congestion. Congestion triggers allergies. Allergies lead to mouth breathing. Mouth breathing leads to snoring. Snoring breeds sleep apnea. Sleep apnea dismantles my immune system. And so I spiral through an endless recursion of man-colds.
My wisdom teeth? They're just there to bully me now. They don't help me chew, they know I don't. They're vestigial ragebait, inflaming themselves out of spite, because my modern, libtard jaw is too narrow to house them.
Every night, I wear a plastic bite guard because I grind my teeth in my sleep. I grind my teeth because I'm stressed. I'm stressed because I take Adderall. I take Adderall because I can't concentrate. I can't concentrate because my dopamine receptors were obliterated by TikTok. I scroll because I can't focus. I can't focus because I scroll.
So now I suck on a little chunk of plastic every night, absorbing microplastics into my bloodstream. Microplastics which end up in my testicles, affecting my testosterone production, making me low T.
Despite my looksmaxxed jawline, the bloodline is doomed. The Bill Gates plastics have corrupted my ability to breed.
And it's not just me. It's not just us. Civilization broke everything. Even animals are adapting to the mess we've made. You see, evolution never stopped, it just got weird. It got urban. The wilderness is now asphalt and algorithms, and the survivors are the ones who can metabolize french fry grease and dodge Teslas.
In Nebraska, cliff swallows used to get annihilated by traffic. Their population was collapsing. The males probably had an incel subreddit. But then, survivors showed up with shorter wings. The shorter wings allowed for tighter turns. Better mid-air dodges. Soon, the population stabilized. Evolution, courtesy of 18-wheelers.
In New York, rats have evolved to digest fast food more efficiently. Not a joke. Genes that support lipid and carb processing are being favored. These rats are now biomolecularly adapted to slop. They are fast-food forged.
Even animals not directly touched by the city are bending to its pressure. In Finland, tawny owls used to be mostly grey, perfectly camouflaged for snowy winters. But now, as the climate warms and snow fades, more and more brown morphs are popping up. Nature is color-correcting for the apocalypse.
So if the swallows get shorter wings, the rats get better digestion, and the owls shift their feathers, what do we get?
What traits help a species survive in a world of endless screens, collapsing ecosystems, and synthetic everything?
Humans 1,000 years from now won't be godlike post-humans. They'll be hyper-specialized sludge goblins, optimized for slop and scroll.
Jaws? Gone. Chewing deprecated.
Mouths? Gone. Nutrition is delivered via IV. All communication is text-based.
Heads? Permanently tilted forward in screen-prayer. Cervical spine fused into gamer hunch.
Eyes? Massive, glassy orbs. Double eyelids evolved into mucus membranes for seamless TikTok consumption.
Fingers are long now. Disturbingly long. Dry, twitchy, curved for optimal touchscreen input.
We don't walk. We scoot. Legs are vestigial. Ankles fused. Technically functional, spiritually broken. Like a 2016 version of PHP.
We're pale, not ethereal, just unwell.
Hairless. Slick. No need for insulation when you never leave the pod.
Swollen asses. Reinforced tailbones. Biological seat cushions for lifelong sitting.
Reproduction only happens through mutual parasocial agreements and state-sponsored IVF programs. Elon Musk, an early adopter of the system, is praised for having been ahead of his time.
Obviously, we don't have sex. Our genitals are mostly decorative now. Honored for their past contributions, like Latin.
The final mutation is neurological. Dopamine tolerance so high we need 30 browser tabs, 80mg of space Adderall, and a podcast at 5x speed just to feel baseline.
We're not apex predators. We're not survivors.
We are the cliff swallows.
The fast-food rats.
The tawny owls.
Not shaping, just shaped.
We live.
Not well.
But forever.
Chewing nothing.
2025-04-18 21:43:00
It's early Friday. The morning light has just started to peek through the trees near my house and then through the gaps in my window blinds. I really want to go back to sleep, but I can't stop thinking about this movie I watched yesterday. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
My friends always decide what we watch. Usually movies that they've seen get added to Criterion or had recommended to them by podcasts (dubious means). I love it because I usually leave the room anyway to go do my own thing and leave my movie nerd buds to talk shop about what they've just seen.
Last night was different though. I only half listened to the gang talk about what we're about to watch, fully expecting to get up a few minutes into the movie to go snake my way over to my computer. That didn't happen though. No matter how much the weed in my system was trying to get me to log into TF2, I just couldn't find the will to peel myself away from the screen.
First off, I'm no film analyst but I can recognize when I'm being enveloped in a great movie. The Talented Mr. Ripley shows us a gorgeous Italy, it's a real treat to the eyes. Tom Ripley our leading man, played by Matt Damon, is such a freak it's so charming until the moment it isn't. This film really earns it's place in the thriller genre thanks to the actions Tom takes throughout the movie's second half. Also, it's surprisingly gay? I think part of why the film was so enthralling was getting mixed into the subtleties and allusions to gay shit being afoot here. The spark between some of the male cast is molto bene. It's a film based on the book of the same name by, Patricia Highsmith, who apperently also wrote the the book that the lesbian movie Carol (2015) is based on. Which I guess now I must watch because lady can write some really interesting queers.
The morning light has fully evolved into daylight now, and I find myself thinking about the character Peter, played by Jack Davenport. He enters the movie almost out of no where and follows up Phillip Seymour Hoffman's antagonistic Freddie character as a much more warm, charming person. Although it's hard to see where the movie is steering us in introducing Peter because he starts off as such an inconsequential character to the plot. However, the direction they go with him and Tom Ripley's "relationship" has really become the highlight of the whole film for me and it only comes together in the final act. Peter's also really cute, I can overlook the whole British thing. Ugh, justice for Peter.
I think you'll be hard pressed to find any current day conversation about the Talented Mr. Ripley that does not include mention of Saltburn (2023). We didn't realize this until halfway through the movie, but the thematic similarities were just too great not to point out that Saltburn is just the same film. I liked Saltburn ok enough, but LOVED the Talented Mr. Ripley. No contest on which I'd rather rewatch (especially for Peter...) and I think that comes down to Ripley's runtime. Normally a 2 hour 19 minute runtime would be primo "walk out and do something else" time for me. However, a movie of this length would have so much to offer on rewatch especially because all the performances given reveal such depth in each character and their movements through the dense plot.
Watch this movie, it's gas. 5 outta 5 turquoise pinky rings.
Not bad for my first blog post I hope! :)
It was a lot of fun to let a stream of consciousness out onto digital paper. If you liked this post please let me know with the little click on the "^" up arrow below.
2025-04-17 21:44:24
When I decided to lose weight in 2007, the world was different. We still untangled headphone cords, worshipped the click-wheel of our chunky iPod Classics, and debated if "Lost" would ever make sense. Atkins echoed through fluorescent-lit gym locker rooms, Paleo had barely crawled from its cave, and Tim Ferriss was still mixing lentils and red wine, scheming up his “Slow-Carb Diet”. Most conversations about weight loss still circled around calories in versus calories out.
There weren’t a thousand protocols floating around Instagram promising "look great naked". No endless carousel of “what worked for me” stories. So I had to write my own. Somewhere deep in an old, battered human nutrition textbook, I found one peculiar sentence:
=="Carbohydrate is a non-essential nutrient."==
That one idea set me loose. I started telling anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t):
==“You have to deserve your carbohydrates.”==
I started myself on a "low carb" diet. Meat, fish, and poultry were abundant, carbs were earned — meaning, once I had enough protein and fat "inside", then (and only then) could I allow a handful of blueberries, a cup of asparagus, and maybe an heirloom tomato. Years later, I learned nuances like how even protein can metabolize into body fat if you overshoot, but back then it didn’t matter. Why? Because ==I wasn’t building the perfect system — I was creating my own.==
These days, in a world obsessed with protocols — carnivore, vegan, Mediterranean, OMAD, Keto, you name it — it’s tempting to shop online for success. Like ordering a new self on Amazon: next-day delivery, please. And if you've ventured into nutrition — or god forbid, dieting — you’ll know there are always more claims (usually dressed as scientific data) than any human lifespan has time to process. Information isn't power; action is. And action demands more than a borrowed instruction. It demands your fingerprints — quirks and all — pressed into the process.
Psychologists call it ==autonomy== — one of the three core needs in self-determination theory, alongside ==competence and relatedness==. Autonomy isn’t isolation. It’s ownership. It means your food choices aren’t hand-me-downs from a bestselling author, but stitched from your own rhythms, and real life experiences. Not because it sounds healthy, but because it makes sense — to you, in this body, at that time.
When you borrow someone else’s diet, you inherit their blind spots too — their metabolism, their cravings, their grocery list, their credit card limit, even their relationship with boredom. And the more obedient you become to their method, the further you drift from your own intelligence. The better alternative is messier, slower, but infinitely kinder: designing a method that welcomes you as you are, shifting as you change.
So what follows isn’t a how-to. These are nine ideas to begin with — not answers, but examples. Use them as riffs, not templates. Try them. Ignore them. Remix them. But above all, create your own.
Pause before the first forkful and name one thank-you — silently or aloud — towards the hands, soil, or luck that placed food in front of you. Gratitude slows the tempo, primes digestion through vagal tone, and tells appetite, "enjoy".
Every meal must fit on one plate. No stacks, no side bowls “just for salad.” If you want more, wash the plate first, wait twenty minutes, then decide. ==Advanced users pick smaller plates — choosing a meal worth the space.==
Choose just a few colors each day — vivid spinach green, tomato red, egg yolk yellow, white cauliflower — and let the constraint build awareness, steer you toward whole ingredients, and spark playful creativity. You may also notice how most junk food is suspiciously beige.
Rhythm over rigidity. Let sunlight dictate your eating window. Meals begin at sunrise, end by sunset — or your best guess.
Begin with a 10-hour eating window and shorten it by 15 minutes every week. Don't rush into asceticism, just notice how clarity rises as feeding hours shrink.
All food must be consumed in front of a mirror. ==Watch your reflection — not Netflix.== It might spoil your appetite or heighten the pleasure, but it’ll certainly pull eating out of shadowy habit and into visibility.
List five to ten pre-approved whole foods — ==your always-yes foods==. Decision fatigue? Default to your simple shortlist. Eat without drama, especially when too tired for thoughtful choices.
Fast by emotion, not the clock. Angry? No eating until you’ve stomped it out on a brisk walk. Sad? Wait until you’ve filled two journal pages. This gently untangles hunger from emotion.
==Sketch your food before taking a bite== — quickly, no art degree required. That drawing becomes a marker of intent. That small disruption breaks the autopilot loop, bringing consciousness to impulsive bites.
Treat each idea as an experiment. Take notes. Laugh at setbacks. ==The body reads sincerity more clearly than it reads macros.== Weight loss protocols succeed not by numbers on a scale, but by the depth of connection they nurture with your daily rhythms.
Would it even be proper prickly writing without some pointed questions? Today, I'll spare you. Just kidding! Here you go:
What hunger are you feeding when you’re no longer hungry?
How would your diet change if each bite were an act of self-expression?
Which conversation with your body are you postponing by following someone else’s rules?
How much of your struggle with food is simply refusing to grieve the identity you’re leaving behind?
Because weight loss isn’t really about losing weight. It’s about rediscovering yourself, meal by meal, ritual by ritual — personal, playful, deliberate.
As I often ask my clients at the end of our conversation: of everything here, what’s the one part that stayed with you? Feel free to share it with me — and if this piece earned it, give it an upvote so others can find it too.
2025-04-17 09:10:00
I'm currently using Thunderbird to get/read RSS feeds. Outlook used to support them but it seems that's gone now too.
I miss when the feeds were available natively on browsers, setup similarly to bookmarks. You could click the RSS logo on a website and it would add the feed to your list. They showed up in a little folder all categorized and everything. Any links in the feed could be easily clicked on and have the page or whatever open up in a new tab. You didn't need to switch apps or anything.
I'm not a fan of the web based feed readers because they require an account. I have so many accounts. Browser extensions are shady. Cool open source projects on GitHub don't always want to install properly. But I do have at least three web browsers installed, you know, for the purpose of browsing the web. (Update: Yes! I have Vivaldi on my Manjaro laptop, but I don't daily drive it.)
It just feels like we have a dozen Band-Aids wrapped around a problem that used to be solved.
2025-04-17 07:34:00
I've never had any motherly feelings toward anyone or anything. I know, that sounds a little wicked. That doesn't mean I am not caring though. I say this only because some who are childfree, a label I sometimes struggle to assign myself given the nature of some in the community, have no issue calling themselves "dog moms" or "cat dads." Of course, people can define themselves however they want. Still, I think labels like those dilute the meaning behind the responsibility and work that parenthood demands. Caring for an animal is no doubt a lot of work, though parenting a child is something else entirely in my opinion. In any case, I've never felt like a mother to any animal but rather a companion, even though that's not quite right either.
I'm writing this because I have long felt like I needed to make a post about it, and I found a lot of commonalities (and some differences) between VonGiorno and me.
Unlike some childfree people, I don't hate children. Okay, I get a little upset when kids run around screaming in public and clearly haven't been parented well. I think more childfree spaces should exist. I don't really care to hold anyone's baby. But children are little people who are sometimes misunderstood or sometimes even disserviced by their parents when it appears to be vice-versa. In fact, one of my favorite experiences in elementary school was when I had the privilege of being a "safety" for the kindergarteners. In this role I was responsible for taking three of the children to their respective buses at the end of the day so that they could make it home safely. With the other "safeties" we supervised them at lunch and on other occasions as well. I still vividly remember the few children I helped and wonder what they're up to over 15 years later. I'll never know.
I never daydreamed about becoming a mother. As a child, I liked playing with my toy animals—not dolls or anything like this—and eventually sports. Sometimes I would hear "when you have children . . . " from my mother or grandma, and it just went into one ear and out of the other. It was assumed I would have kids, but I didn't push back against that idea yet because adulthood seemed so far away. I actually don't even feel like an adult as I write this, instead a perpetual child who will never grow up (for better or for worse). I'm still mistaken for a teenager sometimes.
I guess I should feel grateful that eventual parenthood wasn't enforced on me as much as it has on others. Though my mother also had these expectations in her head for me. Sometimes they were rules, sometimes they seemed like desires she had if she could go back and redo her life. She overlooked that I was studying at a good university and setting the foundations for my career; she only insisted that I marry a (white) doctor. Probably have two kids, ultimately stay at home to care for them. End of story. Thankfully, we are no longer in touch.
Then it further dawned on me one day: I never want to become pregnant. Ever. The idea of my body giving birth to a human being—if that is even possible—terrifies me, not to mention all the bodily changes that come with doing so. I mean the permanent ones post-pregnancy. All this scares me so much that I decided to make my decision permanent over three years ago, at the ripe age of 25, to have my fallopian tubes removed.
Even though the regret following sterilization is higher among women who already have children, many people, including those who perform such procedures, question the motives of childfree women. They're bound to change their minds someday, aren't they? It just takes the right man to want to raise his children. Isn't that how it works?
The truth is that I've felt nothing but relief since that surgery. I have zero regrets and don't see that changing anytime soon.
But people might still think: Well, you could adopt, right?
Now I have made it to what may be the true reason why I am not going to have children. Even if all the other reasons to not have children—the dying planet, the unsustainable costs of living, geopolitical instability, the unwillingness of many men to take on a fair share of household management and parenthood, and whatever else—hypothetically disappeared, I would still refuse.
Why? Every day I feel like I am reparenting myself. I was abandoned, given up to an orphanage on the day I was born. I lost my family and my country. Many adoptees, separated by their birth families by distance, death, rejection, or a mix of some of these factors, dream of having a child to be able to see themselves in another person. It's sort of selfish though, or at least it would be for me. I'd rather focus on building a relationship with my biological family however I can.
More importantly, however, this being-given-awayness is something I will never fully shake, worsened by my inability to fit into what I now realize was a narcissistic adoptive family who only made me feel even more alien and disposable. I'm still recovering from this and just want peace. I simply cannot come home to a child who needs (and deserves) my undivided attention when I am still very much a child. I also don't support adoption even though it is often a necessity, but that is a post for another day.
Don't get me wrong, I respect and appreciate those who aspire to become parents and do so responsibly. And helping young people is still very important to me. I've delighted in mentoring students. I want to support the next generations as much as I can beyond abstaining from bringing another child into a world that is burning down, something that I would consider selfish more than the decision to be childfree. If anyone close to me has a child, I'd be happy to help them in whatever capacity I can. It takes a village, after all.
Sadly, given political events in the US and in other countries, I'm afraid that being a childfree woman will become even more of a statement, maybe one that should not be advertised. Writing this post was nice but still felt a tiny bit taboo. I appreciate VonGiorno speaking up and inspiring me to finally write about it though.
2025-04-17 04:18:00
I don't have a problem with reading every post on the first three or seven or ten pages of the Discovery feed every day.
I don't have a problem.
You have a problem.
Now scoot over, I need to hit the refresh button.
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