Tag: Control

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1959 and Chambre Syndicale

I’m in my luteal phase so primed to be grumpy, frumpy and otherwise combative. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue as I’m currently experimenting with synthetic hormones and all sorts of experimental peptides but the feminine is a mystery.

Thankfully this cunty attitude had a positive side effect of spiraling me into a group chat debate over what constitutes couture. Haute couture literally means “high sewing” or “high dressing making” in French.

I just had to be technically correct as it’s the best kind of correct. I only know as once upon a time I picked a fight with Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode aka La Chambre Syndicale as old school fashionistas tend to still call it.

I may have done a kind of DDOS (allegedly) on their publicity fax machines to get their attention to further my guerrilla reporting efforts. They were not amused by the chron job I set to send them regular faxes at specific intervals. Anyways.

The TLDR is essentially that what constitutes couture is a bit like champagne. It only counts if it’s from the ateliers of Paris with very specific artisans (and a number of them) using hand sewn techniques which sell only to private clients with custom fittings. They then approve your atelier if you meet these standards.

Couture is not custom made clothing nor is it a form of luxury determined by price or self labeling. And it is definitely not “ready to wear” clothing you can buy off the runway. If an elaborate dance of craftsmanship and French bureaucracy. As an American I find it a bit silly but I don’t care for cartels of any kind be it drug, oil or clothing.

Many designers will try to get away with calling a custom made item couture in order to ride on the 170 year aura of French fashions but it’s not really what is meant by couture and it’s absolutely not what is meant by haute couture.

You don’t see Savile Row tailors calling themselves couture designers nor should they. That would be silly and imprecise. They are Savile Row tailors and that’s its own special custom suiting process.

Being imprecise in one’s specifications is exactly the opposite of what you’d want from someone making you a custom wardrobe based upon nearly two centuries of a professional cartel’s specifications.

So please don’t call something couture as a short hand slang for custom design. It may be ready to wear. It may be tailored to you. But only those who meet the standards of the Chambre Syndicale carry the designation haute couture. Otherwise it’s just sparkling custom made clothing.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1956 and Mother’s Day Message on Fertility

One of my mutuals Riva Tez wrote an exceptional read on her research into the American approach to fertility, and in particular, the maximalist hormone dosing that goes into programs like egg freezing, embryo freezing, and in vitro fertilization

It’s a topic on which I have written extensively, as I am one of the women who was hurt by the American approach of high hormone intensity to extract eggs efficiently. To make a long story short, it kicked off an autoimmune process in me that we’ve never fully gotten under control.

I think a lot about what the fertility industry did unknowingly to me and how it forever changed the course of my life. I went from thinking I had an insurance policy to being too ill to work within the space of a year. There is no recovery for me as of yet, even though I spend quite a bit of time and effort on my health.

If you were a millennial or Zoomer thinking about these procedures, I’d like you to consider reading her research and my personal experiences and educating yourself so you can make the most informed decision in your family planning.

Becoming a mother may have been an easy or unexpected decision for other generations of women, but we live in a very different time with very different technologies and different social constructs.

The more you know about your options, the more likely it is that you will find the right path for yourself without doing harm to your body in the process.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1954 and Constriction

I am in so much pain today. The tendon bands that wrap from my sternum around my thoracic to my spine is badly inflamed. It’s hard to breathe smoothly when your own tendons are choking you out.

I had a fairly intense week what with the chaotic back and forth in the national policy debate around artificial intelligence. There have been swirling rumors and much back and forth. Nothing feels worse than seeing your own industry shoot itself in the foot as the stakes get bigger.

Last night Alex and I went for a long walk in the long hours of sunset. It felt as if every living creature from the ducks in our pond to horses out to pasture was taking in the perfect spring evening.

We stopped and chatted with each neighbor as being outside was on everyone’s agenda with the clear sky and warm weather. The joy of greenery had the undercurrent of concern. A dry winter will have its consequences. One of our neighbors who keeps horses mentions their hay costs had doubled from last year.

The worry and activity is taking its toll today. O am paying for all this activity. My activity costs are just as high as alfalfa. From phone calls and activism to sunset rambles through the foothills the costs are mounting. I am hurting from the good and the bad.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1945 and Always Adjusting

I am adjusting, yet again, to a new set of daily protocols in my never-ending attempt to improve my health. I am experimenting with peptides but don’t tell anyone. I’ve also got a hormone experiment in its second round.

I am trying to get healthier, but that suggests it is even an achievable goal. It would be wonderful to get back to endless working hours or even just eight hours on my feet.

Every time I make a tweak to my routines and I see a change in my biometrics, it’s becomes eventually cause for concern. There’s no stable equilibrium to be found, and I know that’s part of life, but I’d like a stable equilibrium that’s a little bit better than one day at a time or ideally a couple weeks at a time.

Take my experiment with Bimzelx. Even when I achieve an outcome like getting my CRP rates into the normal bounds, it came at a cost that is simply too high to maintain. I had four separate incisions and surgeries last year from soft tissue infections.

What good is a drug that tamps down my immune system so much that I need to always go under the knife? It was like Goodhart’s Law came to haunt me personally.

I am going off the biologic (I am 12 weeks from my last injection) and already seeing change in the wrong direction. Not enormously bad but my immune system will pop if it’s not locked down.

Yet there’s very little I can do except keep going and hope that the balance will be more manageable, as I don’t know that I could have another year like 2025 again.

I set out trying to reboot my immune system last year, and it certainly seems like it worked. But can I keep the numbers in a place that are low enough to let me live, and ideally live with fewer medications?

I am constantly working against some new tweak or some new problem, and even little gentle experiments like a Pilates reformer workout or 10 minutes on the trampoline can turn into a full-day migraine if I am not immediately able to tamp it down. Thoracic pain will pop up crushing my breathing if I take a nice slow hike in the pastures beyond our house

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1943 and Lubing Up My Synapses

I’ve struggled with migraines for the lasts seven years and change. It came along with my autoimmune diagnosis but has lived a separate life from ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis.

Typically I get them in my luteal phase of my cycle but as I’ve began to experiment with hormones in pellet form (just tucked away in my fat) I’ve began to struggle with them on a more regular basis. It’s no longer tied to any phase of my hormonal cycle.

I don’t know what I did today to kick one off, but about an hour ago I had to lay down in the dark because I just cannot seem to get any relief from the pressure inside my head.

I have a prescription for something called Imitrex, which helps quite a bit, but I’d really prefer to not have them in the first place.

I am not sure I can get anything else out today, except that this is happening and I can’t fix it, so my apologies there.

Categories
Media Politics Startups

Day 1941 and Uneven Off The Bars

It’s been such a crazy week. I don’t “feel the AGI” only because I am mired in the give and take of living in America where we still have businesses to run and a lot of regular people committed to actual civics. Progress is fast but implementation is slow.

And then above our daily lives, we are actively in the middle of a kinetic war that our population is only dimly watching.

The information environment being irradiated by foreign propoganda. I am astonished to read regular blatant campaigns that no one questions. I get ads for Chinese phone companies on Twitter. Phones that are not legal to sale in America.

It doesn’t even need to be about any of the active campaigns in the news that a New York Times reader would pay attention to. Below the fold, regional political issues go uncovered. The impolite “nobody reads the Africa pages” is an indelicate joke for readers of international newspapers. Americans often don’t even get them delivered with their printings.

As an example. What does an American understand about Mali anyway? I’ve got like a half dozen friends who care about French colonialism (and the sins of Nicholas Sarkozy) so it’s a niche Francophone thing. The stuff you maybe picked up from those who lived abroad.

So no real tangible value there that isn’t social, but lots of Americans used to study with French families so you might be dimly exposed. Or in the past we had a class of people who were and had state department of think tank jobs.

You’d be shocked at how much we’ve cut back on education in the liberal arts. Just as America has her very own Sicilian expedition, we stop bothering to teach Thucydides. I’m in my Allen Bloom season but without any book tour.

I have been trying to keep my cool as a week of progress is just so fast in very real world situations. I am relishing the success of Valar Atomics as they continue own a fast pace of progress. We are going to need a lot more power to meet needs in America. I want to meet them cleanly so I am honestly wishing for a boom in nuclear beyond personal interest.

All the pissing and moaning about the ethics of artificial intelligence misses the point that we need to supply a lot more power for both consumer and defense needs before disaster could strike. So we might as well suit up. We have to manage what might happen with our physical reality. Like physics bro.

So this week was wild to watch the labs stand off with fast releases. It’s very herky jerky the progress from OpenAI but they had a big week. The enthusiasm around Codex is very real even as no one entirely trusts the even management. Still it was fun to have two new models from OpenAI in a week. It’s funny how running a big startup is still largely product management. And they struggle with it.

Which sounds cute I realize. That I am charmed by progress in energy and algorithms while we test being under a kind of network attack with a very naive and easily swayed online population.

I like to think Americans are independent but we are not doing as much as we could to enable good governance. Americans have a say and plenty understand “right to compute” just as they did the “right to repair” but some in government are actual hard power types. Did no one do any of the reading? I thought everyone was all about the Powerbroker for like a decade.

But we seem to have some real second order effect issues being missed entirely by the labs. Like maybe they are bad at politics? I know it’s a cheap shot but I spend so much of my private time as a citizen doing mop up after companies whose management is under stress.

And being transactional with people isn’t very effective for revealed preferences. You can’t buy people and Americans don’t like the implication it sends about being treated like you can.

Categories
Community Medical Startups

Day 1930 and Imperfect Options That Remain

Some days end up being so much more interesting than you expect. I awoke to a family member, who has been preparing for a set of major surgeries, saying they had in fact gone in that morning for the first round of procedures.

I had been concerned they were putting it off so I was quite relieved that their lack of communication on the topic was simply their preparation to face what will be a grueling health challenge. Preparing for a procedure well gives you the best chance at success.

Then I went about a normal work day having lobbed a question, or maybe a prayer, onto the network as the reality of human lives is that imperfect options are always what remains. Being clear eyed about the choices in our lives and how the weight of our past actions have set us on a path can be hard. But it is necessary.

And as I wrapped up my day I was the recipient of some good news. I can’t share anything but the shape of it. But a project that was an experimental approach to a space I care deeply about has bravely faced the whipping winds and looks like they will successfully come to a safe berth intact with all souls.

Which is not such an easy thing to do when you set out for uncharted territory. I am so very proud of what has been accomplished thus far.

All things in life are the fruits of imperfect options that remain. That we make the best use of them is our obligation not only to ourselves but to those to whom we have committed. I am grateful that today was a day where those hard choices were made.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1929 and Lacking The Executive Function for Dysphoria

I am no spring chicken. That’s why we bought some spring chickens this weekend. I kid I kid. I do however have a forever 35 face. I come from a line of women who age well sure but I have very consistent habits.

I’m lucky to have an ageless look. My husband would say I have a forever 28 face as I somehow look better having crossed into my forties than I did when we met at 28. Meanwhile my husband has gone from boyish wonder with full head of hair to distinguished grey beard with a bald pate.

Now sure husbands are supposed to say nice things like “no honey you haven’t aged a day!” Except I really do seem to have benefited greatly from genetics and routine.

He may be right, not out of any urge to flatter me, but simply because some women do look better with a little age on them. I looked young with a rounded features right until I looked ageless somewhere in my late thirties.

Alex and I at 29 where you absolutely can spot my pre-retinol skin
Alex and I two weeks ago before touring the West Wing during our trip to D.C

I don’t look all that different when I compare and contrast between photos from then and now. I gained and lost as much weight as a Kardashian (more than once damn you prednisone and bless you semaglutide) but my face has somehow retained its plump without a maximalist approach without gaining wrinkles. I’ve lost the fine lines.

Yet the approaches are getting more and more maximalist by the year. The difference between a 2016 routine and 2026 routine is enough to warrant a fresh round of social panic and scolding complete with a Big Story from New York Magazine’s The Cut.

Now I myself have left comments on extreme routines for twenty somethings to convince them that it’s too early for Botox as you do want to keep tools in the box for when you need them.

I didn’t start Botox till forty and I’m grateful as I need much less now. I didn’t pull anything out either even when cut looks were all the rage. I’m glad for my rounded features now.

But I have added in more to my beauty routine as I age because I enjoy it. I found it humorous when a 31 year old pursing a doctorate in clinical psychology said out loud what I’ve darkly joked about with girlfriends for years. It’s really hard to be completely controlled.

For a year in my early 20s, I was also spending literally all of my money on a psycho 100-step skin-care process. Looking back, I didn’t have the executive functioning to be successfully anorexic, which is what I also wanted. But I did have the discipline to enjoy this complicated multistep ritual of the skin care. I found it satisfying.” New York Magazine

Now we can all joke and say she shouldn’t be in practice but I never felt I could pull off an eating disorder either even though I often wished I could. That eating disorders are dangerous enough to kill you isn’t the point. It’s being able to control your body enough that you can kill yourself that we desire.

I hated that no matter how much effort I put into diet and exercise I could never achieve the standards of waif like beauty put out in the heyday of Anna Wintour’s heroin chic era. Millennial beauty expectations were a bitch and I could never quite work up the control to hate myself. Sure I got really fit with a heck of a squat but I always had to watch every single macronutrient and instead of skinny I got lean.

And while I appreciate a good Molière joke about The Imaginary Invalid, weight was never the issue that got me in trouble. It was hormones that got me.

So I knew poor health with a healthy weight and I knew poor health with a lot of weight gained trying to fix the poor health.

I will never allow myself to get over the BMI band again to avoid the medical discrimination I faced when I gained weight while on prednisone.

Alas no my autoimmune condition was not mitigated even an iota by weight loss. I had it before I was fat. I got fat treating it. I still have it now that I’m at a healthy weight.

But the desire to maximize your looks and your health always intertwine with women. Increasingly it does for men too. Body dysmorphia respect neither sex nor gender. I doubt it will ever again.

Beauty is a skill set. And some of that skill set is now pharmaceutical in nature. And if we are honest, it’s been that way for a few decades. It’s just that everyone know about it now. The network age comes for us all.

Categories
Finance Preparedness

Day 1923 and Petroleum Dependency Consumer Packaged Goods Risk Dashboard

A chunk of preppers and preparedness enthusiasts are just shopaholics. Shopping is common response to anxiety and depression. Doing something that you can control in a world you can’t control has logic to it.

Now experts in disaster response will tell you that preparedness is as much about skills and community as it is about “stuff” but it’s a lot harder to learn a new skill and nurture community than it is to buy something.

So if you aren’t up for getting first responder certified or spending time in your local library I’ve got just the thing to sooth your anxieties about the current situation in the straight of Hormuz.

I vibe coded a dashboard of common household items with petroleum byproducts in them. It analyzes ingredients and wholesale pricing and assigns risk scores so you can make a shopping list of items most impacted by the ongoing supply chain crisis.

A screenshot of the dashboard I vibe coded today to soothe my anxiety about supply chain disruptions and get ahead of pricing hikes and potential shortages

From diapers to sunscreen, you’d be shocked at just how much our basic needs are downstream of petroleum byproducts. Now it’s just a silly little thing I used AI to put together, but petroleum dependency in consumer packaged is high.

From food products and personal care to drugs, you will find we that we rely on petrochemical feedstocks everywhere.

I’ll mess with it as I add in new data sources and get suggestions for categories I’ve missed. But I’d love for you to check it out even if I am not quite done improving upon the basic idea. You might learn something.

For instance, I didn’t know Kroger’s had a public pricing API till today so you live, you learn and then if you have a kid it’s time to buy Luvs. No really diapers are one of the most at risk products for shortages as the impacts of the war ripple out.

Even if the fighting ends today (as I write this a temporary two week cease fire has been agreed to), the damage to processing, production and manufacturing is already enormous.

Say you aren’t worried about price hikes but you are concerned with the environmental impact of your purchasing habits. I included alternatives in the dashboard if you’d like to make a switch.

Time to buy Aquaphor and Vaseline

The data is compiled from DOE, S&P Global, Investing.com, Packaging Insights, VCCI trade reports. A petroleum dependency score is assigned based on estimates of ingredient analysis.

The prices reflect wholesale market trends so you can be prepared to get ahead before retail prices go up. I’ve even included a bit of context on what aspects of the product are petroleum derived ingredients just for fun.

Below is a screenshot for food preservatives. A type of dependency many of us would like less of in our consumption. Maybe the dashboard helps you improve your diet with a little knowledge. Who knows! Isn’t vibe coding fun?

On another note, I remain amazed at what we can do with artificial intelligence and natural language input. This took me very little time thanks to Claude Code, Perplexity Pro and Cloudflare. If you haven’t explored the wide world of vibe coding now is definitely the time.

Categories
Politics

Day 1922 and Toilet Humor

I’d like to have something positive to say today about the Artemis II mission, going further than we have traveled into space than ever before but it’s much too hard to pay attention to expensive achievements by NASA when your pale blue dot seems set on imploding itself, fourth turning style. But I’m always here for a joke about how we can’t engineer a toilet for zero gravity.

All anyone in finance can talk about is the short seller research firm Citrini that sent analysts to the Strait of Hormuz, only to discover via the mysterious analyst 3 that actually plenty of shit is getting through as long as you pay a toll to the militants holding it hostage, which plenty of people who are desperate for oil are absolutely doing. I am SHOCKED well not shocked exactly.

Meanwhile the Easter Bunny stares into the middle distance as an old man threatens another gerontocracy with obliteration. Not to put too fine a point on it but everybody is going to suffer no matter how this turns out.

And we wonder why Zoomers are all reactionaries. Gee, their older millennial siblings couldn’t possibly have any experience in these matters, could they? Doesn’t matter. They aren’t going to ask us even if we have actually lived through this entire charade once before.

Incidentally has anyone checked in on Condoleezza Rice recently? Seems like she might have something valuable to add here.