Seems like everyone I talk with is extremely sick. We’ve got norovirus ripping through a bunch of populations in America and Europe. Lots of reports of flus and Covid variants taking folks with respiratory cases in my professional and personal life. And of course everyone is worried about the H5N1 the bird flu variant.
I myself am having some autoimmune flares that I’m resorting to treating with steroids which is extremely frustrating. I fear the power of immune system rebooting drugs like prednisone.
Steroids are the “nuke it from orbit” option when your system is too reactive. I try to dose it down as soon as symptoms clear but blowback sometimes means you can’t titrate off them without symptoms returning. I rarely do more than 5mg a few days in a row.l but even then I worry about its usage. Being covered in hives and unable to think from an autoimmune response is probably worse though. Minimum viable dose in all things.
You ever push yourself so hard (physically, emotionally, mentally) that you crash afterwards? This is a common human experience. It’s called an altered window of immunity. Over exert yourself and you get sick.
I’ve come to understand the Christmas Break period as my yearly window of altered immunity. One reason I like to fast during the Holy Nights is to bring down my own physical and emotional reactivity.
When basic functions feel stressful and even small involuntary processes like digestion feel inflammatory then the work of living feels toxic. At that point one hopes rest is enough to get it out of your system.
The human tendency to ignore small problems until they become big problems is surely part of a wider cycle of disease. We wait to rest and repair till it’s too late and find ourselves crashing. For everyone bobbing along on the waves of life be sure to take a deep breath before plunging back under. It just might save your life.
When the weather begins a shift to wet, cold or otherwise stormy, I feel it like some poor grandmother in a folktale.
My joints begin to ache, I feel swelling across my fascia and my ankylosis pain intensifies. Why do joints hurt when a storm system moves in? We’ve got a couple plausible explanations for all too common phenomena.
Barometric Pressure Changes: Before a rainstorm, barometric pressure (the weight of the air) typically drops. This decrease in external pressure can allow tissues surrounding the joints to expand.
Humidity and Inflammation: Rainy weather often brings high humidity, which may worsen inflammation in joints, particularly for those with conditions like arthritis.
Thanks to Perplexity the bone deep discomfort of a storm front becomes much easier to understand.
Cold conditions can stiffen joints by thickening the synovial fluid that lubricates them. Reduced blood circulation may also contribute. Changes in weather can make nerves more sensitive which amplifying pain signals.
The remedies for these changes are pretty basic. Stay warm, get your blood flowing with some light exercise, stay hydrated, stretch and take anti-inflammatory medications like NSAIDs to mitigate discomfort.
I asked Grok to draw me as a cyborg granny out in front of a storm
Prompted Grok to draw me as an arthritic cyborg granny in a rocking chair waiting and watching as a storm comes in.
A quibble I have with modern industrial living is the prevalence of overhead lighting. I know we have to tolerate the bright lights in public and institutional spaces for reasons of cost, efficiency and clarity but why on earth have we found it to be acceptable in the home?
I’m grateful our divas bring their significant cultural gravitas to this debate. Bless Mariah Carey for leading the charge on this assault on the senses. I’ll let her not terribly articulate quote from a podcast speak the truth.
”I can’t with the overhead lighting. Why do they do it to us?,” Carey, 55, said. “But overhead lighting I don’t think so honey. Please stop it!…Everywhere I go, shut the lights! I don’t want to see them no more. Overhead lighting, it makes me sick.”
However it is relatively challenging to do cool focused lighting well. Yes it possible to do overhead track lighting in ways that bring focus and don’t overwhelm your senses. But it’s harder to do right.
You’d probably have to literally light Mariah Carey for a living to do it in a way that’s comfortable for someone with sensory issues. I developed migraines in my thirties and combined with my spectrum level sensitivity to noise, sound, taste and light I don’t need to push my luck. .
Given that us mere mortals without expert lighting design have to live comfortably, I fully stand by my preference for lamps and multiple light sources in my private spaces. It’s just going to be less of a headache. Literally.
If you light from overhead with bright cool tones bulbs so you can see the details I get it. I can’t fathom why I’d want that for anything but cooking, cleaning or sewing.
When the it’s time to relax and interact you are damn right I want a nice warm lamp. Now I’ve got double the lighting. No wonder the topic gives so many of us headaches.
Americans are in pain. Literally and emotionally. How that happened isn’t my focus. We are in the middle of a national conversation about the failures of institutional medicine and its relationship to our government. We are treading in deep water and it’s best not to get swept away.
There are many communities that have emerged on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, GoodReads and elsewhere dedicated to the many paths available to go about fixing the problems in your life. There millions of strong communities of interests, hobbies, courses, and network knowledge that can enable you.
One of those communities is called TPOT. What is TPOT, who is in TPOT, what are its values and what does it believe are all involved and sometimes contentious questions. Being illegible is a big thing.
We mostly agree it stands for “this particular corner of Twitter” which is a loose network of nodes of people interested in applying knowledge they learn across our networked multimedia to their real life.
The experimental “you can just do things” attitude is a big tent. You see DIY projects, tutorials, reading lists, artificial intelligence and coding discussions, fitness and biohacking experiments, nutrition and cooking, meditation and nervous system research, pain management, psychology and emotional wellness and much more. You also see more far out woo woo topics like psychedelics, evolutionary psychology, and many flavors of rationalism and epistemology.
One of the most qualified voices to speak on TPOT might be Brook Bowman of Vibe Camp. In my understanding of her interpretation, TPOT is a memetic virus and once you touch it you are in the topology of TPOT for good.
tpot is this crazy memetic virus where the term itself means so little and is so contagious that you kind of become part of it just by hearing about it
Brooke
This is protective and makes it resilient. The network is bigger than any node and this is a good thing
So TPOT is best understood as a network composed of many interoperable nodes of interests and many layers of engagement. A memetic complex that you become part of on contact. If you read my blog it’s likely have many clear lines to TPOT.
If you like fitness, coding, rationalism, nutrition, or even home improvement well congratulations you are one or two nodes away from “just do things” as a life philosophy yourself and might be a member of TPOT yourself if you talk about it on Twitter.
And this is now some very dangerous semiotic territory as we cope with the gaping wound that is American health and murder. And I am concerned the narratives are going to be heavily fought over territory.
Because it’s easy to dislike a techbro right now. It’s pretty easy to dismiss the group. I can see it now. “Are your friends into this weird sounding acronym TPOT? Have you heard someone say “you can just do things?” If so you need to alert the authorities!”
Of course this sounds funny and histrionic. It’s totally normal to take responsibility for what you can in your life and try out ways of improving your life somewhat.
Everyone is dealing with pain (chronic or otherwise). Being an adult is a set of emotional challenges to manage and most of us do so by making the shocking decision to take action and do something. That doesn’t mean this world is is dangerous. It certainly doesn’t mean murder. It means doing something in your day life like lifting some weights, shipping some code, checking your biometric data, and trying to be a friend to lessen the pain most of us are in.
I’ve been running around keeping a busy schedule while I’m on the road for a few weeks on the west coast.
I had a number of things I wanted to do today but I’m so tuckered out I have been slowly passing on everything.
My stomach is upset, I’ve got a migraine that isn’t quitting and everything hurts. So pardon me for the interruption in my regularly scheduled posting but I am going to attempt one of those sixteen hours of sleep nights in the hope that any issues can be fixed with rest.
I am in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving week. I decided to get a pedicure yesterday. My logic was a larger city would provide better quality at better prices than I can get in Montana so I should make time to get it done here rather than at home.
Bozeman, despite being a college town that doubles as mountain resort town, has relatively limited options for cosmetic services at lower price points.
You can get traveling elite Yellowstone Club services quite easily. We’ve got top notch estheticians, massage therapists and even a tier one city dermatology practice.
But if you want a $30 basic pedicure you are shit out of luck. If appreciate the lower end of market price services and the value of regular cheaper grooming this isn’t Bozeman Montana isn’t ideal.
I have a little trouble with my spine so I appreciate being able to pay for help work task that involves so much bending over. I went on Google and Yelp for some shop triangulation. Being on the bougie West side of town meant locating a salon that was well rated but not fancy was a breeze.
What I did not expect to find was that nail salon had moved almost entirely to gel manicures. I don’t necessarily want that kind of long wear of a gel as it is harder on the nail bed and requires a fuss to get it off.
They only had a handful of regular colors as opposed to the giant wall of OPI or Essie. I picked the one basic pink which when applied I fear is best described as baby hooker pink.
It’s somewhere between a baby shower pink and a trashy mid-aughts white girl pastel attempting the era’s iconic milky Essie Ballet Slipper pink. I’d post a picture of my feet but that seems weird. Hopefully no one has cause to look at my feet as I’m a little embarrassed by the color.
We both like to tinker with new artificial intelligence features and I have got a large training set with lots of tagging.
The synopsis it kicked out of two chatting AI hosts makes it sound like I have written a New York Times bestseller on the cultural and emotional adaption in the Great Weirdening.
So naturally instead of sharing those wins with you I’ll show the emotional underbelly. He asked it to generate my blind spots and boy did the AI read me the riot act.
Beware the AI knows you better than you know yourself
I don’t know if I am blind to these as I see them as faults. I can easily go down rabbit holes and overextend myself. I worry about my physical capacity constantly. That’s why it’s such a clear theme in my writing.
I definitely recommend this as an exercise if you have enough personal content to feed into the generator. Seeing clearly into your blind spots gives you a chance see around the corners of your own life. It’s not quite the same thing as therapy but maybe just as useful.
Running red light for 2-3 hours before bedtime may help lower cortisol levels and increase melatonin production. Plus it gives your bedroom a fun boudoir vibe so we thought why not try it?
Philips Hue 60W Bulbs
We bought a set of Philip Hue bulbs for the three lamps in our bedroom. They sell their own automation systems to manage your thoughts but we already use Home Assistant from the Open Home Foundation for automation because it allows us to run basically everything entirely locally with no cloud dependence or internet access.
For our existing lighting we use a combo of Lutron Caseta (for built in lighting) and Philips Hue bulbs (for plug in lamps). For the purposes of the red light experiment in the bedroom, we are using all plug in lamps.
For the Hue bulbs, instead of using the Hue Bridge and the Hue App, we use the built in Zigbee radios to pair directly to Home Assistant.
Phillips should be commended for using open protocols and enabling users to use these non-proprietary standards. Interoperability is good.
To achieve the light color changes we wanted, there is a plugin called “adaptive lighting” that automatically color and brightness shifts the bulbs through the day (subject to plenty of configuration options).
In our case, Alex set them to go very red (1000K) while also limiting the sunrise to no later than 6am and the sunset locked to 630p in order to fit into our routine and preferred bed timings.
iPhones have an automatic white balance on their cameras but it is actually quite red at night
The lights mostly work automatically but for when manually control is wanted, there are Zigbee remotes on each side of the bed as well as Home Assistant bridged to Apple HomeKit so everything can be controlled via the Apple Home app or through Siri.
It may sound complicated but there are plenty of tutorials in the open source community to help guide you. As we get more data from our own biometric tracking I’ll be sure to discuss it here and on Twitter.
I’m in Miami for the week to attend a gathering. October is as fine a time as any to visit what is otherwise a very humid and hot climate. I’d prefer midwinter but I’ll manage with late fall.
I went to eat lunch at a friend’s home. Even with fans and very breezy weather I could still feel the humidity doing battle with my body. Ancient trees covered in moss kept off the sun as best as they could.
Welcome to the jungle
And still even a little bit of movement is enough to trigger sweating in such a climate. Which just leads to itching and inflammation so I’m being careful to not get myself into much trouble. I’ve got my hats and sunglasses and sunscreen and I move slowly.
I understand why the whole town has a hospitality aesthetic that the done up in whites. Anything to keep the sun from overheating you and let the breezes flow.
Whites on white in our room
If you are in Miami let Alex or myself know. We have a conference that you may be attending as well so we’d love to overlap. I’ve proud some amusing outfits and all kinds of cosmetics I hope I have time to apply and enjoy.
Velvets, pinks, and prints for the adventurousness
