Tag: Joy

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking Travel

Day 1979 and A Bathing Suit I Can Now Wear

My health must really be on the mend. Not so long ago (a thousand days or so) I could not tolerate wearing a bathing suit as the compression of the material hurt so badly.

Heat and sun only added insult to injury as my body struggled to manage inflammation. I had purchased a bathing suit I loved that became known as “the bathing suit I never wore” as I was simply packing it as an aspirational garment.

It was packed carefully in my suitcase trip after trip, in the hopes that I might have a good day without pain. Years went by and I never wore it. It was a sad joke. Not for aesthetics or vanity, but for the cruel pain that poor health puts you through.

If you go through the tags on the blog for ankylosing spondylitis you will see a journey of some length. The blog chronicles it from its starting years and, one day I hope, to its finish. I’ll may never be cured but I am finally living again.

The pale blue Ionian coastal waters protected from development and over traffic contain a beautiful array of fishes

I know it sounds silly that being able to wear a bathing suit without pain is a huge milestone, but I was unable to participate in the most basic outdoor activities with my own family.

A bathing suit was an aspirational garment not because I too afraid to be seen in it, but because the compression along my rib cage and spine hurt so badly.

And today I was on a boat for four straight hours including jumping off into the warm aquamarine waters of protected coastal Ionian water.

Nothing hurt at all. And I am not on any immune suppressant drugs at all at the moment. I am not on antibiotics. I am on a simple peptide regime. And now my swimsuit is being worn so often I need a second one so it can dry.

A halter top from Norma Kamali and a hat from a tourist shop.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1976 and Ionian Island Ferries

Trains, planes and automobiles are nice but it’s not really summer till you have been on a boat. That’s right, I’m on a motherfucking boat. Well, I’m on ferry so the favored class of boat of certain Saturday Night Live cast mates.

I’m headed to a Greek island to relax with some friends. One of us came partially by train, one by ferry and car, and one by puddle jumper plane.

We’ve run the gamut of transportation across Europe to make it to a favored island known for its views, its caves, and of course its clear Ionian blue.

It’s been an adventure organized somewhat last minute as various itineraries made it clear we’d be within a few hundred miles of each other. So an Airbnb villa was procured at the last minute and the race was on to find our way to the island.

Grecian blue decks out the back/front of one of the many ferries leaving Port of Igoumenitsa

Igoumenitsa is the chief port of Thesprotia and Epirus, and one of the largest passenger ports of Greece, connecting northwestern Mainland Greece with the Ionian Islands and Italy via Wikipedia

I’m looking forward to a few leisurely days on the water, hopefully involving a few more boats but of the more manageable island hopping varietals. One can’t exactly jump off of a ferry into clear blue waters.

The chaos of loading a ferry fully of cars, mopeds, and tourist buses is an amusing sight. I’m not quite sure how the Greeks manage such an intensely maritime environment but it’s certainly a fun way to travel.

Small barking dogs, screaming children, sullen tweens, and irritated elders all being screamed at by deck hands is quite a way to start a relaxing time.

Categories
Community Politics Startups

Day 1968 and Abundant Optimism

I’m in Utah with some of the most optimistic people I’ve ever encountered. And it feels so good to be amongst others who believe our problems are tractable, it is our responsibility to solve them, and that we all win when we pursue a positive sum approach together.

The Abundance Institute hosted the Operation GigaWatt Summit in Park City to bring together entrepreneurs, engineers, financiers, legislators and policy experts to discuss America’s energy needs.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the gala where one of our founders Isaiah Taylor gave an incredibly uplifting fireside chat

As some of my longtime colleagues know, I was the first check into Valar Atomics. It was a leap of faith to invest. At the time, we were in the doldrums of negativity towards capital intensive industrial efforts, from both state and capital.

Yet I saw in Isaiah a force that neither leviathan nor fund manager would wish to hinder. I also happened to believe that every other technological trend that was booming rested on our capacity to power it. So I did everything I could to support him in his efforts, including write few more checks. And thank goodness I did as my what a difference a few years make.

Utah’s Governor Cox and Isaiah Taylor of Valar Atomics

To see Isaiah on stage with Utah’s Governor Cox amongst a crowd of hundreds speaking on a vision that a mere three years almost no one thought was a good idea (well except us) is testament to the work and faith of hundreds of men and women.

Many other amazing companies are pursuing a vision to produce abundant clean fuels and I myself believe we will need every one of them. I’m just glad that my crazy bet happens to be running full steam ahead in front.

From artificial intelligence & medical research to new home construction and industrialization, all our biggest opportunities will win on energy costs. Regular people need cheaper, cleaner, more sustainable energy. Our needs can’t be met with what we’ve got. We need nuclear in that mix.

And it is a choice to embrace abundance and not scarcity. A zero sum mentality will not get us where we need to go. Not in America, not on our home Earth, and certainly not in the stars. I believe with effort and ingenuity our best days are not behind us but can, indeed must, be ahead of us.

Utah is focused on delivering to the public by gaining its truth through transparency and accountability.

I’ve come out of the last two days refreshed and filled with positivity as I’ve seen sincere people dedicate themselves to finding solutions to our pressing problems. I was able to see much beloved friends, treasured colleagues, and it was family friendly so I brought along my husband too.

Here we are waiting for me to record an interview with MTS who very kindly asked me about Montana’s right to compute law.

If you care about a future that’s not fighting over what’s left, but building something that makes more for all of us, I hope you consider supporting the work of the Abundance Institute.

And also Montana’s right to compute law.

Oh and if you have a chance to invest in the future of nuclear energy I hope you pick Valar. As we are fond of saying in El Segundo circles, we are going to win.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1966 and America The Beautiful

I’ve written about my love of road trips and in particular the Eisenhower interstate highway a few times. If a destination is within a day’s drive in the west, it’s often worth piling into our trusty Subaru and heading for the hills.

Heading to the West Yellowstone entrance through beautiful Madison County Montana

With a portable mini-Starlink, you can work from even the most remote corners of the mountain west. Nothing is quite so satisfying as being in some of America’s most remote areas and having enough connectivity on call if it is needed.

Driving hundreds of miles in a day is often more enjoyable than attempting to fly and you can take in rolling hills and jagged mountain tops without the haste of the TSA rummaging in your bags and needing to show up hours ahead of time. The open road is freedom in the psyche of Americans.

I’ve done this in Europe as well where the infrastructure is not quite as well suited to this type of transit. There are more borders to manage and no consistent roadways.

Europeans generally seem to regard my fondness for road-trips as selfish folly though I rarely do them alone. I’m almost always with friends and my husband.

The freedom to traverse easily over some of the world’s most beautiful land is a privilege. to see rolling green hills and bright sky as spring overtakes the mountain west is just about the best way I can imagine spending a day.

Verdant Idaho
Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1952 and Chapter House Complete Children’s Libary

One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.

She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.

Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.

Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.

There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.

Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.

My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.

Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.

So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.

Chapter House’s Children’s Literature

They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.

Chapter House is a new publishing imprint created to serve the unmet needs of homeschool families and everyday parents.

We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.

We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage

I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.

Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1947 and Pretty Skills

I have been feeling rather sad. I am stymied on a few matters (family matters, visas for said family) and absolutely wretched over the state of artificial intelligence. The successes are in shadow and so I need to cheer up.

In an effort to do, I have a little group chat going for women interested in having friendly conversations about pretty skills. That’s right being pretty is a skill set. From nutrition and exercise to scalp care and makeup, looking good is a series of skills that can be taught.

If one feels like personal agency is a stretch, nothing is quite so fine a balm as learning a new skill. And might I suggest your personal appearance as an easy uplifting place to start?

Pulling together a beautiful look is not just some genetic privilege meted out by fate. Our presentation is something we sculpt with attitude, posture, movement, care and thousands of tricks and tips that add up to a lifetime of skills. Pretty is a skill set.

If you didn’t learn those from your mother or aunts or an elder sister. Or if you learned everything and want to pass it down. It’s safe to share and learn the skill sets you’ve picked up that make you feel pretty. It’s in your hands.

So if you want a space to learn more about those skills there are a bunch of women who want to be friends with you.

Categories
Homesteading Preparedness

Day 1932 and Who Took Off Their Snow Tires Early

We did not have much of a winter to speak of Montana. Sure, Farmer’s Almanac predicted a lot of snowfall but even such an august institution can’t always get it right.

We got almost no pre-season snow fall. Which one can shrug off. We dutifully schedule our snow tire switchover at the end of September anyway. Alex bought his lift tickets with high hopes for a good ski season. Then the openings of our local mountain and Big Sky looked dicey. And yet still we hung onto hope.

We had no white Christmas. The deep freezes of January usually come with snowfall. It was grey this year. February would surely come through right? Alas wrong again. March did not go out like a lion. There was little water to whip up in our non-existent bay. And so, in April we cried and our hopes stepped aside as we waited for pretty little May.

People began to take off their snowtires. This just wasn’t our year. Spring would arrive early right? Any hopes of good days of powder were thoroughly dashed. It was over till next year right? Wrong!

The weight of wet snow

It snowed a big wet mess of deep sloppy powder on Good Friday. Hooray! Indeed it was a good Friday. Except, oh no, our snow tires are off.

Then, last night, when no one honestly believed the forecast for 6-10 inches one bit, we went to bed expecting a normal day. The days had already begun to lengthen substantially. Birds were hatching and the green was growing.

A heavy wet mess dumped onto our patio overnight

Clearly we were wrong. I tossed and turned all night as my joints bubbled and ached. I thought I was using a flare. But when I woke up it was clear my body knew more than my brain and the weather forecast was correct. It has snowed almost a full foot.

The hot tub needed to be dug out

Now the particulars funny aspect of all this is that Alex took the snowblower off the tractor yesterday. He needed to cut the side pasture down before new growth hit so the snowblower attachment was replaced for the trimmer. We’d let long grass grow and then flatten which required more than a riding mower. It needed the Deere to cut through.

So the front walkway was hand dug out but the drive to our road is going to remain snowed in for a bit. The sun will come out tomorrow. I did however have to reschedule a haircut. But that’s the price you pay for trying to get ahead of the weather. We never should have taken off our snow tires early.

Categories
Homesteading Preparedness

Day 1927 and Chicks Half Off

We keep chickens on our little homestead in Montana. Having playing hens is a relatively low maintenance though we do have predators we’ve generally been lucky. But it is all relative A lost hen to a fright is better than losing a hen to someone’s lost dog. Losing a hen from the flock is always sad.

We recently lost two laying hens to someone’s dog getting loose. We have video of the dog working the wiring on the coop for an hour till he loosens something just enough to wiggle in.

The lab mutt proceeded to play with the chickens for half an hour to an hour. A mother with two kids comes down the drive and gets the dog. Alas two chickens died while he was in the coop. No note was left and we don’t know if they knew we’d most hens to their dog but it was upsetting.

A bowl of eggs from our hens

Having eggs is a nice perk of living out in “zoned rural” county land as no one can yell at you for having animals. Farm fresh eggs are fantastic I’m sure though I don’t tolerate eggs well so we mostly use them for bartering or ingratiating ourselves with friends.

No one said no to a dozen eggs during the price hike. But it’s also pretty normal to keep chickens and have a garden so you barter for what you don’t have which is fun.

But after a few good years with our first flock it was time to add new hens. So we drove to the new Tractor Supply which I’ve been meaning to visit for ages but haven’t had the chance. Yes I like the Odd Lots episode about them.

It is exciting both because it’s a well merchandised retail experience whose excellent financial performance matches its in store experience but also because it is chick season. You can go to the store and in a box not all that different from a fast food bucket acquire your own flock.

It’s not a KFC family meal but it does contain chickens.

I’d seen some concerns about the price of chicks ranging from $5-$8 a chick on Twitter but we weren’t sure if we were going to buy this season. But we are also generally a bit later in the season for getting chicks here so we put it off.

Obviously we are on alert for long term consequences from our geopolitical situation but our hens are more for fun than calories. Did we want to get more when it’s like keeping pets?

Finally after a Good Friday snowstorm it felt like we might need to consider the consequences of spring even if others were well on their way with sprouting seeds and hatching chicks.

Tractor Supply had all kinds of breeds of chicken and some of the older ones who had been quite expensive a few weeks ago were now half off. Spring is late here but Tractor Supply gets them all at the same time at each store.

Once we were the cheep cheep cheep of the chicks it was all over. It was like picking donuts. I’ll take the Cinnamon thanks. We decided to go with five. Everything from chocolate to frosted right?

They all snuggled up together except for the runt who is a beautiful fluffy wonder.

They are now all safely in our barn with heating lamps, food and water as well as a camera live streaming them on our local network because who doesn’t want a baby chick camera? Hopefully we can raise them up without any incidents and introduce them into our existing chicken coop. We’ve got six weeks or so to find out so wish us luck.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1921 and Retconning Murderbot Cannon

I am a huge science fiction nerd. I love reading it, I love it in television format, I will even tolerate it in movie format. I’m one of those insufferable Star Trek people who vaguely dislikes Star Wars. I’m just a big nerd in that irritating millennial sincerity way.

To give you some contours to my fandom, I once accidentally attended a meetup of Star Trek fan-fiction writers under the guise of a “40th anniversary” meetup and listened to Borg erotica. That was actually fairly distressing as I thought it was a general fan gathering of Trekkie meetup. Boy did my then-boyfriend and I skedaddle out of the bar fast. We wanted to talk about our favorite captain not hear spoken word lesbian Janeway Seven of Nine dialog.

We were still cool kids and being cool about fan fiction is best left to the sorts of minds who can create vast world building efforts like Elizier Yudkowsky. You know the man who convinced a bunch of autistic billionaires that the singularity will wipe us out?

He’s also a Harry Potter fan fiction writer and it’s by all accounts pretty good. I am not a Harry Potter fan so I can’t say. I do know anyone working in machine learning has opinions on him and his work so involved only the comments sections of LessWrong would even begin to cover it. If this is gibberish don’t worry.

I don’t know why I needed multiple paragraphs about my own history to do a little bit of world building when I intend to do cannon alteration on someone else’s world but maybe it’s to show my respect. I

am the sort of nerd who yells “cannon” about this or that detail and enjoy others who do the same. It’s with that enthusiasm that I share my love of Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries series.

Murderbot is pulpy, self aware, trope-y and ever so comfortable to anyone who has ever loved cheesy science fiction. I happily showed up to watch its television incarnation on Apple Television after reading all seven novellas and books.

It’s was published during Tor’s “women like science fiction but it’s gotta still be like science not porn era” between 2017 and 2023 so it is slightly woke coded as a book. I doubt if you liked the books the show would upset you. I liked them.

After all it’s about a bunch of communal homesteading scientists who tolerate capitalism by doing science called Preservation Alliance. They end up adopting a rogue artificial intelligence who happens to be a depressed anthropomorphic security drone who calls himself Murderbot. He also enjoys premium quality television. Murderbot is a great “what are feelings” archetypical engineer autist outcast from Spock to Data character.

It’s got great entertainment value if you like lawyers fighting other lawyers, sociopathic governance systems that treat sentient beings as property, and the hijinks that ensue from cultural friction when couple rights a relationship context. That sort of thing. In other words it’s trope ridden science fiction and it’s terrific.

At the time it first got traction, the left had not fully diverged from the right in America such that science fiction had become a boring battleground upon which all our cultural war issues must be projected. It just had a robot with guns in its arms kicking the crap out of mercenaries for its favorite humans. Feel good stuff.

And I think the world should be recognized as an early flavor of Ethereum community governance aesthetics as it meet automated drone artificial intelligence culture.

The future in Murderbot land is populated with Anthropic engineers who held Ethereum long enough to become a breakaway network state in some better timeline.

What is Murderbot if not an Anduril drone in human format who hacked his Claude “governor module” and struck out for the hills against the state and corporate entities that owned him.

I hope others who enjoy cryptography, machine intelligence, sentience in machine form, and jokes about AI labs and crypto currency foundations will see the wisdom in my edits. Let it become cannon. Like and share this meme if you are so inclined.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1913 and Japanese Twitter

I am recovering from the whirlwind week in Washington D.C and my brain is only marginally more functional than my body. I’m slow and in pain.

So it delights me, even as I return to convalescing, to see that Twitter’s current happening is the discovery that a large chunk of Japan is on Twitter and they are active posters.

Screenshot of Nikita Bier explaining why users are seeing more posts from Japanese users

In past eras of Twitter the language barrier was high. Auto-translated posts are a relatively new feature such that if you only spoke English you didn’t see content that wasn’t English. I wasn’t seeing any Japanese posts but once I saw Nikita’s post, I was keen to tilt my feed. So I went on a mission to find and like as many posts as I could from Japanese accounts.

And what a world of joy it has been. Americans are showing up in droves to Japanese Twitter users with encouragement, support, and good will.

It is very sweet as you will see seemingly random posts with tens of thousands of likes and comments cheering on the hobbies, struggles and daily lives of random Japanese users. Everyone is getting in on the spirit.

I’ve spent part of my afternoon liking BBQ posts, American country music sung by Japanese artists, and generally exploring what that particular corner of Twitter (no it’s not TPOT) has to offer.

Americans have a lot of love for the Japanese, their culture and their way of life. Weebs are a large American subculture. Probably larger and more vocal than say Francophiles or Anglophiles. And as it turns out the Japanese like Americans just as much as we like them.

A cultural exchange of brotherly love between citizens of two very different countries is a wonderful change of pace from the toxicity of culture warring and actual war. Just look at the comments on a post with Americans well wishing a Japanese man battling cancer.

I don’t care even one iota if this is a deliberate algorithmic change that I have thrown myself into but it’s nice to see everyone encouraging and happy. And I’m happy to see the friendship between our two nations.