🍵 Notes

Doing some maintenance around the website today. Please watch your step. 🛠️🚧

September journal spread is ready to go.

Compared with eating between 7 and 8 am, a first meal between 8 and 10 am was associated with a 10 percent higher risk of death from any cause. The difference rose to 19 percent between 10 am and noon, and 29 percent after noon.

Cardiovascular mortality followed a similar trajectory.

Eating for the first time after noon was associated with a 46 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death than eating between 7 and 8 am. At age 50, the later group also had an estimated life expectancy 2.46 years shorter on average.

Me reading this while eating breakfast at 12:01PM.

Back to editing this morning and it felt less painful than usual so I’ll take that as a good sign that I’m emotionally and mentally ready to tackle this novel again for the last (last last last last totally definitely for sure last) time.

Today I switched out the coffee beans to a new brand of beans so I had to re-calibrate the settings on the machine. And while we don’t have a “smart” fridge we do have a “smart” coffee machine that walks you through the process.

Here's how today went:

Machine: Leave the grinder at the current setting

Me: Okay

Machine: I will now grind the beans at 19 and make the coffee. grinding-whirring-pouring — Oooh it was too fast. 🙁 Do you like it like this? It will taste watery.

Me: No, I don't want it like that

Machine: Okay, set the grinder to 14

Me: Okay...

Machine: I will now grind the beans at 14 and make the coffee. grinding-whirring-pouring — Ooooh it was too slow. 🙁 Do you like it like this? It will taste bitter.

Me: NO!

Machine: Okay set the grinder to 23

Me: Wait, at 19 you told me 14 and now you're telling me 23? I'm setting it back at 19.

Machine: I will now grind the beans at 19 and make the coffee. grinding-whirring-pouring — Perfect! 😄 You now have great tasting coffee.

It was an all-day ordeal but the new fridge finally, finally arrived many hours past its due time. The first delivery driver took it on a joyride (presumably). The second delivery driver didn’t want to wait around for the first delivery driver because he was supposed to get off at 6 and it “wasn’t his problem.” But lady boss must have put her foot down because he did show up long past 6. (He was very nice so we appreciate that he did wait around).

Common question we’ve been asked: Is it a smart fridge?

It’s better than smart, it’s wise. It cools when it’s closed, beeps when it’s open, and it will last us at least 25 years. It has no ads. No screens. And at no point do we need to worry that it will become sentient and force the dryer to kill us.

So I guess it’s both wise and well-traveled.

Our new fridge was supposed to arrive about 25 minutes ago but the delivery guy is on vacation and the one working didn’t want to work today, then wanted to charge the store lady "for a special delivery.” Thankfully she put her foot down and so now it's coming around 5PM or so. Stay tuned.

So the dishwasher fixed itself! Proof that asking nicely is a perfectly valid DIY solution. (Probably saw me coming with the power tools and went, “Nah, you know what, I’m good.”)

In other appliance news, our new fridge arrives tomorrow. I’m very excited, but that means I have to spend some time today emptying the old one. Should be a fun and rewarding time.

4 things that went wrong this week

1. I broke a glass and it shattered into a million little pieces
2. We ran out of the coffee we like
3. I accidentally flooded the dishwasher and now it won’t run
4. The toilet flush valve broke

5 things that went right

1. Made K a really nice breakfast for her birthday and managed not to burn anything
2. Gave K gifts she really liked (including a couple she didn’t expect)
3. Discovered a new coffee from the supermarket that’s actually pretty good
4. Finally got the receipt for the heater maintenance so we could send it to the landlord
5. My new sleeping schedule is holding very well

1 thing I’m looking forward to

1. Room No. Freen Concert on Saturday 💃

The question of where to post something has often kept me from posting anything at all. Should this super important thought go on Bluesky or Mastodon? No, best post it to micro.blog and then cross-post. But nah, maybe it would be better to include it as part of a longer blog post or just save it for Patreon. And then, because I can’t decide, I share it nowhere.

I’ve seen some posts around the blogosphere that point to people also struggling with this question of where to put a thing so I guess I’m not alone, and that’s the main reason I decided to move everything to this catch-all dump site of whateverness.

Archaeologists have uncovered ancient inscriptions carved into the walls of a cave in Valencia, Spain that point to the cult of an unknown or as yet unidentified goddess.

Among the discoveries researchers have made are a small collection of votive inscriptions, which are dedicated to what appears to be a goddess referred to simply as “Domina,” which means “The Lady.” Three of those inscriptions also feature an unrecognized epithet—MALACI—which the researchers believe may describe some aspect of this mysterious goddess, possibly related in some way to the water that flows through the underground ritual space within the cave.

— “Deep in a Spanish Cave, Archaeologists Discovered a Puzzling Set of Ancient Inscriptions—Could They Be Evidence of a Mysterious Subterranean Cult?”

I’m currently reading a book about the fall and rise of the sacred feminine so this news is very relevant to my interests.

Shortly after posting this, I read this and I agree that ultimately it all boils down to trust.

Some new authors might have a hard time building an audience in a world where readers become more and more paranoid about accidentally consuming AI-generated content.

I do wonder whether there will come a point where people stop caring whether a story was generated with AI (there may already be people who don’t care). But I expect most readers will care for a long time to come so building a strong reader-writer relationship is going to be more important than ever.

Trust is incredibly hard to gain and incredibly easy to lose.

Despite the latest crime novel being currently unpublished, film and TV studios around the world had already begun jostling for rights for “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body,” according to Deadline, making it a particularly hairy situation. But AI detectors exposed apparent “fingerprints,” or signs that the author had made use of the tech while drafting the novel. Falade has denied the accusations. — Major Publisher Cans $2.4 Million Book Deal After Author Was Accused of Using AI

Being an author in the age of AI is going to become increasingly trickier. I’m reminded of an article by Joan Westenberg: “The AI writing witchhunt is idiotic”:

The tools are biased and inaccurate; they spit out false positives at rates that should make anyone uncomfortable using them as evidence of anything, and yet people treat the output like a blood test that came back positive, forgetting, apparently, that blood tests are retested and retested because no single test is entirely accurate.

The idea of false positives makes me nervous. The other day I put a chunk of my writing into one of those “AI detectors” and it said “100% human” which made me feel only moderately better. I mean I know I don’t use AI to write, but who’s going to believe me if a piece of software says otherwise?

‘Be yourself’ is great advice, but I’m not sure most people know what that means. First you have to know who you are, what thoughts are yours and not someone else’s. In a world of constant input and infinite scrolling we’ve all become experts at consuming ideas and very bad at coming up with our own.

We write to think; both in private, in the sanctity of whatever app we choose, alone with our thoughts, and in public when our words reach total strangers who can mirror them back to us and help us see things we’ve missed.

That’s quite a wonderful exchange.

— “Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write it Anyway.”

I’ve always felt that writing is about connection. I’ve never really cared about metrics because reaching even one person is already a lot. And while you can't have a writing career with only one reader, you do have to start somewhere.

Poe's favorite new spot is under my desk and on top of my standing mat, which I think is funny because that mat has been there for over a year and he's just discovered it.

Fixing your relationship with digital tools requires that you fix your analog life first. It’s not enough to stop using problematic apps and devices, you must also aggressively pursue alternative activities to fill the voids this digital abstention will create: read books, join communities, develop hard hobbies, get in shape, hatch plans to transform your career for the better. Without deeper purpose, the shallow siren song of your phone will become impossible to ignore.

— Cal Newport via Fix Your Analog Life First

This is the “path to mastery,” George Leonard wrote: not one initial period of agitation followed by smooth, steady improvement, but an endless succession of new challenges, each making a clumsy, disjointed, agitated beginner of you again and again. “And this is the essence of mastery,” he added: “you must be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.”

— From “SIX at 6: The Initial Agitation, The Essence of Mastery, Starting With Shit, The Natural State, The Psychic Wall, and The Second Effort”

The main reason web surfing is harder now, aside from the gravitational pull of social media platforms, is because outbound links are a lot rarer. Many sites don’t link out at all, because linking out subverts the advertising-driven business model most of them operate by.

Also, because people don’t web-surf anymore, they don’t find as many weird and remarkable online locations to link out to. Even when they do, they’re more likely to share them to their social media accounts, in exchange for some gratifying hearts or thumbs-ups, than on their websites. The bulk of attention gets funneled eventually to those big thoroughfares.

—From “How to Surf the Web in 2025 and Why You Should”

We are not merely truth-seeking creatures. We are meaning-making ones. A story does not have to be true to become useful. It only has to explain a feeling people already carry.

—“Antarctica, the Sealed Envelope, and the Stories We Use to Feel Less Powerless"

First of all, you don’t have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else. In today’s world, most people pick up their phones as soon as they get a moment of inactivity. Serious readers pick up their books instead. So an effective way is to replace the time you spend in front of a screen, like PCs, smartphones, and TVs, with reading a book.

— From How to Read More Books