I've Had Enough of the Once in a Lifetime Shit

 

 This is my worried face.

Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. Donald Trump elected President. A three-year long pandemic. Russia declaring war on Ukraine.

I'm getting tired of this once in a lifetime shit. What the fuck is next? Aliens descending from the heavens? Nuclear fusion? A Star Wars movie that satisfies all corners of the fan base? God forbid, Half-Life 3?

Reality has become surreal, to the point where I expect the unexpected. I'm fucking Batman at this point, planning for contingencies within contingencies. Does any of it make goddamn sense? No, of course not. But I'm the fucking Batman.

If only, right? Would a billion dollars take the bite out of uncertainty? Would it alleviate my fears of global war, disease, or catastrophic climate change? Is there a reason besides ego for Elon Musk's Martian ambitions? Questions bequeath questions, and answers are as fleeting as optimistic thinking. In response to runaway inflation, should I be putting all of my money into something tangible, like gold or silver? Or should I ride the river of the stock market? Who the fuck knows.

I'll tell you what. I hope the goddamn aliens come down from wherever and clean up all of our mess. Tell us that we're not fit to govern ourselves, let alone manage a planet or a nuclear arsenal. Put the natural system back in order. Clean up all the microplastics in the ocean. Suck up all the excess carbon in the atmosphere.

I've had enough of these interesting times shit. Give me Leave it to Beaver and lazy Sundays. Wake me up in some sort of Mormon alternate universe, where everybody is as bland and wholesome as a piece of white bread. Well maybe don't go that far. But let's reel this crazy back a bit. I don't want to see the fall of democracy in America or world wide ecological collapse. Please?

Wait a minute. Is nobody in charge of reality? Who's overseeing this simulation? Where's Lawrence Fishburne with his pills?

Juggernaut AI Is Pretty Cool, so far

 

So like a jabroni, I signed up for the Juggernaut AI app, a reactive training program created by Garrett Blevins utilizing the knowledge of Chad Wesley Smith, one of the most accomplished athletes and coaches in the strength world. Smith's accolades are impressive: he's has posted a top ten all time powerlifting total, as well as won two national championships in the shotput and earned his strongman pro card. Top powerlifters such as Marisa Inda and Andy Huang are Juggernaut athletes. Really, it's hard to think of someone more qualified to teach you how to get strong than Chad Wesley Smith. Maybe that's why the Juggernaut AI app is a rather expensive thirty-five bucks a month. Initially, I balked at the price, then I realized that I've been training for over eight years and haven't made a considerable amount of progress in a while, so what do I have to lose? Thirty-five bucks a month isn't much. After using the app for a week, I'm pretty impressed so far. Before starting a program, you select whether you want to do powerbuilding (bodybuilding with a powerlifting focus) or powerlifting. I selected powerlifting, and the app asked what bodyparts I wanted to work on. I selected biceps and quads, and then entered my maxes on the powerlifts. The app then generated a 188 day program for me, with the first couple months focused on hypertrophy (gaining muscle), then strength, and then peaking for new maxes. It tracks variables such as sleep and desire to train, and then adjusts your program accordingly. It definitely starts out pretty light: I was doing bench presses with 155 lbs and yates rows with 135. However, the volume is high, and my lats were sorer than they'd been in years. You can swap out exercises during your workouts if you wish, and Juggernaut features an extensive library complete with descriptions and videos on how to do each exercise and what it works. The exercise library is really impressive, and a great feature. The main way the Juggernaut AI app tracks your progress is by RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) and RiR (Reps in Reserve). I'd never worked out using these metrics before, but the RPE scale is easily explained. For example, if you're supposed to perform 10 reps with 155 lbs at an RPE of 6, that means you could have easily done another four reps. A 6.5 would mean you maybe could've done 4 reps, while a 7 is 3 easy reps, and so on. Reps in reserve is self-explanatory: a 4 RiR means you need to leave 4 in the tank. I'm a little apprehensive on basing a whole program on how a lifter feels, since I've had good workouts while feeling like shit, and vice versa. Nevertheless, I'm excited to see how I progress, and I'll definitely defer to Chad's judgment, since the program has a growing user base. I'll have a review up months from now.

Bad Poetry: My Children Are Killing Me

 

I go to bed with worry

and lie restless with worry

Until the worrying subsides 

Just enough 

To let my consciousness

Fade away.

Then my oldest pees the bed,

Not once, but twice.

Then my youngest wakes screaming

So my wife puts him in bed with us.

Eventually my other son gets in bed,

and so it's a goddamn party

At two in the morning,

My oldest snoring so loud

That the windows rattle,

While my youngest flops around

And talks to himself

For over two hours.

Every time I edge close to sleep,

He bats it way with a leg kick,

A face slap,

Or a question as to my presence in bed.

What kind of sick CIA torture

Is this shit?

I would kill somebody for the chance

To have a week's worth of uninterrupted

Sleep.

Such is the parent's lament.

This is the price we pay

For having the next generation.

Save us, youth.

Please be worth it.

 

The Pointlessness of Boba Fett

 

Sorry old man, we have no use for you.

Seven episodes in, The Book of Boba Fett reveals its true purpose. We watch as the Mandalorian tracks down his old ward, Grogu, who's learning to be a jedi from none other than Luke Skywalker himself, gloriously reconstructed using a voodoo mixture of CGI and flesh and blood. Luke looks great; Mark Hamill's digitally de-aged voice sounds unnatural and a little too robotic. Luke eventually offers Grogu a choice: either take Djarin's shirt of mithril chainmail, or chose Yoda's tiny lightsaber. Finally, in the last five minutes of his own show, Boba shows up in a round table meeting as he prepares his gangsta family to take down the Pike Syndicate. Boba doesn't even show up in the previous episode, which also stars the Mandalorian. Why is Fett a side character in his own show? Well, the answer is that Star Wars shows now function to launch other shows involving Star Wars characters, none of which will ever be free of the burden of epic heroism. Even age and his character's death in The Last Jedi can't keep Mark Hamill's Luke out of Star Wars. Although I doubt that we get a Disney Plus series involving the adventures of Uncanny Luke and Baby Yoda, an Asoka Tano show is apparently in the works (she also shows up in episode seven of The Book of Boba Fett). So the reason Boba has his own show even though he's largely rendered superfluous by the Mandalorian, is that Star Wars characters never die, even when they should. Boba was a guy in cool armor who disintegrated people and was chummy with Darth Vader; the Mandalorian took his concept (cool armor, bounty hunter) and developed a character and culture to fill in the void. I guess that's why Boba is such a softie now. Instead of a ruthless bounty hunter, he spares nearly everyone who tries to kill him in an attempt to be a kinder, gentler crime boss as opposed to Jabba's grotesqueness. It's all vaguely entertaining, but I'm afraid Star Wars shows will never again be as focused as that first season of the Mandalorian, which told a self-contained story without Luke Skywalker or Bo-Katan appearing to excite the fanboys. 

I feel as though Star Wars is a fiction weighed down by its backstory and its continuous desire to connect everyone in its universe to its central characters. Maybe that's why Visions, a series of non-canonical animated shorts developed by famous anime studios in Japan, is the freshest Star Wars I've seen in years. Visions takes the lore and has fun with it; we get two rival siblings battling in space atop a monstrous star destroyer; a sith ronin who eliminates other sith; and a robot who dreams of becoming a jedi. I've always thought Star Wars would be served better by taking a Final Fantasy approach to its material. Make everything sort of feel like it's in the same universe (weird droids, Western tropes, lightsabers, empires and rebels), but don't feel compelled to actually connect every single piece of fiction. If Disney had chosen this path, they wouldn't feel compelled to computer animate Mark Hamill's face over a younger actor's, or bring Boba Fett back from the dead, when the poor old guy should've stayed in that sarlacc pit.