A Small Excerpt from A Novel That I'm Writing at A Glacial Pace

 

Eventually I found myself inside a bar. The TVs were soundless and tuned to the right propaganda channels. I sat down beside a woman who was no longer presenting as a man and peeled the mask off of my face. She had a masculine jawline and an Adam’s apple, and the shadows did her little favors. I found myself staring at the thick black hairs on her forearm until I realized she was looking at me. A gave the faintest smile—the smile of a murderer, perhaps—and then turned away as though the variety of liquor stacked against the wall had my sudden undivided attention. I looked again out of the corner of my eye and saw that she still stared at me. Well fuck I thought. Sometimes people felt they were owed a conversation.

A Small Excerpt from a Novel that I'm Writing at A Glacial Pace

 

The only thing I really remember is the television. Truck LeMond’s constipated frown watched everything, his curated sneer propped up by Botox treatments and millions of dollars of blood money from insanely rich septuagenarians convinced that liberalism was something you could stamp out if only you controlled all the media channels. I fixated on him too long, my eyes watching his, reading every lie that came from his lips. Now here was a target—the Goebbels of America—but I’d have to find his hidden broadcast studio located somewhere in rural New York. I looked down at my blood splattered hands and had a brief moment of clarity, during which my hands shook and my eyes widened in horror. But you can’t stand there blinking—once the choice has been made, there’s no going back, that innocence is lost, now you’ve done a thing and it can’t be reversed because time doesn’t flow backwards, at least not from a human perspective. And so I erased my doubts and destroyed the place, leaving it a burning ruin, the howls of the vanquished echoing through the night as I fled like Grendel from the Heorot, a new fire burning in my chest.

Juggernaut AI 5 Weeks in

 

-Holy fucking volume, Batman! How do you like 7 sets of 10 rep front squats followed by a side of 4 sets of 8 rep deadlifts? Did I mention that the first set of squats is supposed to have an RPE of 10? When you first boot up the program, it asks you how much volume you prefer. I picked moderate. I guess moderate means something else to a world class powerlifter (duh), but this shit probably isn't sustainable. Thankfully, once you've reported an RPE of 9.5, the Jug AI will delete sets. Also, after a week is completed, you have the option of lowering your volume on your main lifts. I'm just bitching about the last week of my hypertrophy cycle. Still, I hate sets of ten. We'll see what the next month brings (higher intensity, lower volume, it seems like).

-If you pick powerbuilding, the bodybuilding stuff isn't difficult, or at least, I didn't make it so. I picked easy stuff like inverted rows and decline pushups. I would suggest most users do the same.

-I'm very thankful I was conservative with my maxes. Doing so is always the smart way to train.

-Despite the volume, I've recovered pretty well, other than my left SI joint, which was aggravated during the second week. I'm pretty hopeful this program will result in some good PRs. You don't do this much volume without some decent results.

-Speaking of decent results, I think I've gained some muscle, particularly in my legs and arms. My scale is broken, but I'm hanging out around 198.

-Do the warmups, especially on lower body day. They do a good job of getting you loose.

-When I started the program, I had the option of doing a bridge block. I picked no because I didn't know what a bridge block was. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake, since a bridge block would've eased me into high volume training. Oh well. I feel pretty adapted now.

New Music: Instrumental

 

Instrumental is just a couple of riffs I had lying around. I feel as though it is vaguely reminiscent of a Tool song, albeit without Maynard James fucked-up lyrics or weird time signatures. Just some layered guitar over a drum loop.

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.

Fuck My Phone

 

Seriously, fuck this piece of shit.

It took me years to buy one. All those years with a flip phone, a primitive device only good for talking and texting. Eventually, the ease of processing credit cards through Square and an unfortunate washing machine accident resulted in my purchasing of a smart phone. I won't be like everyone else I said. After all, I'd witnessed how people eschewed conversation, the beauty of nature, quiet observation, and obstacles in their path to pay attention to their phone. I didn't get it. What happened to our attention spans? Did we really need to be on the internet all the time? Could we not take a minute of boredom?

I understand now.

The minute I have a question, I think "I'll look that up on google." The minute I have nothing to do, I hop on Reddit and see what's on the front page. When I hit the weights, I take my phone with me, so that I can use it to calculate my percentages as well as keep myself entertained in between sets. It's an alarm clock, a weather forecaster, a repository for all of my data and precious things. It's a goddamn vampire is what it is.

Somehow, my smart phone has made itself essential despite being a thing I lived without for almost the entirety of my life.

What it does is never let me disconnect from the internet. The internet is a cruel place, a techno-capitalist nightmare of garish design and ADHD distraction. I'm starting to quote people from Reddit like they're real flesh and blood people. Which they are. But I don't know them.

Can't we sacrifice convenience for a little bit of humanity in return? Can't we turn back the clock and decided "hey, maybe it's not great to always carry the internet around in our pocket." The answer, of course, is no. People love their smart phones. They spend hundreds of dollars on them.

I want to toss mine out in the fucking driveway and run it over with my car. But I won't.

Who will tell me the weather?

I Got an NFT to Sell You, Moron

 

You can own a piece of this priceless artwork!

Hey, moron. Yeah, I'm talking to you, crypto-bro. We're all going to make it, but by all of us, I don't mean you. Well, it could be you, if you fall for the next scam. All you got to do is cash out before the bubble bursts. And it will burst. Despite being around for ten years, nobody uses crypto as a currency. And why would you? The value can literally change in the middle of a transaction. Not to mention it takes ten minutes to process a transaction with Bitcoin. Oh, and using Ethereum will cost you twenty bucks, maybe even fifty. Who the fuck knows? It's all made-up bullshit, with so much obfuscation that your average person just might buy into the hype without understanding how much of a scam it all is.

So yeah, Pointless Venture is cashing in. Straight from the blockchain, we will be issuing non-fungible-tokens for Dumb-Fat-Bastard, produced by our hard-working NFT collective, Dumb-Fat-Bastards. Our cryptocurrency, which exists entirely in my imagination, making it just as real as any other crypto, will be called ScamCoin.

A shot of the miraculous blockchain, the tech that will revolutionize fraud!

I assure you, the humble buyer, that if you give Dumb-Fat-Bastards your money, we will not produce a single thing of substance. Any attempts to contact us will fail because we're a DAO, which is short for go fuck yourself. If you're a tech-literate individual with low social skills, a small amount of expendable income, and absolutely no financial literacy, then jump on the hype train, baby! Daddy Elon is taking us to Mars, and only the true visionaries are invited! Good morning and good night!

Here are some other potential NFTs we are working on:

Muddy Penis!

A pile of shit!

Mutant waving high!

Hey, at least none of them feature fucking apes, eh?

X Box Series S Review

 

It's a small, attractive console with a simplistic yet elegant design. Hah.

Although I'm mainly a PC gamer, I purchased an Xbox Series S a while back, mainly so that my Playstation-owning buddy could come over and crossplay Halo Infinite multiplayer between the Xbox and PC. It also functions well as a backup gaming machine, which is something to keep in mind, since if my 5700 xt broke I'd be out at least 600 bucks to replace it with something similar.

As a budget machine, I think the Series S works really well, especially with last generation games. Halo 5 runs at 4k and 60 fps; I ran through the tutorial section of Gears 5 and it seems to hit the advertised 1440p/60 fps that Microsoft claims the console was designed for. However, Halo Infinite is another story. Performance mode in Infinite is a dynamic 1080p/60 fps, and boy, that resolution scaling is pretty noticeable, to the point where I'd say that Halo 5 looks better on the Series S. If you sit a distance away from your tv like I do, that's not a big deal. If you sit closer, however, you'll notice those resolution shifts. Regardless, the Series S is still a great deal compared to a budget PC or a last gen console. An Nvidia rtx 3050 will cost you at least 250 bucks, and realistically you're looking at probably twice that. So for the price of an entry level graphics card you can buy a Series S. Also, the updated Zen 2 8 core CPU will ensure that the Series S ages much better than an Xbox One X or a PS4. However, there's no doubt in my mind that this console will probably be targeting dynamic 1080p/60 fps or native 1080p/30 fps in the next couple of years. The GPU is just too weak. Halo Infinite might not be a well-optimized game, but it's still a cross-gen title, and as developers push the power of the X Box Series X and Playstation 5, that advertised 1440p/60 fps nonsense will be forgotten. Keep in mind that the high end consoles can't even do native 4k/60 fps. Demanding titles such as Halo Infinite, Forza 5, and Deathloop all use dynamic resolution scaling to hit 60 fps, with the resolution often dipping down to 1440p. In the words of the great poet Flavor Flav, don't believe the hype.

So yeah, the Series S is a great budget machine, perfect for Game Pass. It's Quick Resume feature let's you immediately resume a game you've been playing, and the whole process, from turning on the console to resuming your game, probably takes less than ten seconds. If you're a budget gamer or looking for a cheap console, it's a great option. Just don't expect it to rival a mid-range PC.