The blog home of Jeff Putz

Simon apparently came in to our room the other night (I didn't wake up) and told Diana that he couldn't sleep because his brain was constantly racing. It kind of makes you wonder if it's hereditary, or the result of something hereditary like autism.

I've articulated before about what this is like. I have to emphasize that it's like this most of the time for me. If he has to endure that as well, that's heartbreaking to me. Sometimes it makes living in the moment and relaxing very difficult. But it's absolutely the worst when you're trying to sleep. As I get more tired, the context shifting is reduced, but then I get into tighter loops thinking about the same things, which might actually be worse.

I don't have a ton of solutions, because honestly I just learned a few years ago that most people don't have this problem. It can in rare instances be useful, because it's definitely why I'm able to say witty things now and then. But mostly I find it exhausting. I'm not entirely sure how to coach Simon around it either.

I can say that a few milligrams of THC does wonders before bed, but the developmental risks are way too high, even with limited research, to give that to non-adults. It definitely helps me though. In waking hours, there are certain activities, mainly video games, that help me turn it off. And this will sound weird, but if I can focus on sexual thoughts, the lizard part of my brain seems to take over and shut down the spiral. Maybe I'm tapping into biology for that one. Oh, writing helps a ton. If I write multiple blog posts in one day, that's me coping with it.

It's a rough way to exist. I'm trying to find something positive that I've passed to my kid.

I've been a fan of free television for a long time, ditching cable for most of the last 15 years. Going cable-free has certainly become easier with the advent of streaming. If you go back more than 20 years, I built a PC in this sweet "stereo" case intended for your living room, and in that computer I had two over-the-air tuners. TV was still standard definition, so even then, you could load up a hard drive with so much stuff. The basic cable channels were not scrambled or encrypted in any way either, so if you did have cable, you had your own DVR, without the cost of subscribing to TiVo at the time. I used software called BeyondTV for that, and it was awesome.

Broadcast TV still has had some stuff that we watch, mostly awards shows and some sporting events. Oh, and we used to DVR the nightly news and SNL. Six years ago I bought a FireTV Recast from Amazon, which was a pretty great little box that you attached to an antenna and your network, and it recorded stuff off-air. Unfortunately, Amazon discontinued support for Recast, and it crashes a lot. It's a bummer, because it worked pretty seamlessly with the FireTV sticks on our TV's. Fortunately, there's a little box called a Tablo that does essentially the same thing, so I bought one of those, hoping to get a few years out of it before everything is streaming. And unlike the Recast, it seems to be getting our CBS affiliate, so we can actually watch the Tony's this weekend.

Beyond that, the landscape is so much better. Peacock seems prepared to perpetually charge $20 per year, so that covers NBC, which will also have the NBA back starting next season. ABC and FOX stuff is mostly carried on Hulu. We do the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle ad-free for $30, totally worth it. CBS is Paramount+, the old people channel, and there's nothing I want to watch there other than the Tony's (60 Minutes segments are all on YouTube). We're not big sports people, though we do enjoy watching as much of the US Open as possible. We usually get a Sling trial for that, which includes ESPN, and it's cheap the first month. I don't know how regular Sling or YouTubeTV makes it, because it's cable-expensive.

The eventual retirement of broadcast TV makes me kind of sad, because it's the thing that I aspired to work in. That, and terrestrial radio, which has been completely useless for a very long time. I haven't listened to it since maybe the mid-aughts, when 107.9 The End met its, uh, end, in Cleveland. But maybe when that all shrivels up, more marketing dollars will move online, helping those of us who have a side-hustle on the Internets not tied to a social platform.

I spend a little more for proper redundancy on my sites, because I believe that's important for the folks that choose to use their distraction time with me. Also, obviously, that's my kind of nerd stuff. Sure, the ad revenue doesn't cover it, but I can't not provide a high level of service. (Also, it's worth mentioning that back in the day I could pay my mortgage on 30k daily ad impressions.) I pride myself on how fast it all is, and the up-time, especially compared to the days when it all ran on a single rented server. The forum app powering the PointBuzz forums normally runs on two instances using only 1.75 GB, and a working set of 500 MB.

That all works fine, because typical traffic to that app is around 2,000 requests per hour, which is nothing. However, I've been dealing with a lot of bots originating from Alibaba servers in Hong Kong, Singapore and sometimes China or India. Sometimes it's from a single machine in Google or Amazon's cloud in the US (not the search engine). They go nuts and generate 100,000 requests per hour. This is also not what I would consider "high," about 28 requests per second, but it does push the limits of what that tiny amount of memory can handle because it's so bursty. By that, I mean the requests are not uniformly distributed over time. It can slow things down, and sometimes generate errors for people.

I can scale it up to 3.5 GB of memory, and everything is again fine. In fact, there's enough overhead at that point probably to do hundreds of requests per second. I don't actually know what the upper limit is there. But it's also the difference between spending $25 a month and $50 a month. I'm already spending $72 on the two "premium" instances running all of CoasterBuzz and the non-forum part of PointBuzz (as well as this blog an a number of other things), $110 for all of the databases and small amounts for Redis, ElasticSearch, Functions, etc. The database has yet to be overwhelmed, fortunately, so I haven't had to scale that up.

The bots are annoying, but if they get really ugly, it's easy enough to see where they're coming from, and block them. Alibaba is especially easy, because they come from predictable ranges of IP's, and always in East Asia. The one-offs are the more annoying ones, because any idiot can spin up a bunch of ephemeral machines and run a script to scrape the sites. Between the two sites, there are hundreds of thousands of pages, so there's a lot to hit. It's great for long-tail Google juice, but not great for rogue crawlers.

We spent last weekend on a cruise, which is hardly unusual for our vacationing endeavors. It's so completely different from everyday life, in no small part because there are people taking care of you in every way. They're making your bed, cleaning up after you and bringing you food. Oh, and taking care of your kid. While all this is going on, you meet people from all over the world in bars, during activities or just sitting around. Coming back to land, it's clear that humanity at its best is people serving people, sharing their experiences and connecting. Sure, in that environment, that's literally the crew's job, but it doesn't mean that it isn't genuine. It takes a certain commitment to work like that, and for guests it takes empathy and kindness to show your appreciation for the crew.

This happens in everyday life, too. Civil servants at all levels of government do their jobs not for the money, but because they believe in the mission of government. Volunteers in every capacity further their causes. People give money, often to the same causes. Again, this is humanity doing its best.

Would you not prefer that the people you elect also work like this? Elected officials are by definition supposed to be serving their constituencies. They must exercise wisdom to decide how best to make government work for all of the people it serves. It doesn't mean that they don't have to make difficult decisions, and it doesn't mean that they have to satisfy everyone. But they must approach the job with the seriousness and care that matches the impact they will have on people's lives.

Instead, we have a bizarre cult of personality that people treat like a sports team loyalty. Outside of working for a political party, I can't see any world where anyone would ordinarily be anything other than cautiously skeptical of anyone in office. It's not that you should expect the worst, but people who seek power are generally the ones who are least qualified to wield it. The power is used to hurt people and marginalize others. The cult turns a blind eye to the blatant self-interest that is antithetical to public service. And for what? To stick it to all of the communities that you fear because they're not like you? No wonder we are where we are.

I got my professional start working for a municipality. I did it full-time for three years, and part-time for the six years prior. It sure as hell wasn't for the money, but I stuck with it as long as I did because I found it deeply fulfilling to be doing things that benefited the community. What I did mattered to people. At no time would I have ever considered using my position to tear anyone down or cause harm to people.

I don't expect Trump and his sycophants to change. What is most disappointing is the regular people who are fine with the destructive outcomes. One can be for, against, or indifferent, but make no mistake, that indifference has the same outcomes as being for it. Is that the legacy that you want to leave?

Over the years, I've talked a little bit here and there about getting divorced. Most people didn't know what was going on, almost until it was over. But it was about 20 years ago that we initially split. That started off a chain reaction of events that eventually led me to remarry, have a child, and move across the country to work for a company that I never thought I'd work for. Stephanie and I are still friends, and I'm grateful for that. The reasons it didn't work out aren't that important to anyone other than us. I will tell you my story, the short version at least, of how things went after that.

I was a total mess for awhile, though I didn't really let on about it. There's just one blog post that implies something bad happened. I was very immature for my age, and I also had several bona fide autism meltdowns, though I didn't know what that looked like at the time. I had just started a contract job that was very flexible, my book just came out, I was coaching volleyball and the sites actually made enough money that I could kind of wing it. Heck, most of the previous year I didn't even work outside of writing the book. Volleyball was the thing that provided the most purpose.

We were doing counseling, but as was the case in my high school and college days, I didn't really know anything about getting into or maintaining a relationship. I was still of the mind that you met someone, made out with them a bit, and she was your girlfriend in a super committed relationship. That's why I was single so much. Later in the year, I got into a separate relationship that was complicated, but it did show me that an attractive woman could be interested in me. That fall I coached high school volleyball, lost a lot of weight and had moments of positivity and independence that I never had before. I don't think I had a choice.

The next year I met Catherine, and I learned from her about how you ease into a relationship. I wasn't proactive, but fortunately she was. We were a strange pairing at first, different in a lot of ways. She was so much more social than I was, whereas I found being that social level to be exhausting. (Again, wish I understood all of this sooner!) I was ready to really dive in, so I asked her to go to Vegas with me right after the divorce was final. Going on a trip with someone reveals a ton about how compatible you are. It was an epic vacation, I'm sure in part because of the newness of it. But we were all-in, with gratuitous PDA and such. I figured out what dating was supposed to be like.

We spent almost a year together, and when we did split, it was not overly dramatic. I think the bottom line is that dating someone in vet/med school is destined to fail, something they even warned her about in orientation. Fortunately, we stayed friends, and now our families vacation together. She helped me reset, and I learned a ton about relationships just by dating her.

After we split (well, mostly, aside from still more mini-trips), I got into a rhythm of dating. A lot. The Internet made it easy to meet people, and I went through a period of time where I think I was going on one date per week. I understood what wasn't working for me, and for the first time in my life declined further dates. It was during this time that I had my one and only one-night stand, which was one of the most bizarre things I've ever experienced. That's probably not a story suitable for a blog post!

Then, a little more than two years after the big split, I met Diana. We were married in under two years, pregnant right after that, and moved to Seattle six months into marriage, all during a serious recession. That period of change was intense, but frankly I needed it. It wasn't that Cleveland sucked, but I definitely needed to get beyond it. Everything has felt mostly fluid since then, in mostly good ways. But after a decade of kind of wandering around without a lot of deliberate direction, the split necessarily triggered a maturing process that I didn't know I needed.

This is where people say things like, "I wouldn't change a thing," and I kind of think that's nonsense. Yes, I am happy about the outcomes, but if I could have the same outcomes without a lot of the pain, hell yes I would accept that situation. The split was only one source of pain. I realized a lot of things about people I thought would be looking out for me that did not even acknowledge what I was going through. I struggled in a lot of ways that had less to do with the failed marriage and more to do with how inexperienced I was in important life stuff. And my therapist at the time was pretty shitty, now that I look back at it.

I can't believe how much time has passed. I could not have imagined any of the current aspects of my life. If this is how it goes for everyone, I have to imagine a lot of Type-A people being borderline suicidal. How do you arrive at a life you couldn't imagine but are so happy to have? I'm not going to pretend to know what things will look like 20 years from now. It'll be wrong.

The algorithm pointed me to an interview of Jordan Klepper, of The Daily Show fame, by Jen Psaki of MSNBC. While he has been going to MAGA rallies mostly to get laughs, he's also been thoughtful about what he's seen, and he was there on January 6. The thing that stood out in the interview was the bit about young white males being attracted to Trump, because they find some identity in associating with him. That struck me as weird, so I got to thinking about what has changed over the years. A decade and a half ago, I don't think his ascension would be possible. (And I'm disappointed it could happen at all.)

That decade and change ago, there was a developing sense that real equality was not only possible, but that we were headed in that direction. Perhaps naively, a lot of people, including myself, felt like having a Black president was a precursor to a more equitable society. Same-sex marriage eventually became legal, and a lot of folks realized that it wasn't enough to not be racist, we had to be anti-racist if things were ever going to change. Marginalized groups were getting louder, and quite happy to lean into their identity. It was exciting, and kind of a relief to see it happening.

At the same time, social media, which was mostly Facebook in those days, began its transformation into something that was less about networking and more about performance. I mean, that's why we have TikTok. Everyone is putting on a show. That was probably true before, at least to the extent that people presented themselves online in a way that was more polished or filtered than their real lives. With ad markets disrupted and monopolized, the concept of "influencer" was born, which mostly involves ephemeral performance in a long-tail of people who do whatever it is they do online. This is narcissistic behavior to various extents, which is kind of weird if you lived before it was typical. The point is that all of this lo-fi, ephemeral stuff appeals to an idea that you're awesome and should get your thing. After all, 16-year-old girls are getting their thing by doing synchronized dance moves online.

As a white hetero male, I've always been able to see first hand that advantage that I had over women and people of color. I knew this because many of my peers, especially those who were older, said and did a lot of sexist and racist things. As a Gen-X'er, I also had the, uh, "advantage" of largely being disregarded. I suppose I took up some identity in that, but I think it left me with a choice to find identity in helping others, or in finding some kind of fame and recognition. I've mostly leaned into the former, as my short tenure in radio, mostly pre-Internet-ish, made me realize that being even local famous isn't really that great. But again, not even autism, which I now understand has held me back in some ways, has not been a big enough impediment in my success. I think a lot of Millennials, who were more in that Internet transitional time, kind of caught up with us. This part is largely anecdotal, but stick with me for a moment.

Young white males today only know that performative online world. And that world includes people who are proud of their ethnic or racial heritage, proud of being queer, proud of being strong women, etc. The marginalized groups have had enough. Now, I'm in the aforementioned cohort that got to decide where we could find identity, and I believe many of us found it in helping others, raising people up. I have nothing to lose, and the proud identities of marginalized people does not come at my expense. But what about the people who only know a world where teens bank on making memes, and making everything about you is normal? If you're not a part of any of that, what is your identity?

To that end, I can see why young, white, hetero males feel threatened and without an identity that they can, uh, identify with. I am absolutely empathetic to this. You can't tell them about "white privilege" because they can't see it. They don't have the life experience to see it, and our education system fails to teach them about how human history is a tragedy of marginalized and persecuted people.

Unfortunately, because that privilege is real, and they're willing to associate their identity with a blatant racist and misogynist, they are moving us backward. The question then becomes, how do you reach them? They've grown up in a situation where it apparently is OK to be selfish, even at the expense of others (not to mention be a criminal without consequence). What's even more bizarre is the portion that show strong affiliation with Christianity, even though Christ stood for basically the antithesis of what MAGA folk believe. So now they also feel righteous through a warped view of religion.

I don't know what you do about this, but I can say that I at least understand how we got here. You can't explain ongoing cognitive dissonance to a person with autism though, or at least, not this person. I can't understand people who are so hateful because it's not rational. I also can't understand people who claim not to be hateful that associate with the hateful. And it's not for a lack of trying. I've tried to engage with random people like this, and they always get back to some talking point not grounded in reality, or one contrary to the values they claim to uphold.

It's not my problem to fix, but I want to see it get better. All I've got is allyship, volunteering and donating to civil rights organizations. It doesn't feel like enough.

I thought that the term "enshittification" was just a thing we said in software circles, but it turns out that it's being used for... everything. But let me back up a little.

In software and technology, the term started to show up when talking about the big social platforms. Remember when they were useful and allowed you to keep in touch and the goings on of your friends? Yeah, those days are long gone. They're gone because those platforms only exist to sell ads and increase engagement. You're forced to endure all of the noise to get anything out of it at all, and since the network is not interoperable or portable, you can't just lift and shift your network.

All of it is getting worse, and AI is one of the biggest problems. So much of the "content" on the Internet is written by machines. All of it uses link bait titles like, "This actor makes bold statement about co-star." If this were written in a more classic journalistic style, it would say the names of the actors and something about the statement. It's infuriating that even the entertainment things are going this way. For more important things like Google, they're giving you AI summaries of things instead of showing you the things, which of course is bad because the AI doesn't think critically (although, neither do most people it seems). It doesn't know what's real. This will get worse because all of the things that publish stuff and rely on ad revenue (also from Google) will stop publishing because they don't get any traffic. It's not sustainable. It was bad enough that everyone wanted to be a "content creator" (a totally meaningless designation), but now the Internet is flooded with people and things that aren't even real.

I'm reading on LinkedIn now that basically all of job recruiting is broken. People use AI to spam thousands of job postings, and recruiters use AI tools to find the "right" candidates. Obviously that doesn't work. That so many jobs are remote makes it even worse because there's no geographical limit to applicants. I always preferred to hire from my network, and that would still be the case if I was in a position to hire people. It feels like those days are gone.

Oh, and dishonorable mention to all of the online tooling that the schools use. Most of it is just terrible, and I'm sure the teachers don't care for it either.

The term is spreading to new contexts and variations on meaning. But the intent is the same: Things are getting crappier. Think about how electronic food ordering has changed the relationship with restaurants. The desire for the cheapest goods has led to lower standards for everything (this is also called the "Walmarting" of things). Entertainment is leaning into time-wasting, ephemeral crap online. And obviously, you've seen what's happened to our government and politics.

I'm generally optimistic about things, but I feel like so many things that used to inspire wonder and curiosity are getting crappy, or the crappy things are obscuring the good stuff. I hope that this is a temporary situation.

I absolutely love The Last of Us. I've played both games, and of course the TV show brings the whole story to a new level. I really liked the game Fallout 4, and the TV adaptation of that universe was pretty solid. Both work on variations of a total breakdown of society as we know it. The Fallout universe is a little less interesting, because it deals in a post-nuclear scenario, meaning that a lot of stuff gets totally wiped out. Oddly, both games spend time in Boston.

The Last of Us is more about people and their relationships, despite the infected zombies. And as I said, the remnants of a thriving society are still around, if largely reclaimed by nature. Since the games mostly take place decades after the outbreak, presumably all of the young people are born into the weirdness, which is to say that they necessarily have some level of survival capability. But what if it was you, at the beginning of the end?

My first instinct is to say that I'd be toast. This is rooted in the joke that I make when someone talks about liking to run, and I ask what's chasing them. That might be true, I may not last very long. However, I think about how my mind seems to change in the worst of circumstances. If I have an obligation, say to my wife and child, I know that I pivot and become more matter-of-fact about things. For example, when Diana's car got totaled (the first time), I dutifully got Simon out of bed, went to get her and did whatever was necessary to keep him chilled out and wait for the FHP (which never ended up coming because of a fatal accident down the road). I go into this mode any time there's a serious travel disruption, too. That one is weird because I'm a nervous traveler under normal circumstances. Heck, as terrible as the whole Finn situation was, I largely kept it together for the benefit of Simon for most of the time. I sometimes adapt because I have no choice.

But those are time-boxed bad situations. They don't last indefinitely. An apocalyptic scenario never ends. That's where I think it can get you. At what point do you get too tired to keep fighting? Sure, humans probably still have that animal part of our brain, but it's like raising an animal in captivity. If you let it go after being hand fed by humans, it's not going to know what to do out in the wild. We've all been hand fed.

Cheerful subject, right?

I'm still pursuing my lighting education endeavor, but it definitely comes in spurts (giggidy). A couple of weekends ago I modeled my office in Vectorworks, along with the half-dozen lights that I own. What's neat about that is that I can import the model into the console, and the software can "listen" to the output of the console and visually render the output. In other words, what happens on the computer is what happens in the office. That's not as fun, but still.

So the next step is to build out a virtual rig with a bunch of fixtures that cost $10k each on trusses, and once I have that, I can program stuff against it. I obviously can't outfit an arena with the real thing, so this allows me to try and be creative as if it were for real. I don't know that there's anything exotic I can really do, as most big shows these days are several rows of lights at various heights, kind of surrounding the "box" over the stage. Sometimes they're curved or circular trusses. More and more, there are a lot of video components, which I could get into, but that feels like a secondary skill. I could create video patterns in After Effects, and use those as the basis for pixel mapping across a rig. That could be fun, and frankly a shortcut to trying to figure out the math patterns to otherwise make it do stuff.

I've watched a lot of videos of various shows, and I've noticed the EDM people mostly just try to blast you with seizure-inducing mayhem across hundreds of fixtures. Understandably, those shows don't exactly have a lot of dynamic range or subtlety in the music, so I guess that makes sense. Pop and rock seems to have more interesting stuff, and a lot of it even, wait for it, attempts to illuminate the artists. And then there's more quiet genres that mostly intend to create a mood, not a light show. The best thing that I've seen in person lately was Lindsey Stirling's Duality tour last year. That was legit.

I'm having fun with it still, but again, I haven't played consistently. I still find myself having to relearn things that I thought I already knew how to do.

I watched the two-hour-plus podcast hosted by Doctor Mike pitting a doctor who is peddling "clean organic no chemical" junk against scientist Dr. Andrea Love, regarding the misinformation being spread by a legion of influencers and conspiracy theorists, and worse, those selling "wellness." The clinician wrote a book that asserts we should be eating only "organic" food and that "chemicals" are probably bad for us. Dr. Love points out that there is no evidence at all that this is true. Absolutely zero. In fact, much of this "wellness" industry makes claims that aren't real at all, and not backed by any scientific consensus. The result is that people are buying into the nonsense and spending a ton of money on things they don't need to spend on.

This is particularly problematic coming from a board certified doctor, because they're supposed to deeply understand science. It's bad enough that so many people are calling into question the expertise of experts, but here's one that should be an expert. A massive percentage of people who buy into this stuff, and especially the "influencers" and personalities that sell it, tend to lean into the wrongness because that's how they explain things that they don't understand. It's the same phenomenon that conspiracy theorists suffer from. If you're unwilling to trust experts, or attempt a deeper understanding of science and history, you can "explain" things by making them up.

The playbook is pretty universal as well, and extends to the people who sow doubt in government and other institutions. They all insist that they're "just asking questions." They say they're doing their own "research." Both of these claims are actually legit if you are in fact genuinely curious and open to being wrong. But when you instead move toward conclusions that are not based on empirical data and observation, you're doing it wrong. As a result, misinformation flows freely, unabated by actual facts.

Take for example the subject of that podcast. The book author's core tenet that organic is better is based partly on the idea that organic food doesn't use pesticides. It's widely assumed that this is true. It is not. They use chemicals found naturally as pesticides, only without the rigorous scrutiny that synthetic pesticides undergo. Something found in nature isn't necessarily better or safer. I mean, arsenic is a naturally occurring chemical, but too much of it is definitely going to kill you. Even excess water can kill you.

And then there's the fear of GMO's. You know how many people in history have been hurt by GMO's? Exactly zero. You know how many people survived famine with GMO's? Likely a billion.

So if you see stuff about "detoxification" and "clean eating" and organic avocados, it's probably bullshit. Spending money on that is a waste. Ask any reputable dietitian. The cheaper vegetables are still good, healthy food. Vaccines still don't cause autism either.

The title is really the whole post. It's where we find the meaning in our life.

So why is it so hard to figure out?

I went to a screening and Q&A with Kevin Smith last weekend, showing Dogma for its 25th anniversary. He recently wrestled the rights away from the Weinstein's, so it will enjoy a theatrical rerelease and presumably streaming and home video reissues.

Smith is an excellent story teller, and if you've ever seen him live, then you know that translates well into his appearances. We saw him coming out of the pandemic, and he was good then as well. This time around, he shared some great stories about Alan Rickman and George Carlin. I've heard him talk about Carlin before, but it was interesting to hear about Rickman, and the friendship that he had with him, without realizing it was a friendship until he passed. Understandably, he felt like his "dopey" movies were not up to big time actors like him. That's kind of Smith's m.o. though. To hear him tell it, he's just happy to be here and make movies with his friends. And that's largely what he's been able to do, mostly on his terms. He found a way to do this through podcasts and tours and such. He's made his own future outside of the traditional Hollywood scene.

And yes, he definitely made some dumb movies, but Dogma still lands pretty well. The dialog is rich in deep cuts of Biblical stuff. Despite protests back in the day, I don't find it particularly negative toward Christianity, or any religion. Smith made the point that the movie captures his beliefs when he was "a kid," but for the most part he doesn't really lean into religion anymore.

His core movies, the Clerks trilogy, Chasing Amy and this one, are pretty great. I never really got Mallrats. Red State was what I would call his "Tarantino" movie, and generally better than people give it credit for. But sure, Tusk and Yoga Hosers are not really very good.

I admire the guy. He's a movie nerd that always knew what he wanted to do, and he's largely done it on his terms. He was doing selfies in the hall on our way out (he had to go into a later screening for Q&A), just kind of hanging out. No entourage, no one else around. He seems relatively grounded, and since going vegan post-heart attack, and later quitting weed, he seems to really enjoy what he does. It's still weird to see him so thin.

I've written a few times about how the medicinal properties of marijuana, or THC specifically, have helped me a great deal. For years I struggled with insomnia, probably related to anxiety, and 5 mg of THC via a gummy has largely solved that problem. Unexpectedly, it also treats my restless leg problem. I've never been formally diagnosed with that, but I know that I don't have it when I'm taking the THC. Diana uses it for back pain management, which is especially useful since the conventional pain killers have not been good for her kidneys. There's a lot of potential upside, but we don't really know what the negatives are, because they haven't been studied.

I was thinking about this because I'm in Colorado at the moment, where recreational THC in all its forms is a thing, and it's everywhere. There are four dispensaries within four blocks of my hotel. Because of the federal status, I can't fly across state lines with my gummies. The least I can do almost anywhere is 10 doses of 10 mg, which sucks because I need only 15 mg total for three nights. It's cheaper here than in Florida, but it's still a little wasteful. Also, the brand that I bought sucks, such a weird texture compared to what I get at home. That's the Wana brand, by the way. They're delicious and don't taste like weed. Unfortunately it's been raining, and the nearest store here is too far away.

One of the things that varies so wildly with product is potency. If you like to smoke it, who knows what you might get. Growers have worked hard to breed more potent strains. But even for edibles, it varies wildly. Even for the brand that I like, the real dosages are between 8 and 9 mg per gummy, and when you're only using half of that, that's a lot of difference. The batch I got here was about 10.8 mg, which is almost 30% more than what I'm used to. Again, I'm not a heavy user, and not trying to get high. The most I've had in an awake situation is that 8.something, and honestly, I don't really like the feeling. It's not like being drunk, but I can't explain why. Maybe it's just the difference in familiarity.

Where I'm going with this is that if it was legal, we could see a lot more precision in how it's regulated consistently, especially as it relates to potency. If you make an alcohol product, the ATF will fuck up your business if you don't exactly land the proof that you're selling. With THC products, there is no uniform scrutiny in that respect. And I understand, when you're dealing with plants, variability is impossible to control. But it seems weird that it isn't more consistent in every other form of THC, including edibles, tinctures and vapes. That's a lot of chemistry.

Again, I have to point out that it's not like alcohol. Alcohol is essentially poison. There is no evidence that it provides any health benefit, despite the longstanding myth about red wine having some benefit. There is, however, a ton of evidence that THC can be beneficial for a range of health issues. It might also have negative long-term effects, but we can't study that with the rigor that we can with legal products. I know it helps me, but I want to know that it isn't going to cause harm, or that the risk is relatively low. We also don't know what percentage of people will find it addictive, but it's a non-zero number, and I'm sure it's higher than clinicians would prefer.

The feds need to reclassify. I realize we have bigger problems right now, but a healthy government can do more than thing at once. (If only we had a healthy government.)

About seven years ago, we bought a robot vacuum from Neato. We actually used it up and downstairs, with two docks. It worked fairly well, though to use it downstairs, you really had to invert all of the dining chairs (that's 12, including the counter), which was a deterrent to using it. The reason you had to do this is because, despite having a spinny laser or something to map the surroundings, it mostly ran into everything over and over. We used it less and less over time, and then its battery died. I replaced it, but also learned at that point that the company went out of business, and they would be shutting down their servers eventually. That's the problem with "smart" stuff... it stops working when it can't phone home. Then a few weeks ago, it died hard. It shut itself down.

I still like the idea of a vac bot, so I looked around to see what was hot. The tech reviews had all of the usual suspects, but various online forums and Reddit were all about this Roborock brand that I had not heard of. That seemed odd, but I suspect many reviews only happen if the vendor gives the writers a sample. I started looking at the suction measurements and such, and Roborock seemed pretty great. Then one of the better midrange models, normally $800, was half-price (they go well over a grand), and that seemed like a good deal.

The software is pretty great. The app allows you to "rope off" parts of the map and delineate rooms, so you can choose specific areas to do. Most importantly, it doesn't bang into stuff all day, especially when it knows where stuff is. The device itself uses rubber brushes, which is interesting, and they seem to do a really good job. The dust chamber could be bigger, but when it does get overfilled, it struggles to empty into the dock. It uses disposable bags in the dock, which isn't great, but not the end of the world. Overall, I'm really impressed with its performance. I do wonder if it will have longevity, because it needs the cloud service. I mean, I've had the same upright Dyson for 20 years, and will probably have it my whole life.

Our carpet sure sucks though. The Pulte builder-grade crap looks like a dozen people have lived here for two decades, and it's just the three of us over seven years. It needs to be replaced, but there's kind of a with a weird economy I'm not sure now is the time. That, and when do we downsize and move out? I assume that better carpet should at least look good for five years.

One of the weird things about politics is that there seems to be a resistance to changing your mind. In fact, it seems to be a badge of honor to double down on something over time, even when evidence shows you're wrong.

A classic quality of a bona fide scientist is the ability to take on more data until you can prove or disprove a theory that you're testing. I would say that some are thrilled by a negative outcome, because now they can talk about something with more certainty either way. For aspects of everyday life, I imagine that this can be harder, because we're emotional creatures. Still, I may be disappointed when something that I hope is true turns out not to be, but I'd rather have that over constant engagement of cognitive dissonance.

This phenomenon of doubling down seems to get worse as people age, which logically is the opposite of what I would expect. As we get older, we have more experiences, we take on more information. I enjoy learning new things, and take pride in living a life of constant learning. I've also tried to be comfortable with what I don't know, in no small part because my step-father insisted that he knew everything, and I resented that. I do my best to try and see the world through a lens of discovery and wonder, because it still surprises me.

I'm starting to feel though that I am not typical. I mean, I know I'm not neurotypical, but again, it seems like this is the way we should operate as we get older. But I look at how Boomers have tended to lean significantly conservative, and that surprises me. When I say "conservative," I'm not really referring to a cohesive ideology as I am a tendency to get stuck in a certain way of thinking. It would seem to me that, at that age, they would all be more open to literally everything that isn't comfortable. They have more data.

When I am talking about an ideology, in the political sense, yes, I'm talking about the belief that immigrants are bad, people of other religions are bad, queer people are bad, people of color are bad, and all of those groups collectively threaten their way of life. When thinking critically, of course we can quantify why none of that is true, and when you remove the critical thinking, you're usually only left with some combination of hate and mistrust.

The hate and mistrust is just as surprising as the inelastic mindset. I can't imagine being in my 70's or later spending any energy on hating anyone. I can't do it now, I certainly don't want to when I have less time left!

Most of these areas of conservatism seem to be about cultural issues. I've always considered myself as politically moderate, which is to say skeptical of both parties, and not at all interested in the cultural stuff because it does not affect me, and I'm not interested in negatively affecting anyone in those marginalized groups. It's bizarre to me that such a sentiment is considered "liberal." If caring about other people is liberal, I'd love to readjust that expectation to making it about being human.

In any case, I want to continue changing my mind. But I can only see one logical conclusion in that process... I will continue to want to care about people and advocate that they live free of the marginalization that is the focus of half of Americans now. Because so far, new information only confirms that marginalizing groups of people does not benefit me, and throughout human history it has not improved our outcomes. It has, objectively, caused only worse outcomes.

Sunday morning, as I was loading up stuff for our water park visit, I noticed a mess of black rubber bits behind the car. I quickly realized that they were from the rubber seal on the bottom of garage door. Something tried to eat its way out of the garage and failed. I've gotta see if I can find a replacement before the next hurricane, because we've never had any water intrusion on those doors, and I don't want to start now.

On Monday, something started to stink in the garage. It can get to be a hundred degrees in there when the morning sun is pounding on those doors. I just assumed that it was something in the garbage. Generally we don't produce enough garbage to be a problem, but now and then something makes it out there. I didn't think much of it, until Diana pointed out that we had not put anything in there yet for the week. We assumed that whatever ate the garage door died somewhere in the garage. If only it were that easy.

When Diana and I went out for lunch on Tuesday, I caught a whiff of the stink in a parking lot. I was pretty convinced at that point that the dead thing was in the car. Leaving it outside of the garage confirmed this. Gross. On the plus side, there isn't much under the hood of a Model Y. Once you take off the frunk liner, you'll see the radiator mounted diagonally under it, the heat pump and AC bits, the 12V battery, and if you have a dual motor, the front electric motor. There isn't much to the inside of an EV. I spent a good hour poking around, but couldn't find the dead thing. The one spot I couldn't easily see was on top of the scrape plate underneath, but removing some of those annoying plastic push pins under the bumper and a few bolts, I could get it loose enough to see all of it. Nothing there.

Two days went by, with the car in the driveway. I pulled out the stuff again today, and I could tell by the intensity of the smell that it was on the driver's side. Then, I just happened to notice some gray fur in a small gap between the frame, the washer fluid tank and a wire harness. I can't believe that I missed it after looking as much as I did. Worse yet, I know the thing was inches from my nose. No wonder I felt sick after looking the other day.

I couldn't easily remove the tank without removing the wiper arms and motor, and the arms annoyingly require a special tool, per the service manual. That's disappointing considering how easy everything else is to get to. Not that I'd try to service an EV, because the electrical bits scare me, but it's a relatively simple machine otherwise. What I could do is remove the feeding part of the tank, and then removing a screw and a nut, I could tilt the tank up enough to grab the rat with tongs. Well, I could with help.

To get leverage, I climbed in the compartment, standing on the aluminum cross-member so I could pull up on the tank in the space I had. Diana and her smaller hands, equipped with a nose plug and my favorite grilling tongs, reached in there and grabbed the bugger. It was in bad shape already, with much of the head and chest rotting. The tail and rest of its skin was still very whole, so I imagine it would have taken weeks for it to rot into oblivion. Gross. And no, I didn't take a photo of it. It's in my front lawn for the scavengers if you wanna go look.

I sprayed some bleach in there and have left it open to air out for awhile. On the plus side, it was never in a place that brought the smell inside, and it's a well-sealed cabin. Diana's newer model has the bioweapon defense mode with the gigantic filter, but even this one has a solid filtering mechanism, and the intake is away from where the critter was. Hopefully it dissipates enough to leave it in the garage tonight.

For the most part, the US, and much of the world, has enjoyed a reasonable amount of economic stability since the pandemic. Unemployment has been low, inflation has been in retreat, the markets have been very robust. Sure, there have been some stubborn things like certain commodities, while other things like gas have technically been below the rate of inflation. But despite the rhetoric of the last election cycle, the economy was enjoying a net positive direction.

Then we elected a petty felon into the White House that has in just a few short weeks destabilized everything.

The retirement accounts that I've worked so hard to build up have lost 12%. If a recovery doesn't happen of the same scope, I can expect to wait two more years before quasi-retiring. With all of the chaos, many companies and individual consumers have pulled back to a place of caution. We may end up in a recession that is completely self-inflicted. Anyone really willing to think things through in November said to expect this, but even I figured the machines would keep running and mostly we'd be dealing with civil rights problems.

And for what? Tariffs are not a tax on other countries, the buyers of their products pay for that. Coupled with third grade supply and demand understanding, it should be pretty obvious how this doesn't benefit anyone. Yet the MAGA cult is insisting everything is fine, despite being the very people who believed that the economy sucked. Now that it's actually in danger, they're convinced it's not.

If people start watering plants with Gatorade, I'm out. (Movie nerds get this.)

The housing crash in 2008 hosed me pretty bad, because that was the only significant asset that I had. The win was that I had time to regroup and be a little more responsible with my finances. But setting myself up for a happier third act requires housing values to stay where they are, reasonable inflation and a market that consistently can return 6% or more annually. Housing demand isn't softening, so hopefully that hangs on, but the markets are scary and tariffs will absolutely drive up inflation. I'm a middle-class guy doing all of the right things and playing the game, so I imagine the future looks even scarier for people who are not as well off. They deserve the chaos even less.

The thing that I tend to think about on Earth Day every year is the transition to sustainable energy and transportation. That starts with the electrification of cars. When we started with a Nissan Leaf in 2014, even with the limited range it was pretty obvious that it was workable. The next year we got the Model S, and began driving all over the east coast in a fully electric car. While the cost was absurd, it did prove that the technology existed even then for a long-range, fully electric car. For nearly a decade now, we've been without gasoline. I can't imagine ever going back. It's extraordinary to have home be your "gas station."

Back then, only a fraction of a percent of cars sold in the US, and indeed the world, were EV's. Today, it's globally expected to be nearly 1 in 5, and here in the US, 1 in 10. In Norway, an enormous country that gets very cold, they're nearly at 90% electric for new cars. What makes it especially great is that there are so many options now, and nearly all can use the nearly ubiquitous Supercharger network. I still maintain that public charging isn't that important, but it seems to be the biggest hangup that non-EV owners have. (We haven't used public charging in about two years.) There are still anecdotes people put up about why they "can't" go electric, but other than the cost, which still starts in the low $40k range, I don't think that most of the reasons are particularly valid. I mean, there are Uber drivers putting 100k miles on EV's per year now.

The cost difference is interesting, because the cost to drive is less than a third than if we were buying gas. Diana has driven about 14,000 miles in the last year, using about $600 in electricity (some of which generated by our solar plant). Assuming a gas version of her car could get 25 mpg, and gas averaged $3.20 per gallon, the gas cost would have been about $1,800. So even assuming our entire draw was from the grid, even though it's more like 45%, over five years the fuel cost savings is $6,000. Maintenance cost is less too, with no oil to change, and brakes that effectively never need to be replaced.

I wish the transition was going faster, but Norway shows that it's largely a matter of will. It is our future, and not a question of if, only when.

Oh, and our solar has produced nearly $14,000 in electricity in seven years. That puts us on schedule for a 10-year return on investment.

The HHS secretary, RFK Jr., doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to, well, probably anything, which is par for the course for Trump's cabinet. But he's really talking out of his ass when it comes to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). That's personal, for obvious reasons. Simon was diagnosed at 3, I was diagnosed in midlife. It has not "destroyed families" or any other such nonsense. Has it made life more challenging? In some respects, yes, but this is less about the condition than it is the world at large.

So here are some truths to share.

• Vaccines don't cause autism. Same with "toxins," which is a meaningless word used by people who don't understand middle school science. They are willingly ignorant. This has been researched at scale for years.
• Autism is not the character in Rain Man. It can be, but that's a caricature and stereotype. Because...
• The DSM refers to autism as a "spectrum disorder," which is a way of saying that the scope and effects vary wildly from one person to the next. It says that "impairment" is a requirement of diagnosis, but it's more of a "neuro-type."
• If you know someone with autism, you know one person with autism. While there are some commonalities between any two people, the next two may be completely different.
• Autism diagnoses are increasing because we're looking for it. No one was looking for it when I was a kid, thus the midlife diagnosis. It's particularly encouraging that minorities and the poor are getting more access to expertise.
• And because it's so broadly defined and underdiagnosed, the statistics around it are borderline useless. For example, government data just a few years ago suggests that only 5% of autistic adults lived independently. This is of course not true... most are just not diagnosed.
• Autism rarely is a thing by itself. It is often found along side of ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, etc.
• While difficulty with social interaction is common, I would argue that often the problem isn't autistic wiring, it's the arbitrary social contracts we have to navigate.
• ASD is described as a developmental disorder, and this is why some people struggle to communicate or reach certain milestones. This does not mean that they are unintelligent, it means that their functional wiring is different.
• I believe that while a "disorder" can impair a person's ability to function in society, again, like the social contracts, sometimes it's just that the world's default mode doesn't accommodate the differences. Nowhere is this more true than in school.
• To expand on that, I don't like to consider it a disorder for me, because despite the challenges, it stands to reason that it has been an asset in other ways.
• Online communities of autistic people appear to me to be incredibly dysfunctional, which kinda makes sense given the differences. There are a varying opinions about whether or not this is something we should consider a part of our identity. And don't even get started on the nomenclature itself.
• Environmental conditions can be difficult for some, but not everyone. Sound, light, smells, food, surface textures... these can all cause discomfort.
• People will talk a lot about coping mechanisms, which are skills that make it possible to exist in a world not optimized for us. It doesn't mean that the person is any more comfortable in the situation.
• Do not ever use the terms "high functioning." That is not a diagnosis. It is not in the DSM. It's a term invented mostly by affluent white people who want to trivialize the diagnoses of their children, or worse, throw shade at the kids who really struggle. I equate this to saying something racist. Close second is using the term "normal."

I'm sure there are other things, and I don't want to pretend that I'm a spokesperson for ASD. Yes, there are people like those you see in these (borderline exploitive) reality TV shows that can't be very independent. That's why it's weird to lump everyone together in one category. I suspect that if you screened the entire population, the diagnosis rate would be two or three times higher.

With that said, I've kind of had a mental list of things that, in retrospect, make it more obvious to me that I would have been diagnosed as a child if anyone was looking for it.

• I apparently would not walk in sand as a very young child, something my mother seemed to hold against me well into adulthood. That's a texture thing. Simon struggled with it at first, too. Now we both enjoy getting beat up by the ocean waves.
• I am to this day a very picky eater. It's part of the reason that I don't force the issue with Simon, who frankly is more willing to eat certain vegetables than I am. In adulthood, I have been able to lean into some kinds of Asian fusion and Indian food, fortunately. I love curry.
• I still remember the most epic meltdown ever that I had in fifth grade. The details are unimportant, and I remember a lot of things when I was young, but the feelings around that were so strong that they stuck with me.
• I always struggled socially in school, and it only got a little better in college. I also tended to gravitate toward adults, and I'm grateful for those who indulged my social efforts. I'm convinced that they changed the outcome of my life. It's why I'm hostile toward adults who won't give Simon the time of day.
• The cost of conforming to social norms is total exhaustion. Any time I've had to interview in person, the eye contact just kills me. And I think about the time that I went to every radio station in Cleveland, dropping off audition tapes looking for a job. On one hand, my lack of filter let me do that, but the actual interactions with receptionists and a few actual program directors was hard. I vividly remember sleeping for 12 hours that night.
• Indeed, I've talked about the speed of my mind, the thought spirals, and how it goes everywhere, all of the time. How do you escape your own mind?
• I need tactile feedback more than I realized. I used to do more harmful things like pick my toenails until they bled, made worse with #floridalife and no shoes or socks, but these days I find solace in the texture on my laptop, or pushing off the corner of my phone case with my thumb.
• My aversion to clubs and bars in my 20's is clearly my aversion to crowds. It's why I'm hesitant to go to shows and why I don't want to be at theme parks when they're extra crowded.
• I am very sensory averse in very specific ways. I remember feeling nauseous as a kid at the smell of bacon (another thing often dismissed by parents), and that's still a thing. Sometimes noisy environments for me feel like the audio equivalent of being in a room with strobe lights that never stop. In January I had to leave a restaurant.
• I'm insanely impatient with anything illogical. And let's face it, that's much of the world right now. It affects my relationship with my child, who does not optimize things the way that I do. It frustrates me at work with meetings and ceremony that have no demonstrable value. And of course, politics.
• I do find safety in routine, but struggle to find routine in things that would be beneficial, like exercise.
• At the same time, I also crave new experiences. Admittedly, this wasn't previously a thing. Moving to Seattle forced that function, now it's a constant. I need new music all of the time. I want to see more of the world. I got a couple of tattoos, and I'm open to more. I imagine this is the most anti-autistic thing about me, but point it out because it reinforces how difficult it is to stereotype.
• People have often said that I'm "direct" or "not afraid to offer an opinion," and I fully recognize that this is the lack of filter, or inability to catch certain social cues. It has certainly gotten me into trouble, but I'm OK with that.
• I have a lot of, uh, let's call them "quirks," when it comes to domestic habits. I'm lucky that Diana just kind of rolls with them, or perhaps contains rage over them.

There are a bunch of other things, but I'm not sure if I can attribute them to ASD or ADHD, or neither. My point is mostly that I'm reasonably self-aware, and that these are things that I'm sure some people, but not all, can relate to. It is materially who I am.

So when RFK says stupid shit like autism ruins families, and that autistic people will never pay taxes, have a job or go on a date, fuck RFK. Fuck him and his ignorant MAGA cult followers.

One of my college classmates unfriended me on Facebook, I imagine because they got tired of me calling out their dissemination of untrue things. It kind of bums me out, because this was a person that I respected in school. I tried to be respectful, though it's hard to reflect intent in text. I used to at least have spirited discussion with them, but I guess they had enough. Could be worse, I suppose. Some years ago one of my high school crushes I unfriended because she was super-crazy-racist. It shocks me to this day.

To be honest with myself, I wasn't going to change their mind on anything. They were already convinced that it was Ukraine's fault for being invaded. But the specific case involved a Fox talking head, talking about tariffs and how we were going to "win," despite nearly every reputable economist in the world explaining why this was bad. Just today, the Fed chair, arguably a top expert on macroeconomics, described the risk we're facing.

Truth is not that hard to find. Observable facts should be obvious enough. Evaluating the credibility of a source of information should also be straight forward. A nihilist with a podcast is not trustworthy the way a trained journalist is. More than anything though, expertise still matters. It's still a real thing. People say things like, "I did my research," but Googling results with your own confirmation bias is not research, it's parroting what you want to hear. Research for most people means gathering information from a number of sources, and leaning into the credibility and experience of experts. With kids dying of measles, in 2025, you can see that so-called "research" by some can have deadly consequences.

Mistrust of experts is bizarre. When I'm sick, I trust my doctor. If I need legal advice, I talk to a lawyer. If I need to fix my car, I take it in. As I've tried to learn new things, like lighting, I have leaned into people who have been doing it for years.

The source of the mistrust is hardly a mystery. The MAGA movement, which is undeniably fascist in nature, runs from the fascist playbook. Putting aside the victimhood and scapegoating for a moment, they do their best to sow mistrust in journalists and experts. If you don't believe them, then you have only the people attempting to consolidate power to trust. Convenient, right? I am amazed every single day that otherwise intelligent people buy into this. History is unambiguous about how that works.

It's possible that I am naive, but I can't imagine that this works out in the long run. Eventually, if you experience enough negative outcomes, how do you not lean back into expertise? Right now people are losing extraordinary amounts of wealth as the stock market craps out, and taxing liquor has never been well received either. Will inflation change minds? Given the volume of people who seem to think Ukraine is at fault for being invaded, I'm not sure. It's like some insane, political variant of Stockholm Syndrome.

If you're reading this and you are a person that rejects expertise, I encourage you to think that through.