For a while my yard work has been my “one thing I do today to make the house better”, so it’s nice realizing that the kitchen – as the centralmost room, the last one unsorted – has been getting better as I gradually address things in the course of stuff and don’t cause new issues to arise
What was once the top roll of belly fat is now registering to me not as part of the belly, a fat storage organ, but as the abdomen, a set of muscles used for bending the torso, merely covered in a pad of fat.
Like I am right now about as thin as I was in the middle of 5th grade, by which time I was already conscious and forming memory, but maybe because the musculature wasn’t as developed I have no memory of this sense, it’s like I just discovered a new body part.
D&D alignment is famously dumb, to the point where in literal decades I’ve only ever heard it discussed to dump on it or joke about it, but designing esoteric cosmic alignment systems for RPGs is very fun in that it appeals to the nerd’s natural delight in taxonomy and mysticism. anyway my favourite one that I ever came up with, which I have yet to deploy in a finished work but still want to, is an alignment trinity that goes like this:
ROCK: associated with moralistic heroes and heroism, personal virtue, romanticism, himbos, babyface wrestlers, beach bodies, unarmed combat or purely cosmetic weapons, doing the simplest or most ethical thing without regard for the consequences, hot-blooded shonen protagonists who are 14, even numbers, the colours red and green
SCISSORS: associated with “bad guys”, cunning, pragmatic and ruthless self-interest, heel wrestlers, “edginess”/antiheroics, lethal weapons (especially blades and guns), surprise attacks, lies and betrayal, decisive lateral solutions, the ends justifying the means, odd numbers, the colours black and blue
PAPER: associated with bureaucrats and institutions, “The Man”, proceduralism for its own sake, dense codes of law, deciding what to do on the basis of abstract theory, Ayn Rand villains, inconvenient traditions, intellectualism and pseudointellectualism, co-optation by the establishment, art that only makes sense if you know art history, nonsense as distinct from lies, domestication of conflict, non-integers, the colours white and yellow
These form a kind of daoist element phase pattern where one is considered to “beat” the other and things transition according to that pattern, in the expected way.
This hits what I think is a sweet spot for design, where it feels plausibly transcendental in the sense that you can kind of let your eyes unfocus and genuinely imagine that these categories embody deep wisdom about the nature of the world, and it’s elegant in that the aesthetics line up with the names of the categories in both metaphorical and literal ways, but it’s also just visibly incredibly stupid and a joke, so you can enter into a superposition of taking it seriously within the narrative while considering it stupid and deflating.
Not to be all “oh now that I’m in my 40s I’ve found that’s when life begins”, that does seem to be the age people start getting purchase on the world.
Because that’s when their parents die. Remember writers scoffing at rich people asking indulgence for someone who’s “just a kid” who is in fact in his late 30s? Thats because among scenes that work less by income than (inherited) wealth, someone is not to be taken seriously as an autonomous actor in the world until he is the eldest of his line.
Anyway, sorting that smashed-up wood took a while so that was most of today’s yard work. Smashed 2 piles of medium branches and one of light, which produced 2 trash cans of twigs, 1 pile of medium, 1 of light, 1 of short-but-too-thick-to-snap, and a handful of almost wrist-thick ones to chop up with the lopper.
So, tomorrow I’ll thresh those, I think there might even be a third round after.
Japanese cuisine being 70% “what’s something you can add a bit of to rice” makes it pretty good for solo cooking, with my “fuzzy logic” ricemaker I just pour in and hit start, and then you can explore a variety of mix-ins or even prepare a fresh protein/flavor component pretty quickly and simply
Just everything I’ve done with Karafuto so far, all the furniture and such, is working out so well it’s really giving me confidence re: executing the rest of my plans
Where at the very depth of winter I have to get out by 4 to get at least an hour of waning sunlight for yard work, by now I can’t get out until 4 when the day’s rain has passed.
90s “electronica” was just a second attempt to adapt gay dance club music to the albums-and-radio-singles recording industry structure after “disco” failed, huh?
ALT
