deathmtn

Well, there’s never a good time for the Return of Wrist Pain, but it is here. There’s some programming stuff I wanted to do tonight, but I should probably not, for the sake of the rest of my career.

Maybe I should learn to code on a phone touchscreen.

The guy accidentally came up with a nice burn today: “Thanks for the joke.”

Today’s reason for quick Lord of the Rings ad-libbing during bedtime story: I forgot that Denethor burned himself alive.

12 pull-ups. Another day where I just could not fit in a full workout. Part of it is that I took two hours to assemble a kids' bike, and I didn't even get the front brake right.

But my excuse for why it took so long is that the fork got bent during shipping, so it didn't fit on the wheel. I kept thinking that maybe it was supposed to be shaped that way, and I was supposed to somehow take what seemed like — and, in fact, was — a permanent thing on the axle off. After a lot of supposing, I finally bent the fork so it was wide enough to put the wheel in.

Well, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.

An article comparing Trump's current campaign to McCain's.A lot of this is about polls, which I don't trust for reasons I've discussed probably way too much, but this bit of historical perspective is interesting:

While every campaign is different, it’s important to note the structural similarities between 2008 and 2020.

It was during this same week in 2008 that the once-vaunted Lehman Brothers collapsed. The pain of the Great Recession followed. Republicans were in power and got blamed, and McCain was criticized for how he didn’t project leadership and have a plan.

The economic collapse was very real in 2008 and not something McCain, then a senator, had much control over.

I’ve read around ten of the short stories in Kolyma Stories now, and they’re rather bleak, being tales based on the author’s experiences in the Gulag. But I just read one that is in a different format — it’s in the form of an official report — and it’s…actually a joke?!

It’s especially striking and relieving in the midst of a bunch of stories about starvation and freezing and people just calmly killing themselves. If all of those stories (which are good in their own right) were all just a setup for this joke, well-played, Shamalov!

One set of burpees, one set of 12 pull-ups. That’s all I could fit in. Today was a bit rough. I didn’t sleep right and had to nap a bit in the middle of the workday. Also real estate shit, and work meetings. Literally one hour of programming today.

A pandemic doom article.

And yet, a recent poll found that 57 percent of Republican voters and 33 percent of independents think the number of deaths is acceptable.

Of course.

Every time I email my real estate agent I regret it. Among other problems, everything is in one long paragraph WITH SUDDEN CAPITALIZATION and. haphazard? punctuation.

The first day of school went really well, actually. They are starting slow, with just a half day. Most of it was spent getting to know one another and the necessary evil of training on the Zoom UI. (After all the school has done to get ready for this, it feels cruel to bring up the many problems of Zoom.) The guy's focus was decent, though, like most kids, he has a lot of trouble with group chats with more than three people.

Some parents wanted more actual academics, but we liked the easing in. Also, I always think of the Finnish school system, in which kids don't learn to read until they're nine and yet get the best test scores in the world on some respected test or other, and I figure we'll be fine.

The informal "recess" after the video calls were over were the best, though. The guy met some of his classmates, befriended them, and played for hours. He has not played with a group in quite a while, and he does not get along with every random selection of kids. He said it was a "super fun" day.

36-minute run, 11 pull-ups.

Old man opinion: ice cream trucks are ripoff vehicles that exploit kids’ FOMO. What parent doesn’t want their kid the only one to not get a $3 ice cream?

In the future: me

There's a longer explanation that I should write, but I just realized that modulation and vibrato are the same thing.

10-4-4-4-4-11.