Always Avoid Alliteration

The Onion Is Starting to Feel Alive Again

2026-07-13T04:04:46.337-04:00

The Onion's annual revenue reportedly grew 300% in 2025 according to Fast Company. After relaunching its print newspaper as a paid subscription, it now has 65,000 print subscribers spread across all 50 states and 50 countries. By some estimates, that makes The Onion the 12th-largest newspaper in the United States; larger than The Boston Globe.

Over the past year The Onion has managed to put out various forms of multi-media including a Jeffrey Epstein mockumentary, a 26 minute 4th of July mockumentary entitled America: Birth of a Nation that ends as a meta-mockumentary about Ken Burns documentaries, and launched Encircled; a spoof of Jubilee’s “one person versus twenty opponents” debate series Surrounded. It has even created an actual advertising agency under The Onion umbrella. America’s Finest Creative Agency now offers copywriting, campaign strategy, stunt marketing, and branded video services to companies willing to get weird.

They have also gotten much better at resurfacing older projects that, frankly, I think slipped under a lot of people’s radar the first time around. Content such as A Very Fatal Murder, which The Onion recently began uploading episode by episode to YouTube:

The most ambitious part of this expansion is, of course, InfoWars.

The Onion has spent more than a year attempting to acquire the assets of Alex Jones’s conspiracy empire with the support of the Sandy Hook families. The legal fight over the original InfoWars brand, studio, and domain remains unresolved, but The Onion finally stopped waiting and launched its own version on July 2. For now, the project lives at TheOnion.info rather than InfoWars.com, with Tim Heidecker serving as creative director and releasing weekly episodes. The launch also coincided with a planned $100,000 payment to the Sandy Hook families from merchandise revenue.

Heidecker has already managed to turn his On Cinema At The Cinema series into a whole universe, complete with a website that's starting to look like its own streaming platform called the HEI Network. If he can do the same thing with the InfoWars brand, the sky is the limit. His stated ambition for InfoWars is similarly expansive to On Cinema: after the immediate novelty of parodying Alex Jones wears off, he wants it to become a broader home for original comedy.

The immediate challenge is that Alex Jones may be the most parody-resistant person alive. Never mind the litany of conspiracy theories, Jones’s new platform is running AI advertisements that appropriate trademarked characters such as Darth Vader and celebrity likenesses such as Clint Eastwood to sell his products:

While watching Heidecker step inside the InfoWars machinery, I keep thinking about the warning at the center of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night: that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” My hope is that the project really does eventually grows beyond parodying Jones while avoiding the trap of just becoming Alex Jones in the same way that a majority of conservatives actually believed Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report “only pretends to be joking” and “genuinely meant what he said.” There are limits to how long even the best impression of Jones can remain interesting, and the greater opportunity is to take a media machine built to manufacture fear and use it to create something genuine.

What I've Read Halfway into 2026

2026-07-01T00:19:35.519-04:00

Aberrations in the Heartland of The Real - Wendy Painting

This is probably one one the most fascinating and gripping books I’ve read in a while. Wendy Painting wrote this book after meticulously researching the thousands of documents that Timothy McVeigh’s defense team donated to a university library. What she puts together is a narrative of the Oklahoma City Bombing that is as close to the truth as we will probably ever get; it differentiates significantly from the narrative that the prosecution, defense, and media all presented.

What follows is a retracing of McVeigh’s movements in the years up to the bombing and written correspondences between McVeigh, his family, and subsequently... his defense team. While never presenting a definite statement on how the Oklahoma City Bombing came to be, Painting establishes that the narratives presented by the federal government and McVeigh were a convenient compromise for both parties. The reality appears closer to this: Timothy McVeigh spent years moving through white supremacist circles that were saturated with federal informants from multiple agencies, and possibly at least one foreign intelligence asset. Because those agencies often failed to communicate internally, let alone with one another, the record becomes so muddled that it is difficult to separate the role fringe groups played in the Oklahoma City bombing plot from the role, negligence, or interference of the federal government itself. The book reads almost as if the US Federal Government inadvertently found a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem in 1994.

Amid the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, I was struck by the overlap between the tactics, failures, and institutional reflexes that appear in both the Epstein case and the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. In each case, federal agencies that are supposed to be among the most meticulous record-keeping and intelligence-gathering institutions in the world somehow always conveniently lost, destroyed, withheld, or mishandled key evidence at the exact moments when that evidence mattered most.

That pattern is what makes the ending of Aberration in the Heartland of the Real so unsettling. Painting closes by pointing to the case of Kenneth Trentadue, a federal inmate who died in August 1995 at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City. His death was officially ruled a suicide by hanging, but the condition of his body, the government’s handling of the scene, and the later fight over records have kept the case alive for decades.The connection to the Oklahoma City bombing is the allegation advanced by Trentadue’s brother, Jesse Trentadue: that Kenneth may have been mistaken by federal authorities for Richard Lee Guthrie, a suspected co-conspirator in the bombing who also died in federal custody, also allegedly from suicide by hanging.

The Allagash Abductions: Undeniable Evidence of Alien Intervention - Raymond E Fowler

I decided to pick up this book after finishing Jesus Before The Gospels This book is awful. Not “I disagree with the conclusion” awful; structurally and evidentially, just outright bad. The entire abduction story (which has been retold time and time again on the History Channel and Sci Fi Network) hinges on memories recovered under hypnosis. Memory recall under hypnosis is not a thing. “Recovered memories” under hypnosis aren’t pristine recollections (no memories are), they’re reconstructed narratives, shaped in real time by suggestion, expectation, and leading questions all given by the hypnotist. It's emotional abuse, and in this book, I’d argue it’s torture.

Bluntly: the guys in this book were not “confirmed abductees,” they were participants in a process that’s extremely good at generating vivid, emotionally convincing false memories. Whether you want to call that manipulation, suggestion, or outright abuse, the book never earns the confidence it demands from the reader. The author was an established “UFO researcher” that needed another notch in his belt and book to publish.

It blows my mind in a frustrating way how many TV show episodes were made in the 90s based on the claims made in this book. Once you read it, it’s horseshit. Inconsistencies in narratives from the separate men are never investigated, instead it’s mostly transcripts of hypnotic sessions where the hypnotist badgers and bullies the men to recall traumatic experiences they didn’t have. The only person who would have use for this book is a sadistic hypnotist.

I read this book before the preceding one in the list as I had always known this book was the primary source on the Allagash Abductions, but I was never able to find a copy. I actually needed to buy a new copy from the publisher to get my hands on it. I’m not stuck with a book that I want to throw out, but have been holding onto because it’s so hard to find.

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens - Susan Clancy

This is a book Ehrman mentions by name in Jesus Before The Gospels. Clancy’s core argument is straightforward: people who believe they were abducted by aliens generally aren’t lying or delusional in the way skeptics assume; they’re working from memories that feel completely real, but were constructed through a mix of sleep paralysis, cultural narratives, suggestion, and crucially, techniques like hypnosis.

My only knock on this book is that it reads like pop psychology and has the trapping of other books I’ve criticized in that genre for treating one social psychology study as if it represents anything at all statistically meaningful; especially when the studies are conducted by the author themself.

Some Girls: My Life in a Harem - Jillian Lauren

I first heard about this book after the news broke that the wife of the bassist from Weezer was shot after firing a handgun at police officers outside her home in LA. He’s the author of this book. That alone sets expectations for something chaotic, revealing… maybe even psychologically interesting?

It mostly isn’t any of these things.

Instead, it hovers in this middle space where things happen, but they’re rarely unpacked. There are flashes where Lauren gets close; moments of insecurity, competition between women, the weird emotional economy of being “chosen”, but she doesn’t push hard enough on them. It feels like she’s reporting from the inside without fully examining what being inside actually did to her.

At a surface level, the book delivers exactly what it promises: Lauren’s time as part of the Prince of Brunei’s rotating harem. There’s money, excess, travel, and the kind of detached luxury that borders on parody. The Prince flies women in from around the world, spends obscene amounts of money, and intermittently sleeps with some of them. That’s the engine of the book.

For example, one thing the book skirts around, and arguably its biggest missed opportunity, is how Lauren’s own history shapes her decision to enter and remain in that environment. She alludes to past trauma, but never fully interrogates how that intersects with the dynamics of the harem itself.I think that absence matters, because without it, the experience risks being framed as purely circumstantial or opportunistic, rather than something psychologically patterned. The book gets close to that question, but almost in what feels like a non-conscious way, pulls back before it has to answer it.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda - Philip Gourevitch

This book is about the Rwandan Genocide. Despite what I was taught growing up, I had no idea that UN intervention in Rwanda didn’t stop the genocide at all, but that they managed to assist it through complete incompetence. I had no idea that the year given in history books, isn’t when the systematic killing of people stopped, its the year that the Rwandan government was overthrown, therefore the only thing that stopped was that the wanton state-sponsored killing continued, it just ceased being state-sponsored.

This book will make you want to kill yourself.

Searching for The Sound - Phil Lesh

After reading the last book about Rwanda I decided that I needed something lighter. I had recently seen the son of of the bass player Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead put on a free show in the panhandle in San Francisco. I knew that Phil Lesh wrote an autobiography and so I queued up this book next before I was even done with Gourevitch’s book.

It turns out that Lesh was a classically trained musician before he was asked to join the Grateful Dead. That he is able and willing to talk about the structure of music, and early in the book, is surprising, interesting, and refreshing even for musicians’ autobiographies. His stark and vivid recollections of specific early performances is impressive. I wish that there was more of this from later shows, but I think that reflects the relentless touring the band did at the time to support the industry they had built under themselves, pushing themselves to the point of exhaustion. I always got the impression that the band found the touring energizing in a way that other bands didn’t; it makes more sense that’s not the case in retrospect.

Deal - Bill Kreutzmann

After finishing Lesh’s book I was hungry for more, and this was the next band autobiography I jumped into, one from one of the drummers of the Grateful Dead. I don’t think it’s as well written as Lesh’s book, but it’s still entertaining nonetheless. It’s interesting the specific things that Lesh does not mention that Kreutzman does: Lesh never mentions the attempt to kick Weir and Pigpen out of the band, Kreuzman mentions that Lesh had led the charge here. In his book, Lesh does mention that he was roughed up by Kreutzmann at least once before. I was kind of surprised by this because in most photos and videos Kreutzmann kinda just looks like a dad that’s a drummer.

Turns out Kreutzmann is true to his profession as a rock drummer: a little wild, and was the guy in the band that ended up being the one to rough up promoters who would try to stiff them on the road when management didn’t step up. This book has a lot of those “rock and roll autobiography” stories that you’d probably expect or maybe hope to find in a book like this.

I was surprised at Kreutzmann’s frankness and directness about certain things; he didn’t want Micky Heart, the other drummer to return to the band after a hiatus. Or that he really didn’t like the Weir/Barlow songs and much preferred the Garcia/Hunter songs.

Deep Work: rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport

Deep Work annoyed me. As someone who has been working since he was 16, there was nothing new here for me to learn. I thought this book was going to be a thought provoking analysis on labor. It’s not. Newport writes as if the main obstacle to meaningful concentration is personal weakness: too much email, too much social media, too little being locked-in. But for a lot of people, the real obstacle is that their job is structurally built around interruption.

If your day is ruled by tasks, chats, hand-offs, other people’s timelines, and the constant need to look responsive; that person does not have a ‘monastery’ problem, they have a class and labor problem. The book keeps treating fragmented work like a bad habit when, for a huge chunk of workers, it is the job and they do not have autonomy over their schedule in the way Newport suggests. Albeit about 100 pages in the author acknowledges this briefly, the book never fully grapples with this reality.

The advice mostly is tailored for the people who need it least: professors, writers, founders, senior technical people, and anyone with enough autonomy to carve out long, protected blocks of time and then call it “virtue”. Frankly, I’m of the mind that anyone who would benefit from the book would end up utilizing their time in a way that would make the world a worse place for other people.

Deep Work flatters the already empowered by telling them their protected working conditions are evidence of superior values, while offering everyone else a kind of aspirational guilt. Read it and you come away feeling like focus is a character test, when in reality it is often a status marker. As universal advice, this book is self-congratulatory, and way less honest about modern work than it thinks it is. This is the trashy self-help book that people think of when they think of trashy self-help books. This book went into the recycle bin.

Others Unknown - Stephen Jones

Stephen Jones was Timothy McVeigh’s lead court appointed attorney during the Oklahoma City Trial Bombings. I mean it when I saw that Aberrations in the Heartland of The Real is one of the most fascinating and interesting books that I’ve read in a while. This is really just an opportunity for me to spend more time talking about that book instead. About 30 pages in, Jones lets us know that attorney-client privilege still exists and that he’s not going to tell us anything that McVeigh has said to him. He could have done this in the intro, instead leading up to that information, a significant amount of the book telling us a bunch of boomer stories about the attorneys in his family before him.

As a result, Painting’s book is better because it utilizes this book as a primary source to show a broader picture Anything important in this book is going to be cited in Painting’s book and crucially analyzed from every perspective imaginable. As far as how Jone’s inside perspective goes, despite his crucial position in the case, really isn’t the best narrator. True to his profession, throughout the book he tries to poke holes in the prosecution’s case even when he probably doesn’t need to for our sake, or in places where his argument seems flimsy.

The title comes the federal grand jury indictment of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. In Count One, the indictment charged that McVeigh and Nichols “conspire[d]… together and with others unknown to the Grand Jury” to use a truck bomb against the Murrah Federal Building. Ultimately, Jones believes McVeigh was involved, but he was not the mastermind. Jones says McVeigh exaggerated his own role to protect others and explicitly says he is not claiming McVeigh was innocent, but that McVeigh’s self-contained confession story is false or incomplete.

The Identity Trap - Yascha Mounk

The Identity Trap met me where I’ve been at with intersectionality for a long time, which is to say: I understand the basic idea, but I have never fully trusted the way it gets implemented in the real word. My first exposure to the concept was at UMass in a conversation where a Black woman used the concept less as a tool for understanding other people and more as a way to position herself above the room; privilege as a pissing context. I do not remember the exact topic, and honestly I do not think the topic mattered as much as the power move itself. What stuck with me from that experience was the implication that empathy had hard racial limits, and the idea that you can't fundamentally have empathy for another person because of their race. The other thing I later learned that switched something in my brain was that this person came from a very wealthy family. She grew up with horses in a wealthy Eastern Massachusetts town, but it was important in that moment for her to identify as being more oppressed than anyone else in the room. I appreciated that I found a book that would explore these paradigms with me from a liberal point-of-view and not some shit-head American conservative Charlie Kirk-esque point-of-view.

in American public discourse, intersectionality often talks about every form of power except class. When class is discussed, it's done in a vague decorative way, as if money, family background, institutional access, and social hierarchy are secondary details rather than central facts of life. This is just me still yapping by the way. Mounk's argument is that the “identity synthesis” as he calls it, undermines the liberal tools and ideas that made real pluralism possible in the first place. He argues that the framework built around the identity synthesis can become a moral shortcut that is just as discriminatory as the systems it is trying to replace. It flattens people into categories, ignores the actual distribution of power in the room, and asks working and middle-class people to defer to people who may be more protected, more connected, or more institutionally fluent than they are; while the shaming those social class while patting the upper class on the back. That is the personal nerve The Identity Trap hit for me anyways.

With all that said, Mounk’s book is not primarily about class, and honestly I wish it was more interested in that relm. His argument is not that racism or sexism are fake, or that America already achieved some colorblind liberal paradise. The argument is that a this style of identity politics has become powerful precisely because it sounds morally serious while encouraging people to use racist group identity as the deepest truth about any person in every situation.

Mounk is good at explaining how ideas that may begin as subtle academic claims become crude social rules once they enter institutions. I 100% agree with this claim. A theory that says identity shapes experience becomes, in practice, “stay in your lane.” A claim that universalism has often been applied hypocritically becomes, in practice, suspicion of universalism itself. A desire to correct exclusion becomes, in practice, a new hierarchy of who is allowed to speak, who must apologize, and who is presumed to understand the world correctly.

Phone Losers of America - Brad Carter

Phone Losers of America is a collection of stories documenting the twenty-year (at the time) history of the Phone Losers of America. Brad Carter, co-founder of the group, is the sole constant of the group over the years. PLA originally started out as a BBS zine that Carter write for and edited, today it mostly exists as a prank call community. Chapters of the book are outlined here, with links to the actual content in question that is being covered. As a result I would recommend reading through the companion first, and then read the book if you still find it compelling.

What I've Read in The Second Half of 2025

2026-01-02T00:32:00.000-05:00

Part one can be found here.

The Terminator - Randall Frakes & Bill Wisher

I heard online multiple times that the novelization of the first Terminator film was very good and I got around to reading it this year. Back in the day before home video was widespread, it was common for novelizations of films to exist. I was hoping to find some more insight into the backstory of the Terminator films, specifically around the creation of Skynet, but there’s not much here other than action scenes. The book is well written, however reading it makes you realize how well certain scenes in the film ended up being shot and that it’s the camera-work that makes a lot of these scenes more than anything else.

Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot else to say. The majority of differences between the book and the film likely would only be interesting to super fans of the franchise. The book does include a scene where Cyberdyne is founded after two engineers discover a chip they’ve never seen before after the final showdown where the Terminator is destroyed. The book then goes on to suggest that time is cyclical as a way to build in this time travel paradox into the story.

The Prisoner in His Palace - Will Bardenwerper

This book explores how Saddam Hussein, very likely a malignant narcissist, managed to charm and befriend the young American soldiers guarding him in the days leading up to his execution. If you lived through the Trump presidency, the mechanics of this kind of narcissist might not feel like new information. However, the book finds its footing when it examines the deep failures of the process of policing Saddam.

Even though Saddam arguably deserved his fate, Bardenwerper highlights how far the proceedings fell short of a fair trial. The most haunting (interesting?) aspect of the book is the psychological toll on the guards. Unsurprisingly, the Army took zero precautions to prevent these soldiers from bonding with their prisoner, leaving them to deal with the trauma of watching a man they had grown to like be handed over to a "two-bit operation" execution. While the book skips the specifics of how the execution video was leaked, it vividly captures the chaotic, unprofessional atmosphere of Saddam's final days.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell

In this collection of connected essays, Thomas Sowell presents a probably controversial thesis regarding the roots of cultural disparities in America. His central argument is that the behavioral patterns often associated with the "urban ghetto", what he terms "Black Redneck" culture, actually originated with the "cracker" redneck culture of Scots and Northern British immigrants in the American South. He argues that this culture was adopted by enslaved people and later carried to Northern cities, where he claims it was preserved and even encouraged by "whitelLiberals" as a legitimate form of authentic identity, and then descends into the consequences of this world view of seeing problems of race in what he sees as problems of culture.

Beyond his thesis on "redneck" culture, Sowell spends a significant portion of the book on "middleman minorities" - groups like the Jews in Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Lebanese in West Africa. He observes that these "merchant peoples" often face identical patterns of resentment and violence across different centuries and continents. His argument is that their success isn't based on privilege but on specific cultural traits: high literacy, frugal living, and community cohesion that allow them to thrive in hostile environments.

The final section shifts to the history of black American education, specifically focusing on the success of schools like Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sowell uses these historical case studies to argue that high-performing black schools existed long before integration or modern welfare programs and that the decline in these standards was caused by the "redneck" culture he described earlier becoming the dominant social norm, displacing the older, more disciplined educational traditions.

While the book has absolutely challenged the ways I’ve thought about the world, Sowell takes a lot of liberties with the sources he uses and claims he makes. At one point he states as a fact that fact that only black people play bridge, and this comes from British aristocracy. I’m not black, and all my grandparents played bridge, so I’m not sure where that comes from... At handfuls of times I looked up the sources Sowell referenced only to see that he completely misrepresented what the author said or just cherry picked his information. So while his ideas sound interesting, I’m not really sure how grounded in reality they might be.

Jesus Before the Gospels - Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman is a secular New Testament scholar, in this books he focuses on the Historical Jesus from the perspective of the social memory and context of the people who told his stories after his death. Ehrman explores the roughly thirty-to-sixty-year gap between Jesus' death and the writing of the first Gospels, investigating how oral traditions functioned in a world without written records or mass literacy. Rather than simply debunking myths, he uses cognitive psychology and studies on memory to explain how stories naturally evolve, sharpen, or distort as they are passed from person to person.

Ehrman shows how the Gospels aren't verbatim transcripts, but rather reflections of what the early Christian communities remembered and needed to believe about Jesus decades later. For example, Ehrman points out that given Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and were almost certainly illiterate, use of pivotal words with double meanings in Greek (which the Gospels were written in) show us that these particular entries in the Gospels almost certainly didn’t happen - they’re absolutely metaphorical stories.

Ehrman ends the book by saying that the gospels are no more a historical document than a painting is. It’s not the painting’s job to be a perfect, photorealistic reproduction of a moment in time. Instead, a painting is an interpretation designed to capture the essence, the emotion, and the significance of the subject through the artist’s specific lens. In this sense, the Gospel writers were not acting as objective reporters, but as "artists" who shaped their narratives to address the specific needs and theological questions of their own communities. This book is absolutely fascinating on one of my favorites of 2025.

9 ½ Years Behind The Green Door - Simone Corday

I go to a lot of shows at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. On the corner a few building away there is a boarded up strip club that says Mitchell Brothers on it and has a large sign that says “Where The Wild Girls Are” that has a group of women posing together in colorful bodysuits. I think the sign is supposed to be a reference to the eponymous children's book? All in all it’s an odd building that does look to be in place in the Tenderloin. I wanted to know about the history about the building, which lead me to this book after a quick Google search.

The author of 9 ½ Years Behind The Green Door, Simone Corday, was a dancer at the club for almost a decade. The building in question is the O'Farrell Theatre, and the Mictchell Brothers who owned it have a bit of a history in the city as I learned; often banging heads with local politicians like Diane Feinstein who were trying to get rid of strip clubs in the city. The book title is a reference to an adult film the Mitchell Brothers produced before Simone started working for them.

The core of the book ends up being Corday detailing her long, tumultuous relationship with Art Mitchell, a narrative that often reads like a textbook on domestic abuse. Despite his behavior, Corday remains steadfast in her love for him to this day, offering a raw, sometimes frustrating look at the psychology of a survivor. Although, I don’t think she would describe it that way and might even get upset at that description? The memoir reaches its climax with the the 1991 murder of Art by his own brother and business partner, Jim. Jim Mitchell’s defense team successfully argued a "diminished capacity" plea, suggesting he only intended to intervene in his brother’s self-destruction rather than commit cold-blooded murder. Even though Corday presents compelling evidence that the shooting was absolutely premeditated, Jim was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, eventually serving a relatively short sentence before returning to the O'Farrell Theatre.

I think one of my favorite parts of the book is that Hunter S Thompson shows up in it as a character and becomes close friends with Corday. Out of everyone in the book, Thompson at times seems to be the most level headed and fair person. It looks like later editions advertise on the cover very heavily that Thompson is in this book as a means to get it to sell better. The last part worth mentioning is that Corday documents how the Tenderloin got progressivly more dangerous over time. I found it a little amusing how interactions she had on the street that were concerning for he by the late 80es, are now just typical and expected on O'Farrell & Larkin Street in 2025.

South End Syndicate - Anthony Arillotta

In 2003 a mob boss named Al Bruno was shot and killed outside Mount Carmel Church in Springfield Massachusetts. I was in middle school in Springfield at the time and it blew a lot of people’s minds that organized crime was a thing still. This book chronicles the history of the Genovese crime family in Springfield, Massachusetts from the 80s to about the 2000s when the Springfield Genovese crime family began to unravel.

One of the biggest complaints I saw about this book publicly is that the author is a snitch. He addresses this at the end of the book by basically saying there is no honor among thieves. In a sort of way, the omerta that mobsters took died with when protectionism was protection against the systemic racism Italian immigrants faced. I believe this creates a Catch-22 situation where we will never have first hand accounts of those times. It also means the people who complain about snitches in this situation are tools. A criminal is an untrustworthy person, that’s how it works.

There’s a lot of interesting contemporary Springfield history here. It’s a good book that kept me hooked and I read it in one day, staying up late to finish it. The author affirms, from his point of view, how the rumors that former Mayor Albano was connected to the mafia were true. He also calls out many locales in Sprignfield where certain events and crimes happened. If you’re from Springfield, it’s highly fascinating if you know the area well.

The forward to the book is written by a former Springfield police officer named Joe Bradly who reflects on an interaction he had with Al Bruno with what feels like nostalgia that ends with him eating at Buno’s restaurant for free for months. My grandfather always warned me that you don’t do any favors for anyone connected, and you don’t let them do any favors for you. Anyone with two cents knows that former officer’s story doesn’t end where he ended it in that intro. I left Springfield as soon as a could. This book doesn’t do the city any favors when it comes to Springfield’s reputation of being an absolute shithole.

Solaris - Stanisław Lem

I picked this up as a cheap science fiction paperback. The premise was really interesting: a sentient-like plant is being studied by scientists who just can’t understand it. I love the ideas like this that come up in cheap paperbacks like this book. Despite its short length, the book is a bit of a slog. It is an interesting book, and I liked it, but I didn’t like reading it. It is translated from French and at times the translation can feel disjointed. Lem spends a lot of time talking about the VERY specific ways in which the planet interacts with the humans studying it, but ultimately one of the messages of the books seems to be that what we are looking for out there in outer space is ourselves (think Star Trek where ever other race that is encountered is just other humanoids with shit slapped on their foreheads); that when we eventually do encounter something out there resembling what we consider sentience, we will fail to fathom it or know what to make of it. That is an interesting idea on its own, but it takes a lot of investment in this book into having to follow along about all the weird stuff this planet does that has no other pay off.

There’s other ideas in this book that are fascinating, but only the surface is scratched on: one thing that happens in the book is that the planet constructs other people based on the humans’ memories, and the idea of how we don’t remember people; we remember versions of them is explored. So is the idea of identity as a construct and loneliness on a cosmic scale. Like the issue of the planet, these ideas are left there to hang out in the air, with one of the lessons of this book being there’s not an answer for everything.

The Last Victim - Jason Moss

This is a book written by a college kid who started corresponding with serial killers in prison, most prominently John Wayne Gacy. The book is ok. The first 50 pages of the book are completely skippable, and are about the author himself. The book itself is not well written, there are jarring tone shifts where you can tell the psychologist co-author Jeffery Kotter took over. Overall the book would have been better if it was only transcripts of the letters and phone calls between the author and the killers that he corresponded with.

The author himself writes about women in a really jarring way, even for a college student. At one point he calls his college women softball team’s uniforms ‘skimpy’? As the author has intimate correspondences and phone calls with the inmates it’s hard for me to not think of the quote at the beginning of Vonnegut’s book Mother Night; “we are what we pretend to be” and that maybe some of the energy going into this book is misdirected sexual energy. I’m dead serious.

There is an untold story that is written between the lines of this book that is fascinating. Years after this book the author would eventually kill himself. As he talks about his upbringing, it is patently obvious that he grew up in an abusive household. He writes about his mom giving him money to buy shoes after he’d completely worn out his current pair, only to yell at him for spending the money when he gets home.

The climatic in-person meeting with Gacey at the end of the book is a bit interesting, though he ultimately just ends up being what I think most informed readers would expect; he’s manipulative and violent. And given the intimate conversations he had with the author, he want’s to fuck him and pulls his dick out several times in front of the author - to, what I felt like, was only to the surprise of the author himself. The co-author writes in the closing: what is interesting about this book is that Jason was able to document the “point of transaction” between the killer and victim where the victim is reeled in right before the crime took place.

Overall however Jason Moss just doesn’t seem like a reliable narrator. He cites Faces of Death claiming a group of men were arrested for committing a ritual sacrifice of another man. After meeting with Gacy the book ends with a story where he was able to pull one over on Gacy with with answering machine “accidentally” catching a recording between Gacy and an associate. It just seems all too clean and pasted together to tell a cohesive narrative.

The Year of The Boar and Jackie Robinson - Bette Bao Lord

I first read The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson back in elementary school as part of a group reading assignment. I remember having fond memories of the book, and it still holds up for a children’s novel. I was surprised to see that today the book was nominated for few, if any, awards. The genre of the book is a mix of realistic fiction and autobiographical elements; it is about a young Chinese girl who moves with her family from rural China to New York City in 1947. The author, Bette Bao Lord, immigrated to the United States from China at the age of 8.

The book starts in China and is written from the perspective of the protagonist who is a child known as Bandit in her home village. These first chapters carry with them the sort of childlike wonderment and amazement that come with childhood at that age, and then bleed into her perceptions of New York City and the US as an industrialized nation. The rest of the book deals with the protagonist’s assimilation into the US and into her school friend groups, she’s able to connect with them through learning baseball, and following Jackie Robinson in his rookie year in the MLB and the Dodger’s eventual post-season run.

The book does end with elements of “in America, you can be whatever you want if you try hard enough”. It perpetuates the American Dream, and I think that alone will alienate a lot of Americans today, and if anything, would facilitate classroom discussions about how that’s not necessarily true - conversations that likely should happen some time after elementary school. The ending is a bit saccharine; with the protagonist meeting Jackie Robinson and presenting him with the key to the school. Nevertheless, I think this is a good book. I enjoyed reading it again, and if anything it shows what Americans thought of themselves at one time, and I think later generations might find that interesting on its own.

What I've Read Halfway into 2025

2025-06-19T15:36:00.005-04:00

The Pathless Path - Paul Millerd

Normally this is a list of the books I’ve read in the order in which I have read them. This book is the lone exception to this rule because it had such a profound impact on me. I was first introduced to The Pathless Path by Jose Madrigal after seeing his Youtube video HR is Not Your Friend and reaching then out to him. I highly recommend giving his video a watch and also contacting him yourself if you feel so compelled.

Millerd’s book is about stepping away from conventional career paths and embracing a more meaningful, uncertain, and self-directed way of living. I know that sounds really self-help-y, but he really does dig into how careers are unfulfilling for many people, as having a career often means not being able to live a life that is authentic to oneself. He heavily cites his work and the personal experiences that he touches on in corporate America mirror my own.

I was initially skeptical of this book; in the second chapter he lays out life advice for people who I would frankly consider tools - people who act as though to seek approval on the outside - they’ve only done what they’ve done in their life so far for the money and prestige. The reality is that this book’s advice for people who feel stuck in the rat race despite trying their best to pursue their interests and struggle to stay true tI was initially skeptical of this book; in the second chapter he lays out life advice for people who I would frankly consider tools - people who act as though to seek approval on the outside - they’ve only done what they’ve done in their life so far for the money and prestige. The reality is that this book’s advice for people who feel stuck in the rat race despite trying their best to pursue their interests and struggle to stay true to themselves in corporate America. That includes addressing tools from the ground floor.
o themselves in corporate America. That includes addressing tools from the ground floor.

The Puck Stops Here: My (Not So) Minor League Life - Bruce Landon

Bruce Landon is the reason why professional hockey has remained in Springfield Massachusetts for almost 100 years. Most Americans may not know this, but ice hockey has been a staple of rust-belt American cities since the 1930s. The cult classic film Slapshot has a plot-line that details this, though it has not aged well in certain ways. Slapshot also details a hockey culture and game that no longer exists anymore, in a way, I’m lucky I guess to have witnessed what was left of that culture in the 90s: bench clearing brawls, goalie fights, and fistfights in the penalty box that broke out into the stands.

Bruce is well known by hockey fans who also can recall other greats such as Eddie Shore, Bobby Orr, and Frank Mathers. Landon was a NHL caliber goaltender, who by happenstance, ended up playing for the minor league hockey teams that have existed in Springfield. He went on to be the owner of the Springfield Falcons; keeping hockey in Springfield, and helped bring in a new franchise when the Falcons finally did move to Arizona in the 2010s, something we all knew was bound to happen since the mid-naughts.

My family were Springfield Falcon season ticket holders, and to be frank, the team was awful and uninspiring. Games felt like watching teams run drills, completely indifferent of the score or game. Back then there were no nets behind the plexiglass, so you had to pay attention to the game for your own safety even if you were bored out of your mind. I hated and resented going to hockey games and having to pay attention to something so boring out of safety the whole time. In my lifetime I’ve been to hundreds of AHL games. Landon addresses all of this malfunction in the book. And despite all of this, and my disdain for the team, I saw Landon at the games in his suit addressing the fans’ concerns personally in the hall. I genuinely got the impression from him that he was someone in the org who cared and should be respected, even if I couldn’t stand going to the games with my family.

I think if you followed the news in The Springfield Republican at the time about what was going on in the franchise, there’s not much new here for you in this book. The book sort of validates what I already knew: the motley group of owners that Bruce was able to scrap together to keep hockey in Springfield meant that there were too many cooks in the kitchen who didn’t know enough about professional hockey. He does also fess up to his own mistakes he made. I also appreciate that Landon acknowledges how much of a shithole Springfield could be at times. To be frank, I don’t think there’s a lot of anything new in this autobiography. But nonetheless, Landon is a standup, honest person who should be celebrated for doing the best that he could and continues to do to swim upstream and keep quality professional hockey in Springfield. Thank you Bruce.

A Short Stay In Hell - Stephen Peck

This is a novella about a man who goes to hell, of which there are a handful of variations. The hell this man is sent to is that he’s tasked with finding the one book that holds his life story in a giant library that holds every variation of the letters of the alphabet put together possible. Finding a book with a word, never mind a sentence in it, is an achievement. There are also other people in this library looking for their life stories. The novella delves into themes of eternity, futility, and the human condition, and reflections on the nature of existence. The ending is not satisfying, but I guess that’s kinda the point of being in hell. I don’t want to get too in depth because it’s just a short story, nonetheless, check it out.

The Teenage Brain - Frances Jensen

This ended up being just another pop psychology book with the first few chapters being things that you would expect to learn in a psych 100 class; it is absolutely geared more towards parents and not academics. It could be a good NeruoSci refresher for psych students, though some of the information in this book is dated. In addition, at times Jensen takes liberties to make claims without citation, claiming that marijuana is a gateway drug for example, or providing parenting advice that seems completely removed from academic literature; such that parents should know all the passwords that their teenagers have. The book also claims that “kids can get started early on a path to addiction through free-to-play gambling apps available through iTunes”. She uses the term “marijuana cigarettes”... While these claims may have some substance, a citation is still needed and the information can be presented in a more modern way that's less dated than the wired headphones on the cover. In the same paragraph about free-to-play apps the author claims that “various studies indicate that anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of all teenagers have tried online gambling at least once” without citing any one of these studies. She does say that for teenagers, school can sometimes be analogous to the cage in a rat experiment - so she gets points for that.

Jensen argues that teens respond better to psychiatric medication than adults. While she does acknowledge the increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in teens, she fails to fully grapple with the implications of that risk and largely brushes over it. At another point she attributes the tragic cases of teenagers who, after drinking, will hide from those searching for them, sometimes resulting in death from exposure; she attributes this to their underdeveloped brains rather than questioning the role of our punitive legal system. This feels especially inconsistent given that later in the book, she critiques how the juvenile justice system often denies teenagers due process.

There were things I did like about this book. I do appreciate that the author says the reason teenagers like to smoke is because it reduces stress. And that there is a whole chapter on stress, acknowledging school is incredibly stressful for teenagers and that there is an anxiety epidemic now, especially with teens. She does go into how juveniles outgrow their antisocial behaviors.

Something I found interesting and learned from this book is that, while the neural tube develops from front to back in the womb, the brain develops in the opposite direction, from back to front throughout childhood and into the teenage years. There is a correlation of gray matter to IQ. Also, teenagers don’t necessarily have poor reasoning skills, but rather, their reward centers are more sensitive, which is one reason why they are more prone to sensation stimulation. There is also research that is referenced suggesting that anticipation, but not the reward is the most stimulating part of an experience, which which relates to a Ted Bundy quote: “The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself”. I also learned that nicotine in cigarettes change the number of cannabinoid receptors in the brain and makes brains more sensitive to the effects of marijuana.

There is a chapter on gender matters which demonstrates brain imaging studies differentiate between male and female children's brains. I was wondering how these studies would account for genderqueer or non-binary children Unfortunately, the research on brain imaging and gender, particularly in relation to genderqueer or non-binary children is still emerging and not as extensive as studies on cisgender boys and girls. I wasn’t able to find any studies in this regard.

High Conflict - Amanda Ripley

A lot of the books on this list came from this Youtube video on online discourse which came with a list of cited books at the end. This is the first book in this list from the video.

High Conflict feels like it was written for aliens on how to communicate. I’m not sure who this books is for, because you have to want to listen from the other person when you’re in conflict if you actually want to get out of it. As a result, this book is like an oxymoron, the people who need to read it never will. Even the book calls out that if people want to revel in contempt, righteousness, want to dominate, and stay in a state of high conflict; they well. Furthermore, if you bring these people to the negotiation table, you open up the other party to physical and emotional abuse. That tends to be the limit of this book, and it offers no resolve for dealing with those that act this way, probably because it would have to resort calling for violence. The book specifically calls out that most people don’t want to solve climate change, for example, because they want to use climate change as a way to change the world into something they’d like to see. The author says the same thing about Israeli officers in relation to the Gaza Strip.

Chapters three, four, and onward feel like a This American Life extended episode on Chicago gang violence. I did learn from this book that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams loathed the concept of political parties, and that George Washington also warned that political parties could be used by an individual to usurp democracy. So that’s cool.

Unlearning Shame - Devon Price

Unlearning shame has also been one of the most influential books that I have read recently. I could probably write a whole article on this book itself. If fact, it was highly influential in regards to my last post on the crisis of credibility in scientific research today. The author Devon Price centers this book around Systemic Shame - the self loathing belief that says you are to blame for the circumstances you’re living in, and the only way to overcome those problems is through individual goodness and grit. Systemic Shame holds marginalized people responsible for solving the problem of their own oppression and that the only way meaningful change can ever occur is if individual people put in a ton of effort and always make the right decisions; that systemic issues are individual issues and need to be solved as such - keeping people in place; that gun violence is caused by mentally ill individuals, that every purchase is a moral decision, that global pandemics are caused by selfish people and not corporate cruelty and government negligence, etc, etc. Genuinely, without trying to sound disingenuous, this book is the closest I’ve seen someone get to Ted Kyzinsky’s theory of over-socialization while also building on it, which breaks out into all sorts of mind blowing directions.

For example, consider how systemic shame politicizes everyone’s choices, with marginalized people especially placed under the microscope. This is why any action taken by a marginalized person is often viewed as representative of their entire group. Another example is how the author demonstrates that online dogpiling, slacktivism, virtue signaling, and the moral licensing effect are all rooted in shame. In one case, she uses Construal Level Theory to argue that the only people who truly benefit from this kind of toxic online engagement are advertisers. Price also explores the history of shame, giving examples of how it is tied to social class, and how in more interdependent and egalitarian societies, fewer behaviors such as nudity, sex, or not contributing to the broader group are seen as shameful. (Though this point seems heavily borrowed Peter Stearns' book Shame: A Brief History.)

I found how systemic shame gets weaponized against workers in the workplace to be particularly insightful. Price points out that individuals are expected to take on more responsibilities and behave more perfectly than the powerful institutions that surround them. If you company’s CEO cuts your hours or reduced your team’s headcount, you as an employee are still on the hook for completing all of your duties. Companies essentially force employees to out themselves by including their pronouns in emails, which potentially can make things worse for them and their clients. When the author presented to their HR team that keyloggers and surveillance tools harm autistic workers during a presentation on neurodivergent people in the workplace, HR ended the talk early and deleted all employee complaints. The author calls out something I have always been suspicious of, that the only thing companies want from Employee Resource Groups is platitudes and praise. A further example for universities is given on page 87: Loyloa University had called the police on student protestors and then issued public statements on its commitment to anti-racism and suggested people take workshops on personal racial biases (bringing a systemic issue back to personal responsibility). Furthermore the workshops also provide the institutions with a legal shield against accusations of racism. Price goes on to detail how employers and universities will NEVER suggest collectively organizing for larger change and that if HR was really on the workers' side they would be advocating for them to organize. And this is the direction of where the end of the book goes: that coalition and community building and organizing as individuals are the best ways we can overcome systemic issues in our society; this is where I will be focusing my free time the rest of this year Price then points to the gay movement of the 80s that started with the Stonewall Riots to show how this coalition building can be done. He says that nearly everyone interviewed for the book said that they were only able to heal from shame through their relationships to others, because shame is intrinsically tied to social rejection.

There are a handful of failings I did find with this book. For one, the ideas in the book are not very well organized, throughout the book Price comes back to all the ways that companies have used systemic shame to shame consumers. I think this might be a way for him to hammer away his point, but I don’t really see why these examples couldn't have just all been grouped all together rather than sprinkled throughout the book. There’s one part of the book that talks about the Protestant Work Ethic scale being a measure of Puritanical attitudes in 19 questions. My copy of the book only has 18 of the questions.

At times, he also seems to take the liberties of pop psychology books with the statements he’s making:

Price claims that you can tie bureaucracy to shame because public records came to exist. Public records existing are evidence of public records existing. Without any further clarification or sources, I’m not really sure how his editor didn’t underline this.
On page 63 of the book, without citation, Price says that the Columbine shooters’ white supremacist sympathies should have been investigated, as if that was a thing. The reality is that was a very early on direction investigators went in and it lead them nowhere.
Price claims that nearly half of mentally ill people experience a violent crime once in their lives. I went ahead and researched this claim and found that Americans have at least a 50% chance of experiencing some form of violent crime and that approximately 83% will be victims of violent crimes (including rape, robbery, and assault), either 'completed' or attempted, at least once during their lives. I got this information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics titled "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization":
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/llv.pdf
Social class is the biggest determiner of success in America before race, sexual orientation, and gender. There is also a level of shame and expected behavior tied to everyone’s social class in America, however the author does not even mention the word class until about halfway into the book.

My biggest qualm with the book is that Devon Price writes that Questionable Research Protocols are a systemic problem. QRPs are when you invalidate the scientific method by essentially putting you thumb on the scale to make sure that your research results will be shown as statistically significant, showing your hypothesis to be true. The author then gets into the history of the replication crisis in social psychology where it came to light, that frankly speaking, a lot of psychological researchers were just making shit up. He then gets into how he was taught these techniques such as “fishing” for only statistically significant data as a doctoral student. I don’t know where Devon Price got his degrees, but when I went to college I was required to take a year of statistics and research methodologies before I was allowed to take any 300-level courses in the Psychology department. I’d argue that a decent dose of shame and self-reflection for not understanding basic statistical methodology as a doctoral student is relatively healthy.

Nevertheless, despite these failings, I want to be clear that this is a great book and I highly recommend it. There’s so much more that this book contains (as well with points that I really don’t agree with or are uncited claims that are pretty out there) but I’ve already written about two pages on this book. Again, nevertheless, I highly recommend reading Unlearning Shame.

Cheap Speech - Richard Hasen

The title of this book comes from a 1995 scientific journal article titled “Cheap Speech and What it Will Do” which, in a way, predicted the current state of technology. Much of this book is just an overview of the 2016 election leading up to Trump’s first candidacy as well as Trump’s first term as president. Going over these chapters reminded me of the Reddit post where a user talks about the collapse of his country being like that of a frog boiling in water: it’s just more and more bad news that you can’t keep up with… and being reminded of all the scandles one after the other I forgot about that have happened in almost the past ten years now... something I think worth calling out in the book is that the “glitches’ we saw in the 2024 election, with Democrats’ content not showing up on social media also occurred in the 2020 election (page 20) and that claims of fake news swinging the 2016 election from Hilary to Trump are unproven and unlikely (page 38). Page 50 is an example of a local Democrat candidate using fake news in his campaign. I also love how this book uses Reddit as a literal example of fake news and amplifying fake news, an accusation which if made on Reddit itself will usually cause users to go reeling. The book points out that in 2016 Russia spent about $100k on Facebook ads as opposed to Clinton spending $768k and Trump spending $398k. This broke the common rule that whoever spends the most on advertising in a US presidential race usually wins; Trump likely did a much better job at utilizing micro targeted ads on Facebook.

The Hot Zone - Richard Preston

When I was a kid, my mom had The Hot Zone on audio cassette and would listen to it in the car with me in the back seat. Given the cover of the book, and its contents, I grew up thinking that it was a horror novel. The book explores the origins and outbreaks of viral fevers, particularly the Ebola virus; specifically a 1989 incident at a primate quarantine facility in Virginia near the capital where a strain of Ebola virus was discovered among imported monkeys. Preston examines the potential dangers of emerging viruses, the response, and the thin line between humanity and a global pandemic. Given the news in February about a “mystery disease” spreading in the Congo likely being linked to children eating a bat, I figured that this book was relevant reading. The book is incredibly captivating and well written, I can see how it was a bestseller. It’s also incredibly short and only took a few days to read.

Jacked - David Kushner

I was hoping that this book would be about the development of Grand Theft Auto 3, especially given how the cover specifically seems to reference that era of the series, however it is about the history of the DMA games, eventually Rockstar North, and mostly the history of the controversy of the GTA series. Whole sections of the book focus on Jack Thompon, the disgraced evangelical, now disbarred, Florida attorney who tried to fight the video game industry in the 2000s. In fact, he is where the title of the book comes from. Like Cheap Speech, I was reading an account of events that I remembered living through in most of the book. I was a huge fan of Rockstar as an early teen and followed the GTA controversy closely in the news.

A few things I learned from this book is that Sam Houser, current president of Rockstar games and co-founder, gave a chat-based interview that was posted to the a day before the 9/11 attacks saying that planes would not be in GTA3. This contradicts a longstanding rumor that planes were removed from the game due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While it’s also never outright states by the book, I do believe after finishing this book that Houser knew that the mod community would eventually find the content that lead to the Hot Coffee debacle in 2004. It was his ultimate goal to release this content potentially as a paid add-on for the PC release at least. I believe he was intent of releasing this content one way or another and potentially purposefully left the content on the console game disks for the mod community to find and release.

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levins

The 70s film adaption of the Stepford Wives always at the top of my recommended films to rent from Netflix back when they had an unparalleled recommendation algorithm and I still got DVDs in the mail from them. Netflix got rid of that algo when they started producing their own content and their own algo was ranking their content as the worst content available on the platform...
Anyways, this book hits a lot of the beats that Rosemary’s Baby does - that there is a broader conspiracy that builds up from a slow burn paranoia, there’s an socially isolated protagonist, trust is weaponized against the protagonist, and ordinary settings hide horror. My copy didn’t say on the cover that this was the same author as Rosemary’s Baby, ome to find out the same author that wrote Rosemary’s Baby wrote The Stepford Wives. The book is a good quick read and social commentary, but I wish it leaned more into the science fiction aspect of the book.

Something I found fascinating about this book is that one of the antagonists in the books formally worked as an engineer at Disney making animatronics. The Youtube channel DefunctLand by Kevin Perjur recently released a video talking about how animatronics captured the imagination of Americans when they first came out. And in a way, I think this book kind of pulls you into that headspace of the time when it comes to this new tenchnology that facsinated and even scared people.

Unwinding Anxiety - Judson Brewer

I don’t think that the premise of this book had to be book length. Brewer outlines a three-step process designed to manage anxiety by disrupting the habit loops that fuel it:

Awareness: Recognize and clearly identify anxious feelings and behaviors without judgment or avoidance. Observe when anxiety arises and what triggers it.

Curiosity: Instead of immediately reacting or resisting anxiety, approach it with curiosity, exploring how it feels physically and mentally. This curiosity reduces emotional charge and helps dismantle automatic responses.

Mindful Replacement: Shift focus to healthier, mindful behaviors. Substitute anxiety-driven actions with calming, mindful activities, gradually creating new habits that weaken the anxiety cycle.

The author emphasizes mindfulness-based practices to help individuals break habitual anxiety patterns, and breaks down what mindfulness is and can be rather than suggesting over and over that you be mindful or practice meditation. The author spreads this three step process out over the length of the book instead of just coming out with it, and he is also guilty of repeatedly citing the results of studies despite only one study allegedly being performed. At times the book feels like an advertisement for their app and at one point the book even starts to show screenshots of the app on the latest model iPhone for the revision of the book I had.

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

My friend ended up with an extra copy of this book and lent it to me after I told her about A Short Stay in Hell. In this book an Irish woman has the opportunity to relive any of her unlived lives after she takes her own life - her unlived lives being represented by a vast library that seemingly goes on forever. This is a very good book and a quick read, I actually put it in a little library in my neighborhood with a sticky note on the cover that says exactly that and it was gone the next day. Ultimately this is the Jungian exercise of imagining your unlived lives put to a novel and done pretty well (this specifically is an exercise Robert Johnson recommends in his book Inner Work). I will say that I thought the ending could have been better, but I also was not sure how a book like this could end.

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I had initially read this back in 2020 right before the US federal election. I am still struck by how sharply relevant King's words still are. Reading his own words is such a great way to challenge the “Disney-fied” version of the man and his ideas that we were taught in public school. This wasn’t the sanitized, feel-good version of MLK but rather the radical, direct, and deeply critical of American capitalism and militarism MLK. King challenges the entire economic and social system that allows inequality to persist. What stood out most to me was his emphasis on genuine equality, not just legal rights but economic justice too, including ideas like a guaranteed basic income fixed to the middle class and that scales with the country’s income.

It shouldn’t be surprising but King is an eloquent writer, and his writing invokes the philosophies of Martin Bueber and Hegel in such a compelling way. This book is hauntingly relevant almost 60 years later and should be required reading in schools rather than the literal cartoons they showed us instead. King was not concerned about just race, but class and poverty, and it’s not unintentional that the latter have attempted to be erased from American history and textbooks.

Science for Sale: The Crisis of Credibility

2025-06-12T14:41:00.014-04:00

I am as much of a secular rationalist as they come. Once I learned about the scientific method in middle school, I saw it as the most trustworthy tool humans have for understanding the world; something solid that stood in place of unquestioning faith and, hitherto, the best tool for us to navigate reality. While that all may be true in the physical sciences, the unfortunate reality is that we are not at such a place in the realm of social psychology. My disenchantment with academia began in college, during my pursuit of a career in research psychology, as I discovered it surpasses even corporate America in its politics, nepotism, and dishonesty.

Psychological research, particularly social psychology research, is often ineffective and unreliable due to weak statistical standards, a replication crisis, cultural pressures like "publish or perish," and deeper methodological flaws. Capitalism, not rationalism, primarily drives which research gets done and why. Money and ego undermine the very fabric of the scientific method, making it nearly impossible to conduct impartial research within any academic institution. Research is often published not for the sake of understanding the world, but to serve the needs of capital. The consequences have included the widespread dissemination of misleading findings, the marginalization of important but unprofitable lines of inquiry, and the reinforcement of existing power structures. Studies that might challenge dominant economic or social paradigms are underfunded or ignored, while research that aligns with the interests of industry, tech, or pharmaceutical giants is prioritized. This results in a distorted intellectual landscape where knowledge is commodified and public trust in science erodes. Over time, the ideal of science as an objective, truth-seeking endeavor is replaced by a performative shell that mirrors the market forces it is supposed to critically examine.

For this reason, I have a great deal of compassion for the “do your own research" crowd even while wholeheartedly disagreeing with them. The layman should not have to navigate multiple paywalled scientific journals to come to their own conclusions.

In the hard sciences of physics, biology, and chemistry, hypothesis testing often requires a p-value of 0.01 or lower to claim statistical significance (A p-value is a statistical measurement of the probability that the results of a study occurred by random chance. A p-value of

0.01

means there is only a 1% probability that researcher landed on their findings by random chance.). However, in the social sciences, a p-value of 0.05 is the norm, meaning 1 in 20 "significant" findings could simply be random chance. As a result, a neuroscience lab (which for all intents and purposes IS biochemistry), you have a much lower burden of proof to demonstrate your findings than the biochem lab. In fact, something that nobody in your university’s Psychology Department will tell you is that many research labs prefer biochem degree holders over those in their own programs!

The p-value of 0.05 was first introduced by Ronald Fisher in his 1925 book Statistical Methods for Research Workers. He suggested it as a convenient cutoff, but he never intended it to become a hard rule. He described it as a flexible guideline for when an experimental result might warrant further investigation. Over time, what became a suggestion for what might be publishable, became instead a hard rule of what demonstrates statistical significance. Psychology academics enshrined and adopted this methodology during a period when the field was desperately trying to be seen as a "hard science” - otherwise very few academics would have had anything worth publishing.

This issue becomes more problematic when you compound that in 2008, an event known as the Replication Crisis occurred. In a landmark effort, a large team of researchers called the Open Science Collaboration attempted to replicate 100 published psychology studies from top journals. These studies mostly came from the fields of social psychology and cognitive psychology. While 97% of the original studies had reported statistically significant results, only about 36% of the replications produced statistically significant results. The effect sizes for these studies (the strength of the findings) were, on average, about half as large in the replications, with many replicated results were weaker, inconsistent, or with the effect outright disappeared. This crisis included work by a researcher you might be familiar with, Amy Cuddy who went viral with her Ted Talk on doing power poses in front of the mirror to increase confidence.

I want to point out that groups like The Open Science Collaboration may exist to challenge the exact issue I am describing; they are still entangled in the same ecosystem as everyone else. Their funding sources include the US federal government and a Mark Zuckerburg 501c. If a study seriously undermined a major funder's interests, it’s plausible that the OSC would deprioritize it, slow-walk its dissemination, or fail to champion it. Not from malice, but from institutional survival instinct. This is the very paradox that the OSC tries to solve, but also cannot fully escape under capitalist conditions.

In Amy Cuddy’s case, the issue with her research was more than just that of replication. She was found to have used “questionable research practices” (QRPs) meaning she cherry-picked data to achieve statistical significance while ignoring results that didn't fit her narrative. I first heard about this situation in Devon Price’s book Unlearning Shame. In his book, Price explains how he was taught to use QRPs during his own upper-grad research training. I would argue that the fact that these methods are called "questionable research practices" instead of something more definite such as lying, cheating, or fraud says everything that a layperson needs to know about how research is conducted in the field of psychology.

Price writes that Questionable Research Protocols are a systemic problem. He recounts the history of the replication crisis, where it came to light that, and that frankly, many psychological researchers were just "making shit up." I don't know where Price earned his degrees, but as an undergraduate, I was required to take a full year of 200-level statistics and research methods courses before I could even enroll in upper-level psychology courses. Perhaps a dose of shame for a doctoral student not understanding basic statistical methodology isn’t entirely unhealthy.

This problem extends to popular science. Many books, including those by PhD holders like Judson Brewer (Unwinding Anxiety), the above Unlearning Shame, or authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), often state that a single study has "proven" a hypothesis. This is something I was taught never to do in my 200-level classes. These are not necessarily bad books, but the way these authors discuss their findings is a product of the academic culture they inhabit; a culture they, in turn, help perpetuate. If there is no room for genuinely critical minds in psychological research, and if researchers who try to do the right thing are dragged down by their peers, what is the point?

In fact, there are examples of researchers outside of psych who were outright shunned for findings that we now accept to be true. Take for example Dr. Kilmer McCully, a Harvard-trained physician and researcher. In the late 1960s, McCully published research suggesting that elevated levels of the amino acid homocysteine, not just cholesterol, could lead to cardiovascular disease. This was a departure from the prevailing cholesterol-centric view of heart disease at the time. His research was not well received by the medical establishment. Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was employed, did not renew his research grant, and he was forced to leave his position, costing him any chance at tenure. McCully eventually found a position at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence where he continued his research. Over time, subsequent studies validated his findings. Today, the role of homocysteine in cardiovascular health is widely acknowledged with McCully credited as pioneering this field of study.

Nevertheless, there was a systemic attempt to stop his research for daring to use the scientific method for its intended purpose: to pursue truth, regardless of political or institutional consequences. his brings me to some open questions in relation to Price's work on shame. At what point should the gatekeepers of such a system feel genuine shame? When does their complicity demand more than a quiet retraction or a pivot to a new grant cycle? What would it mean for them to truly rectify the damage: intellectually, ethically, even personally before they allow themselves the luxury of moving on or forgiving themselves?

More pressingly: if data is being manipulated to fit agendas, if replication is avoided because the incentives reward novelty over reliability, and if entire academic careers are built on shaky, unreplicated findings, then are we actually advancing knowledge at all? Or are we just creating an elaborate theater of credibility? At what point can we even say strides are being made in social psychology, or are we simply becoming more efficient at justifying our own biases in increasingly scientific-sounding ways? If this is how people want to operate, what is the point of anything at all? Do words even have meaning? I’m genuinely sincere in these questions.

Imagine we could travel back 2,500 years and converse with Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates. If we tried to explain modern physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, germ theory, or even basic chemistry - they would likely be bewildered. These concepts would be completely foreign to them, built on centuries of empirical discovery, mathematical modeling, and experimental replication that simply didn’t exist in their time. But if we shifted the conversation to human psychology: virtue, motivation, desire, or the divided self; they might understand us surprisingly well. In fact, many of the psychological insights we consider cutting-edge today were already being explored in their dialogues.

These issues are not just limited to the US. Consider David Nutt in the UK, he performed Multi‑criteria decision analysis where he ranked alcohol and tobacco as more harmful than LSD, MDMA, or cannabis (Lancet 2007; F test p < 0.001). He published his findings and stated that horseback riding caused more brain injury than ecstasy, the Home Secretary fired him and ministries withdrew related research contracts.

Academic incentives prioritize novel, flashy findings over careful, incremental science or simply trying to see if it’s possible to replicate the findings of a particular researcher. This is one reason why QBRs are such an issue in research. Journals favor "positive” results over null findings, creating strong bias toward publishing studies that find something, even if it's not real! Career advancement hinges on publication count, not research quality. This creates perverse incentives to manipulate data until statistical significance is found. Consider the example of a pharmaceutical company trying to release a new drug. Due to the high stakes and potential liabilities, they're required to have multiple independent auditors and trials to confirm the drug's effects. There are institutional checks: FDA oversight, liability law, and third-party replication; that make publishing unreliable or irreproducible findings incredibly risky. Ironically, this means that even in an industry driven by profit, there's often more methodological accountability than in academic social psychology. The absence of real-world consequences for failed replications or methodological shortcuts makes it easy for bad science to flourish in academia specifically.

Even when studies find an impact, the subjects are almost always college psychology students participating in studies conducted by their own professors for extra credit and are aware of the exact studies that they are performing in. There’s even an acronym for this over reliance on particular research participants, WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. For example, when I attended UMASS I would often participate in game theory studies that the Economics department would have. In order to achieve significant results in game theory, subjects have to play with real money; people act and behave differently when you give them fake money; think chips at a casino. The studies would fill up fast as a result of them potentially paying well and the only real reliable way to sign up was to have a smart phone so that as soon as the email went out you could get the notification and sign up. This was the early 2010s when not everyone had a smart phone in their pocket, again creating another layer of class abstraction when it came to study subjects. In fact, this scenario was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me personally when it came to transitioning to a smart phone. The money was too good to pass up. When I did sign up for the studies, I made sure to do a literature review of whatever I thought that the professor was trying to research. I wanted to win the game and make as much money as possible because I was broke. I’ve often been told that I was an outlier in this case by other students, but was I? I consider myself a bright guy, but at UMass I wasn’t a big fish in a little bowl. I wasn't even a business student and was average by UMass academic standards. How many other students were doing something similar?

When these students are tested, oftentimes the constructs used to measure results are vague and poorly-defined. Constructs such as such as "grit," "mindsets," "priming", "brain power" without clear operational definitions. For example, when I was doing research, we were primarily interested in the N400. The N400 is part of the normal brain response to words and other meaningful (or potentially meaningful) stimuli, including visual and auditory words, sign language signs, pictures, faces, environmental sounds, and smells… so what does it actually mean when an N400 response gets triggered? Well, that’s non-concrete and rather fuzzy. The N400 is primarily associated with semantic processing, that is, how the brain understands meaning. When a word fits well into a sentence or context, the N400 is smaller. When a word is unexpected, incongruent, or hard to integrate, the N400 is larger. The normal sentence: “She spread the warm bread with butter.” results in a Small N400 because the word makes sense. However, the incongruent sentence “She spread the warm bread with socks. Results in a large N400 response.

Why is this important? As a researcher I would tell you that the N400 shows that the brain automatically and rapidly processes meaning, even when you’re not actively trying to. It's one of the clearest examples of how neuroelectric signals reflect real-time cognitive processing. Now why is THAT important? You tell me… What I see is that absence of strong underlying theories makes replication and extension difficult and that the field of psychology, in general, often prioritizes interesting phenomena over solid, predictive models.

This over-reliance on a specific type of human subject points to a much deeper, more foundational problem. We’ve only been industrialized for less than 300 years, and we're arguably already in a post-industrial age. This brief, historically bizarre period of human existence created a new kind of person, way of thinking, and in a way... a new science to manage them. The question isn't just whether the research is relevant, but whether the entire discipline of psychology, as we know it, is a temporary tool for a temporary way of life. This is a central theme in the work of documentarian Adam Curtis. In The Century of the Self, Curtis argues that modern psychology, particularly the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud, was co-opted by corporate and political power structures. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, used these insights to invent the field of public relations, pioneering techniques to manage the irrational desires of the masses and channel them into consumerism. In this view, psychology didn’t just seek to understand the modern self; it helped to construct it - a self defined by perpetual anxiety and a constant need for fulfillment through purchasing.

This argument is reinforced by scholars like Philip Cushman in books such as Constructing the Self, Constructing America. Cushman posits that post-WWII American society cultivated an "empty self" a person disconnected from community, tradition, and shared meaning. Both psychotherapy and advertising rushed in to fill this void, promising wholeness through therapeutic intervention or the accumulation of goods. If psychology’s primary role has been to diagnose and service this historically specific, empty, consumer self, then its findings are not timeless truths about the "human mind." Instead, they are maintenance instructions for the engine of capitalism. This context makes the field's current replication crisis and subservience to market forces seem less like a recent failure and more like the inevitable outcome of its own origin story...

So where does this all leave us? If power poses work for you, then they are good enough. And while I am not a religious person, maybe not be so critical of others’ belief systems that might be a little more un-rational than your own. I think an understanding of how rationalism has been co-opted by capitalism can teach us why we should understand where the “do your own research” crowd is coming from, even if we hold them in contempt. Ultimately as it stands today, the very system of integrity has failed all of us. I think that also this helps us understand where Donald Trump is coming from when he said “If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.” in relation to the Coivd pandemic in June of 2020. When everything is for sale, people getting tested for Covid rates is no different than paying a consultant to prove what you already believe, or for experts in the legal system who always find in favor of the person that hired them.

As laypeople, what can we do? We can follow a few rules of thumb. Never trust any single person, author, or publication claiming one study "proves" anything. We should only have evidence-based faith in science, this is taught in elementary school but bares repeating: only after many studies from many different sources should we ever consider that research might be valid. It's absolutely appropriate to always be skeptical of any science. That's the point. If you're so inclined, find the original scientific article that should be well cited. Ask: Has this research been replicated by anyone without a financial incentive? What was the p-value? What perverse incentives might influence these individuals and institutions?

Ultimately, I think our culture places too much value on material wealth, fame, and ego. This problem will not get better until the institutions and societal constructs around us fundamentally change to serve something other than capital.

My Favorite Productivity Tools

2025-02-24T08:57:00.000-05:00

Staying organized in a world full of distractions is tough, but I’ve found a way to make it work for me without losing my mind. My system is a mix of digital tools, gamification, and good old-fashioned pen and paper to keep me on track. If you’re looking for a way to stop doom scrolling and focus on getting more personal projects done, here’s how I use Habitica, Focumon, Hobonichi, Notion, and the Eisenhower Matrix to stay productive without burning out. I would also recommend checking out my previous article on utilizing RSS feeds to escape from apps with infinite scroll.

The way in which I use these tools may not be the best way to go about using them, but I hope that sharing how I use them can open up new ideas for you in which you can use them.

Habitica, formerly Habit RPG, is an app that essentially gamifies your daily to-do list. The party system helps add an additional level of personal accountability since during quests you can cause damage to the rest of your party if you fail to complete your tasks. Discord servers for individual Habitica parties over the years have led me into several communities that have persisted long past the original parties themselves, where users support and encourage each other while also holding each other accountable. If you’re struggling with motivation, having a group to check in with helps big time.

Here is what my Habitica task board has looked like in the past,
in order to give you some ideas on how to best use the tool.
(Click to enlarge)

One of the drawbacks of Habitica is that longer drawn out tasks don’t always reward you the same way that smaller tasks do. Chunking your tasks is one strategy to address this issue. You can also set the difficulty for different tasks, but the variation in rewards is not much. What I’ve found to be helpful in this case is to use the site Focumon in conjunction with Habitica.

Focumon is like the Pomodoro Technique but gamified, breaking work into short sprints with quick breaks. This keeps me focused without turning me into a burnt out zombie. Focumon is great for deep work - writing, coding, brainstorming, cleaning, and even working on this blog. This tool works really well in conjunction with Habitica because it rewards you for much longer tasks that are difficult to chunk in a way that feels better than how Habitica handles them. Nothing in this article is promotional, and if it were, it would be clearly labeled as such. However, if you do want to start using Focumon, please add me (@Carm_GeDK) as a referral on your Community Page so that I can get some extra in-game items.

Habitica and Focumon work really well for recurring tasks that come up through the week. For appointments, deadlines, and one-off tasks: I stick to using my Hobonichi planner. The Hobonichi planner is simply a Japanese daily planner. However, in all my time using daily planners since elementary school, it's simply the best one I have used. They're compact and minimalist - which as a result makes them highly customizable. They're also incredibly high quality - which means they stay in excellent condition after a year of daily use and extensive travel. The planners do tend to be pricey, but the annual purchase price has always more than paid for itself with how organized they've kept me.

I used to use Google Calendar, but got freaked out when they started showing me specific images for my appointments. For example, my dentist appointments would should an image of a tooth and toothbrush, which meant that Google parses the information that you put into the Calendar application. While Google says that they will never use Calendar data to advertise to you, if they are lying here, it’s not like it would be the first time they did; even if that is not the case, what's stopping them from changing their policy and retroactively parsing your data for marketing purposes in the future? They already have always done this with your email…

I've used Hobonichi planners for years now.

I’ve used Hobonichis for four years now. While I tend to use it for one-off task management, please note that the way I use it is very rigid and maybe even an unimaginative way to go about using your Hobonichi yourself. I’d recommend checking out the subreddit r/hobonichi to see all the imaginative ways in which people do use their Hobonichis. Many people, for example, use the planners for journaling and drawing.

Notion natively supports organizational tools like Kanban boards, database tables, and lots of other pre-built templates that are free. I find that Notion is the best way for me to keep track of notes over a long period of time. I do still tend to take a lot of notes with pen and paper, because note-taking is how I tend to best learn. But in Notion, I track blog post ideas I haven’t gotten to yet (since it allows me to quickly add notes on my phone or computer as new fleeting ideas come to me), as well as films and books I have yet to read, all my music lesson notes with links to class videos, questions for my instructor that arise throughout the week, and a list of new songs I want to learn or have already learned.

Notion also includes an AI tool that quickly allows you to generate all of those organizational tools efficiently. For example, you could quickly create a Kanban board with a list of all your long term project Notion pages listed. In less than a minute you can have a Kanban board that tracks all of your projects and what status they are in. (I’ll likely make a further instructional video on how to do this in the near future.) If this AI functionality is ever removed from Notion, or put behind a paywall, just about any free AI or LLM tool can do this for you with Notion, it’s frankly just convenient to have the tool available inside the application.

Eisenhower Matrix from Wikimedia Commons

The Eisenhower Matrix helps me figure out what actually matters. Prioritizing is half the battle, and applying this matrix to all my work keeps me from wasting time on low-impact distractions, and helps me focus on bigger-picture impact rather than one-off tasks.

I didn't want to host an image of someone else's work, but here is a link to the specific Eisenhower Matrix image I have posted on my wall behind my desk.

Building a Better Online Experience: RSS is More Useful Than Ever

2025-02-18T09:14:00.000-05:00

Algorithm-driven content littered with advertisements, astroturfing, bots, and global tracking cookies have made RSS feeds relevant again. Repeatedly, on social media, I see users complaining about the enshitification of the Internet and that the Internet isn’t what it used to be. My answer to this complaint is that if your online experience in the 2020s is primarily via the algos, you have no place complaining about the enshitification of the Internet, because all of the content you consume already is shit. Furthermore, it’s never been easier or more accessible for anyone to create a website, estore, or to have a digital presence. In his book The Pathles Path author Paul Millard argues that “the Internet has handed people the means of production” and I agree with this sentiment: Is the internet slowly being privatized? Absolutely. Is it easier than ever before to have an estore or self publish? Absolutely. Yes, that means your estore or personal enterprise won't immediately be as successful, but that's the trade off.

As long as you are in an algo stream, you are being manipulated. This is especially evident on platforms like Facebook, where engagement is driven by content designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction, often within the first two to five posts in your feed. Social media sites like Reddit are also not immune to misinformation. For example: here is an image that was reposted again, again, and again on Reddit the week that I started writing this post. It contains a photoshopped image of a worker being arrested by ICE while wearing a Latinos For Trump shirt. Today most of the top comments point out that the image was fake, this was not the case on the day that the image repeatedly made it to the front page of the website.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will allow you to have a stream of news and information similar to your Reddit feed, Facebook feed, and whatever other social media sites that you’re stuck with using. The difference is that your RSS feed will be built by you outside of the ecosystem of any one website. Instead of being based on any algorithm, your feed instead will be based on how recent the content is - if that's how you configure your feed to work for you in the first place. What I am getting at is that using an RSS reader is one way in which you can unenshitify your Internet experience.

Over the past few months I found that as I fell back on more smaller dedicated communities, resources, and websites; my time online is a lot more engaging and interesting. In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg reflected a similar sentiment in his recent Joe Rogan Interview about 37 minutes in. My warning when engaging in smaller online comunities is to make sure that you don’t fall into an echo chamber. A good way to avoid this pitfall is to keep in mind that if you find yourself agreeing with everything that a person says, that person is probably swindling you. Subscribe to and keep an eye on media that you are skeptical of and feel like you should keep an eye on, but be sure to prioritize your mental health first. Also, focus creating online communities of people you already know: bring together your friends and neighbors into group chats and Discord channels. Build connections.

I personally use a reader called Feedly, but I'm open to other RSS readers if anyone suggests one that works better for them. Open RSS seems to have a similar ethos to what I am expressing here. Below are some examples of things that you can plug into an RSS reader to inspire you. Many of these services can just be added to your RSS reader app by searching for them in the app without having to follow the below steps.

News:
I follow aggregate tech news sites Slashdot and Boing Boing, making my own RSS feed an aggregate of aggregates in a way. Furthermore, it's going to be important to follow individual writers and contributors as legacy media continues to fail and decline in quality. I suggest following Ken Klipinstein on Substack. Every Substack newsletter has an RSS feed that allows users to subscribe without needing an email address that can be accessed by adding /feed at the end of the URL.

NPR Podcasts also have RSS feeds, which can be accessed on the NPR website's podcast pages themselves:

In most RSS readers you can also set keyword filters for you name, company, revelant topics you are interested in, etc.

Sports:
I follow RSS for specific teams that give me news updates for example:
https://www.pff.com/pff-rss

Blogs:
Bruce Schneier is a leading cybersecurity expert, cryptographer, and author who writes about digital security, privacy, and government surveillance.
Here is the RSS link for his blog.

I am now dedicated to operating an RSS feed for this site.
Here is the RSS link for this blog.

Messaging:
Many RSS readers will now follow Telegram and Signal channels. This can be helpful when you follow someone on one of these apps and it's how they primarily get news and updates out.

Podcasts:
Usually, at least one of the streaming platforms that distributes podcasts you listen to will natively be supported by the RSS reader of your choice.

Youtube:
The Subscribe feature on Youtube notoriously does not work.You might miss out on new content or live streams from your favorite YouTubers simply because their latest video never appears on your subscription page, or you don’t receive a notification. Many RSS Readers will natively support Youtube channels just by you providing the URL to the Youtube channels that you want to follow.

Steam feeds:
The news page for any game on Steam has a link for an RSS feed. This allows you to get patch updates for games directly in your feed.

GitHub Release Feeds:
Repo releases:
https://github.com/:owner/:repo/releases.atom

Repo commits:
https://github.com/:owner/:repo/commits.atom

Private feed:
You can find Subscribe to your news feed in dashboard page after login
https://github.com/:user.private.atom?token=:secret

Repo tags:
https://github.com/:user/:repo/tags.atom

User activity
https://github.com/:user.atom

Open RSS also provides Github RSS feeds:
https://openrss.org/blog/github-rss-feeds

Weather:
The National Weather Service offers weather updates via RSS. For example here is the RSS feed for Albany:
https://www.weather.gov/rss_page.php?site_name=aly

What I've Read in The Second Half of 2024

2025-01-04T22:27:00.006-05:00

Inner Gold - Robert Johnson

Inner Gold is an exploration of the concept of psychological projection; where individuals attribute their own thoughts, feelings, and traits to others. Rather than use projection in a negative way, as it usually is in today’s discourse, Johnson talks about how we will project positive aspects of ourselves onto others that we ourselves are unable to handle. Johnson uses Jungian psychology to explain how recognizing and reclaiming these projected elements can lead to personal growth and deeper self-awareness. The book is pretty brief but deeply insightful; it makes complex psychological concepts accessible and practical for readers seeking self-improvement and a better understanding of their inner selves. I highly recommend this book out of everything I read over the past six months.

Earth To Moon - Moon Zappa

Moon’s memoir paints a whole new side of Frank Zappa that is missing from public perception and will change what his legacy is. Moon discusses growing up and how her father was largely absent between his touring and obsession with writing music, and her mother who was a full blown narcissist.

I grew up in a household EXACTLY like what is described in that book; one narcissist parent and one checked out parent while being the oldest child of three. I was told life's not fair when my parents were cruel, I was responsible for raising my siblings, taking care of my parents emotionally, and was shamed for not prioritizing anyone in the family before myself. It's uncanny how similar my experience is to what I read in this book. The twist is that I read Frank Zappa's autobiography multiple times as a teenager. I loved the chapter about him being a parent because he sounded so reasonable and down to earth. I wished that I lived in the household he described in that book. I guess Moon does too...

Something that stood out to me before reading this book is that Moon did an interview on Mark Maron’s podcast. Around the 1:01:13 timestamp Moon talks about this dipshit LA yoga anatomy class where they get cadavers donated to science so that they can pick up and handle the organs, and then immediately talk about going to Burning Man. After hearing about this yoga class I got unenrolled from being an organ donor in California.

Batman: White Knight - Sean Murphy

I made a mistake by reading this graphic novel / comic, the mistake being not to take reading recommendations from Reddit. Users there said that this series put the Batman / Joker dynamic on its head by making Batman the bad guy and the Joker the good guy. This really isn't the case and there wasn’t much in this series for me: the story is geared towards adolescents. I liked some of the art but a lot of the plot points felt like they were taken out of a scenario a group of kids came up with while playing in their backyard. A major plot point is that there are giant transportation tunnels under Gotham City that no one know about even though an army of workers was brought in to make these giant tunnels. Bruce Wayne’s father is shown to have done business with the Nazis but Bruce is not aware of this probably because of how Batman could be portrayed. Black Lives Matters is portrayed as a media manipulation rather than a grassroots movement.

I would instead recommend The Dark Knight Returns, animated by Frank Miller which depicts a Bruce Wayne who is aging out of the Batman role or The Killing Joke.

Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser

I first read this book in high school, I borrowed it from a friend’s house after I saw it sitting on a bookcase in their basement, and I forgot how much of an impact this book had on me. The investigation around Colorado Springs helped me understand that while growing up in Springfield Massachusetts did kinda suck, there were plenty of other places in America that were a ‘whole lot worse; that the stroads with Mcdonalds, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell were strategically planned.

Fast Food Nation is still a really good book. While it tries to end on a high note, it hurts to think how much worse off the US is when it comes to health, labor, and the wealth of its working class people. While I came back to this book to remind myself why I need to curb some unhealthy eating habits that I picked up during lockdown, I was surprised at how much of a contemporary realistic American slice-of-life book this is. In terms of eating, I remember my takeaways from this book being that pink ground beef is such much more worse for you because almost all of the bacteria in the meat is introduced during the processing process and that one fast food hamburger can include the meat from a dozen to hundreds of different cows. It’s a beef slurry patty.

The finer details is that ecoli is caused by feces. When you get bad food poisoning because of eating undercooked beef, it’s because there is either shit in your meat, or the cows themselves were living in shit before they were slaughtered. When you get food poisoning from veggies, it's because the vegetables grew downstream from a meat processing plant, and absorbed ecoli from runoff water from the plant. The symptoms of poisoning from ecoli in adults can include shitting and pissing blood, and it’s even more dangerous for children. There is a sentence in the book that says “the spillage rate at the gut table can be twenty percent”. Meaning that when they remove the intestines from the cows in the slaughterhouse, the insides of the intestines spills out onto the carcasses of 1 out of 5 of the other cows.

Because of this book I tend to eat a lot more poultry and fish though I know that industrial farming for birds and fish are not great either. I try to buy all my beef farm-direct. I love hamburgers, but it’s hard to get someone to sometimes understand why I won’t eat it if it’s pink inside. In high school, after reading this book, I ate a hamburger from Texas Roadhouse and even though I ordered it medium, it was all pink inside and delicious. I figured that 1) Texas Roadhouse was probably quality and 2) I was too chickenshit to send it back and that first bite was so good. I got more sick than I’ve ever been from food again. I didn’t shit or piss blood but for years the thought of the smell of Texas roadhouse turned my stomach upside down, our family went back some time after and I just ate the rolls and peanuts. Years later I’m standing at Benders in San Francisco ordering food. I order a medium burger (the sign said local grass-fed beef, who knows for sure though) and the guy in an English accent says “why do you do that to yourself? We grind the meat ourselves”. I guess he knew what I was talking about, but I couldn’t roll the dice anymore than I already was by ordering ground beef.

The TB12 Method - Tom Brady

After having spent the last few years focusing on weight lifting instead of cardio, I was finding that despite going to yoga classes and stretching regularly before and after exercise, I was more stiff that usual. Reading this book helped me understand that by making my muscles more dense and big I had optimized my muscles in a way that really didn’t accomplish what I wanted to do when distance running. I can now see how Brady’s concept of pliability plays into orchestrating your body’s physical health and it’s something that I am still working into my daily workout routines.

This is a really great book for anyone who invests in their health and body. Granted some of the habits and advice given is likely more suited for an adolescent than an adult. Some suggestions were interesting: Brady advocates for a plant based fiber rich diet and that Brady recommends sleeping in “bio-ceramic” sleepwear (also called recovery wear) and says that he is trying to figure out how to wear it all the time.

There are some great recipes in this book as well as suggested resistance training exercises that you can do yourself. It’s mostly basic exercises with resistance bands. Practicing pliability fully requires working often with a trainer who is trained in it, which I think is out of reach for most people in terms of both cost and logistics.

Cult of The Dead Cow - Joseph Mann

Cult of The Dead Cow is a written history of the eponymous hacking group. I voraciously read a lot of the text files they had posted when I was a teenager and the book describing the CDC as a labyrinth is right on the nose. This book revealed that Beto O’rouke was a member of CDC, though he was more of a creative writer than a hacker. It also revealed that the federal government used the CDC remote access tool BackOriface in international operations.

Just like how the book It Came From Something Awful draws a straight line from Rich Kyanka creating Something Awful to Donald Trump getting elected president, this book draws a straight line from the Grateful Dead to the existence of this hacking group - whose members would go on to proliferate in just about every major tech company. The member Mudge is now the CIO of DARPA. One member contributed heavily to Windows XP Service Pack 2 (maybe in 2024 that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was at the time. Windows XP was an awful product before SP2). The group's name may sound funny, but their existence has more than one fingerprint on the lives of anyone who has ever accessed the Internet. Funnily enough, you could consider this book a prequel to both It Came From Something Awful and Mindfuck.

WizzyWig - Ed Piskor

The titular character, as well as the story in general, is a composite of hackers throughout computer history. I would recommend reading Accidental Empires, or The Art of Deception instead of this. I had read the first volume of this comic when Boing Boing posted about it sometime in the early 2010s. I was looking forward to reading the remaining volumes of this comic when they came out, but I never got around to them when they eventually came out as life caught up with me.

With the recent news of Ed Piskor killing himself after being accused of sexual misconduct, I figured I might as well put a pin in this series as I was interested to see the direction the story went. The story in the book exaggerates injustices against real life hacker Kevin Mitnick that don’t need to be embellished. The only humor in the book is really just being crude for the sake of being crude. I don’t really find floppy dicks compelling, especially if they don’t have any relation to the story. If you’re interested in learning about hackers I would recommend just sticking to primary sources, there’s plenty of talks that Mitnick himself gave and plenty of recordings of the Off The Wall radio program out there. There’s nothing new or interesting in this book unfortunately.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

As a cyberpunk book, Snow Crash does what Neuromancer did when it came to predicting the direction of computer technology is/was heading, but in a more contemporary way than Neuromancer. The book at times is a little too edgy, the way that Stephenson writes a teenage female protagonist in the face of the threat of sexual assault is cringe. However, I genuinely think that Snow Crash is a seminal work that defines and influenced the way we think about the internet and virtual reality today. The way that Stephenson weaves Sumerian history and lore into the story offers insight into bronze age influence on language, philosophy, and our myths that exist today without the usual interference of Abrahamic religions.

The Parable of The Sower - Olivia Butler

I read this book after Snow Crash, I had mentioned to a coworker that I was so surprised at how well Neuromancer and Snow Crash predicted the current state and direction of computer technology; I wanted to find an even more recent cyberpunk book that would continue to do the same thing. He recommended this book… The Parable of The Sower is not that book. After the first 100 pages, I was of the mind that The Parable of The Sower is post apocalyptic young adult fiction for the children of people who donate to NPR. I was getting the impression that the book was very derivative; it wasn’t until I looked at the publishing page of this book and saw that it was written in 1993. The reality of the situation is that this book was ahead of its time and all post-apocalyptic fiction after it has borrowed from it either directly or indirectly. As a result I would put this book at the top of my post-apocalyptic fiction recommendations, over Alas Babylon and The Road.

Polls are a 20th century tool in the 21st century

2024-10-13T12:35:00.000-04:00

In the information age you cannot honestly get a representative polling sample of anything other than "people who are willing to take surveys". People who take surveys are weird. I know this because I take surveys. And after college the only job I was able to get was to sit in an Abt SRBI call center in Hadley Massachusetts where I had to conduct Pew Research surveys asking women about their pap smears; the more honest answer as to why I take surveys is that I have a penance to pay.

Accuse me of using the availability heuristic. Having worked in a research call center, I can tell you that the people who take these surveys are not reflective of average Americans. They are people who still have a landline phone. They are the people who are so lonely, bored, and senile that they will send thousands of dollars in Google Play gift cards to scammers with foreign accents. They will talk to anybody that will listen. You'll save more lives doing survey calls than you will working the crisis line, believe me, I've done that job too.

In the 21st century some surveys are still only conducted on landlines as a way to guarantee that the person that is being rang is physically in the place that they are being surveyed. Think of all the people you know that have a landline and actually answer it. All of the people you know that's had a Nelson Box in their house. Do those people, even if you actually even know any, reflect an accurate sampling of America?

The second cohort of data you're getting in your polling is bad actors. There's nothing stopping an individual from using tools like Selenium and Beautiful Soup in conjunction the Chat GPT API to automatically fill out surveys online. Heck, you can do the same exact thing on phone lines. Here's a quick example I whipped up using an AI vendor:

For what it's worth, I time-boxed for myself an hour to configure and coach the LLM as well as record the audio. With a little more time this LLM could do much better. This kind of work is literally not worth any one individual's time outside of tinkering. But if someone has a vested interest in manipulating polls? This is money on the table.

While individual bad actors do exist, they typically represent a smaller portion of the overall sample. It wasn't unusual for someone on the phone to respond to your questions while being completely unserious or dismissive. I remember an older colleague once sharing a story about how "sometimes you just do what you have to do to get the job done", which ended with her telling me about a time where she got a guy to finish a whole survey even though she could tell that he was pleasuring himself on the call. The most you could hope for is to note that the survey taker was disingenuous or likely messing with you, but that was it. It wasn't the survey taker's jobs to triage the data, however when's the last time you saw a public election poll that listed the sample size and notes on why certain responses were excluded from the data?

The absence of clear information about research methodologies in most election polls suggests that these polls are more of a media-driven product designed for public consumption than a reliable source of objective data. This lack of transparency turns polls into a form of entertainment or narrative shaping, where their primary function may be to engage audiences, influence perceptions, or reinforce certain viewpoints, rather than to provide rigorous and unbiased insights into voter behavior.

Further Reading: The Problem with polls.

What I've Read Halfway Into 2024

2024-06-23T13:25:00.000-04:00

The Woman in Me - Brittney Spears

This book made me realize just how in the limelight Brittney Spears has been in almost my entire lifetime, because I realized I was aware of just about every aspect of her life as I read through this book despite never really being a fan. This book is heartbreaking.

Kill It With Fire - Marianne Bellotti

I bought this book solely because of the cover and identifying the dumpster fire on the cover as being the place I was working at the time. It was happenstance, but this book is really good. It provides a framework for dealing with technical debt, offering strategies to update aging systems without massive resource expenditure in a way that I could identify with personally. It addressed large technical problems/projects I have faced at work and confounded solutions and approaches to solving these problems. This book helped me land my next job and escape the dumpster fire.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Phillip K Dick

I’ve read four other Phillip K Dick books and a handful of his short stories. I don’t know what I can say about this book without giving it away but this was likely my least favorite of his books that I have read so far. I'd suggest reading first Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ubik.

Fighting Fantasy Books - Various Authors

I came across these books when looking for solo RPG books; seeing that Steve Jackson had written and co-authored some of these got my attention. I read / played City of Thieves by Ian Livingstone and Sorcery! - The Shamutani Hills by Steve Jackson. These books are Choose Your Own Adventure books with dice rolling. At first I thought that these books were a lot more forgiving than the CYOA books, but by them time I finished them I realized the game-play is exactly the same: if you don’t make the exact right decisions in the right order, you will not win. Also like the CYOA books, these are geared towards children. I would recommend Ironsworn instead of these books.

Neuromancer - William Gibson

is the first book I’ve read since I can remember where I had to use Sparknotes to keep up with what was going on. The characters speak in a casual way to each other, similar to hard boiled detective novels which is tricky (for me) to follow. There’s a lot going on here; you can see where the Wachowskis got a lot of their inspiration from for The Matrix. It’s fascinating how Gibson hit the nail on the head in the 80s when it came to the evolution of AI and technology. It gets said a lot already but it really needs to be acknowledged just how prophetic Gibson was when it came to technology here.

The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan

The central idea of this media analysis book is that technologies are the messages, rather than the content of the communication. I know that's a heady statement to make, but that's what this book is. It mainly relies on formatting and images to convey its message. Many times while reading this book, I kept thinking of the “It insists upon itself” meme; I do think that this book insists on itself. I will also say that there are a lot of cool ideas in this book that, if you were a communications major or marketing major, you could write papers on and elaborate on. You can also chase down and explore further the many ideas that come up in this book.

She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

- Sarah Smarsh

My friend lent me this book after I said I wanted to read more book about and by women. She Come by It Natural is a heartfelt tribute to Parton and the women who resonate with her music, but it doesn't bring much new to the table when it comes to being a biography about Parton. Smarsh's admiration for Parton is clear and her narrative is filled with personal anecdotes and reflections and the book largely reiterates well-known aspects of Parton's life and career.

I was under the impression that most of America knew of Parton and the charitable work she has done. On the subject of Parton’s Imagination Library project, the book quotes children’s author Robert Munsch saying “I thought of Dolly Parton as this singer with the really big boobs who was in the movies with, like, the really big boobs. I had no idea.” I was reading this book while riding the bus and after asking what I was reading a lady said “I used to LOVE watching Elvira on TV”. I guess if that's you're impression of Dolly Parton, maybe check this one out.

Empire of The Summer Moon - S.C. Gwynne

Gwynne's meticulous research and vivid storytelling bring to life the incredible saga of Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche chief, and his extraordinary journey from a fierce warrior to a respected leader and eventual advocate for his people. The book not only provides a comprehensive account of the Comanche's way of life but also paints a broader picture of the American West during a time of profound transformation. Gwynne's ability to blend historical facts makes this a compelling read that is both informative and captivating.

Growing up in New England and learning about the tribes that lived there versus the plains tribes which I really only first really learned about in this book was fascinating. Understanding how torture, murder, and rape were accepted parts of plains natives' lives really helps shatter the Noble Savage myth that a lot of us are taught. I've listed these books in the order in which I finished them. I read half of this book during lock-down, and recently finished it. I would recommend this book before all others on this list.

How to exclude traffic from Google Analytics

2024-02-29T21:52:00.002-05:00

With previous versions of Google Analytics (ga.js) you could simply add a utm_nooverride=1 parameter to a redirect URL to retain the source data from the first referral instead of attributing conversion to the last redirect. If you are trying to exclude online payments / checkout data from Google Analytics: This doesn't work with redirects to banks as this parameter is not passed along, so the issuer will be seen as the referrer.

In the most recent version of Google Analytics library at the time of writing (analytics.js), the utm_nooverride=1 parameter is not a recommended (and perhaps unworkable) solution (as noted in this blog here). The recommended solution in Universal Analytics is to add the domains to the referral exclusions list. From Google's own documentation:

The referral exclusion list uses CONTAINS matching. For example, if you enter example.com, then traffic from sales.example.com is also excluded (because the domain name contains example.com).

When you are adding domains to your exclusions list, you can add the bank url base domain. By adding the base domain, you can exclude subdomains of redirect referral URLs (and 3DS redirect URLs for payments). Please note, this solution does require some upfront manual work, but will exclude these redirects as referrals in the future.

There also seems to be some advanced workarounds using cross-domain tracking, which you can find in Google's own documentation.

Why did my expired credit card get processed?

2024-02-28T12:21:00.001-05:00

An expired credit card is not necessarily an invalid credit card. It's ultimately your credit card issuer's decision if they want to accept your transaction. While the merchant who processed your transaction almost certainly sent along your CVC code and expiry date in the payment request, sometimes the credit card issuers and/or acquirers do not even look at or process that information. If there is enough information to go off of to for the issuer to believe that this is a valid transaction, they still may decide to process your transaction regardless of your card being expired or the CVC being incorrect.

Most major credit card issuers and acquirers now also offer merchants software that automatically updates subscription customer card data as well. On top of that, expiration dates are not considered sensitive information. Under certain use cases, it's fine for merchants to retry your transaction with a new expiration date - it's pretty easy to guess and build logic around what your new expiration date probably is.

This also means that merchants should never decline a card at checkout just because it looks to be expired. In my experience, there is no change in authorization rates between expired cards and cards that have not expired yet.

If you are a consumer, always destroy old expired cards when you receive a new one. And do not assume your account has closed just because your credit card has expired.

What I've Read in The Second Half of 2023

2023-12-07T00:51:00.002-05:00

(First half of the year here.)

I read or listened to most of these books by borrowing the digital copies or digital audio-books from my library. I would recommend you do the same thing. I would also suggest looking to see if you can sign up for local county or for nearby cities’ library cards. Despite not living in a nearby city, I was able to register for a library card; they have a vast selection of content compared to my local library system. While each book cover here links to an affiliate Amazon page, you can also sometimes find the same physical copy of the book you are looking for on Better World Books or Thriftbooks.

The Marching Morons - C. M. Kornbluth

Short story by C. M. Kornbluth. It’s hard to tell if this book was a satire or an actual argument to try to justify eugenics. The way that this idea is unfolded in the story made me think the author was a eugenicist until the rest of the story peels that back a bit. The book could make an interesting discussion for a course on utopias and dystopias. Otherwise Kurt Vonnegut’s quote “we are what we pretend to be” comes to mind along with the fact that a lot of early pulp science fiction can turn out to be complicated.

Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and The Stoning of San Francisco - Alia Volz

A mix being a tour de force of the history of San Francisco and a personal memoir of being raised by hippies from the sixties through the early eighties: told through the perspective of the daughter of the woman who ran Sticky Fingers Brownies in San Francisco. I first heard about this book when the author gave a talk at one of my local libraries.

I would say that there probably is not a lot of new things here in this book for you if you’ve previously read or studied the history of San Francisco or marijuana in the US. The biggest takeaway from this book for me is the quote “San Francisco is a city of mass migrations and collapse”. The author of the book does that thing people in the Bay Area do where they’ll acknowledge that we’re on stolen Ohlone land, and then kind of complain about transplants; she says that she “sees techies as an invading force to colonize and pillage”, all the while she acknowledges that her parents were gentrifying San Francisco.

The author kind of also leans into entertaining the idea that certain characters in the book might be psychic. I dunno man... I was taught to never trust a hippy. Here is a doctor in 1967 basically describing hippies as being incredibly passive aggressive people.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher

When I started this book it felt like a philosophy book written by a Redditor with its references to V For Vendetta, Children of Men, and Fight Club; as I continued reading to book I found myself agreeing with it wholeheartedly, take that as you will. Capitalist realism is "loosely defined as the predominant conception that capitalism is the only viable economic system" - which I’m pretty sure makes the book an investigation of the Zizek quote "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism". At times the book can come off as wordy and pretentious, at one point the author makes an obscure reference to the film Videodrome that would leave the reader lost had they never seen the film. Capitalist Realism reminds me of an assigned reading I would get for a philosophy class where we would have a compelling class discussion about the book for one day and then we’d never discuss it again. It also reminds me of something that the hosts of the podcast Chapo Traphouse would love. Sure enough while I was reading this book, they did a segment on the book. Small world.

Scenes From The Real World - Harlan Ellsion

Harlan Ellison was a science fiction writer that was revered for his writing, but loathed for his personality. This video gives a good impression of the vibe Ellison gave off. In hindsight, I'm not really sure who should be reading Ellison. Maybe he's for misanthropes who are tired of being misanthropes and are hoping that holding a mirror up to themselves will help them.

The Scenes From The Real World stories come from a collection of short stories called Stalking the Nightmare. I didn’t read the short stories in the book because I don’t want to read any further from the guy that wrote I Have No Mouth And Must Scream and who also vocally resented his audience. Instead I wanted to read about supposed real life experiences from someone difficult like Ellison.

The first story starts with about how his most interesting sexual experience was tying up a woman naked in her living room, leaving her to be found by her mother. I used the cover of the audio book for this one so that you have to look at his face on its cover as you read that. He puts the story first because he thinks that sex is what it takes to get the audience’s attention, but since Ellison has basically expressed contempt for his readers in the past, it’s more clear the story’s intention is to let you know that Ellison very much wants you to know that he can get laid if he wants to. The second story in this chapter gets into how he once got into an altercation with some men who this time he very much want to let you know are black - it comes off with the same “try-hardness” of the first story to say the least. Ellison was known for kicking the asses people in general, so he's probably not making this story up. Again, take that as you will.

The second chapter is about how he was fired from his job at Disney on the first day for making rude Disney jokes in front of Roy Disney. This story is worth reading. The third story is about a NASA press conference on Saturn. The fourth story is about dealing with the politics of being a writer in Hollywood, this story is also worth reading and reminds me of certain episodes of The Critic. The last story is about his experience on the road as a carny. Also worth reading.

Killerbowl - Gary K. Wolf

Picked this up because I saw it in the author bibliography of Who Censored Rodger Rabbit, and thought it looked interesting. This book is a good read for someone who thought that the 1975 movie Rollerball was an interesting concept but poorly executed. Had this book come out before the short story Rollerball was based off, of rather than two years after, I imagine the movie rights for this book would have been picked up instead. In fact, some covers advertise that this book is “Deadlier than ROLLERBALL!” It’s pulp paperback science fiction from the 70s. I kept thinking that the author of this book was the author of Of Mice And Men.

I was annoyed by a plot point in the book. Incriminating evidence that is on tape is destroyed. No one thought to make backups. I guess in the 1970s data redundancy was not something many people talked about.

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America - Marcia Chatelain

In the 1988 Eddie Murphy film Coming To America, John Amos plays a franchise owner of a knockoff McDonalds restaurant. At one point of the book, Franchise paints Amos’ character as a sort of snap shot into the zeitgeist and history of black McDonalds franchise owners, The book chronicles this history strating with McDonalds relying on black franchisees to grow their brand in black communities in Chicago up today.

One of the repeating themes in the book is that the term “black-owned” obscures the systems that keep money outside of black communities, and is a problem that capitalism itself cannot fix. Reading this book was like learning about another level of American class history that I never knew about, akin to reading about how police would lie in wait to beat union workers and steal their money after they had cashed their paychecks in The Riders Come Out At Night.

Mouse Tales: A behind The Ears Look At DisneyLand - David Koenig

This book, published in 1994, is a little dated now. If Disneyland is a topic you’re interested in, you’re better off listening to / watching Kevin Perjurer’s Youtube channel Defunctland; which probably borrows from this book, but definitely borrows from more established Disney History books when doing research. The book starts as a history of Disneyland (which is better covered by Perjurer’s Defunctland) and then goes into a series of uncited stories from employees working at the park. The stories are broken up into chapters such as Cast, Rides, Injuries, Lawsuits, etc. I think I most enjoyed all the ways Disney cast members would play pranks in the park, and learning about the politics around going to court against Disney in the jurisdiction in which it is a major employer.

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

I’m not in a place to write anything about The Metamorphosis which is new, compelling, or interesting. I picked up a book of Kafka’s stories because in the linear notes on Frank Zappa’s album We’re Only in it For The Money, the track The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny says to read Kafka's short story In The Penal Colony before listening to the track. The track ends up being an avant garde interpretation or approximation of the short story. The short story also has a provocative ending that resonates probably even more today than it did when the short story was written in 1914.

Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Jesus and John Wayne is an admittedly dry history of evangelicalism in the United States and how evangelical leaders slowly culturally aligned their version of Jesus and the gospel with “traditional” gender roles. I put traditional in quotation marks because the book details how evangelicals came to define traditional. Like I said about The Riders Come Out At Night earlier this year, If you’re an American or have been following American politics closely, you can probably drop off of the book from where you ended up starting in real life and skip the last few chapters. You’re probably already an expert on the subject.

NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories - NOFX and Jeff Alulis

Initially all I was going to write for this was: “The first sentence of this book is ‘The first time I drank piss was on the fire escape overlooking downtown Los Angeles.’ ten out of ten, buy this as a stocking suffer for someone you love... or someone you hate”. But after the first chapter, which was probably put there to pull you in with shock value, you find it’s not needed because the book gets dark, personal, and profoundly fucked up real quick. There’s frankly... some messed up stuff in here, with that being said, this book is very good. The way that the book is edited demonstrates that some of the personal stuff band members share is the first time they’ve shared some of this stuff with the other guys. It kinda feels like church confession at times.

I was able to get an audio book copy from the San Francisco Library after it had been on loan for months. The audio book is the way to go here, the chapters are read by the band members themselves, and the two early ex-band members of the band’s chapters are read by Tommy Chong and Jello Biafra, both excellent orators. In a similar vein that’s worth mentioning, The Dirt - which is a band autobiography on Mötley Crüe is also an incredibly interesting book about a group of messed up people, each chapter told from the point of view of one of the members. Books like these really go to show ways in which life can be completely awful.

Strangled Queen - Maurice Druon

This is the second book in the French Accursed Kings series. As the cover above says, this series inspired George Martin to write his book series. I read the first book after trying to get my Song of Ice and Fire fix after having finished the books that have been released sometime in the mid-teens. These books are historical fiction based around French kings in the 14th century. The books are about 200 pages each, so they're not as in depth as the ASOIAF books, as a result they kind of feel like Game of Thrones-lite, but that's not fair because these books came first. The first book has better plots and characters than the second book. It's pretty apparent what's going to happen in this book, given the title, especially after you finish the first book. Maybe French people already know everything that their monarchs got up to.

How to Setup an Electric Guitar

2023-12-02T12:47:00.006-05:00

Years ago I was looking for someone to show me how to do a guitar setup. My music teacher got me in touch with a guitar tech who told me that if I paid for a setup he'd walk me trough the process and let me take notes, that nobody should have to pay for a setup more than once. He ended up making the notes for me, and sure enough I've never paid for another setup! I get tired of taking picture after picture of these instructions so I'm posting them here for posterity. They've been cleaned up a bit.

These are the original written instructions.

You will need:

a set of allen wrenches that measure in metric and imperial. Eklind makes quality allen wrenches.
a 6 inch empire depth gauge.

Setup Steps:

1. Adjust the neck as straight as possible with the truss rod using the strings as a guideline. (You can check the neck by holding the guitar like a rifle with the body away from you and looking down the neck towards the body of the guitar (using the strings as a guideline)). I go by "tighten for bow, loosen for hump". I don't like thinking visually in terms of clockwise and counter clockwise because I've confused myself before by turning the wrong way when the nut is at the bottom of the neck rather than at the head stock.

2. Adjust the action of the strings at the saddles measure 2/32nds at the 15th fret while fretting the first fret. (Just put a capo on the first fret.)

3. Adjust intonation by checking the notes of each string:

- If they are flat, move the saddles forward.

- If they are sharp, move the saddles back (away from the neck).

Once the notes on the 12th fret match the open notes of the strings - you're good to go!

4. Adjust pickups by fretting the last fret and raising or lowering the pickups to 2 1/2 and adjusting by increments of 32nds.

How to Get Therapy or Mental Health Care Under Kaiser Permanente

2023-11-28T21:25:00.004-05:00

As Always Avoid Alliteration slowly turns into something more resembling a professional blog, rather than a source of ad revenue, I hesitated to post this guide as there is a stigma around mental heath. I've decided that if being open, honest, and helpful about my experiences in trying to find a mental health provider puts me at risk of not receiving a job offer in the future, I'm better off for it. If this helps one person, then it's all more than worthwhile. The way in which Kaiser Permanente operates is far more shameful than anything I am going to say here. I initially wrote this post as a forum post, replying to someone else who was experiencing the same issues with Kaiser Permanente Mental Health Services. I have somewhat expanded on and cleaned up that initial post.

If you are experiencing crisis and need to talk to someone immediately call 1-800-309-2131 at any time of day. If you're paranoid you can dial *67 first and this will mask your phone number. You can also call in using a free Google Voice number.

I want to set the expectation with you that Kaiser's mental health system is specifically made to be negligent and discourage anyone who is experiencing mental health issues from actually using their services. In October 2023 Kaiser settled with the state of California in regards to not providing mental health care that they were legally required to provide. Second article. This is also not the first time Kaiser has been fined for this exact same problem. Impacted patients will receive no compensation as a result of this settlement. At the end of the day, there's a litany of reasons why Kaiser Legal has multiple floors of office space in a building overlooking Lake Merritt.

Here are the steps to receive mental health care from Kaiser Permanente. I'd recommend reading through all of the steps before starting your journey:

1. Call the Kaiser Mental Health office local to you (Google your local number).

2. Almost certainly leave a voicemail for an appointment. Kaiser will say that they will call you back in 48 hours. They almost certainly wont. You can kill two birds with one stone by preemptively leaving a bad Google review while you're on hold to leave a voicemail, for what it's worth.

3. Repeat this process, playing phone tag until you get someone on the phone. If Kaiser can't reach you on the phone this is where this process ends and you will need to call them back.

4. Once you get someone on the phone, Kaiser will try to offer you an appointment with a Kaiser therapist in three months, or if you're lucky, you'll get an outside referral right off the bat. Ask for one right away if the soonest you can get an appointment is more than a month away.

Optional step: If you get a Kaiser therapist plan to be stood up on your appointment in three months or plan to have the appointment cancelled the day before. In California you need to file a compliant with Kaiser about this before escalating to the state. (In California you have the right to timely access to care.) This requires documenting every phone call and appointment in forms they provide, and then again on forms the state provides. So if you have the energy to file a complaint, start documenting every phone call and conversation you have. Kaiser meanwhile will provide documentation of every single time they've called you and every appointment they've offered. The intention is to paint a picture that you the individual trying to get mental healthcare are the one that has been inaccessible this whole time, not them the giant company with thousands of workers who aren't staffed appropriately to pick up the phone or call you back.

5. Call the outside referral program and have them find a therapist for you. While they will provide you a list of therapists you can call yourself, they usually know of a few that are actively open to receiving new clients. Around the time I went through this process I literally called over 50 therapists and did not get a single call back.

Optional step: While calling around I got a more than one recordings saying the therapist I called is not accepting any male or cisgender male clients. This is illegal in my state of California. If this happens, and you have the energy, record the recordings and file complaints with your state's mental health board or board of psychology.

6. Repeat steps 1 through 3 with the outside referral program. They tend to be more professional than anyone at Kaiser that you'll talk to and will actually call you back in the time frame that they give you. If you go longer than a week without getting a therapist with the outside referral, Kaiser is pretty good about just giving you a different outside referral once you have one, and renewing your referral once you have a therapist you like.

7. Expect to initially get a few really bad therapists before landing on one that rocks. Plan to continue looking for a therapist again after a few sessions while continuing to see the therapist you have.

As I stated at the beginning: Kaiser's mental health system is specifically made to be negligent and discourage anyone from experiencing mental health issues from actually using the service. Good luck and I'm sorry that you had to read this article.

Getting Xbox 360 Wireless Controllers and Dongle Working on Windows 10 and 11

2023-11-26T20:50:00.001-05:00

In the past you used to only have to install your Xbox 360 drivers from an installer executable that you would either get from Microsoft's site or, if you still have it, from a CD that came with your hardware. This no longer works. The good news is that current versions of Windows now already have the Xbox 360 peripheral drivers ready to go, Windows for whatever reason, no longer automatically recognizes the peripherals when they are plugged into your PC. In order to get your hardware to work on newer versions of Windows, you need to select the appropriate driver from the Device Manager. These steps will also work for a third party aftermarket dongle or controller.

(If you're here because your first party Microsoft dongle died, this Youtuber found a repair, but please note the component that needs to be replaced is a micro component, which is a tricky fix even if your handy with a solder iron.)


You can no longer use the installer, you will need to manually assign the drivers.

1. Plug in your Xbox 360 wireless dongle into the PC. If you are plugging in a wired controller just follow these steps for now as well and plug in your controller.

2. Start device manager. You can start it by pressing Windows Key + R and pasting in devmgmt.msc. You can also type device manager into the search that comes up after you hit the start button.

3. You should see your dongle as an unknown device. You're going to want to right click on it and select the Update Driver option.

4. Select the option to Browse My Computer For Driver Software.

5. Select the option that says Let Me Pick From a List of Available Drivers. You should now see a list of available Xbox 360 drivers in the list to select from:

Be sure to select the appropriate driver for your peripheral. If you're installing the dongle you should do this for the dongle first. Let your dongle discover your controller, and then you may need to repeat this process for the first controller you connect once it is also discovered as an unrecognized device.

PLEASE NOTE: At some point Microsoft made it so that the Home/Guide button is automatically hard-mapped to open up a Windows Game overlay. This, probably intentionally, conflicts with using Steam Big Picture mode and the Steam overlay. As a result I would suggest installing the earliest version of the drivers that will work for your Xbox 360 peripherals. You can also try reverting the controller firmware by opening the Xbox Accessories app, then pressing Windows Key + R. and then running:

> xboxaccessories:\\firmwareupdate?legacyDowngrade=true

If for whatever reason your drivers are not available, you can install the drivers from the executable, and then seeing if the drivers are then listed after a reboot. For posterity, I have included a download link the the drivers here since they don't seem to be available at all from Microsoft themselves any longer.

No emails, follow up questions and comments below please. Thanks.

Sync Windows system time with time.windows.com on startup (all Windows versions)

2023-09-24T13:59:00.001-04:00

Here are the steps to sync Windows system time with time.windows.com on startup. I've confirmed that this solutions works on Windows 7 and 10, it should also work on all currently available versions of the Windows operating system:

1. Open PowerShell by typing PowerShell into the search bar in your Windows start bar.

2. Copy and paste the below line of code into PowerShell:

%windir%\system32\sc.exe start w32time task_started

3. Save As... the file to your Windows Startup folder for all users as "timeSync.bat" or whatever name will help you remember what this file is. It needs to be saved as a .bat file or it will not work.

Where your startup folder is located will depend on your version and installation of Windows, but you can try: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp

Please note that some versions of Windows has a startup folder for individual users as well as for all system users. Individual startup folders are located somewhere within the user's folder.

4. After you add the file to your startup folder, I would hit Windows Key + R and run msConfig. From there make sure that the bat file is set to run.

5. Restart your system.

It may take 30 to 60 seconds for this bat file to run after a user logs on. If you have a way to get the script to execute faster please comment below.

6. If the system time does not automatically update after startup hit Windows Key + R and run services.msc

Make sure that the local service Windows Time is set to Automatic startup type. To modify this, right click on Windows Time and select Properties. Reset your system again.

Use cases for this issue:

I setup a dual boot between Ubuntu and Windows. Whenever I boot up Ubuntu, the system time gets converted to UTC which throws off the system time for Windows. Since websites' security certificates rely on system time to verify certificates I could not access most websites and the system time threw off how the f.lux application worked.

What I've Read Halfway into 2023

2023-06-23T11:45:00.005-04:00

Traumnovelle / Dream Story

is the 1926 novella by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler that the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut was based off of. The film is pretty true to the flow of the book with the exception that the film is much more... provocative than the book. I wanted to understand the ending of the film better where the doctor finds the mask on his pillow. In the book it is insinuated that his wife finds it and places it there, rather than it being a mystery. The book ends in that bedroom scene with him confessing what he’s been up to - the toy store scene at the end of the film was added by Kubrick. The title Dream Story also confirms that the use of soft lenses in the film was an intentional choice by Kubrick to give certain scenes a dream-like quality.

Barbarians At The Gate

What stood out in this book to me was the extreme extravagance the executive class lived in fifty to forty years ago. As the wealth gap in America widens I can only imagine what that life is like now, reading the descriptions in the book made me kinda disgusted. The book is pretty long and dry, you’d probably get more enjoyment out of watching the HBO film adaption of the book. The film comes from a time where the movie was made to cater to multiple different family members who might watch the film together; there is a small comedy B plot about the family dog taking airplane rides. If you’re interested in the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, I’d recommend reading the individual news articles written by the investigative journalists that wrote this book.

American Kingpin

goes into the personal life of the main founder of The Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, up until after his apprehension and imprisonment. The book gets into Ulbricht’s ideology as well as the ideology of the law enforcement personal that are trying to find him. The biggest surprise from this book was how utterly incompetent law enforcement was, and how the investigation had to get all the way up to the Department of Justice in order to stop the crab mentality different law enforcement agencies had when pursuing the founders of The Silk Road.

Inner Work

is one of the best self-therapy books I think I have ever read and you don’t need to read the whole book. It establishes how you need to talk to yourself and how to best use your active imagination to cultivate mental health. I think I would have considered this book a little “out there” if I had not studied psychology in college first. This will be a book where I buy multiple times to give to people I know and I only really read the last half of the book.

When Food Is Love

The gist of the book is that if you don’t have a healthy concept of self-love or self esteem you will repress negative feelings you have. Overeating is one of the ways that this repression can manifest; food is there for you when no one else is. I wish the author spent more time on strategies for building self-love and self esteem rather than talking about themselves. Maybe some people will find the author's personal examples helpful, I did not.

The Riders Come Out at Night

gives a meticulously researched history of policing in Oakland California and a protracted list of probably all of the known illegal things they have done and continue to do. The book starts with The Riders; who kidnapped, planted evidence on, beat, and tortured citizens of Oakland. From there the book goes into the history of policing in Oakland and San Francisco including the how the KKK actively recruited police officers and sheriffs. The book then chronicles all of the US policing incidents of killing civilians that has happened since. This is a good book, but if you have been on top of the shit show that is American policing, you can probably drop off of the book from where you ended up starting in real life and skip to the last few chapters.

Who Censored Rodger Rabbit

Only picked this up because the idea that Who Framed Rodger Rabbit was derived from an 80s adult fantasy mystery novel was so bizarre to me. It’s a mystery book; I wont give anything away. While reading the book I thought it was silly and I wanted to be done with it, the last page made me want to re-read the book with a new perspective on it. The author Gary Wolf also has mastered the art of the garden path sentence.

The Road To Jonestown

is written in an investigative journalism style and goes up through the life of Jim Jones, and the history of The Peoples’ Temple, up until after the massacre that took place in Guyana. If you’re interested in a first hand account of how a narcissist could manipulate a group of people to kill themselves, this is the book for you. If you’re an American that lived through the Trump presidency, there’s probably not a lot here for you to pick up unless you have a specific fascination in The Peoples’ Temple.

The Minority Report / We Can Remember it for you Wholesale (Phillip K Dick Short Stories)

From Robert Crumb's The Religious Experience of Philip K.Dick

Wanted to read some short stories from Dick since I'm a fan of a lot of his books. The Minority Report and We Can Remember it for you Wholesale are sort of almost half-baked ideas with The Minority Report being the better short story of the two. I watched Total Recall recently after reading We Can Remember it for you Wholesale and it's pretty obvious that they slapped a completely different sci-fi screenplay someone else had written onto the end of Dick's story.

Jennifer Government

As a teenager I played Nation States, which was programmed by the author to promote the book. The consensus of people on the Nation States forums that read the book was that it was pretty good and worth reading. I agree, the book is pretty good and worth reading. It’s a dystopian novel written in 2003 where the world is more or less controlled by corporations. Like a lot of (good) dystopian and science fiction books, as time goes on you start to see the parallels between yesterday’s fiction and today’s reality - which probably makes this book even more interesting to read twenty years after its publication.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

is written by Christopher Wylie who was the whistleblower for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This book goes into depth about how they, and eventually Russia, were able to influence American, British, and African elections. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that every person that lives in a democracy should read this book. If you're not going to read it at least take the time to try to create an ad campaign on Facebook or Reddit and take a look at how many tools are available to you to really drill down into the specific person that you can to create ads to cater to. Then keep in mind that you can do that without the phone tracking data and hundreds of data points on individual people that Cambridge Analytica had. Also keep in mind that while there is some oversight over the US collecting data, there is no oversight about them buying it.

The Punisher

I thought reading the original series would give some insight into why police and fascists have co-opted the Punisher logo. There was no answer in reading the original series. The answer is that Chris Kyle, the American Sniper guy, used the symbol during his deployment in Iraq and it picked up traction as he built his personal brand.

“We all thought what the Punisher did was cool: He righted wrongs,” Kyle stated in his 2012 book American Sniper. “So we adopted his symbol, a skull, and made it our own."

The quote is interesting because frankly, the only kind of adult that would find the Punisher cool is one who cannot understand nuance even if they are repeatedly hit over the head with it. The Punisher has a complete black and white view of the world and it's shown time and time again that his obsession with his own definition of justice and vengeance is destructive. For example, in the series there is a little girl who is shot due to the main character's obsession with vengeance. He does not stop to help the little girl. Maybe in the future I'll put my German degree to use and write an article about how and why fascist movements co-opt cultural symbols.

This comic book was written for children. There's not really much to it, the thing I liked the most was the color coordination and color layout of the individual comic pages. The hyper violence in the comic clashes with what I assumed was comic code regulations of the time. There's lots of people getting shot and killed but no blood or gore at all. In a way the censorship seems counter productive because the gruesomeness and horror of war-like violence is completely taken away. If you're looking for something in this vain I would instead recommend the original The Mask comic series published by Dark Horse.

How to Fix The Manhunt Memory Card Error on PS2

2022-05-05T01:28:00.007-04:00

If your copy of Manhunt running on the PlayStation 2 hangs at the save screen, the solution is to simply use an 8MB memory card. Even though the error message that eventually shows up says that an official Sony memory card is needed, the issue specifically has to do with the size of the memory card. According to the current reverse engineered documentation of the PS2 hardware: for unknown reasons, certain games do not work if the memory card is larger than expected. If you are using Open PS2 Loader (OPL) virtual memory cards WILL work, they just need to be manually set to be 8MB. Due to the bug mentioned above you should only be using virtual memory cards of 8MB for all games.

I was not going to do one of those recipe website moves where I provide a whole background story before giving the answer people are looking for. If you're confused as to why this is posted here, I felt that this post fell in with a lot of the one off technical solutions I have been posting as of late. I ran into this issue about a year ago, meant to share a broader explanation to the solution online, and am only now getting around to it. So if this post saves one person hours of trouble because they're able to find this on Google, great!

(And if you're asking why post something like this in the first place:) Manhunt was a niche stealth PS2 game developed by Rockstar Games in 2003. The stealth mechanics developed in the game have been implemented in just about every Rockstar game released since Manhunts release in 2003. Even in their most recent release, Red Dead Redemption 2, the stealth mechanics and games play and feel exactly like Manhunt. Due to the violence and subject matter of the game, there was an ensuing media circus and the game was outright banned in some countries. Users are unable to play the game on other platforms today because the re-releases and ports are considered inadequate and buggy compared to the original release. As a result many users run into the above error early on when trying to run the game on the original hardware. For the sake of media preservation and to humor those with an interest in the forbidden or obscure - I think this is important information to share.

Klarna Postman Collection

2022-05-05T00:40:00.002-04:00

Here is a collection of Postman calls I made to use in conjunction with the Klarna API. It simply needs to be imported into Postman. Please note I removed the test credentials and you will have to provide your own. This collection will allow to you generate an order_id for placed, captured, cancelled, and refunded Klarna Payments orders.

You can use this Codepen to complete the client side requests.

Integration guide for Klarna payments.
API reference for Klarna.

Resetting The Domain Admin Password in Windows Server

2022-01-12T10:36:00.002-05:00

The below steps are confirmed work on Windows Server 2016. Please comment below if you are able to get this to work on different versions.

Download server 2016 ISO > attach to VM > reboot into ISO > Repair your Computer > Troubleshoot > Command prompt

> cd C:\Windows\System32

> ren osk.exe osk.old

> copy C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe osk.exe

Reboot the server, launch the on screen keyboard and Powershell will open

> Net user Administrator PASSWORD

Make sure you reverse the file changes after.

-----

This is assuming you have the Bitlocker key, or you don’t use Bitlocker. If you're trying to get into a Windows user account and the drive is not encrypted:

From the login screen you can hit shift five times to launch Stickykeys - a system accessibility app to keep shift and control on when pressed instead of having to hold them down.

You can rename/overwrite that app (c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe) with cmd.exe and you have system root shell at the login screen instead of stickykeys. Of course havig access to an unencrypted drive, you can do just about anything, but this can be a quick hack in time sensitive situations.

Be sure to always encrypt your hard disks!

Ultimate Weird Al Tournament Enters Round 4

2021-10-16T13:16:00.000-04:00

Over at the Subreddit /r/WeirdAl the users have compiled a head to head bracket of every Weird Al song that has seen an official release in some capacity, and every day for the past few months, they have been whittling down the list from 218 songs down to 32.

Today they've entered round 4, be sure to head over to their community and vote!

Unichusetts of Massaversity Shirts Now For Sale!

2019-04-21T15:03:00.001-04:00

Well they've actually been for sale for a while, but I'd like to keep the momentum going. Grab one before Subbaswamy and the board send me a cease and desist despite the University of Massachusetts being a public university. You know it's gonna happen...

p.s. You can still get Always Avoid Alliteration shirts from Whale Computer well.

How to Get Better Voice of The Customer Scores: Ask for a 10

2019-04-21T14:43:00.006-04:00

Via Slashdot, Buzzfeed News published an article about how "That tablet on the table at your favorite restaurant is hurting your waiter". Which is Buzzfeed speak for 'waitresses and waiters at chain restaurants are being assigned shifts based on the voice of the customer scores they are given at the end of the check out process'. For those that have not worked in customer service before, only a score of nine or ten are considered passing on a Voice of The Customer (VOC) survey. Everything else is considered either a "passive" or "detractor" score.

The simple secret to getting a 9 or 10 on a VOC is to ask for one at the end of the transaction. Tell the customer that anything else is considered failing and if there is anything you can do for them, have them contact you first.

At Penske we ended up creating a small handout we'd staple to the rental agreement explaining this, and we always went over it with customers like the rest of the rental agreement. We also inexplicably kept the handout from already disgruntled customers. At Penske Truck Rental getting your named mentioned (positively) in a VOC review got you a $100 American Express gift card. I made sure to give my business card and mentioned the spiff to any happy customer at the end of the check out process. The managers stopped the spiff after I had gotten three cards in the first month.

I understand this process skews the VOC numbers, but the reality is that for someone who works the front line in customer service, just about every element of the VOC score is outside of your control and there's nowhere enough evidence anywhere that demonstrates VOC is an effective measure of anything important. Your attractiveness, ethnicity, the weather, management, inventory, staffing for the day; all of these and more are going to effect your VOC score, which is going to affect your pay and career directly. VOC has no inherit way to control for bias. We all know that at the end of the day managers are certainly more inclined to blame you for a bad score than take responsibility for their poor management and processes that lead to a particular VOC score. At Penske specifically I had multiple experiences where following management's processes directly lead to a poor VOC score that was assigned to me as an individual. I got plenty of 10s for breaking processes to provide excellent customer service, but I would also also be reprimanded for breaking the same processes.

The Foolproof Guide to Run World of Warcraft Classic (v1.14) on Mac and PC

2018-11-27T00:46:00.002-05:00

This guide was specifically written for connecting to the Kronos servers. These steps and troubleshooting should work for just about any version of vanilla World of Warcraft; when connecting to the server of your choice simply replace the realm-list with the server's URL that you are trying to connect to.

Step 1

Click this link and read every step before proceeding:
http://www.kronos-wow.com/how-to-connect/

I'm now going to step you through each step because I know you didn't read the list... Click the link above.

Step 2

Download the client ahead of time (that means right now). Bandwidth is expensive; if you're Mac the client is currently hosted on Mega and at one point unless you pay for an account you will have to wait six hours to complete the download. If you're PC the file is a torrent. If you need a torrent client use QBittorent. Both uTorrent and BitTorrent are both adware now.

Step 3

While the client is downloading click the link and set up your Twinstar account. You will need to email verify so make sure you do that as well. I've had three separate people ask for help because they did not do this.

Step 4

If you are on Mac make sure to extract the World of Warcraft folder to your applications folder. (This will be important later if the game wont start on you).

Step 5

In your World of Warcraft folder open the file realmlist.wtf replace any existing entry with one of the following possibilities, save and exit.
set realmlist west.kronos-wow.com
set realmlist north.kronos-wow.com
set realmlist east.kronos-wow.com
Each login server will connect you to the same realm, but the path that each server takes is geographically different. This means that you can try each realmlist and see which one provides you with the lowest latency.

If you're on Mac and the game crashes as it's starting up:

You need to run the game as a super user. In order to do this. Open up Terminal and paste in "sudo /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft\ Classic/WoW\ Classic.app/Contents/MacOS/World\ of\ Warcraft" without the quotations. This is why I had you install the directory in applications. If you didn't listen and installed it somewhere else then go back to step 4 and also smack yourself for me.

If that does not work and instead you get a bunch of text you need to run your computer at a lower resolution.

If you're on PC and you cannot connect to the Kronos server:

Make sure that your realmlist.wtf is saved without any other file extension at the end. For example, make sure it is NOT saved as realmlist.wtf.txt .

If you're on Mac and you cannot connect to the Kronos server

It is the same process as with the Windows step but use TextEdit and make sure that your file is not saved with an extra extension after the txt.

If you still can't figure it out:

Don't email me. Post a comment below instead.