Pumpkins, Musicals, Hair, Whole Food
Hello everyone! Welcome back to the blog. It is great to see you here. There is much to catch up on, as life relentlessly pushes onward.
Random Stuff
Hair
Let’s start with the random stuff this week. First, I had my initial consultation with laser hair removal folks last week. I would say that I went into the consultation feeling pretty sure that I wanted to go ahead with laser hair removal in some capacity. Now, I’m feeling a lot less sure.
First, there’s the outrageous price. At the establishment I went to, you pay for laser hair removal by body part, not by session. Once you’ve paid for the body part or area, you can come in as many times as you want or need until you’re satisfied with how things look.
The full-body hair removal package is fourteen THOUSAND dollars. Yes, you’re reading that correctly. $14,000. From what I am able to understand, laser hair removal is only this expensive in the United States, where prices are artificially inflated, cuz ‘Murica. Everywhere else in the world laser treatment is infinitely more affordable.
That last part is important to me. Thankfully, I could hypothetically afford to pay 14k if I wanted to. I’m lucky that way. But the thing is, the treatments being 5x-10x as expensive in the USA than anywhere else is hitting me at a time where I’m already so exasperated with the USA to begin with. At this point, paying anyone for anything other than literal art in this country does nothing but infuriate me.
I might have been convinced to pay the exorbitant 14k to be totally hairless if it were fail-proof, but obviously it is not. Plenty of people get this treatment and are not satisfied with it. I think my plan of attack at this point is to look into at-home lasers and other techniques for a while. That failing, maybe I’ll consider going back and re-evaluating this 14k offer.
This whole thing also got me thinking about just how important being hairless is to me. Up to this point, I’ve worn women’s clothing and lipstick and earrings and short shorts all while being really hairy. In some ways, that does speak to me, since along the trans-spectrum, I’d say that I’m kind of in the ‘clock-ey gender-fuckery’ corner moreso than the ‘wants to pass as a woman’ corner. I still do think that I’d ultimately rather not have body hair than have it, but keeping the hair for now isn’t going to make me miserable.
Food
On Halloween, my brother and his wife came over to carve pumpkins. They brought a bag of mixed candy designed for giving out on Halloween. Depending on what types of news you consume, you may have heard about the atrocious degree that shrink-flation has hit Halloween candy specifically.
As of around two years ago Halloween candy had already shrunk ~30% with prices going up 40% - 50% relative to years past. I have no idea where these figures would be now. I haven’t even been eating candy, and I was actively pissed off just looking at this bag of candy that my brother and his wife brought over. The miniature snickers were so small that only one letter of the word “Snickers” could fit on the wrapper. Erika and I chose not to give out candy this year; while we have given out candy in years past, I refuse to spend even $10 supporting these candy companies. Fuck American “food”.
Zooming out to food in general, digging into the reality of how utterly pathetic our “food” industry is has helped TREMENDOUSLY in my effort to give up processed food. I haven’t touched processed food in around two weeks. The only processed food I’ve consumed in that time are things that I already owned and had in my freezer, because it hurts me to waste food.
And I have to say, I feel so, so much better. I’m still in the process of reading the 2023 non-fiction book Ultra Processed People, and it’s a must read given the trajectory this planet is on with food. Unless you’ve dug into this stuff the same way I am now, however bad you think our “food” industry has gotten, I assure you, it’s worse than you think.
My diet has settled down for what feels like the first time in a long time. I cannot remember being this happy about my diet ever, and it’s getting easier to execute day by day. You can get off of our processed bull shit fake “food”, too. I believe you can do it. If you’re having trouble, read anything about any major “food” company, and just let your anger steer you. It’s not just that our food industry doesn’t make sure you have safe food to eat; it’s worse. The food industry of late-stage capitalism intentionally poisons everyone, and will use their enormous power to keep it that way for as long as they can.
I vow to not give a fucking cent of my money to the processed food industry this week. Join me.
Pumpkins
Despite rage over the size and price of Halloween candy that I didn’t even want to consume, pumpkin carving was an overall fun time. I admit: I am always really lazy about pumpkin carving. Every year I just carve a simple Jack-o’-lantern face and call it a day. I tend to spend more energy roasting and eating the pumpkin seeds than actual carving.
Erika went a different route: she tried to carve a beagle face. The results were…less than amazing. A for effort, but yeah I don’t think I need to share a picture of it. Jason and his wife Teresa made pretty good ones though, so you can admire these:
Musicals
Pumpkins took the place of movie night this week, but on Sunday we got to see a musical production of Little Shop of Horrors. Erika and I went with Lau, the organizer of the Pittsburgh Hounds meetup I have detailed on this blog before. Lau really likes musicals, and Erika and I love musicals, so this might be the start of a new hangout avenue. Who doesn’t need more stuff to do?
I didn’t take any pictures since I always feel weird taking a picture of a live performance like that, but the musical was very fun. If you’re not familiar with Little Shop of Horrors (spoilers coming), the plot is that a a guy comes across an evil plant that requires human blood to grow. The plant also has some mystical property where it makes your dreams come true. Throughout the musical, (it was originally a movie, then a musical, and then a musical movie) the main character starts compromising his values more and more to feed this plant, all while his fame and fortune rise.
In the show’s program, the play’s director described it like this: “As our own country struggles with the death of the achievable American Dream, perhaps the best lesson Little Shop of Horrors can provide us is that the dream is hardly ever what you think it will be, and it may come at costs you can’t imagine.” Y’all who hang around this blog know that this lines up well with my ethos. Live a simple life. Eat real food, adopt pets, be part of your community, and otherwise save your money, because capitalism and the glittery stuff it has made available to us is one giant disappointment.
Stuff I Measure
I will say at the outset here, I haven’t felt this pressed for time in a while. I might officially have too many things going at once. Eating 100% real food is the #1 thing adding time stress. This one goal simultaneously adds more dishes to clean, more trips to the grocery store, and more time cooking and food prepping. I’ve brought Erika along on this ride, so I am now in charge of making dinner every day, for both of us. I’m eating fresh fruit every day, so I need to get to the grocery store every three days or so. I’ve peeled more carrots in the past two weeks than I probably did in the past six months.
Now, all of this is great. This is an ideal way to spend time. I am procuring fresh, real food for my family, and making it. I love that. In fact, it’s a privilege. The increased burden on my time shows you one of the original purposes processed food - to work people harder. Capitalism wants you to believe that you need to be as productive at work as possible, even at the expense of nutritious food. Unfortunately, many people have little choice but to unwittingly participate.
I also do 100% of our household laundry, and the vast majority of cleaning chores. I’ve also had the motivation to tackle some things I’ve wanted to get to for years, like making a will (still in process) and investigating laser hair removal.
If you combine that with the things we traditionally measure here, I am also trying to do game development, speedrun, and exercise. I also prioritize the writing of this blog. As the media reviews on this blog have indicated, I also prioritize playing video games casually for fun (lest video games become solely associated with ‘working’ goals), watching television shows with Erika, and maintaining movie night with my brother. Attending hound meetups and musicals with Lau is a thing now.
The difficult thing is that I enjoy every one of these tasks in some capacity. This is the busy, non-office life I dreamed of all the days I sat still in my cubicle pretending to work. Things are great. I do not know what happens next, but we will keep measuring.
Exercise
I’ve been enjoying walking lately. This happens from time to time. I love running, but I also love walking. Sometimes I lean more towards one, and sometimes the other. For now, we’ll just track both.
38.5 miles for the week works out to walking 5.5 miles a day. I’m happy with that as a replacement for the usual 5k running.
Game Development
My social calendar is starting to be consistently fuller, which is occupying weekends. I generally spend Monday writing the blog post. That leaves Tuesday - Friday. Those are the days I need to try to hit game development hard.
I kept the lights on last week. I’m happy with that. We need to keep from posting a 0 week. Right now I am in the midst of some heavy-duty programming. My animations are not working the way I expect them to, and I’m digging into the code to figure out why. That will be the work ahead of me for this week.
Speedrunning
This is the goal that feels like it’s on life support. I always work on game development before doing any speedrunning in a day. That’s just the prioritization that feels best to me right now. Day by day, I am finding it hard to fit this in.
I think the strategy I will use to try and get more speedrunning into my days this week is that Tuesday - Friday, I am going to push myself to always work on speedrunning before participating in any sort of leisure. The way speedrunning typically gets squeezed out is I do all my usual valuable stuff, but before any speedrunning gets done it’s ~5pm, and I feel ready to start relaxing. I need to try and eek out an hour or two during the evening, before unwinding.
Despite the limited hours, Mega Man 4 is still coming along. I’ve learned the first level in its entirety, and am somewhat reliable at it. Hopefully we can generate some more momentum here.
Weight Loss
The scale hasn’t really moved yet, but I feel a lot of confidence here. If I keep eating whole foods, there is going to be progress eventually. I feel certain of it. I haven’t even been craving junk food lately. Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing and tracking it.
This Week
To summarize, here’s what I think my ideal week will look like:
Monday: Write this blog post -> Chores -> Leisure
Tuesday - Friday: Morning game development -> Chores -> Speedrunning -> Leisure
Saturday: Chores -> Movie Night + other leisure
Sunday: Chores -> Social hangout (TBD) + other leisure
I hope you all have a great week out there! Let’s eat real food and stay positive. Let’s exercise and not support any large corporations. Let’s try to enjoy life. If you’re American, let’s vote. Let’s fucking do this. I believe in you.
Tuesday Update
Two hours of game dev are already in the books, which I feel amazing about. Cauliflower, squash and tuna are on tap for dinner. Plus, I already voted. Have a great day everyone!
Check out dinner from tonight. Tuna + cauliflower + a koginut squash.
Wednesday Update
What’s up. I had a great day yesterday. Did game dev, did speedrunning, walked 6 miles, and did a boat load of chores. At night I read a bunch of Ultra Processed People. First of all, the moment finally came.
If you’ve been reading the blog regularly you might remember that I had a post earlier this year making fun of the fact that every self-help book ever written just HAS to find a way to include a full description of the marshmallow experiment. I have read a description of this experiment over 100 times at this point. Even though Ultra Processed People is the best nonfiction book I have read in a long time, the moment still came - the author tells us about the marshmallow experiment in the midst of a conversation about using willpower to not eat junk food. Book, I forgive you but only because you’ve otherwise been so good.
By the way, I’m also still playing the indie game Sea of Stars, and the indie game equivalent of nonfiction books’ marshmallow experiment obsession is undoubtedly fishing mini games. I have endless respect for anyone able to make their own video game….but guys. As an indie gaming society, I think I speak for everyone when I say that we don’t to do anymore fishing.
The most interesting part of Ultra Processed People that I read yesterday was the chapter on exercise. The book covered the Duke University professor Herman Pontzer’s attempt to figure out how different hunter-gatherers, farmers, and sedentary office workers are in terms of calorie expenditure. As part of the study he recruited the Hazda, a group of hunter-gatherers who live in northern Tanzania. The Hazda hunt on foot with bows and axes, and their diet consists entirely of honey, meat, root vegetables, and local fruit.
Pontzer’s results were that the extremely active Hazda group expend the same number of calories as sedentary American and European populations.
I did not initially believe Pontzer’s results. In fact, I’m still not sure that I believe them in full. Had this book not thoroughly impressed me for the 130 pages that preceded this chapter on exercise, I probably would have been several degrees more skeptical still. As I’ve said a few times though, this is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read in recent years. The author has earned enough credibility with me to make me wonder about this.
A few other studies are cited. Amy Luke and Kara Ebersole from Loyola University found no difference in energy expenditure between one group of people in rural Nigeria, and another in the suburbs of Chicago. You’ll find a similar pattern in non-human primates; captive monkeys and apes burn the same number of calories as their counterparts out in the wild.
So…how can this information possibly be true? After all, we all agree that moving around burns calories. So if you move around, the calories have to keep burning. Yes, that much is true, according to Ultra Processed People. The finding that all people burn roughly the same number of calories daily becomes more and more true as you look over long time frames. So if you run a marathon today, yes, you will verifiably burn more calories that someone sitting at their desk. But, over the weeks that follow, the marathon runner will slowly claw back that caloric debt. Our original guy who did the Hazda study, Pontzer, claims that using more calories in exercise causes your body to scale back the energy expended on routine, non-essential processes. In other words, the debt you created via exercise gets paid back by scaling back things like your immune system, endocrine, stress and reproductive systems.
Pontzer says this scaling back is a good thing, though. The natural downtime those system undergo after exercise helps restore them and make them work better. That, Pontzer says, is the main reason exercise is valuable. Regular vigorous exercise makes you much, much less susceptible to cancer and cardiovascular ailments. It’s not like Pontzer didn’t think exercise was valuable - he thought it was extremely valuable. He just didn’t think that it was tied to weight loss in the way we conventionally think it is.
One of the strongest arguments to support this is who it is that refutes it. Junk food companies fund an incomprehensible amount of research that tries to paint exercise as the cure to our current health epidemic. The Coca-Cola company alone funds hundreds of research initiatives, all of which are five times more likely to produce ‘objective’ results that favor The Coca-Cola company. They also hide it; many cases, these scientists are blatantly printing in their studies that they have no conflict of interest, when in reality they are funded by Coke.
I will leave you with the last page or so of the chapter on exercise, because I found it to be very powerful.
Ultra Processed People, page 135
“Discovering the truth in any area of science is like assembling a jigsaw. The pieces are observations, papers, data points. As you fit pieces together, the jigsaw becomes easier and easier as the picture - the truth - emerges.
In the case of obesity, the completed jigsaw will show that inactivity is not a significant contributor, and that the primary cause is ultra-processed food and drink. This is an existential threat to the companies whose existence depends on the sales of these products.
The tactic of Coca-Cola, and other UPF companies, has been to create jigsaw pieces that look like they might fit, but in fact they aren’t part of the puzzle at all. The jigsaw box fills up with thousands of misleading pieces, papers, and data points, which make it nearly impossible to assemble. Too many pieces just don’t fit together.
If, like me, you’re surprised by the idea that doing more won’t allow you to eat more calories, it may be because the opposite idea, that you can burn off excess calories, has been promoted by companies like Coke all the way from the scientific papers through to policy initiatives like Exercise is Medicine. It took me some time to accept that, despite having a medical degree, part of the way that I have understood my body and its energy requirements has come from the Coca-Cola Company.”
Believe what you want; like I said, I haven’t fully wrapped my head around this chapter on exercise yet. I do know that this was a powerful excerpt, though.
Have a great day everyone. I believe in you.
Thursday Update
Plans for this weekend have crystallized. Movie night is moved to Friday, and Lau and I are going to see a local production of Newsies on Saturday night. Super excited! I love the musical Newsies. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about the newsboys of 1900 forming a union. UNION MUSICAL! Somehow something promoting unions was originally made by Disney…no idea how this one slipped through the cracks when it came out in 1992.
Have a great Thursday! Talk soon.
Later Thursday - check this out:
Dinner update - haddock, shrimp, sweet potatoes, carrots. If you’re trying to eat whole foods today, you can do it!
Friday Update
Happy Friday everyone! Since movie night is today, I need to clean up the house before the guests arrive. That puts a little more pressure on me to start working early today. So, let’s get to it! Today will be my fourth day in a row working on game dev and I’m making a lot of progress, so I feel excited for it.
Have a great day everyone!
Update - you start the game with one dash. After you use your dash, the player will flash yellow to show that your dash has been recharged. This opens up the possibility of two types of upgrades to get during the game. You will be able to increase your maximum number of dashes, or shorten the time it takes to recharge.
Saturday Update
One of the cheapest whole food meals you can find - rice, beans and peas. I actually made these beans on the stovetop - they weren’t canned. I have nothing against canned beans but IDK this whole food kick I’ve been on got me in the mood to just make them myself.
Have a great day everyone! I’m off to see Newsies shortly. This is it for me this week, so I will see you in next week’s post.
