Philip Brewer

It was a very nice day today—moderate clouds, not too hot, no rain—so I decided to go for a run.

I haven’t actually compared it to other runs this summer, but I’m pretty sure it’s my longest and my fastest.

4.88 miles in 1h 18 min.

I really mean to do two runs a week, but I’m probably not managing even half that. But this run still felt okay. I was tired at the end, but not too tired. My joints felt fine during the run.

Basically, it’s all good.

A few weeks ago, back before the Iran war heated back up, The Economist wrote a mia culpa, explaining why they’d gotten it wrong about the war being an economic disaster. Briefly, while the MOU was holding up, I was tempted to write my own.

Like The Economist editors, I had thought back in April that Things are amazingly more bad than markets seem to think, but by the beginning of June, it was looking like maybe the risk of catastrophe had eased.

I didn’t write a mia culpa. To be fair, part of that was just laziness. But part of it was looking at things and thinking I was still right. Maybe between some demand destruction and some dribs and drabs of oil getting through the strait, world markets had found a new equilibrium that wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected.

The Economist thought so. They thought they’d gotten it wrong for two reasons:

First, we thought that America and Iran would hold out against a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: America because Mr Trump deludedly thought he held the whip hand, Iran because its regime knew its people could be made to endure more pain. In fact, facing the fury of American motorists, Mr Trump all but folded, preventing a disaster. Since the two parties struck a provisional deal in June, enough oil has been getting out of the Gulf to reassure markets that supply is coming back online, even if the future of the strait remains uncertain.

Our second oversight was, like others, not anticipating the staggering degree to which China would be able to slash its oil imports. Crude imports are 5m barrels a day lower than a year ago, despite the fall in prices. China has cut its demand and shored up supply. Its oil reserves are opaque—many barrels are hidden from satellites underground, and there is a blurred line between official reserves and corporate inventories. But they have been shown to be a powerful buffer.

I pretty much bought their second point. China had produced a truly fantastic amount of demand destruction, and had done it with minimal impact on their own economy, by largely shifting the impact onto people in other countries who had bought their oil distillates, before China prohibited exports. They could probably keep that up indefinitely, removing their demand from the world market.

That first point, though, I found doubtful. I mean, yes, Trump always chickens out, which is why we got the MOU and the briefly partially reopened strait. But I think they were wrong in thinking that Iran would go along with what Trump wanted, or that Trump could settle for what Iran would (obviously) want to do. They tried to paper over the cracks for a few weeks. I mean, I believe Trump settling for whatever Iran did and pretending it was a victory was a thing that could happen. But I’m not surprised it didn’t work out. Too many other people in the U.S. government were simply unwilling to let Trump leave the strait in Iran’s hands. And, although oil prices were coming back down, they were not on a trajectory that would improve the Republican’s chances in the midterms.

So, I think The Economist was right in the first place, and wrong to imagine that Trump and Iran could agree that “preventing a disaster” was something they could do.

The oil price graphic above is already out of date. It shows yesterday’s closing price, and things have gotten worse already today. Brent crude is over $100 as I wrap up this post.

On Saturday my local HEMA group, Tempered Mettle Historical Fencing, had a guest instructor come to teach a one-day class aimed at “underrepresented groups.” The guest instructor was Kaethe Dundon, “a Chicago-based queer nerd whose major interests are in history, art, and textiles, and of course historical martial arts.” The class was pitched thus:

The primary audience of this workshop includes women, those of other marginalized genders, and those with physical disabilities. Those who are male and able-bodied are welcome to attend – but be aware that your experience will not be the focus of this class, and be ready to primarily take the “losing” role in reps.

I was down with that, so I went. It was a great workshop. A lot of the focus was on stance and footwork, which are two things you can never do too much of.

One member was taking pictures. Trying to be less of a distraction, he switched his camera to “silent,” which turned out to have an odd interaction with the LED lighting in our training space:

I think the photo turned out great!

The posture with the sword across our shoulders was intended to get us to open our chest, so our arms and shoulders would be where they were supposed to be for longsword.

The notion that “SpaceX’s ambition to put data centers in space” makes more sense than putting them in North Dakota, Alaska, Siberia, and maybe Tierra del Fuego or the Falkland Islands suggests that a bunch of people have no sense at all.

I’m using “AI” here in the older sense, rather than the newer sense where it’s just another way to say LLM.

In this older sense, I don’t have anything against AI (even though I generally try to avoid LLMs). So, I thought I’d talk a little about the things I actually object to, when it comes to what people call AI these days. Specifically, what I object to (in order of objectionableness) are:

• Using them to generate anything that looks like creative output. (It isn’t creative output, but it resembles it enough that I can waste a lot of time realizing that. That’s what I object to.)
• The copyright theft at the base of LLMs. (I think half the profits (perhaps 40% of the gross revenues) of every AI company should be distributed to holders of the copyrights that were violated in the generation of the models).
• The resource usage needed to run the inference engines. (Also the resource usage that went into doing the training, but that’s already sunk, so there’s no more point in complaining about it than there is in complaining about the resources that went into building your house.)
• The fact that AI is unnecessarily used to do stuff that used to be better without it (such as web search).

I do also have some good thoughts. Generally speaking, there’s all kinds of stuff that (I hope) is going to get a lot better. Here’s an almost random sampling of ideas I’ve had. This list is most definitely not comprehensive. It’s not even the most important stuff. It’s just a few things I have been thinking of, because they’re things I want.

I would like an AI to keep track of everything I read (including whether I finish reading it, or give up part way through), and then (insted of trying to sell me something), guess what I’d like to read next. I’d pay money for this. (Not much money, but a little.)

I’d like an AI that picked up domain information what what I read. When I read an economics or finance article, I’d like it to put a little note over on the edge of the screen that I could click on, and then it would apply the information in the article to my situation. “That article, and three others that you’ve read in the past two weeks, suggest that European stocks might do better than U.S. stocks over the next year. Your portfolio is 43% U.S. stocks and only 16% European stocks. Click here for steps you could take to boost your European stock holdings.”

Of course, it should also track future results of each of those hypotheticals and compare them to both what I had before and what I actually did.

I’d like an AI to look at a blog post I’ve written and then from the taxonomy of categories and tags I’ve already created, suggest which ones I should use for that post. (There have long been “tag recommending” plugins for WordPress, but the last time I checked, none of them preferred the tags I’ve already got. Most of them seem intended for a completely different purpose from supporting your own internal tagging system. It seemed like maybe they were intended for finding keywords for maximizing ad revenue?)

I couldn’t think of a good picture for this post, but didn’t want to post it without a picture, so I thought I’d use this picture of my dog. It’s been hot here.

My brother asked me today, “Which author do you think best immanentizes the eschaton?”

Not being a moron, I immediately replied, “Obviously it’s Charlie Stross.”

Before I could finish typing that, he suggested a Mastodon poll to ask people, to which I replied, “The poll should be ‘After Charlie Stross, what author next best immanentizes the eschaton?'”

We speculated a bit, throwing out names like William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Neal Stephenson, and Cory Doctorow.

I assume this was all prompted by the most recent Pluralistic, in which Cory Doctorow says, after explaining why, if their AI is so close to having god-like powers, anyone would be asking for money for their AI, when they could just be using the AI to make money for them, says:

So it’s not surprising that we don’t ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they’re immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?

Source: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta

Anyway, at this point I put the question to confer.to (so I don’t know which AI model responded), but it gave me a great reply:

The Core “Eschaton Immanentizers” (Closest to Stross)

1. Vernor Vinge ⭐

• Why: He literally coined the term “technological singularity” in his 1993 essay. Stross stands on Vinge’s shoulders.
• Key Works: A Fire Upon the Deep (zones of thought = different physical laws based on intelligence density), A Deepness in the Sky, Marooned in Realtime.
• Vibe: More optimistic than Stross, but equally committed to the idea that superintelligence changes everything, including physics.

2. Greg Egan ⭐⭐

• Why: If Stross is the journalist of the singularity, Egan is the mathematician. He goes harder into the ontological breakdown. His characters upload, fragment, merge, and cease to be human in ways that make Stross look cozy.
• Key Works: Permutation City (simulated reality, consciousness as substrate-independent), Diaspora (post-human civilization across dimensions), Quarantine (reality modification).
• Vibe: Colder, more rigorous, less humor. The eschaton isn’t just immanentized; it’s proven.

3. Hannu Rajaniemi

• Why: Writes about societies that already live in the post-singularity world Stross describes arriving.
• Key Works: The Quantum Thief trilogy (solar system transformed by post-human technologies, memory as currency, gogolized consciousness).
• Vibe: Dense, playful, requires work—but depicts the aftermath of eschatonization brilliantly.

4. Ken MacLeod

• Why: Stross’s contemporary and friend; they share a intellectual milieu (Edinburgh SF scene). MacLeod explores similar themes but often from a more political/ideological angle.
• Key Works: The Fall Revolution series (The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal), The Execution Channel.
• Vibe: More focused on how ideologies (libertarianism, socialism, etc.) interact with singularity tech.

I mean, really, I don’t know why we didn’t have Verner Vinge in mind, or Greg Egan. I’ve read both, and I’m sure Steven has as well. They’re obviously on top.

I don’t know if Steven has read Hannu Rajaniemi, but I’ve at least read The Quantum Thief, and, yes, I’d put him on this list.

The AI also rather dismissed our guesses:

Your Guesses, Evaluated

Author	Verdict	Notes
William Gibson	Adjacent	Cyberpunk is pre-singularity. His later work (The Peripheral) touches on it, but he’s more about near-future tech’s social impact than ontological rupture.
Bruce Sterling	Adjacent	Same as Gibson—cyberpunk pioneer, but more interested in design, aesthetics, and near-term futures than the actual singularity event.
Neal Stephenson	Partial	The Diamond Age and Snow Crash have elements, but he’s more interested in memes and social structures than the hard break of singularity. Anathem gets closer.
Cory Doctorow	Partial	Writes about these themes (especially in Walkaway and Makers), but with a more accessible, activist, optimistic lens. Less “reality breaks,” more “how do we organize after tech changes?”

The AI actually goes on a bit, mentioning several other authors including Richard Morgan, Ted Chiang, and others, but I’ll just go hang my head in shame rather than copy and paste more AI output.

(Normally my posts are entirely my own writing. This post is an exception, in that it includes a bunch of copy/pasted AI output. I think it’s adequately tagged, though, and it’s clear that I’m not trying to pass off AI output as my own writing. Because I thought it was funny, I also generated an AI image to be the “featured image” for this post. Once again, I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying to pass off AI output as my own.)

Do you use an activity tracker? I have an Oura ring, a Google Pixel watch, and a phone which runs Google Fit. All of those count my steps, and each one does some additional activity or sleep tracking. I find them all fun and interesting, so I’m always amused when yet another article comes out warning of the dangers of activity tracking.

The article at the moment is this one, sent by my brother: Five hidden pitfalls of fitness tracking, by Sahar Bakr.

I mean, sure. If you’re really foolish, you can be seriously led astray by one of these. But you’d have to be really foolish. It’s like the early days of GPS map software, where they’d be giving you directions and say, “Turn left!” but if you turned left you’d end up in a creek. Sure, you could do that, but all you had to do was look where you were going, and you could avoid it pretty easily.

Although the article has five items, there are, I think, two fundamental issues that Bakr is warning about. The larger one is outsourcing our good sense to some external device. The smaller is an excessive focus on step-count as the measure of fitness activity.

Letting a device tell you to push hard when you’re feeling crappy is just stupid. (It is perhaps somewhat less stupid to let a device tell you to take it easy when you feel great. I have several times decided to push hard because I felt great, even though one of my devices was warning me that I wasn’t fully recovered. More than once when I did that, I ended up having a crappy workout, because the device was right and I was wrong.)

With their fixation on steps (because that’s easy for a device to measure), devices have a pretty limited insight into the full scope of your movement practice. This means that they’re never going to know if your strength training is covering all the major muscle groups, or if your volume and intensity are on point. But that’s not really different from training without a device. Really, it only makes things worse if you’re so foolish as to imagine that it’s got some insight into stuff other than your steps and heart rate (or whatever else its measuring). Just like it doesn’t know enough about your strength training to provide useful advice there, it also doesn’t know much about your skills training or your flexibility training.

A lot of my training is focused on specifically increasing the sort of fitness I need for my HEMA practice. None of my devices even tries to guide me as to whether I should do less lunging practice in favor of overhead pressing practice or vice versa. (And if they did, I wouldn’t pay much attention, unless they’d started getting me to upload my sparring footage. And maybe not then.)

Getting back to the fixation on steps, the device makers want to pretend that step counts gives them some sort of deep insight into a human’s movement practice, with a one-size-fits-all target of 10,000 steps.

Weirdly, I don’t think that’s crazy. I mean, steps are by no means the only aspect of a human’s movement practice that’s important, but it’s actually not a bad proxy.

Over an evolutionarily long period, walking and running have been critical to human success. Running and walking were key to our successes in both hunting and gathering, and probably led directly to our big brains.

All three of my devices count steps. All three track walking and running. (They all try to track other activity—cycling, swimming, gardening, housework—but do so pretty poorly. Walking and running, though, they pretty much have nailed.)

In my mid-20s I was working in an office, but getting out to hike at every opportunity, which didn’t come frequently enough. I remember thinking, “If only I could get out and hike a few miles every day! I’d be in great shape!” That turns out not to be true, but it’s not completely false either.

My point here is simply that step counts are by no means a terrible proxy for one’s overall activity level, and 10,000 steps is by no means a stupid target—it’s mildly ambitious, without being out of reach for anyone with a reasonable level of fitness and some spare time. (I admit that I might well think this because I’m a weird outlier. I’m a walker from way back. I’m retired, so I have all the time in the day to walk if I want to. And I have a dog who likes to walk a lot. The upshot is, my daily steps hit 15,000 nearly every day.)

All of which is to say that I find these devices useful. In particular, they’re good at observing that I’m not fully recovered, meaning I should take it easy, even if I’m feeling okay. I find them (mildly) motivating, in that I pretty much never fail to hit 10,000 steps (unless I’m sick, the dog is sick, or the weather is terrible). I find them somewhat entertaining, especially when their praise is so for stuff I consider pretty minimal. (“You’ve met your activity goal for the day!” My Oura ring will say at 10:00 AM.)

In any case, I find them quite harmless. They don’t make me feel anxious or shamed. I’ve seen no sign that they are prompting disordered eating. I’m amused by their fixation on step counts, but not troubled by it. (I occasionally miss my 10,000 steps, usually when I’ve spent the day sitting in a plane, train, or car. I am not bothered when my devices observe that this is the case.) I care deeply about getting in my mobility work and my strength work, even if the devices don’t track it adequately. I take great joy in my movement—click any of the tags over there with “movement” in the name and find yourself taken to dozens of places where I’ve celebrated my movement practice, starting from before I had any devices, and continuing to this day. Finally, I am merely amused if my device dings me for not doing enough, as my Oura ring does if I sit for more than 50 minutes. (In fact though, these past few years, I can only barely sit still that long anyway.)

The key paragraph from the article:

For users, the first shift is to treat tracking as information rather than instruction. A watch can tell you what it has measured. It cannot tell you what your body needs today.

I mean, I know I’m a movement weirdo, but really? Who would do anything else?

If your website has a “See more” link, I assume that indicates that the rest of the article or site is unimportant or uninteresting, so I basically never click on it. Why would I?

Now, if you share 20 or more full posts and then have an “Older posts” link at the bottom, that’s different. (And much better than having a script to make the page endlessly scroll.)

Does that seem weird or contradictory to people?

I’ve started to get comments on this blog that I figure are probably AI-written spam, but are sufficiently well-written and sufficiently on-topic that I can’t tell for sure.

I hate the idea of giving spam a place on my site. But I used to really enjoy the discussions in my comment space, back when people did that sort of thing. This leaves me conflicted about what to do. I’m seriously considering turning off comments, and just letting the discussion move into social media. (You can see my social media accounts, if you want to tag me any any response you make. That page also has other ways to contact me.)

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who thinks blog comments are still a good way to do things, and wants to advocate for me keeping the site comments open.

Economists pretty much understand both inflation and recession. Because the policy tools to fight them—raising or lowering interest rates—are the opposite of each other, people sometimes think they are the opposite of each other. But this is not true, which is why “stagflation” is even a thing.

Inflation is caused by the money supply growing faster than the supply of goods and services. Back in the 1970s and 1980s there was a real push to manage the money supply as a way to keep inflation low and stable, but it didn’t work very well. (For a lot of reasons. In particular, the lags between money supply growth and the flow to spending are long and variable. Also, people have choices in where they spend their money, so sometimes the money flows to goods, other times services, and other times assets like stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.) Since the mid-1980s, the Fed hasn’t really considered controlling money supply as a key policy tool.

Recessions, on the other hand, are caused by consumers or businesses choosing to spend less money. The Fed tries to fight this by lowering interest rates. This can work—lower interest rates make it cheap to borrow money to spend. But people can still choose to spend less, even when they could borrow that money really cheaply. This happened very obviously in 2007 and 2008.

When people (or businesses) choose to spend less, the economy slows down. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. People spend less, so business income declines. Businesses sell less, so they buy less raw materials; they buy less products to sell; they cut employees. Employees lose their jobs, their income shrinks, so they spend less. Commodity sellers can’t sell what they produce, so they stop producing. Businesses can’t sell what they buy, so they quit buying. All those choices flow through the economy, reducing everyone’s income, reducing everyone’s spending even more.

We haven’t seen much of this yet, but we’re about to.

I mention all this now because I just saw this article in the New York Times: We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America. The writers came up with a model for a fairly affluent middle-class family in the United States, and found that rising prices were crushing it:

According to our calculations, the math has stopped adding up for this family over the past 18 months. They had a small cushion in 2024. Now they are in the red after covering just the basics

People’s reactions to prices that outstrip their income vary. Up to now people have adapted by simply doing what they have to do. They start by making the easiest cuts they can manage, but that doesn’t go very far. You can only make the adjustment from beef to chicken to beans one time. You can quit buying new clothes and make do with what’s in your closet for a year or two, but eventually your old clothes start to wear out. People can quit saving and investing, and they can start borrowing to cover their expenses, but that can’t go on. Eventually, people have to start making structural changes to their household costs, of the sort I talked about all the time when I was writing for Wise Bread: They can become a one-car family. They can move from a house, to an apartment, to a smaller apartment. They can raise the deductibles on their insurance policies.

These sorts of changes have long lead-times. Selling your second (or third) car might take months, and it might not save you much money in the first year or two after you do it. Moving to a cheaper place to live similarly takes months and costs money. Even switching to a cheaper phone plan takes a while. But 18 months is enough time for people to start making these changes. And once they’ve done so, that new lower-spending structure is largely locked in for at least months, probably for years. Even as prices start to come down (and they will, although not to what they were in 2020), people who have made those structural changes to their household cost structure aren’t going to undo them anytime soon.

The result is going to be a recession, very possibly a severe recession, and one that goes on for a very long time. It’s not obvious yet, because businesses are still spending huge amounts of money on things like AI infrastructure, but a lot of that spending is illusory, so it will vanish all at once, rather than gradually.

This wasn’t inevitable. The Fed deserves some of the blame. The Trump administration deserves much more—tariffs and war are what most dramatically hit the cost structures of the typical business and the typical household.

At this point, there’s no good solution for the economy as a whole, because the smart moves by individuals (dramatically changing the cost structure of the business or the household to enable lower spending) all act to deepen the recession. But that is no reason to do anything else but act to bring your costs in line with your income. Going bankrupt will not help the economy.

I’ve talked about artist’s dates many times, so I won’t go on about those, except to say that on Jackie’s birthday we went to the Krannert Art Museum.

Jackie particularly wanted to see the crocheted coral reef exhibit. I neglected to get a picture of the whole thing, but I did get a picture of this sea slug, which I thought was interesting because Jackie knitted a terrestrial slug for Steven for his birthday perhaps 15 years ago.

Here is Steven receiving his slug:

And after that enormous success, Jackie knitted several more slugs:

The left-most (greenish) slug is Sigurdsson T. Slug, my personal slug.

We saw lots of other cool stuff in the museum, but about the only other thing I got a picture of was this awesome snek jug:

Is it not glorious?

Appreciate these day lily flowers with rain drops, and this wet dog (which smells like a wet dog, but that is not captured in the photo).

As someone who uses at least two wearables that gather all manner of biometric data about me, I have considerable concern about just how that data is used. I was pretty pleased with Oura’s old privacy policies; I’m not sure how much their most recent changes have compromised them. I’m not so sure about Google’s policies, but since Google knows everything else about me, I’m not inclined to worry a lot extra about the Fitbit data.

Anyway, this post by Bruce Schneier is interesting:

I have often said that surveillance tech is generally deployed first against people with diminished rights: children, prisoners, military personnel, the mentally impaired. This is another early use case with different dynamics. The surveilled are wealthy and powerful, and—in many cases—unionized.

Source: Professional Athletes and Wearables – Schneier on Security

I was out walking Ashley this morning when I saw this painting on top of the recycling bins near my house in Winfield Village.

I immediately thought of a guy (probably this guy) who would buy thrift-store landscape paintings and then add monster to them.

I shared the image above with Steven, who immediately thought of the same guy. (Steven was the one who found that link, before I was even home from walking the dog.)

Isn’t that little lake just begging for a sea monster of some sort standing in it? Or maybe some little cryptids lurking in the trees?

Steven commented while he was visiting on how much fun vole-watching on my patio was.

Ashley thinks so too.

Ashley has caught three voles that I know of (because she was on-leash when she caught them). She may have caught some others on the patio when she was out there off-leash.

One thing that surprised me, because it is so different from our boxers when I was young, was how gentle her mouth is.

Our boxers would promptly dispatch whatever they caught—groundhogs, even raccoons. One shake of the boxer’s head and whatever it had captured in its powerful jaws was dead.

That is not Ashley’s modus operandi. Two of the voles that Ashley captured were released unharmed, after I told Ashley “drop it.” (The third got eaten before I got organized to tell Ashley not to.)

In addition to the three voles, Ashley has caught both one (rather stupid) squirrel, and one (rather immature) robin fledgling. Both of those were released unharmed as well.

I’m not quite sure why. I know some retrievers have very soft mouths, so they can bring back a dead fowl without ruining it. Maybe there’s a gene for that, and Ashley has it? Or maybe it’s just that she was rewarded repeatedly for being very gentle when she took treats from people’s hands?

Whatever it is, I like both aspects of my li’l pupper: truly a mighty hunter, but also a gentle one.

I’m always on the lookout for books that take a more balanced view of sun exposure than “skin cancer bad,” and this looks to be a good one: In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen

From a review in Nature Briefing:

“One study he mentions analysed the skin of lifeguards at the start and end of a summer season during which they were heavily exposed to the sun¹. By summer’s end, their skin was enriched with microbial “beneficial bugs” that protect against UV radiation. A square centimetre of human skin contains millions of microorganisms, some of which produce compounds that kill cancer cells without harming normal ones.”

Source: The best way to start your day? The science backs naked cartwheels in the sun

I mean, really. We know the UV rays are actinic, as are the blue-green rays (tell your brain it’s daytime), and the red and infrared rays (promote healing at various depths of skin and below the skin). I don’t know about all the other wavelengths, but I’m willing to bet that they all do something.

Humans evolved in the sun, and evolved different skin pigmentation that varied with latitude (and, I suspect, varied with other things as well). The idea that our skin can’t handle a perfectly ordinary amount of sunlight is just silly.

As you’ll know if you subscribe to my newsletter (sign up in the sidebar), my brother and I are attending SFWA’s Nebula Award Conference in Chicago.

Today Steven had SFWA board stuff all day, so after breakfast I went to the hotel fitness center for a workout.

Normally I always do a full warmup before a workout. (This is slightly problematic, as too often I just do the warmup, and then need to walk the dog and fix lunch, and end up never getting to the workout.) Today, because the scheduling seemed to work better, I did the workout first, right after breakfast. Then I did my morning exercises in the early afternoon.

That worked out surprisingly well.

One reason it worked out well was that I did most of the workout on new-to-me machines, so I started with reasonably low weights and worked my way up to working weights, which basically amounts to a warmup all by itself. I did:

• Single-leg Romanian deadlifts with a 25 lb dumbbell 3 x 5 left/5 right (my only non-machine exercise)
• Shoulder press 30 lbs 1×12, 35 lbs 1×12, 1×10
• Leg extension 50 lbs 1×12, 55 lbs 2×12, 60 lbs 1×12, 65 lbs 1×12
• Pulldown 70 lbs 1×12, 75 lbs 1×9, 1×5

I forgot to do goblet squats! There wasn’t a leg-press machine, and I kept thinking, “What can I do to work my glutes?” But I didn’t think of goblet squats. I can do those tomorrow, as well as hitting the other machines (leg curl, biceps curl, and chest press are the ones I didn’t do today).

In con-related news, I have successfully registered! I have a name badge, a program, and tickets for a promised book bag.

I’m expecting Steven’s board-related activities to wrap up shortly, and then we’re talking about heading out to a margarita bar. Or, if his thing runs too late, maybe just having a beer here in the hotel.

I personally am very flexible in this regard.

Have you ever seen a more pleasant garden spot than this sterile bit of lawn, concrete, and pavers at the Crowne Plaza O’Hare? There is no seating at all. There are some walls you can sit on, if you’re reasonably tall, but even the lowest bit of wall is too tall for me to balance a laptop on my knees.

I did find one cigarette butt, so I know the space does not go completely unused.

At Aspen Tap House with @stevendbrewer. I’m drinking a Destihl ILL-IPA. He has an Emancipation Plowhorse.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d made two changes to my morning routine: I had quit wearing my earbuds (and listening to podcasts) during my first two walks in the morning, and had started sitting down to write as soon as I got home from the second walk.

I am pleased to report that these changes are working great. I’ve done at least some fiction writing every single day for over three weeks now. Most of it was on a long-form project that I’m pressing ahead with, but I briefly paused to work on a short story (a flash piece?), that made use of one idea from my long-form project that I really liked, but that wasn’t working in the story.

“People with substantial cryptocurrency holdings face grave personal danger, and the physical attacks on their person grow bolder, more violent, and more sadistic by the day.”

Source: Pluralistic: Hold on for dear life (28 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Apropos nothing in particular, I just wanted to mention that I own no cryptocurrency assets at all, and (except for a few bitcoin cents that I briefly owned and then lost in 2011 in the hack of mybitcoin.com) I never have.

And, just for the record, I’ll also mention that I don’t think any cryptocurrency asset will ever be a thing of durable value. (This doesn’t mean that blockchains aren’t a useful technology. Just that they make crappy assets.)

My toot reminding people about RSS feed readers got some attention, so I thought I’d re-up this thing I wrote thirteen years ago:

“Finding a great writer is way better than finding a great post.”

Source: Great writers versus great posts | Philip Brewer

However wonderful it is to find a great post, it’s much better to find a great writer. Back in the day when more people used RSS feed readers, it was perfectly ordinary to find a great post, and then click on the writer so you could add their feed to your feed reader.

I’d like to see the return of those days. Use an RSS feed reader again, and when you find a great post, you too can check out what else the writer writes, and if you like their other stuff too, go ahead and follow them.

My brother and I think alike about many things, and differently about many other things. We also sometimes disagree about what it is that we disagree about, which is kind of funny all by itself.

Although we agree about many things, we sometimes actually come at things from quite different perspectives.

Source: Retiring to… Something – Steven D. BREWER

In my brother’s thinking, I “never really wanted to work and pursued a career with the goal of retiring early,” which is both true and false. I hated having a job of the sort where I needed to show up every day, and do stuff that I didn’t find interesting. But I never objected to working. I just wanted the word used correctly. I was delighted to “work” in the sense of producing great works of literature (or art, or philanthropy).

It was never working I objected to. I simply didn’t like “working for the man.”

In retirement I don’t have to do that, and am able to devote myself to work (such as my fiction writing), to the necessary tasks of daily living (such as walking my dog), and to doing things I enjoy for their own sake (such as exercise, and reading).

And although the specifics may be quite different, in this area I think my brother and I are very much in agreement.

I have no shortage of interesting projects I intend to work on in retirement.

Source: Retiring to… Something – Steven D. BREWER

A while back someone among our local group shared a link to a set of books they’d found on the internet, with interpretations and drills for Meyer’s Art of Fencing. Word among the local group was that the people behind the books publish stuff “based on interpretations that are… subject to debate,” and suggest taking all of it with a grain of salt.

What caught my eye, though, was not the interpretations, but rather the suggested drills.

They reminded me of the sort of drills you find in a certain class of music texts, where they’re going to go on to the advanced stuff, but they want to make sure you’ve got the basics down, so they’ll have exercises like, “Play every major and minor scale in every key for every octave.” Which, you know, if you can’t do it pretty smoothly, you’re going to have trouble doing the advanced stuff, so you might as well know that right from the start.

And that’s what these drills are like. One is to stand in each guard and cut, thrust, or shift to every other guard. Then take a few quick notes. Did moving from that guard to this or that other guard seem easy and comfortable? Did it seem like it would be useful, or just leave you open for your opponent to take some advantage?

The next drill was to stand in each guard, and then execute each of Meyer’s cuts and thrusts. Again, take some notes. What seemed like it worked?

Drills like that don’t seem like they would depend on the author’s hot takes on anything about Meyer. In fact, they seem great on every level. I can get an idea of what might or might not work. I can get some practice doing each of the cuts and thrusts. I can spend some time standing in each of the guards.

Those are all things I can benefit from.

So I started doing some drills along these lines today, starting with Right Ox and Dempfhau.

I want to get a little lower in my fencing stance, and maybe hold my sword a little more forward, but it doesn’t seem as bad as I imagined.

Although Meyer doesn’t say so anywhere I’ve found, Right Ox is the guard you’d find yourself in at the end of drawing your rapier from a sheath. (Thibault says this, I think.) If your opponent drew before you, the very next thing you might need to do is fend off an attack, which suggests to me that Dempfhau might be very useful. So that’s one thing I drilled: Dempfhau from Right Ox followed by a thrust into Longpoint, followed by falling back down on the sword that I’d dempfhaued, and then moving to Iron Gate or back into Right Ox.

Besides that, I did some moving from Right Ox to several other guards (High Guard, Left Ox, Low Guard (on the right and on the left), Iron Gate, Plow, and Longpoint). I need to look more at the low guards and at plow, but the point of the drill is to start putting in the time, not to already be doing everything perfectly.

I’ve gotten back to writing regularly, for the first time in too long. I’ve made two changes to my daily routine to make this happen.

The first is that I’m avoiding listening to podcasts during my first two dog walks. This lets me use that time walking outdoors to get into the headspace of whatever story I’m working on.

The second is that I’m going ahead and sitting down to write, right after the second dog walk. I’ve known for a very long time that I have to get started writing early, if I’m going to be successful. After second walk is perhaps not idea—earlier might be better—but it’s been working these past few days.

I had been using that time to get started on my morning exercises. But that leads into doing a workout, and by the time I’m done with that the dog is ready for her third walk, and then it’s time for lunch. And that is why I hadn’t been getting any writing done.

Slotting in a session of writing before I exercise is cutting into my exercise time, but maybe that’s okay. Delaying my workout for an hour (or, hopefully soon, an hour and a half) is certainly okay occasionally, and so far I’ve been getting in a reasonable amount of exercise anyway.