I have two active lists of following, and this is getting annoying.

I've lost 96 pounds since late July. Au naturale, no drugs. I'm swirling a sub-200 weight for the first time in a couple of decades. I stepped on a scale at the end of July and blinked. It'd been a few years. Sure, my pants were getting bigger, but 298? No. Decided right then and there. Wasn't going to happen. Diet and exercise. Cardio combined with resistance, with the objective of gaining muscle. Intermittent fasting and calorie counting, followed by a shortening on the fasting, always calorie counting. Everything calories, if not with an app then mentally. The gains were easy at first. The weight melted off, because I am one stubborn Gaul, and none are as fierce as the Belgae, or so Caesar says. Plus, I was fat. I had nowhere to go but down. Anyway, I stalled out at around -70 pounds. That's okay. Stalls happen. But this one stuck around a while. I didn't know how to get 'er out of neutral. Then I stopped drinking alcohol, and the weight loss picked back up with a vengeance. I'm a social drinker, and a social guy. Only recently did I read about the metabolic effects of Mr. Booze. I ran through the chemistry today, dusting off ancient knowledge from undergrad I'd intentionally kept buried. I despise chemistry as a field of personal study, and I resent having to do this. Turns out, though, alcohol isn't just something to calorie count like I was doing previously; it's a substance that works against fat-burning metabolically. I intensely dislike knowing this. You may now dislike me for knowing this, too. I've gone 45 days without a beer, but feel no real impetus to have one now. Sometimes, ignorance is preferable.

Was fun! My first CW in years. Thanks!

Only the media ever cared about it because they knew it'd create member-berry clicks from COVID. The epidemiologists didn't even care about it, because it's a nothingburger.

I consider my Signal chats private. I consider my hotel traffic via Obscura to be... most private. I consider nothing I do on a publicly viewable chain to be private. We should know this by now. If privacy is the aim, I'd use XMR under the presumption that it is still not compromised. All this to say that I find current debates about zaps... amusing.

Guy I don't know trots in here and starts complaining about Nostr so I check out his protocol. Realize it's kinda like BlueSky with centralized servers where you can export your data, laugh, close tab. He's right about you coiners and how you limit the adoption of the protocol, though. That much, he's right about.

The Vatican has provided some pretty slick infographs for "Magnifica Humanitas." I have some quibbles with some of the contents of the encyclical (namely, the intentional misreading of the Tower of Babel story at the beginning in order to score cheap metaphor points; unity is an original blessing, and "diversity" the punishment for humanity's transgression), but the overall message is a good one.

Absolutely: that's what it looks like at a lower level. On a higher level, it's all about power, and it doesn't matter what country we're talking about. This is why I use sovereign monetary policy as an example here: countries with fiat not worth the paper it's printed on soldier forward with it, simply because they control it. They will never surrender their control over money, because it's power.

Awful big rat you've got on your hands there, Alex. Best just to flush and be done with it.

But, that's reality when it comes to the nature of government. It's all about control. The state can keep its paws wrapped around a couple of corporations, and so it does. Moving forward a bit, though, with the black pill: do you think they'd tolerate an actual threat to monetary sovereignty? Heh. Just the way it is.

Big, awful, oversized frames for glasses are back from the 1980's, and I just want to say: no, kids. No.

I am in the Diocese of Joliet. So yep, we’re Midwestern as it gets. ;) Also spent time growing up in Ann Arbor, Omaha, and Decatur.

First sunburn of the year, let's go. Get it over with and get outside.