May Voting Polls, the Preschool Plague is Ended!

Voting Polls, Random Updates, etc

Prompt: yours truly, Ghiblified, in a state of delirium

A Dream of Spring

For the first time in what seems like forever, no one in my family is sick. I had not realized this would be such a big component of preschool or parenthood. We called it the Preschool plague. No sooner would we recover from one bout of the flu before we could be struck down by another. I’ve certainly never been sick for an entire month before, let alone a month and a half!

My eldest boy got so sick of trips to urgent care to look at his ears that he crossed his arms and said, “I’m not talk to you” when I carried him inside. Once again, he fought the doctors when they tried to take his temperature like they were going to keep it and refuse to give it back. And I, once again, had to restrain him thereby, once again, making him feel betrayed. There were lots of movies and ice cream during this period.

It seems like more was demanded of me during this time than has ever been demanded before. I’m usually quite good with stress but it was genuinely pushing me to a limit to do things like have every single shower with my eight month old so the vapor would help break up his congestion. If we were lucky, he’d sneeze a gallon of snot all over my chest while we were in there and then immediately want to take a three hour nap. All while having to do my regular job where I’m also getting a bigger and bigger plate of things that need doing.

If you don’t have kids and you can, I want to highly recommend it despite what you might think from the above paragraph. Imagine loving someone so much that when a gallon of their snot is dumped over your chest you respond with, “Good job, buddy!”

The Trust Assembly Charges Forward

I know that I should have a brand, or whatever. I really do. It would help so much if I just wrote stories about my family, OR pieces about AI, OR random movie reviews, OR kept pushing the Trust Assembly. But I have always been a very eccentric person unless I‘m actively trying not to be, and I’m difficult to categorize. This is just who and how I am, for better or worse.

That said, I wanted to just publicly thank all the core volunteers on the Trust Assembly project for suffering with me through this period. We’re working more on the core product and all of these guys have had to get on our weekly calls while my kids are shouting at the top of their lungs in the background. I had to do one call while giving one of my children a bath because my wife had hurt her wrist and couldn’t manage both of the boys on her own. Everybody stayed on task even when I had to pull away to ask my son to stop splashing water everywhere.

This is a great group of people and we’re working on something that we genuinely hope will change the world. I know it’s cliche, but we all just want to give people something they can trust and feel good about. You shouldn’t have to scroll your phone all the time feeling like you’re living in the Doom of Valyria. If we’re successful, you won’t have to. You can be a boring regular person, with the understanding that being a boring regular person is the best thing there is and it’s how you do useful things for all the other boring regular people you share the planet with.

And now to voting polls.

The Tower of Bullshit — an analysis of where big organizations actually fail via a retelling of the story of Babylon but in the “Josh Chris” framing where it’s all about construction workers.

What is it like to be Elon Musk? — a brief history of Musk and how I imagine it must feel to be him day to day.

Sermon to an LLM — why LLM’s should have religion. You humans can vote on this but it will actually be written to an LLM.

I, a Man, Wade into the Messiness Discourse — In this piece I will cleverly switch the roles my wife and I play in our household several times so you’re not sure who to side with, thereby forcing you to realize you’ve been picking sides in situations where you just need to attend to human suffering, to show how this is a really ugly conversation and you should treat people like they’re human. For the record, I am much messier than my wife by instinct but I also much more housework than she does.

The Hellhole of the Pacific — A sort of sequel piece to “The Deep South of the Pacific Northwest” where I delve into some of the local folklore of the region where I grew up. The title is actually the nickname for Aberdeen in the early 1900’s. It was also known as “The Port of Missing Men.” There’s a lot of colorful stories in the area and almost all of them are… uh… not for kids. Lotta folks getting killed in this one.

The Men of the Mill — a series of vignettes of stories I heard in the mill. Again, a bit of a sequel to the “Deep South of the Pacific Northwest.” It will open up with the story of a guy named Elroy, who always inexplicably wore a bandolier full of bullets to work, trying to run over his son. It will get weirder from by a lot.

A Geek from Krypton — the story of my college experience, where I assumed I would continue to be the most feminine man that anyone ever saw, only to find out that by the standards of the outside world I was almost cartoonishly masculine. This is really the story of culture shock that I’m struggling with to this day. It will start with the framing of how I won a scholarship from NASA and then my slowly unfolding realization that literally the entire rest of the world was, from my dad’s perspective, “Gay.” Will have lots of moments where I literally can’t understand why you can’t tell some super important person to fuck off.