#kind of a simplified explanation but that's the gist of it.

[thornshadowwolf]

I'm generally on the same page as you; just wanted to clarify - by "incomparable to existing species" I don't mean "original species" (necessarily; some might still be included if they are strange enough). I mean genuinely difficult to compare / equivalate. If I can easily explain what the character (or species) looks like using existing creatures then that wouldn't really count as this category (ex. if I can say "looks like a really long cat with six legs" it wouldn't count). I wouldn't put sergals under this category because they're very much Any Other (anthropomorphized) Animal (and if you want to literally compare them, they're oft described as shark-like). It's meant to be a step up on the scale from "strange anatomy." Really pushing what can be described as an animal (/ furry).

Tho admittedly this scale is far from perfect. I struggled with categorizing things beyond what my own interpretation of the term is. Like, with the aforementioned category, there are many real life animals that are incredibly unique, so is there really anything that can't be described by comparing it to animals? As another example, there should probably be a step between "common add-ons" and "strange anatomy" I just couldn't figure out how to define / word it. (And of course in practice the "steps" aren't quite so neatly separate.) Point is I tried not to favor my own answer too much by cutting off the options at what I thought was obvious or logical, and as a result had to come up with things that I Didn't Really Get and therefore struggled to define and exemplify.

Thanks for the thorough answer/thoughts though!

Ok because I keep thinking people are grossly misusing the term but maybe I'm in the minority -

(If people are interested I might make more nuanced/in depth polls, since there are many things that don't exactly fit on a straight "less weird to more weird" scale of this type, such as "object heads" "character has piercings and body mods" "hybrids" "art style makes an otherwise normal character weirdfur" "cyborgs" "uncommon species" "furrifying inanimate objects")

(Also, there seems to be two overlapping but generally distinct weirdfur communities, one that's about weird furries in terms of strange and unusual anthro characters and designs, and one that's about weird furries in terms of furries (i.e. the people in the fandom) who are into kink. Respect to the latter but this poll is about the former.)

[inventors-fair]

Flavor Mode Commentary: Choices

We're talking about cards, right? We're talking about cards. We're talking about various choices in a card game and their possibilities thereafter.

But that's not usually how it works, is it. Modal spells are all about opportunity. There are the places where one mode will work better, and one where the mode works worse, and sometimes you can't even play one of the modes because the battlefield doesn't allow for it. There's sometimes a choice, but is there really? MTG is a goal-oriented game in the end. The goal is to win. Which choice is the right choice? Which choice gets you there faster? Which choices will be cut off?

It's so easy to imagine that the choices on our cards will always be available, but sometimes the choices get made for us. Perhaps the challenge this week was less about the specifics of the worlds and more about the notion that we have to believe in these choices being available at all. It's curious to think about, really, the distinction between what's reasonable and what would actually happen. There are no dice being rolled here. It's all up to you.

...I'm way too far behind for all of this. Anyway, Judge Picks here and there for the cards I wanna point out—there were way too many good cards this week and paring down was a nightmare. Read on.

@corporalotherbear — Alleyway Mugging (JUDGE PICK)

Your childhood memories or your life! Ha. Just kidding. Anyway, this card's absolutely nightmarish in limited but I don't mind it. Having an Eviscerate and Pilfer mode is pretty on-rate for common destruction spells these days. I have the feeling that quite a few cards end up getting relegated to Ravnica, but I don't want to jump to conclusions, so I do wanna know where you envisioned this card, if anywhere specific. What I like about this card is that in that old draft-quadrant-theory thing (sorry, no idea what it's called), this card's basically smack-dab in the middle and fulfills everything you want it to regardless of where you are positionally.

I think that the whole money-or-your-life trope is decently executed here, enough that I can give this a thumbs-up in the flavor department. Right now, I will say that it's somewhat bare-bones, but there's the question of whether or not my expectations are too high for this sort of thing. Still, compared to the specificity and polish that would potentially set it apart, I do want a little more past the base concept. OR, is this one of those things where the direct name and the common opening is designed to be more simplified to reach players on that level without spiraling into overdesigned and overwritten explanations? Hey, I dunno, don't ask me, I'm just an innocent mugger. I mean judge.

~

@helloijustreadyourpost — Stitcher's Judgement (JUDGE PICK)

Great options here, and I think that the flavor is simplified enough that the execution feels like it's doing just what it wants to—one single masterpiece or extra corpse fodder. I like the scientist's gist here, and the stitchers of Innistrad don't get as good a reputation as they deserve. She's calculating, her zombies aren't decaying, she knows the difference between showing off and being pragmatic. I like that a lot! I think that the flavor text itself is pretty good; the only thing that came into my head was replacing "corpse" with "body," and editing to get some kind of 'everybody'/'every body' pun in there. You could make the argument that the stitchers don't have quite the same kind of bourgeoisie art standards that the vampires might have in terms of mood, y'know?

Five-mana reanimation is pretty on-rate for these effects, too, and I'm down for where you're going with it. There should be one big thing that you'd want to get back for this to be worth it, but stealing your opponent's creatures could be more than worth it depending on board state. It's really hard to argue against also having six damage worth of evasive bodies on board, though, and that's a tough argument to make. At this point in the game (and assuming that there's some graveyard shenanigans at hand b/c, well, zombies and Innistrad), having three cards to exile might not be so hard to get. Board flexibility is all situational as always. I think that the vibe and mechanics are solid, though, and I'm a fan.

~

@horsecrash — Wrong Way

We're back to building a better Unsummon, heh—and that's not a dig, honest, it's just something that Magic's been doing on and off for a while. I think I'm down for the stretch of "last words" being associated with a disappearance instead of death, for the most part as well. Let's start with the mechanics, though, because I have the feeling that instant-speed unblockability might cause some small issues with inexperienced players attacking and then being surprised when their trick doesn't work after blocks. That said, I'd also love to see someone blow up an attacking creature just to get sniped by this card played in response on a different attacking creature before blocks have been declared. It's a really small issue with timing, though, and the flexibility saves it, IMO. It's not the strongest combat trick in the world but it's what Blue wants to do.

Part of that semi-weakness also makes it feel slightly less...specific in its flavor? Or at least, it's a card that meets the player on their level, and I've been looking at a lot of these modal cards recently and I can't help but want a little bit more and I'm not sure where or why. Maybe it's because the flavor text is something we've seen before from Boros/Dimir interactions. Maybe it's just the expectation doesn't have that same kind of tension between modes that makes the choice apparent? The divergence of a trap vs. an escape doesn't feel like there are any stakes to me, or at least that they're not super high, and that the weight of the choice itself is negligible compared to the gameplay where one or the other makes a strong difference. It's not a bad card by any means, and the flavor is right where it needs to be. For this contest, my brain's just looking for a different kind of heft, I think.

~

@i-am-the-one-who-wololoes — Urza's Choice

I wish I could remember everything that happened with Urza and Mishra as much as I remembered pretty much everything else that's happened in MTG canon. That said, I know there was the whole Sylex thing, and then there was Urza's Ruinous Blast, etc. I think that with that in mind, this card's flavor is essentially a one-or-the-other when canonically everything got blown up, I think? I just skimmed the wiki, honestly, so I couldn't tell you one way or another.

That said, I feel that this card gets precedent'd mechanically and flavorfully by Urza's Ruinous Blast—i.e. what's been done has been done before with specificity. Four-mana boardwipes might be okay on the one-sided front with kindred support, so I understand where you might be coming from there. This card also feels like it's almost in the Alara era in terms of power level overall though. I guess I wouldn't really know what more it could do. Maybe this particular moment for this particular contest could've been better applied elsewhere considering precedent.

~

@la-femme-de-stardust — Peacegranter

I'm going to get to the mechanical strength in a moment. I understand what the modes are trying to do here from a flavorful perspective: one is granting strength to vanquish a foe, and one is saving a creature from dying. I wish there was a little more context here, because there's that kinda-ironic twist of death being a mercy as seen by this war-cleric character, but that's a deep cut even for me. The flavor text is difficult to parse because of the passive voice, and digging out some interpretations is probably more difficult than it needs to be.

Still, in a Mardu-colored shell, I really liked the intended flavor of combat mechanics and how they flow into imagining how this character might be depicted. It doesn't have to be specifically the Mardo horde, and—oh man, what was the last tri-color nonsense that we had... Honestly, aside from Ikoria, the last one that I could reliably call to mind was Isshin from Kamigawa. I miss this archetype and I thoroughly enjoy it! Having white be the primary color makes both of these potential costs perfectly appropriate. Combat control ahoy. Marginally esoteric flavor skews awkward, but the card itself is pretty awesome.

~

@levelzeo — Beloved General

I really don't think that this card needed flavor text, mate. And I mean that as a compliment, because I absolutely get the notion that this general leaves behind a variety of interpretable legacies dependent on the needs of the world at the time. One story shows her losing her corporeal body but gaining an incorporeal one, one shows the dedication of her strength, and one displays the revenge of the troops. All of that totally makes sense! Maybe "beloved" is a little bit of an awkward adjective, but that might just be one of my random vocab preferences for this context? It's certainly serviceable.

The mechanics are pretty neat too. Early-game allows you to increase the odds of this card going more aggressive, of course, but there's a non-zero chance that allowing her to die creates a spot of removal when you might need it, allowing you to attack into potentially unfavorable boards. At the very least, if you don't have any creatures, you get a flying body back and some card advantage. What I really like about these mechanics is that they scale up in usability the more creatures you have, and that's pretty smart. I think the first mode could just say "Exile it" instead of the full "from your graveyard," and the last one should be worded like Case of the Gateway Express. Aside from that, I really like how you thought about this card. Just drop the extra two lines at the end when you have this much text.

~

@melancholia-ennui — Lovers' Tragedy (JUDGE PICK)

Long live Cataclysm effects. Or Divine Reckoning effects. Whichever works! I think that the setup to the modal choices is as important as the choices themselves for a lot of cards in this contest. The Romeo and Juliet backdrop would probably be most players' first point of entry to this card. Personally, that's a little strange to make two creatures "fall in love," but I don't think that gameplay and flavor need to match the board state to be good. Run Away Together is another kind of example, perhaps! Let's back up though, because I knew there was something I super loved with this card, and that's the choices' ultimate result.

Sacrificing those creatures might be the best option if you have something you're willing to throw away. When are the choices revealed? Probably at the same time, or maybe there needs to be a "then" there for showing that you're choosing first, I dunno. ANYWAY, the deciding factor of threats is definitely nail-biting. Sacrificing the chosen creatures incentivises your opponent to choose a small creature, but if they do, then you're probably gonna exile the rest instead. This card rigidly enforces parity, and I like that a lot. The lovers' death is tragic, but if they destroy everything to be alone, that itself is equally tragic. The fact that you as pseudo-storyteller are enforcing this choices hits on an emotion that I don't quite have the right words for. That's a good thing, a complex thing. Boardwipes, I feel, have a lot of flavor wiggle room, and you're delving into some interesting territory here. I'd clean up the first section to show how that timing would work best.

~

@nine-effing-hells — Lance the Boils

Ha, gross. I almost feel a Lorwyn vibe from this card because of that one with the teeth, and the pseudo-grossout thing that fantasy tropes do sometimes, but as a gold card, this one's a curiosity to me. In a good way! A little flavor text might've helped this one, though. Or maybe AD. As it stands, the interpretations are nice but I want more context for the story of it all. It's a gross story of a medical nature—maybe. That's generous, I know. We don't see as much of this kind of humor in MTG these days and probably for the better. Stabbing pustules going either horrifically right or horrifically wrong is as nasty as it can get.

I guess the mechanics of it flow well too, depending on the archetypes and world. I wonder if there would be some incentive for removing counters from an opponent's creature? But that's thinking too far ahead; healing up is the intent of the second ability, and I totally feel that it would be a fine draft uncommon. I can't see this card coming close to replacing Lightning Helix in the kinds of decks that would play it, and that is 100% fine. It's designed for a specific environment and I'm down to play it in the aggro sideboard. Again, I understand everything that you're going for on this card, which is a massive plus. I think following that there was an opportunity to get into the inner-flavor-nitty-gritty that we missed here.

~

@real-aspen-hours — Stroke of Inspiration (JUDGE PICK)

"Galvanatrix" is certainly a title. Or is that a name? I certainly don't see it referenced on any cards thus far; as either name or title, I'm struck. There's the possibility of this outcome working and I think that it's kinda funny, honestly. There are only two outcomes for this kind of experiment: death or half-ingenuity. I totally get it! There's a brutal physicality that's associated with the intended flavor and I like how that feeds into the gameplay. A manner of destruction happens either way, and at instant speed, too.

The gameplay of this card is both strong and simple. I think it was a good call that you can only play one of the cards exiled this way, to slightly mitigate the issue of power level. Otherwise, this card would be comparable to Light up the Stage but somehow even stronger. SERIOUSLY stronger. Wait, no, which one... Wrenn's Resolve, that's the other one, and the VOW one too. Those cards are competitively viable so changing the speed and adding removal.. I'm getting ahead of myself. The long and short is that I like this card a lot. I do wonder for poor Inna, what happened to the remainder of her nervous system...

~

@reaperfromtheabyss — Impassioned Guildseeker

How does one determine what a guildless human looks like? I'm visualizing this card and the intent, and I feel that there's some wiggle room where I want to caution you away from the image in question. Right now I get the sense that the AD and the name are trying too hard to put a story of this particular character into the forefront where the decision is an action-packed moment of clarity, where it really doesn't have to be to bring Ravnica to life. I'm imagining a small cycle of common creatures that do just what you're after—two abilities that reference the guilds—and it's less climax and more like a side-bildungsroman, e.g. this individual isn't named as a "guildseeker" but just as a vagrant or vagabond, and there's flavor text that talks about Gruul and Rakdos as homes for unchecked violence.

What that leads into with the mechanics is a really interesting potential for a common cycle that I can envision right away. This character is torn between Gruul and Rakdos, and so maybe there's a white character that's torn between the naturalization of the Selesnya or the steadiness of the Boros, represented by either an ETB Naturalize or an ETB untapping of a creature. Y'know? You've got a potential cycle here, or pseudo-cycle, that hearkens back to the guild structure way back in the RTR or even RNC days, and it feels great to me. I don't think that this is the absolute best execution yet, but it's good for inspiration.

~

@sparkyyoungupstart — Monstrous Intervention

This card could honestly have cost just WB and been fine, in my opinion. Temporary indestructible is fine but doesn't need more than one or two mana. Multicolored options are fine, too, and I don't hate the second ability, but you're getting rid of a creature for life and that's usually a terrible board prospect. Honestly, it's almost like a free Swords to Plowshares for your opponent even if you're in deep to the aristocrats archetype. As someone who loves the aristocrats archetype, it's usually not worth it. But that first mode is still something you wanna use more often than not, and I really like the potential.

Flavorfully as well the potential is awesome. My personal take is that an emdash would've served better than ellipses, but that's also pedantry. Vampire romance is quite the story beat here, and you know full well that this ain't an Innistrad story. I don't really know where it would take place, actually! I don't feel that MTG has fully embraced the sexy vampires as much as they should. Yeah, some of them are purportedly hot (if you're into that), but they don't seduce humans as much as they should. I'd be more sorry for this awkward commentary if the card didn't kinda introduce that trope! I really do like it the more I type about it. Mercy or love. Interesting how mercy can be its own kind of love, but not the other way around, not as much. Hm.

~

@tanknspank — Auspicious Harvest

What a bleak (or wonderful) outcome. Deep in the food archetype, we have these cards that rely on sacrifice, and that leads to a card that would be either first-pickable or one that would run around the table ten thousand times. Free food sacrifice is one possibility but that would mean two creatures dying...and you know what, I wonder: what does that actually represent? The cost to "eat" Food, I mean. Is that exertion? Competition? Or just gameplay trumping flavor? Probably the latter. Mechanically, I feel that you want a lot of Food either way, so while I understand from your comments how the Famine means less competition for food in general (i.e. easier to consume b/c fewer people), there's an inherent disconnect between the two.

I think the problem with this route is that the card both wants and expects you to have more Food, and the flavor of Famine doesn't work at all if there's any food whatsoever. Incongruity is the bane of flavor parsing, and gameplay incongruity is the most frustrating of all. The attempt is a great modal representation, but I don't feel that it's quite captured here. Maybe Famine could have you force-sacrificing foods, and if you can't then you have a Mulch-like effect, representing the search for fertile land? I just feel that there are options that could've played out with both gameplay and flavor that could've worked in a more cohesive manner.

~

@wildcardgamez — Rigged Game

I think that I like this card's flavor without the flavor text; it's perhaps too meta to Magic than it would be in-universe. But I would like to see what you might have in mind for how it would fit into a Magic plane because I like this card as a cute little draw/discard trap. The notion of a devious bargain going your way and your way only is pretty cool, and an interesting use of six-sided die. I don't have as much personal experience with the whole die-rolling mechanics, but having those be related to games still connects in a way that I feel doesn't have to be as precise as the flavor suggests. Again, this is long-winded and also positive. I'm down for how this card's mood and the in-game feelings work together! It may just be a bit heavy-handed.

The mechanics also work out in a way that I'm not quite convinced would work in any way other than situational ways. Like, if your opponent is hellbent, then the game's not really rigged, and if your life total is low enough that the crackback would be lethal, that's gonna hurt if you need the advantage still for whatever reason. When do you play this card? Hopefully, when either outcome is in your favor. And when would that be? This card feels like it would be better when you're already ahead, and you know what, that's fine sometimes. I'd have to see how it plays out, and I also have to admit that there's nothing inherently wrong with state-situational cards. Just gotta work out your devilish deals so that you don't get your legs caught in the rigging.

~

@xenobladexfan — Threat of Compleation

Maybe I'm just Phyrexian'd out at the moment, because the actual notion of compleation is pretty well-done for me. Transformative effects are great, of course, and I think that this week showed a lot of people's interest in creature-type-changing effects in a great way. Where would this card find a home, I wonder? Oil counters and toxicity suggest an environment like ONE, but what does this card do for that kind of situation?

Just for brevity's sake, the modes are understandable for the story but I don't feel that they're doing anything particularly new or nuanced for the presented choice. Compleation vs. resistance has been tried and true throughout. Without any sense of specificity, I find myself wanting this card to give a less macroscopic notion that it's just not giving right now. The choices are broadly represented, and that's fine if you're going for it, but the idea isn't gripping me as much as a specific difference in a character's experience might. The flavor text more or less reenforces that sense of broad strokes. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but I'm looking for more of a foothold.

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@yourrightfulking — Gruul Diplomacy (JUDGE PICK)

Meat and eggs? We're eatin' well tonight. I think that with the modes, a three-mana Bite spell is probably marginal enough that everyone would be willing to play it. And everyone gets to eat, too! Within the Gruul clan, there's a sense of prosperity that not everyone gets to feel on the outside, and thank goodness for a feast to make that happen. I kinda like that, actually, even if that boar is probably going to be an attacker as well. While I'm not a fan of the specific phrasing "After all this time" in the FT, I like the notion that you're going for of nature's constancy.

Bold of you to assume that the Gruul would use utensils, but I digress—because as far as gold uncommons go, any Gruul player would be happy to have this card as a limited inclusion. Bite spells are always good, and tokens are most of the time pretty great, even if creatures have gotten a little better over time. Could this perhaps have been a trampling or vigilant Boar token? Maybe, but the life's flavorful enough (heh) that maybe you don't necessarily need much more. It's playable, it's easy to understand, and it's a callback that I think is worth the slight confusion for folks who don't know the cyclops in question. I like what folks have been doing with Ravnica for this contest. Makes me miss it.

That's one week out of the way. Thanks for everyone's patience. @abelzumi

[rollingeevee]

Robo Fizz x DID!Reader Headcanons

DID stands for Dissociative Identity Disorder

Warnings:  Tooth rotting fluff lol

●  I headcanon DID takes on a unique form in Hell, in which it causes the one suffering with it to fully shapeshift when a different personality is fronting, and for little signs to show up, like eye color changing, when someone is co-fronting.

●  He typically misses your minor tells for co-fronts because his focus often wanders. XD

●  When he first notices the minor changes in your appearance for a co-front, he assumes it’s part of your abilities or normal demon appearance that you developed when you manifested in Hell.

●  If your personality alters a bit during a co-front, he’ll assume the physical changes are based on your emotions.

●  When you fully shapeshift when an alter fully takes over and act completely differently, his attention is now fully on you.

●  Demons all have fully demonic forms, yes, but he could tell this was different. For starters, you looked completely different from your normal form, and demonic transformations still looked close to the normal form.

●  When your alter gives him a different name, he gets confused and worried. What happened to you? What was wrong? Who was this? What was this? Where were you?

●  If you change more with another alter switching out, his worry will only continue to grow.

●  One of them, probably a protector or soother, will get him to calm down a bit by assuring you’re okay.

●  He’ll be a bit skeptical, but will listen nevertheless. He can tell they have a connection to you because he noticed traits you had from them when they were co-front. He knows the body is still yours too.

●  Your alters may try to explain, but he won’t listen as far as that goes. They may have your body, but they’re not you, in fact they’re completely different. So he waits for you to come back for an explanation.

●  When you finally return, he bombards you with questions.

●  He hugs you and tells you he was worried. You get him to calm down and once he has, you begin to explain.

●  He has trouble understanding at first. He’s a robot who was built in Hell. Mental illness and disorders is a foreign concept to him.

●  You have to really simplify things for him to understand.

●  “I went through really bad stuff as a kid, so now I have different people in my head and I don’t know what happens when they're here and I’m not.”

●  He slowly starts to understand. But even though he’s a robot, he’s still an individual so it’s quite a bit to process. You settle for explaining more and more to him over multiple days so that he could properly process everything you were telling him.

●  He eventually gets the basic gist of it and is able to process it for the most part, especially if you keep explaining it to him.

●  He starts to ask questions about your alters. Who are they? What are they like? Should he watch out for anything? Things of that nature.

●  He’s fascinated by it all. He learns to see it in a way like there's more people to love. And he will love each and every one of them.

●  Probably only hesitant on persecutors since they cause harm to you and possibly the others.

●  Finds unique ways to tease each of your alters differently.

●  Goes out of his way to learn about each alter from them personally so he can deal with them more appropriately.

●  Always asks how they’re doing.

●  He’s great with any littles you have. After all, his job is as a child entertainer. Will play with them, love on them, hug them, sing them to sleep, and more.

●  Loves playing with any animals you might have.

●  Got a prankster? Oh boy, Satan help you…

●  Still constantly demands attention from all of them like he does with you.

●  Loves that he gets different kinds of hugs and cuddles from each of them.

●  All your alters love him. Or, at least, most do.

●  Sees them all as an adventure. He gets a different experience with each of them.

●  Gives you a necklace with his face as a pendant. You wear it as a reminder to him that, no matter who is fronting, you all love and belong to him.

●  He will always love you and your alters. Very, very much. No matter what.

[i-am-tumbling-energetics]

Basics - Balance of Consumption and Generation: Energy Storage and Regulation

If you are a power engineer, I'm sorry but you'll possibly be horrified by how much I'm simplifying things. I apologise in advance, but you probably also already know this.

One of the fundamentals of the AC electric grid is the balance of consumption (load) and generation.

To put it simply, we generate as much power as we are using.

1. Why, you ask?

Because we can't store it efficiently and economically. And not, like, profit margin-wise economically. Physics-economically.

I'm guessing you are once again asking why, possibly while looking at your perfectly working cell phone which operates off a battery.

To put it simply, in electric energy storage, we have several factors to consider:

how much energy we can store (capacity)

how long can we store it for / how much energy it will lose while idle (self-discharge)

how fast can we get it out (discharging)

how fast can we put it in (recharging)

how many times can we discharge and recharge before it becomes degraded/unusable (charge cycles)

how many units energy we get out per unit put in (efficiency)

how much material it needs per stored unit of energy (energy density)

how much it costs per unit of stored energy + other other setup costs (installation cost)

how much it costs/how complex it is to maintain

how bad it is for the environment

Each energy storage method is good at some factors, but there is not a single one that is good at all of them. Capacity is the biggest limiting factor in terms of grid-level storage, but that's because it's prohibitingly limiting so we don't need to talk about the others.

The most efficient way of storing large amounts energy we currently have is storing it as "potential" energy. If this sounds very cool, sorry. It just means that when the load is low, we pump a lot of water up a hill into a reservoir, and when the load is high, we let it flow through the turbines, like normal hydro. (wiki for pumped storage) Sadly, geography is one of the biggest limiting factor for this type of storage.

The thing is, the electrochemical batteries in cellphones and other mobile devices simply do not scale. Their capacity per mass is not enough.

The largest pumped storage in the US is Bath County Pumped Storage Station. It has the storage capacity of 24000MWh and the discharge capacity of 3000MWs (around 8 hours). Your cell phone battery will have somewhere between 2000-4000mAh capacity generally in the 3.5V range, which comes to less than 15Wh (for 4000mAh).

Mathematically speaking, it would take 1.6 billion cell phone batteries to make up for the capacity of just that one pumping station, if there weren't other factors, such as that you can't just chain batteries to create one big battery.

And that one power station? Only ~3% of the world pumped storage as of 2009, which was 12 years ago.

2. How? Planning and Regulation.

Warning: this is going to be a hugely simplified explanation.

A. Planning

Lots and lots of planning, taking into account lots of factors, such as day of the week, predicted weather, etc.

Depending on the legal situation, who makes and submits schedules to who and who does what with them is different. In some countries, power generation is a state monopoly, so all planning for consumption and generation is done by the TSO (or the relevant authority. I'm mostly familiar with the European grid). In others, power companies submit their plans to the TSO.

These schedules, in all places, will contain the generation, the consumption, and if relevant, all trades the party might be making with other parties. The schedule has to end with a net zero, or within a certain small range of zero. They have to generate and consume the same; if there would be difference, it has to be made up with buying or selling energy.

This strict kind of planning is possible because of the large number of consumers on the grid. The power company won't know who flips on the switch when; but they will have consumption data from previous days, weeks, months, years and extrapolate with a certain degree of accuracy. The larger your grid and better data you have, the more accurate your prediction will be, and the less you'll have to regulate.

B. Regulation

Power regulation is the process of making sure that the generation and the consumption of electricity is the same or close enough.

This has to happen because if they are not the same, frequency deviates from the norm. (50Hz in Europe). Small deviations are fine, though prolonged, it will make your grid-operated clock late/early (don't worry, they'll make up for it the next day!), but sudden large deviations can/will* cause cascading failure.

*can or will depends on severity and available mitigators

I'll spare you the physics, but the gist of it is that we have a lot of rotating things on the grid, which are supposed to be rotating on the system frequency. If the frequency wanders outside of the allowed deviation range, these rotating things will start to disconnect to prevent physical damage to the machines.

Problem is? Those rotating machines are also the source of our power. And regulation power. Which is why it cascades.

So we regulation our generation, or, in super serious cases, regulate the consumption. (Like the rolling blackouts in Texas in February). Consumption regulation is tricky and is generally a last resort method when there is no generation capacity.

Note: The rolling blackouts were necessary at that point, but if the electric grid have been a) winterized b) connected to the rest of the US grid, they would not have been. Either they could have simply purchased power from the rest of the US, or the grid would not have completely collapsed due to the weather damage and increased load

This has gone on for long enough, so I'll put the hows of Regulation into a different post..

[exmo-freakshow]

fun story

in middle school when we were talking about human traits we were given a simplified explanation of eye color inheritance. iirc it’s actually a little more complicated than what can be expressed with a punnett square but you can kind of get the gist - brown and black eyes are essentially dominant and green and blue eyes are essentially recessive. blue eyes are, in fact, basically simple recessive genes, where if both parents have blue eyes, all of their children are guaranteed to have blue eyes as well.

anyway. both my parents have blue eyes. I have hazel eyes.

we had a homework assignment to draw a punnett square of our parents’ eye color cross and circle which of the possibilities we had ended up inheriting. obviously this was problematic for the many people in the class who do not live with or are estranged from their birth family, but in my particular case, it was especially obvious that I was not the product of my parents’ relationship. I drew the blue-blue punnett square and didn’t circle anything, just wrote “I have hazel eyes.”

teacher passes back the worksheet a while later and crouches next to me. she is obviously trying to choose her words carefully. “are you aware of why this happened?” she asked. I just shrugged. “I’m adopted. I’ve known since I was little, but it would be rough if this was how I found out.”

teacher looked like she had dodged a major bullet and as far as I’m aware she never gave that assignment again but dude it’s hilarious to think that I could have found out I was adopted via sixth grade science class

Punnett squares had no business being that fun

[kemeticcalloutsfromthepublic]

To Light A Magic Fart

We have been made aware that our latest commentary has elicited a rant.

https://web.archive.org/save/https://smarmykemeticpagan.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/liminality-divine-intervention-and-other-heresies/

We would like begin by saying the first half of this rant is not only a misdirect but a lot of personal stuff that is outside our targeted topics of commentary so we shall be skipping that.

“As I type all this, I feel a strange sense of bewilderment. I’ve read very little on liminal spaces, magical theory, mythic time, or Dionysus; and yet I’m sitting here, trying to tell my own story and no one else’s, and finding myself describing something that I somehow, recognize as being intimately connected to all of these things at once. “

We must inform you this is very doubtful.  As someone who has crusaded against actual knowledge and those who teach it, study it, and understand it, you suddenly valuing any knowledge you are adamant against giving any sense of importance, this is a contradiction.  We would like to remind you, you have spent years demonizing those who are academically minded, who would possess the best supply of these topics of information.  We need to remind you, you have chased, and guided newcomers away from these very informed and academic individuals with a very glib and dismissive expressions that they are somehow morally and emotionally defective.

We need to remind you, you have spent more posts declaring how unimportant and meaningless academic resources, information, and knowledgeable people who covet such information, that it boggles the mind how you can sit here now and suddenly have an appreciation for information and knowledge.  We must say that is highly convenient, almost like you are a bag of contradictions and hyperbole.

“ I don’t know. Maybe I can’t know. Maybe knowing how and why this is happening isn’t the point. “

We would like to mention that in every occurrence that knowledge is passed on from a deity it is made obvious that it is given by them.  We would like to remind you, this would be conferred as a minor miracle and the god that granted it would not do so with a cloak and dagger delivery.

“Maybe no matter how strange and fantastic my real life is...“

We can not believe you, as you complain constantly about how you are incredibly oppressed and put-upon by the evil capitalist misogynistic patriarchy, holding you in a death grip of poverty...strange and fantastic is not the picture you spent years painting.  If you’d like to recant those lies and give a more accurate depiction of your life, feel free, no need to keep up the pretense.

“... there will always be some way that I and everyone else can convince ourselves that there must be a perfectly mundane, scientific explanation for everything, that nothing truly magical could ever possibly happen in our actual, physical lives. “

We would like to say this is a gross generalization that disturbs us greatly.  We would like to mention that, something can be scientific and still be magical.  Magical events do not have to be beyond scientific involvement or divorced from the world in a separate sphere.  They are part of the same world, they occupy the same space.  Magic is everywhere, and science just helps us understand how that natural magic works.  We understand the gist of what you are attempting to say but it’s so mushmouth muddled with it loses cohesion.  We would like to simplify, you’re wrong.  --Memphis

Not familiar with the idea that magic is only science we don’t understand yet, are you?  The world is as magical as you make it. --Cairo

“In fact, if I had done what nigh on every single Hellenic polytheist told me, 3 years ago, that I absolutely must do before I was allowed to even talk to any of the Theoi; i.e., devote far more time, money, and energy than I even had... “

You’d have a functional well structured and meaningful religious practice that you can easily make a habit to exercise, in order to have an actual religious practice and not just invent it on a whim while screeching “muh poverty lack of resources”, in a religious practice that has its ancient methodologies of worship and practice well outlined with a knowledgeable community that could inform you of them and help you?  We can see how dreadful that would have been!  Better you avoided any of that ACTUAL respecting the gods with their own religious practices which are time tested and just dump a can of wine on the ground, belch and in tone “amen, bro”.--Memphis

If every single practitioner of a religion is telling you that you do something, perhaps that’s how the religion is actually practiced?  Just saying.--Cairo

”I would still be refusing to accept the very possibility that the Theoi are real, and trying to communicate with me, and weren’t just trying to kick the shit out of me because I ‘m not “humble” enough to be allowed to even casually worship them, or even think about wanting to worship them. That is the extent to which I have been gaslighted by an ableist, sexist, queerphobic world...”

We must inform you this is not gaslighting, and none of this is true.  You’re so buried helplessly in the twisted murky interior of your own ideology that you have bought into all the lies and fables it has generated.  Snap out of it!

“It’s because polytheists are, for the most part, every bit as closed-minded and self-righteous as the Southern Baptists who told me I was an abomination and a Devil worshipper and a degenerate for being a queer witch who talked back to pastors and smoked weed.“

We must inform you, you are confused.  These are your actions which you committed upon every community you attempted to infect like herpes.  Anyone who didn’t bow down to every word of your vapid ideology was to be summarily purged.  You created an entire callout blog (which we parody), to bully, harrass and purge people you deem morally corrupt and a heretic to your divinely sanctioned and holy edicts of social justice that must be obeyed to the letter.  You terrorized this community for years with it, dividing it, polarizing it and demonizing our gods, twisting them into these token puppets you can make spit out any words you want to give yourself the squishy feels. 

The only ones who act like southern Baptists or medieval catholic inquisitors, are you and your friends.  Don’t try to backpedal that YOU are the victim here, you are the bully, the aggressor, the one causing harm. 

Some sects of polytheism have actual ancient records detailing proper practices to how their religion is followed.  While following them in personal practice is largely voluntary, they are the methods espoused to have been prescribed by the gods of their own religion.  It’s just respectful to those gods to follow such practices.

”Because of all this, polytheists are perfectly willing to bully, threaten, gaslight, and otherwise abuse young, vulnerable people in their midst who even for one minute threaten their perceived “respectability” in the eyes of the mainstream and of their favorite Big Name Pagans. They are perfectly willing to ignore the real problems in our community -bullying, toxic groupthink, overwhelming authoritarianism, rape culture and misogyny, TERFS and other assorted trans/homophobes, bigots of every kind, ableism to the point that the first thing anyone says to discredit me is that I’m “obviously hallucinating” when I talk about astral stuff or magic (that’s not how hallucinations fucking work you fucking morons! Read a book every now and then, for chrissake), and goddamn actual Nazis- in favor of whining about how Pop Culture Pagans or “fluffy” people or “loudmouthed brats” are OMG THE REASON NO ONE TAKES US SERIOUSLY!1!!11!!! They do all of these things, and simultaneously fancy themselves particularly enlightened, superior to followers of “”Abrahamic religions””, by virtue of simply “following the old gods” and “being connected to nature”, or whatever.”

We are touched, this is clear vagueblogging about us.  What was it you said...

Seriously though, you left this on our post as if you don’t care, and then wrote this thesis of how much it bothers you and you do care.  You’re pathetic.

“Because of this shallow, petty, and toxic paradigm that permeates basically every single official pagan and polytheist space, it is almost impossible for most of us to really, meaningfully connect and communicate with our gods. “

We must inform you, this is fundamentally untrue.  You’re reaching again.--Memphis

Citation needed.  This mod has actually heard more complaints that name you, Devo, and your friends specifically as making it difficult to practice, than heard such complaints about other online spaces.--Cairo

“Because of this shallow, petty, and toxic paradigm that permeates basically every single official pagan and polytheist space, it is almost impossible for most of us to really, meaningfully connect and communicate with our gods. Human beings are intimately social creatures; we are constantly, consciously and subconsciously, affected by the social environment that we are in, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. It’s basically impossible not to be drawn in by the assumptions everyone around you makes and operates on, even if we’re ignoring thoughtforms and energies and other woo stuff. Polytheists have convinced ourselves that anything we experience that’s in any way out of the ordinary; in any way not exactly what the historical record we currently have portrays…in other words, anything that might realistically be a part of interacting with actual deities and doing actual magic, absolutely will be called a delusion, an attention-seeking stunt, an idiotic act of hubris, an attempt to “start a cult” or gain coercive power over others, an evil and sacrilegious act, or all of the above, by anyone and everyone in our community who wants to discredit whatever it is we’re saying. No wonder even people who have fantastic experiences doubt themselves, or refuse to go public with it; I’m not a particularly sensitive person by a long shot, and I often have to steel myself to be honest online because of the (attempted) bullying and public shaming that I know for a fact will result from it.“

More about us.  You must love us dearly.  We must inform you, again you are entirely wrong.  You literally told Set in that interview post, you would start a cult.  You adhere to a collectivist ideology that operates on the concept of original sin and so everyone of that group must atone for the sins of the group for every instance in history.  You follow an ideology that abhors individual worth and thought over the group opinion and the group’s collective thought, in which any dissent and the individual will be sacrificed to ensure purity of the group.  You operate like a wanna-be cult leader who wants a cult.

You have done alot of evil in this community and you called it righteous because your ideology decrees it must be.  Your every action is dictated by it, your every thought is shaped by it to the point you declared that a god who historically always supported a theocratic monarchy...suddenly fell in love with socialism/communism...an inherently destructive and genocidal form of government and philosophy.  One that has claimed over 100 million lives, and more?!  That is alot ot buy, smarmy, a LOT to buy.  We didn’t even mention how he just outright confirms all your political points, thoughts, beliefs, and heralds them as divinely sanctioned?!  We don’t have to know how the stove top makes the coil red hot to understand touching it will burn.--Memphis  

Others have said it, and this mod will say it again:  It is not that you are sharing your personal experiences that is the problem; it is that you are stating them as being as factually true as peer reviewed historical sources.  You can believe what you want, but it is absolutely dishonest and disgusting to expect and insist that the rest of the community treat it as fucking holy scripture.--Cairo 

“I’m not a particularly sensitive person by a long shot...”

We would like to say, considering you felt the need to write this dissertation of drivel, you most certainly are sensitive.

“If you say you worship Set, but then spit in the face of his ideals in almost every mundane action you take -from the way you treat people traditionally associated with him to the way you think and talk about mundane, real-world chaos, riots, criminals, and political violence- are you actually worshipping Set, or are you just worshipping your own assumptions about Set?“

We are amazed at how unironic you write this and yet, it’s like you wrote this looking in a mirror.

“And if the very fact that someone online who you don’t like has posted UPG about Set condemning your actions and behavior…causes you to post frantic, histrionic paragraphs about how the person in question is an evil, power-hungry, lunatic aspiring cult leader who is “evidently” crazy and lying and trying to manipulate the entire kemetic community and also is in league with the Sn/ake that wants to destroy existence itself, are you really prioritizing your devotion to Set? Or are you prioritizing your own ego, because you refuse to even entertain the possibility that you could be wrong and ought to change your behavior in some way in order to better honor him? “

Wow again, you gazed in the mirror.  None of our commentaries, nor those of any of your critics, are frantic, nor histrionic, but it is apparent that you are and you do.  They are not the ones fueled by such deep seething hatred and rage for anything outside your own myopic and narrow minded views.  They aren’t the ones demanding slavish devotion to an ideology that history has proven is murderous and dangerous.  They aren’t the ones who profess to be ‘on the side of the angels’ and in the same breath long for violent rebellious war to shred the country and slaughter millions.  You are a hateful person devoid of compassion and an enemy of anything resembling freedom. 

We see you have again mistaken UPG for something provable.  If you had written that interview and stated that you wrote Set’s dialogue intuitively, or you interpreted them, rather then composed the transcript verbatim...we’d have been more lenient with our criticisms.  We point out, every word of his dialogue was verbatim your own, that you have ranted about for the years.  Every bit, from his diction, to his syntax, from tone to word choices was entirely from your own and not from an external source.  The fact it entirely vindicates every word of your political tripe, your beliefs and ideology, to the decimal place, is evidence that it’s not from any external source, or external spiritual entity but from you.  This was a complete fiction.

To state that “anyone who disagrees with smarmy, Set and his people gunna git’ya”, is such a colossal over reach that it strains believably.  We are certain that any god who loves their devotee would say they will defend them against attack, but this.  We must inform you this is something else entirely.

We are quite certain we don’t need to change our behavior to profess your ideals as our own and bow down to accept communism and socialism or even anarchism as the true path forwards.  We don’t need to throw away any sense of actual morality to support systems that have led to more destruction and death then any others in history and recorded memory. 

We are also not above admitting if we are wrong, but when it comes to you and how you abuse the name of the gods for your own twisted ends, we aren’t.

We are however, certain you are.  You are so in love with your own ideological puppetry that you not only profess that a god has endorsed you 100%, promised to smite all who oppose you, promise you power and prestige as his precious prophet of his ideals (which you forced into him).  So deeply entrenched in this ideology and stances of no matter what the cost, no matter how ridiculous, you can never admit to being wrong when facing any dissenting voices or else it instantly negates all of your teachings, beliefs, and words (which it only does because you made them so absolute), that you cannot admit you are wrong and can only dig deeper down this endless trench of foolishness and madness. 

We have no doubts the S/na/ke influences you, it praises you, it agrees with you, it gives you whatever you want, the sense of righteousness that you’re never wrong and always on the side of purity, everyone else is evil, everyone else is impure, everyone else is wrong, everyone else is at fault...That is the danger of isfet and the parasitic spirits that serve it, and you let them in.

“ I believe that gods are huge, ancient, and multi-faceted, so sure, it’s possible that there’s a version of Set out there that likes racist bootlickers and encourages them to follow the law no matter the human cost“

This is among the most offensive things you’ve ever said.  Historical record cannot be dismissed and hand-waved away of how these gods have acted in the past and expect they did a full 180.  We would like to mention, that once again, like any good cult leader, you degrade anyone who dissents.  We would like to state you are completely off the mark, you have no understanding of this god if you honestly think he loves communism and loves nazism and loves racism because ‘there MUST be an aspect of him that likes it’.  We need to remind you, that would make him evil.  This is a complete insult to a god you claim to love and worship.  This is a damning and horrible thing to say about a god you claim to respect.  This shows us you have nothing but sheer contempt for the gods, so you invent a twisted and corrupted idea of them.  We need to remind you, it’s bullshit like this that makes us say your a delusional child aspiring cult leader who is aligned with the sn/a/ke, if you honestly think this about Set.  We are disgusted, you do this noble god, so much dishonor.  --Memphis

How dare you.  How dare you insult a god you claim to be even an outlaw priest of with such a foul misunderstanding of his character?!  Even for hyperbolic rhetoric?!  Can you not have even the barest smidgen of respect for the god you claim to serve or worship?  Or are the words that describe the most basic relationship of priesthood too uncomfortable for you?--Cairo

“ ... to “keep it real” by regurgitating tired and ignorant bigoted stereotypes and acting as though the fact the stereotype exists at all is somehow evidence that you’re right to be a bigot; and believe that “illegals” seeking asylum so that they and their families won’t fucking die are inherently dangerous enough to justify putting them in motherfucking concentration camps. But just because it’s possible doesn’t necessarily mean it’s very likely, now does it? “

We would ask if you ever get tired of making sweeping incorrect generalizations that make you look stupid but we already know the answer.  If you’d like to discuss what we believe regarding various political situations, we at KCFTP would be happy to chat, but do stop shoving words and beliefs into our and everyone mouths that do not apply.--Memphis

Who the fuck is Smarmy even talking about here?--Cairo

“No wonder people react to anyone showing historically common, textbook behaviors of a person being called to spirit work or reacting to being in a liminal space or state of mind, with derision and scorn and bullying. Genuine liminality, one of the main historical requirements for communicating with gods or using magic, is almost universally despised and cursed by modern-day polytheists as heresy.“

We would like to say this literally never happens.  This is a bold faced lie.  We knew you could not help it!--Memphis

That is really fucking weird, every discussion I’ve had with other polytheists and pagans has touched on how to communicate with gods, spirits, and other entities, magic, or other things that require having a foot in multiple worlds.  Everyone usually seems pretty eager to talk about such things.  Unusual for something “universally despised and cursed.”--Cairo  

“LGBT+ people are stereotyped as “special snowflakes” and yelled at about “assigning modern labels to gods” when we say that deities who canonically act as multiple genders or sleep with same-gendered-beings, are queer like us. “

We would like to clarify, no smarmy, that’s just you and your ilk...and it’s by other LBGT+ people...Stop trying to be some martyr, you aren’t.  Go outside, get off the internet.

“ Young people are bullied and publicly shamed on a regular basis if they run afoul of the wrong “Big Name Pagan”, and people smugly tell themselves and each other that it is, somehow, for the kid’s own good because they have to be “taught a lesson in humility” and “being the bigger person” or some other fucking nonsense that sounds like it fell directly from the mouths of actual child abusers and predators. “

So anyone who disagrees with you are child abusers and predators now too!?  We would like to say that is astounding, almost like it’s entirely fiction.  We’d also like to mention, the only BIG Name Pagans around here are you and Devo, and you guys are constantly a problem.  Maybe its you who needs to “be taught a lesson in humility” because you are no where near humble and you are among the most abusive individuals in this community.--Memphis

Said it before, will say it again.  We have seen you and your crew bully and publicly shame far more people in this particular community than any of us.  We’re not the ones who started the Kemetic Callout war, only the ones who have arguably been more successful at it.  And your callout blog only has the people who talked back and wouldn’t bend, it doesn’t count the many who bowed and broke before your bullying or those who left here altogether.--Cairo  

“Until sharing UPG that goes against the more popular narratives no longer makes one a social pariah among their polytheist peers, nobody should be surprised that it’s almost exclusively the heretical, disrespectful punks who are constantly being publicly snubbed and dismissed by their peers, who ever seem to talk about seeing any results or evidence that anything out-of-the-ordinary is actually going on. “

Translation: “Until I can share my UPG and it is believed as absolute fact without any question, and be heralded as the divine truth, the community is a shitshow!”--Memphis

As long as your UPG agrees 100% with your own personal and political beliefs, it will and should be questioned.  Whatever your stance, the gods have a wider experience and knowledge base than we do and will always have a different perspective.  Any spirit that tells you everything you want to hear and flatters you shamelessly is no god and has no good intentions towards you in the end.--Cairo

“Until we all accept that it doesn’t matter if Christians and mainstream secular people think we’re weird and so we don’t need to constantly jump through hoops to seem Academic™ and Serious™ and Normal™, nobody should be surprised that the only public discussions that don’t devolve into nasty name-calling matches are ones facilitated by a handful of holier-than-thou assholes who treat having a PhD in Philosophy as though it’s a permission slip from the gods themselves to be a self-righteous, know-it-all douche, and never really allow any disagreement with them on anything important.“

Translation: “We need to continue being edgy punk teens who disrespect gods and culture and snub actual belief systems by turning them into comical satires of themselves, until the people smarter then us give up and let us have all the power, while we use our UPG to try and seem way more divinely important then we actually are by assigning ourselves flashy titles and divine endorsements!!! Cause if the gods support US, then we can’t be wrong!”

We would like to remind you that history is fraught with oppressive regimes who used this tactic, one example is the Spanish Inquisition.  Did you agree with them torturing and killing people to force them into conversion?  Another example we would like to mention is the North Korean regimes.  The ones who still have ACTUAL concentration camps. 

We would like to mention, China now has concentration camps where they hold and torment innocent Muslim citizens, and Chechnya who still have death camps where they send gay and LGBT citizens. 

We would like to mention these go entirely against your belief and political structures about LGBT+ issues, oppression, and gay rights.  We notice you never mention those.  We notice you never complain about them and how evil they are. We wonder, is it because it goes against your narrative of “communism is the truth and the way” or do you just not care? 

We would like to point out it would seem like those are true injustices you could fight against and for...not...how everyone needs to behave and believe how you want.

We would like to set the snark aside for a second and say, we’re always up for discussions.  We need to clarify that you always reduce the conversations to insults and calling everyone who disagrees with you “racist bootlickers”, so the issue is not on our side, but with you, so stop lying that we and all your critics are the unreasonable ones.

“And until we care more about taking care of each other than protecting our deities’ reputations, nobody should be surprised when our community remains a toxic, misogynistic, homophobic, Nazi-infested shithole, while everyone is more than happy to spend hours arguing about the particulars of shrine setups and deity name pronunciations and whether or not it’s okay to offer potato chips and Netflix binges to ancient deities who, ultimately, realistically are not that likely to give a shit either way. “

Literal Nazis wandered into our community and your reaction was “meh so what” and continued bullying other innocent people, who you labeled as nazis and racists.  You’re a one tune piano smarmy, and you just keep tooting the same tune.  It wasn’t believable when you were “the holy ambassador, ordained by Jesus, to the hellenics” it is not believable now.

“Until we fix the problems with our collective paradigm, until we fix the way we treat each other, until we genuinely value wisdom, compassion, humility, and courage over our reputations, we are all gonna have to accept that the gods we worship are not all that interested in revealing their actual, authentic, awesome, strange and unexpected powers to people who are determined to believe they are either incapable or unwilling to do so.“

We agree, you should start treating people better, starting with inatier and all the other people you’ve spent YEARS defaming, bullying, berating, harassing, snubbing, and demonizing.--Memphis

Actions speak louder than words Smarmy, and based on yours none of these are your values.  We have seen you bully and cast aside community members who did their research and were willing to share, we have seen your utter lack of compassion throughout your time here with anyone who has the nerve to disagree with you, and the idea of you having humility is a joke.  You worry more about being seen as your edgy, antifa, communist [insert additional labels here} self than about having the courage to suck it up, show some compassion, and value the wisdom of trying to mend the fences you have broken so badly over the years.

Additionally, we have had no problem seeing the many wondrous and varied faces of our gods because we are not hell bent on forcing them into tiny boxes that fit only our own personal beliefs.  If this is a problem you have been having, perhaps you should take your own advice.--Cairo

My colleagues have added much to these particular points of your diatribe, but I’ll add my bit here. While it seems like you may be in a better place physically (despite claiming you know more about psychology and medicine than your previous doctors do), you seem to be going down a dark, dangerous road mentally. You might just find yourself in jail yet, or worse if you don’t reevaluate your thinking.

“The insomnia is what caused my other symptoms to get so bad that they become delusions, paranoia, mania, and once, auditory hallucinations.” So you’re admitting to having breaks from reality, along with your emotional instability. Yet, you get butthurt when people are skeptical to your religious experiences. I’m no psychologist, admittedly, but I don’t automatically trust random people’s religious experiences, much less someone with a history of psychosis. Whether it’s you or anyone else. 

I would also recommend you be very, very careful using THC. I don’t know what medications you’re taking, but THC can interact with several different drugs, including Prozac. High levels of THC can cause paranoia and psychosis as well. 

You’re trying to act as a leader and activist when you’re still dealing with some very serious conditions. This is why so many people recommend to not use magic or occultic practices when dealing with mental health. People are not being elitist or ableist when they do this. The whole purpose is to encourage others to first attain treatment for their conditions. You’ve been claiming your own voice as Set’s, threatening violence to attain your desires in regards to politics, and using magic to harm your political enemies. You refuse to understand the motivations of people who don’t hold the same political opinions - even “centrists”, so that even the politically moderate are your enemies. This is even a symptom of borderline personality disorder, which you say you’re diagnosed with. Clearly, your symptoms aren’t completely managed.

https://www.webpsychology.com/news/2015/09/01/dangers-black-and-white-thinking-228391

You have a long way to go in terms of healing. You can blame the outside world all you like for not getting treatment or for a lack of progress, but your mental health is YOUR responsibility and you need to take responsibility and fix yourself before you’re in any position to try and “fix” the world with your ideology.

I highly encourage you to take a break and get some further professional help; wherever you are and however you can get it. Your writings are extremely troubling to us here. The last thing you need is to get arrested or committed trying to “punch a Nazi” or “take down the system”. You’re going to really screw up any chances of getting on your feet, getting treatment, and doing something actually meaningful with your life if you continue down this road.

--Karnak

[ticktockstuck]

would it be possible for magic in ticktockstuck to make someone conditionally immortal? its never been stated not to be able to that im aware but im finally thinking of how best to expy my ocs to this and that would be part of one of them

I think you'd be able to very closely approximate canon-style conditional immortality but just as a result of how the universe is structured getting exactly there might be difficult (since even within TickTockStuck's reality godtiers don't have the same conditional immortality).

To get to that approximation, let's start at what we actually want to have happen. The desired outcome is that when you die, you come back and are rejuvenated unless your cause of death is cosmically deemed Heroic or Just. TTS works off a magic system with some rules, so let's simplify that to its most basic mechanical description:

When [Condition X] happens, do [Effect], unless [Condition A] or [Condition B] also happen.

Here, [X] is "when a person dies", the [Effect] is "bring that person back to life", [A] is "the death was Just", and [B] is "the death was Heroic". Now we can start figuring out how magic can fill in each of those.

The effect we want is revival- and healing-based, so the core of the magic we're going to use here should be focused around Life. Since this effect isn't just going to be happening once - we want it happening any time somebody dies - we'll either want to enchant a person with this magic or imbue that magic into an artifact of some kind. Since we're trying to emulate canon godtiers, let's assume the former is happening and somebody has altered their body to work on the rules of the magic we're crafting.

We only want to call up that Life magic in a specific situation, when a person dies, and that's actually a fairly easy thing to track since the aspects Doom and Ash are all about when things die and meet their ends. So the enchantment would tap into Doom or Ash to figure out when its host has died, and only then draw together enough Life magic to bring you back.

Detour: at this point you might wonder if anybody in-universe just stopped here without the Heroic or Just caveats, and the answer is yes, but you wouldn't like the results. Life is a prime aspect, and a really powerful one at that, so not putting in floodgates and conditionals can lead to unexpected results. Like turning into a tree when you die because plants are still a form of life.

For the extra conditionals - determining how a death was Heroic or Just - that's a little trickier since morality isn't something you can mathematically quantify. The virtue and vice aspects might help you qualify it though. Rot in particular is helpful - it's an aspect largely themed around weakening oneself for the benefit of others. Vim is based around empowerment and likewise is a helpful virtue aspect. For vices, Lies would be able to determine if your life was spent inflicting cruelty unto others, and Scorn would be able to know if your last act was spent in petty revenge. The gist of what I'm getting that is that'd need a couple different aspects measuring your life and evaluating whether you fall into the category of virtuous - Heroic - or villainous - Just - at the moment the Life magic would be drawn in.

So, to wrap up that giant block of text:

Some detection magic would be needed to figure out when you've died.

Use additional detection magic to tap into various temperamental aspects and, if you meet the right criteria when you die, stop the enchantment so you actually die.

If you don't meet those conditions, summon up a boatful of Life magic to revive you.

If that seems like a lot to process it's only because it is. This kind of mechanical logistics is a big part of why magic is so easily gated off from the public and left to the hands of experts (hell, there's a lot more with this process I could have gone into but left off just to keep the explanation simple). That being said, this kind of tooling around with Life magic is not unusual considering full-on immortality is a high goal of magicians around the Verse, and I can easily see a mostly-indifferent-to-morality aristocracy finding some value in death conditions of "died while being nice to people" and "died while being one of those really really big jerks".

The only things I'd add on here for the sake of character building is that, if it's an enchantment on a person, there's usually some kind of upkeep so the magic doesn't just flow out of you over time - I'll leave it to you to figure out what the cost is. Enchanting an object would dismiss that (living things versus inanimate objects work differently, magic-wise) but then it's a matter of having that object on their person constantly. There's also how a character would get an enchantment like this since it's not exactly a textbook working, but given what I've said about magic already that shouldn't come as a surprise.

As always, folks are welcome to send in follow-up asks if I just misread your question or you want more details about something I brought up in here. Thanks for asking!

[septembersung]

Looking at the posts I’ve accumulated so far for #500 reasons and counting, I realized I need to frame the various subjects I’m tackling. I’d rather post more quotes than original posts, but the trouble with a complicated history like the Reformation (and the internet in general) is taking things out of context causes problems. To do this right, we need a clear conceptual framework in which to lay those quotes (and my inevitable commentary on them). So while in my first post I talked about where I’m coming from personally, in this post, call it intro 2.0, let’s lay out some history and approach parameters.

Let’s get the approach parameters out of the way first: 

A) I’m trained in theology, not history, and I’m blogging about this as someone learning, not an expert. B) please charitably correct me (with sources!) if I get something wrong, but C) we should go into this realizing there’s a lot of room for disagreement (as you’ll see if you finish reading this post). D) I always try to represent the source I’m summarizing/working from accurately. That means: D-1) if you disagree with something I say, let’s first go back to the source and make sure I’m conveying it as they said it, and D-2) A good debater should understand the opposing POV so well that they can word their opponent’s argument to the satisfaction of their opponent. If I misrepresent an argument, it is not intentional. Please bring it to my attention and we’ll work it out. 

That said, now we can talk about bias. If we’re going to talk about the Reformation, its causes and effects, how it influenced our civilization and still affects people today - even, yes, all those pesky theological “details” many would say no one cares about and don’t matter anymore! - then we need to ask some pointed questions: Just what do we mean by the Reformation? Whose version of the Reformation and its legacy is correct? What exactly is it, septembersung, that you’re taking issue with and arguing against?

Well, if you ask three historians “what happened,” you’ll get thirty answers...

To a large extent, Catholics, Protestants, and secular historians tell the story of medieval Christianity (i.e., Catholicism) and the Reformation differently. Extremely differently. (There is a lot of overlap in some areas between Protestant and secular approaches, however.) You might think that “facts are facts,” but history isn’t primarily facts; history the story we tell ourselves about facts as we know them. Sometimes an assumption, or a “fact” that’s actually false, or a matter of opinion, or disputed, gets enshrined as truth, embedded in how the subject is approached and handed down, and then everything from that is skewed. (This is an exceptionally important point we will come back to frequently.) 

Everyone has a bias; this is unavoidable. In this context, bias means “where you stand to see the rest of the world.” Everyone has to stand somewhere. What’s important is to be able to identify your bias and see how it affects the story as you’ve received it and as you tell it. And, equally importantly, to differentiate bias, a fact of being an individual human person, from prejudice, which in this context means unfair and probably incorrect negation of a point of view you don’t share. An illustration of the difference: A secular, that is, non-believing, historian writes a history of the Reformation. Their bias is that they are not Christian, neither Catholic or Protestant. Their prejudice is shown in privileging the Protestant side of the story. To pick just three examples of how that prejudice could play out: using slurs against Catholics, the Church, and Catholic beliefs; accepting Protestant claims about Catholicism and Christian history a priori, as factual premise, without investigation or explanation; taking it for granted, as an accepted truth that does not need proving, that the Reformation did the world a favor. Here’s the kicker: this is not an invented example, but a summary of a large swath of writings on the Reformation.

As you know, I’m Catholic; that’s my bias. You should ask yourself: what’s yours? Do you know how it affects what you’ve been taught and the way you perceive history and the world around you? What prejudice might you be participating in that you don’t even realize is a prejudice?

(Sidebar: In addition (and related to) to the bias issue: intense specialization and the ways history as a whole is conceived and taught has led to such an overabundance of “facts” and narratives, particularly about this stretch of history, that there is little cohesion, and simply so much that trying to get a handle on the big picture can be completely overwhelming. You can drown in data and never learn a thing. (I always picture a cartoon child opening a stuffed closet and being buried in toys.) There’s a super good, though technical, layout of this problem in the introduction to Brad S. Gregory’s book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. I’m going to talk about that book a lot.)

The takeaway so far should be: the story of history that we receive varies by which community we’re in and which community delivered the story to us. I am not arguing that no objective truth about the matter exists. Quite the opposite: the first step to finding the truth is recognizing that what has been uncritically accepted as fact is an interpretation based on unreliable ideas. What I would most like to show my readers through this project, especially my Protestant readers, is that the reality and significance of the Reformation has been greatly misunderstood across the majority of communities. It’s pretty unlikely you’ll read my posts and come away deciding to convert to Catholicism. What is possible, and I hope it will happen, that you’ll walk away with a different understanding of Catholicism itself and Protestantism’s role the last 500 years of Christian history.

(Important sidebar: “Protestants” and “Protestantism” can only ever be a generalization. Not only do the vast number of denominations disagree with each other about Christian doctrine, on points big and small, but they have different biases, different understandings of history, different views of Catholicism - you get the idea. Whenever we use the term “Protesant/ism”, we should be aware that is a generalization.)

With all that said: here is a simplified summary of the story of the Reformation as popularly understood. What does that mean? It means this summary doesn’t cover everything, but it does encompass the broad spectrum of “not-Catholic” opinion, including both Protestant and secular views, which vary from each other and among themselves. And, of course, scholars and academia tend to acknowledge more nuance and complexity in the events of history than non-specialists. I spell this out to avoid tiresome arguments that I’m setting up a straw man or objections like “but I don’t believe that/all of that/that in that way,” etc. So as I said: the broad gist of the Reformation story as popularly understood by much of the world today:

The Catholic Church was pure institutionalized corruption. The hierarchy and religious lived immoral lives and oppressed the lay people. The Church was unChristian in deep and significant ways that were harming people. When Luther (et al) realized this, and that what the Church taught as religious truth was just a means of perpetuating its control and corruption, they got up and pushed, and the whole rotten structure came tumbling down. Suddenly the common people had access to the Bible, Jesus, real catechesis, spiritual and political freedom, genuine community, and (to use the modern terms) freedom and agency. There was some resistance, but the populace more or less welcomed the Reformation and joined in enthusiastically. The Reformation was a movement who’s time had come. With the suppression of “priestcraft,” superstitious practices and beliefs, and man-made ritual, the accumulated debris of centuries of ”Romish inventions” was swept aside and Christianity was given a clean slate. With this demolition of the Church, thus (believers would say) true, original Christianity triumphed; all the excess (at best) and demonic distractions (at worst) that led people away/separated people from Jesus was gone. With the demolition of the Church, thus (some believers and the vast majority of secular analyses would say) the road to modern society was paved: separation of church and state, the triumph of the thinking mind/rationality/logic over and against the deadening religious/organized religion influence, the growth of the sciences, freedom, tolerance, pluralism, etc.; the goods and wonders of the modern world exist because the iron grip of the Church was broken. Shedding the past launched us into the future. We’re lucky it’s over and done with and not relevant to us, in our secular society, anymore.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: it’s almost entirely wrong. 

That’s a large chunk of what I’m taking issue with and arguing against.

I can’t guarantee this tag is going to be particularly organized or exhaustive - I decided to do this just a few days ago and, despite being a fast reader, can only cram in so much - but I’m going to examine these kinds of claims (in their originals, please note, not from my general gist summary) through my own writing and through sharing the content of scholars and writers more qualified than myself, to argue for a contrary thesis: Not only is that understanding of Catholicism and Christian history factually incorrect, but the Reformation was not an organic, welcomed event/process but rather a violent uprooting of a strong, loved religious tradition and past that cut Christians off from their heritage, fragmented and splintered society, blew the foundation out of Christendom (society as Christian society,) putting Western civilization on the road to society’s secularization, the marginalization and oppression of religion in the public life, and opened the door to the moral, rational, and political chaos we know today. I will absolutely address issues like “but wasn’t the Church corrupt?” but to a certain extent I don’t think that’s actually helpful until some of the fundamental falsehoods in what is generally assumed about the Reformation have been examined. In addition, as we follow the ramifications of the Reformation down the centuries, we’ll get to talk about politics, American exceptionalism, Dracula and turn-of-the-20th-century English culture (it’s amazingly relevant), and - my personal favorite - iconoclasm and incarnation.

I highly recommend reading Karl Keating’s short article “Not a reformation but a revolution.” (Quotes are coming.) He says it better than I do.

The queue starts tomorrow, Sunday October 1st!

[jasonhaw]

Life in Ghana 10.3: Post-Presentation Processing

I’m still reeling in from the high of yesterday’s presentation.

I am fortunate to have four years of research experience to ground me on how to prepare for the presentation. I have attended high level meetings before, but I was always there as a quiet observer or diligent rapporteur, never someone who really needed to present anything. Yesterday, the spotlight was on me. I was the lead (and only) investigator of my research. Whatever I say during the presentation is a reflection of my professional competency and personal opinions on the health financing situation in Ghana. I carried the name of Georgetown and Dodowa Health Research Center, and there was that pressure to present myself well because I am not acting only on my own capacity. I was a pageant baby, and I have acted, sung, spoken in front of live audiences as far as I can remember so stagefright was never an issue with me. But for the first time in a long time, I had the jitters.

The first challenge that I had to overcome was making my presentation easy to digest and relevant to my main audience, the senior NHIA officials. The statistical analysis involved in my research is highly technical - and I am grateful for the help of Professor Bouey in linking me to statisticians that validated my outputs. I have read five statistical books (one on analysis for complex survey data, one on econometrics, and three on mixture modeling) in a span of two months (I'm sorry to my fiction reading list as they had to take a back seat). I have written thousands of lines of Stata code, redid my analysis far too many times because I am a perfectionist that never settles, and convened debates with myself on how the data should be interpreted. All of that was extremely worth it, but the bigger issue was whether the results were interpretable to a wider audience. For example, I had a significant interaction term in my regression analysis - ownership of facility (private vs. public) affected the propensity of patients to use their insurance card - and so I struggled to present the results of the regression analysis. The first time I presented was to staff of Dodowa Health Research Center, and the main criticism to my presentation was that it was too technical. And to think that I already tried to simplify the explanations to my analysis! That was my best effort at that point in time, but seeing that my best effort was apparently not good enough, the perfectionist in me spent more days trying to find a way to ease interpretation. I finally did, because everyone understood what the main result of my analysis was.

The second challenge was coming up with recommendations based from the results of my analysis. I knew from the beginning that the main value of my study was the fact that there is this survey that can be used to feed into policy. For my thesis, I saw my role largely as a bridge between the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) dataset and feeding it to policymakers - I cleaned the dataset, conducted the analysis, reviewed literature, processed the results, and yesterday I presented it to them so that they can pick up the gist and make policy from there. I was very cautious with how I phrased my recommendations. I needed a delicate balance between two conflicting perspectives: from the perspective of the clients, the NHIA seems to not be doing anything towards patient improvement and improving quality of care, but I also want to validate all the hard work NHIA has been trying to do in being more responsive to clients. Having worked in government made me more understanding of how difficult it is to change things from the inside. It has given me this patience and humility that while in public, we can harp about how easy it is to change something, but in reality, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. I decided that I will take a position with my recommendations - that I want to be explicit that the NHIA should work harder to be more responsive to clients - but I also want to incite discussion and reflection from the NHIA staff during the open forum on what they have done and what they could still do. And I was so relieved when that happened.

I will brag about this because I am so giddy that this happened - the officials were applauding after my presentation because in the words of one of the directors, "It was very well-presented." (#nailedit!) During the open forum, all of the officials were keen on discussing the issue of patient empowerment and health system responsiveness. They dwelled mostly on my recommendations but I was glad that they did because they were able to reflect on their performance as an agency. For example, one senior official asked me about what else they could do to empower patients. The NHIA has a call center, and there have been numerous pilot studies on community engagement and ensuring patient safety, but none seemed to stick. I gave my two cents on the matter - that it was important for health systems to have an independent patient watchdog embedded in the public sector but is completely independent from the Ministry of Health or the NHIA, and has enough power to demand accountability from health providers. Having a call center embedded in the agency that the patient is complaining about does not give patients the assurance that their feedback will not be used against them. It's not a function of how the call center operates, but a function of where it is operating and what impression it gives to clients. That comment was well-received, and the officials agree that it is the case. They also mentioned to me that the latest revision of the National Health Insurance Scheme Act has a legal provision to set up a consumer protection group, but this has not yet been operationalized. In response, I promised that I would fine tune my recommendation to stress the fact that this already has legal basis and that political will and action is what is needed to make that happen. It was that kind of fruitful exchange during the open forum that really showed to me that meaningful, constructive conversations on one's weaknesses is still possible in today's hostile political climate.

The final challenge was trying to find a way to make my report stay longer in their minds than the presentation. During the open forum, the officials gave specific requests on the final report that they would like to see, which they pledged they would use to help shape policy. I've mentioned the recommendation regarding patient empowerment, but let me share another. One limitation of the DHS dataset was that while ownership of the facility was asked, the level of facility (hospital, clinic, health center) was not asked. It was a comment first brought up by Director Williams even before I started my analysis, and this was thhe same comment that the officials noted because they wanted to identify which specific facilities were having issues with the card. I was able to demonstrate in my analysis that the use of the card is not negatively perceived in public facilities, but it is in private facilities. They wanted to know if such a difference in perceptions was also present across different levels of the health system. I said that the NHIA should request to have this question added when the next survey round is done in 2018/2019. This additional question would not be a troublesome request and the wealth of insight that can be extracted later on would significantly improve the utility of the analysis. I promised to also make that recommendation clear. I also got confirmation that they want to read the final report, and so I will send it to them as soon as possible. I was not able to mention this during the presentation, but I also want to write a policy brief that can be peddled around the NHIA and to other stakeholders.

I am excited to spend the next few weeks wrapping up my literature review, writing up my results, analysis, insights, and recommendations. This whole experience has been monumentally helpful for me as a researcher on so many fronts - technical skills, communication skills, building social capital, and actively advocating the reduction of research waste and the value of research translation. Again, I could not have asked for a better conclusion than this. I have dozens of people to thank for getting me this far, but I'll save the farewells for my final post next week.

[captainlenfan]

New Post has been published on http://websiteshop.network/episode-436-qa-with-robb-and-nicki-29/

Episode 436 – Q&A with Robb and Nicki #29

http://robbwolf.com/2019/07/19/episode-436-qa-with-robb-and-nicki-29/

We’re here with Episode 436, Q&A #29!

Submit your own questions for the podcast at: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

If you want to see the video for this podcast, be sure to check out our YouTube channel.

Show Notes:

  1. Endurance Fueling For A Keto Athlete [2:00]

  Cassandra says:

Dear Robb + Nicki,

First off…thanks for the great job you two do in making complicated nutrition and fitness information easy to access and understand (even for uneducated gym rats like myself).  I’ve been listening to the podcast for years, reading the blog and the books (just got Wired to Eat) and I still find myself learning something new almost weekly.

Bottom line up front – how do you guys recommend tackling post-workout nutrition for endurance / high-intensity sports while on the keto train?

I’m 35, 5’8”, 155 lbs with a fairly muscular build.  I’ve been doing the Crossfit + weightlifting thing for 5-6 years now (4-6 times a week).  I’ve got 10 strict pull ups, a 250 lb 1 RM back squat, a 285 1RM DL and can hold an L-sit for a minute….so I think I’m pretty strong(?) – in some aspects anyway …  Strict bedtimes at 8:30 every night with 8 hours of sleep, no injuries, no severe reactions to any type of food (except tequila) – BUT I perform and look a lot better when I’m strict about paleo.  I’ve been eating that way and it has been keeping me fueled really well in the aforementioned training situations. 

Due to the nature of my job – active duty Marine, I am required to run a 5k every year for time…so I do incorporate running into my weekly routine – usually no more than 15-20 miles a week…long-ish runs mixed with hill sprints or pushing sleds so I don’t die of cardio boredom.

Within the past year – – due to losing a bet or being shamed into them (I can’t quite remember), I’ve also been running a few half marathons and one marathon.  I plan do to one more full later this year, the Rock n Roll in Las Vegas – mostly because its an excuse to travel to Vegas with some girlfriends of mine. The low-carb/paleo diet has been awesome for my health  on the weightlifting/crossfit/sprinting side of things… but I’m struggling with the endurace side of my fitness.

For my runs more than 90 minutes, I’ve been fueling with some organic stinger chewies/gels near the end of my run and then other, whole-food-type carbs at the end….bananas, berries, coconut water…sometimes gatorade, (an occasional beer :)), etc.  My recovery has been OK…not awesome though (and when I take out the mid-run or end carbs, my energy tanks and my joints hurt for days)….. it takes me about me 1-2 days to get through my soreness for half marathons and almost 5 days for a run more than 22 miles WITH the intra and post-carbs.

I’ve recently jumped on the keto train in January…did your masterclass, read Mark Sisson’s book, started listening to a lot of low-carb / keto based podcasts (Shawn Baker, Fat Burning Man, etc) and just started Wired to Eat.  I’ve been trying to do my own homework and listen to my body…so far this keto thing has been great! I’ve dropped about 10 lbs since the beginning of the year, have been sleeping a lot better and have seen gains in my strength.  But the race season starts up in May (the LV Marathon is in November but I have smaller races and training runs scheduled throughout the summer) and I want to be prepared. 

I *think* I’m generally fat-adapted…but I panic after 8 or 9 miles sometimes (the old advice of “carb loading” always creeps back in) and will suck down a terrible gel or gatorade because I’ve made the mistake of running these distances underfueled before and it was a painful, painful lesson.  I have heeded your electrolyte advice. I constantly track my sodium, magnesium and potassium levels and take the recommended supplements almost every day (normally on days with a taxing WOD or a workout lasting more than 90 mins). 

So what can I eat/drink to keep on the keto train that will help me recover and keep me going on some of these endurance events?  Nut butters? Whey protein and water? I want to be armed when I take on Vegas this year and not completely derail my eating habits. And I’d like to start experimenting with these foods now, while I still have time to adjust.

Sorry for writing the novel!  If I can find this info in a podcast or in one of the chapters of your books, please feel free to point me in that direction!  I appreciate any insight you guys have. Thanks in advance,

Cassandra

  2. Should I Add Fat To My Whey Protein Shake? [10:40]

Ben says:

Hi!

Love the podcast (I am one of the six listeners)! Here is my question:

I am wondering if the insulin-spike from a post-workout whey shake can stall my weight loss. Should I add fat like heavy cream or coconut milk to the shake to blunt the insulin response (if yes how much) or am I unable to burn that fat because of the spiked insulin storing it as body fat instead.

Thank you so much and best wishes from Munich, Germany

Ben

  3. Portal Circulation and Leaky Gut [14:36]

James says:

Hi Robb,

Thanks for your detailed answer to my question about sun exposure in Q&A #7. You provided a clear and concise answer which is hard to come by these days!

Following your book recommendations in Q&A #6 I hungrily delved into the Lecture notes on Human Metabolism (Thanks Nikki!) and within the first chapter encountered some information that gave me reason to pause.

The portal circulation, I’m certain that you can provide a more accurate and concise explanation of this system to your listeners than I can in this question, so I’ll leave that to you if that’s okay!

My question is: given that all blood (and therefore solutes) from the intestines are drained through the portal vein and through the liver – filtering out excess substrates and removing toxins such as ammonia from the blood before it enters ‘general circulation’, how can leaky gut have such a damaging effect on the body? It seems to me that the liver is a vital backstop in this process which is never mentioned when functional medicine practitioners talk about leaky gut – they give the impression that blood drains from the intestines straight into cardiovascular circulation and these fuel substrates are clanking around in our arteries causing inflammation which seems not to be the case!

Also how does this impact the gut hypothesis of heart disease (highly simplified here) where endotoxin is said to pass through the mucosal membrane into circulation, binding with LDL cholesterol, being attacked and immobilized by immune cells and ultimately ending up being sequestered into an arterial plaque because the immune system cannot destroy cholesterol or unbind the endotoxin from it.

Would the portal circulation not remove this endotoxin from the blood before it enters cardiovascular circulation and meets LDL particles? Is this disease process driven not only by a compromised intestinal lining but also by inefficient liver function?

Thank you for your time again guys, really appreciate your input

Kind Regards

James

  4. Do I Have To Sprout My Nuts & Seeds? [20:10]

Joseph says:

Is phytic acid harmful or of benefit?  Is it really necessary to jump thru the hoops of soaking & sprouting before consuming nuts & seeds?  thank you

  5. Caloric Estimate for Young Children? [25:10]

Rory says:

Is there an estimate for calories/pound when it comes to feeding my almost 3 year old (or any child for that matter, say 2-12? The teen years of course marking the onset of self-consciousness and peer pressure, thus thwarting any biological hard-wiring toward survival.)

Or is she still young enough to be biologically incapable of starving herself, at which point I should just trust that she has normally functioning satiety signals?

I ask specifically about my daughter because, as is par for the course in ‘Murica, she received antibiotics immediately after being born, so it’s not a stretch for me to imagine that she could have some kind of gut imbalance that could cause hormone dysregulation with her leptin/ghrelin.

    Where you can find us:

  Submit questions for the podcast: https://robbwolf.com/contact/submit-a-question-for-the-podcast/

  Transcript:

Download a copy of the transcript here (PDF)

Nicki: Don’t. Stop. Stop. We’re rolling.

Robb: We are rolling. What’s up wife?

Nicki: You know, just kind of riding the wave of chaos.

Robb: Indeed. Indeed. So, we’re in the throws of packing, getting ready to move.

Nicki: We had a nice visit from your friend, Steve yesterday.

Robb: Good friend of mine, Steve who… A 20 year military veteran flying a B1 Bomber and I got to hang out with him and we related many stories that we-

Nicki: I only met him once before, him and his wife once before, when Robb and I first met and let’s just say in the few hours that we spent together yesterday, I learned a lot about what you did as a teenager.

Robb: Yeah and most of it was probably incarceration worthy.

Nicki: There were lots of laughs.

Robb: We turned out okay.

Nicki: You guys survived.

Robb: Yep.

Nicki: Somehow.

Robb: Yep. We did. We did.

Nicki: What are you drinking?

Robb: I’m drinking a Salty Palmer, which is a black tea, Lipton ice tea specifically, with a-

Nicki: LMNT Citrus Salt.

Robb: … LMNT Citrus Salt in it and it’s pretty darn good.

Nicki: Really good. Okay.

Robb: Do you want to jump in on this thing?

Nicki: Sure. Let’s jump in. Our first question this week is from Cassandra and Cassandra wrote a very, very lengthy question and I’m just going to read-

Robb: Great detail, but it’s-

Nicki: Really wonderful detail, but I’m just going to read some sections of it. But the main gist of her question is, how do you recommend tackling post workout nutrition for endurance and high intensity sports while on keto? So let’s see here.

Nicki: Okay, so she says, “I think I’m generally fat adapted, but I panic after eight or nine miles sometimes because the old advice of carb bloating always creeps back in and I will suck down a terrible gel or Gatorade because I’ve made the mistake of running these distances under fuel before and it was a painful, painful lesson. I’ve heated your electrolyte advice and I constantly track my sodium, magnesium and potassium levels and take the recommended supplements almost every day. Normally on days with a taxing wad or a workout lasting more than 90 minutes. So what can I eat or drink to keep on the keto train that will help me recover and keep me going on some of these endurance events? Nut butters, whey protein and water. I want to be armed when I take on Vegas this year and not completely derail my eating habits and I’d like to start experimenting with these foods now while I still have time to adjust. Sorry for writing a novel.”

Nicki: So just to fill in some of the details, she has done several half marathons and a marathon and she’s wanting to do another full marathon later this year. The Rock and Roll in Las Vegas

Robb: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative) and lots of great detail, so if you guys check out the show notes-

Nicki: We’ll post the full question, yeah.

Robb: … you can kind of dig into that stuff. So what one thing up front, I’m definitely not an endurance coach. We’ve dabbled in that area when we ran the gym, it wasn’t really my area of interests nor expertise. So I’m going to give some general guidelines, but I’m not an endurance coach. That said, one thing that I would recommend is following all the work from Zach Bitter. He has set multiple, I think national and world champion distances, 100 mile races, largely keto fueled, keto carnivore fueled. He drops in some carbs though. He has kind of a strategy around what he does with that. Part of what she related is she feels soreness and difficulty recovering after her hard sessions, in particular when she’s using carbs, interestingly.

Robb: This is one of the interesting things that folks that are in that keto, carnivore space seem to report they just seem to bounce back from workouts better. They don’t seem to get the delayed onset muscle soreness and all that stuff. It’s kind of funny, before we were recording this I was kind of noodling in the shower about how low carb in the context of a higher protein, like keto gain style, ketogenic diet or carnivore diet or even some of the old, original Loren Cordain protein recommendations. Even though it’s low carb technically, because you’re not eating carbohydrate as part of the diet, it’s not necessarily low glycogen.

Robb: The keto scene has gotten all freaked out about gluconeogenesis and being kicked out of ketosis, but this is all still super context driven stuff. For an individual that needs really, legit levels of ketones for say, like neurological condition or for cancer, co-treatment or something like that, then there’s a compelling reason to kind of limit protein.

Robb: But what’s interesting is that, and again I’m going to bounce around like there’s a zillion things I’m thinking about, but Charles Poliquin recommended for people who were not particularly carb sensitive, but doing high intensity training, a pretty high protein, low carb diet and then, supplemental glutamine post-workout because the glutamine was kind of a slow release way of topping off glycogen levels, both in the liver and the muscles. But that didn’t have some of the other side effects potentially of carbs and I know people are going to freak out. It’s like, “Oh, carbs aren’t the devil.” Yeah, they’re not, except when they are.

Robb: For some people like me, who still have some sort of GI problems or what have you, type one diabetics or people that are just tinkering with this stuff, there are other ways of getting reasonably good glycogen repletion, while also still staying in more of that kind of fat adapted world.

Robb: So one thing about this, we have to break this stuff into kind of training nutrition, event nutrition, post recovery nutrition. So during the event, this is definitely where she made the point that she needs to experiment with this stuff and see what’s what’s working. Again, I would kind of pun to what Zach Bitter does, as just kind of a beginning baseline.

Robb: I think that in general, if he’s doing something that’s more in that 100 mile pace, he stays pretty much fat and protein because he’s going to be going at such a gentle pace comparatively because he’s going to run for basically, like two days straight and so he just not going to get glycolytic. So, in that context then, there doesn’t necessarily need to be additional carbs or not much additional carbs to the degree that there might be a lot of elevation change or something like that. Therefore, going anaerobic, getting some glycolysis going on, then we might drop in some type of carb.

Robb: Again, you just have to play around with that stuff to see what sits well with gastric emptying and all that type of stuff. I feel like I’m just kind of bouncing around here, but it’s interesting. So, she also mentions that in the past, she was kind of worried at some point and this is where I think doing some training runs that are on the longer side and to establish like, how do you do? So she said that she panics after eight or nine miles sometimes. So there should probably be some like 12 or 15 mile runs consistently within the training block where you pressure test. It’s like, how do you feel at mile 10 through 15 with a particular type of training without necessarily doing a goo or something like that?

Robb: Even that said, there are a lot of people in the low carb space that, over the course of a day of activity like this, they may consume two or 300 grams of carbs on that day, which is still quite a bit less than what most other people are doing. But this is where there’s just a massive amount of individual variation. Again, I’m just not the most knowledgeable person on that side of things.

Robb: So, the takeaways, we don’t necessarily need to just cater towards ketosis. Don’t think about it being ketosis. Think about it being performance fueling. It may be on the lower carb side, it may be on the higher carb side. Even if it’s on the lower carb side, if our protein intake is higher, it doesn’t necessarily mean low glycogen for the body. So that can have all kinds of ramifications for recovery and nutrient intake.

Nicki: She definitely needs to make sure she’s not skimping on the protein.

Robb: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. The one caveat with that and this is where it gets really detailed, in event training, you may be, particularly if water may be a little bit limited or what have you, higher protein intake requires more water to deal with the ammonia load that’s coming out of that. But you don’t necessarily want to go super low protein because you will burn through all your branched-chain amino acids and then, tryptophan levels raise. The person will be running along and they get sleepy and they’ll literally, fall asleep and it happens a lot on a bicycle, mid run or at a minimum you lose some of that kind of motivation because you’re getting sleepy.

Robb: So this is some of the stuff again, that folks just have to play with. Like what protein level keeps you mentally alert? Because you don’t have enough branched-chain amino acids in the mix. Some people use of branched-chain amino acids as part of their training mix and stuff like that. But this is again where, it’s just super outside of my-

Nicki: Wheelhouse.

Robb: … Yeah, my wheelhouse. But those are some kind of big, broad brush strokes to consider when you’re doing this stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Nicki: Okay. Let’s see here. Next question is from Ben. Should I add fat to my whey protein shake? Ben says, “Hi, I love the podcast. I’m one of the six listeners. Here is my question. I’m wondering if the insulin spike from a post workout whey shake can stall my weight loss? Should I add fat, like heavy cream or coconut milk to the shake to blunt the insulin response? And if yes, how much or am I unable to burn that fat because of the spike insulin storing it as body fat instead? Thank you so much and best wishes from Munich, Germany.”

Robb: Man. So, whenever I see someone who’s… So clearly, I would read between the lines here, that the goal is fat loss, right? If you’re in a fat loss mode, you don’t need a shake. You just don’t. You need to chew food. Three meals a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, possibly a snack. I rarely have a snack. I eat two, sometimes three meals a day. It just kind of depends, but you don’t need a snack and you really don’t need the shake as a baseline.

Robb: That’s not really answering the question, but we noticed this within our gym based practice and I kind of felt like… And I would have all kinds of people, like Spencer Nadolsky, who are like, “Oh, shakes aren’t the devil and everything.” But I just saw people spin out and they would go from eating pretty well and then, do liquid food. Then they were hungry and then, they would end up overeating pretty consistently.

Robb: Then I started hanging out with Tyler and Luis and really watched the way that they handled things within the keto gains group and man, they could’ve made a mint linking wagons with some protein company and recommending that. Just their ethics are so sound that, what they noticed was that people who are really legitimately struggling with weight loss don’t do well with liquid food, don’t do well with shakes. They need to eat unprocessed food for the most part.

Robb: So Ben, I would one… It kind of becomes a nonissue. If we get people eating whole and processed food, it’s not really going to be a problem. That said, in the context of eating beef or whey protein and the subsequent insulin response from that, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, whether or not that’s going to influence fat loss overall. That’s still going to be driven by total caloric load, ultimately.

Robb: Some of the things mixed into that, if we get… Like in some people, and this is where some people will tolerate more or fewer carbs. If we get a disproportionate insulin response to carbohydrates and we get a low blood sugar environment, then people are going to tend to want to eat more food. We tend to not see this when the insulin response is from protein.

Robb: And this is another piece that’s kind of interesting when people talk about bodybuilding or recovery. Proteins do release insulin and so, you’re not necessarily always in a completely low insulin environment, even though you’re eating low carb. This gets born out, when you see the flip side of the crazy keto scene, where people are limiting protein intake because they’re freaked out about the insulin response to this whole thing.

Robb: So I know that’s kind of all over the place. But Ben, I would definitely ditch the shake and once you get to a level of leanness that is fantastic and you’re training like absolute crazy, such that three meals a day don’t work then…

Nicki: Then have the shake.

Robb: … dump a shake in. I wish that shakes did as well as real food but they just don’t. It’s another one of these things where we’ve really never recommended shakes. Here and there-

Nicki: Specific situations.

Robb: Yes. Specific situations. Yeah, so I think I beat that one to death.

Nicki: Okay. Let’s see. Our next question is from James on portal circulation and leaky gut. “Hi Robb. Thanks for your detailed answer to my question about sun exposure in QA number seven. Following your book recommendations in QA number six, I hungrily delved into the lecture notes on human metabolism. Thanks Nicki. And within the first chapter, I encountered some information that gave me reason to pause. The portal circulation, I’m certain that you can provide a more accurate and concise explanation of the system to your listeners than I can in this question, so I’ll leave that to you if that’s okay.

Nicki: My question is, given that all blood and therefore, solutes from the intestines are drained through the portal vein and through the liver, filtering out excess substrates and removing toxins, such as ammonia from the blood before it enters general circulation, how can leaky gut have such a damaging effect on the body? It seems to me that the liver is a vital backstop in this process, which was never mentioned, when functional medicine practitioners talk about leaky gut. They give the impression that blood drains from the intestines straight into the cardiovascular circulation and these fuel substrates are clinking around in our arteries causing inflammation, which seems not to be the case.

Nicki: Also, how does this impact the gut hypothesis of heart disease? Highly simplified here, where endotoxins is said to pass through the mucosal membrane into circulation, binding with LDL cholesterol, being attacked and immobilized by immune cells and ultimately, ending up being sequestered into an arterial plaque because the immune system cannot destroy cholesterol or unbind the endotoxin from it. With the portal circulation not removed, this endotoxin from the blood before it enters cardiovascular circulation and meets LDL particles. Is this disease process driven not only by a compromised intestinal lining but also by inefficient liver function? Thank you for your time. Really appreciate your input.”

Robb: That’s a great question and this is kind of, definitely before, oh, one question. This is kind of-

Nicki: Super advanced.

Robb: … Chris Masterjohn area. Usually, he’s the one that delves into stuff like this, but it’s a fantastic question. So for people that aren’t familiar with this, the portal circulation is the kind of circulatory loop that drains the gut and goes, as what James said, largely to liver and we do get it… This is where chylomicrons, the packages of lipids are unstitched and reshuffled and put into triglycerides and into lipoproteins. Proteins are kind of sorted and shuffle. Carbohydrates are stored at least, in part, in the liver. Then also throughout the rest of the body and that’s actually, a great example of this LPS story that James is alluding to.

Robb: What he’s asking here is a great question. In this leaky gut story, there’s this discussion around lipopolysaccharide, which is kind of the cellular identification matrix around bacteria and this stuff is incredibly inflammatory in all vertebrates. It sends the vertebrate immune system into kind of an overdrive response. But James, if we just subbed out LPS for carbohydrate, this pretty much answers the story.

Robb: So although dietary carbohydrate fills some, potentially all of the liver glycogen, there’s virtually always more that goes to the rest of the body. So although it removes some, it does not remove all. In the case of this LPS story in general, the liver should be effective. The liver in conjunction with the lipoproteins, the lipoproteins like LDL lipoproteins, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, these things bond to LPS and it tends to help in the detoxification of this substance. But if we have more LPS than what we’re really able to deal with-

Nicki: The liver handles some and the rest-

Robb: The liver handles some and then, we get the the spillover and that’s one piece of the story. Another piece of the story is that a lot of the lipid containing substances don’t go directly into the portal system. It goes into the lymphatic system and the lymphatic system then dumps in right around the aorta.

Robb: So it does make it into general circulation without going through the liver first. So that one year of medical school anatomy actually pays off every once in a while. So, this is a great question though. There are kind of two directions that the LPS story gets around the liver.

Robb: The first one is that there may just be more occurring than what the liver can reasonably detoxifying. Then the other part is the lipid constituents that end up in the lymphatic system, also end up dumped into general circulation, do ultimately make it into the liver, but that’s another spot where this stuff ends up.

Robb: Yeah, but a really good question. Lecture Notes on Human Metabolism is just an outstanding book. Really, really good. It was oriented for individuals heading towards medical school. So it was kind of, an end of their senior year. Like how to pull all the biochemistry, cellular biology, vertebrate physiology all together and make some sense of it. The MD-PhD who put that book together, he oriented a bunch of pharmaceuticals into it. He talked about statins, he talked about blood pressure mentally. It’s really an outstanding book, yeah.

Nicki: Okay. Let’s see. Our next question is on phytic acid from Joseph. “Is phytic acid harmful or of benefit? Is it really necessary to jump through the hoops of soaking and sprouting before consuming nuts and seeds?”

Robb: What do you think on this wife? What’s your gut sense?

Nicki: A lot of people do find benefit when they soak and sprout.

Robb: For sure and I would throw this under the, it depends category. So phytates and even… Gosh, there’s this stuff out of rice, I want to say. Ip-6, which is kind of one of these bonding chemicals, kind of a culation type chemicals. They can be beneficial in some circumstances and they can be a bastard in other circumstances. Georgia Ede who is a psychiatrist and really incredibly knowledgeable on this stuff, has some great studies where individuals would eat something like oysters, which are very high in zinc, and you would quantify the amount of zinc in the oysters. Then the person would consume it and they would actually do some plasma zinc analysis. So they can show, “Okay, the before oyster, plasma zinc was here and post-oyster plasma…” So it’s showing that you’re absorbing it or it’s magically appearing in your bloodstream, one or the other.

Robb: Then she showed eating the same oyster meal, but with either say, fruit or corn tortillas. The fruit does not have phytates in it. The corn tortillas have quite a lot and the corn tortillas, plus the zinc source, basically made the zinc absorption zero. I mean, it just gutted it.

Robb: So this is one of these things that’s really interesting and in looking at a lot of the Weston A. Price stuff, traditional cultures bent over backwards to soak and sprout and ferment and process grains, legumes and even dairy, for the most part. So, I think that there was some really good wisdom to all that. It kind of dovetails around on another piece around this kind of emerging story around the carnivore concept and whatnot and I could make a case that… How do I want to say this?

Robb: The amount of plant material that we eat is allowable only up to the point that it displaces animal products. At some point the overconsumption of plant material could potentially cause nutrient depletion. I know this is going to be a super controversial topic, but when you look at, let’s say just things like spinach, they may contain different nutrients that may be valuable and they may look like they’re in a large amount, particularly from a nutrient density standpoint, like a percentage of folate per calorie. But the thing is, the plant based materials are not that absorbable and oftentimes have constituents in them, like phytates that are antagonistic towards their absorption.

Robb: These things can also interfere with… They’re basically protease inhibitors, so they inhibit the ability to break down protein, both plant and animal protein. So again, how important is it? I think it boils down a little bit to individual situations. But I think to the degree that people can get away with not doing this, is reflective of all the other right stuff they’re doing. Also, I think that you’re just kind of beating your system a little bit. Like there’s some pressure testing that’s occurring there.

Robb: So, if you’re going to do bread, I would do something like Ezekiel bread that’s been soaked and sprouted and all that type of stuff. A lot of people are finding these ancient grains, like the Einhorn wheat and then soaking, sprouting, doing the sourdough mix that that helps to break down the gluten and all that stuff. Although there’s some great literature indicating that not a lot of celiacs still react to the Einhorn wheat, even after it’s gone through all of that stuff.

Robb: I’ll be completely honest, even though the Weston A. Price stuff is pretty cool, I think that this is still why a lot of people are pretty fucked up in that scene. Because they’re just logistically dogmatic about having these foods and they don’t realize that even some pastured dairy may be problematic for some people. Yeah. Yeah.

Robb: So, it’s super context driven, and this is again, where if somebody has general problems or they’re just wanting to ask a question, if they may be grain, dairy or legume reactive, pull them out for 30 days, reintroduce and see how you do. But I would say that to the degree, that you process these things with these traditional methods. It’s definitely going to improve the nutrient value of those foods and it’s going to decrease the likelihood of damaging the nutrient value of other foods.

Nicki: Okay. Let’s see. Our final question this week is from Rory. He wants to know about a caloric estimate for young children. Rory says, “Is there an estimate for calories per pound when it comes to feeding my almost three year old or any child for that matter, say from two to 12? The teen years of course, make marking the onset of self-consciousness and peer pressure, thus thwarting any biological hard-wiring towards survival or is she still young enough to be biologically incapable of starving herself? At which point, I should just trust that she has a normally functioning, satiety signals? I ask specifically, about my daughter because as is par for the course in America, she received antibiotics immediately after being born. So it’s not a stretch for me to imagine that she could have some kind of gut imbalance that could cause hormone dysregulation with her leptin and ghrelin.”

Robb: Good question, but my gut sense is, Rory’s probably being a little too worried about this. Also, I don’t know how early… How old did she say?

Nicki: Three.

Robb: She said she’s three.

Nicki: Almost three.

Robb: Okay. I mean, I know there are some benchmarks out there. I think it’s something like 16 or 18 calories per pound or maybe it’s 20 calories per pound. I forget off the top of my head, but it’s a lot of calories generally. But even if you know this, then it’s like you’re going to weigh and measure their food and then, you need to weigh and measure what they didn’t eat and you need to separate out the protein, carbs, fat.

Nicki: That’s a lot of work.

Robb: It’s a lot of fucking work. The risk-reward deal, I just don’t see. Yeah.

Nicki: I think you feed them and they eat until they’re-

Robb: Full.

Nicki: … full. Especially if you’re feeding him unprocessed, real foods, they’re not going to overeat.

Robb: Right and they will generally not under eat and also, kids tend to cycle.

Nicki: They do cycle, yeah.

Robb: Zoe and Sagan, it’s funny. We don’t have a pool, but our friend has a pool and we’ve been taking them swimming. On the days when they swim, they don’t really eat that much and you’re like, “Man, they should be really hungry.” But then I tell you what, the next day, they eat everything that’s not nailed down. They just don’t want to get out of the water. So they might have an Epic bar or something like that and just kind of a little snack here and there. But they’re so excited to swim that they won’t get out and they might do a half decent dinner. But then oftentimes, they are so smoked by the end of the day of swimming. I mean, like six hours of swimming. There in the sun and all the rest of that. They don’t even really eat that much. They’re almost passing out at the table.

Robb: But then, the next day they get up and they eat everything. Which I think is a really… that’s a great… In general, kids tend to do a really good job with that. I think that this is something that, over the course of time because of my kind of power lifting background, for ages, I just kind of over ate because I felt like I needed to eat more. I finally, at almost 50, have gotten to a spot where it’s like, if I just kind of sit on my duff all day, I don’t need that much food. Then on the day where I’m real active, I may lift weights and do two hours of Jujitsu, I eat a lot of food that day and then, maybe even the following day I’m like, “Man, I’m pretty hungry.” So I end up eating more.

Robb: If we’re not eating odd foods, I think that the appetite control mechanisms are very well in place and I wouldn’t worry about a round of antibiotics displacing that stuff. It’s a great question to ask, but I wouldn’t be overly concerned about that. Anything else as a mom to cap that off?

Nicki: I don’t think so. I think it is cyclic. I mean, I think that’s fairly normal, where one day they might eat a ton and the next day it tapers off a bit. She’s not going to starve herself.

Robb: Nope. Nope. The thing that we do, we kind of make it a speed bump method. We really kind of hold the kid’s feet to the fire. It’s like, you got eat your protein and then, if you want some more of this other stuff, then we kind of open it up and that works. That works fine.

Robb: We have noticed, even within the two kids, if Sagan in particular, who seems to kind of take after me a little bit more, at least in some ways, if she doesn’t get enough protein, that kid gets cranky, real cranky. It’s just like a switch just flips and then, she’ll eat and she’s good. I think she ends up potentially, getting a little bit of these kind of blood sugar changes, if she’s not getting enough protein. So, you’ll notice a little bit of variability on that.

Robb: Whereas, I think Zoe is a little bit more like you and just a little more even keel, with regards to… She’ll eat a lot of protein, but even if she doesn’t, it doesn’t seem to affect her quite the same way. But Sagan’s also going through growth spurt, so I don’t know how much of that’s going on.

Nicki: She’s sleeping like 15 hours at night.

Robb: Yeah. Yeah and she’s just been sprouting. So that’s a whole other crazy thing to this and it’s been funny all the way along. Now that the girls are basically seven and five, the changes aren’t quite as dramatic. Maybe up to about three years old, maybe four years old, it feels like every time you kind of get dialed in on one sequence, then they change and you’ve got to rejigger things. But they still change over time and for sure right now, Sagan is growing a lot, sleeping a lot and we noticed that if she doesn’t eat well, she will get some cranky McCrankerkins going on. Yeah.

Nicki: Yeah. I think that’s a wrap for this week.

Robb: Yep. Yep. Thank you guys for the awesome questions. Enjoyed doing this, as always. Most of my activity, at least for a while, is still over at Instagram @dasrobbwolf. This episode brought to you by…

Nicki: Drink LMNT, LMNT Recharge and hope you guys are all having a great and safe summer.

Robb: We’ll talk to you guys soon. Take care.

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[antialiasis]

The War of the Worlds

So after seeing that live War of the Worlds concert the other day, I started getting curious about the book. I was interested in exactly how faithful of an adaptation the album was, plus just feeling a little uncultured for considering myself a fan of this classic story without being more than very vaguely familiar with the actual book. So I decided to do something about that.

I started by just going on Wikipedia (hence that H. G. Wells quote I posted the other day) and reading the plot summary to get the basic gist of how it might be different. The plot summary featured passages like “Now in a deserted and silent London, he begins to slowly go mad from his accumulated trauma, finally attempting to end it all” and “The narrator continues on, finally suffering a brief but complete nervous breakdown, which affects him for days”, which made me think that aaactually maybe I should just read it, particularly after feeling a great kinship with the author after reading that quote that I posted. And luckily, it’s in the public domain and freely available online.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot, actually more than I expected. The War of the Worlds came out in 1897, and like a lot of people, I can’t help but feel sort of instinctively prejudiced against books written that long ago - I expect something kind of stuffy and unrelatable, rooted in the values and concerns of a bygone, alien era. The War of the Worlds, somewhat ironically, is not alien in that way at all. Human society may have changed over the course of the past 120 years (120 years!), but the basic emotions and instincts of human beings are the same as always, and The War of the Worlds is an intensely human novel - more than the activities of the Martians per se, it’s about human reactions to the invasion, the narrator’s harrowing emotional journey through his encounters with the Martians, how the people he meets cope with the horrors that are happening, the dawning realization that humanity is powerless to stop this alien apocalypse.

In other words, it’s also my kind of novel, and it’s delightful to me to see just how similar this is to the sorts of things modern authors write about analogous situations - the sorts of things I might write. There’s even a bit that presses my buttons pretty hard: The narrator is holed up with a curate (the book equivalent of Parson Nathaniel) who is slowly losing his mind and has started shouting and raving in a way that’s set to alert the Martians outside to their presence. After trying desperately in vain to get him to be quiet, the narrator, “fierce with fear”, grabs for a meat cleaver on the wall and leaps after the curate, then, “with a last touch of humanity”, turns it around to strike him unconscious with the butt of it instead. A man desperate to survive after weeks of unending horrors is driven almost to horrific murder with pure, animalistic terror, but can’t actually do it? Yes, please. This is totally what I would write into a story about a Martian invasion, and 120 years ago H. G. Wells wrote the same thing, because humans and the fascination with the outer edges of human psychology in extreme, horrifying situations transcends time and culture.

That being said, it is of course obvious in the framing of the novel that it’s set and written in the 1890s, and that’s pretty fascinating too. I noticed particularly how much communication has changed - in the novel the Martians have murdered a party of scientists and set a large area on fire days before the news starts to spread that okay, there are Martians and they’re hostile and this is kind of a big deal. A man sends a telegram to London about it, but is dead before they telegram him back to confirm, and when they get no response, they shrug and figure it’s a hoax. It seems incredible to read about people going about their lives normally the day after an alien mass murder, simply because they’ve only heard vague third-hand stories if that and none of it seems terribly real. It’s unthinkable in the modern world to imagine information spreading at such a slow, human pace - it really makes you appreciate how much the world has changed in that respect.

In other places, the novel is simply scientifically dated, in delightfully quaint ways. Everything about Mars in it is of course wild speculation from long before we’d gone to space or knew much of anything about Mars: Wells posits that its red color is the color of its native vegetation, for instance. The Martians themselves have evolved to sustain themselves simply by injecting the blood of other creatures into their own veins, and this completely removes their need for a digestive system, allowing them to consist almost entirely of brain. And the narrator asserts that this (along with their asexual reproduction) is what causes the Martians to experience no emotions - because human emotions come from the digestive and sexual organs, and would simply disappear if we were to evolve to discard those organs! The way it’s described sounds very logical, and it must have seemed totally reasonable at the time, but it’s pretty amusing for a modern reader.

That speculative aspect is often really interesting, though, and it was fun to see how much more of that background the novel has than Jeff Wayne’s adaptation (understandably). I was not at all expecting an explanation for why the Martians would decide to feed on humans specifically rather than other animals, but that’s in there: the Martians brought in their cylinders the corpses of a couple of Martian animals which coincidentally happen to be bipedal and fairly similar to humans in size, and it is subsequently deduced that these must be their primary native food source. They simply regarded humans as the most edible-looking creatures on Earth, the same way we’d probably feel most comfortable eating a bulky, quadrupedal alien resembling cows or sheep than one whose basic form looks more like a human or an insect. It takes a standard weird trope that your average person would just shrug and accept and explains it to make perfect sense - beautiful.

In the musical version there is a moment where the narrator mentions the Martians have long since eliminated bacteria from their planet, obviously in order to set up the ending; I’d often heard the ending referred to as one of the most infamous examples of a deus ex machina, so I wondered if the novel had had no such setup at all, but it actually sets it up even more extensively, in two separate chapters (once when discussing the biology of the Martians in detail, from which the line in the musical is taken, and also in a different chapter where the narrator explains that the Martian red weed would eventually be killed off by microbes).

(Really, the ending is fucking awesome and I will fight you on this. The whole point of the novel is how for all of humanity’s arrogance and what they consider awesome weaponry, they can barely touch these superpowered invaders, but the Martians’ own arrogance and reliance on their superior technology is their downfall in the end - they’ve rendered their own bodies frail and defenseless against these invisible threats that they simply forgot existed and never accounted for (or never knew; the novel also suggests maybe bacteria never even evolved on Mars), which we humans are protected from because of our evolutionary history of struggling with disease and developing defenses against it. It is not an authorial asspull to save the day on any level at all; it’s carefully foreshadowed and exactly thematically appropriate and makes perfect sense within the established premises of the novel and is generally one of the best endings of anything ever. Putting it in the same category as lazy “but then a contrived coincidence/power pulled out of nowhere/conveniently arriving character fixed everything” resolutions is pretty ridiculous.)

Of course, since at the outset I had wanted to examine how Jeff Wayne’s musical version had adapted the novel, I was also looking out for that. The adaptation is all in all quite faithful to the basic story; the actual core storyline of the Martian invasion is pretty much identical aside from being compacted, with most of the narrator’s lines closesly adapted from the novel as direct or near-direct quotes (where changed, they’re usually cutting out detail or slightly simplifying the language).

There are mainly two major changes. In the novel, the narrator never goes to London himself until the end; instead, there are a couple of chapters from the point of view of the narrator’s younger brother, a medical student in London (still written in the narrator’s voice, though, since in-universe he’s writing this account after the fact, relaying what his brother described to him). The brother is there for the panic when (several days into the invasion) the government calls for an evacuation of London, and then eventually gets on a steamer out of the country, from which he witnesses the HMS Thunder Child’s valiant last stand. These chapters feel a little out of place, and the introduction of several new characters to tell this part of the story who then simply disappear is fairly extraneous and doesn’t get the reader terribly invested, so it’s definitely a solid and sensible choice in the adaptation to simply remove the brother and have the narrator be in London and witness the Thunder Child chapter himself. Since he’s obviously not going to be on the boat getting out of England himself, though, to get the listener invested in the fate of the steamer, Jeff Wayne instead puts the narrator’s girlfriend/fiancée Carrie and her father on the boat - with them also providing his reason to go to London to begin with. In the novel, the narrator is married and lives with his wife near where the first Martian cylinder lands; after they turn out to be hostile and dangerous, he leases a horse-carriage to take his wife to safety in the town of Leatherhead and then comes back alone to return the carriage, which is how they get separated. He then spends the rest of the novel worrying for her safety and wanting to get to Leatherhead to find her again. This setup is a bit complex, and all in all I think the musical version made a good call in simplifying it to one that’s easily comprehensible with much less dialogue; it does create an interesting difference in the narrator’s situation during the second act, though, as in the musical version he knows that Carrie made it to safety, while in the novel he believes his wife to possibly if not probably be dead until they both meet again in the epilogue.

The other major change is in the narrator’s dealings with the curate/Parson Nathaniel. In the novel, the narrator meets the curate, a young man, shortly after escaping from the fighting machines and being separated from the artilleryman, and they spend weeks together, first traveling and then trapped in an abandoned house after a cylinder lands on top of it. The curate is cowardly, indecisive and grows increasingly agitated and incoherent, and he is in a constant conflict with the narrator for most of this time. His character is frustrating, pitiful but starts to border on despicable, a man reduced to a gibbering, animalistic mess selfishly hogging food and recklessly endangering the narrator and himself with inane ramblings.

Parson Nathaniel in the musical adaptation, however, is a more genuinely pitiable figure. The narrator only comes across him shortly before the cylinder lands on the house they take shelter in; he sounds much older than in the book, and he has a wife, Beth, who he deliriously believes to be one of the devils here to claim the earth for Satan. His religious philosophy, while deranged, feels much more coherent than that of the curate in the book, and ultimately he comes across as much more of a sympathetic and tragic figure. That’s likely the root of why this change was made - the curate in the book is desperately unlikeable, which mostly fuels the narrator’s conflict with himself and the long, grueling setup culminating in that desperate moment of nearly killing him. Obviously I’m a fan of that part, but it would’ve been very hard to do that setup in a way that would actually work in the musical version, and making the parson’s desperation and misguided faith into the focus for that part instead makes a lot of sense. It helps that “The Spirit of Man” is one of the best songs on the album.

(Interestingly, the outtakes on the Collectors’ Edition include some voice outtakes with a much younger-sounding parson who is much closer to the curate’s character in the book and seems to match his role much more closely, with more direct or near-direct quotes from the book. The change to the parson’s character must have happened fairly late in the development of the album, then - after they started recording vocal work. I’m pretty interested in the story here and how they developed the final version of “The Spirit of Man”.)

The addition of his wife Beth is a less obvious choice, and even before I read the book it felt a little weird how unceremoniously she was disposed of in the musical version. Part of me thinks she may have been added in part just to get one female voice on this album - the book contains basically no real female characters with significant speaking parts whatsoever. That lack isn’t too glaring in the book - there are very few characters with significant speaking roles to begin with - but it’s still reasonable to want to patch it up a little in a more modern adaptation. But her role is also as an optimistic, hopeful contrast to the parson’s apocalyptic ravings, which the narrator probably couldn’t have provided in the same way after everything he’s seen. And the parson’s relationship with her develops him a bit more and adds to his tragic nature - she’s his wife, so they must have loved each other once upon a time, but this alien apocalypse has driven him to believe she’s in league with the Satan himself, and even when she dies he only channels his anguish into his nonsensical convictions. Beth is the only character who remains steadfastly hopeful and urges sanity and reason - in the book, the narrator remarks that seeing the curate’s descent into madness tightened his grip on his own sanity, but perhaps Beth’s genuine hope serves the same purpose for him in the musical version.

(It also occurs to me that theoretically Beth’s optimism could be viewed as setup for “Brave New World” - if one man could stand tall, she sings, there must be some hope for us all, and later, the narrator comes across what initially seems to be just such a man, with a plan for saving humanity and keeping its spirit alive. But I’m not sure I buy that as a reason for her presence - both because it seems a bit backwards given the artilleryman turns out to not actually represent the true hope of humanity and because otherwise these two songs feel very separate and not like they’re supposed to be connected at all.)

I found it interesting that in the book, the way the artilleryman frames his plan is a lot more explicitly eugenicist in nature - he talks a lot more about getting the right sorts of men and women into their underground city and keeping the riffraff out (“We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.”), compared to “Brave New World”’s vague, innocent-sounding “With just a handful of men…” Interestingly, the Icelandic translation of the musical version felt closer to the book in this respect, because there that line was translated as “With just a few chosen men” - definitely getting the feeling the translator had read the book. I suspect this was very intentionally toned down for the musical version because the narrator initially pretty much buys into the plan, which would be a bit jarring with the full implications of the original.

The artilleryman’s character in the book also generally comes across as more of a… well, the sort of nerd who today might fantasize about the zombie apocalypse. He focuses a lot more on how the Martians will keep humans as pets and how most humans will eventually just accept their Martian overlords, relishing the minutiae of how grim things will be and the depths to which humanity will sink and how they must resist descending into savagery, while Jeff Wayne’s version is far more focused on his grandiosely optimistic ideas about what the underground city will be like - banks and prisons and schools! We can get everything working! He sounds enthusiastic at the idea of this underground living, whereas his book counterpart appears to suggest it strictly as a means of survival.

I don’t have much of a big conclusion here; Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds is a good adaptation, its changes are solid, and overall it puts the novel fairly faithfully into an accessible dramatic format, but I still really appreciate the book’s somewhat more complex and nuanced, if also somewhat more cynical, takes. Overall, I think The War of the Worlds is a really good story, and I’m amazed that here I am enjoying its explorations of human nature 120 years on. And if you want to enjoy it in a more accessible form than a 120-year-old novel, go give the musical version a listen, because it is great.

[we-future-first]

The AGI Fallacy | A potential phenomenon where we assume new tech will either only come about with AGI or is unlikely without it. This misconception might cause a lack of preparedness for certain future technologies

We're probably familiar with the AI Effect, yes? The gist there is that we assume that a technology, accomplishment, or innovative idea [X] requires "true" artificial intelligence [Y], but once we actually accomplish [X] with [Y], [Y] is no longer [Y]. That might sound esoteric on the surface, but it's simple: once we do something new with AI, it's no longer called "AI". It's just a classifier, a tree search, a statistical gradient, a Boolean loop, an expert system, or something of that sort.

As a result, I've started translating "NAI" (narrow AI) as "Not AI" because that's what just about any and every narrow AI system is going to be.

It's possible there's a similar issue building with a fallacy that's closely related to (but is not quite) the AI Effect.

To explain my hypothesis: take [X] again. It's a Super Task that requires skills far beyond any ANI system today. In order to reliably accomplish [X], we need [Y]— artificial general intelligence. But here's the rub: most experts place the ETA of AGI at around 2045 at the earliest, with actual data scientists leaning much closer to the 2060s at the earliest, with more conservative estimates placing its creation into the 22nd century. [Z] is how many years away this is, and for simplicity's sake, let's presume that [Z] = 50 years.

To simplify: [X] requires [Y], but [Y] is [Z] years away. Therefore, [X] must also be [Z] years away, or at least it's close to it and accomplishing it heralds [Y].

But this isn't the case for almost everything done with AI thus far. As it turns out, a sufficiently advanced narrow AI system was capable of doing things that past researchers were doggedly sure could only be done with general AI. Chess, for example: it was once assumed that since only the highest intellectual minds could master chess, an AI would need to be virtually alive to do the same.

Garry Kasparov was trumped in the mid-90s, and I have a distinct inkling that the Singularity might not have begun back then too, but I need more evidence to confirm this.

Things like Watson defeating a human on Jeopardy or an AI crushing humans at Go were in similar places in complexity: if an AI could do that, we're probably close to the Singularity. Both happened earlier this decade, and no human-level AGI has assumed total control over our nuclear launch codes since. If they have, they're doing a damn fine job not telling us, but there may be a tiny chance that AGI doesn't exist and these tasks were perfectly accomplishable by non-AGI due to focusing on specialization of certain tasks— which has the added corollary of saying that many aspects of human cognition we assume can only be mimicked by a full-fledged mind can indeed be reduced to a much simpler and narrower form.

Of course, there genuinely are some tasks that require AI more complicated than ANI. Autonomous cars are one. Sure, their narrow goal is "driving", but it turns out that's actually a very general goal when you really think about it because you have to account for, predict, and react to so many different stimuli at one time. Therefore, autonomous cars are only happening when we have AGI, right?

Well...

So, for the past few years, I've been trying to get people to listen to my explanation that our model for AI types has a gaping hole in it. We only have three types as of the present: ANI or NAI (narrow AI/not AI that can only do one thing), AGI (general AI, which can do everything), and ASI (artificial superintelligence, which can do everything and then some at a bizarro superhuman level). But ever since roughly around 2015 or so, I started asking myself: "what about AI that can do some things but not everything?" That is, it might be specialized for one specific class of tasks, but it can do many or all of the subtasks within that class. Or, perhaps more simply, it's generalized across a cluster of tasks and capabilities but isn't general AI. It seems so obvious to me that this is the next step in AI, and we even have networks that do this: transformers, for example, specialize in natural-language generation, but from text synthesis you can also do rudimentary images or organize MIDI files; even with just pure text synthesis, you can generate anything from poems to scripts and everything in between. Normally, you'd need an ANI that specialize for each one of those tasks, and it's true that most transformers right now are trained to do one specifically. But as long as they generate character data, they can theoretically generate more than just words.

This isn't "proto-AGI" or anything close; if anything, it's closer to ANI. But it isn't ANI; it's too generalized to be ANI.

The gist there is that this proves to me that it's possible for AI to do narrowly-generalized tasks and, thus, be far stronger than any narrow AI network that exists today even if it's still weaker than any theoretical future AGI. This is a bridge from here to there, and we've all but started crossing it in the past couple of years.

The term I've coined for that kind of AI is "AXI" or "artificial expert intelligence" (not to be confused with expert systems). It makes sense in theory: an expert is one who specializes in a particular field rather than a worker who does one singular task or a polymath who knows everything. It's certainly better than "proto-AGI" because many will latch onto the AGI part of the name to discredit these sorts of technologies, and even then it really isn't proto-AGI anyway.

This has some implications for this "AGI Effect", if I may be able to coin another term. If we believe things like synthesizing a 5-minute photorealistic video with audio requires AGI, then we can comfortably say that this is 50+ years away and not have to worry about it. But if a suitably strong AXI does it in only five years, then we may have a problem: by assuming that [X] is 50 years away, we compartmentalize it in the same place as things like our grandchildren going to college, distant future effects of climate change or astronomic events, science fiction, and our own deaths. This is fairly low on our internal list of concerns. If it's only five years away, it becomes a much more immediate concern and we're more apt to do something about it or at least think through how we might deal with it.

This is why there's little being done about climate change: even some of the most dire predictions still place the start of the worst effects decades in the future, which reduces our own responsibility to do or care about anything, despite the fact certain effects could start much sooner by unforeseen events.

It can be used to justify skepticism of any sort of change, too. The AGI Effect explains why people tend to think automation is decades away. For one, we tend to think of automation as "humanoid robots taking jobs from men in blue overalls and hardhats, burger flippers, and truck drivers" and because humanoid robots are still rather pathetic (despite the fact they can backflip and freerun now), we can comfortably say "jobs aren't going away any time soon."

I mean, for one: media synthesis is a thing, and the basic principle there is that disembodied neural networks can automate any data-oriented task (including the entertainment industry, news industry, and many white collar office tasks) as long as it has enough power, and that might start hitting as soon as the 2020s. Of course, there are also predictions there that say that "we need AGI to get an NLG program to write a novel" or "we need AGI to generate a 5-minute animation," and yet both tasks seem like they may be accomplished within just a few, zero-AGI-filled years. And autonomous robots don't need to be entirely generalized to be better than humans; they just need to be able to handle unexpected issues. If you have strong enough ANI and AXI to handle vision, spatial awareness, and prediction, you could conceivably get a general-purpose robot worker. And this might only take 10 to 15 years as opposed to 50+.

Sure, the robot with AGI is going to be better than the one with a bunch of less generalized networks, but it's not like we can only make these robots with AGI in the first place. And I think we're going to see what I mean in very short order.

I think autonomous trucks, for example, can be done with sufficiently powerful ANI. If not ANI, then certainly AXI.

The cold fact is that most of the faculties of our mind can be reduced to certain algorithms; the issue is and has always been replicating the whole mind. And I'm merely saying that, in order to get to our sci-fi future, we don't actually need to do that (though it would greatly help).

TLDR: There's a fallacy where we assume that we need AGI to do something, when a sufficiently advanced narrow AI (or narrowly-generalized AI) will do that same thing much sooner. Since we don't expect it to be done so soon, we don't prepare for it properly.

If I'm wrong, please correct me.

submitted by /u/Yuli-Ban [link] [comments] source https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/e23njq/the_agi_fallacy_a_potential_phenomenon_where_we/

[sidbridgecomedy]

Feedback on Joking About Work

Last week's experiment on a piece of material/premise that wasn't working brought about some interesting feedback. For this follow-up article, I'm going to look at the responses and give my thoughts.

1. My friend Susan suggested talking about former coworkers, mainly as an attempt to goad me into picking on our friend Jamie on stage - poor Jamie was once the victim of a cubicle full of post-it notes. While it's true and funny, it does kind of lack the punch of a good piece of stand-up. Cubicle full of post-it notes? Maybe a mild chuckle at best. Cubicle full of freshly-cut shark chum? Comic gold.

More to the point, Susan, we really should be making fun of our time at the now-defunct Harris Publishing Company. That place - in less than 1.5 years moved me across six cubicles, all of which were the same, ending in the exact same place I started. We also put a lot of faith in the future of printed alumni directories. What could possibly go wrong there?!

2. Matt, a local comic who's been bringing his extremely unconventional style to open mics all over Hampton Roads tries to butter me up first: Good read!

Thanks, Matt! I also think my writing is a good read!

Here are Matt's thoughts: People may have a hard time understanding what you actually get paid to do. So try being very clear about what you actually do from day today and you could possibly make a joke out of that. Also, you could try stretching the truth with a certain social situation that might be present at work. You could try relating to the change of environment after the Me too thing. You could give your take on how you would run things if you were the boss that has pretty much endless possibilities.

Good read, Matt! Stretching the truth is a tried-and-true strategy for bending a real life happening into a piece of material, and if I could find a way to make it simplify my corporate life, I may do that. Over-explaining never works, so if I can't distill an explanation down to a few words, it ain't happening.

3. Noel, another local comic who also frequents my open mic, decided to rib me a bit: The fact that you have a very good job might alienate you from the audience. Who wants to hear why Daddy McBigBucks hates Mondays?

He's right, but what's even more telling is that I somehow earned the title "Daddy McBigBucks." That's the impression I give off when I talk about my job, and boy do I wish it were true. Right now it's more like "Daddy McSignificantDebtwithRidiculousMonthlyExpenses". If talking about my job erases any credit I have with the audience as a regular human who struggles to pay his bills like anyone else, it's best to steer clear.

3a. Matt chimes back in and points out that if I do go arrogant, I have to turn it up to the point of ridiculousness.

Also true, but I have always felt the best comedy happens where there's a clear protagonist - especially if it's you. If you're an antogonist in the bit, you need to get your comeuppance in order for the audience to enjoy the laugh.

4. Ryan, another comic who I sometimes see at my open mic, wrote way too much stuff in his response. The gist is that I didn't give enough details for the reader to give suggestions about what's funny. If so, he would suggest how to simplify it. There were also some solid points about making it relatable to people who aren't in my tax bracket - which is true, but the last thing someone in a lower tax bracket wants to hear about is the struggles of those in a higher tax bracket. Try listening to a billionaire bitch about taxes. It's frustrating.

5. From Earl: Have you tried lying? They don’t know if you’re a lawyer or a plumbers assistant.

Thanks, Earl. I'm a cheese salesman.

6. Kenneth jumps in with some great insight: I think your later points are probably closer to home. Lots of funny situations at require too much explaining - it's funny to everyone at the office because there's thousands of hours of common experience. Which theoretically makes it an inside joke - funny at work, bomb on stage. And trying to find the humor in an exasperating work experience really isn't a funny bit, like you said, it's really just ranting. Dennis Miller and Bill Maher have done pretty well with it, but they take very public events or situations which really don't require much explaining about the event itself.

Totally agree.

7. Finally, Ben jumps in with the cold, hard truth: I think you’re right about the white collar thing as soon as I read manager of corporate communication my mind shut down.

Ben gets it.

Here's my bottom line. I've actually managed a couple of one-off jokes about my job that don't require set-up. I'll stick with those at clubs. Anything else about my job, I will still jot into my notebook. It'll be tucked away in a safe corner, just waiting for... a corporate gig. Friends, don't forget stand-up happens in lots of different places. Riding on a jet and complaining about how the scotch selection is better than the choices of cookies won't work in a comedy club, but it will sure as hell work at a corporate gig. When the funny stuff comes to mind, jot it down. You may find a place to use it later.