Author: tworuru

  • Should I do more of these? I have to say, I love painting along with Bob Ross; the result is surreally lovely every time and every time I dig this canvas out of the cupboard it lives in it warms my cold heart

  • On web presence consolidation, and convergence

    I’m determined to give this micro.blog thing a proper hoon, while I’m on my free trial. But experimenting with it has already made me realise just how much I’d love to consolidate my Internet presence on one platform that plays nice with others. I love the microblog concept, the idea of frictionless quick blogging and having a repository of my stuff that I control. I can see myself keeping it, for these reasons and as a way to syndicate my posts across the Indieweb.

    But consolidation remains the dream. Currently, I have a long tail of Internet projects both current and abandoned that I would very, very much like to clean up, across a truly upsetting number of platforms. There’s:

    – my essentially abandoned webcomic, [www.cakeburger.com](https://www.cakeburger.com) (WordPress)
    – my old blog that I’d like to turn into a portfolio site, [www.joshuadrummond.com](https://www.joshuadrummond.com) (WordPress)
    – my bad news newsletter, the Bad Newsletter, [www.badnewsletter.com](https://www.badnewsletter.com) (Ghost)
    – my self-improvement obsession newsletter, [www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com](https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com) (Ghost)
    – my art shop, [tworuru.com](https://www.tworuru.com) (Shopify)

    I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that spring to mind.

    Now. Not only is the experience of keeping up with all that web stuff full of friction, it’s *expensive*. There’s no way to run two newsletters out of Ghost, so I have to pay a flat fee for both of them, and Shopify of course has a monthly cost. Both the WordPress sites are self-hosted so the only thing I am paying for them is the hosting and domain name costs.

    What I’d really like, I’ve realised, is a way to keep all that stuff straight in one container, if it’s at all possible. I’m aware that this is the Web and that there’s always going to be a need to straddle different technologies (and, I have to admit, a lot of my trouble stems from the fact that I’m a nerd who wants to do advanced nerd stuff who also never learned to code.) But I’d still love to be able to run and host my two newsletters from within one platform, without having to pay for two separate instances. As long as I am fantasising, I’d like to be able to do the same with my webcomic, and why not my online store as well? It’d be fantastic to draft a post for the Cynic’s Guide, knowing it was going to appear on the correct domain name, be sent out to the right email subscribers, and then upload a comic that also appears in the right spot and *doesn’t* get sent out to a bunch of subscribers. Then upload a new artwork to the shop and have *that* appear in the right place, because why not. And of course all this stuff has to play nice on the emerging indieweb: there needs to be webmentions and social web / Fediverse stuff included from the get-go. Oh, and microblogging, because I want to lean into things that keep me creating, rather than consuming. The ratio of consumption to creation has been wildly out of whack for the last 20 years and I’m slowly moving the needle in the right direction, which is of course what the Cynic’s Guide is all about, fundamentally.

    So. Am I dreaming? Can I do what I want with some kind of mongrel WordPress/WooCommerce implementation or do I need to go underground for a few years, learn to code, and build the Temple OS of mad web service convergence that suits my own, highly idiosyncratic needs?

    Let me know what you think: I need to understand if I’m just being crazy, and if so, how much.

    As a reward for reading that rant, here is my cat.

  • Just giving this little Micro.blog thing a hoon. To celebrate, a picture of the view from my office. It’s like working in a forest.

  • I don’t like the drugs, but

    I don’t like the drugs, but

    In your most distant memories, you remember colouring in.

    You remember being good at it, and being praised for being good.

    But when you slip and colour outside the lines, you howl and hide like a beaten dog, and no-one can tell you why.

    You learn to read, although “learn” is probably putting it too strongly. Reading happens to you the same way as breathing.

    Reading is the best thing that is or ever will be. You can no longer hear the clamour of the confusing world, or feel the tension that seems to surge from your bones, that makes you sit bolt upright, vibrating, sensitive to the slightest touch or sound.

    Reading makes it quiet. In books, things make sense. The world goes away.

    The tics start when you’re about eight. They are annoyingly literal, like the ticking of a clock; a sound you make in your throat over and over and can’t stop.

    They change form. Soon you are 11, and everything you say must be said again, like an echo. You do this sotto voce, lest people think you’re weird.

    The other kids do hear it sometimes. They thought you were weird already, and this doesn’t help.

    When you’re older, you’ll look this up on a whim, and find out it is called palilalia.

    At the time, you thought it was merely demons.

    You start finding it very hard to do things.

    You are bright, everyone you talk to says so, and you’ve been moved up a year and are taking extra subjects in school.

    But on certain tasks – mainly maths, but others too – genuine attempts to work fly dead into a towering, blank wall of mental impossibility.

    Because you are so bright (everyone says so) it is assumed that this is a phase.

    If so, it is a long one.

    It continues until your late thirties, and then? It carries on, only worse.

    Your childhood saviour, reading, has become a monster. Unfortunately, society has thought to gift you an infinitely long and perpetually interesting book. You wake up each day full of ideas, and a portion of the ability required to achieve at least some of your ambitions, only to have all this potential energy subsumed by reading bullshit on the internet. Every day. Every day!

    It feels like one of those ironic curses, the kind bestowed by a malevolent genie, where the wish is thwarted even as it’s granted.

    Each missed opportunity, every failure, every slight imperfection compounds, compresses the shame you feel down into a savage knot of guilt that builds, layer on layer, like a pearl made of pure shit. It sits in your gut, causes nausea, sends you running blindly from even the implication of obligation.

    It’s not just hard to do the things you need to do; it’s all but impossible to do the things you want to do.

    Can you talk about this, lighten the burden? You can not. If anyone knew how useless you really were, how flighty, how distracted, how lazy, you’d never work again.

    Complicating this obvious fact is the competing reality that you have had a number of jobs that people seemed to think you were good enough at to give you money.

    This dissonance does not help. Every day, you endure the static screech of an endless primal scream, black noise, the cosmic background radiation of your brain.

    You can’t let it out. People would look at you funny.

    You do overhear things sometimes. “Couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.” Someone lets something slip. “Can’t do the simplest thing.” A backhanded compliment is reduced to a mere backhander. “You might be always late, but at least you’re always there.” These accumulate and fossilise in the tar-pit of your mind. They are who you are; an agglomeration of failures and frustrations so intense they surface when you’re trying to vacuum the floor and this fucking piece of lint just won’t fucking move.

    The vacuum cleaner is noisy and makes it possible to yell without being overheard, so you do.

    Of course you have ADHD. That’s not special. According to the latest of many ADHD books you’ve read, anywhere from 5 to 25 percent of people may have ADHD. That’s not a disorder, that’s an overly-generous pie slice. For context, that would mean here are three times as many people with ADHD as there are Libras – and there are around 680 million Libras.

    Horrible.

    For many, finding out they have ADHD is hugely helpful. For you, it doesn’t feel that way.

    You get your diagnosis over Skype from an archetypical psychiatrist; an ineffable reduced-affect Martian giving the overwhelming impression that any given patient is just one of many items on a rapidly-growing list. He sighs his way through the checklist you filled in – ADHD is diagnosed from a checklist, and this is one of many reasons it is so easy to diagnose oneself with, as it is about as accessible and mentally taxing as a Facebook quiz – and gives you a $1000 verdict; combined-type ADHD, with elements of autism spectrum disorder.

    You think: this does explain a lot.

    The vicious anxiety. The constant distractability, unless you’re reading. Also the fact you could read from age 3 – quite weird, in hindsight, although of course to you it was normal. The crippling perfectionism. The tics. The absurd procrastination. The way you learned, in school, how to perform social norms like you were learning from a script; and it explains too your puzzlement at how students reacted to your mistakes and line-flubs when you said the wrong thing at the wrong time (which was always very confusing, because often the thing you were laughed at for doing was something that someone else had been rewarded for just a week or so ago). The way people looked at you expectantly, like a malfunctioning robot; wondering what new runtime error you were about to throw.

    Now, as an adult, with a series of masks so embedded you can’t tell where they stop and flesh begins, you learn that some of this agony might have been optional.

    You think: hooray, I guess?

    Social media, which of course was the source of the first inkling you might have ADHD, is unhelpful. Once the algorithms learn that you are ADHD-curious, your feeds become wall-to-wall relatability. If 25 percent of the world’s population has ADHD, about half of them seem to have taken up as ADHD influencers. There is an enormous industry dedicated to selling coaching and courses and one-weird-tricks and likes and subscribes, all through the lens of, at long last, being seen.

    At first being seen feels great. But soon enough, it starts to feel more like being watched. According to influencers, ADHD is the ur-condition, the cause and effect of everything in your life. Overly talkative sometimes? ADHD. Feel strongly about genocide? ADHD. Forgotten to do the dishes? ADHD. The influencers, hungry for the next viral hit, have strip-mined the human condition down to bedrock. The relatable becomes hateful, because there are no solutions in sight: just an endless parade of half-working temporary life-hacks that link to purchasable courses.

    Everything is ADHD.

    And when everything is, nothing is. Maybe ADHD, despite mountains of evidence, doesn’t exist at all. Or maybe you just don’t have it. There’s nothing different that explains you, apart from being a screw-up.

    And even if you do have ADHD, this condition is permanent. You’re stuck with it. If you want a picture of the future, imagine shooting yourself in the foot — forever. The solution is, or appears to be, accepting there is no solution.

    Except for one thing.

    You don’t like the idea of taking amphetamines every day of the rest of your life, but it’s got to be better than this.

    The generic ADHD medication Rubifen, Medsafe says,

    is a central nervous system stimulant. It is thought to work by regulating specific chemicals in the brain that affect behaviour. It helps to focus attention, shut out distraction and allows impulsive people to think before they act.

    The first few days on medication are astonishing. Everything snaps into focus. The cloud of amorphous haze in your head coheres into a single bright beam. Tasks that once had impossible weight become somehow airy. Things that have lain undone for days, months, years, slowly accumulating the slow gravity of guilt, get done. You message a friend:

    “Is this what being normal is like?”

    In a follow-up telehealth appointment, you tell your Martian shrink that it’s going great and you feel like you’re cured, and his face flickers momentarily like the ghost of emotion past has walked over his grave. Or it’s a video-call glitch.

    After a time, you notice some things. Your jaw has a tendency to clench. Headaches set up evening and occasional matinee showings. Your mouth is dry. You find it hard to write, literally; your fingers freeze up on the keyboard and it is difficult to move them to the correct places. Sleep is erratic. You lose weight, without trying or particularly wanting to. Sometimes the anxiety is quelled; sometimes it seems to surge more than ever, like hot wires laid under the skin.

    You notice, to your horror, that some of the tics seem to be trying to come back.

    Slowly old habits manifest, like water released from a dam, determined to return to its old path. If you manage to wrestle the laser light of attention on to the right task, you might be all right. But if you should allow it to illuminate the endless well of shiny internet objects, God help you.

    Eventually you are back where you started, but this time with side effects.

    You don’t like the drugs, but it would seem the drugs can’t even give you the common courtesy of liking you back.

    So you quit.

    Some time later, in despair, hoping to plaster over the cracks in your facade that threaten to become structural, you start again.

    The process repeats, and you quit once more.

    Later again, when the weight of the big and small things you swore – and needless to say, failed – to do consistently seems ready to crush you, you start over.

    You look at the capital letters on the box of Rubifen, the ones that say DO NOT STOP TAKING THIS MEDICATION.

    This time, you decide, you’ll make quitting part of the plan. One or two days on, some days off. Apparently some people with ADHD find this works for them.

    You hope it works for you.

    You are here ⬇️

    ‼️
    A postscript I should definitely have put in before hitting send.
    Hopefully you already know this, but if not: only take medication as prescribed by your doctor or psychiatrist. Abruptly quitting long-term prescribed medications, especially those that work on your brain, can have serious and dangerous side effects. If you are considering a change of medication for any reason, talk to your doctor first (which is what whoever the guy is in the story above really did do, honestly.)
  • Is this the standard of political journalism we deserve?

    Is this the standard of political journalism we deserve?

    I am tired, and very cranky.

    Audrey Young from the Herald has put out a “Cabinet Report Card” and it’s hard to scrape together adjectives for just how catastrophically useless it is.

    Unfortunately, the following passage doesn’t appear until part-way through the article, which might have saved readers from being exposed to several paragraphs of demented, optics-pilled prose about the Prime Minister:

    Today’s ratings are out of 10 and reflect a judgment about how effective ministers have been in delivering the Government’s policy, how effective they have been in their public dealings and in leadership roles where relevant. The ratings are not about the merits of policy.

    Let’s look at that last sentence again.

    “The ratings are not about the merits of policy.”

    That’s it, Audrey! That’s the problem! At the risk of editorialising, this is precisely why audiences despise and mistrust political media. They have one job – explaining the merits of policy, as implemented by politicians – and they don’t do it! Instead they present either hagiographies or acidic tongue-lashings of politicians that are utterly subjective and deliver zero value to readers. The “ratings” are based entirely on Young’s (Voyager Political Journalist of the Year 2023) extremely Tory-friendly reading of political tea-leaves and how her computer keyboard (and, possibly, AI assistant) feels at any given point in time. I’d call it valueless, uninformative slush, but for the fact it says so much about political media’s priorities. Their fetishisation of the absurd corporate buzzword “delivery” is exactly like praising Courier Post for delivering parcels on time, while failing to mention that the only way they’ve achieved this miracle is by replacing people’s actual packages with bag after bag of steaming dogshit. This kind of article cares not at all for facts; only for feelings, for optics, for the vibe.

    That meme with a goose chasing a dude in a puffer jacket. The goose says "but *what* specifically are they delivering? What are they delivering, mother'ucka?"
    Including a Flight of the Conchords reference because I am an old man.

    Here is how she chooses to talk about Minister for Transport, Simeon Brown.

    Has a dry but important set of portfolios and is turning out to be the Government’s most populist minister – road cones, potholes, motorways and speed limits. Has also overseen the repeal of Three Waters and reintroduction of local referenda on Maori wards on councils. Highly combative in the House. Effective communicator outside it.

    The repeal of Three Waters, as reported by Young’s own newspaper, has caused Council rates for many New Zealanders to skyrocket. The repeal of Maori wards is the worst kind of populism; short-sighted and counter-productive for government-Maori relations, and it was accomplished under urgency, with almost no opportunity for scrutiny. And, according to experts, the abolition of speed limits and measures like traffic calming around schools will literally kill people.

    For raising rates, increasing racial tension, and bearing ultimate responsibility for a bunch of preventable deaths, Audrey Young gives Simeon Brown a 9 out of 10. Because he’s “populist” and “highly combative” and an “effective communicator.”

    She’s awarding him points for being great at being terrible.

    We deserve – and need – so much better from political media.

    The last thing I wrote here was an agonised obituary for mainstream media, and what horrors might replace it, but this sort of article is irredeemable. The perpetuation of the lie that politics occurs in some kind of consequence-free void is inexcusable. If this kind of journalism dies, we’ll all be better off.

    Anyway, I am considerably more tired and crankier having finished writing that, so I thought I’d finish by how it might look if Audrey Young was writing in Italy at some point from 1922 through 1943. Because we deserve a laugh, even if it’s a bitter one.

    Fascisti report card: the ministers thriving and those just surviving

    Benito Mussolini, whose policies occurred in a kind of Platonic void and had no real-world effects whatsoever.

    Benito Mussolini today is not the same Benito Mussolini of last year.

    You might think this is just an artifact of the passage of time or biological reality and thus too unimportant to mention, but trite cliches are the only way to get a column to length in time for publication.

    So yeah, he’s not the same guy.

    Delegates to the National Fascist Party conference in South Rome this weekend will see that.

    He has the same energy but he is tougher, busier and a little more impatient. One imagines that his genitals have enlarged, but in a tasteful manner, like those on statues from the glorious Imperial past.

    He has been battle-hardened by a successful March on Rome and the realities of Government.

    He developed a large Coalition agreement with the prickliest operators in politics, the Nationalists, Liberals, and the Catholics of the People’s Party. Such leader, very wow.

    Mussolini dealt with Giacomo Matteotti and his son-in-law Ciano more swiftly and ruthlessly than his mentor, the “smiling assassinated” Giovanni Gentile.

    Mussolini himself, while having accomplished a lot to become Il Duce, has room for improvement.

    He talks up his heroic realism but is often defensive or negative.

    He has been at his most positive on the numerous international missions he has led to promote spazio vitale, especially in Ethiopia.

    But he is not yet as politically dexterous as he needs to be. In press conferences and interviews, he often relies on bluster or sloganeering which makes him sound more robotic than real.

    However, the Prime Minister seems confident that his strong relationship with the Reich, and his new venture in Greece, will bring a brighter future for Italy – and for this he rates 8 out of 10.

  • The Cynic’s Guide to Sobriety

    The Cynic’s Guide to Sobriety

    I’ve been away plying my trade and visiting long-lost kin among the endless howling voids of Australia’s Gold Coast, and have only just returned to civilisation. Now, I collect my scattered wits, trying and failing to wrestle some cogent sentences out of the black matter of my brain. Luckily, my old mate JJW is here. The JJW stands for Jackson, James, Wood. He’s a good sort, Wood. After 11 years of sobriety in a society that looks aghast at mere moderation, he has some reckons, and he asked if I’d like to publish his latest as a guest piece.

    Of course, I did. Take it away, JJ(W).

    It’s been a hot minute since I last wrote about alcohol. Surprisingly, the thought of problem solving with booze hasn’t come up in the rolodex my lizard-brain inner-monologue flips through when trying to prompt a response from sober JJW. Spoilers: alcohol is not good at solving problems.

    Even when the thought does pop up, I have 11½ years of sobriety to ponder on and help me navigate some of the truly terrible spanners the universe has thrown into my life over recent years.

    Because of this long running streak of sobriety — surpassing philately as the longest thing I have ever stuck with — people often ask me something like: got any tips on cutting back the booze / how do I stop drinking alcohol?

    A digital collage centred around an illustration of a sober person sitting at table looking sad as people are drinking heavily.

    Spoilers: alcohol is not a good way to solve problems.

    Most recently, a friend — who we’ll call Shitkicker McGee — reached out seeking advice:

    Can you offer any guidance on how to reduce/stop drinking? It’s something I would like to do, but I’m not quite sure where to start. I would really appreciate any thoughts that you can share!

    Because I am currently in a very productive mood where writing is helping me get into states of flow and process aforementioned spanners, I thought I would tap out my reckons for Shitkicker and share them with you all in the hope it helps you reconsider your relationship with alcohol and/or support you in your sober journey.

    To get into the mindset, I went back and read some of the things I wrote in very early sobriety. You can go read them here on The Wireless and Ours and listen to a segment on RNZ where I talked about alcohol and other drugs.

    I stand by everything I wrote/said back then. My only thought, with 10 years hindsight, is I should have given the people who got married a heads up about using the dude from their wedding as an example. Sorry team, it was a lovely wedding, and although I haven’t seen you in years, I still think you’re both aces.

    (No sorries to the fuckwit who accosted me about not drinking and then passed out in the shower though. Fuck you.)

    One passage from this piece stuck with me:

    I’m not quite sure why I need to have a drink in my hand to make others feel comfortable. But I am comfortable with taking the time to explain why.

    So in that spirit, here are

    JJW’s top ten tips for turning tenacious tipples to teetotaling tranquillity

    1. Sobriety ain’t for everyone

    Stopping alcohol is hard. In the west, we live in an ‘alcogenic society’. Booze is everywhere. It is brewed into our shared culture, from birth to death we celebrate and commiserate with alcohol. We medicate and mediate with it, it’s glorified and demonised. And, because of capitalism, there are very few places / times when alcohol isn’t on sale or straight up being offered to you. So being realistic about your own ability to stop is first and foremost.

    For me, it was a simple decision. Alcohol made it easy for my brain to be like: hey, throw that spanner into this good thing, really wedge the fucker in there. But many people who I chat with try sobriety, and discover they don’t have a problem like I did. Which is great for them. They were just going through a tough patch, but the breather from booze helped them reevaluate and reconsider.

    2. Make a commitment to yourself / loved ones / close friends

    Peer pressure can be good. Making a commitment to yourself is a great place to start. But I don’t think I could have sustained sobriety for so long without the love and support of my family and friends. When I first told people I had stopped drinking, they were like: finally, lol. Thanks team.

    But seriously, from that day forward they supported me to make and maintain this very positive decision — remembering and nurturing sobriety and generally being kinder mental health wise. You can’t lose because if people react with anything other than support I would suggest they might not be that good of a friend.

    3. Remember: one drink isn’t the end of the world

    As per above, there ain’t no getting away from alcohol. So if you do happen to find yourself halfway through a boozy beverage, don’t sweat it. Just like having one Tim Tam doesn’t mean you have to consume the whole packet, one drink is unlikely to harm you too much. It’s excess which is the problem.

    The trick is to be mindful and kind to yourself. Which is fucking hard, especially if you’re experiencing a patch of bad mental health. But if you do happen to have a realisation earlier in the evening — before things get out of hand — you do have some agency to switch to the waters, leave the party, or whatever it is you need to do to look after yourself.

    Also, if it does turn into a bender: FUCK IT. Start again tomorrow.

    A digital collage of lots of different postage stamps surrounding JJW drinking a milkshake.
    Philately and milkshakes.

    4. Be upfront with people that you’re not drinking and be honest with them if they ask why

    There is no point making excuses or trying to hide it. You miss the opportunity to have a conversation and reinforce why you’re not drinking and/or may never drink again. Obviously this is situation specific, I don’t tend to unload on waiters in busy restaurants by yelling: WHY ARE YOU OFFERING A PERSON IN RECOVERY A GOD DAMN DRINK, YOU SICK FUCK. I just say no thank you, and move on. As per point 2 above, if someone doesn’t support you, fuck ‘em. Go straight to point 5, do not pass go, and …

    5. Don’t be afraid to be rude

    I am empowering you to stand up for yourself and be strong in the face of people who don’t support you. I give you permission to treat anyone who actively encourages you to drink with extreme hostility. Life’s too short to fuck around with knob heads like ol’ mate who ended up in the shower covered in his own vomit. Perhaps their brains are so addled by alcohol they cannot conceive of a world where people don’t rely on it.

    As much as I complain about people who do not get it, most people do. Coming from New Zealand, and living in Australia, the chances are everyone you know has a story of a friend or relative whose life has gone awry because of alcohol.

    6. Find decent alcohol-free drinks

    Things have gotten better in the sober-safe beverage market in the ten years since I wrote the piece in The Wireless. There are so many great alcohol-free beers and wines available now! You don’t have to just drink coke, orange juice and/or water. There are great kombuchas, shrubs, seltzers, and other low sugar soft drinks too. At my sister-in-law’s wedding they specifically bought a case of non-alcoholic bubbly, and people just started drinking it because it was delicious. At my brother-in-law’s wedding earlier this year they had two alcohol-free beers available and heaps of people were smashing them. Happy days!

    7. Get out of your head (in a good way)

    One of the biggest things I have learnt over the past wee while, and this applies to all things in life, is pretty much no one cares about anything not directly affecting them. Ergo, hardly anyone will notice you’re not drinking and even fewer will actually care. It’s very self indulgent to assume people are so fixated about you they pay attention to what you’re drinking. Get over yourself, Shitkicker!

    Also don’t get out of your head in a different way. Changing from alcohol to cannabis — or anything else — probably ain’t going to make you happier either. As an aside, I’ve also noticed many people in recovery rely on sugar. The plus side of sugar is you’re not likely to piss yourself while dancing on a table at your work Christmas party. Sugar is still pretty unhealthy though, so proceed with caution.

    8. There is no tip 8

    But here is a picture of a Kōkako eating a pūriri flower.

    A Kōkako eating a pūriri flower.
    by Stefan Marks on Flickr and used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

    9. Track the data

    I have a sober days counting app on my phone. As of today it’s at 4232. That’s a whole heap of days. Whenever lizard-brain says “mmmmm you could have a bottle of champs, yeah boiiiii” I flick it open and check my run streak. Pretty good incentive to stay on the wagon.

    I also regularly use an app called How We Feel which is made by psychologists to help people identify and keep track of, you guessed it, how they feel. Bonus is it helps your mental health in general. No lizard brain, I don’t want to snatch that nice police officer’s pistol. Not today. I will, however, open up How We Feel and log I am feeling jittery.

    Speaking of logging. Log your exercise in whatever fitness app you use. Log the books you’ve read wherever you do that these days (don’t use GoodReads). Or the movies you’ve watched in Letterboxd. Chat about your latest stamp finds with other philatelists on Canadian Stamp News.

    Keep a diary. I now write a diary every day. I record my general mood for the day and specifically three good things / something I am grateful for. I take a moment to reflect, gain perspective, and breathe through the big feels. And fuck, it helps.

    By not having hangovers and getting decent sleep, it is surprising how much extra time you can carve out in your life. These are all amazing wonderful things. Make sure you remind yourself about them because our brains are wired to look for negativity. Celebrate cool shit and, if you’re feeling like you might have a bender, go remind yourself hey: life is actually kinda okay sometimes.

    10. Get help (if you need it)

    Remember, these are just the opinions of some dude who yells his unhinged thoughts into the ether of The Internet. It’s definitely not medical advice, and if you’re seriously struggling (with drinking, mental health, addiction, or similar) there are heaps of services available, online, in-person, professional, or group.

    I’ve been seeing the same psychologist for +7 years now and we’ve hit a good rhythm. I take my meds. I do exercise. I let them help me reframe my thinking, and use all the psychological tools available. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is something you can kinda just do on your own once you understand the basics. I don’t think I really understood CBT — despite seeing psychologists on/off since I was 17 — until Blindboy explained it in his podcast. I can’t remember the exact episodes, but it was quite early on. He puts it in easily understandable words while embracing you in the warmth of his podcast hug.

    I don’t go to 12 Step meetings anymore, but they were (vaguely) helpful in early recovery/sobriety for something to do which wasn’t drinking. Plus, 12 Step forces you to make amends to people who you might’ve hurt while drinking/drugging. So, if I didn’t do it at the time when I was working the steps, please accept this heartfelt blanket apology for being a see you next tuesday. Twelve Step isn’t particularly evidence based, and can be incredibly toxic, and (as per point 1) sobriety ain’t for everyone. Hence why I don’t particularly recommend it, but there is no harm trying it if you go into it knowing it’s not a panacea.

    What I would recommend are the loads of services/groups out there which can, and will, help. My favourite NZ-based one is Living Sober. Whatever you choose, just make sure it is evidence-based.

    You really can’t go past self care, being kind to yourself, exercise, being part of a community (I’ve selfishly built my own here, in this newsletter, and here in the real world), talk therapy, and eating healthy. Boring, yes. Effective, totally.

    An illustration of JJW sitting at a table looking bored as people pass out and spew from drinking.
    Illustration by Rhiannon Josland, originally for Ours.

    Thanks, Shitkicker for the prompt. I hope this helps. Always here to talk if you need it and that extends to anyone out there who is reading this. Hit me up by replying to this email and/or smashing this button.

    Clicking this button will subscribe you to JJW Unhinged. Do it!

    Some final thoughts

    Does all this make me a wowser? Probably. By any and all measures alcohol creates significantly more harm than benefits. Should we ban it? No. But we really need to change the playing field in terms of following public health advice around what evidence-based changes can be made to reduce and prevent harm.

    We also need to better fund treatment and addiction services to help people. Drinking (or drugging) is not really the problem — plenty of people hold down jobs while getting on the beers (and/or nose beers). The anti-social aspect of addiction is a symptom of a deeper malaise in our societies. Fix economic inequality, build strong communities, get people active, smash capitalism, yadda yadda yadda. You know how it goes. But for now, perhaps start by switching out your next beer for a non-alcoholic one.

    Cheers to you!

    Stay safe, stay sane

    <3

    JJW

    Josh here again.

    Imagine, for a moment, your most incorrigible, pernicious habit. Imagine that it has a powerful psychological and physiological hold on you. Imagine that it is tacitly or overtly encouraged by practically all of society; an endless sea you have no choice but to swim in.

    Imagine stopping.

    Imagine staying stopped, for any length of time. A month. A year. 10 years. More.

    And yet, you remain sober.

    That’s what many recovered and recovering alcoholics manage, and they have all my admiration. Everyone has something – often small, sometimes not – that they’d like to stop or start doing consistently. Those who achieve sobriety after alcoholism have achieved this, over much higher stakes than many of us will ever face. Nothing impresses me more.

    Well done, JJW old mate. I’m proud to be your friend.

    Warning: this will expose you to JJW Unhinged. Click at your own risk.
  • Introducing the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast

    Introducing the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast

    I thought it’d be fun and perhaps even convenient to record some of the posts here as a kind of mini-podcast. So here is the first episode – a recording of last week’s post, Map of the Problematic. (I’ve also added this audio to the original post.)

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    It seems to be a rule in the writing business that the stuff you like the most is what audiences like the least. I really enjoyed Map of the Problematic, but a somewhat surprising number of subscribers didn’t! While it’s easy to assume that the unsubscribers were just those readers who are also into Andrew Huberman, I doubt that’s the case. I think it’s a bit of newsletter fatigue. God knows there are a lot of these things, with seemingly every made-redundant journalist starting one. I just want to reiterate that while a paid subscription is lovely and helps keep me in coffee, I want this newsletter to stay aggressively free. If a paid subscription causes you any kind of financial hardship, just stop paying (or, preferably, pay someone whose newsletter pays the bills, like Emily Writes. I love her Meditations posts).

    Meditations to get you through the week
    Who needs a rest? And it’s only Monday! How about some meditations to get you through the week? I hope at least one of these brings you a bit of joy and a bit of calm. You are a half blind seal bathing on the beach along the Whangaparāoa peninsula. You are large and round and perfect. Growing crowds watch you in awe. You listen as they coo and gasp in wonder at your fat belly. It is full of fish or whatever seals eat. You are happy. Your only job is to lie on this beach and bring joy to onlookers who will hold the memory of you through generations. In years to come, they will walk one day with a friend or a grandchild and point to the spot where you once bathed and say “I saw a fur seal here once”. And they will smile as they remember. And this is your sweet and lovely legacy.
    Emily Writes WeeklyEmily Writes

    The best way to pay me is to DM someone who has buyers remorse over purchasing a second-hand copy of 12 Rules for Life and getting them to subscribe, for free, to this newsletter.

    So here are some links to some stuff I found improved my self this week:

    Steal some writing time back

    Nadine Ann Hura is always worth reading, and she’s got a rather lovely observation on stealing time to write – in poem form!

    Steal back your life
    Time to write is always stolen
    So get used to thieving
    I think of all the words I’ve ever written furtively, fearfully, faithfully
    Hiding notes inside the spines of books penned by others
    Never daring to describe myself as a writer
    despite writing being the only thing I have ever done with any consistency
    and not once because someone gave me the time
    I am a thief, not a writer.

    I relate, heavily. Go subscribe (for free) to read the rest. Newsletter fatigue notwithstanding, you won’t regret having Nadine’s writing in your inbox.

    Time to Write is Always Stolen
    So get used to thieving
    Nadine Anne HuraN A Hura

    Bro, read this essay on bro culture, it’s sick bro

    After reading Map of the Problematic, a bunch of people recommended this essay by Patrick Wyman. I’d already seen it, but it was well worth the re-read.

    But this kind of Bro Culture is also intimately connected to the emergence of a new kind of American ethnonationalism, rooted in its peculiar conception of masculinity, its collection of lifestyle products, its worship of guns, and its aversion to self-reflection. Maybe you can just have the big dudes lifting stones without the drive to pardon Navy SEALs convicted of horrific war crimes; but then again, maybe the algorithms make them impossible to separate.

    Bro Culture, Fitness, Chivalry, and American Identity
    This is a foundational text of American Bro Culture: two large men shooting the shit about lifting weights, working in references from everything to guns to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to football in the process. The subject of the day is the squat, and whether one of the two participants – Echo – neglects this essential lift.
    Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, by Patrick WymanPatrick Wyman

    Life Coaching is (very often) a scam

    Caveats: I think that some kinds of coaching – ADHD coaching, business coaching, sports coaching, even life coaching, whatever that is – are not scams, or at least, they don’t have to be. I’ve got an article coming up on coaching stuff, but in the meantime, use this NYT gift link to gape in horror at how thoroughly some people have been fleeced by the deeply unethical aspect of an unregulated industry:

    After completing the program, Ms. Mullett was certified by the school and hoped to start coaching. But although she had initially been told that her certification would give her “everything I needed to make my first $100,000,” Ms. Mullett found herself short of clients and scrambling to make any income. The solution that she was offered? To spend more money on being coached.

    Is Reddit OK?

    A social experiment: Go to one of the self-improvement subreddits, like r/selfimprovement, sort the posts by controversial, and witness the absolute state of it.

    A question to r/selfimprovement: “Thoose of you who has been an avid music listener but has either stopped or quitted listening to music in a whole. What has the benefit been according to you and how long did it take you to adapt to not having music constantly playing in your ears”
    How is babby formed, but for self-improvement

    There’s been a huge increase in GPT spam to Reddit lately and the self-improvement subreddits have been hit hard. They’re full of posts that are just some spammer’s poorly-written AI summary of a self-help book studded with affiliate links, and are somehow escaping moderator attention. But sometimes you get something so impossibly odd that only a human could have written it.

    Too long for alt text but basically it's screenshot of a guy asking Reddit how to stop wanking.
    You learn something new every day. Today we learned about “ghost loads.”

    I just thought this was funny

    I don’t mean to dunk on this newsletter – I’m sure it’s good, and paid subscriptions help enable writers to do fun activities like “eat,” but I thought this was amusingly emblematic of the great Paywalling of Everything:

    Here’s what she had to say: this post is for paid subscribers.

    More Birmo wisdom

    If there comes a day when John Birmingham stops churning out quotable articles that boldly identify the self-improvement elephant in the room especially as it relates to writers, I’ll stop plugging him in my own newsletter – but today is not that day.

    The Blergh, whatever you want to call it, arises from a loss of meaning, a loss of any connection to what’s grounded and firm. For us, specifically, I think it’s triggered by the rootless, untethered feeling of floating around on an endless sea of digital shit. And you what isn’t gonna help with that? Some glowing, beady-eyed, ratbastard influencer yammering at you to get one per cent better every day.

    Failure is the point.
    We get sold a lot of shit in this crazy, go-go world of ours. Climate change is no biggie. Delicious carob animal snacks with half the calories but all the flavour. “People are looking at your LinkedIn profile, John!” But of all this dubious content, perhaps the most pernicious is the idea that we need to be one percent better every day.
    Alien SideboobJohn Birmingham

    Pilgrim’s progress

    Let’s take a break from pull-up updates. Look, self-improvement is all about doing things yourself, right? So what could be more self-improvementing than self-surgery?

    Here’s the story. I think I mentioned a while back that I’d picked up a splinter while gardening. “Splinter” doesn’t perhaps do it justice. It was a big bit of sharp stick that shot deep into the ball of my thumb, and when I pulled it out, it dropped off a friend. This splinter stayed in my thumb for two months, long after the entry wound had completely healed over. I had two ultrasounds to image the thing – one from a startlingly inept technician who tried doggedly to scan the wrong bit of my thumb and then snarled at me for daring to whistle in an attempt to take my mind off the whole ordeal – and I finally got surgery exactly one month ago today.

    Unfortunately, the surgeon missed the splinter. She had promised that if they couldn’t get it out on the first attempt the only recourse was to (I’m using her term) flay my thumb wide open. I didn’t feel like going through this, and I’d figured out I could kind of push the splinter towards the end of my thumb, as it seemed to have made a kind of tunnel for itself – like a water-slide, but with pus. So I sterilized one of my craft scalpels, made a small cut, and slowly pulled it out with tweezers. It’s now a great life regret that I didn’t take a video of the process, but I did get this pic.

    A picture of a splinter I pulled out of my thumb against my thumb, with the tools I used in the background.

    The splinter was pretty pristine given how long it had lived in my thumb. If anyone is looking for a variety of wood that can survive being carried around in their bodies for several months, I recommend whatever my hedges are made of. The moral of the story is obviously that if I ever need any kind of surgery in the future, I’m going to do it myself, and you should too.

    Pango

    You asked, the Cynic’s Guide to Kitten Pictures delivered. Here he is looking alternately fiendish and adorable while trying not to fall asleep.

    It's a gif of my tiny fluffy black kitten doing his best to look fierce while also trying not to fall asleep

    Expect regular Pango updates in future, and possibly podcasts of select posts too!

    Dopamine, now in song form

    Also, let me know what you thought of the Cynic’s Guide podcast! You may now type any words you choose in the comments.

    Comment maker
  • Map of the Problematic

    Map of the Problematic

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    Map of the Problematic – The Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement Podcast
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    A while back I set up a podcast to listen to while I mowed the lawns. It was ostensibly about weightlifting, by an outfit called Starting Strength, hosted by a bloke called Mark Rippetoe. I’d seen stuff by Starting Strength before – I’d used their YouTube videos to learn how to deadlift and squat when my bad form threatened to mutilate my spine – and when it came to novice lifting programmes they seemed to know what they were talking about. [1] I was looking forward to learning more about strength, and lifting, and sports science in general. I put on my headphones and got to work. [2]

    I was rounding a tricky bit out on the front verge by the fence, one of those bits where the grass grows out long from somewhere the mower can’t quite get to. My frustration at this was compounded by a growing sense of confusion as the Texan drawls on the weight-lifting podcast turned their talk, for some reason, to solar power.

    I wish I had examples of what I heard. Infuriatingly, I can’t find the recording anywhere in my various internet or app histories, which is sad, because it was very funny. The gist was that solar power doesn’t work. This perplexed me, because I have solar panels on my roof, and a battery next to my house. I can watch them work in real-time by turning the lights on. Of course, to give credit to Rippetoe and friends where probably none is due, he was talking about how solar power at scale doesn’t work. Which is also wrong, but for different reasons. This talk inevitably segued into general riffing on climate change, and how it was a myth (feat. manly guffaws). All this was, for reasons that remain mysterious, presented as a metaphor for weightlifting.

    I don’t know a lot about lifting. Nor do I know much about climate change, in the scheme of things; I’m not a climate scientist. But I know a hell of a lot more about climate change than those yahoos. It was howler after canard, bullshit piled on bullshit so deep that it stopped being offensive and became riotous. I had to stop the podcast because muttering “that’s not right,” “well that’s wrong,” and “what the fuck?” under my breath — punctuated with occasional disbelieving yelps of laughter — was starting to attract looks from passers-by.

    Mower parked for the moment, I did a bit more digging into Starting Strength’s online oeuvre. Their “how to lift” videos seemed excellent, and in aggregate, were about twenty minutes long. Time well spent. Their novice lifting programs seemed, to my untrained eye, fine. There’s plenty of stuff like interviews with strength coaches and athletes and the like, which I assume is also fine. The rest was dismaying. It was much less about strength and more a telling meander through the myriad pathologies of the modern American male mind. It’s a grab bag of conspiracist nonsense: there’s both climate denial (a recent episode features professional fossil fuel shill Alex Epstein opining about “the need for increased usage and accessibility of fossil fuels”) and Covid-denial (Naomi Wolf and other cultural dingleberries receive guest spots).

    So yeah. They’re lunatics.

    The implications are troubling. If I can’t trust Starting Strength’s ability to filter fact from fiction in their podcast, what am I meant to make of their fitness program? I don’t expect perfection, or anything close to it, from my sources of information. Nor do I require uniformity of opinion or values. But this stuff was so egregiously wrong it was difficult to look past it. I suppose the real question is: why do people so reliably assume that their expertise in one domain — let’s say, weightlifting — gives them the ability to comment on another, wildly different domain like climate science? [3]

    The easy explanation is that weightlifters are meatheads, but I don’t think that’s it. [4]

    In hindsight, the mug was a clue

    Let’s look at another telling example, someone who cannot be dismissed as a meathead. If you have spent any time at all in the online self-improvement space, you have run into Andrew Huberman. A scientist, a Stanford professor, a weightlifter and runner; chisel-jawed, muscle-bound, blue-eyed; this gleefully earnest podcaster and video-maker boasts subscribers in the millions. Huberman is — or at least appeared to be — one of those cases of nominative determinism so egregious that if he was a character in your draft novel or screenplay you’d get a strongly-worded email from an editor. “So this professor guy, he’s good at everything? And extremely good-looking? Runs marathons, lifts heavy weights? And you put “Uberman” right in his name? Yeah, I’m going to need to get you to revise that draft.” Huberman’s style is simple, and instantly identifiable: his Huberman Lab show consists of really long recordings, sometimes with guests, often without, always with a camera on. He doesn’t talk down to the audience, or at least, he affects not to; you feel like you’re an undergrad in an introductory university science class being enlightened via bewilderment. Huberman endorses free, science-based “protocols” for a wide variety of things — eating, sleeping, exercise, fertility — as well as a dizzying array of supplements, beginning with the podcast staple Athletic Greens and multiplying from there. In addition to the red flags raised by supplement-hucking, recent revelations have both asked and answered questions about Huberman’s character, as well as just how scientific many of his protocols and podcasts really are.

    In short, the “lab” part of “Huberman Lab” is at best a stretch and at worst a fiction; his supplement regimen is spurious, some of his claims are implausible, others are bunk, and he was, until recently — there’s no polite way to put this — boinking five different women. If the boinking had occurred in just one time and place I’d have no other comment apart from praising his stamina, but as it turns out, it was just boring old-fashioned non-consensual cheating. At least one of the women interviewed claims he gave her HPV; another says he was prone to outbursts of rage.

    None of these things speak well of Huberman’s character, and they’re opposite to his image as a very cool and together guy, but I’m almost equally bothered by the revelations that he strayed almost as far out of his lane as the Starting Strength guys. It doesn’t take much to start seeing this pattern repeat everywhere: well-meaning people begin opining on their area of expertise, which quickly grows to encompass everything. As well as sounding endless klaxons in my own head – I am swimming in the same sea with my little self-improvement newsletter – I’m struck by how difficult it is not just to produce accurate information but to consume it. How can we know what’s true or helpful?

    This is where I risk going wildly wrong myself, but here’s how I try to manage it. As is eternally the case, your mileage may vary.

    No gods, no heroes, no gurus

    If you’re looking for information, and a high-profile person is providing both helpful and unhelpful content, this is easier to parse if you haven’t been worshipping at the altar of a cult of personality. Hopefully, you can take whatever useful stuff they’ve produced without feeling that you must either publicly defend or defenestrate them. The same applies for me, in the unlikely event that anyone feels like putting me on a pedestal. I often worry that my occasional ability to make England word good will result in people taking me too seriously. Try not to. This will not do wonders for my following or reputation as a producer of “content,” as everyone in the space seems to thrive on delivering every word with the same total sense of self-assurance, but I think it very important that you take what I say with a nutritionally correct amount of salt. I try my best to get things right but I’m inevitably going to get stuff wrong. When I do, I’ll try to correct it after the fact.

    Domain expertise only

    This might the most helpful way to map around the problematic. Here is an example: Is it 1976, and is Richard Dawkins talking about evolutionary biology? Then you should probably listen. Is he talking about trans people on Twitter in the 2020s? Good news, he’s so far out of his domain that he may as well be a fish on the Moon. You can safely ignore his pronouncements on trans folk, and much else besides. Hooray!

    It doesn’t follow that expertise in one area can’t apply to others. And there are methods of inquiry that can throw up insights across multiple domains. Done properly, journalism is one of them. (If it wasn’t, I should probably stop writing this newsletter.) But if someone is being a dingbat in public then you’ve got a heuristic to hand: are they being a dingbat about their domain, or about something else? By way of example: Andrew Huberman is an ophthalmologist and a neuroscientist. In the event I find myself very interested in optic nerves, I will listen to him with reverence. The Starting Strength guys are very good at lifting weights. I’m happy to take their advice on my squat form, but I can safely leave their opinions on climate change in the trash where they belong.

    Don’t be Rick

    I’m an sometime fan of the show Rick and Morty, which is a reluctant admission because have you looked at that show’s fanbase? The premise, for anyone unfamiliar, is a kind of warped, multiversal Back to the Future in which Morty is a mostly inept teenage kid (and a bit of a piece of shit) and Rick is a autodidactic genius (and a complete piece of shit). The problem, as I see it, is that fans have not only taken “how to behave in real life” lessons from a cartoon, always a bad idea[5], but also that they’ve settled on being a know-it-all-asshole as a prerequisite to being an autodidactic genius. Needless to say, it’s not — or, at least, it doesn’t work that way around. There have been plenty of geniuses who were complete dicks in their personal lives, but their lesson should be that being an asshole is completely optional. Of course, being an asshole it doesn’t necessarily diminish domain expertise. I’ll happily accept drumming lessons from Ginger Baker or painting tips from Picasso, but I’m not going to take life advice from either.

    How much information do you really need?

    When you get interested in something, in self-improvement or any other field, it’s natural to want more information. But how much of it is necessary to what you want to achieve? I’m not telling any budding neurosurgeons to throw out their textbooks, please don’t do that, but in the self-improvement field a lot of information boils down to “do something quite simple very consistently for a long time.” Starting Strength teaches you how to squat, deadlift, bench, and press. If you are most people, this is much of what you need to know for the first stages of your lifting journey. Yes, one size doesn’t fit all, and I’m sure there are more optimal programs, but the fact remains that if someone who doesn’t lift starts to do so regularly and safely they’ll get stronger. [6] And that’s all the information a beginner needs!

    One might quibble this attitude when it comes to Andrew Huberman. His entire thing is providing the research and background that (sometimes!) backs up his protocols, and surely that’s enough reason to listen. But let’s look a little closer at the protocols themselves. They are often very simple, which is no bad thing. In fact, routines.club — a truly hideous website that appears to be almost entirely an artefact of AI built to SEO-huck the same supplements as Huberman — has conveniently summarised Huberman’s daily routines, illustrated with physiologically implausible AI illustrations.

    AI Huberman needs to start skipping leg day

    I’ll go one step further and deconstruct AI Huberman’s routine down to a bulleted list:

    • Wake up at 6 am
    • Drink 2 glasses of water + huck a supplement, also at 6 am
    • Yoga Nidra meditation, also somehow at 6 am
    • 6:45 am: sun exposure. I’m going to call this “going outside”
    • 7 am: “cold exposure.”
    • 7:30 am: workout
    • 10 am: coffee
    • 1 pm: breakfast(!)
    • 3 pm: more Yoga Nidra
    • 6:30 pm: cardio
    • 7 pm: food
    • 9:30 pm: dims lights for quiet time
    • 10:00 pm: reading
    • 10:30 pm: zzzz

    Apart from the intermittent fasting, there’s nothing particularly controversial there. It’s a well-ordered day, if a highly idealistic one (anyone with children, chores, or a normal job will be able to spot this instantly.) The one remaining Huberman oddity is his insistence on “delayed caffeine intake” to about 90 minutes after waking up to avoid a crash later in the day, which a recent literature review has all but debunked. There’s certainly nothing that requires listening to hours of podcasts. Speaking of info-dumps: I’m going to suggest that Huberman’s podcast-lectures are not actually that well-formatted for those with a casual interest in science. On multiple listens, his style starts to resemble a Gish Gallop, an unending cavalcade of information and citations in which it’s very difficult for either scientists or laypeople to distinguish the science from the supplement sales pitch. (This podcast is brought to you by Mathletic Greens, the only balanced nutritional supplement that supports and enhances your maths skills). So not only is some proportion of the information suspect, it’s surplus to requirements.

    In fact, over my long history of trying and failing to be consistent with anything self-improvement, I’ve come to suspect that all the extra information gets in the way. We labour under the delusion that more information — or information delivered in a slightly different package — is what we need, when what we really require is the ability to stop overthinking, simplify the more-than-adequate information we already have, and put it into consistent practice.

    If I ever figure that out, I’ll let you know.

    1. The weight-lifting program I (very imperfectly) use is essentially Casey Johnston’s LIFTOFF, which – as far as I can tell – shares a bit with Starting Strength, including some newbie-friendly tweaks. If all of that means nothing to you, don’t worry. I do recommend checking out Casey Johnston, though. She’s great. ↩︎

    2. Before anyone decides to point it out: You shouldn’t really use noise-cancelling headphones as earmuffs. You should use earmuffs. But my mower is electric, and sounds more like a content swarm of bees than the usual deafening four-stroke roar, so I’m sure it’s not doing me any harm. What? What’s that? Sorry, I think some kind of bell that never stops ringing is calling me. ↩︎

    3. Any neoliberal economists reading this can leave now, secure in the knowledge that your expertise is indeed applicable to every facet of life, as you’ve long suspected. ↩︎

    4. And yet there’s probably something to it. If I’d looked a bit closer at Mark Rippetoe’s YouTube content before embarking on his podcast I might have come to the meathead conclusion a bit sooner and avoided the whole debacle: his omnipresent desk ornaments include a toy monkey and an oversized novelty mug with tits. ↩︎

    5. When I was about eight I based an uncomfortably large part of my personality on Garfield comics. The autism is more and more obvious in retrospect. ↩︎

    6. You also have to eat enough food with adequate protein, but that’s another story that others are probably better equipped to tell. ↩︎

  • Making The Link

    Making The Link

    While I’m working on a bigger piece, I figured I’d write up some self-improvement links I thought were worth collecting. I haven’t done this before so I’m not sure if it’s a good idea. Do you like this sort of thing? Do you want to submit a link for a future newsletter? Let me know in the comments.

    To the comment section!

    But you should probably read the newsletter first.

    Blue zones might not be real

    Heard of “blue zones?” You probably have: there are many articles, multiple books, TV docos, and a Netflix show. The idea is simple: that in areas where people mostly eat simple, reasonably nutritious food, walk around, and have a good sense of community, longevity follows. Good ol’ small-town country livin’, in other words. Now a (preprint) scientific paper throws the whole premise in doubt. It’s one of those excellent scientific reports that’s summed up neatly in the headline: “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud.” Yup: Blue Zones look to be either people forgetting how old they are, or “forgetting” how old they are.

    Caution is warranted. It’s a preprint, for one thing, and for another it would be a mistake to throw out the “eating well, enjoying community, and taking active transport” baby with the “extraordinary claims of longevity require extraordinary proof” bathwater. But if Occam’s Razor holds, as it so often does, it looks like we’ll be able to replace the blue zone concept with a bunch of actual old frauds.

    a screencap of a post that says "yeah they dropped a new love language. yeah a sixth one. its biting"

    Love languages definitely aren’t real

    As reported by New Zealand Geographic, my favourite magazine and one to which I wholly recommend subscribing, love languages are bunk. First described in 1992 by Baptist pastor Gary Chapman, the “five love languages” are familiar to self-help aficionados and anyone who’s ever fallen foul of a certain kind of social media algorithm: physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, and receiving gifts. So far, so good: that’s a list of things that nearly everyone likes. But it gets more complicated! Everybody supposedly has a primary and a secondary love language, and to love your partner efficiently, you must learn to speak their love language.

    An image of the cover of the book "The Five Love Languages" that is cheesy in the extreme and features all five love languages on the cover
    This book cover is peak 90s self-help design, and is one of the happy cases where you can get everything of value in the book from merely reading its cover.

    Not so, Impett et al argue, in an paper that manages to be delightfully tactful while destroying love languages with facts and logic:

    Despite the popularity of Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages, there is a paucity of empirical work on love languages, and collectively, it does not provide strong empirical support for the book’s three central assumptions that (a) each person has a preferred love language, (b) there are five love languages, and (c) couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferred language

    This is bound to annoy people whose love language is being annoyed when their favourite bit of bunkum gets munted by science. “But my love language is gifts, and I know it, because I really like getting gifts.” OK! I don’t really think it matters that much if people are using “love languages” as a shorthand or excuse for doing nice things for each other, just as I’m not overly fussed by people who take astrology slightly seriously. There’s plenty of potential harm for people who go too hard on it – for instance, anyone who says they’d “never date a Virgo” is dismissing one twelfth of the human population for no good reason, and anyone who takes love languages too seriously is potentially depriving themselves of, well, love. But using it to get more pressies or hugs? Sure, why not. Go for your life. The authors seem to get it:

    We offer an alternative metaphor that we believe more accurately reflects a large body of empirical research on relationships: Love is not akin to a language one needs to learn to speak but can be more appropriately understood as a balanced diet in which people need a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting love.

    Lovely. Go read the whole paper, it’s very accessible to laypeople and (to me and possibly no-one else) very funny in the its methodical, wholesale destruction of love languages.

    An image of a twitter meme with too much text for alt text :(
    This meme managed to bother me in every possible way, as on the one hand I feel like I could make more use of my talents if I could better market myself, or wanted to; but I simultaneously feel like I fall into the overconfident dude bracket. Thanks, Internet – as usual, you’ve been no help at all.

    Holy scientific method, Batman

    New research just dropped about how science can inspire spiritual feelings and it’s about goddamn time.

    This… suggests that spirituality of science reflects a unique attitude toward science that is not captured by belief or interest in science, but which is characterized by its unique associations with awe and spirituality.

    Sure, it’s just a survey, but I like that someone out there is looking at this stuff, as I’ve been fascinated by the idea of scientific spirituality since I read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and Pale Blue Dot. This, in particular, resonated:

    Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual… A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.

    That does sound nice! But don’t think about it too hard, or you might find yourself beset (as I am) by a blizzard of cognitive dissonance where I imagine scientists presenting a paper in an attempt to inspire a congregation to feel the numinous as a janky band plays milquetoast rock and people sing whilst clapping out of time or waving their arms vaguely. To make it worse, I have rewritten my favourite Pentecostal worship song, Our God Is An Awesome God, which – I can’t stress enough – is real. (Please click that link, if only for the ~2 minute drum intro.)
    Josh’s version:

    Auroras: a phenomenon
    They cause oxygen
    To emit red photons
    Oh, forbidden transition!

    I’m sorry about all that. Let’s forget science for a bit, and draw from the reliable well of hokum and witchcraft:

    How to use chickens to cure cat allergies

    DID YOU KNOW: if you have cat allergies, a cure is simple! First, acquire some chickens. Encourage your cat to make friends of the chickens, or at the very least, make sure their boundaries overlap significantly. Care well for the chickens and give them a comfortable home, so they produce eggs. Then, feed some of the eggs to your cat. Bam, your cat allergy is gone!

    Nonsense, right? Well, what if I told you that it’s all true?

    It is. There’s a protein in cat saliva called “Fel d1” that’s responsible for most feline allergies. Because cats groom themselves with their tongues, the protein gets everywhere the cat goes, and that’s why your allergic brother starts sneezing the moment he enters your house. Chickens will produce antibodies to allergens they encounter in their environment, and these antibodies are passed into the yolks of their eggs, for the good of their young. So if you make sure your cat and chickens share an environment, and feed these yolks to your cat, the chicken antibody will nix the cat allergen. This incredible paper has the details. I’ve been meaning to get chickens, and I think this clinches it. (On the other hand, bird flu.)

    Star Wars BB-8 toy, cat, and chicken on tiled-floor
    Photo by Daniel Tuttle / Unsplash

    Birmingham

    I’ve been a big fan of the Brisbane-based writer John Birmingham for a very long time, ever since I discovered his work via (this is telling on myself a lot) the long-defunct Australian “lad’s mag” Ralph. He’s probably best known as the author of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, which has long resonated with me, as someone who had his share of horrific flatmates and revolting flats.

    He’s still writing – he turns out enjoyably sweary, explosion-heavy sci-fi, and, like me, punishes himself by writing two newsletters despite being in the grip of the dead hand of procrastination. For Alien Side Boob, the best-named newsletter on Substack, he’s written two bangers. The first is on modern loneliness; he suggests that the title should have been “It’s The Phones, Stupid.”

    As I grow older, I find that I have to put more effort into reaching out. Because, of course, I do. The things that make friendship and connection so easy when we’re young, time and proximity, work against us as the years pile on. With children and careers, time becomes short. The friends we held close in our teens and twenties might well scatter to the far side of the world in their thirties and beyond. It seems as if we’ll never have that easy confluence of time and presence until, of course… we do. Because the seasons of work and parenthood also pass.

    Modern Loneliness
    I drove up the freeway to Ipswich early on Easter Sunday a couple of years ago. It must have been after the worst of COVID had receded, but it can’t have been too long after that weird, liminal disruption to all of our lives. The clock was running. I do remember that. I was making the hour or so round trip to pick up an old friend we were hosting for Easter lunch. I remember what we had. A slow-cooked shoulder of lamb with all of the trimmings, and chocolate, of course. Way too much chocolate. It was a very old-fashioned meal, top-shelf stodge, really. But this was an old-fashioned friendship, one that reached back over 50 years to the very first day of primary school.
    Alien SideboobJohn Birmingham

    It’s a timely read. I was in the grip of the usual low-grade Sadness that makes worthwhile work so hard and solipsistic scrolling so easy when I found the impetus to keep tapping away at this newsletter, and Birmingham’s most recent piece played a big part in that.

    Focusing on goals, like winning a race or a game—or writing a book, or losing weight, or fixing the sliding door to the guest room that the stupid dog knocked off the runners during a thunderstorm a couple of years ago and which has been hanging there mocking you and your lack of home handyman skills ever since—focusing on those end goals is only likely to remind you that you haven’t fixed the fucking door and you don’t even know how to start and you are a worthless excuse for a man so why even bother.

    Focussing on process, though? That’s the money shot.

    For me, these days, that means two things. Writing stuff and staying well.

    The process is “simple but hard,” which – in my growing experience of self-help stuff – bodes well.

    I turn up at my desk every day at about the same time. I make a list of three things I have to work on, but I understand I may not get to the third, and that’s fine. I quickly check in with a writing buddy on the other side of the world, a guy who’s usually just sitting down to his evening writing session as I begin my day. We tell each other what we’re writing. Then, I meditate for ten minutes. When that is done, I turn on my timer, set it to fifty minutes, and start to write. When the timer goes off, I tick a box on my three-item to-do list. I set another timer. Ten minutes. I do some stretches. I might lift some weights or hit the punching bag. The timer goes off, and it’s back to the desk for another fifty.

    I liked it so much that I’m copying it. A big chunk of this newsletter was written by the fairly simple expedient of setting a timer for 50 minutes and not doing anything else until it went “ding.” Of course, I’ve tried this sort of thing before, and it works, but I’ve often fallen off it because something fools me into thinking that I’ll find some other method that doesn’t require that first, gut-wrenching lurch into action. Accepting that sudden twist of fear has been the only thing that ever gets me doing anything worthwhile. It’s simple, but hard – and worth it.

    The full newsletter is here and well worth reading. Content warning: it contains mentions of weight loss, but mostly in a “forgetting about weight and focusing on getting strong” way that I think is a net positive.

    Trusting the process
    I wrote my first book, you know, that share house one, in five weeks, fuelled by four thousand dollars worth of hot chips, whisky and amphetamines. I had a goal. Get that sucker done before my 30th birthday. And one day before I fell backasswards out of my twenties I dropped the floppy disc with the finished manuscript on my publisher, Michael Duffy.
    Alien SideboobJohn Birmingham

    The products and services that support this newsletter

    Hey! You know how I think that self-improvement content should be free, and so I make my newsletter aggressively free? Unfortunately I keep suffering from this nagging need to feed my family and pay the mortgage, and to that end I think I should probably try to make my tiny art-merchandise business something more than an annual tax liability. To that end, here is a tea-towel, designed by me, and printed right here in New Zealand. Do buy it.

    A towel for teas, feat. Birds in Hats

    Do you have teas that need towelling? Are you after a piece of display art that folds away neatly in a drawer? Or do you merely wish that more tiny hats came with accompanying birds? Manifest those desires simultaneously in your own home by simply buying these tea-towels I made that are currently sitting in a box and not towelling anything.

    Yes, I have teas that need towelling.

    That’s it for today. I have high hopes that my new “do work instead of fucking around” method produces measurable results. I suppose we’ll find out together! To that end, here’s that large blue comment button again.

    Click this large blue button to comment

    Because you have been patient, and you’re worth it, here is Pango the kitten.

    Pango the black rescue kitten playing in a green, red, and orange toy dump truck
  • Going To Pot

    Going To Pot

    It’s not about marijuana, sorry. I’ll save that for another time.

    It’s about the garden.

    See, we have these potted plants on the deck. There’s herbs, some plants some friends gave us, a plant with a horrifically problematic name now known as a Thai lime, a non-Thai lime, a yellow flower whose name perpetually escapes me, and some pots of dirt.

    (The dirt contains bulbs, which may or may not flower at some point in the future.)

    Gerberas! That’s the name of the flower. When we got them, they looked lovely. We took good care of them, and the rest of the plants, and they rewarded us with many healthy flowers. For about two weeks. Then we started to forget to water them. Abruptly noticing the yellowing, drooping leaves and dying flowers, I’d drench the plant. This made things worse. Meanwhile, the plants kindly gifted by our friends live on the deck in the same temporary pots they arrived in. I’ve been meaning to put them in the garden for six months. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been possible because for the last 18 months or so the garden has been an impenetrable jungle. I’m barely exaggerating: I recently bought a machete to help deal with it.

    In my defence, the yard is both large and challenging. When we bought the house it had a well-kept vegetable garden, several fruit trees, and an expanse of hedges that wouldn’t look out of place in the gardens of Versailles. The former owners liked hedges so much that some of the large camellia hedges have smaller hedges, under which are lesser hedges made of a kind of hedge-grass. Under these, I suspect, will be moss hedges, and so on.

    Within a few months of moving in, the lawns approximated meadows, the vegetable garden was overrun, the fruit trees – perhaps aware of their fate – appeared to be trying desperately to leave the premises, and the hedges were performing the topiary equivalent of free-form jazz. The seedlings and bulbs and Little Gardens we planted got eaten by the weeds and an alarmingly large army of slugs and snails that, it turned out, lived in the hedges. I went out once after dark to pick some mint and found them crawling over the walls and plants. There were, once more without exaggerating, thousands of them. When my family visited from Australia and tried to make progress through a former gate, inhibited by a hedge comprised entirely of Triffids, I made embarrassed apologies for the state of the place. “Oh, no, it’s nice!” said my sister-in-law. “It’s like The Secret Garden.”

    As the yard grew wilder, so did any hope of improving it. The base state was so unkempt that I felt like I couldn’t tackle any one aspect of it, and so it fell further and further behind where I wanted it to be.

    Despite this, I’ve finally made some progress in the yard. It started by spending a few minutes of my breaks poking at the worst weed infestations, and escalated to swapping some of my Scrolling Time to spending early mornings outside, swatting at plants and digging things. In the same spirit of pointing out obvious things that motivates this newsletter and all of the self-help genre: it’s nice to get outside during the day, even if it’s raining.

    Things reached a new level when I realised I owned the house and could kill any hedge I wanted. I’ve been at it for a month or two now, even hiring a mulching machine that allowed me to feed the hedges to the rest of the garden. The ones that didn’t mulch I set on fire. When my dad came to stay a couple of weeks ago we blitzed the whole place with loppers, chainsaws and trimmers, letting the surviving hedges off with a warning.

    Sure, the garden had gone to pot, and it was a lot to deal with, but – once I found the right approach – all that was fixable. Now that the garden fundamentals are in place and I’ve finally caught up with all the overgrowth, it feels like we might have space for some of the other things we’ve been wanting to plant.

    There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

    It’s been a while since I last emailed and I am increasingly conscious of the gap. When I did a reader poll some time ago, people told me to take my time with newsletters, and I do, but consistency remains the elusive goal. It’s tricky to judge how much of my personal life to bring into what is mostly a personal development + comedy newsletter but it’s inevitably a lot. The fact is, our little family had more bereavement – my wife Louise’s much-loved nana Ella passed away, and a week later so did our much-adored tabby cat, Darcy. We like to think he went to keep her company.

    In events’ wake, we decided not to have any pets for a while.

    Last Monday, we were dropping Leo off at preschool when I spotted a tiny black shadow on the tight shoulder of the road. I pulled over and went back to check what it was, almost getting smoked by a car in the process.

    I found this.

    A small, black, slightly frightened-looking kitten.

    Of course, we’d decided not to have any more pets. Our resolve to stay the course lasted about two days. He’s since had a vet check-up (all’s well) and his name is Pango. As I write, my lap looks like this:

    A tiny black fluffy kitten on a lap with a laptop behind it.

    The cat distribution mechanism, something I was previously unaware of, has done its work. The cosmic ballet goes on. Oh! And speaking of the cosmic ballet:

    A few snaps I took of the aurora. In the first photo two meteors are visible in the bottom-right of the sky, by the treeline.

    When I heard about a solar storm predicted to cause aurora visible throughout the whole of New Zealand I steeled myself for disappointment. Surely it’d fizzle out, like the other times I’d chased aurora. But no. Somehow, we got Aurora Australis, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country. My brother-in-law and I drove out to his parents’ farm with my ancient, entry-level DSLR, and I took pictures I’ve been obsessing over ever since. Despite attempts, it’s impossible to do the aurora justice. While the colours are less intense than they appear in photos, no picture (or prose) can convey their sheer scale and majesty. The Lights are like a fracture in the sky, and it is easy to see why people have long attributed them to gods.

    If you’re looking for a self-improvement moral, I suppose it’s that nature is healing – whether it comes in the form of gardens, or cats, or vast swathes of radioactive debris flung across space by a pitiless star. From my own experience, I can think of nothing better to lift your spirits than witnessing a once-in-a-century cosmic event. Do try it.

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