Year: 2026

Comic Judgement

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

Out of boredom I posted my bookshelf to r/BookshelvesDetective on Reddit.

That’s a sub where you post an image of your (or someone else’s) bookshelf. Then people take guesses at who you are. Many posts are people trying to get insight on the person they are dating. Sometimes the guesses are weirdly specific, and correct.

So I took a few pics of my bookshelf (Claw has her own in her office), and created a burner reddit account with no identifiable information and gave it the post title “Who is he?”

The Comments (I didn’t respond to any of these on Reddit, but will here (italics) in the private darkness of my blog):

  • Nerd (kind).
  • To quote the poet Donald Gibb, “nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd.”
  • He’s a comic book nerd – Charlie Stross & Maus are green flags.

Yes yes, nerdy taste. I obviously enjoy sci-fi, fantasy and comic books. The spirit of these comments seems positive. Ie. He’s a harmless nerd and probably won’t be an abusive asshole if you date him.

• He’s also organized – my kids don’t have their books in any organized fashion – so he’s giving off mild collector vibes – I didn’t see a lot (or any) plastic sleeves – correction – went back, saw sleeves – but they also looked gently used so maybe I’m guessing living life and enjoying art is more important to him than possessing things – if that feeling extends to his romantic interests, another green flag ?

This was one of the more insightful comments. I do collect more for the utility and pleasure of reading. The ability to share my comics and books than any investment angle. I suppose that generally applies to life too. I have mercilessly culled so many Funko pops and other collectible detritus. I think about the paraphrased line, “The things we own, end up owning us”, all the time.

  • Blankets is also a green flag in my book
  • so is Once & Future
  • Bone is a green flag too. Watchmen is a beige flag but in absence of reds we should assume green.
  • He’s a total nerd but Blankets indicates a heart beneath

That last one made me feel warm. 🙂

• First thought was “this guy seems cool as hell.” Then I thought “I think this is my ex.”

I highly doubt it.

• I’m willing to bet he has a beard.

Yes.

  • Becky Chambers is awesome, so another green flag.
  • agreed, thought that was hot
  • Cool as hell

Redditors predictably love Becky Chambers. That Wayfarers series is good.

  • A comic lover. Though that Terry Goodkind novel is looking pretty sus.
  • I’m not familiar with Terry Goodkind, what’s wrong with him?
  • Daniel Greene did a really good video explaining why. It’s his argument, but I can’t summarise everything on a single reddit comment.
  • I’ll check it out, thanks
  • at the very least he only has one (and its the first). If he only could endure (or didnt finish) that one, i’d say that is positive
  • Yeah, he should probably ditch that one.
  • Both Terry’s on the shelf looking not great, everything else is pretty good though

I wasn’t aware Terry Goodkind was controversial. I read Wizard’s First Rule in high school after my Robert Jordan phase. I just kind of breezed through it, enjoyed it at the time, but didn’t care enough to continue. I remember it was pretty similar to the Wheel of Time, but with some kinky bondage/torture stuff near the end. Claw also makes fun of me for the Terry Brooks books. I only read the first one. Yes, I acknowledge it’s not high quality writing, but I don’t remember it being awful either. She told me that when we were first dating she loved my bookshelf, but Sword of Shannara was the one that made her raise an eyebrow.

  • I was going to say a man who should read Fables but no it’s right there.
  • You should get him Bone by Jeff Smith of his birthday is coming up.
  • It’s on the same shelf as fables

I have such a soft spot for Bone that one of the characters, Roque Ja, is the mascot of this blog, and is the basis for the main image I use for it.

• The lack of Brian K Vaughn is a red flag and you can tell him I said that.

I’ve read some of Y The Last Man on my kindle. Haven’t tackled Dune though.

  • Rich (literally some of those comics are old as heck) well diversified nerd
  • I could give him a list of comic recs a mile long. Seems chill.
  • I’ve never seen comics stored this way. This lad is an innovator.
  • Why aren’t his graphics novels organized by volume number?

My collection isn’t worth much, I collected mainly in the early to late nineties. Like sports cards, there were a lot of copies printed of most of my comics. The ones I have showing on the edge are the oldest ones.

• millennial nerdy guy with a dog.

Swing and a miss. Gen X with two cats.

  • It really bothers me that his The Walking Dead books are out of order
  • I would say overweight, not well groomed, bad clothes, smells weird. Has a beard but not a well kept one. Neck beard is on the table but not guaranteed. Very passionate about trivial things.

Oof! Well, I think my beard is very nicely groomed. I shave my neck, have defined edges. After a shower I put on moisturizer, then soften it up a 50:50 mix of Jojoba oil (which I know to pronounce with a soft J) and Argan oil. Then i finish it off with a high quality beard balm and special scissors to trim any stray hairs. Then I go about my day with a groomed, magnificent looking, salt and pepper beard. I’m in good shape and smell pleasant too. And if I cared so much about trivial things, then why are my Walking Dead Graphic Novels all out of order then? hmmmm? What a meanie.

  • Lethem and Vonnegut hanging out together under a couple Chambers novels screams green flag go to me. Nerdy dude. Probably some anxiety issues (why? No idea, just got that vibe.)
  • I’m guessing 40-45 white male with a middle to upper middle class job where he works with his brain a bit more than with his hands.

Yes, these were close. Anxiety is probably a little above the mean. Slightly older than that age range, career in Science.

So… yeah that was kind of fun. Kind of hurtful. I do now mostly just read on my kindle, so the bookshelf is a bit of a snapshot of a younger version of me. A little library shrine.

Debbie Downer

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

It’s March 2026 now. 11:31pm and it’s quiet in my house. Claw in bed, everything off save the little light in this dim ground floor office. Typing slowly and quietly. I’m not feeling particularly articulate right now, just restless in a low energy, low glutamate, sober, bored state. I took two sleeping pills, they should kick in pretty soon, if not already.

How are you doing? Do you feel that low level sense of dread that I do? It never used to be there. Not like this. It’s persistent dread for all of us. Doesn’t it feel like we’re all treading water, but our muscles are getting tired? How does this tension break? You can feel that the break is coming soon too right? Something awful feels imminent.

Is it going to be the AI bubble popping, coinciding with massive loss of wealth and employment? Financial hardship and pain across the board. Is WW3 going to be triggered? Is someone going to launch a nuke? Is it going to be an unforseen environment catastrophe? Or maybe a foreseen one, like rapidly crossing multiple climate change tipping points. Ecosystem collapse? Civil war? Aliens? Skynet?

Or is the quiet desperation just going to continue. A long steady, shitty decline where more people have less and less, and a lucky few disproportionately take more and more. No rebellion, no break, just slow descent into dictatorship, oligarchy and poverty for the masses.

Are benevolent AI robots our only hope?

Tom Bradycardia

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

Claw and I had to get a new doctor since we live in Canada now. We haven’t registered into the Canadian system yet, and still have health insurance in the USA. So last week, we crossed the border into northern Minnesota to get our first annual physical with a new primary care physician.

At the appointment, the nurse did the standard things. Blood pressure, heart rate, questionnaire. She had trouble with my heart rate, measuring it twice. Apparently it was low. When the doctor came in, she wanted to check my heart rate too. She confirmed it was low. She asked if I’ve ever had an EKG.

There’s never really been a time in my life where I’ve paid attention to my heart rate. Not to say I don’t find it interesting. On the contrary, a couple of my favourite scientific articles are about how well the total number of heart beats in a lifetime predict life expectancy across mammals of all sorts of size better than chronological age (Levine 1997).

Isn’t that a cool result? All these different mammals have very different heart rates (15 bpm for whale, 600 bpm for mouse) and life expectancies (40 years for whale, 2 years for mouse), yet all have roughly the same amount of total heartbeats throughout their lifetime. If you are a mammal, you get about 10 billion heart beats and that’s it. It’s a better predictor of how much life you get than chronological time. Human is a little bit of an outlier, likely due to modern medicine squeezing out another half-log of heartbeats, but it’s a real finding. Your life is measured in heartbeats, not time. When it comes to life expectancy, the heart is the undisputed MVP organ.

To use an expression I hate, this knowledge lives rent-free in my head. I’ve carried a small but persistent sense of dread that the things I have done throughout my career and as a student have shortened my life. The copious amounts of coffee, red bull and other stimulants I’ve leaned on to power up and manically charge through all obstacles and competition have spent way too many precious heart beats. Additionally, I’ve always had a hunch my heart was naturally too quick. That even without the stimulants, my heart would give out unnaturally early.

So what’s a normal resting rate for a human? For a healthy Brazilian male, (which I am not), it’s 64 beats per minute. (According to the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (Dantas, Milll et al. 2017)

So how low was my resting heart rate at the clinic?

43-48 bpm. I just looked down at the Apple watch I’m borrowing from Claw, 47 bpm as I write. That’s low. So low, the EKG function on the watch doesn’t even work.

I found another source stating that mean resting heart rates are 61.4 with a standard deviation of 3.7. If that’s true it looks like I’m something like 4 standard deviations away from the mean. That’s so much of an outlier, it’s hard to believe.

After talking with the doctor, some things in the past started to click. At an urgent care facility about 10 years ago, they gave me an EKG when I just had a muscle spasm. I thought they were just ruling out a heart attack, even though I was in my thirties at the time and decently healthy.

A few years ago, I had a kidney stone that was broken up with lithotripsy. Afterwards, because the pain was unbelievable, we went to an ER to verify everything was ok (it was, I was just in agony). Claw recently told me that after they hooked me up to the heart monitor, a crowd of nurses and medical personnel gathered around it just to observe and watch my slow heart rate (I was out of it, not paying attention and had no idea).

Since the appointment last week, I have been wearing Claw’s Apple watch because it has heart monitoring functions. The doctor suggested it to gather data. Just checked again. 44 bpm. Fuck me, I have an elephant heart.

So I have a very slow heart. the medical term for it is Bradycardia. In my case it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

There weren’t any clues. I truly had no idea. I’m still having a hard time accepting that it’s unusual. I eat like shit, sugar and junk food binges. I’m kind of athletic, but not really. I try to exercise my way out of a crap diet, living by the terrible motto, “If the fire burns hot enough, you can eat anything”. Even so, I’m definitely not a super athlete or anything. I don’t do any cardio, although I do workout 5 out of 7 days. Nothing nuts, just 30 minutes of not particularly strenuous weightlifting. When I weightlift, my heart has no problem powering up to over 160 bpm.

Anyways, I’m fascinated and weirdly proud of this. I have a lower bpm than an athlete half my age. In the dark part of my mind, I thought I had an abused rabbit heart that was fast wearing out. Instead I’m a sea turtle, very slowly creeping towards the finish line. So much of our life is the product of random uncontrollable circumstances. I’m thankful that of all things to be an extreme outlier on, this is it.

2026

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

It is dark. It is cold. And it is ass o’clock in the morning (I believe Webster’s defines ass o’clock as any time before 6am). It is also Saturday and I had a hankering to visit the old vanity blog and groggily peck out a life update. I was prompted to, after seeing this headline on boingboing.net: The internet isn’t just shortening your attention span — it’s dissolving your identity Whoa! My identity? Fuck me. It doesn’t even matter what’s in the article. You read a headline like that while lying in bed in the silent, ass o’clock darkness, how could I not go make a gremlin green Matcha tea, quietly creep to my office, blow the crystalline dust off this digital tome, and proclaim before my personal shrine, “I still have an identity! I can still generate my own words!”

So my last check-in was late November. To mark my first 2026 entry, let’s recall notable things since then.

We attended a December wedding in upstate NY. We definitely had a fun table at the reception. I danced, got drunk and had a great time. Later at the hotel in the wee hours (ass o’clock, if you will), I vomited four Guinness’s and the other lightly digested contents of my stomach onto the bathroom floor. We drove to Toronto and flew home the next day.

I bought a boat. Not a big fancy, expensive one. More like the Toyota Rav4 of boats. Ubiquitous, nice, boring but functional. A small 14 foot fishing boat and trailer. I am excited to take this out on little fishing adventures with friends and family. My dad was very excited after hearing I bought it. I’m hopeful we can have some good times on that boat. He is still in his early retirement years, and has been far too housebound. It’s tragic to live in Northwestern Ontario, and not enjoy the wildlife here. It’s one of the more unspoiled wild areas of the world.

Thanksgiving (in Illinois) and Christmas/New Year’s (in T.Bay) happened. Very smooth this year. It was as if all the ordinance had previously exploded, and we were just enjoying the rituals in a more low-key comfortable way. The Trump loving in-laws avoided all things political and Claw and I abided in a similar way. Xmas was also smaller and easy. We watched The Holdovers with my parents, aunt, and cousin. Perfect family Christmas movie (Likewise Bugonia was the perfect New Year’s Eve movie).

We’re currently in our yearly push to watch all the Oscar nominated films. Everything we’ve seen in the International category has been stellar. As like last year, there is more substance and quality in that category (and best Animated Film) than in the Best Picture category. I’m totally tempted to write a satisfying pretentious rant on this right now, but let’s keep some structure and discipline here. Life updates it is….

Did a bit of home improvement. We fleshed out house decorating with the purchase of a painting from my favourite sister-in-law. It’s a white tiger. We put it up in a very prominent location in our main room. I also put up a big beautiful owl painting (made by my talented, blood related, estranged, asshole sister). If I’m fair, it’s the best quality painting we have, but currently, I view her art kind of like something by Adolf Hitler or John Wayne Gacy – historically important, even if made by a monster. Complimenting these are some classic/classy water paintings made by my great grandmother. Did some other homeowner stuff. Replaced all the old thermostats, the sauna I had ordered 6 months ago finally was installed and wired up.

What else… after many months of abstinence, had a 10 day cannabis binge that I recently just came out of. Insomnia has always been my main THC withdrawal symptom. Probably has something to do with waking up at “ass” this morning.

I got into fancy tea and smoothies, Claw got into bread making. I’m still working on my chess game, still playing Magic the Gathering. Currently reading the Berserk manga on my Kindle. Started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 again, this time with hundreds of mods installed. Claw rolls her eyes at the mods that make the ladies of Faerûn more scantily clad and chesty, but I really appreciate that she lets me enjoy my video game cheesecake (even though she might tease me for it during breaks from reading or doing Duolingo on the couch).

Did some tinkering with offline AI models. There are open source LLMs and image generators that you can download and run locally if you have a good GPU. So I did that, and it was pretty fun to be able to generate text and images beyond the eyes of a corporate content nanny. Then the novelty wore off. There is an ickiness to AI. I was left with a disturbing foreboding feeling about the future. It’s hard to shake the notion that imperfect fleshy meat computers are an endangered species.

So, existential AI dread aside, really the state of the union is good. I can recognize that this is an enjoyable time of my life, maybe one of the best. I’m trying to maintain good physical health, find and enjoy the things that make me happy.