#<- up for interpretation but most likely pre-transition june

[return-of-the-vegetable]

i can't fit all the love i have for you guys into a neat little box, sorry. the wind carries my grief out of your coffins and into my every day life.

[juney-blues]

June Egbert is, and always has been incredibly fascinating to me because of just, how many factors have conspired to make Homestuck fans show their collective transmisogynistic asses.

The main character of Homestuck transitioning is a planned future plot point for the official continuation of homestuck, that was spoiled in advance by a fan making a joke about finding some toblerones Andrew Hussie the author of homestuck hid in a cave.

The current main writers of Homestuck: Beyond Canon have went on record in an AMA confirming that this was indeed always the plan, even before they took up the project.

In spite of these facts, the general consensus among certain homestuck fans seems to be that "June Egbert" is purely a headcanon for the original comic that was "made canon" by a "Toblerone Wish" (a concept that didn't even exist at the time)

For a variety of reasons, the "canonicity" of the postcanon official continuations of homestuck is a mattter of much debate, (though a debate that most homestuck fans seem to err on a side of "it's not canon at all in the slightest," something the writers have feelings on I'm sure.)

All of these factors combined leave the concept of "June Egbert" in a very nebulous place. It's assumed by most to just be an "ascended headcanon" that was shoehorned in, it's a spoiler so it hasn't happened yet in any official media, and the official media it will eventually happen in is regarded by some to be nothing more than glorified fanfic.

If someone is talking about June Egbert, and you don't like the concept of June Egbert, you have your pick of a million different excuses for why she's fake and gay and not worth discussing and bad writing and just the authors doing a gay dumbledore*, paying lip service to representation while actually doing nothing.

And of course, lots of people *don't* like June Egbert! Rather than being introduced as transfem from the start, she's in this nebulous position of discovery where people have to truly reckon with the idea of a "Pre-transition Trans Woman."

You can try to write off *some* of the backlash as transphobia, because obviously not everyone in this fandom is gonna be cool about trans people.

But there's no shortage of fans just dying to tell you about how much they like reading her as transmasc, or the idea of her being nonbinary or genderqueer or genderfluid, or literally anything besides a trans woman. And since they're fine with all those other interpretations, there's obviously no implicit biases driving their distaste for the concept! (if you want to try explaining the concept of "transmisogyny" to people like this you're braver than I.)

you can trust them when they say it's *just* a problem with whether or not it makes sense with the writing, or it just doesn't feel right somehow, or any of the thousands of excuses that this writing situation gives them to just Not Like It.

It's just, so interesting to me. There's not a lot of characters out there that get a trans arc in this way, that leaves room for open denialism and insistence that we have our trans cake and eat it too... Because Homestuck is a timeline spanning multiverse story, lots of people seem to want it to be an alternate timeline thing. Assuring us we can have this character share space with a non-transitioning version of herself and it won't be weird or imply gross things about trans people.

If you ask me it feels like a plotline that'd be really good for exploring some gender horror though, finding your true self and then being demoted to a footnote, an alternate version, because everyone around you likes your pre-transition self more....

Anyway I have no broader point beyond "hey look at this isn't this kinda weird. You don't get this kinda stuff often!"

*side note: it's a little ghoulish I think to compare "a future trans plot point that hasn't been given the chance to even happen yet, in an already famously queer piece of media, from a nonbinary author" to "some stupid shit done by the literal most famous transphobe of all time" but that's perhaps a discussion for later.

[relaxxattack]

hi! it's me :) fic rec anon. things have been hard lately so i have some more stuff to recommend bc it makes me feel better. uh, this one's mostly a like, grab bag of stuff? miscellany yknow. let's get into it (also if i have any repeats of stuff you've rec'd here before then Whoops)

pilot light, pale rapture is a post-game fic about jade and her Issues. jade/davepeta. has some excellent jane work in there and is meant to imply june pre-transition. i'd also like to recommend this author's other work, including the collected works of the originators, and the fanventure kittyquest which you can find on mspfa. both the collected works and kittyquest are about a richly detailed take on earth C, with accompanying myths; kitty quest is about jade and davepeta's daughter kitty harley-leider. very very good.

estrogamer girl is about trans girl roxy! very sweet. gen.

METHODOLOGY AND INTERPRETIVE "RECORD" OF SOULBOT WRECK AA109.23J2 – [DRAFT] is about a post-game grad student accessing the wreckage of one of aradia's soulbots postcanon, and experiencing the feelings of a doomed timeline's aradia. ararezi, outsider pov.

who could ask you to be unbroken or brave again is a fic about rose and vriska talking about trauma and child abuse post-canon. gen.

Metronome of a Night Queen's Heart and Other Unused Romance Novel Names is a fic in which kanaya asks dave to be her bloodbag after becoming a vampire, causing rosemary and davekat misunderstandings. rosemary and davekat.

Jade: Endure is about what it would have been like for jade to grow up with her corpse in her own house. short and very good. gen.

grant me wings that i might fly is about jade english raising jake english up to her eventual death. very good. gen.

DIRK TAKES A PISS is , okay listen i know from that title oyou might be like, fic rec anon, What are you recommending to me BUT LSITEN ITS ABOUT DIRK ACCIDENTALLY DROPPING HIS PACKER ON THE FLOOR OF A BATHROOM AND GETTING MEET CUTE'D. it's good. okay. dirkjake.

one more night (your ex-lover remains dead) is a junejasprose fic about trauma and what it means to be a rose left behind. if you're going to read ANY jasprose fic you have to read this one it's literally iconic to me and changed the way i see her forever. junejasprose.

Light Without Effulgence is a jake & rose friendship manifesto and it is HILARIOUS. "rose, you gather, is like dirk if he were a woman and capable of being happy" like that's hilarious to me. gen.

Bitter is a fancomic about jade and rose and i'm not going to spoil the surprise of what it's about but it's DELICIOUS. jaderose.

CHARGING THE VOID is a space opera roserezi au with hints of vrisrezi left behind and also both rose and terezi are trans and also it's DELICIOUS like i can't even say anything about it. if anyone has read baru cormorant and is familiar with it it's like that. roserezi, unlike pretty much anything else i've recced here it DOES have a sex scene so if you're uncomfortable with that it's not for you.

think about staying alive is a kidswap au! about rose strider my favorite kidswap <3 gen.

Postscript is about rosefef, rebellion au, being the last two left alive carrying out a rebellion against the condesce. rosefef.

Transperience is about calliope and the trans experience! fancomic, gen. very good.

goddess is about june egbert coming out! can you tell i'm a june egbert Believer gsdlkjfsakldj it's gotten to the point it's hard to read fic where she's called john lmao

I'm Hoping One Day Acting Cool Will Make Me Feel More Self Assured is about kanaya maryam and the burdens of being assigned mom friend. rosemary. also she and rose have a long furby.

we are the reckless is a space opera au in which vriska's a pirate captain and aradia's a helmsman. i love the blackrom in this. aravris.

i think this is enough for rn. have fun!

AND WHEN THE WORLD NEEDED THEM MOST…

THEY RETURNED!!!

thank you so much!!!!! these all look very fun and it’s definitely appreciated TwT and kind of you!!! 💞💞💞

[kinetic-elaboration]

June 22: 1x03 Where No Man Has Gone Before

Today, the second pilot, aka Kirk fights his ex-boyfriend, the superhuman space mutant.

Whaaaaat TV screen by the chess set? That’s such a funny transition for me for some reason.

Spock thinks he can win lol. I love that he’s sassy from the start. And throwing shade at Sarek, which is how I choose to interpret “my ancestor married a human woman” when he very well knows it’s his dad.

“Materializer.”

For a moment, I thought Spock was of a lower rank but then I realized the pilot uniforms only showed three different ranks so who even knows.

I’m barely even paying attention to the plot, I’m too distracted by the outfits and the banter.

Are you certain you don’t know what irritation is, Mr. Spock????? Are you SURE?

THIS ELEVATOR SCENE IS STILL MY FAVORITE IN THE WHOLE SERIES. Kirk is so obviously in love with Spock already, like just the way he looks at him??? And Gary is bitter. Did you finish your GAME GUYS? How was the GAME?? You like that CHESS?

Lol at Kirk’s microphone. I love how different the pilot is and how much more obvious the differences are because it’s sci fi. (Their screen/windshield is also hilarious for some reason? It looks very fake.)

Sulu is head of astrophysics?? Really got a demotion there. This needs to be a thing in fic though, somehow.

Kirk is so brave. Gonna explore this weird space thing to save future space travelers.

New drinking game: take a shot every time there’s a random shot of Kirk looking beautiful.

My mother asked if Gary was hoping he could hold Kirk’s hand when the alien force field attacks and I said yes. Dig it in there Mr. Kirk.

Kirk and Spock flying the ship.

Sulu looking gorgeous.

Some gratuitous k/s arm grabbing.

Love how they show the ship has no warp by having it move really slowly across the screen. But actually--completely underrated problem that I forgot about it what with the whole Gary God Complex thing--if you have no warp capabilities you are stranded for real.

It took me a suuuuuper long time to figure out why most esper people died and two became supermutants. The force field targeted the most susceptible but was too much for most of them.

Also I love how the force field was just literally never explained. It just is. Nor was it explained that that other ship was, which Kirk seemed to think shouldn’t have been in deep space in the first place.

I can’t believe Dehner is telling a literal alien “this is how this thing is and there’s only one version of the thing and these are the limits.” Like??? He has all sorts of abilities you don’t know about? Why do you assume that things as they have been observed on Earth are the only way things can be, especially outside Earth? When you are talking to someone whose very existence would be impossible by your measure?

Looking at medbay, can’t help but feel that McCoy really spruced up the joint.

Gary rearranging himself just so for Jim’s entrance.

I legitimately don’t know what “this long hair stuff you like” is. I was born in 1988 so, that’s my excuse.

A STACK OF BOOKS WITH LEGS

IN LT. KIRK’S CLASS YOU THINK OR SINK.

Kirk is giving Gary those “I love you” eyes. They’re exes. Clearly.

I mean “I outlined her whole campaign for her”? First, putting unnecessary characters into a story because the short version is homosexual is ITSELF homosexual and second--that’s very gay on its face.

Kirk is clearly trying to be the Cool Ex (and, uh, boss) and Gary’s still bitter. “Friend Captain.”

No privacy on the Enterprise I see.

“The one you used to know,” Spock says, clearly jealous.

Love poem from 1996--so ancient.

Imo Spock is glad for this opportunity to shade Gary Mitchell openly. Finally, I can tell Jim my real thoughts: we should kill him.

Dr. Dehner is awfully enamored of this whole “new kind of human” thing given that she must have some knowledge of Earth history, including, you know, the horrifically deadly WWIII fought over exactly this idea but w/e.

Sulu bringing the math.

Spock saying “Jim” again. He definitely actually does this a lot? Maybe later he pulls himself back on purpose on account of Too Many Feelings.

D E L T A V E G A .

Forgot they poached that name. Should have kept it a mining planet. I wonder if it is supposed to be the same place and if Ambassador Spock was thinking about Gary while he was there.

“You’re talking about Gary!” This Kirk and Spock scene is really good too. Just about as good as the elevator scene. I literally cannot read this through anything other than the “ex and future boyfriend” lens and it makes it so much better. (Not that it’s not a good story on its face because it is. But just like the additional layers??)

“Our task: maroon my ex-boyfriend on this abandoned planet.” They’ve known each other 15 years.

Kirk and Spock taking Gary down.

That is 100% a drawing taken from the cover of a 50s sci fi novel.

Spock is so ridiculously, comically armed. Pacifist who? They keep on saying he doesn’t have feelings and yet ALL I see are feelings. Arming himself to the teeth for Jim. Clearly bitter about Jim’s feelings for Gary. Ready to thrown down all the time.

RIP Kelso. Good thing he got that commendation.

“Command and compassion is a fool’s mixture.”

“Don’t wake up Spock until I’m gone or he’ll follow me.” True.

Just Jim and his ridiculous weapon now, off to ruin Gary’s date.

Kirk and Spock would love all these flowers.

“You were a psychiatrist once--ten minutes ago.”

“Did you hear him joke about compassion?” I know the powers corrupted Gary but...did they do all the corrupting? Or did they just allow him to say some stuff he really means?

That “phaser rifle” looks like a supersoaker. (Mom: it probably is.)

Gary claims to know Jim so well but he doesn’t even know his middle name.

He’s so dramatic. SO DRAMATIC. Calling Jim “James” all the time; clearly his personal name for him when they were together. Whereas Jim continues to call him by his last name, which is funny.

And then Spock sees Jim is about to get sad and makes sure to come right over. “I felt for him too,” he admits, reluctantly.

It’s weird how much more dated this ep looks imo. Like I strongly maintain that even on the basis of style TOS ages very well (better than TNG which is 90s to the hilt), but this one looked very...50s/60s sci fi. Not in a bad way, just in a very obvious way. I feel like even the Enterprise looks a lot different after the pilot, in ways I can’t really explain or describe or pinpoint. It’s just subtly.... more unique. More real.

Mom and I were discussing where this fits in the timeline. She thinks early 5 year mission, which is what I’ve always assumed...but I’m bothered by how 99% of the crew is different. So now I’m thinking, like, pre-5 year mission? Maybe like a short mission? This is Kirk’s first command, maybe they sent him out for like a year first. It doesn’t explain how Gary and Spock have “worked together for years” but Dehner could have been wrong about that, or she could have meant they both have 15 years + in Starfleet.

The AOSverse should have rebooted Mitchell instead of Khan and that’s all I’m saying about that but it’s true.

I have always assumed Gary is First Officer in this ep but I don’t remember it actually being mentioned and now I’m wondering if we’ve all just collectively made that up.

Next up is the absolute classic The Naked Time. Maybe I’ll find an opportunity to watch it in less than a week’s time?

[raynexinanna]

Divination Journal Entry #001

Saturday, 21st of June 2020. 00:17 GMT+7 | Jakarta, Indonesia.

Planetary Positions Today (Tropical):

☿ Mercury (℞) in ♋︎ Cancer ♀︎ Venus (℞) in ♊︎ Gemini ♂︎Mars in ♓︎ Pisces  ♃ Jupiter (℞) in ♑︎ Capricorn ♄ Saturn (℞) in ♒︎ Aquarius ♅ Uranus in ♉︎ Taurus ♆ Neptune in ♓︎ Pisces ♇ Pluto (℞) in ♑︎ Capricorn Chiron in ♈︎ Aries

Winter Solstice (Southern Hemisphere) Annular solar eclipse to occur within the day.

Question asked: Why do my parents (dad) come off as if they’re excessively over reacting and lashing out on me all the time over something so small? Everything that comes out of them is so particularly negative, and every single time I try to share something with them, they seem to bash me about it. However, when I decide to keep things to myself, they end up feeling offended as well.

Context: I literally just got some traditional Chinese tea and wanted to share it with my dad, to which he declined the offering and proceeded to bash me... saying I didn’t understand shit about the tea industry and the tea mafia in Taiwan, and went on a complete tfw2intelligent tangent when I literally just wanted to share some tea with him. Like... bruh. This is just one example of many, but this took the cake for me.

••

Deck used: Lenormand Oracle Cards

Person who drew the cards: my s/o

Cards revealed: Garden | Mice | Woman | Crossroads | Bear | Fox | Heart

••

Interpretation:

Dad is paranoid as a result of an interaction between him and someone he formerly trusted. This trauma with who is presumed to be a business partner or someone in relation to him on a business standpoint may have attempted to or have been fraudulent towards dad in one way or another. 

Dad does not think that he’s trying to actually diss me, but he thinks that he is trying to save you by giving advice, even though most of the time his own emotions kicks in and overrides other considerations, making him rather narrow sighted and lack context. His actual intentions were aimed towards helping me make certain decisions based on his knowledge, but the advice given tend to be based on presumptions that are on his own understanding without trying to listen into my perspective. As a result, his advice may seem brash and extreme, almost reaching to an extent. 

Despite all this, the reason why he still went on that tangent is because he still cared about me and he’s really just telling this out of care and love, as well as wanting to share his experiences in hopes that it could contribute to my life decisions...

He seems to be overly reaching in terms of how his pre-judgement was that I would be diving into the tea business, when actually I just wanted to share some tea with him... which is rather foolish so to speak.

In this matter he unfortunately dodged and missed the whole point of what was initially supposed to be a bonding moment between him and I... Like, what was supposed to be a nice conversation was perceived as an overly bloated perception of danger to his eyes (even though it is nowhere near threatening). He really just can’t seem to put his priorities in the right direction. He missed the point and played assumptions upfront, which is unfortunately a mistake on his part.

Since this happens so frequently, if the old man won’t admit he’s wrong, then these problems will never be solved. 

••

Outcome: I gotta be patient... again. The old jeezer is getting older and it’s becoming more obvious that his permanent and nagging traits (inherited from his own mum) are starting to show. Not going to lie... I still can’t stand it, but I guess I just can’t call him out on it. He’s got problems with the way he’s delivering his message, and realising that he has this sort of almost dunning-kruger thing going on with the way he draws his judgement on things... is the only way for me to feel for what might seem right in that moment (despite it being against his side of beliefs as well). If dad tries to 4D chess everything, then I guess I have to keep up and maybe 5D chess my way around him to avoid unnecessary conflict. I’m tired lmao.

••

My Transits Today (Tropical):

Sun sextile I ASC (0º 53′ | 329) Mercury conjunction Lilith (1º 55′ | 259) Venus square Mars (0º 17′ | -127) Venus opposition Pluto (2º 39′ | -113) Mars conjunction Saturn (0º 53′ | 109) Jupiter sextile Saturn (0º 36′ | 158) Jupiter conjunction Neptune (1º 27′ | 240) Jupiter conjunction X MC (2º 35′ | 148) Saturn conjunction Uranus (1º 41′ | 233) Uranus square Mercury (0º 34′ | -100) Uranus trine Jupiter (1º 04′ | 69) Neptune conjunction Saturn (3º 36′ | 154) Pluto sextile Saturn (0º 05′ | 98) Pluto conjunction Neptune (2º 08′ | 94) Pluto conjunction X MC (3º 17′ | 27) Lilith conjunction Venus (0º 10′ | 275) Lilith square Lilith (0º 14′ | -0) Lilith opposition North Node (1º 53′ | 16)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Imagine a creature left behind by evolution. It is obedient, passive, and dependent on others for its care. Devoid of morals, it lies in order to survive. Such is the fate of Homo Sovieticus, the personality type identified by Yuri Levada’s sociological surveys on the ‘simple Soviet man’ of the late 80s. Homo Sovieticus was expected to go extinct with Russia’s post-Soviet transition, only to receive an alarming new lease of life. Scholars and journalists such as Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa have invoked the concept to attribute the country’s current brand of authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin to the subservient mindset of its citizens.

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a political scientist at King’s College London, rejects the ‘hopelessness’ and ‘Russophobia’ of such interpretations. She calls for ‘an emotionally intelligent’ approach that is focused on ‘empathizing with the Russian population, rather than pointing to where it went wrong’. In The Red Mirror, she attempts to diagnose the Russian condition without relying on Homo Sovieticus or assuming the superiority of its imagined foil, the liberal Western subject. She proposes that polling data like Levada’s can be stripped of its Cold War-era ideological foundations and retrofitted to produce a more convincing assessment of the collective psyche. ‘You can’t step twice into the same river—a classic saying’, she writes. ‘Or can you? . . . How can we use the insights in social psychology to arrive at a less biased understanding and give credit and the blame where they are due?’

Sharafutdinova grew up in the republic of Tatarstan, an oil-rich region with a majority Tatar population, and received her PhD from George Washington University. Her first book, Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism inside Russia (2010), examined the rise of corruption in the provinces. As privatization and free elections were introduced simultaneously in the early 90s, access to power meant access to property, and vice versa. Sharafutdinova identifies two political models that emerged: ‘centralized and noncompetitive’, the system favoured by the tight-knit Tatar elite, and ‘fragmented and competitive’, which characterized the Nizhnii Novgorod region under Yeltsin ally Boris Nemtsov. In the latter, politicians aired corruption scandals over the course of nasty campaigns, leading many voters to see elections as elite infighting and to respond with apathy and protest voting. As competitive democracy delegitimized itself, the Tatar model looked increasingly appealing. Popular disillusionment with democratic institutions united the self-interest of Putin’s circle with the desires of an alienated public. This, Sharafutdinova argues, is why most Russians didn’t mind when Putin abolished regional gubernatorial elections in 2004 (according to polls) and why his popularity remained high even as oil prices dropped.

By March 2014, when ‘little green men’ wearing unmarked uniforms appeared on the island of Crimea, apathy had given way to euphoria. The Red Mirror is focused on ‘high Putinism’—the enormous esteem the president enjoyed in the wake of the annexation, when his approval rating regularly exceeded 80 per cent. It fell to pre-Crimea levels of 65–70 per cent after the announcement of the highly unpopular pension reform in June 2018, which raised the retirement age by five years for men and eight for women, but has held relatively steady ever since. Like some liberal American writers who have made forays into Trump country, Sharafutdinova says that her study is motivated by a ‘personal urge’ to understand why many of her friends and family in Russia take a positive view of Putin. She does not accept that their perceptions stem from ‘brainwashing and propaganda’, ‘cultural preferences for a strong hand’, or ‘moral bankruptcy and the inability of Russian people to distinguish right from wrong’, as the Homo Sovieticus paradigm would suggest.

‘Homo Sovieticus’ inverted the Bolshevik concept of the New Man, which promised to reform human beings into a perfected, generalizable type. According to later observers, the revolutionary social experiment had gone horribly awry. Émigré sociologist Alexander Zinoviev created the first popular formulation of Homo Sovieticus in his novelistic depictions of Soviet life from the early 80s. Zinoviev’s interest in taxonomizing socialist man was expressed in a different key by Eastern Bloc dissidents who spoke out against what they saw as their peers’ passivity and conformity, captured by Vaclav Havel’s famous example of a greengrocer who puts a ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ sign in his window. As Sharafutdinova explores here and in a 2019 article for Slavic Review (‘Was There a “Simple Soviet” Person? Debating the Politics and Sociology of “Homo Sovieticus”’), these ideas dovetailed with the model of totalitarianism inspired by Hannah Arendt. Scholars of the totalitarian school, backed by generous funding from the US government, shared an assumption that the collective nature of state socialism destroyed the individual autonomy essential for democracy and free markets.

Levada put notions about the ‘simple Soviet man’ on an empirical foundation when he took over the All-Union Center for Public Opinion Research in the late 80s, as part of Gorbachev’s effort to enlist the social sciences in reforming the Soviet system. At the time, many members of the intelligentsia were decrying Russians’ degradation as a means of calling for change. Levada’s research combined concerns about the Soviet Union’s debased inhabitants (referred to in ironic domestic parlance as the ‘sovok’) with approaches derived from Talcott Parsons’ social systems theory. Levada discovered the cowering practitioner of doublethink that he had set out to find, while expressing confidence that this figure would die out along with the Soviet state.

While Western Sovietology faded away, criticism of the backward masses persisted among Russian intellectuals who sought a scapegoat for the country’s apparent failure to adapt to capitalist modernity. Levada’s successor Lev Gudkov, who has headed the independent Levada Center since 2006, announced that Soviet man was mutating and taking on increasingly cynical and aggressive forms. According to Gudkov’s Abortive Modernization (2011), ‘the main obstacle for Russia’s modernization “. . . is the type of the Soviet or post-Soviet man (homo sovieticus), his basic social distrust, his experience of adaptation to violence, that makes him incapable of receiving the more complex moral/ethical views and relationships, which, in turn, makes the institutionalization of new social forms of interaction impossible”. Gudkov’s argument became the go-to framing for Anglophone journalists in search of a hot (if reheated) take: ‘The Long Life of Homo Sovieticus’, a 2011 headline in The Economist proclaimed. Its usage intensified after Donald Trump’s election, when the increasingly ambiguous status of the liberal Western subject rekindled longings for its constituent other and the associated Cold War verities. The persistence of Soviet man is the central conceit of Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017) and Yaffa’s Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia (2020). Both authors are staff writers for The New Yorker.”

- JOY NEUMEYER, “BURYING HOMO SOVIETICUS.” New Left Review. Issue 129 May/June 2021.

[blue-opossum]

Spray Mist, Bridge Collapse, and Vestibular Modulation

        Morning of June 6, 2020. Tuesday.

        Dream #: 19,528-02. Reading time (optimized): 3 min 30 sec.

        Instinctual awareness of being asleep underlies the foundation of my dreaming experience, which is co-occurrent with me being in bed. (Question: Why would this instinctual awareness and its resultant literal rendering have any relationship to symbolism or waking life?)

        In my imaginary experience, minimal modeling of my conscious identity occurs. (Question: What do you think would happen if a dream correctly modeled waking-life identity?) I am sitting at the end of a bed in the home of Zsuzsanna's friend Tash (from years ago). (Note that I have never met Tash in waking life or seen any residence where she has lived.) Zsuzsanna is standing near the center of an adjacent room on my right (an atypical orientation, as she is most often on my left when in the dream state).

        The bed is illogically in what seems to be the living room, perpendicular to the front door (on my left) into the residence. The television is on. Although I am looking at it from the foot of the bed, I do not focus on the broadcast. (It is typical for a bed to be in an unlikely location as a precaution to prevent the dream state from being mistaken with waking life or having relevance to waking life.)

        Tash is this dream's cerebral-RAS personification (to modulate consciousness emergence from out of the dream state). She starts spraying from a can of disinfectant spray between the foot of the bed and the television. I do not mind it at first, but it eventually becomes annoying.

        I do not feel any emotion over her imposition, though I think she has sprayed too much, so I say, "That's toxic." She ignores me and continues to spray. I perceive no danger to my health, but I decide to leave her home through the front door (which signifies a form of pre-liminal modulation that results in my dream being less vivid for a time). Even though I had been in Australia up until now, I walk directly into a fictitious version of La Crosse (in America).

        (The above scenario was influenced by Zsuzsanna telling me about her waking alert dream during this sleep cycle, caused by her sleeping uncomfortably on her arm, which resulted in content about a ghostly mist pushing her against a wall to trigger Cerebral-RAS activity.)

        I wrongfully consider that the Loomis Street house is where I live (though there is still recall of my marriage to Zsuzsanna, though she has never been to America). (Question: Why would anyone believe that the virtual amnesia of the dream state has any "meaning" when it exists to PREVENT waking life correlation on a cerebral level?) It is north of a strange narrow bridge. As I attempt to walk on the structure, it is flimsy and precarious. This situation models the precursor of the vestibular-cerebral handshake (that I often modulate) that has occurred in every sleep cycle since early childhood. (Question: Why would dream content that is compensating for vestibular system ambiguity AS A RESULT of being in REM sleep have an "interpretation" or relevance to waking life? I have modulated vestibular system ambiguity similarly in tens of thousands of my dreams.)

        As I had anticipated, the bridge collapses before I walk on it just from me touching it while contemplating the vestibular-cerebral process. I recall that I enjoy the sensation of sliding and, briefly, think I should slide down the collapsed bridge (even though the Loomis Street house is at least three blocks away and the height and length of the "slide" would not logically account for the curve or slope). Instead, I pull up my end of the bridge remnant and flip the entire three-block bridge. It leaps upward like a carpet, resulting in cars in the distance scattering into the sky.

        The bridge is stable again, though much broader than it was. However, I choose to fly to the Loomis Street house in a standing position about three feet above the bridge in case it inconsequentially collapses again (a common dream state choice in this mode). I arrive at the location, but it is not like it should be (though my dream self does not care).

        Looking up at a window in the sloped roof while I sit on the foot of a bed (the room with the essence of the northeast room of the Loomis Street house even though it is visually nothing like it), I see the silhouette of a flying creature of some sort on the other side of the sheer curtain, perhaps a bat. I am wary it may be on the inside (and soon think it might be a big squashed bug), though when I look more closely after mentally sweeping the curtain away, I see that it is on the outside of the window. Additionally, after finding its shape very curious, I conclude it is a monarch butterfly.

        This dream's outcome is very close in nuances and specific mood to one from 1971 (at age 10). As a result of managing the liminal factors of the waking transition (vestibular-cerebral handshake), deciding the content, a bat hanging on a curtain eventually turned out to be a moth as dawn arrived. Otherwise, the causal factors for this sleep-wake management have remained identical, each sleep cycle, since childhood.

[noahfence1d]

In Harry Styles’ first tour as a solo act, there was a disconnect between teen-scream past and serious-artist present. The singer did his best to put his stock in earnest songs while strumming a guitar, as if he were singing to a few friends in his living room. But his audience was still at Soldier Field, where Styles’ former band – One Direction – used to headline. The fans brought so much noise, energy and ga-ga enthusiasm that at one point all Styles could do was stand back and giggle at the over-the-top response his mere presence ignited.

On Tuesday at the Chicago Theatre, only the fourth date on his first major solo tour, Styles experienced a few growing pains before finally catching up with the pace set by his fans. He was first among equals in U.K. hitmakers One Direction, the mega-selling pre-fab vocal group overseen by pop svengali Simon Cowell. The group’s string of bubblegum hits allowed them to fill stadiums around the world, but in the early stages of his 75-minute set Styles evinced little interest in revving up that sort of dizzy playfulness.

Instead, he tried to recast himself as an earnest folk-rock singer-songwriter steeped in ‘70s influences, beginning with intro music that featured bands (Beatles, Kinks, Crosby Stills & Nash) that predated most of his young, largely female audience by several decades.

Even his stage outfit, a suit with a swirling green-and-red motif, looked like something you’d find under grandma’s Christmas tree circa 1973. But with his ascending hair and perfectly serviceable voice – a flexible but rarely showy instrument that hewed to the contours of the tightly scripted songs – he carried himself like a star, though a modest one.

Songs from his self-titled debut album dominated the early part of the show, and leaned on influences from a classic-rock era that exists on oldies radio rather than his audience’s cellphones: The riff from Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” that defined “Ever Since New York,” the hints of the Allman Brothers’ “Melissa” on the forlorn “Two Ghosts,” a knock-off on Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” for the glam-rocker “Woman.”

The more serious tone struck by the likes of the hushed “From the Dining Table” and the acoustic “Meet Me in the Hallway” was more one of style than substance. If Styles is trying to break off a piece of his heart, he is doing it in the vaguest fashion possible, with watery images, boilerplate choruses and predictable dynamics. There is a dissolute message buried inside some of the ballads, one of post-fame burnout, of wanting to find connection with that one special person after being adored from afar by millions of screaming fans, but quiet intimacy is not what this audience craved.

Styles was at his best giving the fans the uptempo payoffs their inexhaustible and loudly audible devotion demanded. A couple of One Direction tunes were strategically placed in the set to keep things bouncing: “Stockholm Syndrome” stomped through a bondage-themed romance and “What Makes You Beautiful” strutted with a little pop-soul; its wordless vocal hook with rapid-fire handclaps contended for the set’s best moment. For the set-closing “Kiwi,” Styles sprayed the fans with his water-bottle and frat-rocking silliness. Too bad he slowed down a three-song encore with a tepid interpretation of another ‘70s throwback, Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.”

Though Styles is still finding his voice as a solo artist, ticket sales for his concerts have been brisk – his current theater tour is reportedly sold out, and he’s already booked a summer arena tour that will bring him to the United Center on June 30, 2018.

In many ways, the current smaller-scale show is a test run for the big stages he will aim to command next year. Will his ‘70s-inspired ballads sway the revelers who pack hockey-stadiums to see him? Perhaps that transition away from One Direction’s unabashed pop won’t be as instantaneous as he might have first envisioned.

[rocketrobinprints-blog]

April Update

One month into the second quarter of the year, and admittedly, we haven't had much to show for it business-wise, but! with the Spring season in full throws and Summer fast approaching, we will be getting our butts in gear.

So far this year, I have been working to settle into the routines of my day job and finishing up my semester at the community college and an online course. My day job at the spice shop has been going really well. I have good hours to fit my schedule and my boss an I get along pretty well, which is particularly good since the shop is only him and me. I've oriented myself to running the shop on my own now, and I've found that I enjoy the work. Only working three days a week on a consistent schedule also helps.

As for class, I'm finishing up my ASL II course pending an in-class interview to test working fluency and one more Deaf-event. The Deaf history course is also coming to an end with one more quiz and a final project which I'll be focusing on CODAs. Both classes have gone really well and I'm confident about finishing up this semester. I am wavering a little on my decision to stick it out for the certificate in ASL though, since my motivation for learning has not been to become an interpreter or go into education. I'll have all summer to think it over before registering for Fall classes, so I'll have time to decide if I want to continue for the certificate or shift my educational focus to other things.

On that note, I've started getting back on track with my original plan coming out of college to pursue an M.A. in psychological counseling, particularly because I've found a couple programs to receive an M.A. completely online which would work much better for me to schedule around. Currently, I'm trying to get back into the comfort of studying psychology by taking a Coursera class called Schizophrenia and Its Treatment, taught by a professor from Wesleyan. So far its gone well and I'm excited to get a certificate of completion from the course when I finish. Its a small step towards counseling, but it gets me back into the rhythm of working with psychology again. I should be able to finish up the class within the next two weeks, so that's also going well.

Eric is also settling into a new role at his work where he's been given a new full time position title coordinating rentals and filling in where he's needed through the transition. His week schedule will be changing and it will end up looking much more like my current schedule without two proper days off in a row. Regardless, things seem to be working out well there, despite some hesitations. Also, the children's book he illustrated is officially going to be released sometime in May, after the long, drawn out publishing process. Eric is also getting further on track with his comic Harlow, hopefully ready to begin illustrating panels soon. We're very excited to see it come together.

Most importantly! Eric and I will be moving in mid-June to our own apartment! The move will be taking up a lot of our focus and energy for a while. We need to pack, coordinate the move, do paperwork, get proper insurance, and all that fun new apartment jazz. We're very excited and itching to go though, so it should all be fun and go relatively quickly.

So that's our current situation pre-Summer.

Once Summer arrives, I'll be out of class, we will have moved, and hopefully we'll have some more free time to devote to the shop and our artwork. I'll have Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday open on my schedule once classes end, so I'll be spending much more time writing and working for the Etsy page. I think late-Spring and early-Summer is a good time to jump back into regular artwork production and a good time for local outreach. In town here, we have a number of art festivals that start up in the Summer, and while many of them are primarily geared to run on the weekends, which will be largely impossible with our work schedules, there are some at other times we could definitely sign up for. We still also want to do outreach with local businesses and possibly even sales through the art gallery where Eric works.

All in all, Summer should be fun and new changes will be coming to the shop and definitely to our lives. I hope to have some new shop news for the next update, which preferably will not take so long for me to make. I haven't been very good at keeping with regular updates, but as we move into the new season and things start lightening up, I will definitely be committing more time to the shop and the blog.

Right now, we still have a number prints available of traditional art, Eric's fantasy linocuts, my line design pieces, and cards up on the shop. More will be coming soon!

Thanks for sticking with us.

- Kecheri

[noirmornings-blog]

Kanye West: Inside His Creative Agency DONDA

The brand the everyone wants to create but no one really knows what it is...

Kanye West’s first creative agency, DONDA, still remains as a mystery to most of us. They continue to crank out album covers and projects, but no one really knows who is exactly behind the work. Obviously, Virgil Abloh is down, but who else? VIBE discovered that a former Mercer Kitchen waitress by name of Hanna Christian was one of the first employees and helped hire others. However, she is no longer on-board. So who else is down? VIBE investigates…

The rest of the DONDA stable is virtually anonymous. And West has a tradition of cobbling together a rotating cast of collaborators, which makes it tough to distinguish who’s actually part of the core clique. Liner notes on Yeezus list Joe Perez as DONDA graphic designer and Justin Saunders as art director. Those who are believed to have worked with the company consistently include West’s longtime barber and style consultant Ibn Jasper, art directors Matthew Williams and Guido Callarelli and graphic designers Nathaniel Brown and Alex Milsom. Perez declined to be interviewed, and the others did not respond to requests. Before Abloh could even be contacted, he sent a pre-emptive refusal: “We appreciate the interest, but our staff is not doing interviews at the moment. If our stance changes, we will be in touch.”

BEFORE HANNA CHRISTIAN started working for Kanye West, she was a waitress at The Mercer Kitchen. The exclusive restaurant serves as the cornerstone of New York City’s Mercer Hotel, where West and Jay Z camped out in early 2011 to record their album, Watch the Throne. When West returned in October of that same year to take a series of meetings, Christian, then a 21-year-old college dropout and aspiring visual artist, struck up a conversation. For a week, West picked her brain about everything from architecture to fashion to art. He invited her to a Watch the Throne tour stop in New Jersey. She came back to work the next day raving about the elaborate stage design. Noted visual artist Es Devlin (a frequent West collaborator who’s also worked with Lady Gaga and Rihanna) projected video of sharks and Rottweilers onto enormous cubes that doubled as podiums for West and Jay Z during the show. After gushing about the design elements, Christian went for broke. “I love The Mercer,” she blurted out to Kanye. “But I want to work with you!”

Christian was hired on the spot as West’s personal assistant. And within 24 hours, she was attending the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show at the Lexington Avenue Armory in NYC. Three months later, he announced his latest venture, DONDA, an experimental design agency named for his late mother. Christian transitioned to office manager, interviewing applicants and helping to build the company’s early infrastructure.

She’s bubbly and effusive when she talks about her big break into the entertainment industry. But when asked something seemingly as innocuous as where the DONDA offices are located, Christian shuts down. “I can’t talk about it,” she says firmly. “It’s in my confidentiality agreement.” A confidentiality agreement with a clause about office headquarters? Sounds ludicrous. But no one does private and mysterious like Kanye West. And for a potential entity born out of one of his legendary Twitter rants, it almost makes sense. Almost.

In January 2012, West laid out a series of tweets, highlighting his plan to create a firm with more than 22 departments staffed by a bevy of experts in divergent fields. He name-checked everything from architects, video game developers and nutritionists to doctors, lawyers and what he called “app guys,” plotting to house them under DONDA.

His master plan reads like a stream-of-consciousness riff that becomes an epically ambitious screed (think Jerry Maguire’s infamous manifesto). There will be summer school programs with filmmaker Spike Jonze! An overhaul of the prison system! Nutritional consultation on achieving energy balance! Amusement parks! West tweeted: “We want to create, advertise and produce products driven equally by emotional want and utilitarian need.”

The kicker was that he intends to not just turn a profit or join the billionaire’s club. He wants to change the world through design and fill the void of late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. A bit extreme, sure. But Kanye’s bombastic statements are expected. And for a man who secretes naked ambition and pretentious overtones from his very pores, it almost makes sense. Almost.

DONDA may sound slightly absurd, but the idea wasn’t completely random. Even before his Twitter proposal, he fantasized about launching a creative clique to those in his inner circle. In 2008, during a New Zealand press conference promoting 808s & Heartbreak he talked about building art installations. Four years later, he aimed even higher. “I want to work on cities [and] amusement parks,” he said while premiering his short film, Cruel Summer, at Cannes Film Festival. “I want to change what entertainment experiences are like.”

Kanye’s fight for creative control is long-standing. Collaborators describe him as a hypercritical presence on photo shoots and film edits. So it’s no surprise that with DONDA, he was looking to circumvent middlemen who might dilute his vision. “They wanted to eliminate the person who has to interpret the idea to the brand,” says Marc Moran, who cofounded the Chicago-based RSVP Gallery with West’s longtime right-hand man Virgil Abloh.

Post-rant, West moved quickly. Just a day after the online proclamation, his attorney Brad Rose filed the first trademark papers for DONDA. The list of goods and services sounds more profit-based than the good works and lofty world improvement goals in his mission statement. Expect to see the DONDA name on “toys and playthings, plush toys, teddy bears… home furnishings, bedding and linens…”

He also tweeted an e-mail, contactdonda@gmail.com, for like-minded aspiring trailblazers to pledge DONDA. Thousands of applicants poured in, according to Christian, who left the company in May 2012 and now works as a creative assistant for actor Jason Sudeikis. “We moved forward with quite a few people who submitted portfolios,” she says, refusing to reveal who made the cut.

Essentially a future funnel for West’s obsession with his legacy, DONDA is poised to be the ultimate vanity project. And yet, he barely references it by name. Rather than a string of credits on an official Web site, DONDA projects are denoted by album liner notes, cryptic tweets, hashtags and Instagram photos (“NUMBERS ON THE BOARDS. NO ARTWORK. DONDA,” @virgilabloh) from his inner circle. Will this mysticism carry on to a true vision with results? Some experts are doubtful.

“When [Kanye] talks about Apple and those other companies, [he] has a very clear mission or statement in mind,” says Andres Nicholls, a partner in the brand and marketing consultancy Prophet, which lists GM, BMW and Visa as clients. “I tried to find a Web site. I couldn’t find any. He needs to formalize the vision of the company if he wants to expand to a broader consumer.” In addition to no website, DONDA no longer has a brick-and-mortar presence. Christian followed up her interview several weeks later to give an update on the DONDA office in New York: it no longer exists. “When I was there, we were just starting to set up shop, so I’m not surprised that so much has changed since I left.”

Expanding to a broader consumer may prove difficult for West, considering his desire to keep everything he does under tight wraps. During a June listening session for his newest album, Yeezus, at New York’s Milk Studios, a black van was parked outside, projecting a video of Kanye (shot by his go-to director Nick Knight) rapping the lyrics to his single “New Slaves” onto the side of a building. The screenings were part of a larger, international guerilla-marketing scheme— Kanye’s idea—that initially took place in 66 cities. When pressed for info on the installation, a woman operating the video offered a non-committal smirk and riddled responses:

Are you a member of DONDA? “We don’t have any input in the content. We’re just hired to project it,” she said.

What’s the name of the projection company? “I’d rather not say.”

Did Def Jam or DONDA hire you? “I’d rather not say.”

Following West’s lead, the DONDA collective hasn’t done interviews regarding their affiliation. LinkedIn profiles and liner notes help piece together a rough masthead, but there’s no clear consensus on who’s involved. One source suggested finding Virgil Abloh because “he is DONDA.”

Abloh’s credited title has varied from head creative director to art director for DONDA. It’s easy to see why the Chicago native and former architect would be Kanye’s right-hand man when it comes to DONDA. Abloh has the holier-than-thou hipster vibe down cold. He’s a Birkin-bag-carrying dude who owns a clothing boutique that sells $200 T-shirts. He drops obscure style references, like waxing poetic about the genius of German industrial designer Dieter Rams.

The rest of the DONDA stable is virtually anonymous. And West has a tradition of cobbling together a rotating cast of collaborators, which makes it tough to distinguish who’s actually part of the core clique. Liner notes on Yeezus list Joe Perez as DONDA graphic designer and Justin Saunders as art director. Those who are believed to have worked with the company consistently include West’s longtime barber and style consultant Ibn Jasper, art directors Matthew Williams and Guido Callarelli and graphic designers Nathaniel Brown and Alex Milsom. Perez declined to be interviewed, and the others did not respond to requests. Before Abloh could even be contacted, he sent a pre-emptive refusal: “We appreciate the interest, but our staff is not doing interviews at the moment. If our stance changes, we will be in touch.”

Whoever’s pulling the strings, the overall theme seems to be minimalism. And so far, DONDA’s work still falls in the domain of hip-hop: album artwork stage sets (West’s Atlantic City Revel Resort shows); promotional apparel; and visuals for Ye’s G.O.O.D Music compilation, Cruel Summer. With the interactive video for West’s “Black Skinheads,” DONDA has been focusing on multimedia projects. They were also hired to re-edit the trailer for The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan.

The DONDA-designed cover for I Am Not a Human Being 2 spotlights a lone butterfly on a black background. And instead of a cliché mean-mug close-up, 2 Chainz’s Based on a T.R.U. Story features two chains draped over a black backdrop. Some say the DONDA design style currently on display is a brilliant respite from hip-hop’s often-aggressive literalism. Some say it’s basic. “Because hip-hop has been so literal, esoteric things excite people. But it doesn’t mean that it’s good,” says Joseph Buckingham, aka Joe Buck, a graphic designer whose album artwork includes the classic De La Soul Is Dead cover. “That seems to be the trend now, to just be beyond hip-hop. Kanye plays that game well.”

The abstract approach can be vexing for the executives who write the checks. “The label wants to go with what’s obvious and marketable,” says Courtney Walter, a creative director who’s designed packaging for Chris Brown (Fortune) and Miguel (Kaleidoscope Dream). “If it’s conceptual, sometimes you’re pushing boundaries that make more of a statement than you need to.”

West is already barreling full steam ahead with his own music. Yeezus is the musical equivalent of a splash painting. From the anti-packaging to the loony American Psycho–inspired commercial starring two Kardashian family affiliates. He does what he wants (and more importantly, corporate bigwigs allow him to do what he wants) because it’s profitable. Kanye’s audience is built-in and primed to respond to whatever he’s pumping out, even if it’s a pair of $245 Nike Air Yeezy’s, which once sold for $90,000 on eBay.

“Marketing is usually so much about ‘reach,’” says Patrick Ehrlund, creative director of B-Reel, the company that produced West’s 2012 commercial for the Cruel Summeralbum. “Because Kanye West is such a strong brand, you don’t necessarily have to worry about reach, because it will always reach people. So it’s about how you affect people. Visuals have become a much more permanent and visible part of hip-hop. I think it’s amazing that artists are exposing people that might not be exposed to these kinds of artistic things.”

It may be unrealistic to expect DONDA to run like a traditional business and actually attempt to attract media attention. Especially since Kanye has become more paranoid about his message being misinterpreted. The true test will be marrying his laissez-faire approach with the eventual need to gain investors if he’s serious about turning DONDA into a conglomerate.

“From a funding point of view, it can be a challenge when you have people who aren’t used to thinking outside the box,” says Jessica Irish, director of academic affairs at Parsons’ School of Art, Media and Technology.

West’s ambition to succeed Apple is clearly a stretch. But he may have the ultimate business consultant in Steve Wozniak, who cofounded the iconic tech brand with Jobs. They met this year and discussed Kanye’s top-secret plans. When contacted for comment on DONDA, Wozniak stated via e-mail: “I have opinions about it, but they would be personal between myself and Mr. West.”

West isn’t alone in his determination to push the margins of the entertainment industry. From Nicki Minaj and Drake to Jay Z and Pharrell, rappers are expanding their résumés beyond endorsements and fragrances. Ten years ago, vanity labels and clothing lines were compulsory. Now, it’s about creative direction for major brands. West can certainly transform DONDA into a lucrative movement. He’s defied odds before.

In February 2012, four months after the lukewarm reception to his women’s collection, West started work on the first official DONDA endeavor—the Cruel Summer short. He commissioned three design firms and a post-production company and scored funding from the Doha Film Institute in the Gulf state of Qatar, where the film was shot. The team spent four months constructing an unprecedented seven-screen display and a white tented pyramid to contain it.

That May, his 30-minute movie about a car thief and an Arabian princess (He even consulted with a local Arab woman on wardrobe) screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The verdict from most media outlets: flawed, but ambitious. The movie has yet to be released on DVD or screened anywhere outside of Cannes. It hardly matters. Kanye pulled it off, and his first step to achieving what he wants with DONDA was complete.

Whether DONDA becomes another told-you-so moment or a pipe dream remains to be seen. Limitations exist in the corporate world, but from the looks of it (the ambiguous anti-business business plan), West wants to see just how much he can break the rules. As DONDA progresses, he’ll have disciples and cynics, either blindly following or silently skeptical, but never counting him out.

Story By Clover Hope

[forestcrack83-blog]

A different path to the same destination

This is one of the latest success stories from one of our clients at the IDM Program:

The Obesity Code, to the fasting uninitiated, is tough love. Is there an simpler path to start? As a reader of the book in spring 2017, I did NOT have a support team. The IDM Facebook group did not yet exist. IDM was just getting its internet coaching team started. I watched Dr. Fung’s videos; The Aetiology of Obesity series is particularly edifying. I, nonetheless, needed something easier than jumping directly into 24-hour alternate daily fasting. Dr. Fung deploys hormonal obesity theory to lose weight — to mobilize fat from low insulin levels. I started by having my evening fast last for as long as possible, thus keeping my insulin level low. I also followed Dr. Fung’s advice by eliminating snacks and sugar sweetened beverages. I called this my 12+ Protocol.

It started working. I could only last about 13 hours before I started getting hungry. I would always push the time to start my breakfast 15 minutes later than when I felt hungry. Breakfast was two egg and cheese breakfast tacos. The tortillas are not particularly low carb, I know. A fasting induced low insulin level is doing the weight loss work, not a specific diet. I mostly eat whole carbs, healthy fats, WCHF — more Michael Pollan and less Dr. Atkins. Yes, I minimize fast carbs and that helps a great deal.

But it was working. I started reversing my main marker of pre-diabetes, Hb A1c, in 5 weeks, 6.1% -> 5.9%. I dropped about 10 pounds (5 kilos). By November 2017, after six months following 12+, my Hb A1c was normal,

It took me about four months to migrate to eating just two meals a day, 2MAD, with a 16-hour fasting window. I was becoming adapted to using my stored fat. Over that time during late 2017, I lost 30 of my 40 pounds (13-18 kilos) between my annual physicals and had a high normal Hb A1c. While my fasting glucose was still borderline pre-diabetic, my doctor was nonetheless ecstatic.

There was a very good chance that I would not fall off the wagon and gain my weight back.

With 12+, I had created a lifestyle I could maintain. There was a very good chance that I would not fall off the wagon and gain my weight back. This is a huge relief. Why? All of my previous diets had failed. 12+ is a pattern that easily recovers from dietary sins. The next day’s fast starts when I put the fork down every night. While lots of folks discuss how macronutrients affect weight loss, and some have a particular fascination, bordering on fetishization, with bacon, I think they miss the point. While it matters what you eat, it matters more that you are not eating for long stretches of time. A low insulin level mobilizes fat. You cannot lose weight that is locked up in fat cells; it has to move before it can be metabolized. A low insulin level causes all of the energy reserves distributed around your body to be tapped — creating space for the mobilized fat to be metabolized.

But 12+ fasting still seems much easier than my prior efforts at losing weight — efforts that had always failed. Always. Has this low insulin pattern caused some other changes? Yes. These short daily intermittent fasts have caused my body to become metabolically flexible. I can burn fat as easily as I burn sugar. It is a result of a low insulin lifestyle. I don’t become hungry as often. I’ve gained control over my response to food. I’ve become fat adapted and so can you. It is the superpower conferred upon us by fasting — the more you fast, the more you can fast. I think becoming fat adapted is the most important goal to achieve in your weight loss journey. It makes everything easier. Becoming fat adapted takes time. It took me 4 or so months. People eating in a ketogenic fashion can force the transition in a few weeks. Nonetheless, 12+ time-restricted feeding is a pattern I’ve maintained for 18 months while eating all kinds of food. I am confident that everyone can become fat adapted this way.

Hitting the wall about halfway home

My maintenance weight should occur with a normal Body-Mass Index (BMI) less than 25. In my case, that means weighing less than 174 pounds (79 kilos), about 100 pounds (45 kilos) less than where I started. After dropping about 60 pounds (27 kilos), just over halfway to my normal BMI weight, 12+ time-restricted feeding hit a wall; my rate of weight loss slowed down. This could happen for many reasons. I could have started eating sooner or more. Or, as I’ve lost a lot of weight, there is less of it coming out of my fat cells. For example, my hands and forearms are visibly thinner and vascular; I’ve had to remove links from my watch band. Is the lack of arm fat a cause of slowing weight loss? There is less to lose? Regardless, slowing or stopping weight loss is a common phenomenon. It is frequently where I’ve failed at losing weight before. This is a dangerous time; the time where, heretofore, I fell off the wagon and yo-yo-ed my weight back up. Could fasting see me through? You can see the plateau between March through May 2018, below.

I have a higher fasting glucose level than my doctor or I would like. Is that the cause of my plateau? As ketones are a proxy for low insulin levels, what do they look like? I purchased a Keto-Mojo meter in June to find out. Turns out that many mornings I have both high glucose, 95-103 mg/dL, a pre-diabetic level, and a modest level of ketones, 0.3-0.9 mmol/L. In other words, my insulin level is in check; I’m reliably producing ketones. When I purchased the meter, the sales person tested me and I had a glucose 110 mg/dL and ketones of 1.3 mmol/L. She had never seen that high a combination before. Before purchasing the meter, I had tried adding a once a week 23-hour fast. It wasn’t hard and you can start to see modest movement in my trend-line. But it wasn’t working very well either. My high glucose level is, I believe, a problem. Time to call in the big guns from IDM. Their books got me this far, perhaps their insights can help me push this through to completion?

The longer fast forces your body to switch from stored glucose.

Megan Ramos, IDM co-founder, was speaking at a nearby keto conference and she was very welcoming to me and offered to advise me. After I acquired two weeks worth of data from my Keto-Mojo meter, I set up an appointment with Mrs. Ramos. One approaches a coach to learn, to help you see your current situation correctly and improve it. As someone trained in the sciences, I really needed to remember this. While I had read Dr. Fung’s books and watched his and Mrs. Ramos’ many recorded lectures, I still did not have much experience. I had n=1 experience; IDM has n=5,000+ experience. This was important because Mrs. Ramos had a different interpretation of my stall than I did. To her, my 12+ pattern had not allowed my liver and pancreas to fully heal from my pre-diabetes. Multiple 36+ hour fasts drain your liver of glycogen and start working on reducing ectopic and visceral fat. The longer fast forces your body to switch from stored glucose. Her theory was that my glucose was remaining high because my liver and pancreas were still operating based upon my insulin resistant history, that I had not reset this hormonal set-point. I needed longer fasts to drain my liver of glycogen and, thereby, reset the set-point.

Her advice: up my fasting game to include at least two 36+ hour fasts per week.

My response: It’s complicated. I work with a personal strength trainer twice a week. This has also helped me get healthier, albeit in a different fashion than fasting. As my workouts are very intense, I need to eat afterwards. I am loath to change something that is also working. Furthermore, I’ve solved the acute pre-diabetes problem and I wish to reserve dietary flexibility for a social weekend. Hence, I was willing to adopt a 40 and 23-hour fast per week. I make up for this by having a five day fast per month. (Socially, I found that it was easier to just block out a week a month versus juggling multiple 36+ hour fasts per week.) I also decided to get a DXA scan, Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry scan, before I started my first five-day fast. I wanted to record my baseline value of visceral adipose tissue, VAT, at 3.06 pounds (1.2 kilos).

Allow me to emphasize, having a coach in your corner really helps you succeed. Fasting is a hard path and there are many in our society who will try to dissuade you from continuing. Even I, a known curmudgeon and generally crusty individual, am subject to social pressure. Hence, just having Mrs. Ramos’ imprimatur to push forward into deeper fasting really helped. She helped me have confidence that I could do this. And I did. Don’t hesitate to recruit allies into your corner. I joined a small group of extended fasters on Facebook WTF (Willing To Fast) that helped me. You need supporters too. IDM’s Facebook group is a good place to find allies. IDM’s subscription programs work well too.

Each five day fast was separated by over three weeks of my normal 16:8/2MAD and 40- and 23-hour weekly fasts. By the way, it takes at least a week to recover from a five-day fast and I suspect that my body uses every day of the three week inter-fast period to heal. As expected, the five-day fast preferentially reduced my visceral fat; my VAT dropped to 2.27 pounds (1 kilo), by 26%, while my non-VAT fat dropped, 8.51 pounds (3.9 kilos), only 14%. As also predicted, the five-day fasts seem to have reduced my average fasting glucose. The glucose results after my five-day fasts, averaged over multiple days from the Keto-Mojo meter, all in mg/dL:

Reversing 45 years of obesity doesn’t happen in a month or even a year.

Mrs. Ramos was right. Her tactic, upping my fasting game, worked. I needed to hit my central/visceral obesity directly with longer fasts to lower my glucose level. Home glucose meters are highly variable and my October average of 92 mg/dL also contains a reading of 78 and 102. My morning fasting glucose is far from stable. More healing is required. My doctors would like to see my average glucose level below 85 mg/dL. I’m about to purchase a continuous glucose monitor to help me finish healing from diabetes. My job is not yet done and I’m keeping the longer fasts in my protocol. Reversing 45 years of obesity doesn’t happen in a month or even a year. I’m 18 months into living the fasting lifestyle and I expect to be managing my weight via fasting for many years into my future.

Hormonal obesity theory for the win!

My Bride, Daughter, Doctor and myself are celebrating this change in my life’s prospects. By every measure, I am healthier now than three years ago. This is primarily due to adding fasting to a twice-weekly strength training regimen. By addressing my pre-diabetes before it became full-blown diabetes, I have likely added years to my life and have certainly improved my quality of life. You can too. But I’m not yet done. I still have to bring my weight down to normal BMI levels and keep it there. I have to get my glucose level reliably less than 90 mg/dL. I know how to get there and have confidence in the fasting path.

Weight loss takes time; it is important to get started. I took a different path than Dr. Fung describes in his books but one supported by hormonal obesity theory. While I ended up in a similar place using alternate daily and extended fasting, I gained a real benefit by becoming fat adapted. By reading The Obesity Code carefully, I found an easier but slower path. I’ve lost over 70 pounds (32 kilos), 286,363 kilocalories, of fat. At 2,000 calories per day, that is 143 days worth of meals. Using Mrs. Ramos’ preferred pattern, which yields about a half pound loss per 36-hour fast, I would have taken 280-320 days to lose my weight. I took about twice as long. I’m OK with that. There are many fasting paths to good health.

Thank you, IDM, Mrs. Ramos, and Dr. Fung. You’ve helped me find my path to weight loss success.

Keep calm and fast on.

Disclosures: I have no financial relationship with IDM. I’ve purchased Kindle editions of “The Obesity Code” and “The Complete Guide to Fasting”. I purchased the paper edition of “The Diabetes Code” to gift to my family doctor. This article is my effort to pay back to the community the gift of Mrs. Ramos’ ad hoc coaching.

Source: https://www.dietdoctor.com/a-different-path-to-the-same-destination

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Alan Turing - the lifetime of the father of modern computers.

Early life and schooling.

Born 23rd June 1912 to Ethel Sara and Julius Mathison Turing. The Turing family were distinctly upper-middle-class within the English class system. Due to his father’s employment within the Indian Civil Service, serving within the Madras Presidency until 1926, Alan Turing and his older brother John were fostered in various strict English homes that did little to nothing to encourage expression, originality and discovery.

Despite this, Alan’s interest in science was an extra-curricular passion. At a young age, he was given to read a popular book called ‘Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know’, and later commented on the influence and significance this book had upon him. His boyhood scientific interests were a trial to his mother, who feared he would not be accepted to the English Public School. Despite this, he gained a place at Sherborne School, of whom the headmaster reported of him ‘If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.’

During Alan’s time at Sherborne, he seems to have only had one friend - Christopher Morcom, a year ahead of Turing. Morcom gave Turing a vital period of intellectual companionship during the two years before his sudden death in 1930. For the next three years, Turing went through a crisis, only sustained by his conviction that he must know what Morcom could not. During these three years, Turing wrote to Morcom’s mother, sharing his thoughts of how the human mind - with Christopher’s in particular - was embodied in matter, and how or if it could be released from such matter by death. With psychology being a very little respected field at the time, Turing was led deeper into twentieth century physics. He was first helped by A.S Eddington’s book ‘The Nature of the Physical World’, wondering whether quantum-mechanical theory affected the traditional problem of mind and matter.

Turing’s studies at King’s College, Cambridge from 1931 allowed him to enter into a world where he was encouraged to be free-ranging in thought. His readings throughout 1932 of von Neumann’s new ork on logical foundations of quantum mechanics, nurtured Turing’s transition from emotional to rigorous intellectual enquiry. For the first time, Turing had a real home at King’s College, and this allowed his homosexuality to become a definitive part of his identity. He associated with the so-called anti-war movement of 1933, though this didn’t develop into Marxism.

Despite a distinguished degree in 1934 and a Fellowship of King’s College in 1935, and a Smith’s Prize in 1936 for work on probability theory, Turings uniqueness of mind sent him in a direction that few foresaw.

By 1933, Turing had introduced himself to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. In 1935, Turing learnt from a lecture course from the topologist M.H.A Newman at Cambridge that a question posed by Hilbert was unanswered - one of Decidability, known as the Entscheidungsproblem. At least in principle, could there exist a definite process and/or method by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical assertion was provable? To answer such a question, a definition of method was needed. Turing supplied. He presented arguments - convincing at that - that the scope of such a machine was sufficient to encompass everything that would count as a ‘definite method’. Being daring, Turing included an argument based on the transitions between ‘states of mind’ of a human being performing a mental process.

The Turing Machine.

Turing’s definitive contribution was this triple relationship between logical instructions, machine and action of mind, which could be embodied in principle in a practical and physical form. In such, Turing made the novel definition of what should count as ‘definite method’, known in modern language as the algorithm. In his 1936 paper, Turing made a bridge between the logical and physical worlds, thoughts and actions, which crossed conventional boundaries, and thus created the Turing Machine. The concept is like that of an equation or formula, in which there is an infinity of possible Turing machines with each corresponding to a different ‘definite method’ or algorithm. Turing imagined each algorithm as being written out as a set of instructions, and that working to interprete each set of instructions and carrying them out is in itself a mechanical process. This can then be embodied in a particular Turing machine, namely the Universal Turing Machine, which can be made to do whatever other particular Turing machine would do simply by supplying it with the standard form describing that Turing machine - creating one machine for all possible tasks.

Nowadays, its hard to not think of the Universal Turing Machine as being a computer program, and its task of interpreting and obeying the program as what computers themselves do. So the Universal Turing Machine embodies the essential principle for a computer: a single machine which can be turned to any well-defined task by supplying it with the correct program. The Universal Turing Machine, abstract though it may have been, exploits what is now seen as the ‘stored program’ concept essential to the modern computer.

But in 1936, modern day computers did not exist, and so these concepts were created out of his mathematical imagination. It was nine years later that electronic technology was tested sufficiently to allow Turing’s ideas to be transfered to actual engineering.

The Second World War and the emergence of the computer.

In 1938, Turing was offered a temporary post by von Neumann at Princeton, but returned to Cambridge instead. Publicly, he sponsored the entry into Britain of a young Jewish German refugee. In secret, he worked part-time for the British cryptanalytic department - also known as Government Code and Cypher School. His was the first scientific input into an arts-based department, due to the failure of pre-scientific methods to decript the mechanical Enigma cipher used by Nazi Germany. It was only in 1939 when information and vital ideas from Poland when significant progress was made.

After the British delcaration of war on the 3rd September, Bletchley Park was set up as the wartime cryptanalytic headquarters where Turing took up full-time work. Due to the very particular way the Germans had been using the Engima, the Polish work was limited, however one of their ideas embodied the machine called a Bombe. Turing generalised the Polish machine into a far more powerful device. 

Turing cracked the system at the end of 1939, and from late 1940 onwards the Turing-Welchman Bombe allowed reading of the Luftwaffe signals to become routine. Turing knew that cracking the Enigma codes would be a long process, and required it to be a slow process - even at the cost of more lives being lost - to prevent the Nazis discovering that the code was being cracked. Turing argued that if the Nazis were aware, they would change the code and their process of cracking it would need to begin again.

Turing’s section ‘Hut 8′, deciphering Naval and U-boat messages became the key unit at Bletchley Park. When the Americans entered the war in 1941, the battle of the Atlantic ws moving toward Allied advantage. However, on 1st February 1942, the Enigma machine for the Atlantic U-boats was given an extra complication. This complication made nothing decodable.

Many recalled Alan Turing as being shabby, nail-bitten and tie-less, halting in speech and awkward in manner. He worked relentlessly in long shifts with his colleagues of student age, including Joan Clarke, who he proposed to but later retracted his porposal after telling her of his homosexuality.

By march 1943, after returning from a trip across the Atlantic to liason about the desperate U-boat Enigma crisis, logical weakness in the changed U-boat Enigma system had been detected, and the Enigma decrpytion was effectively restored for the remainder of the war.

Turing devoted himself and his time to learning electronics. He had more ambitious end goals - he planned the embodiment of the Universal Turing Machine in eletronic form. In effect, invent the digital computer. For his part in this, he was awarded an OBE. He became captivated by the potential of the computer he was creating, fascinated by what Turing machines could do, rather than by what they could not do. By the end of the war, he held that the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress towards embodying intelligence in an artificial form rather than the tentative idea that there ware steps of intuition.

After the war, Turing drew up a detailed computer scheme. A plan that could be effected immediately with the memory storage. Turing emphasised speed in every sense, and knew that advances in technology would soon transform his own designs.

After the war.

Alan Turing was arrested and came to trial 31st March 1952. He made no serious denial or defence to the charges, instead telling everyone that there was nothing wrong in his actions. Due to the time and its views against homosexuality, Turing was concerned to be open about his sexuality. Rather than go to prison, Turing opted for injections of oestrogen intended to neutralise his libido over the period of a year.

He continued with his research, and - unkown to most around him - he also continued to work for GCHQ, the post-war successor to Bletchley Park. However, since the start of the Cold War and the alliance with the United States, it meant that known homosexuals were not eligible for security clearance.

In March 1953, state security became concerned over a visiting Norwegian who had come to see Turing.

Alan Turing was found 8th June 1954, a day after he died of cyanide poisoning. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

Alan Turing influenced modern day lives across the world. His cracking of the Enigma code changed the course of the war for the Allied advantage. Without him, historians have argued that the war would have dragged on for another two years or more. His influences and input into computers has influenced the creation of all our beloved modern devices. Not only computers, but anything that involves the use of an algorithm.

Due to the time that he lived in, Turing wasn’t allowed to be the man he truly should have been. He was never fully recognised for his work during the war due to his homosexuality and the highly secretive nature of the work. Due to the Cold War that ensued aftewards, public knowledge of Bletchley Park was near to nothing - other than for those who worked there. So until the 1990′s Alan Turing’s input into the war was widely unknown. Even today, most people are unaware of his amazing contribution. I chose to include a photograph of Turing smiling - in contrast to the subdued photograph used by Fullerton. I believe that if social understanding had been more accepting of Turing’s sexuality and his unusual behaviour, and if we had recognised Turing at the time of the war - say if the Cold War had never occured and there was no or little need for secretive information - this is the image or a similiar image would have been used for Turing.

http://www.turing.org.uk/publications/dnb.html