Panasonic has announced plans to offer a four-day workweek to employees in Japan in an effort to improve productivity and attract better workers, according to a new report from Nikkei Asia. The move comes after the Japanese government made official recommendations to private employers in 2021 that included a shorter…
I feel like I’ve lost my goddamn mind, but we’ll get back to that point soon. Let’s start with this. Two things seem to be true at this moment in the pandemic:
First, that our numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, in most cases not just by a hair’s breadth, but often by two, three, even four times their previous peaks.
Second, that we are doing less now to mitigate cases than ever before.
This happened alarmingly fast. Delta took a couple months to simmer here. Omicron, the dominant variant, boiled as soon as it hit the stove. It rolled over us in a matter of weeks, not months. Hey, we flattened the curve — just in the wrong fucking direction, as our leap in cases is now a billionaire’s rocketship, launching straight up and into orbit.
With this new variant came the assumption that it is a milder form of the disease, and from that single assumption arrived a number of decisions. The CDC changed all its policies in a sudden, confusing barf of protection reductions. (Though in fairness, Carl Bergstrom notes on a Twitter thread that, despite the piss-poor communication, there might be some value in these changes.) The CDC’s head, Rochelle Walensky, offered a (correctly) maligned soundbite, explaining that “the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Never mind the fact that comorbidities such obesity, diabetes, depression are not uncommon, particularly as one enters middle-age (and never mind that were they uncommon, it is not actually encouraging to be told that you are unwell and will be the ones to bear the brunt of the disease that nobody is protecting you from). The Biden administration has relied on vaccines and mandates, but not fully — they refuse, even still, to make vaccines a requirement of domestic flights. And the current business mandate is being challenged in the Supreme Court, with a not-unreasonable chance for it to fail. There are supposed to be tests coming to us by mail, though I’m not sure when, and we’re not even sure how well the home tests detect Omicron, particularly in its early stages. There exists little clarity on what anybody is doing, which mostly means, nobody is doing anything.
From this, you can feel the lack of leadership and the loss of focus and good communication cascading out through the populace like a wave of surrender. Masks? Fuck ’em. Gone! Gone. I mean, to be clear, they were gone mostly when the CDC botched that communication early on, but here, now, I go out and I don’t see a mask on a face. Not from anybody. Not even as our cases are triple where they were in this county. Vaccine mandates? Temporarily gone, and probably full gone soon enough, with no seeming plans to introduce them. Testing? Quarantine? Isolation? Contact tracing? Can’t find tests, and the CDC has changed who should get them. Quarantine and isolation is already limited now, and for the most part here, parents and workers are subtly encouraged in schools and in jobs to just… casually not test at all because if you test, you might find it, and then your kids might not be in school (THE HORROR) and you might not get to come in to do your job (OH SHIT) and so maybe, y’know, I dunno, don’t go looking for COVID and you won’t find it. (This, a particularly Trumpy echo.) Contact tracing? Hahaha. Haha. Hahahhahgaaaaaaah yeah nobody is tracing shit anymore. It’s on you if you wanna do that. Good luck.
And from all this has cascaded a particular attitude, even among people who were once maybe careful, who are vaccinated and are not necessarily thoughtless people —
The attitude is, I give up.
It’s, “I don’t like this anymore, so I’m not going to do it.”
It’s, “Well, we’re all going to catch it anyway, gotta live my life.”
It’s, “I don’t want to hear anymore about how the bridge is out, I’m just going to accelerate the car and assume they’ll put the bridge back up before I get there, or at the very least, I’ll just jump the ravine in my Toyota Camry.”
They are bored with the pandemic.
They are tired of it.
They don’t want restrictions.
They don’t want to stop or even slow down.
And it has led to this peculiar, troubling moment —
Cases are worse than they’ve ever been.
And people are done caring.
If you ask them, they will say — to go back to the beginning of this — oh, I hear Omicron is mild. Is it? Is it mild? Maybe. It may be milder. I know a lot of people who have COVID — more now than cumulatively throughout the entire pandemic — and they’re all vaxxed and boosted and experiencing a relatively mild sickness. Of course, when you realize that before now, there was Delta, and vaxxed/boosted people did not catch Delta easily, it starts to feel like it’s weird to call Omicron — which is kicking down the doors of your body’s protections — milder. Is it mild? It’s mild in that it doesn’t seem to lead to as much hospitalization and death, though that’s not the only metric by which we live. A lot of the people I know who have or had Omicron experienced a rough ride, even if it didn’t include an ambulance ride. Hospitalizations have not yet made the epic leap with the case rates, though hospitalizations are usually a couple-few weeks behind, and deaths behind that. And even still, hospitalizations are boiling over (yes, even with kids) and our healthcare system is wobbling toward collapse, and none of this even seems to consider the unknown potential of Omicron to lead to Long COVID, which would be a mass disabling event that would create some of those pesky comorbidities the CDC is so eager to dismiss. Does COVID significantly increase the chance of developing Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes in children? Seems like it does.
If you’re starting to feel like, “Hey, maybe this doesn’t sound good,” check this out:
Let’s go to Buzzfeed, where they asked experts to clarify some of the questions about kids and COVID. (Please, no jokes here about Buzzfeed — they have a pretty robust journalistic wing, and have at times done some fantastic reporting.) In this article, you will find first this:
‘“You don’t want colds passed around schools either, right?” Rutherford said. “But on the other hand, one of the reasons we have preschools is so parents can go work. That’s a benefit of it. And if you send them home every time they sneeze, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy parents.”’ Rutherford said it makes sense for schools to continue to follow whatever pre-COVID sickness policies they had in place, with an added layer of COVID testing for children with more severe upper respiratory symptoms. But he said this testing should be rapid, not PCR, which usually takes multiple days to deliver results.
Because, ha ha, yeah, exactly, you can’t be too STRICT with this shit, right? But then:
‘About 20% to 40% of teens who get infected may develop long COVID, said Blumberg. “In younger children, it’s less, but we don’t have good numbers on that.”’
Wait, wait, what? Fucking what now? Twenty to forty percent? Uh, first, that’s a huge unknown gap between those two numbers, but even on the low end, that’s one out of five teenagers.
But we’re just like, nah, fuck it? Ha ha, eat shit, teenagers!
Now, I want you to go check out the CHOP guidance for the new year — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a generally reputable source on all things children-health-related, yeah? They begin their piece by noting how COVID has pushed the healthcare system to its limits and how dangerous it is, yadda yadda yadda, but then they land on their actual guidance, which begins with:
‘With evidence that COVID-19 is becoming a milder infection in most children, and at a time when all adults and youth in K-12 settings have been offered vaccination, our PolicyLab experts and CHOP clinical leadership have reached a consensus that preserving as much in-person schooling as possible outweighs the risks of infection to children and school staff at this stage of the pandemic.‘
To translate: keeping kids out of school for any period is a sickness greater than COVID.
And here, again, is where I reiterate:
I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Am I losing my mind? Are you?
I sure feel that way.
I feel like someone just told me 2 + 2 now equals 22, and a lot of people seem to agree with that, even though we all know math doesn’t work that fucking way.
I feel like I’m seeing and hearing how bad the pandemic is presently, how the systems are straining, how teachers and healthcare workers are quitting in droves and are pushed to their limits, how friends and family are seeing workplaces and schools hamstrung by all this shit, and then, at the same time… I’m seeing nobody do anything about it. Like, not a fucking thing. In fact, less is being done.
We acknowledge, oh yeah it’s not good, and then we just keep doing what we were doing. No slow down. Only acceleration. We will violently shoulder our way through this pandemic, because we are so done with it, even as it is clearly, clearly not done with us. Schools are open because jobs are open because the economy must be fed. And people defend it. Like they’re people who know they’re in the Matrix and they defend it. Everybody’s Cipher from the first movie, YEAH I LIKE THE TASTE OF THE STEAK, FUCK YOU. Long Covid? Ennh, fuck it. Masks? Fuck it. Restrictions, lockdowns, any mitigation efforts? Fuckity fuck it all. We give up. Game over. Get COVID. Who cares. ISN’T IT TIME WE ALL GET IT, says Agent Smith as he coughs into your mouth.
It feels like gaslighting not from a single-source, but in a miasma that surrounds you. It’s area-of-effect gaslighting. You feel like you wanna say, “Hey things seem really bad right now, maybe we should give things a pause,” and then you get a look like, WOW LOOK AT MISTER LOVES-THE-PANDEMIC OVER HERE, CHECK OUT THE PLAGUE FETISHIST, THE MASK-HUMPER, THE GUY WHO REALLY LOVES HURTING CHILDREN BY SUGGESTING THEY NOT GO TO A SCHOOL WHERE HALF THEIR PEERS ARE OUT, HALF THE TEACHERS ARE OUT, BUT THAT’S FINE IT’LL MAKE THEM TOUGH. It’s like we’re trying to John Wayne our way through a global pandemic, like we can bootstrap it. I mean, sure, kids are barely vaccinated. But jobs! Jobs. Jobs jobs jobs. Gotta churn that crank. Gotta turn out the widgets, and you can’t churn widgets unless your kids are in school. Feed the beast!
(Here I recognize that yes, some kids do need to be in school, not just for education and social development, but also for food. But it’s also worth recognizing that these are systemic failures, in part, and punishing them by forcing them through a boiling pandemic comes with its own obvious deleterious consequences.)
It’s like we’re done with the finding out part and want to get back to the fucking around part, even though it’s not usually supposed to go in that order.
We just… deflated.
I don’t have any great conclusion here. I only write this because I want it written somewhere that I feel like I’m losing my mind. And maybe I am. Maybe I’m the wrong one.
It’s just — what the fuck.
I am blown away. Once we celebrated our healthcare workers and teachers, once we at least tried to band together and flatten the curve (if in our limited way), but now we’re like, nah, fuck it. Nah. Just nah. I mean, sure, other countries are addressing the problem. Sure, if we had just cooled our heels for two, maybe three weeks, we could’ve taken this sharp rise and spiked that volleyball back to the ground. But this is America. We do everything bigger and better. We’ll make this the biggest spike the world has ever seen. We’ll never let it go. We learned to stop worrying and love the COVID.
Mission Accomplished. That’s the banner COVID is hanging right now.
It won.
And we are good with that.
And now imagine:
Just wait till climate change really gets going. Every day is already a new story about how FIRE AND SNOW HAD A BABY AND A NEW ATMOSPHERIC RIVER IS DROPPING A BOMB CYCLONE OF HUMID HELL WASPS ON BOTH COASTS, and already we’re like, ennnh but fuck it. But I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ll develop renewed patience just in time, I’m sure. Any time now. Any. Time.
(As a PS, I apologize if this feels like a bummer. But I honestly feel pretty anxious not just about the pandemic, but also about our sudden acquiescence to it, and I really wanted to talk about it somewhere that wasn’t just Twitter. It required unpacking and so here I am, unpacking. I will get back to fun writing advicey stuff soon. Buy my books or I die. Bye.)
Season two of Star Trek series Picard is set to arrive on Paramount+ next month, but the show’s still in production, keeping to a schedule structured to film seasons two and three back to back. Or it was in production until this week, when the sci-fi show temporarily ground to a halt for exactly the reason you’re…
Did you know Kristofer Hivju, AKA Game of Thrones’ Tormund Giantsbane, is in season two of The Witcher? This might be news to you even if you’ve watched the entire season (here’s your warning for very mild spoilers for the latest episodes of The Witcher), as Hivju had some serious prosthetics he donned for the show.
Hivju played Geralt’s old friend Nivellen, a magical man who was cursed to look like a boar and/or a bear. The transformation is so complete, however, that it’s easy to not realize Hivju and Nivellen are one in the same.
Buy it Now
I, for one, had no idea that was Hivju under all those prosthetics until I stumbled upon the video above, which goes into detail how the show’s visual effects team created Nivellen, who Hivju describes as “a kind, funny, secretive kind of guy.” (Spoiler—he’s a horrible guy as well.)
About halfway through, you see Hivju getting rigged up in prosthetics, which includes a full bodysuit made off a mold of Hivju’s actual body. The actor’s performance, however, went beyond the Nivellen suit—Hivju worked with a movement coach to try to incorporate how a bear and/or boar moves into his performance (though how a bear and/or boar would be able to throw a knife is a bit beyond me).
And while Hivju had a full prosthetic bodysuit, the show did use CGI for his face. “I didn’t manage to make my face look like a boar,” he says. “I tried, though.” Hivju did wear what looked like the mask from a football helmet on set, which held a camera that captured his facial expressions for the CGI team.
Another Witcher actor who had to don a major monster costume was Basil Eidenbenz, who played the Witcher Eskel. Eskel eventually turns into a tree creature called a leshy, and had to undergo his own time in the makeup chair to get the look right. Check out that process below, which he posted to his Instagram.
Anti-vaccine activists have spent the past few days spreading lies about Betty White, the beloved actress who passed away at 99 years old on Dec. 31. But contrary to internet rumors, Betty White didn’t die after getting a covid-19 booster shot.
In the UK I grew up in there were only three ice cream flavours - vanilla, chocolate and pink. For sophisticates, there was something called Neopolitan which was vanilla, chocolate AND pink. In squares.
Baskin and Robbins turned up when I was about 17. Terry and I liked the idea that Adam’s world was always behind the times, because of Adam, so even if it was 1989, his world was mostly 1950-1975.
I’ve just had to refresh my US Visa because I’ve been out of the US for so long. I wonder if people out there know how many vaccinations you need to be allowed to enter the US to live…
New research this week seems to affirm the suspicion that the coronavirus can infect many parts of the human body, not just our respiratory system. It also found that the virus can sometimes linger in the body even after a person’s initial symptoms have abated. The preliminary findings may shine a light on the complex…
Instagram tog bort möjligheten att se ett rakt, kronologiskt flöde år 2016. Istället visas en tidslinje baserad på algoritmer.
Utvecklaren har tidigare sagt att ett kronologiskt flöde skulle göra det omöjligt för de flesta personer att se allt innehåll. Nu har Instagram ändrat sig och berättat att de arbetar på en valfri kronologisk tidslinje, vilken kommer återintroduceras nästa år.
Läget kommer visa inlägg från personer användaren följer, i kronologisk ordning. Appen kommer även lägga till ett ”favorit”-flöde som prioriterar inlägg från vissa personer.
Jag får många mail och meddelanden på mina sociala kanaler, nästan alltid är det frågor som rör diverse hälsoproblem. Tidigare brukade jag angripa problemen utifrån symptomen, och försöka förstå vad det är för tillstånd och vad man kan göra åt saken. Efter mycket introspektion och meditation har jag dock börjat tänka på ett helt annat sätt, nämligen hur viktigt det är att förstå den riktiga roten till sina problem. Inte nödvändigtvis den fysiologiska roten även om det också är intressant, utan den emotionella och mentala delen av det.
Låt mig ta ett exempel: en kille mailade mig om sin envisa typ 2 diabetes och när jag frågade om roten till problemet fick jag svaret “det är genetiskt” och så må vara fallet men faktum är att även de sjukdomar som vi tänker på som genetiska inte är renodlat genetiska. Endast några ynka procent är det, och typ 2 diabetes är inte en av dem. Däremot kan vi ha en medfött ökad risk för att utveckla vissa sjukdomar, men det betyder inte att de för den skull är genetiska. Det är fortfarande livsstilsbetingat till största del, dvs påverkas starkt av kost, aktivitetsnivå, sömnhygien, socialt liv och psykiskt mående.
Mitt nya favoritområde som jag håller på att utforska heter psykoneuroimmunologi och handlar om hur psykologiska faktorer som stress, oro, ångest och depression inte bara bidrar till utan även skapar sjukdom i kroppen. Inom psykoneuroimmunologi kan man hitta den riktiga roten till sina hälsoproblem.
Låter det flummigt?
Även om känslor kan uppfattas ganska abstrakt så har varje känsla sin egen biosignatur. Varje känsla och tanke inbegriper en fysiologisk process som involverar inte bara hjärnan utan flera olika organ såsom binjurarna, sköldkörteln, mag- och tarmsystemet med mera.
Introspektion gräver upp emotionella rötter!
Sedan jag började förkovra mig i olika typer av introspektion har jag lyckats koppla ihop livshändelser med fysiologiska och emotionella problem på löpande band. Jag har också sett den här processen hos andra, och det gäller allt från generell ångest till depression, ryggont, autoimmuna tillstånd, menstruationsrubbningar och beroendeutlopp. När jag gjorde den här upptäckten om hur otroligt ihopkopplad vår mentala hälsa är med vårt fysiska välmående, så började jag direkt gräva i det för att se om det fanns någon forskning gjord. Till min glädje forskas det faktiskt väldigt mycket på det, och det finns till exempel en stark koppling mellan autoimmunitet och trauma.
Vad är trauma och är du traumatiserad?
När man säger trauma är det många som tänker att det måste vara stora, hemska händelser men för att någonting ska kvalificeras som ett trauma räcker det med att vara med om en händelse som man inte har den emotionella kapaciteten att processa.
Om man tittar på till exempel sin barndom från sitt vuxna perspektiv kan det se ut som vilken barndom som helst, men utifrån en 5-årings perspektiv kan det ha varit den ena traumatiska upplevelsen efter den andra. Att som 7-åring dyka upp på hockeyträningen i gamla, fula och förstora skridskor kan vara ett trauma, även om det låter jättetramsigt ur en vuxens perspektiv. En mamma som gråter utan att förklara för sin 5-åring vad som har hänt kan vara ett trauma, och ett spädbarn som inte blir upplockat av en förälder trots upprepade skrik och gråt, kan bli ett djupt trauma som inte ens koms ihåg i vuxen ålder.
Trauma, stress och försummelse
Även i vuxen ålder har vi olika kapacitet att hantera känslor och händelser. De flesta kvinnor kan hantera ett smärtsamt break-up, men många män kan inte det. Att frugan vill skilja sig kan vara ett avgrundsdjupt trauma som det inte finns emotionell kapacitet att ta hand om. Att spendera tonåren som utstött eller inte känna sig uppskattad av det motsatta könet kan också vara traumatiserande.
Ett annat kapitel på detta tema är självkänslan. När vi inte tänker särskilt högt om oss själva ökar risken för olika nivåer av försummelse. Det måste inte vara så dramatiskt att andra reagerar för att man har slutat duscha och borsta tänderna, men det kan vara att kvällarnas spenderas med en flaska vin framför teven, eller att dagarna spenderas med dataspel och skräpmat. Kroppen blir mer och mer nedgången, men man gör ingenting åt saken. Den typen av försummelse tyder ofta på ett upplevt lågt egenvärde eller bristande emotionell kapacitet.
Vad leder det till i förlängningen?
Till sjukdom!
Vilken sjukdom? Det mest troliga är någon form av inflammation eftersom man medvetet eller omedvetet belastar kroppen på olika sätt, framförallt de inre organen. Om det finns någon typ av missbruk med i bilden såsom matmissbruk, alkohol, tabletter, dataspel, porr och så vidare, uppstår inte sällan hormonella problem.
Hur kan dataspelsberoende orsaka hormonella problem?
Eller inflammation? Det är en kombination av passivitet, självförsummelse, dåligt näringsintag och obefintlig sömnhygien. Det gäller förstås inte alla gamers, men många är uppe sent, dricker energidrycker framför datorn och äter bara det som går lätt att stoppa in i munnen samtidigt som man spelar. Ett recept för kraschade testosteronnivåer och kronisk låggradig inflammation. Inte för att hänga ut gamers som en enhetlig grupp men de brukar inte vara vältränade unga män med god hållning som äter ekologiskt, även om dessa också finns förstås!
Vad är den riktiga roten till dina problem?
Det kan ta lång tid att komma på alla delar som ledde fram till ett fysiskt eller psykiskt sjukdomstillstånd, men delarna finns där. Det finns en rot eller en kärna. Ingenting “bara är”!
Det finns alltid en anledning bakom kronisk värk, kronisk övervikt, hashimotos, ångest, depression, tvångstankar och diverse skador.
Kan du hitta dem?
Vi måste ta hand om oss själva inifrån och ut, för så fort vi inte gör det lägger vi grunden för sjukdom. Vissa är tåligare än andra och kan köra över sig själva på många olika sätt utan att det blir några större problem av det, men de flesta kan inte det!
Hur många 50-åringar känner du som är i toppform och aldrig klagar över sin hälsa? Ju äldre vi blir desto större risk för sjukdom och ohälsa, men det måste inte vara så. Du kan påverka så otroligt mycket själv!
Det positiva med psykoneuroimmunologi och den emotionella komponenten bakom hälsoproblem är att det gör det hela väldigt lösbart. Med ihärdig självinventering och självarbete kan du laga det som är trasigt och få en friskare kropp på kuppen! Så ihopkopplat är psyket med det fysiska att när du lagar det ena så lagar du det andra. Många som börjar meditera märker av kroppsliga fenomen, som att värk eller andra sjukdomstillstånd blir värre vid djupare meditation, men kan sedan plötsligt bli bättre eller försvinna. Meditation är ett fantastiskt verktyg men dagboksskrivande och olika former av terapi kan också hjälpa.
Jag vill egentligen skriva mer om det här ämnet men jag börjar såhär så länge. Jag vet att många tycker att området är superspännande, så vi kan väl gräva i det tillsammans? Berätta gärna om du läst eller hört något coolt, eller kanske har någon egenupplevd historia!
And to help us along with this, I am calling on your friend and mine, Whatever’s favorite recurring gimmick, the Fictional Interlocutor!
For the record, I’m not comfortable being called a gimmick.
I understand that entirely, and yet.
Hmmmph. Why are you bothering me now?
Because I want you to help me introduce the latest Scalzi acquisition!
(Rolls eyes) You know, there are only so many multi-necked guitars you can buy before the schtick gets old.
I understand that. Are you ready?
(Sighs) Fine, let’s get this over with.
Okay! Here’s the new thing:
Wow, what a surprise, you bought a new guitar.
Well, yes, but —
And it’s a three-string cigar box guitar with a silk-screened American flag! How very patriotic of you.
Thank you, but —
Only one neck, though. You’re slipping.
Well, look, one, not every guitar needs more than one neck. And two, the guitar isn’t actually the latest acquisition.
Come again?
The guitar isn’t the latest acquisition.
So… you’re showing off what, then? New shoes? Is this kindergarten show and tell?
Not the shoes.
(Impatient) Then what? The jacket? The pants? That clearly obvious neck wattle?
It’s not a wattle.
All right, it’s new, it needs time to grow into a wattle. It’s a wattlette.
That’s not even a word, and no to all of those.
I give up. What is it?
Here, let me reframe the photo. Maybe that will help.
Okay, so, your latest acquisition is a court summons for trespassing at a local church.
Well, see, that’s the thing. I’m not trespassing.
What do you mean?
That’s the latest Scalzi acquisition.
You… bought a church?!?
Yes.
A church.
Yes.
You.
Yes.
A whole church.
I mean, who buys a fraction of a church?
I… you… just… Dude. A church.
Come on. Yes. I bought it. Actually, we bought it, since Krissy is on the title as well.
… why?
I need an excuse?
Yes, you really do.
Fine. For a while now, Krissy and I have been talking about how we wanted to get some additional space for long-term business plans that we have. We had looked at other property in Bradford, but it didn’t fit for what we wanted to do. So were thinking of buying some land locally and building some office and storage space on it. I opened up a real estate site to see what land parcels might be available nearby, and as it happened this church had literally come onto the market that day, a couple hours earlier. In terms of what we needed a space for, this building offered it, along with a fair number of other options as well.
We set up an appointment to see it, were convinced it was worth pursuing, and made an offer. They accepted it. And if people are reading this, it means we’ve actually closed on the deal, and we’re now officially the owners of the building. We own a church.
You’re not planning to, like, start a religion or anything.
Well, as it happens, Krissy and I are both ordained ministers.
What.
It’s true. It’s useful to officiate weddings. But to be clear, no, we have no plans to start a religion. The track record of science fiction authors starting their own religions is, shall we say, spotty at best.
You say that now. But you have a church.
You’ll just have to trust me on this one.
We’ll see.
Fair enough.
And anyway, now you’re one of those people.
What do you mean?
Look, not everyone can just wake up, eat a donut and then buy a church on a whim.
I mean, it wasn’t a whim. As noted, we have practical reasons for wanting more space, and it just so happens that the space that best suited our needs locally came in the form of a church.
With that said, okay, sure. I’m now in that tier of authors with idiosyncratic real estate purchases. Some of these authors buy old movie theaters. Some buy Masonic temples. Some buy small islands. I’m getting a church. I’m not going to pretend it’s not a little eccentric. I actually like that. I will probably lean into it as we go along.
So, how much are churches going for these days, anyway?
A bit more than a six-necked guitar, but inasmuch as this is a church in a small rural community, possibly less than you might suspect. Suffice to say we wouldn’t have gotten it if we did not believe it was within our means. The odd musical purchase aside, Krissy and I are fairly conservative in how we spend our money. This is a long-term project and investment and we’ve budgeted for it as such.
What happened to the former owners? Did you defenestrate them or something?
There was no defenestration. The building was formerly owned by the Methodist Church, and as I understand it over time the congregation shrank and was merged with another congregation a bit down the road. When that happened, the Methodists didn’t need this building any more, and while they kept it in reasonably good repair (otherwise we wouldn’t have bought it), it wasn’t doing what it was intended to do for them, which was to be a place of worship and community. So they let it go to be useful to someone else, in this case, us.
How old is it?
It’s a little over eighty years old.
Is it haunted?
When word got out locally that we were buying the place, some former members of the congregation assured us that it was. However, if it is, they are Methodist ghosts, and I suspect that means they are reasonably friendly and that the haunting will be somewhat polite.
You should start a bookstore/goth club/restaurant/[insert some other idea here] in that space.
When you buy your own church, you can do any of those things you like! As for us, be assured that we do have plans, and that we will work toward them over time. Again, this is a long-term project for us. I will say that one thing that Krissy and I have talked about is the desire to have the building continue to be part of the community, rather than entirely removed from it. Bradford has been good to us over the years, and we would like to return the favor. How best to do that is something we still have to think about. But it’s very much part of our planning for the place.
What are you going to name it? Church of the Scalzi?
There’s already at least one of those, in Venice (right by the Scalzi Bridge!). But we might call it that, simply for convenience. I’m sure there will be other possible names: Church of the Infinite Burrito, First Assembly of the Bacon Cat, The Sacred Order of the Six-Necked Beast, and so on. If people have suggestions, they can leave them in the comments, along with any other questions they might have about the church, and us, and the fact that it’s our place now.
And I think that’s it for you today, fictional interlocutor.
Return to #1 New York Times bestseller Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn world of Scadrial as its second era, which began with The Alloy of Law, comes to its earth-shattering conclusion in The Lost Metal.
For years, frontier lawman turned big-city senator Waxillium Ladrian has hunted the shadowy organization the Set—with his late uncle and his sister among their leaders—since they started kidnapping people with the power of Allomancy in their bloodlines. When Detective Marasi Colms and her partner Wayne find stockpiled weapons bound for the Outer City of Bilming, this opens a new lead. Conflict between Elendel and the Outer Cities only favors the Set, and their tendrils now reach to the Elendel Senate—whose corruption Wax and Steris have sought to expose—and Bilming is even more entangled.
After Wax discovers a new type of explosive that can unleash unprecedented destruction and realizes that the Set must already have it, an immortal kandra serving Scadrial’s god reveals that Harmony’s power is blocked in Bilming. That means the city has fallen under the influence of another god: Trell, worshipped by the Set. And Trell isn’t the only factor at play from the larger Cosmere—Marasi is recruited by offworlders with strange abilities who claim their goal is to protect Scadrial…at any cost.
Harmony’s vision of future possibilities comes to an abrupt halt tomorrow night, with only blackness after that. It’s a race against time, and Wax must choose whether to set aside his rocky relationship with God and once again become the Sword that Harmony has groomed him to be. If no one steps forward to be the hero Scadrial needs, the planet and its millions of people will come to a sudden and calamitous ruin.
Brandon Sanderson grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He lives in Utah with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. He is the author of such bestsellers as the Mistborn trilogy and its sequels, The Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, and The Bands of Mourning; the Stormlight Archive novels The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance; and other novels, including The Rithmatist and Steelheart. He won a Hugo Award for Best Novella for The Emperor’s Soul, set in the world of his acclaimed first novel, Elantris. Additionally, he was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time sequence.
We will often start our days with the best of intentions … and then promptly get caught up in a chain of busywork, messages, opening browser tabs, checking on things, answering email …
… and soon the day has gone by and we wonder what we did with the day.
There’s a simple practice that can shift that in a huge way: the Interstitial Ritual.
It’s very simple:
When you finish with a task (or email, message, reading something) … pause. Don’t go to the next tab or message right away.
Take a breath. Notice where you are, how you feel, what is around you.
Write down what you just finished, if it was a task. For me, I have a Today list and a Done list and I simply add the last task to my Done list, remove it from the Today list.
Celebrate! Reinforce your accomplishment by being grateful.
Now take another breath. What do you want to do next? It can be another task on your Today list, it can be answering the next email in your inbox, or it might be to take a break, drink some water, go for a walk, stretch.
Set that intention, and get to it.
It’s that simple. A pause, a little mindfulness, write down what you just did, and then consider what you want to do next.
I promise you, this will bring a lot more intention, mindfulness and focus to your day. You might even get some important stuff done.
The trick is to remember. How will you remember to do this ritual after every task?
And how powerful would it be for you to make this shift?
The original population of wolves living in Norway and Sweden were wiped out 50 years ago, a report commissioned by the Norwegian parliament has concluded.
Smofcon Europe runs from December 3-5 in Lisboa, Portugal. James Bacon and Vincent Docherty, now both in Lisboa, took a few moments to let me know that they have now surpassed the Smofcon Amsterdam (2011) membership, and that this year’s … Continue reading →
One of my first short stories, written when I was 22 or just 23, I proudly showed to two people whose opinions I respected in the Fantasy world, both editors. One said it wasn’t very good. The other told me it was “pretentious twaddle”. I put the story away, and when I thought of it, I felt guilty for having written a story that bad and for ever showing it to people.
Twenty years later I was asked for a story for an anthology, remembered that long-ago buried story and went into the attic and found it in a box of things I was never going to show anyone. I read it, to see if there was anything in the mass of pretentious twaddle that I could use. It wasn’t actually bad at all, which surprised me. It was a typewritten manuscript, so I retyped it, fixing things I needed to fix on the way, but there wasn’t a lot to do.
No doubt buoyed by word that Wheel of Time is a hit out of the gate, Amazon Studios is once again reaching into its alarmingly deep pockets to fund another genre show: an adaptation of popular BioWare and Electronic Arts video game Mass Effect.
När man säger trauma är det många som tänker att det måste vara stora, hemska händelser men för att någonting ska kvalificeras som ett trauma räcker det med att vara med om en händelse som man inte har den emotionella kapaciteten att processa.
