Please be so kind as not to just say I'm welcome. Words are nothing but wind.

I was supposed to be there with the rest of you, and then a plague happened, and I know it's the least important possible thing to be upset about here but still.

Sometimes I wonder how long it would take for anyone to actually notice if I just vanished suddenly.

German surely has a word for that thing that cats and other small colonial predators sometimes do where they go hide somewhere to die.

me: I must offer something of value to this community I feel myself to be at the edges of, so that they will not reject me

also me: I will never be fully sure whether I am accepted in this community that I feel myself to be at the edges of because of the thing of value I brought, why does this keep happening to me

tbh I'm kinda hoping we fail tonight and the sun just doesn't come back

wouldn't fimbulwinter just be the cherry on top of this shit sundae of a year

(which will still be the best year in the next decade)

why can't I trust that people like me

ffs I have a crush on someone and I'm half-convinced that they barely tolerate me

anyway now I have potpie and also pot

Seven quarantines, and today is the solstice.

It occurs to me all of a sudden that all this worry I feel, all these games I end up half-consciously playing around how long to wait until responding and micro-positioning around power dynamics and trying to pretend I need the other person less than they need me -

that these things are likely totally unnecessary and the other person doesn't even realize that they're going on, and that if I were ever actually justified in doing these things, that that's a relationship I probably don't want to be in to start with.

Anyway I guess what I'm saying is I'm kind of an anxious mess and if I've reached out to you to say I have a crush on you that that was a massive effort of will and also headpats pls.

oh good now I get to struggle with rejection sensitivity and then subsequent anxiety again with respect to the group I'm slowly joining, cool and good

why did I think that they actually liked me

Suddenly, snow.

This year, what did I get done? What did I achieve?

1. I survived. I lived through a literal fucking plague.

2. I finally saw what might be this nation's fever breaking, if even a little bit - direct action on the one hand, and electoralist bleed-stopping on the other.

3. I passed my quals in algebra and geometry with flying colors. I got a rerun of the Forty Days of Hell, and I won.

4. I finally managed to get in touch with local mental health services.

5. I kept my tiny experiment in macroeconomics running (again, *through a plague.*)
5'. (More on that here: lorx.us/favor )

6. I bought a first firearm, and have been teaching myself to shoot long(ish)-range. I'm still decently good at it, after all these years; thank muscle memory, I suppose.

7. I applied to about 50 postdoc math programs.

8. I helped out with local mutual aid efforts and jail support (again, DURING A PLAGUE) more than a few times, both materially and with labor.

9. Colossal successes in [Unspecified Project 3] through predictive skill and access to [unspecified resource] permitting generous aid.

10. I came to conceptualize mathematical research, academic pursuits, and other personal pursuits as *literal* pursuits; that is, hunting abstractions.

11. I taught several friends to hunt basic algebra and calculus.

12. I turned 27; again, IN THE MIDDLE OF A WORLDWIDE PLAGUE. I didn't fully expect to make it this far.

13. I won the Little Drummer Boy Game! 9 hours to go on the bonus round.

14. I kept my own plague calendar and covid statistics tracking.

14'.) The calendar (BLaRTS) is defined to have Bunker Time Day 1 as March 17; right now is Year 1, Day 290. More finely, right now as I type this is BLaRTS T+24,985,000 - the time since 2020/3/17, UTC 22:00.

The plague stats are here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14X18mvs9dlsg9rnihnd8Vi6cMNesOkcp3AXV2epZWUQ/edit#gid=971024186

15. I put the finishing touches on my first original result (in geometric group theory, no less!).

Could I have done more? Certainly. But ultimately, hindsight is 2020.

At any rate if at midnight we roll over back to January 1st 2020, you can count on me ruling the world by about April.

Let us remember those who entropy has stolen from us this past year.

Let their names and their deeds live on in us.

Liang Wudong, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Li Wenliang, who is dead, but not forgotten.
David Graeber, who is dead, but not forgotten.
John Horton Conway, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Vaughan Jones, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Freeman Dyson, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Chuck Yeager, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Michael Hertz, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Ronald Lewis Graham, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Alex Trebek, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Shin Kyuk-ho, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Wes Wilson, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Yi Hae-won, who is dead, but not forgotten.

Cullen Mahany, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Rick May, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Ahmaud Arbery, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Breonna Taylor, who is dead, but not forgotten.
George Floyd, who is dead, but not forgotten.
James Scurlock, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Krzysztof Penderecki, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Kim Yong-un, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Bernd Fischer, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Peter Borwein, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Bernard Stiegler, who is dead, but not forgotten.
Michael Darwin Morley, who is dead, but not forgotten.
George Robery Carruthers, who is dead, but not forgotten.

I don't believe there's anything after death, unless people make it, and we haven't yet. Accordingly, these people are permanently gone. It is now ours to remember them, and to continue their work.

As of a few hours ago, it is BLaRTS T+25 megaseconds of the bunker era.

Happy New Year!

Got to do a little science today - tested out some armor-piercing ammunition and found it didn't do a thing to 1/4" AR500 plate. Possibly was due to how the target was hung up? Fun either way.

well, we sure are livetooting a doomed coup attempt in the year of our luigi BLaRTS 1, day 296

As of yesterday, it is BLaRTS Day 300.

Genuinely wasn't expecting it to take this long, at the start.

I... probably shouldn't be on daily modafinil, but it's about the only way I can manage to get work done consistently.

"What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it any worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it is true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it."

I think about that a lot. One of the little charred scrolls I took with me after a couple of wise men made a series of very long and very foolish mistakes, and failed to update well enough to notice in time.

Can't figure out whether I'm stressed to shit this morning because I'm already behind on thesis editing, because I forgot to take my meds last night, or because tomorrow there's going to be another attempted coup by right wing horrors.

Snapping my jaws, licking my chops, padding around, feeling like myself again.

I forgot how nice it was to hyperfocus on math I'm good at.

...I sure did hyperfocus so hard I abruptly ran out of reserves right after stopping and then crashed into unconsciousness for 2 or 3 hours. Oops.

At least I got my thesis draft done!

anyway I've used up all of my brain juice for the day and then some

wait, I slept through meds o'clock

one sec

I think about the concept of the Big Mac Index a lot.

one of these days, I am going to have to try to explain my thesis to you critters

bring you around my hunting grounds for a few moments

I finally thought to look it up and my traditional calendar birthday is 3/27, which is just deeply satisfying

wait, it's even better - it's *intercalary month* 3, day 27

I was born in a leap month with a date that has a nice simple relationship!

I never realized that; that's deeply satisfying.