Andrew Webster, The Verge:

The Longing feels like a troll. It’s a game that takes 400 real-world days to finish, and it moves at a pace that could only generously be described as glacial. The first word that ever appears on screen is “Wait!” Simple tasks, like walking up some stairs or opening a door, drag on forever. And yet, here I am, a month after I first started, and I can’t seem to stop playing.

I remember seeing this game during last month’s Indie World Showcase and thinking how much I wanted to play it. I thought the idea was clever, a game whose purpose is all about the player feeling the weight of time. I probably won’t play it because my backlog is ridiculous, but maybe one day…

Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score:

[Dr. Vincent] Felitti points out that obesity, which is considered a major public health problem, may in fact be a personal solution for many. Consider the implications: If you mistake someone’s solution for a problem to be eliminated, not only are they likely to fail treatment, as often happens in addiction programs, but other problems may emerge.

One female rape victim told Felitti, “Overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.”

[…]

“The idea of the problem being a solution, while understandably disturbing to many, is certainly in keeping with the fact that opposing forces routinely coexist in biological systems… What one sees, the presenting problem, is often only the marker for the real problem, which lies buried in time, concealed by patient shame, secrecy and sometimes amnesia—and frequently clinician discomfort.”

When I read this yesterday, I felt deep, deep shame. Up until the end of 2011, I always battled with my weight and my self-image. I ate all the time, even when I wasn’t hungry. I ate when I was bored, when I watched TV, when I was with friends. I ate when I hated myself, when I wanted to die, when I wanted to numb the pain. I’m 5’8”, and at my heaviest, I weighed over 230lbs. I had failed so many times in trying to keep my weight in check, and each time I failed, I ate and ate and ate.

But then that all changed. I wish I could remember the mindset I was in when it did, but I can’t. Not really. One day it just clicked: I want to lose weight, and I want to live healthily, and if that means a pound a week, a few pounds a month, so be it. This isn’t something I wanted to do in 10 days and then just stop; this was something I knew would be a lifelong endeavor, and at time time, that made complete sense to me. So I just started.

Slowly at first. I only worked out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I did simple resistance band training. I did what I could, knowing that I was in it for the long haul, and I decided to only weigh myself once a week. What I wanted to see was a steady decline in my weight, regardless of the number. My arbitrary goal at the time was to lose a pound a week. It didn’t happen the first month. I think I only lost two pounds that first month, but I had a month’s experience under my belt, and that made the next month a bit easier. I started to feel stronger, healthier, and more excited to start my next workout. That next month I lost the four pounds I wanted to lose, and then it snowballed from there.

From December 2011 to April 2012, I lost over 60lbs. Each new milestone propelled me to the next one, and I’ve been living healthily ever since. I’m at my ideal weight range, which is in the mid-170s, and I have no intention of ever stopping. I have over 10 years of experience built into my system now and stopping means sadness, means depression, means death. During the past decade, I have noticed myself stopping when in front of a mirror because 1) I like how I look, but also 2) I sometimes don’t recognize myself.

I felt shame when I read that passage above because I have sometimes thought to myself, whenever I’ve seen an overweight person, why they don’t do what I did and just lose the weight. I know this is awful, and my hands are trembling a bit as I’m writing this, unsure whether I should just delete this section or not, but it’s true. I only remember the results, the consistency, the routine of it now, but I don’t always remember all the pain and hardship I had to endure before I decided to make the change and how everyone is different. How everyone is battling their own demons, their own personal hells.

And then I read the next section:

But when the ACE study data started to appear on his computer screen, he realized that they had stumbled upon the gravest and most costly public health issue in the United States: child abuse. He had calculated that its overall costs exceeded those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters. It would also have a dramatic effect on workplace performance and vastly decrease the need for incarceration.

In early 2020, before I ever heard of the coronavirus, I befriended a little girl named Zoe. She is the sweetest person I’ve ever met in my life, but what I didn’t know when I met her was her past. When she was much younger, she witnessed something truly horrific, something that no one should ever ever see. She and her brother were both taken from their parents and adopted by a lovely family, but the memories of whatever she saw infected her in ways that make her a “troublesome” student. She lashes out in class sometimes, and other times she just shuts down without any discernible reason.

So I bought The Body Keeps the Score because I wanted to learn more about trauma, specifically childhood trauma, but then the coronavirus shut the world down, and I didn’t see any of the kids, particularly Zoe, for months and months. So I kinda forgot about the book. Last spring, I did attend a Zoom meeting that dealt specifically with childhood trauma, and I earned a certificate and everything, but without putting it into practice, I kinda forgot what I learned. Like others, I focused on other things, and when school started again in the fall, we were all more concerned about wearing masks and social distancing than paying attention to the mental states of our students.

Throughout the year, I’d been checking in with Zoe more and more, and to me, she seemed okay. She even gives me hugs whenever she sees me. It’s funny because there was one time last week when she saw me, she said, “Just give me a hug,” and she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me. It was so funny and so sweet that it was then that I remembered this book. I wanted to know if there was something in what I was doing that was helping her in some way. I’m about halfway through the book now, and I may be getting hints here and there about how to help children with childhood trauma, but I’m not quite there yet, so I’m not sure if what I’m doing is helping. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. All I know is that I’m committed to this topic and to Zoe and other children like her.

This is a lifelong endeavor, and I’m in it for the long haul.

Peter Kafka, Recode:

Gruber, a blogger and podcaster with a passionate audience among Apple fans (and executives), thinks Apple will eventually have to relent on at least one of the App Store policies former CEO Steve Jobs instituted years ago: Apps can’t tell their users they can buy something — say, sign up for the paid version of an app or buy virtual currency for Fortnite — outside of the app.

In practice, this means developers that don’t want to sell through the App Store — such as Netflix and Spotify, which sell subscriptions to their streaming services on their own sites so they don’t have to give Apple a cut of their monthly revenue — can’t tell app users they can do so when they open the app. Instead, they have to just hope users figure out how to do it on their own.

I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Epic vs. Apple trial, but this is one rule I never ever liked. Prohibiting developers from even breathing the fact that there are other ways of buying their products or services from within their own app always felt petty and stupid to me. If this one change does actually happen, then I think that’s a win for many people.

Aubrey stopped me and asked me if I would like to have my fortune told.

“Sure,” I said.

She pulled out about a dozen Pokémon cards and fanned them out, their backs to me. “Okay,” she said, “pick just one card but don’t look at it.”

“Okay.” I scanned my hand over the cards and picked one near the center. I did not look at it.

She grabbed it from my hand, looked at it for a bit, then showed it to me. I only saw it for a brief second before she pulled it away and said, “In your future, you’re going to get a dog!”

“A dog?” I said. “When will I get a dog?”

“Hmm,” she said, thinking about it. “When you’re fifty!” And then she ran away.

The 1st grade teacher was nearby and overheard the whole conversation. She laughed and said, “Yeah, you’ll be so sad and lonely at fifty that of course you’re going to get a dog.”

“Damn,” I said and laughed along with her.

“Freeze!”

I looked up and saw Aubrey and her big smile looking up at me. I froze and watched her grab my hand. She closed it into a fist, then grabbed my thumb and stuck it out. She grabbed my other hand and did the same thing. I stood there frozen in place with both my thumbs out, and I heard Gunner laugh behind her.

“Now stand like this,” Aubrey said. She stood on one leg. I did the same, and all the kids around us started to laugh. I must’ve looked ridiculous, but I didn’t care.

“Okay, you can unfreeze now,” Aubrey told me.

I did as she commanded and went on my way, a silly smile on my face.

Ashley, another of Aubrey’s classmates, is afraid of me. I’m not sure why, but every time she sees me, she freezes in place, as if she thinks I can’t see her if she doesn’t make a sound. Lately, when other kids see me walking around, they yell, “Ashley! Mario!” and Ashley looks around and freezes in place once she sees me. Other times, she falls on the floor and plays dead. All I can do is laugh because I have no idea what else to do.

Last week, some of the kids started to shield her with their bodies and say things like, “Nothing to see here,” or “Ashley isn’t here.” I laugh and say, “I see nothing,” and continue on my way.

I find all of this so adorable and weird and nonsensical that it has made my life that much richer, and sometimes I can’t wait until recess just to see what these silly kids do next.

Last week, I received two gifts by two teachers and friends I work with. The first was this wine by our 5th grade teacher:

I laughed out loud when I saw it. It references a few inside jokes that I won’t get into here.

And the next one was this beer by our 4th grade teacher:

Other than the fact that I think the elementary school is trying to turn their tech guy into an alcoholic, I appreciated both gifts. I’m not at all a wine or beer connoisseur, but I found both got me sufficiently drunk, so I highly recommend them both.

Reggie Ugwu reporting in the New York Times:

For Mars, 46, giving up his company’s independence is a major professional and philosophical pivot. Joining SiriusXM means leaving Radiotopia — a network of creator-owned podcasts Mars co-founded with the public media company PRX in 2014 — which he has regularly championed in the credits of “99% Invisible” as the home of “the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting.” Mars said he will give $1 million of the money he is earning from the sale of his company to support the rest of the Radiotopia roster, which includes smaller but well-known podcasts like “Criminal” and “Song Exploder.”

“I’ve been devoted to independent podcasting for a really long time, and I still believe that there’s a role for that in the world,” Mars said. “But my role right now is something different, which is to spend more time on the show and on making things that I love.”

I’ve been a fan of “99% Invisible” for a very long time, so of course I’m happy for Roman Mars and his team, especially after the last year, but part of me worries about the consolidation the podcast industry is experiencing right now. I trust Roman Mars enough to believe he thinks he’s making the absolute best decision for himself and his team, but I don’t know.

With the backing of Stitcher and SiriusXM, Mars said he hoped to continue producing ambitious work — without the strain of handling the financing himself.

“With a bigger company, I can do more things and not be fettered by the small business mentality,” he said. “Hustle less and make more.”

Artists need patrons, but will some part of his soul suffer because of this? Will he still have that fire now that he doesn’t have to worry about money? That’s really hard to say.

I do wish him luck, though, and I’ll keep listening.

After finishing Demon Slayer back in March, I’ve read through all of Jujutsu Kaisen (so good!), The Promised Neverland (much better than the anime), and Chainsaw Man (loved the art style). Today I start Haikyuu!!, and I’m excited.