BodyBySisyphus

It's been a while since I've breadposted because I've been lazy and not baking anything particularly exciting. But this week I pulled out the grain mill and channeled my inner Poilane. The fresh milled component is a mix of wheat, spelt, and khorasan, and the balance is Sequoia AP. I converted my liquid starter to a stiff one, then did one feeding with the fresh milled flour. After the starter doubled, I mixed the loaf and gave it an overnight proof in the fridge.

The forums said cutting the traditional three-day starter build down to one day doesn't make much of a difference, but I can't say the end product tasted substantially different from a decent whole wheat flour. Sprouting makes a much bigger difference but that's also a process.

I think I'm going to have to just go the whole hog and try all the extra steps to see if it's worth it.

Oil companies lobbied for - and received in the Inflation Reduction Act - better subsidies for carbon capture and storage while overstating its efficacy and selling captured CO2 for new oil extraction

My self-discipline has been crap lately. My therapist thinks I have ADHD. I spend all my time in front of a screen. I don't exercise as much as I used to, I bounce in and out of the gym, and I haven't been out dancing in years because - while I'm not the most covid conscious - that many people in a confined space together gives me the heebie jeebies nowadays.

I need something to right the ship. I did Korean martial arts when I was a kid but I never practiced on my own and was too much of a goofball to take it seriously.

I need do something that requires enough concentration to get me out of my head and ideally involves some speed. Any thoughts on what's good? Things that worked for you?

Vote Yellowstone Supervolcano for Erupting and Finally Putting a Stop to All This Nonsense 2024

The big AI models are running out of training data (and it turns out most of the training data was produced by fools and the intentionally obtuse), so this might mark the end of rapid model advancement

Slightly older interview with the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. He points out that a lot of anxiety over climate change is related to anxiety over the end of Western dominance, because the tropics are already experiencing climate driven catastrophe on top of the damage done by colonialism:

The West has also come to rely on what Ghosh calls "an expert discourse" from scientists. The result, he believes, is that science is giving fearful westerners a hope in business-friendly "sustainable development," biofuels, or carbon-capture technology, which they think will save the system before it collapses.

The alternative, a massive-scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider: The end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.

"The people who saw the climate crisis first are at the absolute other end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they've already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods," says Ghosh. "And indigenous peoples have already lived through the end of the world and found ways to survive."

It's a grim sort of optimism, but it is a reminder that there are opportunities to adapt and persist if we don't push our biosphere to the point of collapse in an effort to maintain a failed system. We're not going to do that, right?