Words On Wednesday

The first "Thirsty Thursday Eve" of the new year, but certainly not the first in this series. I arrived at a somewhat unexpected drink for January. The AI recommendation went in some fairly standard directions for January: either low-calorie drinks to appeal to resolutions about health and weight loss, quintessential winter drinks, or "classics" for some reason. January Theme 1: New Year, New You.  Focus on lighter, low-sugar cocktails or drinks made with invigorating, fresh ingredients like citrus or herbs. Theme 2: Winter Warmers.  Explore boozy hot drinks like a Spiked Hot Chocolate, a Hot Buttered Rum, or a Chai Toddy. Theme 3: The Classics.  A great time to revisit foundational cocktails like the Old Fashioned, a Martini, or a Manhattan, as people are often cozying up indoors. I already did  spiced buttered rum , so that's off the table. I make hot chocolate with Bailey's or eggnog for my wife frequently, so that was an option. However, the most attract...

I've been playing around with Bluesky lately and building a bot to automatically share Words on Wednesday posts to that platform.   I'm not stranger to social media automation, but it's also never been my strong suit. Back in August of 2017 , I had automation set up for a few social media platforms with presumably OnlyWire . That worked for a while, but by August of 2018 , I had swapped to dlvr.it for my social media sharing needs. At some point along the line, probably around September of 2024, dlvr.it stopped sharing to my Words on Wednesday Facebook Page . Either that, or I was manually sharing those posts each week and just gave up. In either case, that page has been basically dead for over a year now. In the past year or so, I've made a point to visit Facebook less. It was my sort of default state when I would unlock my phone to visit Facebook and doom scroll for a bit. I recognized that because the algorithm prioritizes things that make you angry, I was s...

Fourth Wing isn't what I expected when it was recommended to me by my favorite librarian, but I'm not mad about it. I love new book recommendations. When someone recommends a book to you, it says a lot about them. Sometimes the book doesn't fit my personal preference, but I try to give an honest attempt at any book that gets recommended to me. This is especially true for people like librarians, who tend to read a lot of books. When the librarian recommended Fourth Wing, it moved immediately to to the top of my reading list. Unfortunately, it was already at the top of a lot of other people's reading list. The five copies of the audiobook that my local library had in circulation were already heavily requested. It took several weeks before I was able to get my digital hands on it. Near the beginning, Fourth Wing comes across like pretty standard fare high fantasy fiction. There's a little drama, plenty of magic and dragons as one would expect, and just the general feel...

I hate new year's resolutions as a matter of principle, but I am overweight and unhealthy. That needs to change. If that coincides with the beginning of a new calendar year, so be it. I've expressed a lot of pessimism before about  new year's resolutions . It seems pointless to wait for a new year to begin if you're making a resolution to do something good, especially when most people who make resolutions over-promise and under-deliver. I *know* how flaky we are as human beings, so I *know* there isn't much point in making a resolution at all. Validity of new year's resolutions aside, I need to lose weight. I've struggled to maintain a healthy weight for most of my life. I was big as a kid. When my blood pressure tested high at the beginning of 10th grade when I was 315 lbs, I spent basically a full year drinking tons of water, eating healthy, walking about 4 miles every day, and playing an absurd amount of Dance Dance Revolution. By my junior year, I was d...