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Morning Me, May 18 ’23

Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

We refuse.

Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

And we…aren’t.

Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

Those are your “American Values.”

When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.

May 18, 2023
Morning Me, May 17 2023

It is the morning and I am me so let’s get rolling on the Morning Me! A little late today – I got started find but then a friend (actually a friend’s kid, although given they’re in their 20’s “kid” isn’t really the right word) stopped by needing a little ear and advice so I broke off this and talked with them for a couple of hours. Time well spent, but not outwardly productive for my purposes here.

Work continues apace and I’m happy with it. Finally having a project management tool that does what I need it to do has been a real game-changer. We’re still in the stage where it’s eating up as much time as its saving while I learn all the things it can do and how to use it for my explicit purposes, but it’s definitely doing the job.

I think I’m about done with the “building” part of things for the most part at JHUS now. There’s still a lot of content and nodes and sections to be added, but the key thing for me the last week or so has been building a process that facilitates easy and efficient content creation and other work. There’s a million years of other work that needs doing too, but one thing at a time. Right now I feel like I have things in place such that you’ll start seeing a shift back toward content rather than infrastructure in the next week or so.

The AfterParty newsletters went out yesterday, this week’s for supporters and last week’s for everyone else. I am not anticipating a lot of output today, as I have a number of offline tasks that need attending from basic human needs to rearranging my room, and I anticipate that will absorb most of my truly useful energy for the day, plus it’ll probably have me tied up for at least four or five hours.

I’ve still got at least one and probably two more segments of the “National Debt” section to kick out; if I get any writing time in today and there are published results, it’ll probably end up being part 2 of that. Plus I’ve still got several dozen screenshots to go through from Fallout and will likely build a bunch of sub-set pages for that, but a lot of that work isn’t at all time-sensitive so I’m not rushed about it. Still, I do want to get that content built up because it’s already drawing traffic organically via search and that’s a good sign that the work’s worth doing and people are interested in it.

Whole lot of stuff bouncing around in the ol’ brain this morning, but what’s going to really happen is I’m going to finish this quick post, account for the time on it, and then disconnect and get on this room; I told my roommate that if she got home and I wasn’t on it she had my permission to climb my ass about it, and she’s due home in like three hours.

Right now I’m broadly and roughly thinking that my next “project” will be getting another daily-ish post like this happening that deals with everything else in the world that isn’t me – a quick news take, probably closer to SNL’s “Weekend Update” or the news coverage segments Jon Stewart used to often open his shows with. “Here’s a thing that happened, here’s 1-4 quick sentences deconstructing it and baking it down and telling you what it really means, probably with a smart-ass twist at the end.”

One that’s rolling, my current plan is to take that and this and add video and audio versions with each drop. Not sure how far I’ll take that, but we’ll see. I feel like there’s definitely part of my audience who fall into that space of folks who like to have that quick little morning shot and then a little dose of afternoon news and comment.

It dawns on me that I’m basically setting myself up like a modern Paul Harvey, that was his gimmick right? He had the “News & Comment” segments that would run like 3-5 minutes on your local radio station during their news break, and then “The Rest Of The Story” which would be an essay and you’re probably all familiar with it especially if you’re over forty. Funny story: he basically started his career at WKZO radio, which was also WKZO-TV when I was growing up. WKZO radio is still around, WKZO-TV is now WWMT. They’re local, the “KZO” obviously stands for “Kalamazoo.” Just a funny-quirky-synchronicity that crossed my mind as I was describing how I currently see things unfolding over the next few months. As always, Card Subject To Change.

Anyway, beyond that is where we start looking at getting back to regularly creating video and audio content, getting back to podcasting and maybe doing an hour-long livestream every week. I’m trying to stay super mindful about committing to more work than I can realistically accomplish, that’s another long-standing habit of mine (my aunts used to say my eyes are bigger than my stomach; that was about the amount of food I’d eat at the holiday table but the principle persists – it’s not “biting off more than I can chew” so much as “swallowing more than I can digest,” if that’s not a bit too grossly gastrointestinal.

I may have said this yesterday and forgotten I said it, but today I plan to follow through: this is the last day I’ll be distributing the “Morning Me” outside of my “me” platforms – the JH page at FB, my twitter, etc. – and leaving Custode, WeAntiFascists, and Progressive American out of it. The point of MM is to be a little chunk of me for my readers and whatever relevance it has to those pages will be, at best, secondary if it exists at all. That’s not to say I’m dumping those pages, just trying to be a little more mindful that everything I do doesn’t have to be seen everywhere I do things.

And it’s almost not even morning anymore so let me get the heck out of here and I’ll talk with y’all later.

May 17, 2023
JH AfterParty 1.2

Thank you!

Hey everyone, thanks again for being part of the ride and welcome to the second official edition of the JH AfterParty. As always with the AfterParty, it goes out to Patrons and other contributors a week before everyone else gets it, generally around noon on Tuesdays (at least for now). The public edition is scheduled ahead of time and will always drop at noon eastern a week after the previous one, and the whole mess is published simultaneously on my Patreon and on JohnHenry.US! (The edition on the website tends to be a bit prettier due to limitations of the rich text editor at Patreon.)

It has been a heck of a week in terms of getting things done. Since the “launch” issue of AfterParty last Friday, I put up a couple of articles plus did a ton of work building and creating content on the newly-built section of my site devoted to gaming, which has long been a passion of mine that I’ve wanted to write and create content around, but have never really sat down and taken a serious run at it. There’ll be a comprehensive rundown of all that stuff in the Saturday Substack, but between that and the new article about gun violence alone there’s a couple of hours’ worth of well-spent time waiting for you over at JohnHenry.US if you get the urge to just pop over and check it out.

All of that and everything else I do is possible only because of your support, so thank you!

Looking Ahead Through Blurred Lenses

I had this notion of creating a short – 60 seconds or less – ad video that’s intended to be used by “you,” Constant Reader, to introduce me to the part of the world you have contact with and I don’t.

This is one of those rare things where I’m thinking pretty much in straight-up marketing terms. When it’s necessary I sort of have a little consultant in my head that I allow to run his mouth in small doses and look at me and my work as a product and service and object to be distributed and communicated. According to him, it would be really effective to reach out with a short vid pointing directly to past support and largely intended to be shared by you folks who have been behind me and watching me go through all this mess for the last harumharum years.

Basically it’s an ethical and righteous way of leveraging social proof. Like these clowns that go buy 200K fake followers from an agency right out of the gate so you see them and think “well, obviously with that many people behind it there must be something worthwhile there.” It’s a known human “thing” to do that, and nearly everyone in any kind of marketing space leverages that with the artificial appearance of this support (called “social proof”) to build “real” support.

I think that’s crooked as hell and reduces discourse and platform access to another dollar chase, and the dollar chase is exactly the disease I’m trying to vaccinate us all against. Unfortunately we live in a world that runs on money, and while we can fight to change that all day long it’s still the present reality and we have to work within it to some degree or we don’t work at all.

Consequently I need to lean in a bit harder on the whole marketing thing even though I absolutely HATE it. I’ve often said that I’m a proud graduate of the Bill Hicks school of marketing and advertising…

Planting seeds. It’s Hicks, again if I gotta tell you the audio’s NSFW I’m not sure how you found me in the first place…

But the reality is that you good folks are all out there. There are dozens of names I could think of without looking, should I take the mind, that I know I’ve been seeing in and out of my comment section for many years. You all have an ownership piece of all of this work whether because you’ve put literal cash into it or because of the time and energy you put in reading and watching and liking and sharing and commenting, and I feel like growing the support base is as much a validation of your support as it is of my work.

I want to give you a way to say straight up “hey I’ve been watching this cat fight like hell through some unimaginable garbage that’s been thrown at him over the years, he keeps on going and keeps on kicking out this really good work, I support him and I think you should too.” Everybody loves an underdog, everybody loves a comeback, (especially when it’s against the odds with righteous cause), everybody loves a story of a powerless individual triumphing against the malignancy of power arrayed against their desire to simply live freely. Everybody wants to be part of that.

We just gotta let ’em know I’m out here, and I’m unfortunately “that asshole” who refuses to cheat the system by buying artificial appearances of social approval to “sell” myself emotionally to people by unethically bypassing their critical thinking. That means I’ve got to work a thousand times as hard to magnify and enhance the legitimate social approval I do have. It means eventually I’ll buy advertising on various platforms that I’d rather not exist at all, because those platforms have a monopoly on information gatekeeping and if you don’t pay them, your information doesn’t get in front of people’s eyeballs.

Mostly it means I need to work harder to give you the voice to spread the word, so I’ll be doing that Real Soon™. Clearly the word needs to be there, to be spread, so I’m balancing the need for creating these kinds of overt marketing materials with the need to create quality original content that speaks for itself and doesn’t require a bunch of carnival barking or sales pitching.

Obviously the idea is very rough at present and I’m not 100% sure how quickly that will be done, so that’s about all I’ll say about it for now, but obviously I’m always interested in your feedback and thoughts on stuff like this.

In My Head

Life is incredibly positive right now. Not perfect by any means, there remain challenges even beyond trying to pay for my existence, but I’m working at a speed and level of quality that I haven’t touched in years, and I’m super excited about it. Things I’ve struggled with mentally for a long time because of ongoing stress and anxiety about the stability of my living situation or other pressures related thereto, I’m finally breaking through on and getting settled in properly the way I’ve been fighting to in some ways for most of my life.

This newsletter is one small example of that, and I think I’ve discussed enough others that there’s no need to re-enumerate them here. I’m more organized, more focused, more productive with my work time, generally in a better mood. I’ve even lost about a tenth of my body weight in the last couple of months, which is a good thing – it’s because my diet isn’t mostly pasta, sugar, and salt anymore. I have more energy when I’m awake, and I feel more stable than I have since I was working at Musician’s Friend…more so, because I’m not relying on my ability to not piss off some yuppie.

I’m probably in the best space mentally and intellectually that I’ve been in…at least a decade, maybe two, maybe ever if I take everything into account. By no means does that means life is easy, obviously I’m still scrambling for forward momentum and financial stability, or steady income of any sort that I can count on beyond the $105/month in pledges that goes through Patreon right now for that matter – but boyohboy does that $105 – or really about 97 after fees – make a difference!

If I just had 18 more people pitching in $50 a month, that would be $1k/m. That’s easily survival money in my present situation. That plus an occasional large contribution or a whole lot of other small ones, and I can start doing things like replacing this computer, which has now officially aged out of useful life for my purposes as a primary machine because it’s so old it can’t run Windows 11 and MS has announced they’re not issuing any more updates for Windows 10 beyond critical security patches.

That means that OS is at end of life and it’s the most modern one I can run and still use any of my tools to speak of. That also means my tools are evolving beyond my current hardware’s ability to even upgrade to with the same motherboard and cpu architecture (i7-3700 I think, so i7 yay but third gen; it’s twelfth-gen now plus they’re up to i10 or so. It’ll make a great file server for years to come but as a production box its breathing its last.). I think I’m going to work up some kind of targeted fundraiser specifically for that, maybe two thousand dollars. From what I can see that’s about where the current “sweet spot” is between paying too much for the most modern tech and getting tech that will age out too fast to be worth what they’re asking for it.

Plus the market is so screwy right now you’ll still pay two grand for a box that has 4.5K worth of components in it if you tried to build it yourself, largely because of the price of video cards and how much cheaper they are for fabricators buying them to put in computers than for tech bros buying them to mine crypto. Some of that’s changing and shifting now that crypto has basically fallen apart, but I don’t expect to go back to the days of building it cheaper than you can buy it, except at the very high end of the price ranges, for at least another five, maybe ten years, if at all.

My last guess has lasted me ten years with nothing but video upgrades, so yeah. I’ll be all right, just need the funding. Should make for a step up in video quality too, especially when I also upgrade my webcam and ultimately invest in a solid 4K or (better) 8K portable.

I note that it’s about noon-thirty my time right now, which means in theory I should’ve had this out half an hour ago. I’m gonna shut up for now and get back on the rest of my work. Hopefully as things including my mental health progress, I’ll get to the point where I’ve got this newsletter done by Monday night, and I can just schedule it to drop regularly at noon on Tuesdays for the “Advance” edition at the same time the “Public” edition from the prior week goes public. That said, I also don’t want them to drop on top of each other, so I’ll probably aim for a little earlier, say 9am, on Tuesdays for the Advance and then noon for the Public.

Edition 1.1 will be public at noon eastern, this Friday.

Let me get back on it, there’s still about a day’s work I want to get wrapped on this gaming subsection, then get at least one and probably two bits of “serious” writing and content done, then I get to start doing the same thing I’m doing now with gaming, but with music which is a whooooooole different game. In spite of appearances, I remain first and foremost a musician, and I’m getting awfully long in the tooth to keep all that knowledge to myself too. Plus…yeah. Let me get on or I’ll stay here talking until I starve to death.

Love y’all, see ya soon!
-jh

May 16, 2023
Morning Me, 16-May-23

Good morning folks and welcome to the show, let’s see what’s rattling around in the ol’ brainpan today…

Got a ton of new stuff kicked out yesterday, lot of backend work on this new project management tool. I’m super excited about that, I’ve been trying for years to find just the right PM tool for me and the way I work, and this one seems to be doing the job. I’ve got some playing around to do with it yet, but I think it’s going to be a powerful help for my work and my personal life as well.

I haven’t yet figured out how, but I’m going to make the reporting tool viewable for supporters and add it to the “perk” list, since I figure details like that are in the package of stuff that pretty much nobody’s going to be interested in except supporters.

Fact is the tool is for me, first and foremost, to help me stay organized and stop losing good ideas to the ongoing rush of trying to keep up with my own brain. Sharing it and showing everyone else is just a lucky artifact of its abilities that allows me some transparency while also not getting stuck in a loop of writing a twenty-minute Facebook status every time I have a thought I need to chew on or a little bit of happy fluff I want to share. Like this:

Health insurance companies should be outlawed and if you work for one you should make them fire you and start collecting unemployment. There’s no reason for health insurance, at least in the way we have it, to exist in a nation that respects its people.
– John Henry

I don’t want to get too deep into this today because I’ve got the JH AfterParty newsletter to get released. As I’ve mentioned previously I’m trying to get in the habit of having that ready to drop for the advance edition by 9am on Tuesdays, and then the public release of the previous weeks’ edition at noon (all times Eastern). This week because I just started this “Morning Me” thing and didn’t want to skip it on the second day, I went ahead and decided to let the AfterParty be a little late because I didn’t finish it last night like I should’ve. In the future, if there’s a conflict the AfterParty will take precedence and the MM will get skipped.

I should note here also that while I loosely intend to try to get one of these out daily, I’m not committing to it. My personal goal is to try to hold the line at no fewer than four “Morning Me” posts per week.

I noticed last night that my FB login app for the comment system is not working properly, which leads me to suspect the rest of the social logins aren’t working either. I’ll probably have to take half a day or a day in the next few to hack that out and see what the problem is.

Sidebar: if y’all notice something broken, tell me. Please. Thanks.

I really can’t be effusive enough about my current state of mind. I’m pretty sure I’ve never “had it together” at the level I do right now, in terms of how I’m approaching and accomplishing my work. I know there’s a lot of noise and confusion right now because I’m doing a lot of things in many different directions, but it should get more steady and stable and predictable around here steadily and quickly.

On that note, I’m giving a few days to make sure I haven’t overwhelmed myself but I’m probably going to try to work up a second daily (or sorta-daily) issue newsletter, like this one but about news, events, etc. that are catching my eye or potentially going to work up into a bigger piece. A bit like a short version of the excellent Heather Cox Richardson newsletter (man, I can get 120wpm freehand when I’m really cranking it out, she must be using a voice parser or have a couple of people typing for her or something, I seriously have no idea how she creates such long, comprehensive newsletters every day….and I’m the guy most people are like TOO MANY WORDS SLOW DOWN WITH ALL THE WORDS ITS TOO MUCH! I’ll try to get a link to her substack in an upcoming MM.

And with that I’m going to get on with my day. First priority is getting this JH AfterParty newsletter written, and then I’m back into content creation wherever I pick up, probably will get to work on the second part of that series about the national debt.

I’m probably going to stop distributing the MM to my “other” FB pages like Antifa, Progressive American, and Custode. This newsletter is really just about me for my people, my way of staying in touch as my work pulls me ever farther from the levels of social media engagement I’m used to. As such, I think cranking it out to those pages would be more annoying than interesting to their readers.

Please don’t forget my existence is predicated on your support so please remember to lean hard on those like and share buttons. We’re past the point in history where worrying about being “spammy” is even on the radar. Flood the net with JH as best you can – plenty of content to do it with right here! – and JH is gonna keep working on making sure you’ve got plenty of material to work with.

Love y’all, don’t forget to pitch in few if you can at the money page. (Sustained support is critical! Far better to have forty supporters sending me five bucks a month than have one person send me $250 one time. Check out the options for weekly and monthly support via PayPal and Patreon at that link.) There’ll be a lot more coming on that, too, but that conversation is better held at the AfterParty. Have a happy upbeat song to get your day off to a great start! You can always count on George Harrison for a smile…

May 16, 2023
What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 1 – What Is Debt?)
A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”

This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.

More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…

Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.

So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!

We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”

This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.
- 22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
- Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
- 78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
- That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
- In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”
So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?

Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.

There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.

What your money’s really worth. Don’t get any bright ideas; destroying coinage is a more serious federal crime than you think.

A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)

In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.

Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.

NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.

Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!

That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.

In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!
May 15, 2023
Morning Me

As part of this whole process I’m going through of finally nailing myself down into good work habits and maximum productivity, I’m facing the not-entirely-pleasant reality that writing social media updates about what I’ve got going on is a fairly important part of my thinking process; it’s where I work out ideas and often will find flaws and gaps in my own thinking or planning as I’m writing.

Obviously there are two flaws involved there: the first is that it doesn’t have to be done on social media and the second is that it’s content and ought to be treated that way. Ergo, more blog posts like this one and I hope you dig it. I’ll probably end up playing with some kind of official cute daily title thing or whatever (I did, see below), but taking this time to focus on exactly what my goals are for the day and how I intend to achieve them is important to making each day I have left as productive – on my own terms and for my own purposes – as they can possibly be. That’ll be the last meta comment on that whole thing, at least for now, let’s commence with the thoughts that actually prompted this like 90 minutes ago and then yeah.

A screenshot of the ProjeQtOr ticket for this blog post.

So I have this tool called “ProjeQtOr” running on a subdomain now, and it seems to be just what I needed (an earlier promising candidate turned out to be a false start). Good, solid project management, works great for a one-person show but still easily scalable and scopable to include stuff like some CRM and collaboration on projects. I’ve got it running on a subdomain right now (https://projects.johnhenry.us – you can go peek if you want but all you’ll see is a login screen).

I still need to spend some time learning the reporting tools to get everything I want out of it, including opening it up for public view as a supporter perk and using it to help generate work reports for inclusion in the Saturday Substack, which is where this whole side-track with the project/task management stuff started (again – I’ve taken many runs at this, but I’m finally in an environment where I have a hope of making it stick). Once I do that I’ll figure out a way to make it visible to users with access and tell them how to access it.

From my POV it’s a necessary sanity tool to keep everything I’m doing in order and stop forgetting and leaving off on things – there are probably three dozen unfinished articles on my blog! – but also the public-facing functionality that I may be able to put to use is significant and constitutes a legitimate value add for folks who are supporting my work to be able to see more closely what exactly they’re supporting and how it’s getting done.

Other than that…let’s see, I’ve got this blog post, the piece about the national debt, continuing to learn and develop with this new tool while simultaneously using it for its intended purpose which is to help me keep track of what I’m doing, when, and for how long. I did force myself to take a few hours off last night and got some new Fallout 4 screenshots…I think I’ve talked enough for here and now. I really appreciate everyone’s patience during this exciting and energetic period of major growth and development on my end; I’m doing my best to stay visible so you know I’m working and not just off screwing around somewhere.

(NTS: Maybe get into a habit of a “morning me” blog post and then something else that’s a sort of “morning news review” where folks can just get a peek at what I’ve been seeing in the news and what I think of it, small-dose stuff some of which will likely end up developing into more substantial content in time…and oh hey, half an hour later I’ve created a new project node with two levels, a new project for a new newsletter titled “morning me” that I’ll do kinda daily, and turned this into the first issue…but I have other work to do and I’ve already got a couple of hours in this plus a couple more undocumented fiddling with infrastructure and yeah. I’ll go more into what I’m thinking for this in the next edition, for now I gotta run, see you soon!)

May 15, 2023
JH Afterparty, Vol 1. Issue 1

It’s Go Time!

Hi everyone and welcome to the first official edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter! This will be my “supporter-Patron perk” content, or at least part of it: Patrons and people who support or have supported my work financially get to read this when it’s released, and everyone else will be able to see it in a week.

Lots of exciting stuff to talk about here, so let’s get right to it!

First, as should be obvious if you’re reading this on my site, I’ve implemented a proper authentication system on JohnHenry.US now, so that supporters who contribute via methods other than Patreon will be able to get their (admittedly nominal, at present anyway) “perks” as supporters.

Right now this comes primarily in the form of posts/newsletters/content just like this one.

The habit I’m striving for with this is “every Tuesday.” So every Tuesday (ostensibly!) I’m going to write a sort of “backstage diary” type of post where things are more casual, less go-go-go and bullet pointed, and more this is what I’ve been thinking about and doing lately.

Also a place for some of my more personal musings and ramblings, for instance I think this would be the right place to tell the whole story of this old friend who deus ex machina’d out of nowhere and gave me exactly the things I was missing to turn everything around – basically the time and space to work that I’ve been promised multiple times in the past and always ended up getting “not so much” and conditions and hurry up and hey when you gonna get a job.

All that sort of personal rambly stuff that has often taken place on my Facebook page will be shifting in to these newsletters, too – I figure most of the folks who would care to read stuff like that are already supporters anyway 🙂

(Sidebar: if you are a past supporter but have never had an account here, get with me via the contact form and we’ll get you set up properly.)

Now that I have the proper infrastructure in place, my weekly casual newsletters that I’ve been referring to as my “patron previews” and will now be known as “JH AfterParty” (see below) will also be posted here under the same “conditions” – they’re only visible to logged in users who have supported my work somehow for the first week after publication, then they’re public-access. Folks who just create accounts so they can access the forums are in a different group and will have the same access as the general public; the posts will be available to them a week after they’re available to supporters, both here and on Patreon.

I do plan to continue duplicating the work at both JHUS and Patreon, though; there are people who are Patrons first and JH fans second, and I want to make sure they’re getting their due. Plus it helps the whole *shudder* marketing situation on that platform, by way of the same folks.

Oh crap, I’m a rock star.

Part of this comes from an unfortunate reality I’m facing: I’m going to have to stop being quite so accessible. The scope and volume of noise arrayed against me is just deranges, with obsessed twits crossing over into people who have jacked me around and got caught and cut off crossing over into plain old psychos crossing over into all those various forces of capitalism and grift that have plagued my online presence for so long now.

It’s sad, but a lot of that over the years has taken the form of bad-faith “friends” and people playing on my various buttons to get close so they could use me or ingratiate themselves – and this is a problem that goes all the way back to my childhood, mind you, because of who and what I am – and it’s come to the point where I just don’t trust any private communication from people I don’t know anymore (or from a lot of people I do).

Consequently I’m sort of shutting off most of the DM capabilities on my social media or heavily restricting it to a closely vetted list of friends when I can. I will instead have a contact form at JohnHenry.US (actually do now); if you’ve got something to say but you’re so worried about it being a problem for you that you’re afraid of leaving footprints behind with your message (like the network information that’s routinely collected by every website you visit), I don’t care to hear from you anyway to be honest.

The hardest part of this is how many people who started out as readers have become friends over the years, and by no means am I shutting those people out en masse or going all Greta Garbo on everyone. I hope to continue developing new friendships and relationships from an expanding readership/fan base over time. But leaving myself wide open just invites too many bad actors to waste too much of my time and energy, and yours, so I’m closing some things off and “funneling” others, which also helps me manage my time more efficiently and effectively in terms of organization.

I anticipate that, over time, the forum at JHUS will grow to supplant the greater part of the “community” aspect of my social media platforms, and from that perspective unfortunately I’m going to start looking a whole lot more like the standard-issue in terms of presentation. Hopefully I’m picking up the things that work without the things that don’t or that I feel fundamentally compromise the work when I start worrying more about advertising and marketing than about creating quality original content.

As I was writing this I decided to name this newsletter the “JH AfterParty.” The afterparty is where friends of the band hang out after the show, and everyone else hears about it a week later, so the whole thing ties nicely thematically. Especially since I plan to run it on Tuesday afternoons and that’s usually about when I’d be waking up from an afterparty from a really solid Saturday night gig back in the day 😉

Keeping up & wrapping up

I don’t want to duplicate work so in terms of raw, “this is what I did here’s the links and what it was all about” stuff please please PLEASE do get subscribed to my weekly Substack digest. (There’s also a signup form in the sidebar of JohnHenry.US). Every Saturday I publish a digest of the prior week’s work that includes links to new content and ongoing discussion of non-content work as well. That’s the very best way for anyone, regardless of whether or how they’re supporting my work, to keep up with what I’m doing. Please don’t forget to share those links around and all that other stuff; more than anything else, engagement is absolute king, and now that it finally seems like I’m firmly headed in the right direction it’s more important than ever.

As I’m writing this message I’m bouncing back and forth between other tasks, including other content work plus putting together tomorrow’s newsletter. Let’s talk quickly about what you should expect to see upcoming, and I’ll get out of your hair.

Ain’t no party like a JH AfterParty cuz a WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!? Photo by Thiago Miranda on Pexels.com

I’ve just about finished adding/changing/tuning up the back end of JohnHenry.US. I have a column 95% finished for WeAntiFascists.Com, but I want to go through the same process with that site before I publish (some of that is also already done). Then I’ll do it again with Custode.Org, in preparation to get a whole bunch of things rolling there that I’m not prepared to discuss in any greater detail than “a whole bunch of things.”

As part of the whole membership thing I was discussing at the top of the newsletter, I’ve also gone through and rearranged/simplified the user groups and permissions on the site. As of right now either you’re a “supporter” or a “subscriber.” Subscriber is the default group you’re in when you register with the site, and allows for things like posting to the forum. “Supporter” is the group you’re in if you contribute financial support; that’s the group that will see this newsletter when it’s published rather than a week later.

Those of you who are already registered supporters right now are also part of the Legacy user group, which is mostly just for my own internal record-keeping mostly to ensure I’m staying in touch with you about any sorts of new offers or perks or whatever become available to supporters going forward, which those folks should by rights qualify for retroactively as most of them are among the group of people who has been keeping me and my work alive the last few years.

These changes may make some things funky on your end that I can’t see from here. If so, let me know via the contact form. Note that if you’re logged in you have access to a higher-priority contact form, which you’ll find in the site navigation menu (It’s under “Forums & Account”)! You can also contact me directly through DM at Patreon if you’re a Patron.

Fun fact: what’s actually going to happen is I’m creating this post twice. Once that will post now and is visible only to subscribers, and the other that will post in a week and be visible to everyone. This replicates the functionality of Patreon without having to get too crazy. Plus then if I get a little chaotic or whatever and “forget” to shut off the original, it’ll still be in place and ultimately I’ll just add a 301 redirect to the non-paywalled version of the article so all the traffic goes to that one, and then this actual post goes byebye.

I’m gonna wrap it up and get out of here, get this posted, and see what else I can get done before I try to wrap up and have a bit of a weekend.

May 12, 2023
Ratholes and Tangents

Hey kids, let’s write a blog post about ratholes and tangents!

I wanted to take a second and tell you a little “behind the scenes” story of how sometimes even when you’re firing on all cylinders, you end up taking a detour…

Front page of this site

So if you’ve been paying attention here the last couple of weeks you know I’ve been doing a lot of work across the board, but mostly here at JohnHenry.US. I’ve got a couple of huge new articles up, a handful of smaller ones, and entire new sections of the site.

As I write this there’s still some flash that needs to be trimmed all over, but this is about the rathole so ignore that part and check out this page real quick. Just peek and scan, there’s not much there in the way of words.

Now look at the front of this site.

The front of this site should be that “Home” page, but this theme won’t let that happen. Why? Don’t know, and hacking through the internals to track it down would take weeks. Harumph.

Guess I have to try a new theme. I’ve got all kinds of new branching internal content set up and planned and executing (like this) that’s designed around this theme with the same basic setup of hero banner on top, pages and posts below, and sidebar, so we’ll try to stick to something close to this layout…and nothing works.

I noticed this problem late Wednesday night.

I tried almost forty themes on this site yesterday, and the ones that would properly render the “right” home page, ended up having other major content formatting issues that made them unusable or would have forced me to redesign the entire site again.

There’s probably a fairly easy solution to this, but nothing jumped out at me in the theme code, and all the available Google solutions are dead ends. I even gave some serious thought into using WordPress’ new “Site Builder” feature, which is rather deeper than simply theming, but again this would be a huge rathole that would take me weeks to crawl out of and bring my forward momentum to a dead stop. (Note to self: make time for that rathole once you’re back in production.)

I’ve been trying to improve a lot of things about myself over these last few weeks that I’ve been quiet, for me, since I moved out of the motel. On one hand, I’m not in a crisis which demands that I just keep paddling as fast as I can and hope I hit land before I sink, so I can take the time to find the right solution. On the other hand, I know I’m prone to getting lost in these ratholes and tangents,

What the front page of this site is supposed to look like.

So I gave it one day. I mean, it’s the entire site design, right, so it’s okay to take a minute and see what you can do to make it exactly the “right” way you want it. But again: let’s not lose momentum or get into tangents of tangents of tangents, or all this stuff you’ve started doing is going to get lost.

Turns out: no good solution! I spent a day fiddling with different themes trying to make it work, and consistently the themes that fit reasonably well into the aesthetic and UI I had in place, will not render that home page as the root page of the site no matter what I do to it.

So the home page of the site is just gonna have to be vaguely mis-matched from the rest of it from now on. Hardly anyone visits home pages anymore anyway. Plus I can rig it a little bit by taking the time to properly set up my site’s page structure, using the “right” page as the root of the site tree, and then the breadcrumbs should use that as home and get SOME traffic pointed there.

So today it’s back to the tangent I was on…getting the gaming section of the site set up and a bit of content in it, then setting in to a production groove for a minute with new content coming in there and in other areas of my work…and at that point I can start thinking of doing the same things with music, film, books, TV/streaming, IT geek stuff, and all of the other things that interest me.

I figure it’ll be a year – and probably at least one more site redesign – before I’ve got this site in the condition I want it to be. The good news about that is it’s all one-time work that I frankly should have done twenty years ago anyway. Not only is it all scalable and amounts to a bunch of plug-and-play content boxes, the same techniques and some of the scripting I’ve written and so forth can also be used on Custode and WeAntiFascists, and it will be.

The same is true for some of the less major tangents I’ve been on this last week and a half or so – changing my SEO tool from Yoast to RankMath, adding and changing all kinds of back-end tools and plugins for the site (talked about some of this in last week’s Substack – make sure you’re signed up, all you gotta do is punch your e-mail address in the sidebar form on my site or go to my SubStack home page and punch it in there – always free!), most of which will also be implemented on my other sites. (The WAF site is set up a little differently with less metric/traffic monitoring and no advertising implemented whatsoever…so that’s like six different tools that aren’t used over there, or are used in substantially different ways.)

Shot of the “Gaming” section – you can see it’s still rough, but the aesthetic-thematic consistency should be obvious.

The first edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter goes public in a couple of hours, be sure to keep your eyes out for that please and thanks. Let me get back on the game section and get that wrapped up (mostly design elements and I want to get a few more Fallout 4 screenies posted, plus get the Cities:Skylines section started), then I’ll start picking up on the half-dozen articles I’ve got almost finished for other platforms (all my sites plus Medium, plus I need to get my Substack newsletter written so it’s ready to roll in the morning).

Finally just a quick personal note: yes, I recognize that from “out there” it looks like I’m kind of up my own butt right now, but that’s what happens when you’re a one-person conglomerate. I’d love to have some folks working for me to handle like 85% of this so I could just focus on writing, but that’s life in the big city. I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of social justice issues to discuss – and I have been even in the middle of all of this – so please don’t be concerned that I’ve decided to stop doing what I do and just focus on “light” stuff like gaming and music. I have a rich, full intellectual and artistic life, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it in my public work. I’m starting to get some of that stuff out there now, because it’s interesting and – as I’ve mentioned before – I frankly have much less ethical quandry related to monetizing that stuff as opposed to public interest work that ought to be free. Ironically this will end up resulting in the other stuff generating the income necessary to do the social and public interest stuff well.

That’s it for me for now. I’m not going to set a schedule on “My Actual Blog,” but am trying to make sure I hit it at least once in every calendar period.

May 12, 2023
Notes On “Irradiated Notebooks”

Me and Heinlein

These are “The Irradiated Notebooks of Lazarus Long,” and that’s a name that bears some explanation. I habitually name my game characters after characters in Robert Heinlein’s novels, notably those in his “Future History” series of books centering around “Lazarus Long” (multiple aliases applicable, the oldest known continuously living (i.e. subjective time measured objectively) human being of some two thousand years).

As part of the whole process of setting up this section of my website, I rolled an all-new character by this name for Fallout 4, and will be chronicling his adventures through a bunch of screenshot galleries, blog posts, and so forth all collected under the banner of “The Irradiated Notebooks Of Lazarus Long,” a play on the title of the book-within-a-book in Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love.”

(There are long-standing urban legends and rumors, never confirmed, that the idea of the “World’s Oldest Man” was a snarky thought Heinlein had after listening to L. Ron Hubbard bloviate for several hours – that for anyone to have actually done what Hubbard claimed to have, he’d have to be two thousand years old.)

Wassupwitdat?

No, I don’t mean I’m going to role-play and story-tell through it, I don’t really game like that. I use those names because I lack imagination.

I’m going to play through the main storyline of Fallout 4 with Lazarus, catching screenshots and writing about interesting little oddities and easter eggs that I find. The game’s seven years old or something as of the moment I’m starting this; spoiler warnings and walkthroughs would be a waste of time.

This image contains a little side-joke/easter egg/adult humor. See if you can figure it out on your own. Hint: remember the game’s set in and around Boston. This single frame tells an entire story.

That’s one reason I decided to do this new character. I have an existing game, “Dora Brandon (*).” I’ve been picking away at that game for about 6 years. You’ll see some of Dora’s stuff turn up in other parts of the Fallout 4 section here, as I’ve done a ton of work building settlements and so forth with her that are great showpieces for some mods, plus I hate to dump half a decade of casual game time.

Much of this content will be a screenshot parade, and I’ll likely work in some video over time as well, but I doubt I’ll be doing any livestreaming, at least not with my current rig; it doesn’t have the room to stream a high-quality cap of an ongoing game, I’d have to turn all the visuals down to nothing. Also, I’m running out of drive space and don’t want to overload it with video game videos.

One hell of a big closet to come out of.

I’ll also use ol’ Laz here to explore various aspects of the game and mods I use and so forth, eventually we’ll get him all the way through the main storyline and main DLC storylines and start building big ol’ settlements and managing those, which to me is the most fun part of the game.

At some point I’ll likely do an entirely separate article just on Bethesda‘s game console, which is consistent across two entire game worlds (Fallout and Elder Scrolls) that I know of and has been for over twenty years, give or take a few technological developments.

I’ll probably throw in a little narrative as I post ongoing bundles of screenshots of his progress through the game as well, because in the end I am after all a game nerd and general geek on top of the rest of it, but mostly this is just a fun little project making something useful of my hobbies.

I’m pretty sure there will still be plenty of suck in the world to talk about at my real job, don’t worry.

(* Also a Heinlein character. I tend to roll female about 80% of the time, too – when I do actually “game” rather than using someone’s game software as a manic ADHD playground, I enjoy trying to put myself in the brain of someone not like me and try to understand how they’d handle various things. It’s good mental exercise and helps develop my empathy muscles. A storyline-rich game like Fallout 4 is great for this. In this case, however, our protagonist bears some physical resemblance to his controller…)

May 10, 2023
Gallery: The Life And Times Of Lazarus Long

The omnibus collection; this is the entire screenshot life of Lazarus Long, Sole Survivor. Companion to “The Irradiated Notebooks Of Lazarus Long.” This will likely feature hundreds if not thousands of screenshots by the time it’s done, but I’ll try to make them entertaining.

Lazarus, Come Forth

The birth of Lazarus Long, Sole Survivor.

Meet Lazarus Long, the Sole Survivor. That’s his wife behind him, she (spoiler) will not be surviving.

I rolled ol’ Lazarus here specifically for this blog. I’m going to walk him through the main quest lines, doing my best to create as few settlements as possible along the way (save that for after the main quest lines). I don’t have a big plan or purpose other than to post a bunch of cool screenshots and share various things about how I play this game, cool mods and things you might be in to, and so forth.

Biggest reason I’m starting a new character for you is that the one I have running has been running since about 2018, and much of the space is unrecognizable where settlements have been build up and so forth. So I figured if I’m gonna do it, let’s do it right and get proper before-and-after stuff and let people see how it all develops and changes over time, what kinds of neat screenies I get, and all that good stuff.

I’m going to let the gameplay and process dictate when things get screenshots and what sort of content I write here, but fundamentally this is my character to do this blog with so a good deal of the eventual side and meta content like plugin/mod reviews and so forth will feature both here and in its own content space. I got a few early shots from The Story We All Know And Love, but you’ll see I start going on detours right away…

Impending Doom

The Sanctuary Hills area prior to the firestorm.

This, as anyone who’s played for more than five minutes will recognize, is the entrance to Vault 111, looking back at my wife Nora and son Shaun as we’re evacuating the town, you all probably know the storyline. Basically just a “candy” shot of the world before it gets blown to hell.

The Big Bang

And now, the end is near…

Again, hardly a spoiler for the new game cutscene that was released in 2015. Shows off some nice work with the graphics though, and it’s a nice bit of howdy for folks who haven’t played.

Rings Of Fire

And they burn, burn, burn…

Just a few seconds later, as we see the light of the bomb and the pulses of energy (heat, I’m guessing) in the atmosphere creating concentric rings in the atmosphere, as Our Hero And His Beloved Family Desperately Run For Safety.

This Is The End

My only friend…

Just as the kinetic shock approaches Our Heroes, the elevator to Vault 111 lowers them to safety, and the world burns overhead…

The Cold Equations

“…but I didn’t DO anything!”

I’ll spare you the nine millionth recounting of the Fallout 4 storyline here. This is the last thing Lazarus sees before the unexpected cryogenic hibernation. It’s the second to last time he’ll ever see his beloved wife Nora. sniffle Note: If you’re not familiar with it and you don’t mind a story pretty much guaranteed to leave you sobbing and maybe not in a terribly bright space in your head, you absolutely must read the short story ‘The Cold Equations‘ by a fellow named Tom Godwin, originally written back in 1954. It’ll make you think.

That’s All For Now!

To Be Continued…

And that’s the end of the gallery for now. This will be updated constantly-ish, as I get opportunities to put time in on the game. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget my entire life and work is crowdfunded so please like, share, comment, subscribe, and use that tip jar if you can!

May 9, 2023