Kistaro Windrider @kistaro@dragon.style

This seems like as good a time as any to remind folks that I'm otherkin. I don't need to preface this with some explanation about how identity is all in your head and is whatever you make it; my cosmology allows for past and parallel incarnations, a universe that we can only begin to glimpse at from over here while physically incarnate on earth, and allows souls to acquire a form - which does not have to match their incarnation. I am a dragon, I have been a dragon for aeons, and I will continue to be a dragon after this planet's star burns no more.

None of us are bound to any one place or time forever. Incarnation is transitory, but souls are eternal; a consciousness is an indivisible spark of will and experience, but it has no power to act or experience anything on its own; incarnation is the only way out of an insensate hell. (Or an insensate nirvana, if you are better at keeping company with only yourself than I am.) Incarnation is, to a first approximation, recursive; I am a soul, incarnated as a complicated crystalline being of fractal nature that exists alongside itself in a multitude of places and times, which again incarnates to experience and explore forms of the universe that it cannot exist in, which incarnate and reincarnate subject to local forces and whatever passes for "metaphysics" (or just plain physics) wherever it happens to be. What else is there to do, but unwind the mysteries of the universe? We're here, we might as well figure out what "here" is.

Most of the time, I incarnate in something that at least resembles a dragon, for reasons of comfort and personal preference. This was *supposed* to be a sapient lizard planet but apparently my copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide was sixty-five million years out of date, so I've made do with the species that at least has smartphones. I can exfiltrate some brilliant works of engineering, electronics, and reinventing the process of logic for the benefit of machines - pure machines, with no souls, engaging in reasoning! Few places have laws of physics so strict that there's no easier way to do it, leading to spectacular development in large-scale mathematics and hyperminiaturized electronics, all of which can be re-applied to places that don't *need* it so didn't develop it, but could use it.

So perhaps I'm a little "old-school" by local standards, because not a word of this is figurative. I have beliefs that I freely agree are unusual, and a self-consistent and unusual cosmology to match. I read Tarot (although I'm badly out of practice) and am reasonably convinced that it works, when applied well. My consciousness is not primarily local, although it's running on a monkey meat computer that I'm not entirely happy with (but who is?) but I make it work and I know it's doing its best.

I neither require nor expect people around me to believe that my view of the universe, and my place in it, and my nature, is accurate. I believe it to be accurate, however, and I will not make psychological excuses for why; it is a reflection of the sum of what I am and have experienced and perceived; it is not abstract.

New bed foundation assembled and the mattress is back in place. Success!

the hardest thing for me to do most mornings is to just get out of bed, everything is usually fine after tea and food even if I wake up feeling anxious and terrible. It’s hard to remember that and force myself to get moving anyway

so, USDA headquarters is moving to Kansas City (they're not sure which Kansas City yet, just one of them) and firing 2/3 of their researchers along the way. I think this is a good idea and genuinely necessary; the loss of research careers is an unfortunate but unavoidable cost because that happens whenever an HQ moves.

Washington DC is a terrible spot for the center of agricultural policy in the United States. It is not geographically or culturally near where agriculture mostly happens in the United States, and it has completely unrelated weather patterns.

I want the USDA right in the fucking middle of climate change. I want them right where crops are being ruined by year after year of extreme weather - droughts followed by mass flooding, mostly down the Mississippi river. Well, this gives the USDA a front row seat to the chronic flooding of the Mississippi River to levels thought of as something that would happen "once every 500 years", three times in the last decade. This gives the USDA a front row seat to droughts destroying the wheat crop. This gives the USDA a front row seat to seasons of rain that turn fields into swamps and make planting impossible. These are things they should have a front row seat to.

This puts the USDA somewhere geographically closer to the majority of agricultural work in the United States. It puts them closer to the best agricultural colleges and universities in the United States - real STEM degrees that are just too blue collar to take seriously on the coasts.

Mostly I'm pissed off at seeing an attempt to put some part of the Federal government in the region I grew up in taken to be unavoidably part of an evil plot to destroy science. No, that's not plausible; it is going to create science careers in an impoverished part of the nation where no such careers can easily be had, but there's an awful lot of on-the-ground experience and people trained for those careers. The "Brain drain" people are afraid of from losing people already working at USDA headquarters? That's already happened, much worse than could ever happen by moving the USDA, by keeping agricultural policy away from agricultural parts of the nation. It ensures that people who know what they're doing can't create a voting bloc or strong opinion in the Midwest, taking a bunch of trained scientists out of swing states.

Let "flyover country" have its say in part of the government. Putting the USDA in Washington D.C. is a historical accident; there's never a "good time" to move it but the move seems clearly warranted to me. Make the USDA live in the middle of where their policies land and their policies will improve because they get to see the results of their policies through some lens other than media and lobbyists.

Moving the USDA out of D.C. weakens the power of agricultural lobbying because it moves the USDA closer to real agriculture and farther away from Lobbyist Central. D.C. is not a real place, it's a drug-fueled collective hallucination created primarily by lobbyists, and decentralizing our bizarrely concentrated Federal government can only help.

Work has been insanely fast paced for the last couple of weeks. It feels wildly different when I’m part of a team where we’re all working on solving the same problems, rather than fractured on totally different objectives (with a common codebase).

I’m the tech lead, I’ll try not to get too drunk on power and return people to their original projects once the “can we do this before an external deadline?” drama is over.

being drenched in sweat and stumbling around because my legs don’t want to hold me means the exercise machine is doing its job, right? @..@

My wristwatch just gave me my "you stood for a minute this hour" credit while I was sitting and cleaning earwax out of my ear

Do I know anyone local who can drill a precise hole through a metal tube? An exercise machine I bought off Amazon is impossible to assemble because one hole is not drilled.