WIL WHEATON dot NET (![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
wwdn_feed) wrote2025-10-02 07:56 pm
wwdn_feed) wrote2025-10-02 07:56 pm
no kings
Seriously. Fuck these fascists. Join a No Kings protest on October 18 and stand up for our rights and our democracy.
WIL WHEATON dot NET (wwdn_feed) wrote2025-09-24 07:31 pm
wwdn_feed) wrote2025-09-24 07:31 pmin the mirror hypnotized I’m haunted
Yesterday, I mentioned on Bluesky that I’d heard this guy suggest a way to break the doomscrolling Ouroboros we all seem to be stuck in right now: when the urge to resume doomscrolling hits (our brains asking for dopamine), make a choice to be creative instead. Satisfy the brain’s desire for dopamine by making something, instead of chasing that hit from the Internet. It takes a little bit of time, and requires mindfulness, but he says it worked for him.
So I’ve been doing that for a few days, and I have noticed a measurable decrease in my stress and agitation. Instead of looking at the news and hoping for The Headline, I’ve been writing down story ideas, working on this thing I needed to turn in at the end of last year, and playing around with the design of my website.1 And that’s been surprisingly fun and satisfying2! It’s amusing to me, how difficult it was to find a simple theme that just recreated what I was able to do in the Before Times, and I’m not 100% satisfied with it, but the sense memory associated with “tinkering with my blog” has taken me back to a time that wasn’t necessarily happier, or better, or anything like that — I remember how hard it was for me and my family in those day — but it does take me back to moments when I felt like I was making something that mattered3. There was so much fun to be had back then, when we all generally agreed that Nazis were bad and behaved accordingly.
While I was under the hood of my blog, I came across a rather large drafts folder, with a few dozen incomplete posts that I abandoned for one reason or another. One of them, which I posted yesterday, was actually a repost from earlier this year (I’d forgotten that I put the unpublished part of my post into a different post, and now I’ve created a timeloop paradox. Sorry about that), which some of you helpfully pointed out to me.
When I was looking at the unpublished stuff, I found things that were last edited 12 years ago, and almost every year, since. I saw a clear picture of who and where I was in my life then (not always great), and I understood why I didn’t post them. But there were some others that I thought were kinda nice, and I must have talked myself out of posting them for some reason.
I am going to be the person I needed then, and supportively tell my past self that it’s absolutely good enough, he’s good enough, and here is a lovely thing he wrote a long time ago:
Pushing myself through this heavy membrane that separates me from the rest of the world, feeling it stretch and stretch and refuse to break long after it should have.
Then, all of a sudden, it snaps and I’m through it and I’m breathing again and I can feel the air and the world.
And I’m not as tired. Or maybe I’m tired, but I’m tired like a person is tired, because just moving forward is like one of those dreams where you go as hard as you can just taking one step and then another and it feels like you aren’t getting anywhere.
I’m trying my best. I’m doing my best. I know it’s all I can do, and I tell people that when you do your best you should feel proud of yourself no matter what the result but motherfucker that’s hard to do when gravity feels stronger wherever I am than where I’m not.
So I make myself do stuff. I make myself get out and run, and I hurt my leg again and it’s so unfair and I cry and I feel stupid and I just want to give up but I’m not going to. I’m not going to let it win.
I walk a little bit and my leg starts to work that cramp out on its own and pretty soon I can run again. I can’t run as fast as I want to but at least I can run. It’s a bigger victory than it should be but it’s also very small. But it’s something and I need it so I take it.
I’m tired and I don’t want to go anywhere but I press against that goddamn membrane as hard as I can and I go to my friend’s house and I play games and I try real hard not to let them know how bad I feel because we should all just have fun.
And we have fun, and it feels good to be around my friends, and for a little while I forget to feel bad.
I get home and make myself write a story. It isn’t the story I want to write, but it’s a story that I need to write, and it helps me get out some stuff and I remember why I’m a writer.
Me from the past, that’s really sweet and I’m happy for you to embrace the part of you that is a capital-W Writer. I don’t know why you thought you shouldn’t post that — maybe you wanted to say more, or felt too vulnerable — but it’s enough, and so are you. I am standing on your shoulders, doing my best, just like you were. It gets better, buddy, and I need you to know that.
I love you.
- I think I’ve settled on Structure Lite, from Organic Themes.
︎ - In the old days, I had to make any changes to my blog by hand. I had to open up a text editor and do it all in html. I still haven’t wrapped my head around CSS, how styles are inherited, and how to use a stylesheet. I never learned how to use scripting or anything, because I would absolutely break things if I did. ︎
- I had no idea. ︎
WIL WHEATON dot NET (wwdn_feed) wrote2025-09-23 08:56 pm
wwdn_feed) wrote2025-09-23 08:56 pmperfectly salted soup
In every partnership, a division of labor emerges over time that allows each partner to play to their strengths, stay out of each other’s way, and efficiently get shit done together.
In our house, I do most of the cooking, because I genuinely love everything about it … with one very important exception: I always fuck up the salt.
So I’ll do everything in a recipe until the “salt to taste” step. At that point, I summon Anne (usually with my voice, though in my imagination I am using a bat signal that projects the Morton’s girl with the umbrella) and she uses whatever weird magical skill she has to put in exactly the right amount of salt.
A few weeks ago, I was making soup. Anne had to run to the store when I got to the “salt to taste” step, and I would be lying if I told you that I did not panic, hard. I mean, a normal person would be, like, “Oh, I guess I’ll wait until she gets back,” but not me! Bill Junior was a DAREDEVIL! Just like his old man.
“Look on the Internet,” a mysterious voice echoed in my head, “look for ‘how much salt for two quarts of soup’ and math will save you.”
The voices in my head have never lead me astray (well, except for all those times they did), so I did a quick search.
This is where I tell you that this post isn’t about the salt, but I know at least one of you wants to know the answer, so I’ll also tell you that it’s about a teaspoon, which is what I put into my soup, with trembling hands.
Fuck yeah, math! It was perfect.
But that’s not what this is about. This is about an entirely different recipe that I saw a little further down in the search results; it’s about the Martha Stewart recipe for basic chicken soup.
Martha Stewart always makes food in such interesting ways, I was curious to know what her take was on chicken soup.
Oh my god, it’s incredible.
She tells us to buy a whole chicken, cut it up, and use it to make the stock. Then we pull it out of the stock, cut the meat off the bones, and return that meat into the stock we just made.
Quick aside: this is the point in writing this post that yet another voice in my head asserts that this isn’t interesting and I should just delete it. I’m doing my best to push on through, though.
I showed the recipe to Anne when she got home (after I asked her to taste my properly-salted soup — she loved it) and then texted it to our family chat, because Ryan likes to cook as much as I do (I love that I passed that along to him, without even trying). We all agreed that it looked amazing.
Last night was the first opportunity I’ve had to make this recipe and HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS.
It’s so much fun, it’s so satisfying, and the resulting soup was so magnificent, I almost couldn’t believe that I made it.
And yet, I needed to go further. I needed to make some matzo balls.
That’s also something I’d never done before, but I knew it was simple enough. So I made some matzo meal in the food processor, followed a simple recipe, and ended up with something that wasn’t too bad for a Gentile’s first attempt.
I put it all together and …
It was so good. The matzo balls were a little too big, but that’s an easy fix for next time.
Oh, and … it was perfectly salted.