Comedy

Holy crap. So yesterday I had the most incredible stroke of random luck.

A few years ago, I decided I’d gotten sick of walking through the middle of Wellington, casting my eye up and down the usual vast collections of event posters that always throng any and every available surface, seeing the face of one of my favourite UK comedians, jumping a little bit in unexpected pleasure and surprise, seeing the event poster in question advertised a gig, in Wellington, like my home town, my god I can see my heroes live, going squee - but then oh ugh it’s last month! Then I’d feel downcast and crappy and start kicking myself for not being self-aware enough to do basic research.

So all this was going to change. When you’re particularly well-endowed with mighty hammers, the entire world looks enticingly nail-like, and I started my whacking. Back then I knew a few bits and pieces about Ruby on Rails, not too much but enough to kickstart any tech-based solution to my problems.

I was going to make a web app. It’d keep tabs on the Upcoming Gigs pages of several million of my favourite comics. It’d scrape the latest info, geocode the venue info, update the Comedians pages, and slot the relevant bits and bobs of info into the Comedians, Gigs and Venues tables in my brand new database. From there I can pull out whatever geocoded pieces of info tickle my fancy, and display the results on a Google map. Web users can use this to answer questions like “What’s the schedule of my favourite comic over the next X months?” or “What are all the gigs in my city tonight?”

I got a little way into it. I mucked around with jQuery UI for a bit and threw together this loathsome interface. Horrid and clunky. Trying to jam a square peg of Comedy apps into the round hole of jQuery UI-ish-ness. It seemed to work for a bit, then I lost interest and moved on. Either that or PathWrangler happened - from memory, this happened between me “leaving” Carnival Labs, and casting my employee-hat far and wide and eventually landing at PathWrangler. But that’s another story.

In any case, I got bored and abandoned the thing.

Years passed.

Then I got an email. An email from a guy calling himself Matt Taylor. I’m a comedy producer, he said. Your app is just what I’ve been looking for. Seriously. You have no IDEA how rare this app style you’re cultivating is. I put on about 30 shows a month. I’ve got comedy events organised in three cities in the USA. I want to expand nationally. But my god the logistics. The web-scraping. It’s so hard! There’s so much stuff to get done, and believe me I don’t have the programming chops to do one tenth of what I consider necessary. I’ve tried hiring programmers. I dunno, it might be me, but they keep quitting. I’ve tried learning code myself, but I’m not cut out for it! Best part of two years spent slaving away at the code-learn coal face, still none the wiser. I’d given up.

Then. By pure luck. I came across your Github comedy project page. And I just about had a heart attack.

This is exactly what I’m looking for! Would you, could you, please please please work with me to build the app of my dreams? I’m not kidding, Matt continued to me, this will make us super-rich. And we can split it 50-50. I’m not stingy like that, half and half sounds fair to me.

So now I’m just sitting here going holy shit what rare miracles have I wrought. This is amazing! One random crappy weekend trainwreck of a hobby app, wait three years, and now this?

As I write this, he and I have yet to discuss explicit salaries and day-to-day renumeration. But from what he’s said this sounds incredible. Better even than PathWrangler. Now on a related note, I’ve felt torn at ACS, about which I have written already. Sure, I’m on 85k, more than most people earn, but when compared to the easy relaxing freedom of remote contracting, it’s jarring. How could I possibly complain about that? I feel like a gigantic pampered asshole if I’d ever say that. Especially to many of my friends, most of whom are still either students or finding it difficult to get stable fulltime work. They’re genuinely still either semi-studenty or full-on-studenty in their disposable income, like I was a very small number of years ago, so for me to complain about a job where I only get 85k is a colossal conceit. I might as well wear powdered wigs and whine “let them eat cake” at homeless people.

That said, this new offer from Matt seems fantastic! If he and I do indeed agree on decent weekly or at least regular compensation, then yay, back to home office and sloppy freedom I go! Back to designing my own apps. Back to escaping code-monkey-dom. Now working for Steve ain’t half bad, of course, but this seems much better.

Matt himself seems quite the character. He’s a comedy producer and coach. He says he’s personally coached over 1,200 people, one-on-one, for free. Bold claims! Of course I had to see what’s what. So last night over Skype, he coached me. Well. At least that was the attempt - he seemed quite convincing and had solid stuff, but he was using his phone and not holding it at all steady, so most of the video chat was these seismic-level shaky bits of footage of his nostrils, backlit by what in reality was probably a standard-wattage lightbulb, but after Skype video image processing looked like the dying screams of a thousand hellish suns.
Good insights into what makes good comedy though! His opinion is that it’s seamless and FAST movement from one quick emotional state to another seems quite solid to me. Now I’m thinking over most comedic styles I know of, to see if I can think up a counterexample. None so far. But this is insightful.

Work and writing

So I’m at a new job. It’s this place called Automotive Computing Services.

Peals of bells go off every five minutes. For some reason there’s only one phone line into the office, and whenever Natasha, our receptionist, doesn’t pick up the phone, the call gets diverted to the one and only office-wide phone line, hooked up to every last phone here. Oh god it’s gone off again. Each and every phone has its own unique ringtone. So when someone calls, bam, a cacophony of sound galaxies. Rrgh.

From what I can tell, there’s this office culture here of, whenever the sound galaxy kicks off, everyone sighs and shrugs and grits their teeth, going “rrr, someone else pick that shit up! I’m busy, I couldn’t possibly”, so the phones ring and ring and ring until someone finally cracks and answers. And muggins here gets his concentration disrupted, away from writing things like this. Quite annoying. There’s a phone on my desk too, on the other side of my monitor trio so it’s hard to reach over and pick the thing up at a moment’s notice, but I wouldn’t mind prank-calling the incoming callers if I didn’t think I’d be fired immediately.

But it’s quite the sordid tale, me working at ACS in the first place. Of course I dragged my heels with PathWrangler far too long, allowing my savings and buffer to be whittled away, month after month, while PW tanked like the world’s slowest blimp. Hell of a shame - Doug’s a good guy, in the same boat as me, and of course much about startups is hella risky, funding and so forth. But when my funds/savings reservoir has dipped far below zero, when I’m going into credit card debt to pay basic bills and stay afloat? Ugh. I waited far too long. Should have applied for other jobs and had the Hard Talk with Doug months before. Right when he was dragging his heels on my salary.

But what’s done is done. Look forward. ACS is, hm, um, interesting. 85k is not bad at all as salaries go. $150/wk into student loan payments - nice to get progress on that again. $130/wk into Kiwisaver - why yes I would like to get a house in the medium-term future. A great big nice one with a swimming pool. ~$960/wk after-tax income. $260/wk on rent; ~$100/wk on food, $50 on bills? $550/wk disposable income ain’t too shabby. It could be more, but how can I complain about that? 85k is far, far more than most *families* in this country get. I’m doing okay.

ACS isn’t such a bad place, although the adaptation from home work to office work took some doing. Punctuality! Discipline! Ye gods. How rude. Part of me finds this unsettling and jarring and discombobulating - another part of me feels nothing but contempt at this first part and sneers and wishes part 1 to grow a backbone.

The work is pretty laid-back, nothing I haven’t had to deal with before. Fairly standard Rails stuff - running into the usual discombobulation mish-mash of infinity gems and infinity version numbers, but give ‘em a kick and they start working well together. Bootstrap’s a functional if mundane style framework - pedestrian form input styles, although things like its Grid system is fairly snazzy. Doing something as non-Railsy as CSV file uploads - remembering that the average user is already uploading partially-validated data from their own databases instead of injecting the raw data, blind, means many of the standard Rails assumptions about how to manage and validate data no longer apply so strongly. A few misunderstandings with Steve about that, but I think they’re mostly fixed now.

I’m also rather luck in that this new ACS work environment is almost as conducive for novel-writing as working at home was - or possibly even more, as the sharp tang of office-sound around me (telephonic bell-pealing notwithstanding) has a rather pleasing way of focusing the mind.

Upgraded coffee! We has it! Up till now I’d viewed Upgraded coffee as an expensive luxury, and sure, when I’m paying, indeedy it is. But - a quick chat with Natasha, and it turns out the stuff is actually cheaper than the local brands! Persuading her to buy it instead of anything else at all turned out to be unconscionably easy, and now I can enjoy the stuff, any time of day. I brought my own coffee grinder from home - local shops sell it pre-ground.

But writing is great. Hell, I’m writing this at my office desk right now, keenly aware that m’colleagues and m’boss might take a rather dim view of anything non-work-Railsy being processed at my desk.

It’s an interesting topic, this issue of how much leeway I can accumulate for myself, writing-wise, at this place of work. I would love to bang out a novel a year, or even, once I really start feeling like I can hold every last aspect of the novel-writing process in its entirety, in my head, all at once, hell, why not once every few months? Let different ideas swirl round in my head, all the time, get a quiet moment to myself every so often, splurge them out into a Google Docs file much like this one, and once every several months, output yet another novel, of scintillating quality and brilliance, thus allowing me to hobnob at diplomatic occasions and say “Why yes I am a well-renowned Writer, hur hur hur, listen to me for my opinions carry much weight”. Well. Maybe not that, hilarious though that posturing may be. Returning to the original point, it would be very nice to remain at a job like this, where I can bang out enough work to keep Steve happy and satisfied and content, while also banging out enough writing output to keep my creative side happy and content also. For while programming is quite fun, it doesn’t fire me up like writing does. There’s so much more you can do with it! Traverse universes, concoct wild plots, make people laugh with my bullshit.

Actually, come to think of it, a place/job like this is probably the best combination of pay and freedom. Higher payment would be fantastic, but it’d also start reaching into Senior Dev / Team Leader territory and thus involve management of others, more scrutiny and less opportunity to write. Best of both worlds, this.

Lego

Ever played with Lego? 
Maybe you got a simple Duplo set for your fourth birthday. You’d get a plastic-wrapped set of these big clunky plastic blocks, oddly light but with a real heft to them, topped with odd pairs of dimples. Strange, they seemed, odd and regimented, and even though they were made of plastic they didn’t deform or break no matter how hard you bit ‘em. Too big and clunky for biting, too, seriously, who designed these things? No thought for milk-teethed tots!

But then. Pick a block up, feel the top’s knobbly texture against your palm. And push it onto another block. It sticks! It stays there! And you can do it again! Hey, look, you’ve got a great big bag of the beasties too! Stick them together in various simplistic ways (hey, it’s a start, but ugh Duplo), and bam, you’ve got yourself a car. Or a duck. Or a train.

Forward a few years. Maybe you’re seven. The Duplo set has been gathering dust for a good while now. Why? Toyworld. There’s this amazing gleaming store in the local mall. It sells nothing but toys. Not like one of those great big general-purpose stores which might just kinda sorta have this miserable little toy section skulking in back. Hah. This store has nothing but Good Bits. Nothing but gleaming treasure, glittering prizes, incredible goodies (apart from the oh so pink Barbie / doll section ugh girls cooties blergh) but but but the Lego! Gigantic cardboard-shelled infinities of astonish! You pick up a box, staggering under its weight a bit for that shit is heavy to a seven-year-old, shake it, and the thousands of bits of Lego all rattle at once. Not mere Duplo dozens but Lego thousands. The granularity! The precision! The exquisite plastic elegance!

Then you sneak a look at the price and you shrivel up and die. $109.99? There is not that much money in the world. You lie. Not even your dad makes that much. It is not possible. Still, the set’s a galaxy of perfection. Gotta try, right? The Lego Space Marines OMG2000 Lunar Drilling Ore Precision Extraction E.T Popsicles set? Who’d say no to that? Miss Trunchbull, that’s who. Or the Head Witch from The Witches.

You approach your mum. She’d never be like them, right? She’s on your side! She’ll buy it. Honest. She looms over you. You’re seven, she’s a mile high or something.

“Muuuuuumm....”

That sinusoidal whine kids do when they want something. She looms over you still more loomily and looks at you. Her expression says We’re in a toy store crammed with impossible levels of Holy Shit Gimme, designed for the specific purpose of making the hearts of prepubescent children explode with impotent yearning. What could possibly be on your mind, O my beloved vaginal emission? 
You pause. The whine doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect. You try again.

“MuuUUUummMMM...”

“sigh Yes, dear? What is it?”

“Can I”“No”

“...But I””No”

You smart with the injustice. What! She doesn’t even know what you want! Your lip trembles. “But Mum!”

“All right, sweetie, god give me strength what toy have you been looking at?”

Aha! We’re in! “Mum it’s Lego! It's the Kung Fu Dinosaur Holy Crap Ninja Fusion Battle Excelsior Laser Sexy set!” You rattle off the buzzwords like you’re casting an Ease The Pain Of Carrying Around All That Useless Money spell.

She takes one look at the price tag and her eyes narrow. “I don’t know, dear, it’s awfully expensive.”

“MummmmmmM....” She’s GOT to say yes! It goes against all that is right and noble and honest and decent not to let you have it!

She smiles faintly. “....Your birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?”

“My ... mymy birthday?” What? Don’t you dare dodge this mother. Lego. NOW.

“Tell you what, sweetie, if you’re on your best behaviour over the next month, I’ll buy you it for your birthday.”

You freeze, stricken with the agony of So Near Yet So Far. A month! That’s decades! Aeons! Entire geologic periods will come and go before then! The ice caps will advance and retreat across the globe before your birthday arrives. Civilisations will rise and fall and rise once more. Steaming mangrove swamps with huge dragonflies will envelop the world and vanish, time and time again. The very continents of the world will squiggle and reshape themselves and burn out with age. The geriatric Earth will greet your eighth birthday with withered red deserts, your new Lego set will be small comfort indeed as together you wander Earth’s crumbling desolation, frightened and starving and utterly alone. You start crying. Mum starts growling.

Of course your birthday arrives before you know it. You spring bolt upright in bed at minus infinity-o-clock, heart bursting with anticipation. It’s here! It’s finally here! Birthday and Lego! The Chainsaw McDaddy Tactical Awesome DNA Large Fries Bazonga Nuclear set will finally be yours! You leap off the bed, pull the blanket off, tie two corners around your neck as a makeshift cape, go woohoo, burst out of your room, gallumph down the stairs three at a time and into the lounge, look out the window, that’s odd it’s dark, hang on no-one’s up, hah we shall fix that, gallumph back up the stairs and towards your parents’ room to prod their lazy arses into gear for now they will deliver on their Lego promise, and get within a metre of the door before it’s flung open with great violence and Mum emerges.

“YOU.” Her eyes are fatigued fire.

You falter. “Uu... lego?”

“It’s 3am. Go. To. Bed.”

“But it’s my birthday! Lego-”

“If you aren’t back in bed and asleep in ten seconds Young Man, then for MY birthday you will get me a retroactive abortion voucher. MOVE.”

“Butbutbut-”

“Actually, hah, no, you were born at 4:45! I was there, you know, I remember it well. It is NOT your birthday, not for a couple of hours. Now then. Back to bed. If you’re quiet as a mouse until 7:30, THEN, and only then, you will get your present. BED!”

You trudge off and back to your room, blanket-cape dragging forlornly behind you. Hmph and double hmph and a triple hmph thrown in for good measure. Hours. Argh. Ages. You pout and you sulk and you have a little cry and then feel a bit better and still feel abuzz with great excitement and anticipation. You bounce up and down in bed. 
Quiet as a mouse, she said. Mice can play the drums, can’t they? I bet they can.

Tokyo SF Club #1

Remember being a small child? Remember the nurturing cocoon of Home, of hearth, of family and wee friends? Not only were you virtually never exposed to the brutish realities of reality, of adulthood, of shit like paying bills and taxes and ugh responsibilities and dreariness and shitty bosses and stress and looking after those damn kids, you were virtually unaware of their existences. Your life was filled with friends and playtime and high adventure and a bit of schoolwork admittedly and what seemed like the hobnailed boot of Authority stamping on your fun and making you do cruel cruel shit like go to bed at 7 rather than 7:30 and miss Star Trek. Oh the humanity! Oh the cruel injustice! You’d be sent to bed with decades of taunt-worthy sunlight still streaming through the curtained window, calling to you, saying what the hell are you doing in bed ya moron? There’s stuff to do, bugs to catch, fun little mud canals to dig through river banks, brooks to dam, rafts to build, trails to run along, another ridge on the horizon to explore, friends to josh and tease and do incredible shit with, bikes to ride, sticks to fashion into medieval broadswords and do righteous battle with, shoots of bamboo with which to create epic longbows, fun and glory and Adventure. Hmph. Damn and fuck and wank. Instead you’d do a sub-blanket pout for a few seconds, maybe have a wee cry, then steal away and get a torch or, knowing kids these days, an iPad, and get your favourite book and read for a couple of hours before dropping off to sleep and being woken by in adult retrospect caring and well-meaning but at the time seemingly Stalinist parents, insisting you move your arse out of bed and get to School. Hurry up! Rinse and repeat.

That’s our childhood. Most Western kids have it amazingly easy. But what of ‘30s Japanese kids?

Time for backstory, of novel character creation and early mindset. We’ve got a group of kids. They’re urbane and have sophisticated wealthy Tokyo families. Families who are well-connected, who by and large pay only lip-service to the Kokutai-good-gaijin-bad groupthink mentality so strong in Japan since the Meiji Restoration. Well. Some do, some don’t. There’s a fair bit of variation, the better with which to concoct and mould the same plot-rich Gaijin variation within the Club kids.

Picture one, the archetypical SF club member. Too soon for names, let’s call him A. A is introverted, has self-imposed isolation. He grew up in various places - the family mansion in what then was the outskirts of Tokyo, mainly, but also in summer on the country estates deeper in Honshu’s interior. His grandfather, head of household, is a wealthy, bombastic sort of bloke, cheery and a bit aggro, generous to his friends and happily terrifying to his rivals. This rubs off on the family in general, and most are the outdoorsy type, riding horses by day and their spouses by night. They picture themselves, very definitely, as right amongst the cream of Japanese society, the leading citizens.

A, on the other hand, feels isolated and alone. Sure, he feels mildly proud of simply being that high up in Japan’s social hierarchy, but cannot relate to most of his family. Charging everywhere outdoors? Ugh, what for? It’s smelly and sweaty. And besides, there was that time they dragged me out to the stables, Grandfather harrumphing the way he does, shouting that no grandson of mine will waste his life cooped up indoors with silly books, not when there are Koreans and Russians and Manchurians to conquer, and he ripped up my comic! Frightening Stories 19! I’d waited months for it! Stomach curling and cramping with nervous anticipation every day, staking out the mailbox, week in and week out, finally it arrived and I burst with excitement and joy, scrabbling off the wrapping paper in joy and exhilaration, got cracking into it, reached page 7, and the next thing I know Grandfather stomped into the room, saw the comic, turned ragey red, whipped it out of my hands and tore it up! I felt like he’d punched me in the guts. I’d prefer that! Bruises heal. Books don’t. My world stopped and I could feel myself turning inward, to my “happy” place, away from ol’ G. The servants dragged me out to the stables, plonked me on a horse, still crying bitterly, and oh what fun and fucking joy, we all went riding. The family glaring at me like I was at fault, the whole whole way.

Then the beggars. Somehow they’d got on the estate. The groundsmen are a bunch of bullies, sweaty and reeking of tobacco and with forearms like gorillas, I can’t stand them, but they usually do their jobs pretty well. They keep out the riffraff. Or so Grandfather tells me. But not today. Today several hundred ragged people, people with xylophone chests and outstretched hands, made it onto the estate and kowtowed to Grandfather all at once. They begged for food. Grandfather set the hounds on them. Most survived.

Who are these “people” who call themselves Family? No family of mine. They genuinely sicken me. But books. Comics. Adventures. Full of people, heroes, men and women of honour and decency and morality, they’ll swing from chandeliers and pick fights with the baddest bastards in town, they’ll raid the treasuries of despots and vanquish evil and fight baddies and get the girl, make friends and fight henchmen. They’re noble and wise and educated and see the good in everyone, they’ll bring smiles to a small child’s face, take tea with the village elders, kiss the hand of a beautiful woman so tenderly she swoons in happy bliss, they’re toasting to wine, women, song, camaraderie, friendship, honour, civilization, intelligence, romance, happiness and love. Incredible! I’d love that! Why isn’t the world like that? Why isn’t Japan? Why aren’t my family? Why isn’t Grandfather?

I want to set the world right. But I have NO IDEA how.

Keto

The Keto diet is damn weird. Efficient, no doubt. Pragmatic? Maybe. Depends on your surroundings, and who you interact with, and what sort of food you’ve got access to, and what your income is. If you’re still a kid and you live with your parents and your ability to Keto-ify yourself is channeled through quite-possibly-brittle-minded middle-aged people who won’t be too happy about you prodding their own insecurities about dieting and exercise and weight, well then, good fucking luck with that is all I can say.

It’s quite incredibly damn interesting watching the reactions of people who, for their entire lives, have been taught, by let’s face it, the scientific establishment and quite well-regarded nutritional bodies hurr hurr, that fat = bad, carbs = good, protein = go for it, now for the first time get told that, hey, I eat 60% fat! Ehrmergerd, they squeal, don’t you know that’s bad? Artery-clogging? Heart disease? And it’s mostly fun but a bit conflicting discussing such things.

First up, it’s a bit squeamish having to face the fact that Science, the body of knowledge I’ve so enjoyed following for most of my life, the Scientific Establishment, may well have got this entire field of nutrition so wrong. How? Was early ‘80s science politicised in some way? It’s quite possible, but saying to my friends “Um yes but it’s all political!” “Eh? The Food Pyramid the work of politicals? Have you any evidence?” “Uh.” doesn’t sit well with me. Yeah. I would need more evidence.

Second. Demonstrating on my own terms that a high-fat diet is in fact a good thing. Pointing to the example of Eskimos, chomping down on whale blubber for month after month, ain’t half bad, although I haven’t actually done that yet. Might be an idea.

But it’s not all that difficult - the only diet source I’ve come across, the only “alternative”, “fringe” one, the Spartan Health Regime, that advocates eating shitloads of fruit, even its source, Anthony Bova, recommends a shitload of fat too, for its ability to help us assimilate fat-soluble vitamins. I don’t know what his views on the Keto diet specifically are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he considered it impressive and edgy and gnarly.

The evidence on /r/keto ain’t too shabbby, as is Steve Gibson’s anecdotal account also - a few days of keto flu, then easy weight loss. The stuff just melts off. I’m at my lightest for the last, what, eight years? And I can still Pinch Quite A Bit More Than An Inch. That body fat test I had way back at Sportswide, it estimated that shorn of fat, I’d weigh 76kg. 76. From memory, that’s what I weighed in the summer of 2003/04, and even then, I was still a bit chubby. Just how much can I lose? Quite a bit, apparently :) Although, although, I’ll have quite a bit more muscle on me now than I did then. We’ll see.

The problem is, the Keto diet is damn brittle. Once you’re adapted, fantastic, weight begone, but a single bread slice and you’re kaput for days. Ugh. Additionally, do it really strictly and you can lose a pound a day, but holy shit concentration health ugh blah. You can’t work. You can’t think.

The cure’s simple. Patience! Life is long! My current moderate fat levels are hardly debilitating. I can afford to go the easier route, lose only 2-300g a day, and take the scenic route. I’ll get lean in no time.

It’s frustrating though! When did I last have a flat stomach? Six? Seven? How many times did I proudly proclaim to all who listened, “I’m putting on weight!” Ah, youth, such naivety. Fish and chips were damn tasty then and they’re damn tasty now. It’s just that I’ve got a little more of an idea about their effects. Their repercussions. Sucks! But eh, what can you do. Eat ‘em sparingly, that’s you can fucking do. And done! 101.8kg at my heaviest. Just look at me now.

The Keto diet can be damn frustrating at times. Not because Keto-friendly foods aren’t damn yummy. They are. I love ‘em. Well. Most of ‘em. My boiled vege/meat/butter concoctions could be a hell of a lot worse, but they could be a hell of a lot better too. And almond pizza! Now what’s going on there, eh? Cheese too. Most of what I read on /keto says Yes! Go nuts! It’s scrummy and delectable and holy shit chomp down eat ‘till you’re satisfied. I do. I did. And the result? Gain. Rrr. That’s what Layne discovered too when he tried his bacon experiments. Eat these diets that their authors claim you can stuff yourself, eat what you like - but noooo, try that in practice and clearly You Can Not. Hmph.

Ah well. It’s a little ambiguous sometimes. Just claiming “No calorie counting!” is a little different from explicitly claiming that you may stuff yourself until you explode and no side effects. I pity the poor people who among their dietary plans include things like pasta. Holy crap. Yes pasta’s yummy, but the cravings! The hunger pangs! I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a pasta meal that when I’d made more than I could eat in one go, didn’t stop eating until my stomach physically hurt. That shit ain’t cool. Compare this, on the other hand, to the boiled vegemeatbutter slurry. I eat a fistful and bam, that’s me done for the next three hours. I’m not physically full, but my instincts say Stop. You’ve Had Enough. You Are Satisfied.

And the running! My endurance has doubled. Incredible Keto-related evidence just keeps showing up in front of me about how more efficient fat-fuelled running is. I’m permanently beyond the wall. but my biochesmistry has adapted to it! Every run burns fat directly! Not bad, eh? The only bottleneck now is simply getting quite a bit fitter than I’ve been in the past - all the better for a three-hour run every weekend. Let’s grind those miles down and melt that fat off.