I've spent most of my break from work adding to my Spotify playlists, bingeing the Muppets, reading a book about the history of psychedelic drugs in religion that so far has taught me more about spirituality and the human condition than 29 years in the LDS Church, celebrating that my asshole roommate is gone for a long while, and trying to get my money back from a scam company. I have plenty of time, and no excuse for not writing a long, thoughtful post except that I don't feel like it. I do feel like reminding people, however, that my humorous science fiction novel is out. I've sold at least three copies, and I don't know how many more because the purchases take over a week to show up. But I need to sell many, many copies, and I have no advertising budget, so I'm going to be a bit of a nuisance about it. This is my lifelong dream and my only hope of escaping from a life of mediocrity and borderline poverty we're talking about here.

ebook - reminder that this option is cheapest but gets me the most money because it has no printing costs.

paperback

hardcover

Now here's a nice underrated song for the new year. Of course, the numbers we attach to dates and times are really meaningless, and nothing is going to magically change at midnight tonight, but celebrate if you want to. Myself, I'm just happy to be at home with no responsibilities and no roommate.

The legal proceedings regarding Elijah McClain's death wrapped up this week, and the paramedics who killed him with an overdose of ketamine are going to jail. That's one of the best Christmas presents I could ask for. It's very rare for healthcare workers to be criminally charged when their stupid mistakes kill people, but they were so obviously and so much in the wrong this time that I've only seen three conservatives bitching about the verdict and blaming McClain for his own death. Do you realize how significant that is? You have to be a saint in order for conservatives to not think you deserve to die after a police encounter, and McClain was. He deserved to be killed about as much as Jesus did.

These convictions will be a game-changer. The Associated Press cautions that they "could have a chilling effect on first responders around the country." To that I say, good. First responders and all other healthcare workers damn well should be afraid to make a stupid mistake that kills someone. If they aren't, they need to choose a profession with more room for error. The obvious problem here was that Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec just didn't care enough to do their job correctly. Well, that and they had an obvious implicit bias against Black men that made them overestimate McClain's weight by almost sixty pounds. The International Association of Fire Fighters claims that this case "criminalized split-second medical decisions." To that I say, bullshit. Cooper and Cichuniec had more than ample time to communicate with McClain and check his vital signs. They didn't even have the ketamine with them when they showed up. But yes, if they had been paralyzed with fear of making a mistake and just not done anything, McClain would still be alive.

They injected him with ketamine because they thought he had "excited delirium." It is unfortunate that paramedics in this country are still being taught that "excited delirium" is a thing even though no legitimate medical institution recognizes it. Just the symptoms of this fictitious condition - superhuman strength, impervious to pain, sudden death - sound so stupid that I can't comprehend how any adult believes in it. But then, millions of adults still worship Donald Trump, so my opinion of the human race, or at least Americans, is obviously too high. Police supporters literally made up "excited delirium" to justify police killings of Black and Latino men in their custody. It's racist as well as stupid. California recently became the first state to ban listing it as a cause of death. Funny how I was raised to believe that California's progressives were the stupid ones.

It is most unfortunate that only one of the three police officers who assaulted McClain for no reason was convicted of anything. Roedema was found guilty because his statement "He's definitely on something," which exemplifies police officers' rampant bigotry against neurodivergent people, contributed to the paramedics' decision. Jason Rosenblatt was acquitted because, like the people at Nuremburg, he was just following orders. Nathan Woodyard, the first police officer who assaulted McClain, was somehow acquitted of everything even though he had no legal justification for stopping McClain, he acknowledged in court that he did everything against his training and needlessly escalated the situation from the first moment, and the paramedics would never have been there in the first place if he had minded his own damn business. So he has his job back. I hope he never has a good night's sleep again. After those acquittals, I was ready to go burn something down if the paramedics were also acquitted. The whole point of having separate trials was so that each person or duo could throw everyone else involved under the bus. If our legal system had determined that nobody was at fault, it would be beyond saving.

So anyway, Merry Christmas. I do mean that, though I don't have much to add.

The Kindle ebook of my novel is available here. You don't need a Kindle device to read it, you just need to download the app. Paperback and hardcover options should be available within a few days. Setting up the ebook was super easy, barely an inconvenience, but sizing and formatting the covers for physical printing has been a long ordeal that's left me feeling like Hitler in that movie clip where he goes ballistic. I can only hope it's over now. The Kindle version is much cheaper, but will get me more money per sale due to the absence of printing costs. I'm going to charge $24.99 for the paperback version, and if anyone buys it, I'll get less than a fifth of that. Of course I need to get enough sales that the amounts don't matter.

This novel goes back over eighteen years, all the way back to the daydreams I had in seventh grade study hall after seeing what was then the last Star Wars movie ever and reading Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first Star Wars Expanded Universe book ever. These daydreams eventually became an attempt at a book, and then another attempt at a book, and then another attempt at a book. I've started many books. The last attempt, in the summer of 2010, was two pages long when I gave up on it. The next year I came home from college for winter break and found it on the computer. At that time, I felt inspired due to recently discovering several sci-fi abandonware games from the early nineties, so I got back to work on it, and I kept working on it off and on until the summer of 2013, when it became my first finished book. Then I just had to revise it several times until it was perfect. Then this past summer I became so frustrated at entering my second year as a bleeping substitute teacher with a bleeping Master's degree that I decided to stop procrastinating on my dreams, and I gave myself a deadline when I would have to decide it's good enough and put it out there. I chose December 15, 2153 because that's the anniversary of me discovering those old games and also 130 years before the book takes place. I'm obsessed with dates and anniversaries. So here it is. By self-publishing, I've avoided all the rejection and arguing over creative choices.

Today's Cache Valley Unitarian Universalist service was a celebration of the winter solstice, with the lights down and the curtains drawn until the very end, and candles and chanting. It was the most spiritual I've felt in a while. Spiritual feelings don't come easily to me. I've been looking forward to the solstice so that it will be over and the days will start getting longer again, but just celebrating it for the sake of itself was a nice perspective shift. Every week CVUU also does "Joys and Sorrows," where people are encouraged to light a candle and share a joy or a sorrow with the group. Today I shared my joy, and people were really happy for me, and it felt wonderful. Alluding back to a recent service on the topic of book-banning, I told them that if they want to support me, they should challenge my book and try to get it banned so I can get free publicity. They laughed, and it felt wonderful.

I really don't have any publicity since I'm self-publishing. My original plan to build up a large following on my blog and then tell everyone to buy my books never panned out, and every social media algorithm seems hell-bent on keeping me invisible. But I honestly think my book is so funny that it could become a success through word-of-mouth. That's its greatest strength by far. I didn't set out to write a comedy, I just wrote the kind of thing I would want to read, which happened to be something very funny. That's not conceited. It's just a fact. If you don't find it funny, you should see a doctor to make sure you aren't clinically dead.

I've completed the final pass through my novel, I just have some more description and other touch-ups to add, and then I hope to get it published by Friday, though that partially depends on whether the artist I hired comes through with the cover in time. If he doesn't, I'll be kind of pissed, but it won't be the end of the world. Anyway, I'm very sleep-deprived even by my standards. A couple of nights ago I had multiple nightmares, and I don't even know why. First, I either woke up and had sleep paralysis or dreamed I had sleep paralysis and then woke up. I imagined a shapeless white ghost thing coming through my window, and then a vague black demon thing standing over me while I couldn't move. I've read about sleep paralysis, and I don't believe in demons in large part because everything that people used to blame on them has been explained by natural phenomena like sleep paralysis, and it only lasted a few seconds, but it was still terrifying. Then I dreamed that lightning struck hundreds of times simultaneously, all over the sky, and I thought about how much it would hurt to get hit by lightning, and I wondered how anyone could survive that, and I remembered that I was more likely to get hit by lightning twice than attacked by a shark, and I decided that if I was going to get hit by lightning twice, I didn't want to live. It's weird how sometimes my thoughts in dreams are entirely coherent like that. It makes me think my brain is still working too hard.

So anyway, this post is basically filler to keep up my goal of writing one every week, and I will continue by mentioning some other things from my Spotify Wrapped that I would have mentioned last week if I hadn't been in a hurry. Spotify said that I'm a "Shapeshifter," and described my listening habits as "eclectic." That's exactly the word I would use to describe it. I also used to use that word for my political philosophy, but then I realized that one side of the spectrum is a much, much, much, much, much bigger problem than the other one. (Hint: it's the one dedicated to fighting against social equality and education.) These were my top five songs, none of which are by my top five artists, because I'm a Shapeshifter.

A fun Halloween disco track that clocks in at almost ten minutes but is worth it for the way it starts small and layers instruments on each other to gradually build up to the good part. I like it when songs do that. And that's the closest I'll ever get to sounding like a legitimate music critic. Completely out of nowhere, Duran Duran covered it on a Halloween album just a couple of months ago.

A hauntingly beautiful fantasy song from the sixties that sounds like it must have always sounded old. An English version was released a few years later, but the lyrics are so hard for me to make out that I find it barely more comprehensible than the original Hungarian.

A fun song about the Fallout games. If you, like me, have never played the Fallout games, then it still works as a fun song about living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. We'd better practice having a positive attitude about that sort of thing.

I encountered this banger as the backing track for a compilation posted in r/ukraine of the Ukrainian military prepping to kick Russia's ass. According to Google Translate, this is what the artist said about the song on YouTube: "​These lines were written just a few days before going to war. It contains my entire inner state, and I want to convey this state to every brother. A great battle is ahead, after which not only our country will change, but the whole world as well. This is a real war between the warriors of light and the forces of evil, the battle of angels against demons, people against the dead. Each of us must accept and walk this path. Today, the future of the planet is being created in Ukraine, and we must do everything in our power to defeat the horde of darkness. Perhaps this will give someone motivation, know that I will not only be by your side in song, but also physically at the front with my unit. It's time to return yours! This is not a track, not a composition, not a song - this is a spell of immortality!"

According to this song, maybe love is more precious because it can't last forever because we're all going to die someday. It was always beautiful to me, but it became more poignant after I lost my faith and had to take it more seriously. I still think it's possible that human identities and relationships will persist after death, but I'm no longer confident of that, and I am confident that whatever the afterlife may look like, Joseph Smith's eternal sex fantasy is not it. I heard this song a lot because I have three versions of it on five playlists - my 2010s playlist, my Halloween playlist, my fall vibe playlist, my nostalgia playlist, and my death playlist. It works on many levels. I just realized that I should also add it to my twue wuv pwaywist.

Everyone cares about my music tastes, right? I hope so, because I'm too busy revising my novel to come up with a blog topic out of thin air. According to Spotify Wrapped, this year I listened to 13,846 artists for 91 days, and these were my top five.

I would have discovered the Beatles on my own, but my fondness for them has a lot to do with my parents frequently playing their album "Magical Mystery Tour" when I was young. Granted, when I was really young, it terrified me to hear them sing that the Magical Mystery Tour was coming to take me away, and the creepy animal costumes they wear on the album cover didn't help. But the Beatles deserve the almost universal praise they've received. This year, they topped my list because I listened to all 71 songs of "Live at the BBC," which I hadn't heard before. Also, this year they released what's meant to be their final song, "Now and Then," using new technology to clean up one of John Lennon's demo tapes that they found unusable when they first worked on it in the nineties, then adding parts from the other three Beatles. The song itself isn't mind-blowing, but the fact that I lived to see this day is. I can only imagine how Paul and Ringo, born in the 1940s, must feel about it.

Xeen Music is actually a guy who works with composers to release their soundtracks to early nineties computer games from Sierra Online and other companies, and he gets listed alongside them as an artist. When I found him, I was so overjoyed that I could have kissed him. I didn't play these games in the early nineties, or even know that most of them existed until adulthood, but they fill me with nostalgia for the era of pixels and 8-bit sound. Check him out so these composers can get a few cents for their underrated work.

Roxette were a duo from Sweden that sang about the glories and pitfalls of love, lust, and like. Their female vocalist, Marie Fredriksson, died from cancer four years ago, but Per Gessel has continued an iteration of the band with other singers. My parents played their albums "Look Sharp!" and "Joyride" countless times on car trips to my grandparents' house and back. Because of that, I'm a fan of pretty much all of their songs. Without that exposure, I would probably only be familiar with their songs that have the most streams on Spotify, because I simply don't have the time to check out every song by every artist, even though there must be countless songs with lower stream counts that I would love if I heard them. My life is an unbearable tragedy.

I was introduced to Rammstein in my first semester of college, when I walked into Honors US Institutions a couple of minutes late while the professor was playing the music video for "Amerika." I saw guys with an American flag on the moon and heard an Eastern European language, and my first thought was "Soviet propaganda." I enjoy many of their songs, though I stopped listening to some of them after I learned enough German to realize what they were about. "Amerika" is a harmless satirization of the United States' disproportionate influence on the world's cultures, but in some of their other songs they sing about oral sex, bestiality, incest, child abuse, murder, mass shootings, erotic cannibalism, and/or normal cannibalism. I don't mean to group oral sex in the same moral category as those other things; I just personally find it gross. Anyway, Rammstein are still great because they have loud guitars that sound epic.

You already know that he did some of the greatest scores of all time for some of the greatest movies of all time. Need I say more?