i'm 30 hours into my fast right now, and about 26-28 hours in i started to develop quite severe orthostatic hypotension. getting woozy when i stand up, but also when laying down, hearing the sound of my pulse in my ear. something that i never recall reading before about fasting is that when you fast, your kidneys ramp up elimination of sodium. a lot of the unpleasantness of fasting actually comes from low sodium. whatever amount of salt you might normally take with you food, maybe one and a bit teaspoons a day, you have to take more when fasting, throughout the whole process. something i have discovered through this also is that there's some other things that help - ginger, lemon juice, mint tea. the low sodium also makes you crave sugar more, though you don't feel like a lot of it. first thing i did when this low sodium state came on was "mmm i could really use a little of those sour cherries i picked, especially because they are cold in the fridge" that heating sensation is also from vasodilation caused by acute sodium deficiency. salt is very important stuff. on keto diet and in fasting both the levels you actually need are higher than the RDA. RDA is based on a high carb diet and high blood sugar. high blood sugar also increases endegenous synthesis of sticky cholesterol. everything they say about heart disease is backwards. higher fat intake also reduces the stickiness of the oils in your blood if you concurrently have high blood sugar.

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GOG.com

The Settlers® 2: Gold Edition

Build your kingdom with the help of hunters, soldiers, shipbuilders and more at your comm

better still, the best version of the original. three dolla. me love this long time

Making sure you're not a bot!

back in amiga days, i played settlers for a while. it's an example of a relatively uncommon genre of games, where you only control structure and initial conditions, and the NPCs do their thing, and victory is about giving them the right initial state to be successful, modifying the structure to their benefit. Kingdom games are in a similar category as well, and Dwarf Fortress is another game, the original is a terminal based game, someone made a pretty graphical version (hah, i use the word pretty, loosely) that has similar logistics-oriented focus. you set up the defenses, and the correctness of your setup (and modifications as you go) has the greatest influence over success in the game. just about to crank it up and have a play, anyway. i've kinda done kingdom now, figured out most of the key structural things to do (don't expand prematurely, clear fast, plant archer towers everywhere to thin out the hordes) and after about the 4th island it gets a bit boring. so, time for something new. claude is busy finishing the moxie bootstrap and i'm just waiting on my many job applications to come back to me. job market is a bit thin at the moment, every other day i do an hour or two looking for likely positions and putting it out there. still waiting for something to happen, gotta stay entertained for morale.

because i'm fasting, technically, i shouldn't be consuming anything with sugar or alcohol in it. but i am. ginger, 2 lemons worth of lemon juice, vodka (200ml) with a gram or so (pinch) of salt in a litre of water. i'm drinking it so slow, it's too sour to guzzle, so it's easy to just sip at it real slow. in the fasted state this means i get a little trickle of ethanol, some ginger calming my gut so the little bit of sugar and acid and alcohol don't unduly slow down my gut membrane repair (after all the toxic shit that has built up after i plugged it with too much cacao) and my glucose-hating blood brain barrier is getting a bit of ethanol for fuel as well as that i'm taking carnitine (along with magnesium glycinate, potassium and zinc citrate) to give the liver a hand with making the ketones for my brain, which absorb better than glucose. it's working out really nice. getting things done that require a focused mental state, healing my irritated gut, rebalancing my microflora.

14 hours into fast, and after a week grinding at the moxie bootstrap (rewriting moxie compiler in moxie) i finally had a dawning realisation about something. in libraries, there is very often an initialization step required. establishing tables and such that may be affected by the specifics of a given operating system or specific configuration of the operating system. in C, you have to hand-initialize all your libraries. there is no standard method. in Go, you have package global var and init() functions. in Moxie, what it is going to be, is that every package (can) have a main(). the import graph defines the ordering, you walk the import tree to the leaves, and then run the main() of each library in reverse order, with the deepest dependencies first (in whichever order) but constrained by the dependencies. this is fractal, once you run all the main() functions in each dependency, you get to the application main() and then teh application starts running. what this means in practice is that there is no longer multiple ways to initialize a library. you can declare globals, but you can't assign to them at the base of the package (peer to the function/type/constant declarations). they must be populated in a single main() function which takes care of the initialization work. Go eliminated the mess of making initial values constants, and associated MMU voodoo required for this, and only actual values can be constant (strings, numbers, arrays) but because of the double indirection of slices and tree shaped maps, if you need slices (which basically means arrays, but with the thing of them not being fixed size and having size/location/capacity information) this got complicated because of that indirection. go is stricter typed than C, [32]byte is not the same type as []byte{...32 elements...}. by unifying the initialization into the already existing entry-point of every import, you get C's clean isolation of libraries, without the spaghetti of go's init() and the implicit init-ness of var (you can actually even assign to vars at package global level by writing closures, as well, to make it even more messy). i wanted to eliminate this spaghetti, and making it so that it's a uniform structure that applies no matter whether it's just initialization or the actual application, means that when you read the code, you know exactly what is happening, before you even compile it. it's an extensive task. all of the stdlib has to be refactored this way, and because some substantial amount of mutation has happened to the moxie versions of the stdlib, i am batching the work in a reverse dependency tree walk, refactoring each stdlib package one at a time, checking it against the Go version, and ensuring the semantics are preserved so it functions the same, except in as far as moxie diverges from Go. all the var statements at package root stay as they are, but their assignments are removed and collated into the initialization main() function. even though it's a big task, it's strictly defined, and bounded, and this also should help with claude staying on task, because it breaks everything down into little bite-sized pieces with clear definition of done.

after a week still something not right in my gut, after jamming everything up by consuming too much cacao for a week before that, it seems to be time for me to shoot for a 72 hour fast. i did one a bit over a year ago and i felt different and better for 3 months after it.

ugh. #jobhunting for today was thin pickings. trawled the entire relevant linkedin, already applied for most of the ones that were viable, found one short contract on upwork. oh well, it is what it is. i have many non-closed applications in flight still and one of them relatively good but maybe the client is hoping for a better candidate. as always, anyone needing someone to improve back end performance or nostr specific knowhow and any kind of task you need doing, HMU #nostr #jobs #contract #work