physical training

Fingering

I may have given the impression that the Harambe System is the only muscle building equipment I use, but there are two exceptions to that. I’ve been using a Gripmaster Pro for the past 10 years, and a Captains of Crush Gripper for a bit longer.

Back in 2015, shortly after I first met Ed Calderon, he was using my body to demonstrate for Mark Denny a selection of the BDSM techniques he had learned from Japanese prostitutes.1 In the moments of clarity between pain, I was impressed by the strength of his individual fingers. Later, when we were decent, I asked him about it and he pointed me to the Gripmaster Pro. I bought one.

I keep the Gripmaster at my desk at work, and the Captains of Crush Gripper at my desk at home, and use both the way The Youth use their so-called “fidget spinners”, rather than as part of any sort of purposeful program.

Notes

  1. ↵ You can't open the book of my life and jump in the middle.
links

Link Log 2025-07-06

myNoise

Ghost Dog and selective philosphy

The Visual World of ‘Samurai Jack’

Aphex Twin: a case study in nostalgia

How to Dress and Undress your Home

The Blade Runner FAQ: Language Matters

The discreet charm of the infrastructureless

Kulshan

admin

Recruitment

Back in May I received an email, improperly routed to my spam folder, which contained my (long-expected) invitation to join the Illuminati. I’ve yet to receive further details, but I figure I’m basically in at this point. It isn’t like they’re going to send me a secret decoder ring in the mail.

Date: Mon, 19 May 2025 14:25:37 +0300

From: The illuminati alexandr@medicine-it.ru

To: Recipients alexandr@medicine-it.ru

Subject: illuminati recruitment.

Greetings, from the illuminati world elite empire, Are you a business Man/woman, politician, musician, student, employee. Do you strive to expand your knowledge to achieve personal growth, Do you want to be rich?, need protection, be powerful and famous. If YES!. Then you can achieve your dreams by being a member of the great illuminati empire, Once you are a member all your dreams and heart desire can be fully accomplish. With this brief summary, If you are interested to become a member of the great illuminati then get back to us for more information about joining the illuminati. kindly reply us back on our direct recruitment email only at: infoilluminati@religious.com Please note, Kindly make sure all your response are send directly to the email stated above.

This is my second favorite recruitment offer. The first being when, in the year of our lord two thousand and eighteen (or was it ‘17), I received a phone call from a (purported) CIA recruiter (allegedly) encouraging me to apply for a role in the (recently renamed) Directorate of Operations.

It is periodic acknowledgement like this that leads me to believe I am making the right life choices.

physical training

A Machine for Building Muscle

Back in December I wrote that I was very happy with the Harambe resistance bands but intended to keep using the X3 bar and plate.

That last part didn’t age well.

In March I bought the Harambe CyberPlate. This was great and lived up to the hype. Encouraged by that, about a month later I bought the bar-previously-known-as-Manhattan and rods and black ropes. This too proved to be a significant quality improvement over my previous equipment. Two months after that I was back for the blue ropes and foam block.

Harambe System

My original Harambe purchase of the bands is, I think, still the most valuable. The reduced length of the bands and the intelligent assortment compared to what I’ve used previously directly contributes to a better, more efficient workout. The other components of the system, when compared to the X3 equivalents, are less about improving efficiency or functionality and more just quality of life improvements.

The rollers on the unfortunately named CyberPlate do make all the movements much smoother. After experiencing it, I find it hard to go back to a plate without rollers. But I do not think the that CyberPlate lets me lift heavier bands, or build more muscle faster, or anything like that. It should increase the service life of the bands, but that’s not much of an argument when one considers the price of bands compared to the price of the plate.

The bar is similar. I appreciate the greater width. I have come to prefer its independent bearings, rather than the X3 bar’s approach of having both sides move in unison. My deadlifting calluses have mostly gone away, despite the fact that I’ve progressed to heavier bands than what I was lifting when I was still using the X3 bar. (Partly this is because I’m using heavy enough bands that most of the time I need to use straps, but mostly I think it is because of the better knurling on the Harambe bar.) But, like the plate, this is more on the order of quality-of-life improvements rather than the Harambe bar being somehow more effective. The one exception is that on some movements – overhead press being the main one – I do notice my abdominal muscles being hit much more than they ever were with the X3 bar. I suspect this is due to the greater width of the Harambe bar and the independent bearings both requiring greater stabilization efforts on my part. I appreciate this. A strong core is important, and I hate doing sit-ups.

The sling system that Harambe uses offers some functional advantages over the hooks of the X3. The ability to change rope lengths and add spacers can help with progressive overload, but I feel like that advantage is pretty minor – especially if you get their orange band, which mostly replaces the contribution of the spacers in helping to progress to heavier bands. (Did I mention that I also ended up buying the orange and black bands at different points? I regularly use all six bands – individually or in some combination – for different movements.) The only area where I really take advantage of the modularity of the slings is when I put on the blue ropes, which allows me to back squat with a doubled band. I like doing back squats, but I do them after front squats. If I could only do front squats, I’d still be happy. So I don’t think the hooks vs sling question is worth spending much time thinking about. Both are fine, slings offer greater modularity, hooks provide a built-in stand, but ultimately it probably just comes down to personal preference.

If I’m home and bored and have a few minutes, I often find myself pulling the Harambe bar and plate out from their home under my desk and doing some exercise for a few minutes (this in addition to my more structured daily workouts with the system, which usually happens in the evening). I never did this impromptu work with the X3. I’m willing to accept that the responsibility for this failure lies more with me than the X3, but I think it also speaks to the difference in the experience of using both systems. When I get on the plate, grip the bar, and start pushing or pulling, it just feels like I am using well-made, top quality, professional equipment. Because I am.

All of these components cost a good deal of money (after my third order I made the mistake of asking ledger for my total spend with Harambe). Yet I don’t find myself regretting any of the purchases, and I think I would happily purchase all of them again (despite recent price increases meaning that most components are now more expensive than what I originally paid). That’s usually a good metric to assess an item’s value. But of course part of the point with a machine like this is that except for the bands, which are ultimately consumable, I should never have to purchase any sort of muscle building equipment again. I’m set for life.

I’ve noticed Harambe start to use the word “luxury” in some of their marketing. While I think that word does not properly apply to what they’re doing – “premium” would be more appropriate in the official lexicon – it implies a basic strategy to differentiate themselves from their competition that I agree with: their product is expensive, it may not complete the task more efficiently than more affordable offerings (except for the bands), but the extra thought and polish that goes into their components do craft a superior user experience, and once you use it everything else will seem less than.

The disadvantage to all this is that my shirts and jackets are all shrinking and I don’t want to replace them.

media, stationery

Stationery of the Jackal

My critique of frivolous details in The Day of the Jackal continues.

In the third episode, there’s a scene where our titular assassin is doing some computing and we see his pen in the corner of the frame. It isn’t in focus but is obviously a fountain pen. I immediately lose interest in whatever he’s doing and say to myself “Ah, bella penna.”1

A few shots later we get a close-up of the pen and notebook. The pen is clearly a Kaweco Sport. So, he could do better, but anytime I see someone use a fountain pen my opinion of them goes up. I can’t identify the notebook, but the paper is grid-lined, looks to be A6 in size, and it doesn’t seem to feather much with his ink. I approve. The nib is probably a Fine based on the size of the writing. Good choice. The ink is a rich blue. Always classy. I’m more of a blue-black man myself, but every now and again I can get down with a little Pilot Iroshizuku Kon-peki or similar. Maybe this Jackal character is all-right.

The Day of the Jackal: Stationery screenshot

I judge a man by his stationery.

Notes

  1. ↵ The recent Ripley TV show approaches perfection because, unlike The Day of the Jackal, it revels in all the minor details. (Also, that lighting.) One of the things on my aspirational to-do list for the past year or so has been to watch Ripley again and make a super-cut of every time someone says "bella penna". Because I'm weird like that. It is one of my favorite parts of the show. The pen doesn't really matter to the plot at all, yet at the same time it communicates most of what you need to know about the character. And anyone who EDCs a fountain pen fantasizes about others acknowledging it.
media, review

Tribulations of the Jackal

I’ve begun watching the new The Day of the Jackal TV show. I read the book years ago, and remember enjoying it – though I think Forsyth (like Trevanian) is one of those novelists for whom one’s memory of the books is usually better than the reality of them. I never saw the 70’s film. The only thing I remember from the 90’s film was how satisfying it was to watch Jack Black’s arm get blown off. (The Internet assures me that there was another 121 minutes of this movie, but those 3 minutes are all I remember.) All of which is to say, I went in with middling expectations. But the first episode was better than I expected. I’ve watched the second episode now, and it is as good as the first. Unfortunately, there are plot issues holding the show back.

I have notes.

The show opens with the titular Jackal assassinating some political candidate. The Jackal is shown to be meticulous, competent, and highly skilled. (This excites me because competency porn is my favorite porn genre.) In the aftermath of the assassination everybody else in the show’s world comments on how the shot should have been impossible. This communicates to the audience that the Jackal probably isn’t desperate for work, nor is he a replaceable cog like his fellow gig-workers at Uber and Doordash.

Then we see the Jackal go home to some fancy villa in Spain. Everything about his house, his clothes, his cars communicates to the audience that he is rich.

As he communicates with his existing client and a new speculative client via his not-Tails live distro we see that he has strict rules about how he works and how he interacts with clients.

Yet this new speculative client immediately asks him to break his rules and his response is basically “lol ok let’s go”. Why? It is never explained. He’s rich, successful, and has a well-respected brand. Usually the setup for this sort of plot is “He wants out but the big bad boss is going to kill him unless he does this one last job”. Or, “He wants out but he’s broke and this one last job will earn him enough to retire to a Spanish villa.” But the writers of the show don’t attempt any of that. This guy already has the Spanish villa. They could solve this problem with just a few lines of dialogue and about 30 seconds of screen-time, but instead they just traipse right past this gaping void in the very beginning of their plot.

In the second episode the speculative client requests a meatspace meeting. The Jackal says “That’s not going to happen.” (It’s one of his rules, you know.) To which the client retorts with something like “Then we’ll have to go elsewhere. I expected the Jackal to say “Have a nice day” and hang up. This guy should hold all the cards in the negotiation – he’s supposed to be the best, the client approached him, he’s not struggling to feed himself, he just completed a job that nobody else could do. Instead he agrees to the meeting. It makes no sense. In every interaction he rolls over for the client, giving up all leverage. This is not how successful freelance employment works. How has he lasted this long?

The client wants him to murder some tech-bro CEO because said tech-bro CEO is going to release a piece of software called “River” that promises to make all financial transactions publicly viewable. How? Magic. It is never explained. Somehow this software will just be released, and in the next second all transactions everywhere in the world are going to be in some central, public database, I guess? (I keep expecting some character to say the word “blockchain”, but am pleased to report that this has yet to happen.) This is not how fintech works. River is just the show’s MacGuffin, so it doesn’t really matter, but the writers make the deadly mistake of telling us just enough about it to shatter the fantasy of the story. I find this sort of thing super frustrating. The right way to setup a world-ending MacGuffin is to copy The Rabbit’s Foot from Mission Impossible 3: the only thing we are told is its codename and that it is bad. Nothing else to distract from the plot. (They later fucked this up by trying to explain it in the recent sequels, but, well, you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.) The writers should have told us that tech-bro CEO is going to release a piece a software that will change the world, and left it at that. Don’t extrapolate when it isn’t necessary.

The client tells the Jackal that the murder has to happen by such-and-such a date, because that is the date the tech-bro has said he is going to release the software. So… killing this CEO guy is going to destroy the software? This is not how software development or deployment works. The date is coming up soon (soon enough that the Jackal scoffs at the deadline but then immediately agrees, because he doesn’t care about his rules and always does whatever the client wants). The tech-bro is shown making the television rounds on some sort of press tour, promoting the imminent release. So we have to assume that the software is already pretty much ready for release. The client is not trying to kill the tech-bro because they want to prevent him from writing the software. They just want to prevent the release. They have yet to explain how killing the CEO will accomplish this. Why not figure out what data center the guy stores his git repos in and destroy that? Nobody knows.

Prior to the meeting in episode 2 that should never have happened, the Jackal quoted the client a fee of $100 million (or maybe Euros or Pounds or Woolongs, I don’t remember). At the beginning of this meeting the client says “We’re still pretty far away on the price.” The Jackal ignores her and requests half now, half on completion. She says no, but she’ll give him $20 million now. To which the Jackal responds, great, he’ll get started as soon as he gets the $20 million. Dude. She has explicitly told you that she is not going to pay your requested fee. She has offered to put down 20% of what you’re asking. You have completed no negotiations about what the remainder of the fee is going to be. And your response is to start on the project anyway? This guy is a terrible business person. The client must be overjoyed at how much of a pushover the Jackal is.

When he first uses his not-Tails live USB flash drive, he does so on a public computer at an internet cafe in Paris. This threw me. I thought the show was supposed to be set in the modern day, not 2003. Are internet cafes really still a thing in Paris? I paused the show to look it up on Google Maps, and apparently they do still exist. Weird, but I can move on. The Jackal then moves on by navigating to his darknet web chat thing and logging in with his username and password. On a public computer. So, not worried about key loggers, I guess? Surveillance cameras in the cafe that capture the keyboard? Why even go through this whole thing with the internet cafe? Just use your laptop from a public wifi network. Later, he does insert the same USB drive into his personal laptop and log into the same chat service. So it isn’t like he is trying to keep all his work stuff off of his personal machine. The whole thing just seems odd, and it’s not like his being at the internet cafe drives the plot in any way. Maybe later in the series they’ll reveal that security cameras in the cafe captured him and this will become relevant to the plot. But even then, they could accomplish the same thing by having him login from his personal machine while sitting at McDonald’s after ordering his Royale with Cheese.

When he finishes with the public computer, he stands up and picks up the snacks that he was munching on and the cups he was drinking out of. I think to myself “Oh, neat, this guy’s tradecraft is so good that he’s going to take this trash with him and dispose of it elsewhere so that he doesn’t leave any DNA at the cafe!” But then he just tosses it in the trash can inside the cafe before leaving. I cried a little inside. What was the point of even writing the trash into the show if not to communicate something about the character with it? I really hope this whole cafe scene comes back later in the series and becomes some sort of linchpin in the good guy’s investigation.

The MI6 lady who is trying to identify the Jackal gets a lead when she figures out that the backpack he is seen carrying is from some sort of small-batch Kickstarter thing that was only sold at two shops in jolly-old-England. So our (anti-)hero, who is shown to be so meticulous in his planning and a master of disguise, is dumb enough to walk around with some couture backpack of which only a couple hundred were ever sold? It strains credulity. I checked, and the first episode aired on 2024-11-07, while Brian Thompson was killed on 2024-12-04 so it wasn’t like this plot point was sloppily shoe-horned in at the last minute to make fun of Peak Design – which was my first thought.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the show. I just need to pause it three or four times an episode to rant about how stupid some minor plot point is. It’s frustrating because all these little unimportant things hold it back from being a good show. I hope they improve the writer’s room for the second season.

shaving

Simpson Synthetic

I bought a Simpson Commodore X2 badger brush in 2013 and shaved with it for ten years. This replaced the cheaper Vulfix Pure badger brush I mentioned 2008. In 2023 I decided that the Commodore had shed enough hairs and it was time to replace it. I bought the Simpson Trafalgar T2 synthetic brush, mostly just because it was cheap and I thought it would be worth trying for a bit before spending more on another fancy badger brush. I’ve been using that synthetic brush for 24 months now and have no complaints.

Using it is a bit different from using a badger brush. I always start by wetting my brush under a running faucet. With a badger brush, my habit was then to give the brush a few vigorous shakes. That resulted in the correct amount of moisture being left in the hairs to lather the soap. After that amount of shaking, the synthetic brush is practically dry. I had to retrain myself to only give it one or two gentle shakes to remove excess water.

When I circle a badger brush on my soap, I’m just picking up the soap. The lather doesn’t develop until I take the brush to my face. With the synthetic brush, the lather develops when circling the brush on the soap. I then use the brush to paint it on my face. It’s a slightly different action, requiring less pressure, which is better suited to the relatively stiffer hairs of the synthetic brush.

The quick drying nature of the synthetic brush probably makes it nice for travel. Personally I never bother packing a shaving brush. Instead I just use my scouring cloth to lather up when on the road.

Over these past two years I have not noticed any real disadvantages to the synthetic brush. Considering the price difference – I paid $75.39 for the Commodore badger brush (in 2013 dollars) and $27.40 for the Trafalgar synthetic brush (in 2023 dollars) – I’d say the synthetic was a good buy. I’ll stick with it.

quote, books

You Will Die

We are now in a period of crisis not for a specific nation but for humanity, inhabiting a planet that is becoming less and less habitable. A new kind of heartbreak can be felt in The Iliad’s representation of a city in its last days, of triumphs and defeats and struggles and speeches that take place in a city that will soon be burned to the ground, in a landscape that will soon be flooded by all the rivers, in a world where soon, no people will live at all, and there will be no more stories and no more names.

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

Emily Wilson, in the introduction to her excellent translation of The Iliad.

Luncheon