I don't sit around dreaming of having a ton of money. Would I like a ton of money? Of course. An awful lot of anxiety and worry would disappear if I was loaded.
But when I think of what having a lot of money would mean for me, this is what pops into my head...
Now, for those who are not familiar with Point Three, Assouline is a luxury book-maker whose products are beyond stunning. They're large, beautifully-crafted coffee table books which cost a fortune.
The company is best-known for their travel books (at $105 each)...
But they also have releases about many different subjects. Heck, they designed an entire book around Nutella.
But I'd probably start with Miami Beach.
NEWSFLASH: RFK Jr. plans to curb antidepressants, which he falsely compares to heroin.
I've had crippling anxiety since I was 17. I know the age because I can remember the first anxiety-fueled attack I had with crystal clarity. Couldn't breathe. Felt like I was dying. Didn't know what was happening. Couldn't put a coherent thought together. At the time I thought I was having a heart attack. Everything was dialed to 11 and I was in quite a lot of pain.
Not knowing what was happening, mom took me to the doctor. We were told that it was a "panic attack" and I would be fine once I calmed down. Which I did. But I was still so rattled the next day that I still didn't feel like myself. The best word I can think of to describe my condition is... scrambled.
I have no idea what triggered the attack. Whatever it was probably disappeared as I was trying to deal with it all.
A couple times a year I'd get hit again, but it was never as intense as the first time. Probably because I understood what was happening to me. Though it could still get pretty bad. It's called crippling anxiety for a reason. It incapacitates you and you literally can't function.
Eventually I visited Thailand and looked to make some changes in my life. I started meditating, and that allowed me to manage my anxiety fairly well. I did have to run to initial care a couple times over the years for help, but I was never put on any medication.
Until I was.
Caring for a parent with dementia drove up my anxiety levels every single day, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. Far worse than it ever had been. No amount of meditation would touch it. And the fact that I was being incapacitated meant I couldn't care for my mom... let alone myself. Which probably made things even worse.
And so... my doctor ran me through the SSRI gauntlet, where you keep trying different options until something works. Or at least makes life with anxiety manageable. And we hit it on the third try.
I stayed on the pills until three or four months after my mom passed, when I slowly started to get my life back together and go back to meditating to control my stress and anxiety. It wasn't a cold-turkey halting of the drugs. It was a medically-controlled tapering off so that the side-effects don't get too awful. And, despite the FUCKING BULLSHIT NONSENSE BEING VOMITED OUT OF RFK JR.'S STUPID, IGNORANT, ANTI-SCIENCE, PIECE OF SHIT FUCKING ASSHOLE... it wasn't harder than "quitting heroin." Or, if it was, quitting heroin must be a fucking cake-walk, because it was no problem at all. My doctor gave me a schedule and advised me how to do it safely and, after a while, I was done. Back to practicing my meditation.
And then, seven years later, I was at work trying to deal with too much and there it was... an anxiety attack so bad that I was in my car thinking I was dying. All my muscles were so tight that I thought I was going to pass out from the pain. I was jumping out of my skin. My hands and feet were frozen and my fingers were bent back, leaving me clawing at my chest. I would have started screaming, but I couldn't breathe. I don't think that I passed out, but maybe I did. I honestly don't remember.
I didn't mess around. The minute I was able to pick up my phone and dial, I was calling for an emergency appointment with my doctor. YOU KNOW, THE ONLY PERSON QUALIFIED TO GIVE ME FUCKING MEDICAL ADVICE.
Given the severity of the attack, it was decided I would try some milder doses of SSRIs to see if that would allow me to get back to being able to function again.
It did not.
I was spiraling so often so quickly that I went right back to the drug which worked the best for me the first time. From there I worked myself from one pill to three per night. But slowly. Because the side-effects are horrible. Mostly revolving around explosive diarrhea from morning to night... and sometimes in the middle of the night.
Eventually things evened out. And my life started to feel like my own again. Which is to say that my life started to feel like most everybody else's does. Which is to say that any anxiety I'm experiencing is manageable. I don't get so overwhelmed that I can no longer function and am trying to scream while struggling to breathe.
After five or so months when things started to normalize for me, I worked my way down from three pills to two. Two pills to one. And then I was going to go back to zero when I decided that I just didn't fucking want to. I'm old enough now that I simply do not want to spend any more of what little time I have left struggling with my anxiety. I'm done with it. So I met with my doctor and explained where my head was at. He was happy that I had taken the initiative to reduce from three pills to one pill safely (I'd been through it before), and agreed with my reasoning. His training led him to believe I was better off where I was at, so he supported my decision. Medically.
And so...
Every night I take a small yellowish-peachy pill called Paxil.
Then I thank God that Paxil exists and my doctor exists so I can have a normal life that's not being ruled by something I can't control. With that pill I can manage. I can cope. I can be me. And I don't have to live in terror of an anxiety attack appearing out of nowhere and sending my life spiraling...
So fuck RFK Jr. and his stupid ignorant shit. Fuck him sideways.
I have no doubt that there are doctors who over-prescribe. I have no doubt that there are people who are abusing SSRIs. And, yeah, addressing that is probably a good idea. But for RFK Jr. to feel that he gets to overrule my doctor and unilaterally purge/reduce SSRIs for whatever stupid-ass reason (RFK Jr. being somebody who, I'll remind you, has no fucking training for this shit)... well, he can go fuck himself.
I am not going back to where I was when there's a perfectly suitable, perfectly safe, medically-sound, scientifically-studied solution available to me.
And some fascist junkie asshole with no medical training and not a lick of sense in his fucking brain-worm-riddled head has any fucking business telling me otherwise.
I was quite young when I realized my "mind's eye" is blind.
Unlike the majority of people who can "see" stuff in their head, I do not. When I try to close my eyes and envision a red apple, I see only darkness. The closest I can get is to think about a red apple and describe it's attributes to myself while seeing absolutely nothing.
This condition is called "aphantasia."
And if you're wondering what I'm talking about, then there's a test you can take to understand it a bit. My answer to every one of the questions is the first one: No image at all, I only know I am thinking of the object. Coupled with this is also a condition called "Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory" (SDAM). This means that not only can I not envision things in my mind's eye... I also cannot re-experience past events.
An example of SDAM is me thinking back to when I was in Rome and staying at a hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps. I remember trudging up the stairs with a gelato cone. I can remember what the texture and color of the steps were. I can remember the buildings and the people. I haven't forgotten a thing. But when I close my eyes and try to re-live the experience, there's nothing there...
And so... now you know why I take hundreds of pictures whenever I travel somewhere. It's the only way I can visually re-experience what I experienced is to look at the images and videos.
Since I've had this condition since birth (or so I'm guessing), I don't know what I'm missing. I've never experienced it. But I am extremely jealous of people who can. I would love to be able to close my eyes and see my mom's face. Or the places I've been.
Between all this and my mild dyslexia, I'm assuming that my brain damage makes my life a bit less fun than most people's.
This also extends to how I dream.
In that I don't. I'm never having these vivid dreams where I'm flying... or walking on Mars... or whatever. It's always the same. When I'm "dreaming" it's like I'm sitting in front of a screen where I'm "drawing" the objects by description. I'm not actually seeing anything in my head. Which is not much fun at all.
But anyway...
The reason all this popped into my head just now is that J. Craig Venter died.
He's the genius geneticist who was the first to decode a bacteria genome, which lead to a genetics renaissance which culminated in decoding the human genome.
He also had aphantasia...
Rest in Peace, sir.
I'm about as exhausted as I can get after a week of trying to juggle all the balls I have in the air, but I'm not passing on the bullets... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts...now...
• My Room! Olivia Rodrigo was the host of Saturday Night Live last night, and had this hilariously awesome sketch...
As if that weren't enough, the track is a banger!
• Spider-Noir! It's not just because I'm a huge Nicholas Cage fan and he's perfect for the role... it's because this actually looks like it's going to make use of his talents in all the right ways...
I'll be watching it first in black &' white, then probably again in color if it's awesome. Which I'm expecting it will be.
• Best Friends! Somebody commented that this video is the opposite of toxic masculinity, and that seems apt...
There's an entire Instagram channel devoted to this, if you need a mood boost.
• Grapes! No, I'm not finished with watching animals eating stuff videos...
And can you really blame me?
• Yuii Chan Draws! This is remarkable...
It's like she has the entire thing in her head and is just tracing out what's already there. That's talent.
• Deadly Crystals! This is utterly fascinating. And a little scary. There's science happening, but they take great care to explain it in a way most people can understand...
Polymorphs be terrifying, yo.
• We're Out Of The Salmon! Tell me you've never worked in a restaurant without telling me you've never worked in a restaurant...
Amazing how Biden was the target of a gajillion 86-46 memes, where it apparently wasn't some kind of "mob term." And a simple Google search shows that the president himself re-posted far worse. And then there's this...
Funny that. Or fucking disgusting. You be the judge.
And now? Back to being exhausted. In more ways that one.
Jenny is a dangler.
She loves hanging off of any surface she can fit on, and does so all the time. And some of the time when they're particularly impressive, I will snap a photo... and I've accumulated quite a collection over the years.
This past week I found a Facebook group called THIS CAT HAS D A N G L Y A R M B S. Which is a group devoted to cats like Jenny. And so I joined and started posting my photos there because images like these needs to be seen. I mean...
It's the blerpy tongue that makes it...
So many dangles...
But her favorite place to dangle is the catio. These two photos are months apart, but you can see that the dangle is the same, but the background has changed...
And these are too...
Now all I need is a catspreading group, and Jake will have a place for me to post in as well.
Everything we see and do is manipulated for a desired outcome by the people who design the way we see and do things.
Everything.
Where you don't really expect it is in data graphs. You'd think that data is data and the graph will honestly reflect that data. That's a graph's entire function... to clearly present data in a way you can easily and quickly grasp it.
Except we know that's not how it goes...
Yes, it's a valid crash-out.
I bought my car in December 2024. It has never been washed. I park it outside when it rains and don't worry about any dust that accumulates. I just don't care about having a meticulously-maintained car. It's far from a priority in my life. Way down the list.
But then... I parked under a tree where birds ended up shitting all over it. Seriously covered. No amount of rain was going to clean it off. That was embarrassing enough that I relented and went to the carwash.
So now my vehicle is all shiny clean and I've marked my calendar to see if I can go even longer than I did this time before washing. In a day and age when fresh water is a vanishing resource, it seems like a responsible attitude to have!
Or I'm just lazy.
Though at some point, I should probably think about running a vacuum on the inside of it.
Yesterday one of the most important videos you'll ever see was released.
And I need you to watch it.
It's that important, and here it is...
Okay, that was a ruse. Here's the real deal...
I implore you to watch this. If you have kids then I implore you to watch this then talk with them about AI chatbots. I implore you to share this with people you know... especially if they have kids or are vulnerable in some way.
You could be saving a life...
This is fucking repugnant.
AI is stealing our precious resources like fresh water and electricity.
And now they're coming for the people. Exactly as we knew it would. Because there's money to be made.
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently acquired a brand new Narwal Flow 2 robot mop/vacuum. Here are my notes after a week with "Carl the Fourth" (named after Carl the janitor in Sixteen Candles, as my previous three robot vacuums were).
As I noted yesterday, this is a darn good robot mop/vacuum, and my home has never felt this clean with any other robot before. So let's get into it...
When it comes to mapping out your home, Carl the Fourth is pretty darn smart. Like all devices now, it's got "AI onboard" which means it can "see" objects and obstructions far better than older vacuums. Instead of mucking about by bumping into everything over and over, the Narwal Flow 2 using twin sensors to get a 3-D view of your home...
The initial mapping of my home was shockingly fast because Carl just zoomed around sensing where everything is. From the map he makes, I can see how he is seeing my home...
The AI is smart enough to detect objects like phones, cables, fabric, and shoes. I have two pairs of shoes by my door and they were identified easily (albeit in singular instead of plural form)...
Furniture like beds, couches, tables, and even pet feeders(!) are recognized and marked on the map. The problem is that they are not marked on the map correctly. Here's the map that Carl made of my home...
Let's look closer at my couches...
You can see that the coffee table perfect lines up where Carl cleaned. But the couches? The large couch is shown 2/3 of its length for some reason. But look at the smaller couch. Not only is it drawn massive, it also doesn't reflect the angle of the actual furniture. This is truly bizarre. Why doesn't the map representation match what is actually on the map? Maybe this will get better with updates.
When it comes to creating cleaning zones within your house, it's very difficult. I turn the furniture icons off because they're not remotely accurate. I would use past mopping data, but it doesn't show up. All you get is the sensor map... WHICH FADES AWAY WHEN YOU START DRAWING ZONES?!?? They're barely visible...
Ugh.
Narwal recommends that you first do a full vacuum-only so that any dirt doesn't interfere with the mopping so I did that. Even though my Roomba had cleaned just two days before, the Narwal Flow 2 came back looking filthy. Which means Carl the Fourth is obviously doing a deeper clean and getting closer to areas which collect dust, cat hair, and cobwebs. This was quite impressive.
I left some cat vomit residue from the previous week because I had gotten a notification that Carl had shipped and was on his way. I wanted to see if he would be able to scrub it up...
The answer is no. Not only did Carl not get them cleaned up, he didn't even identify them as dirty spots so he would attempt to clean them up. In reviews and the sales promotion, I saw video after video of Carl scrubbing spots clean with the "Smart Stain Detection"... but not here. I don't know if it's because my floor is dark wood instead of light wood, but should that really matter when the spots are fully contrasted against the floor? How did all three of these get missed? I sincerely hope that Narwal sends improvements to the Flow 2 in order to upgrade its smarts for stuff like this. I ended up having to wet paper towels and manually wipe them up as usual. Bummer.
The next morning I woke up to find that Jake had tried to hack up a hairball, leaving fresh water vomit dribbled from the dining room to the guest bedroom. So I opened up the Narwal app... drew a box around the area affected... then unleashed Carl and waited to see if the fresh spots would be recognized. Turns out they didn't need to be. He blazed over them without a second glance, obliterating them easily...
And then... yesterday I woke up to find that one of the cats had done a scarf and barf. So here we go. This is why I got Carl in the first place. Will he think that this is poop and avoid it? Or will he recognize this as cat vomit and attempt to clean it up?
Oh heck yeah! Carl noted the stain, then turned his vacuum on highest speed and attacked it. Going over it again and again until it was gone, then he mopped over it until the floor was clean. Great job, buddy! Though this does worry me a bit. I haven't had a chance to look at Carl's undercarriage to find out if there's cat puke smeared on it. And does this mean if my cats end up pooping on the floor for some reason that he will try to clean it? That's a good question.
UPDATE: Carl ran through the vomit and got his wheels messy. Not good. Would probably have been easier to clean the vomit than clean these wheels.
The water in the base station is pre-heated in the tank to 140º, which is supposed to give you a better mopping. The problem is that even fresh off the base station, the water Carl leaves behind is not at all hot. Maybe slightly warmer than ambient room temperature. This is disappointing after reading it so prominently in the promo literature, but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Where it likely makes a lot of difference is in cleaning the mop head during/after he's been mopping. Multiple rinses with 140º water is sure to clean the head better than room temperature. For that, I am thrilled, because it addresses one of my biggest problems I had with the Bissell SpinWave robot, which doesn't clean its spinny pads at all. You have to manually toss them in the wash.
There's a bigger problem with the spinny pads and vibrating pads and roller pads on other mopping robots, though. They just smear the dirt around with water, and my floors never felt freshly-mopped. The Narwal Flow 2 doesn't use any of these technologies... Carl instead uses a flat mopping head which has a "rolling track mop" head that rolls around it while constantly being rinsed off and re-wetted. It actually cleans your floors...
Just look at how my SpinWave "cleaned" my floors in comparison...
But here's something else that's cool about the mopping... the head can extend outward from the side to get closer to edges than it would if it just stayed underneath the unit. The technology behind the Narwal Flow 2 alone makes it better than any cleaning robot I've ever had. After mopping, my floors look as clean as if I hauled out a mop and manually scrubbed them. It's so amazing to see. I walk on the floors in my bare feet and they feel great. So good that I could never go back to the spinny pads, vibrating pads, and other stuff I had in my other mopping robots.
Time will tell if the notorious hard water where I live is going to build up inside the robot or the base station and ruin them. I toyed with the idea of using distilled water, but that would get very expensive very fast.
As expected for a robot with the advertised suction power, the vacuum is great. But it seems to have a bit of a problem due to the way it sections off your home. Carl understands that the kitchen is a different surface than the dining/living/bedroom area, so it attacks them separately. This is a bit of a problem, because the kitty litter that gets trapped against the transition strip between them doesn't really get vacuumed for some reason...
There's an HD camera on board which allows you to look out the front as cleaning is happening. You see what the robot sees...
You'll note that there's a directional pad in the lower left where you can manually drive the robot. I haven't done this yet. It might be fun from a remote-control car standpoint, but if I have to do that in order to vacuum or mop, I'll just grab my vacuum or mop!
Disclaimer: My home is wall-to-wall hardwood, so I don't know how well it does on carpet.
So... yeah... love this thing. Hope it gets even better. Let's sum this up, shall we...
THE GOOD
THE BAD
Ultimately I'm very happy with Carl the Fourth. He's very expensive, but does his job very well. Much better than I do with my quick cleanings on Sundays. Yes, I will still do an occasional deep-clean, but probably not every month. Maybe every-other-month or when company is coming. In-between, Carl will be vacuuming and mopping Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
I just hope that he has a long service life, because when you have built-in obsolescence or planned failure at this level, because if he dies right after the 3-Year Warranty ends, that's too soon.
The problem is... I have cats.
In addition to year 'round kitty litter getting kicked around, this time of year Jake and Jenny are shedding like crazy. This means fur is everywhere and hacking up hairballs are more frequent. Yuck. Every Spring I toy with the idea of buying new robots to help keep things clean (all my floors are hardwood, so it's very noticeable).
So every Spring I toy with the idea of getting new-and-improved robots. Then I don't because I don't want to spend the money only to be disappointed again.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago and I said something to a friend about cat hair being everywhere and I was presented an option for a too-good-to-be true new robot that was being released on April 20th... the Narwal Flow 2.
So of course I researched all the pre-reviews of the product and did a deep dive into the competition.
The robot I was looking at a couple months ago was the Matic, former Google Nest engineers. The reviews were amazing and its reimagining of floor cleaning seemed a smart take. But it was way too tall. It wouldn't fit under any of my furniture, which means all the cat hair blowing under it would never be touched. So I passed.
I have mixed experiences with Dyson (I find them mostly sub-par) but was told they have been investing loads of their cash into robots, so I looked at some reviews. But their latest and greatest Spot+Scrub was getting terrible reviews.
The previous Narwal models were always in competition with Mova, Roborock, and Dreame, so I investigated their offerings. I had experience with i-Robot and Ecovacs, so I looked into those as well. After exhaustive research, I decided that the models competing with the Narwal Flow 2 weren't much better or worse, so I pushed the button on it because the offer I had was too good, then I hoped for the best.
After living with the robot for a week, I have opinions.
Which I will share tomorrow.
SPOILER ALERT: This is a darn good robot mop/vacuum, and my home has never felt this clean with any other robot before.
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