Jeremiah Donaldson's Blog: This and That, page 2

Self Sufficiency Blog Series 4-Protein

Now, I'm to what is perhaps the most important thing you need to pay attention to when it comes to producing your own food: protein. It's also perhaps the most important thing to pay attention to when it comes to your diet in general. As nutritionists and people who work out have been saying for decades and as recent studies are finally backing up, vegetable proteins are just not equal to animal protein. The reason for this is very simple: complete proteins. No vegetable or combination of vegetables gives you the 21 amino acids you need like ANY 'complete protein' like beef, chicken, milk, eggs, etc does. Your body cannot produce these amino acids and you will literally fall apart like a two-bit Frankenstein monster if you don't get them. The vegan nut that just 'starved to death', aka, fell apart due to amino acid deficiency, is a sped up version of what happens to all vegans at the end of the day. She just took it to extremes and it happened in a matter of a few years instead of a decade. And when I say your body falls apart, I mean that the connective tissue breaks down and you leak fluids from your skin and into your body cavities, such as that vegan leaking lymph fluid from her legs in the weeks leading up to her death. This breakdown of connective tissue is very similar to what happens if you have scurvy (discussed in previous essays in this series) or catch Ebola. Needless to say, you don't want this to happen. To prevent this, you need access to complete proteins.

Blog post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

DTR2ed countdown-6-Player Characters

Welcome to the sixth blog post counting down to the release of the Disturbance Timeline RPG: 2nd Edition rule set. These posts will continue up to the release of the 2nd Edition on June 1st of 2024 to mark the 10th anniversary of the 1st edition.

This post takes a look at the Player Character changes. Overall, this section has seen massive changes from the 1st edition and the range of characters that can be created has been greatly expanded. Paralysis by analysis is now a serious issue at creation due to the options available. For instance, there are 39x38x37, or 54,834, three Skill combinations if you count the 30 main Skills and the 9 Skills added by Knacks. The number of PC build combinations jump to 4,222,218 if the other 77 Knacks that don't add Skills are included in that calculation. The first expansion module, Vicksburg Region, will add yet more (22 Knacks so far, 4 of which add new Skills) as will the other two planned pieces of supplemental material. A random Skill table, for the 30 base Skills only, has been included to alleviate paralysis by analysis.

Full post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

Character Profile 6: Roek

This is a 6th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at another of my oldest characters.

Roek is a vampire main character that first publicly appeared in my short story The Pendant, published by the small print magazine Title Goes Here: in their Spring 2010 issue as the lead story. It revolved around Detective Jack Young finding Roek's pendant at a crime scene and the events that transpire. However, the story itself was not new to me. I wrote the original story, called Roek at the time, as a teenager sometime around 1993 on an old typewriter that I took as payment instead of money for cleaning out a basement for someone.

I still have the original copy of the story, as well as the very first rewrite that was done a year or so later in 1994 or 1995 on the same typewriter. Everything but the title is basically the same. It was simply rewrote one final time ~13 years after the fact in 2008 and that was the version submitted to Title Goes Here:, which is the version used now with only minor edits to fix typos.

Blog post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

Third Times the Charm: Comeback #2

This year, 2023, marks a big year for me. I've got two major writing anniversaries coming up later this year (20th for first self published book and 10th for first political essay) and, through dogged determination, I've managed to get my sales picking up once more for the third time. I get a laugh at these people asking 'how much can you make as a writer' after they were lied to for 4+ years at whatever bullshit college they went to. It shows they don't understand the task. They don't understand that writing is an expensive hobby and a way to leave a mark on the world, not a 'job', unless you want to be a reporter, and even then, you're not making much unless you get some cardio and go out reporting in war zones. Sports writers are a dime a dozen and that was before 'AI'. Which I won't get into, because 'Intelligence' doesn't belong in the definition of anything that's a glorified copy/paste program that does nothing but steal any material it encounters like a malicious internet bot. And any other writing that doesn't require actual thought, research, and insight into human beings is at risk of being turned into gibberish by poorly programmed bots. Just like EVs, AI is going to take out nearly everyone stupid enough to engage with it since both are frauds. Which actually makes this a perfect time for a comeback.

Full essay on Authorsden: https://authorsden.com/visit/viewarti...

Character Profile 5: The Disturbance Timeline

This is a 5th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. This one takes a look at the Disturbance Timeline itself. Not really a character, but sorta is. Maybe you'll agree by the end of this.

The Disturbance Timeline is my fictional future of humanity that is now 'alternate history' since its starting point (2022) that was almost a decade ahead when first created (2014) is now past us. The timeline was inspired by my love of all things history mixed with my love of futurism and was purpose built to connect the storylines in Plague and The Last Stop. They weren't originally connected, but then I realized one day that they did, or should, take place in the same world. The first version was first posted on my website in 2014 and it is in the back of the Disturbance Fiction Collection (vol 1 since pieces for vol 2 are well advanced).

Blog post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

DTR2ed countdown-5-Combat

Welcome to the fifth blog post counting down to the release of the Disturbance Timeline RPG: 2nd Edition rule set. These posts will continue up to the release of the 2nd Edition on June 1st of 2024 to mark the 10th anniversary of the 1st edition.

This post takes a look at combat in the 2nd edition, and there have been some subtle but major changes made to the combat system in DTR2ed.

Perhaps the biggest change to combat is just how fast it gets very deadly. PCs start off with more of everything compared to the 1st edition as I detail throughout this essay series. Concentrating this power into noncombat abilities is one thing, concentrating it into combat abilities is another. The overall effect of this is that a level 1 PC in the 2nd edition starts off roughly as strong as a level 12, give or take, PC in the 1st edition. I've been able to get a single Skill to 81% at level one with test PCs by (mostly) sacrificing everything else at creation, and balanced PCs are still just as much stronger, their strengths are just more spread out. The deadliness of combat by the Skill number is compounded by other changes that have made it easier to land Critical Hits and increase other combat stats.

Full post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

Fruit Plants part 2 of 2

Cherry tree. Again, this gets shut down by the late frosts. However, it is a wild cherry tree and they self pollinate. It was planted as a sapling back in 2018 and it bloomed for the first time in 2022, which was early at 4 years old. Wild cherry trees, unlike domesticated, have pits (seeds) and you will have saplings coming up around the mature tree once it has gotten going, and the one I have was a sapling at my dad's. They are also somewhat susceptible to fungus infections. To sorta make up for that, you can take branch cuttings from a wild cherry tree to start a new tree with. Unlike domesticated cherries, wild cherries are darker and more sour, which makes them good for jams and pie fillings where sugar is added to them. The trees only live to 18-25 years and stop producing in their last years, so they have to be rotated out every decade and a half or so. The wild cherry tree I have is the shortest lived of all my fruit plants and is already almost 1/3 through its estimated useful life. Birds will go after the wild cherries relentlessly.

Full post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

Self Sufficiency Blog Series 2-Fruit Plants(part 1 of 2)

As detailed in part 1, the number one thing to get going IMO are fruit plants. Trees, bushes, vines, whatever. Doesn't matter. Just fruit plants. In general, you can eat as much fruit as you want to consume, although there are some exceptions. The most important thing provided by fruit is without a doubt vitamin C. People in the modern era mostly see vitamin C as a cold and flu scam cure all (or an actual cure all if they don't know it's a scam) and not much else. In reality, vitamin C can't be stored in your body, is constantly flushed out, you must have a constant and consistent source of it, and to go without it for too long means scurvy. And scurvy means that your body simply falls apart. The collagen that bonds your cells together literally starts becoming unglued, which shows up first as bleeding from the gums. If it progresses too far, it can't be reversed. Vitamin C has been stuck in almost as many products as HFCS due to how important it is. Needless to say, you don't want scurvy today, tomorrow, or ever. And you prevent scurvy and other vitamin C deficient ills by making sure you get vitamin C. Of course, citrus fruits have the most, but you're not growing those easily except in south Florida or California. Anywhere else, you're left with other types of fruit and now I'll go over what I've got so far and what I've learned...the hard way.

full post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

Character Profile 4: Ren

This is a forth in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at one of my newest characters.

Ren, no last name, was a character I created in 2013 in the Neverwinter MMO online game. The playable version of Ren was where his general look and style were created.

Ren himself is a very small man at only 1.1 m tall and 35 kg. He is thin, wirey, bald, has black mutton chops that end in braids, and a tribal tattoo covers the left side of his face. His eyes are bright blue and he's highly intelligent, but has a mean streak. The MMO version of the character was a mage that dressed in blue to match his eyes. The post-apocalyptic version of him is a skill monkey that is an expert with pistols dressed in combat armor. He, with Ott (profile #3), are my two characters with the most artistic renditions.

Full post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...

Self Sufficiency Blog Series 1-Intro

This is a new blog series that takes a look at what I've done, what I've learned, and what I plan to do in regards to being self sufficient as possible on my ½ acre property. Each post will cover a different topic, but this first one is the intro to the series.

First of all, why? Why go through all the work to be self sufficient when you can buy what you want from the store? And the answer to that is easy: poisons. The food from the large stores are full of poisons. These are in the form of insecticides sprayed on produce to keep bugs off them. They are steroids and antibiotics given to animals to keep them healthy in poor conditions and to make them grow faster. They are in the form of sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners that are causing cancer and obesity in equal amounts. These poisons are in the form of many other ingredients that cause or are suspected of causing health issues like palm oil and dyes. You can't even get real meat from a large store, because it's shot up with saline solution to make it weigh more so that you're buying as much water as meat. There's other reasons to produce some or all of your own food such as food cost, wanting to know how the animals are treated, and economic purposes.

Full blog post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...