Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 2

Stupid Bodies

Man, I missed chewing.

…But that’s skipping to the end of the story. A lot of you know pieces of this already, and I’ve lost track of who knows what, so I thought I’d put all of this down in one place so anyone who’s interested can get the whole story. Warning: TMI! Because IDGAF.

Right, so a few months ago, about midway through Tears of the Kingdom, I started getting real bad stomach aches. They were not very different from stomach aches I got as a kid, in fifth and sixth grade, and that was always “gastritis,” so I thought, eh, real bad gas, it sucks and is extremely painful but not the end of the world. I’d drink a lot of water, burp a lot, and be okay in an hour, maybe two.

They started at about, eh, once a month, and moved up to about once a week. I had a lot of theories about what might be causing it: Bra band too tight? Carbonated drinks? Eating too much after not eating all day? (By the end we were up to more like three times a week, and no amount of water helped.)

In late July, I thought hey, this might be pancreatitis associated with using Ozempic, and that would be real bad. It is basically your pancreas digesting itself! So I went to the ER during an episode to make sure it wasn’t that. They were great and did a ton of testing right away: bloodwork, x-ray, ultrasound, CT scan. They concluded it was nothing immediately dangerous and referred me on to a GI doc, who I couldn’t get in to see until October.

That doctor decided to give me a colonoscopy/endoscopy to take a look and see what the problem might be, and anyway I was running behind schedule for a colonoscopy so why not? That didn’t turn anything interesting up, but my bloodwork did. My liver enzymes were getting pretty bad; that and the location of the pain suggested a diagnosis: a bile duct stone. An MRI the day before Thanksgiving confirmed it.

See, it turns out just because you have your gall bladder out doesn’t mean your body stops making stones! And because I am an overachiever, this was no paltry stone: it was 1cm. Your bile duct is only ever supposed to be about half a centimeter wide… It’s a wonder it was hurting me only two or three evenings a week and not all day every day.

Anyway, last Friday I had a procedure to get my stupid bile duct stone out. Fortunately no holes are cut in your body for this! They use an endoscopy camera with another, smaller camera coming out of it to go into your bile duct (I can’t help but think of the alien from Alien, with a mouth coming out of its mouth.) So anyway they went in, used electricity and a water jet to break the stone up, eventually got it out, and some three and a half hours later I woke up ready to move on with my life.

And then. It started hurting. Real bad.

A short anatomy lesson here: the bile duct is a tube that goes from your liver to your intestines, and it releases bile, which is necessary to digest fat. (Your gall bladder is a little sack off the bile duct that holds and squirts out the bile as needed, uh, if and when it works right, not that I have much experience with that.) Your pancreas is right next to your liver; that’s the organ that secretes insulin and other key hormones. The tube from the pancreas to the intestines shares the same opening as the bile duct, which means if you do something to the bile duct (like breaking up a massive stone) there’s a chance your pancreas is going to be a whiny little bitch about it.

This is what happened to me! It was not an enjoyable experience. First I got Tylenol, and that helped not at all. Then I got fentanyl, but not really enough fentanyl to, you know, not still hurt a lot. At about this time the doctor decided to keep me overnight to calm down my stupid pancreas and make sure I didn’t get real full pancreatitis, which happens about 5% of the time for this procedure. I got like 3 liters of IV fluids that day and peed once an hour. I got dilaudid and finally stopped hurting. I got about three and a half hours of sleep and caught a ton of new Pokemons in the middle of the night. My roommate desaturated to 55% blood oxygen and was sent to the ICU at 6am. An eventful time, to be sure.

But! When the dilaudid wore off, I did not hurt anymore (though everything still felt kind of... bruised up in there for a couple of days, which, fair, tbh.) So they let me have breakfast! Which was jell-o and bad green tea and a Boost Wildberry (surprisingly delicious?) And then around lunchtime I was allowed to go home, with strict instructions to go right back to the ER with any of a long list of complications, plus a very gradual reintroduction to solid food.

And then, that first night at home, I couldn’t sleep past around 3 in the morning because my arm started hurting opposite the IV site, and it was hot and a little red and a little swollen, and… ugh, isn’t that the symptoms for a stupid blood clot? …Yes, yes it is. So we went back to the ER at about 7am, and long story short (haha too late) probably just a stupid staph infection somehow? But I was already on antibiotics so whatever. It sucked and was exhausting but ultimately a nonevent.

Which brings us to right now! And food! On Saturday I was on clear fluids. Sunday was “full liquids,” which includes stuff like milk and tomato soup. Monday I moved up to apple sauce, flan and mashed cauliflower (because the store didn’t have mashed potato.) When I wrote this I was doing okay with cream of wheat, and later I did so great with chicken noodle soup that I had pancakes! Livin’ on the edge, that’s me! By the end of the week maybe I’ll even move on to my ultimate target: the sacred tradition of wine and pizza. Or maybe next week, we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway chewing is pretty great, you guys, and your mouth starts to taste and feel extremely weird on a liquid/soft diet, even when you’re brushing and flossing your teeth like normal.

So. That’s what’s been going on! It’s been very exciting, in the bad way! But it seems like pretty much everything is sorted out now. Stay tuned until next time, when I… maybe tell you about my book? And how book writing is going? Maybe. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Nothing But Bluesky

Bluesky! It’s the new hotness, which is to say the new app people are hoping will replace the Twitter-shaped hole in their hearts. I was super lucky to be invited a few weeks ago (I went with @andrea.bsky.social, breaking my years-long andrhia login pattern, find me there, tell me how to find you back.)

Now that I’ve soaked in the ambience of Bluesky for a while, I have some things to say about it. Let’s roll, kiddos.

What is Bluesky?

Once upon a time, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had a dream. It was to make something like Twitter, but without the reliance on a single company and its profit-seeking and its shareholders. Something more resilient, something distributed, something where users could have control over their own data, man. So he started up a group inside Twitter to make that very thing. That was Bluesky.

Lucky for every single one of us, it was spun off into its own company about a year ago, before the… unfortunate events… that led to this moment. And today, it looks like Bluesky hit a tipping point, with large numbers of journalists and Twitter personalities coming on over.

It’s a real party, I have to say. I love it. It’s like Twitter back in maybe 2007, 2008. Then again, I thought the same thing when I checked out Mastodon last October.

Bluesky vs. Mastodon

So we’re going to see a ton of pointless slap fights in the coming days over whether Bluesky or Mastodon is better. The truth is that under the hood, they’re very similar and share closely aligned goals. Both aim to have a federated structure with multiple servers. Both aim to have a robust ecosystem of developers working on apps to interface with it. Both are making a new protocol that could in time replace not just Twitter, but Instagram, Soundcloud, YouTube, blogs. Both are responding to a need for users to be able to control their own experiences, though Mastodon is doing it at the server level, and Bluesky wants that to be in the hands of every single user.

Sure, each one has a few features the other doesn’t. Mastodon doesn’t have a repost function and never intends to, which has become a contentious subject. Bluesky doesn’t have a block feature for ill-intentioned users yet, or direct messages. (But they’re building them.) Mastodon has a confusing onboarding process that requires someone to understand the architecture of the network before they can really participate. Bluesky has a signup as smooth as butter.

The upshot? For right now, I’d liken the difference to the Mac vs. PC wars of the 90s. Each had some technical edge over the other by some measures, yeah, but at the end of the day they were pretty much the same. The difference — as it is here — was mainly in the user experience. That’s not just how many clicks it takes to get to the feature you want to use, though that is important. It also includes the look and feel of the thing, whether there are lots of buttons and menus and sliders or just a few minimalist icons.

Some people like being able to see all the guts and know they can tinker around and make something truly their own. Some people just want the thing to work without ever having to think about it. There’s not a wrong choice.

So vibes are the thing I think will make the difference, in the end. The two cultures are very different already, and I expect they’ll remain so. Mastodon is a caring place, it’s an inclusive place. The flip side is it feels easy to put your foot in your mouth. Bluesky is more rough-and-tumble, like a pile of adolescent dogs play-fighting. That means you’re a lot more likely to be offended.

Not to say Mastodon isn’t fun and Bluesky isn’t thoughtful. They both can be! But as anyone who’s ever made an internet community knows, you have to be very careful how the first days and weeks go, because the zeitgeist of a place will stay that way forever without an enormous amount of effort expended to change it.

And Bluesky is a lot more improvisational, unguarded, jokesy. I think that might be the winning formula: easy and fun. So let’s keep an eye on it. Maybe we’ll all be skeeting in no time. See ya there?

I'm on Substack but Ignoring Notes

Just a little housekeeping news before we resume our regular blogolicious blogging times. For a while I’ve had a feature where you can subscribe to get my posts sent to you in your email! Like a newsletter! I used Mailchimp for this service, it integrated seamlessly with Squarespace and Just Worked. Life was good.

But sometime in the last few years, Mailchimp changed their interface? I think? And the result is that I could no longer get into any of my templates and edit a number of problems that were slowly cropping up — think escape characters in the footer and broken links.

Unfortunately they also changed their pricing model, and for the volume of emails I send, the math didn’t make sense. I am not making any money from this, folks. Just a hobby!

So! Like the title says, I asked around for the best service for this purpose nowadays, and the answer I got was… Substack. It makes sense, because tapping into the Substack ecosystem does put you in front of a bigger audience. And it’s free, which is also pretty great.

Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t have a neat integration with Squarespace so I can write a post in one and have it magically appear in the other. I’ve spent a lot of time looking around, and it looks like it should be technically possible, but I don’t have the right combination of chops and time to make it happen. …If you know how to do this, though, I am all ears.

Anyway! If I’ve done this right, many of you are now seeing this in your email. Great! If not, I done screwed up, and I’m really sorry about that, but also please tell me so that I’m not spamming everyone.

Oh and if you’re reading this on Deus Ex Machinatio Prime and are interested in the Substack/email version, there’s a signup form at the bottom of this page. And if you want to keep up with me but in a less verbose way, there’s always my classic newsletter, now also on Substack!

And that’s it. Have a great weekend, everyone! Excelsior!

18 Months on Ozempic, or, Better Living Through Chemistry

Content Warning: Intentional weight loss, diet culture, needles.

Hi. Hello. Hi! Let's talk biology, shall we?

The drug Ozempic has been in the news a lot lately, both as the trendy new Hollywood magic skinny trick and as a medication that the vain and shallow are snatching from the hands of diabetics just to lose a few pounds, causing widespread shortages.

A lot of people have a lot of questions about these drugs. I've been on one or another for about a year and a half now. I have lost fifty (50) pounds. I'd like to tell you about it.

As background, Ozempic is a kind of medication called a GLP-1 agonist; the chemical name is semaglutide. It was originally developed for treatment of diabetes. A separate but chemically identical product called Wegovy is also approved by the FDA for weight loss.  These are both injectables, and the main difference is the injector pen it's packaged in. A somewhat less effective oral version called Rybelsus also exists. And pharma companies are developing a rapidly increasing number of drugs in the same family, of which Mounjaro is the latest to come to market.

This post is a little more structured than usual because I want to lay out a lot of information but you might want to skip some of it. First I'm going to give you the story of what exactly has happened to me over those 18 months, and then I've written a FAQ answering some of the questions I'm seeing or being asked the most often.

As a warning, I'm using real actual numbers for my weight in this, because talking in concrete terms is always more helpful than vague hand-waving toward facts. These numbers will seem very high to some of you, and depressingly low to others; one person’s starting point is another’s dream goal weight. I apologize for any distress this causes you. Please remember that you are not a number, and neither am I.

Weight History: Where I Started

Prednisone: Where It All Went Wrong

Losing: Calibrate to the Rescue

What It's Like on a GLP-1

Rybelsus

Ozempic

Mounjaro

Conclusions

FAQ

You're an asshole for taking this life-saving medication away from diabetics!

Do the injections hurt?

How fast did you lose weight?

Do you still have to diet and exercise?

Did you still, like, enjoy food?

Are there any side effects?

Did it affect your period?

Will you have to take it forever?

Should I try it?

How expensive are these drugs, anyway?

Should I join Calibrate?

How do I get a GLP-1 medication?

Let's goooooo!

Weight History: Where I Started

Historically, I'm like a lot of American women: perpetually maybe 15 or 20 pounds overweight, capable of bringing it down a little through persistent diet and exercise but it goes back on as soon as you stop paying vigilant attention. I know what to do and I've done it with varying degrees of success. Historically, my highest weights were around 170, and my lowest were in the high 140s, but for the past decade or two I've mostly been in the middle, somewhere between 155 and 165 pounds. Not so bad for a middle-aged lady when you know that I weighed 154 pounds on the day I got married at 24 years old. For reference, I'm 5'5".

Fine, I'm 5'4.75". Happy?

I was, you know, okay with it? While I would have loved to be the fashionable size and shape, I was and am mostly pretty healthy and mobile, have a spouse and family who love me, I'm capable of doing most of the things I would want to do. It wasn't bad.

Let me just say this again: I was, you know, kinda overweight in a perfectly ordinary way, and it was just fine. I don't know who needs to hear this, but your weight is not your value, at either end of the scale, and calling beauty standards "health" does a disservice to all of us.

Right, let's keep going.

Prednisone: Where It All Went Wrong

Remember just before the start of the pandemic, when I had stupid scleritis and I had to go on a bunch of prednisone (and later methotrexate) so I didn't wind up with a stupid hole in my stupid eyeball?

Yeah, good times.

Until then, I'd been in a pretty great place, weight-wise. I was going to barre classes three or four times a week. I was feeling fit and strong and looking good in my clothes. I was down to 155 pounds and sinking! And then…

So OK, prednisone. It is well documented that prednisone makes people gain weight. I was no exception. Once I went on prednisone I could. Not. Stop. Eating. I would eat until I felt full and then more after that. Still the same person, still with allegedly the same amount of willpower as before, but totally unable to show a modicum of restraint around anything delicious. And some things that weren't even especially delicious.

By the time I came off prednisone, about five months later, I was up to 176 pounds, erasing all the progress I'd made and then some.

Demoralizing, for sure. But I knew what to do now that I didn't have the insatiable urge to eat all the things! I knew how to calorie count. I knew how to exercise. I'd done it only a few months back. It's not complicated, it just requires a lot of persistence, yeah?

So I counted, I persisted. Same person, same knowledge. This time it didn't work. I stayed at the same weight, up or down about three pounds, for the next eight months.

Then I became lax for, I kid you not, two measly weeks before Halloween in 2020. I looked back at my health records, and even I couldn't believe it. Just two weeks. With that fairly short dalliance with 100 Grand bars and Twizzlers, I wound up at 184. Eight pounds. Two weeks.

There are people who will tell you this is impossible because physics, or that I must be lying to you, and maybe also to myself. Some of these people are, tragically, doctors, who blame their fat patients for their fatness. They deeply believe such people just underestimate what a tablespoon of peanut butter looks like, don't count the extra salad dressing they glopped on or a nibble of just one cookie, don't realize the mashed potatoes at a restaurant are 50% butter by volume.

The physics model of weight would also tell you that in those two weeks, I ate an excess of 28,000 calories — 3500 calories per pound. That's 280 fun-sized Hundred Grand bars, or 311 mini Twizzlers. That's as much Halloween candy as we even buy in total, and friends, I promise you I don't eat all of it by myself. Not even most of it.

…Nobody else in the house gained eight pounds in those two weeks.

I've been at this a long time. I'm someone who obsessively researches everything, but especially health information. I know what a cup of rice looks like, and that's why calorie counting always for me worked before. That had not changed. Something else had.

But I hadn't really internalized that yet. Back on the saddle, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I went further and harder. I ate beans and escarole when my family had pasta, I eschewed cheese and processed foods, I basically went full whole foods plant based — call it vegan lite, however hard it is to keep up when the rest of your family are the meat and potatoes kind. But I did it. My cholesterol dropped by leaps and bounds. My A1C went down a good amount as long as I could manage. But I maintained at pretty much the same new, higher weight for another ten months.

Then I went to on vacation for a week and a half, still sticking to whole foods, plant based. But I had some cocktails and some desserts, because you’re on vacation, you know? I hit 191 that week.

Again, still the same person, still the same general eating habits and living situation, still the same amount of self-control, yeah? But something had definitely changed.

Getting fatter sucked. It sucks to have to buy new clothes, yeah, and it sucks to feel like your body isn't yours anymore, but what also sucks is getting diabetes. Two of my three closest blood relatives are diabetic. (Except my own kids, but give them time, I guess. Sorry for the bad genes, kids!)

I wasn't so far, but it was getting to be a real close thing and it was clear I couldn’t be vegan forever, natural inclination or no.

In the before-prednisone times, in that last set of labs, I had a fasting glucose of 93. Great, fine, healthy! But that number kept creeping up the same way as my weight kept creeping up.

In my last labs before the meds, but after I'd mostly given up on vegan-lite, I had a fasting glucose of 122. When you hit 126? That's when you're diabetic, and not just pre-diabetic.

Losing: Calibrate to the Rescue

A few months beforehand, I'd seen an interesting article in The New York Times about a weight loss startup called Calibrate that prescribed a miracle drug called Ozempic that had recently been approved by the FDA for weight loss. It wasn't new — it had been used for diabetes for over ten years already. It worked spectacularly well for weight loss. The problem was that Calibrate was… really expensive. And the medications, too, in the United States, unless you can get your insurance to cover it, and most peoples' insurance doesn't cover weight loss.

I signed up from a hotel room at Disney World. This was in late August of 2021.

Onboarding was pretty simple: get some blood work done, meet with a doctor to go over your history and health, and if you're eligible, they get you a GLP-1 medication — not necessarily semaglutide, the magic one, but at least something from the family. It all depended on what your insurance would approve and what contraindications you might be living with.

Calibrate says some stuff about coaching and pillars, but let's be real: everyone is there for the meds, and all of them have already been through some combination of Weight Watchers and Noom and keto and paleo and calorie counting and low fat and Sugar Busters, probably with some cabbage soup diet-like phases sprinkled in the middle.

I was super nervous about taking injections and read up on it to psych myself up. And then my insurance company approved me for the oral version, Rybelsus! It was if anything a bit anticlimactic.

What It's Like on a GLP-1

Starting the meds, though. I've talked to a number of people about this now, what it's like, and the word is WILD. It is WILD. You just… don't want food as much. There comes a point in a meal where your body signals "no more food, kthx." This is a signal that didn't exist for me before. It had always been my intellect telling me what was a reasonable amount of food. If I let my body decide, it might as well be Thanksgiving every day.

Now, though, I had become the person who actually eats the serving sizes on the box, and sometimes less than that. There was a moment where I was eating an apple and halfway though it I just… didn't want it anymore. I wouldn't have been able to even imagine this previously. It was WILD.

There were other effects, too. I found I was much less interested in alcohol, and could make a cocktail and then completely forget I had it. Others who smoke and binge-eat have found those urges reduced or eliminated as well. Whatever it's doing isn't just slowing down your digestion; it's doing something in your brain.

My weight began to go down. I wasn't one of the people reporting twenty pounds in the first month!!!! or whatever, which was a bit disappointing. We all want the quick fix. But I lost about a pound a week while continuing to live my life as normal. And it kept going.

Rybelsus

Sadly I couldn't endure the Rybelsus after a certain point. See, you have to take it with no more than six ounces of water (less is better) at least half an hour before you eat or drink anything else (more is better). And they're big pills. So I felt like I had something stuck in my esophagus all day, every day, and it totally destroyed my morning routine. It was kind of awful, and I actually asked to be changed to one of the injectables.

I stalled out for a while between med changes, as you would expect. But I got approved for Ozempic by my insurance! And game on.

Ozempic

Ozempic was more of the same wild thing, but easier to use without wrecking your whole morning routine. Doing the weekly injections turned out to be no big deal. The needles are laughably tiny.

It was like Rybelsus in effect, but even more so. I just kept on losing at a modest but steady pace, with no particular effort on my part. (I mean, I still tried to drink water and exercise and eat lots of vegetables, but it wasn't hardcore diet mode, just healthy living.)

I felt fantastic. I started to feel like my body was the one I was used to. I had tons of energy and got a lot of stuff done. It was amazing, and I wish those good feelings for everyone.

This did not last.

Mounjaro

Then there were shortages of Ozempic starting up, and I asked to switch to Mounjaro. (Not just altruism on my part, alas, so don't think too highly of me; it was also a lot cheaper at that point, for boring insurance reasons.) This was a terrible, terrible mistake.

Mounjaro is a slightly different and more powerful chemical. It works better, for a definition of "better" that left me struggling to eat so much as 500 calories a day. I was hungry, mind, I could tell my body needed energy, but actually consuming food was repulsive to me.

Here my weight loss sped up to two or even three pounds in a week. Every day a new low. In the two and a half months I was at the effective dosage, I went from about 160 to about 140, blowing easily past 145, which had always been my sensible, sustainable goal weight.

It sounds great, but friends, I can assure you the experience was anything but great. It was miserable. Zero energy. Little zest for life. I couldn't get rid of a horrible taste in my mouth that returned within fifteen minutes of eating or brushing my teeth. (Probably ketones, the natural by-product of your body burning fat. Urine tests confirmed they were present. Hypothetically great because it does mean you’re burning fat, but it's still nasty.)

So I have some boring health conditions and one of them is POTS, a condition where your heart rate shoots way up when you do such grueling physical activities as standing up, which I mostly have under good control most of the time. During the Mounjaro months, this became grievously bad, probably the worst it's been in my life. I went to a black tie party and couldn't eat more than a few bites of my meal. When I shuffled the hora at the speed of a nonagenarian, my heart rate hit the mid-150s. (This is much less worse than some other people with POTS! But still not a good time.)

It might have been hypoglycemia. But more likely it was because I simply couldn't take in enough water and salt to have enough blood in circulation for my heart to be able to pump it all the way up to my brain, so I could be a functioning human being. Other people with POTS: watch out, be careful, don't do it without a lot of forethought, and take it very slow.

After a couple of truly awful months, and several weeks after I begged Calibrate to change me back, I returned to Ozempic. I’ve been getting a lot better, though slower than I’d prefer. I’m just about back to the glorious feeling I remember.

Right now I'm at about 137 pounds and tapering my dosage to see what I need to stay here-ish. I don't think I weighed this little when I graduated high school.

Conclusions

There's a new way of thinking about human body weight and fat composition. It's that you don't get fat because you eat too much; you eat too much because something else has already triggered your body to be fat. You, by which I mean the part of you that decides things after thinking about it, only have a modest amount of control over it.

This tracks exactly with my experience on both sides of the coin. I was the same person with the same amount of discipline at every stage. My moral worth was unchanged. My personal habits and preferences, all the same. The thing that changed wasn't me, it was chemistry in my body that I can't alter through the power of my mind however much I might want to, and no matter how many squats I do or salads I eat.

I very much believe this is the case for the majority of people who have more fat on their bodies than doctors and society are happy with. It's not laziness or ignorance; it's not moral turpitude and it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's definitely not that anyone has decided they they'd rather be fat, so please stop trying to make fat people feel ashamed of their bodies.

It's just a bad roll of the dice, like having allergies or myopia.

And all of this is why I'm having a really complicated emotional reaction to being where I am. I'm happy, yeah! But at the same time, I feel guilty that I'm glad at seeing a lower number on my jeans, because it's bullshit that anyone should feel that a thing they have so little control over decides their value as a person. I did something good for my health! I didn't do it for the "wrong" reasons. But I like the wrong reasons, too.

And I feel guilty that I have the various privileges that made this treatment possible for me. This is also extremely messed up. Access to health care shouldn't rely on a person's job, income, race, or learned ability to navigate hostile bureaucracies.

As a culture, we need to stop treating fat people and especially fat women like it's something they've chosen to demonstrate they’re somehow lesser-then. The people with the adipose tissue aren't the ones who need more moral fiber nearly so much as the ones going out of their way to make fat people feel bad about themselves. And bodies of all sizes are absolutely beautiful. However else you may feel about soft rolls and graceful curves, remember that the breath of life, the warmth of skin, the spark of consciousness live inside them. How can anything be more beautiful than that?

FAQ

You're an asshole for taking this life-saving medication away from diabetics!

Uh-huh. Yeah, so there's a definite thing happening in the media where people treating one set of health conditions — mainly obesity and pre-diabetes, but also PCOS andmetabolic syndrome  — are being shamed for seeking treatment because there are other people who require the same medication, thus pitting two patient populations against one another. Isn't it funny how the companies doing the manufacturing get none of the blame?

There have been shortages, yes, and it is dangerous and terrifying. That said, Ozempic isn't the only diabetes medication that exists (though changing medications sucks and has risks), shortages have only been of some dosages at some times (to begin with the shortage was for the lowest doses only, but right now it's just the highest dose), and this isn't a problem confined to these medications alone. There are massive shortages of ADHD medications right now. We're also experiencing shortages of some antibiotics, saline solution for IVs, topical pain killers, epinephrine injections, a number of anxiety and depression medications that have nasty withdrawal effects, children's fever reducers, and, hahaha, also prednisone.

Drug shortages are a systemic problem. Blaming shortages on people receiving health care for less urgent reasons than some other person somewhere else in the world is like blaming people using a dryer instead of line-drying for climate change. Sure, it matters, but not nearly as much as other factors.

Do the injections hurt?

Nah, they don't hurt so much as they sort of poke? And the needles are truly, comically tiny. It's a subcutaneous injection so it doesn't need to get to your muscles, just the tiny layer of fat under your skin.

That said, there are different kinds of injectors. I personally prefer the kind with multiple doses in the same pen, and not the ones that are spring-triggered and single-use. The spring kind can be too forceful, and I find it hurts less when you do it more slowly. Other people find it easier as long as they never have to see the needle. But it really isn't as big a deal as people think it will be.

How fast did you lose weight, and how much did you lose?

Mostly about a pound a week, but in the awful time I was on Mounjaro, more like two or even three pounds a week. Some people lose much faster, some slower or not at all, or not until a fairly high dosage. It's not clear why; for one thing, it definitely doesn't have to do with how much weight you have to lose.

I went from a high of 191 pounds to around 137. All said and done, I lost about 25% of my starting body weight, and went from roughly 44% to 34% body fat.

Do you still have to diet and exercise?

That depends! Do you want to be healthy or nah?

Some people do still need to be conscious of what and how much they eat. I didn't, or at least, not in order to lose weight. But that doesn’t mean you should live forever in the pizza and ice cream aisle.

Taking a GLP-1 doesn't mean you don't still need to eat your veggies and take walks. It changes some stuff about your metabolism, but that's only part of the equation for health. You can still do a lot of harm to your body while being thin, it turns out. Hey, just look at smokers.

Do you still, like, enjoy food?

Yes! I have heard of some people finding foods less satisfying, but not the majority. And it's not my experience. I still want and enjoy all of the same foods as before. Just now I want… less of them.

Are there any side effects?

Heck yeah!

Oh you mean for me? Nope. Not really, except the whole Mounjaro situation. But for other people, apparently!

A lot of people have no side effects at all, but happy people are less visible on the internet. Some find the meds make them tired. Some have problems with nausea, diarrhea, or vomiting. A few have some trouble with hypoglycemia. A lot of people have trouble with constipation, because everything is moving through your digestive system more slowly.

I've seen three main reasons that people have the worst side effects from these meds. The most common is an inexperienced doctor started them at the target dose instead of working their way up. This is, apparently, an express ticket to Vomitopolis. Insist on starting at the lowest possible dose, and give yourself the full four weeks before moving up to the next, and then the next.

Some people find they need to avoid rich foods and eat small amounts spread out over the day, or they get terrible nausea and GI effects. It sounds quite a lot like I've heard from people who have had gastric bypass surgery, and the mechanical reasons would be similar.

Most intriguingly, the injection site you choose seems to matter, thanks to different absorption rates. Belly injections get the most side effects. Thigh injections are better. Upper arm is the best, though hard to do by yourself.

Did it affect your period?

YES. I usually don't have periods at all (a great side effect of another medication) but Ozempic gave me exactly one proper period. You guys, it is so messy and inconvenient, there has to be a better way.

After that one time, though, everything went back to normal, and that's what a lot of people find: maybe a bad cycle or two and then you're normal again. For people with hormone regulation disorders like PCOS, I’ve seen quite a few anecdotal accounts of cycles regulating themselves for the first time. Another real game-changer.

Will you have to take it forever?

Don't know. Maybe? Probably? But that's fine by me.

As I see it, without this medication, I'd be diabetic probably within another year or two. If I'm going to wind up taking a diabetes medication for the rest of my life, I may as well start now, before I've done much damage to my body.

Should I try it?

Do you have diabetes, pre-diabetes, PCOS, or obesity? Then yeah, it's probably worth the shot, and I'll cross my fingers your insurance covers it. These medications can change your life.

If you just want to lose that pesky five or ten or fifteen pounds, mmmmmmaybe not. Putting aside moral issues over shortages, which won't last forever, these are serious medications that change your endocrine system. If you’re trying to lose weight to, say, fit into a wedding dress, then sweetheart, no, just love yourself. You’re not broken, so don’t fix it. Meddling with your health and hormones is not worth it for vanity alone.

How expensive are these drugs, anyway?

In most countries with decent healthcare systems, they're at most $300 a month. In America, the sticker cost is $1000 to $1400, depending on which one you're looking at. Yowch.

If you can get your insurance company to approve it at all, you're looking at somewhere like $0 up to that $300-ish negotiated price other nations enjoy.

Should I join Calibrate?

FUCK NO. It was great when I started, but the company has sort of fallen apart since then. Response times for queries — especially medical queries — take weeks to get an answer, the app is terrible in design and in execution, and the eating program they suggest is confusing and overly complicated.

In the beginning, the one thing they had going for them was knowing how to work the levers of an insurance company to get these medications covered. But they're not the only game in town anymore.

How do I get a GLP-1 medication?

Your best bet is to ask your general practitioner or PCP. You can also try going through a teledoc like PlushCare or Hello Alpha.

To make it more likely you'll get insurance approval, there are a few things you should know ahead of time. Most insurances want a prior authorization before covering. They're looking for a documented history of type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes or obesity.

You may also need to prove you've tried other methods of weight loss and didn't succeed, so write down all of your prior efforts. Make sure your doctor knows you’re tried South Beach and Soylent, and your purchase history is littered with running apps, free weights, and yoga subscriptions.

Sometimes they want you to try other, less expensive medications like metformin or phentermine first. Sometimes that turns out to be all you needed anyway! Give it a go, and if necessary you can probably get the GLP-1 approval in another month or two.

Good luck, good health, and feel good about yourself, okay? We're all in this together.

Something Old, Something New

I have news! It’s pretty exciting! And I should have told you all about all of this weeks ago! But here we are.

First, Bookburners has become a free-as-in-beer podcast that you can listen to at any fine podcasting platform near you. For a while, we were even the #2 fiction podcast on Apple and still holding steady in the top 20. Amazing!

None of my episodes are up yet, since I only came in on the second season, but I am so psyched to see this work getting so much love from a wider audience. The world that Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, and the stubbornly offline Brian Francis Slattery created together is magnificent, and I still maintain that everything I did later was Bookburners fanfiction that I somehow accidentally got paid for.

And then… I wrote, sold, and had published my first piece of original fiction since America Inc. came out three-ish years ago! (I’ve been writing in that time, just not… finishing things. We’ve all had a rough few years, yeah?) It’s a short story about aliens called Requiem for the Stars, brought to you by the absolutely lovely people at The Sunday Morning Transport.

Please note that this is a subscription publication, so to read the story you’re gonna have to pony up. It’s a great model: one new short story a week sent to your email inbox. I’m enjoying having fiction to read where I never feel like I have to catch up. And I can assure you that they’re putting out some fantastic work — it’s written by a constellation including a lot of Realm/Serial Box alumni and other genre notables. I’m excited to see new work from basically every writer they’ve featured yet so far.

And that’s it for today! I’ve got a pretty long queue of posts coming up, including in no particular order some follow-up on the alien invasion that may or may not have taken place, that whole Five Observables thing, and a long, long piece on Ozempic. More soon!

Something Old, SOmething New

I have news! It’s pretty exciting! And I should have told you all about all of this weeks ago! But here we are.

First, Bookburners has become a free-as-in-beer podcast that you can listen to at any fine podcasting platform near you. For a while, we were even the #2 fiction podcast on Apple and still holding steady in the top 20. Amazing!

None of my episodes are up yet, since I only came in on the second season, but I am so psyched to see this work getting so much love from a wider audience. The world that Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, and the stubbornly offline Brian Francis Slattery created together is magnificent, and I still maintain that everything I did later was Bookburners fanfiction that I somehow accidentally got paid for.

And then… I wrote, sold, and had published my first piece of original fiction since America Inc. came out three-ish years ago! (I’ve been writing in that time, just not… finishing things. We’ve all had a rough few years, yeah?) It’s a short story about aliens called Requiem for the Stars, brought to you by the absolutely lovely people at The Sunday Morning Transport.

Please note that this is a subscription publication, so to read the story you’re gonna have to pony up. It’s a great model: one new short story a week sent to your email inbox. I’m enjoying having fiction to read where I never feel like I have to catch up. And I can assure you that they’re putting out some fantastic work — it’s written by a constellation including a lot of Realm/Serial Box alumni and other genre notables. I’m excited to see new work from basically every writer they’ve featured yet so far.

And that’s it for today! I’ve got a pretty long queue of posts coming up, including in no particular order some follow-up on the alien invasion that may or may not have taken place, that whole Five Observables thing, and a long, long piece on Ozempic. More soon!

Alien Invasion 2023

Right. Last week, a Chinese-made balloon drifted across the continental US. It was probably a spy balloon though China insists it was an innocent meteorological tool; the US shot it down on Thursday just off the coast of Myrtle Beach.

And then all hell broke loose. Since then, three additional UFOs have been shot down near the northern border of the US. This is in the classic sense of "unidentified flying objects," though the new official acronym is "UAP" for "unidentified anomalous phenomenon." Let's leave the question of origin aside for now.

After the initial balloon, NORAD removed some filters from its radar systems. For the first time, it started paying attention to slow-moving objects, and objects at a wider variety of altitudes. So why we saw these additional craft now isn't really a mystery.

But this is nonetheless very new and unusual. Here's the thing: the US has never before (to our knowledge) shot down anything from anywhere over the mainland. The continental US hasn't been a battlefront since before flight was invented.

Something real weird is going on.

What We Know

Before we march off into irresponsible speculation, let's take a minute to review what we know, exactly.

1. There have been three incidents. So far.

…Not including the initial Chinese spy balloon. For clarity, I'll be calling the later three objects "the UAPs."

The first was a metallic, silvery "car-sized" object detected and shot down over Alaska on Friday. It was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet. Pilots said that it had no visible means of propulsion and interfered with their sensors.

The second was shot down over northwest Canada by a joint US-Canadian effort on Saturday. It was also described as cylinder-shaped, and floated or hovered at 40,000 feet.

The third was detected over Montana late on Saturday, and shot down over Lake Huron on Sunday. This one was described as "octagonal-shaped," with "strings hanging off of it." There's an assumption that some payload was originally attached to this object by those strings, but that it was jettisoned at some point. It was floating at the lowest altitude yet: only 20,000 feet.

2. The UAPs aren't the same as the first balloon.

There are several notable differences. First, the UAPs have been described as car-sized where the Chinese spy balloon was the size of three school buses. The UAPs were floating at much lower altitudes; the rationale for shooting them down was that they were a danger to commercial flights.

Most interesting of all, China said that the initial balloon did in fact belong to them, but have taken no responsibility for the subsequent three.

And… the military said it knew what the spy balloon was right away. The response from the Pentagon regarding the UAPs makes it very clear they have no idea what they're dealing with.

The first of the three broke into pieces when it was destroyed, which doesn't seem very balloon-like. The Canadian cylinder is reported to be more likely a balloon; the third, again, not so much.

A little math makes the whole thing a little more… mysterious. In the case of the first UAP, a balloon of an approximate car size at that altitude would only be capable of carrying about 3.5kg, according to several independent calculations I've seen. Even if you generously don't include the weight of the craft itself, that doesn't leave a lot for any sort of sensor array, transmitter or storage medium, and a battery that would need to last for days or weeks.

Modern electronic warfare devices being used by the US military clock in at 25-30 pounds, or around 12kgs.

3. This is not new.

The US has been spotting craft that it can't identify for years. In 2017 The New York Times published an article about a few incidents involving Navy ships and pilots. Subsequently, four videos were released over the course of a few years showing instrument recordings of encounters with mysterious craft doing things that humanity is not capable of, and that don't even seem possible to us.

They accelerate at speeds an order of magnitude higher than the fastest human-made aircraft, and at a velocity that a human being could not survive. They stop abruptly and hover. They don't have any visible engines, wings, or other means of generating lift and movement. They break the sound barrier without generating a sonic boom. They can go underwater, too. And just for emphasis: this is not fringe crackpot territory. We’re talking about official government statements to the newspaper of record; actual sensor data; FOIA documents.

The Navy has said that these objects have been frequently encountered since 2014. Go ahead and search around; you can find a lot of interviews with pilots describing their encounters.

A lot of explanations have been raised to explain all of this; most notably, sensor problems, or an electronic warfare suite that produces false readings. But many of these sightings include multiple means of detection, including human eyes. The military has investigated and concluded that they don't know what they are.

I'm inclined to believe that.

4.  Our three new UAPs are being described in language similar to prior UAP sightings… sort of

Here are keywords that put the UFOlogy community on high alert: "no obvious means of propulsion." "Interfered with sensors." "Cylinder," "octagon."

I promised the next post in this series would be about the Five Observables, a rubric for determining if a UAP is something really unusual or not, but in lieu of that let me just link to this great explanation. We've got two of them here: an apparent anti-gravity capability, and low observability.

But others are very notably missing. These UAPs only seemed to move at the will of the jet stream, instead of showing the impossible acceleration of the prior Navy encounters. They didn't go very fast. They didn't go underwater (or into space.)

What Could They Be?

All right, now we venture into the unknown, and the region of irresponsible speculation. If they're not more Chinese spy balloons, and we don't know what they are, then… what else could they be?

The most prosaic answer is probably the right one. They're some form of device using a combination of high and low technologies for an ordinary purpose: spying, smuggling, whatever. Maybe there's a secretive billionaire villain who's developed these objects as a means toward ultimate world domination, who knows.

The prosaic answer is troubling, though, because it means that somewhere in the world, despite the grotesque amounts of money the US spends on military research and production, someone has run laps around us. And has done for almost ten years already.

It's also possible that the government is lying to the public for a purpose unknown. It's unclear why the Pentagon would want to make itself look weak by acknowledging things it doesn't know and can't explain or copy. But perhaps this is a double-secret US tech program, and this is a big show of pretending that we're not the ones behind it for the rest of the world, to keep it under wraps. That does raise the question: why call attention to it at all? I'm not one to unquestioningly believe everything the government says, but the motivations behind lying about this particular set of facts are opaque to me.

And then we get to the conclusion a lot of us leap to immediately. It's not human.

Just because it's not human doesn't mean it's space aliens; the UFO community has a lot of theories about what "the Phenomenon" could be, and interstellar aliens isn't even the top contender anymore. Other possibilities include visitors from some neighboring reality or dimension; time travelers from the future; even some species of beings who have been on earth hiding in remote underwater or mountainous areas this whole time.

There's also a theory that UAPs are projections from elsewhere and not physical at all, but if we're shooting them down, there goes that one.

But the truth is that we just don't know, and saying it's aliens is a way of grappling with that yawning uncertainty. Having an explanation feels more comfortable than not.

It's scary to know that there is something in our skies, it's been there for years, and the US military, without argument the most powerful armed force on the globe, has been caught flat-footed by it. I take comfort in the knowledge that whatever this phenomenon is, it hasn't done anything destructive so far, and could have at any time. So there's no reason to assign ill intent.

But I sure would like to know what it is for sure.

Alien invasion 2023

Right. Last week, a Chinese-made balloon drifted across the continental US. It was probably a spy balloon though China insists it was an innocent meteorological tool; the US shot it down on Thursday just off the coast of Myrtle Beach.

And then all hell broke loose. Since then, three additional UFOs have been shot down near the northern border of the US. This is in the classic sense of "unidentified flying objects," though the new official acronym is "UAP" for "unidentified anomalous phenomenon." Let's leave the question of origin aside for now.

After the initial balloon, NORAD removed some filters from its radar systems. For the first time, it started paying attention to slow-moving objects, and objects at a wider variety of altitudes. So why we saw these additional craft now isn't really a mystery.

But this is nonetheless very new and unusual. Here's the thing: the US has never before (to our knowledge) shot down anything from anywhere over the mainland. The continental US hasn't been a battlefront since before flight was invented.

Something real weird is going on.

What We Know

Before we march off into irresponsible speculation, let's take a minute to review what we know, exactly.

1. There have been three incidents. So far.

…Not including the initial Chinese spy balloon. For clarity, I'll be calling the later three objects "the UAPs."

The first was a metallic, silvery "car-sized" object detected and shot down over Alaska on Friday. It was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet. Pilots said that it had no visible means of propulsion and interfered with their sensors.

The second was shot down over northwest Canada by a joint US-Canadian effort on Saturday. It was also described as cylinder-shaped, and floated or hovered at 40,000 feet.

The third was detected over Montana late on Saturday, and shot down over Lake Huron on Sunday. This one was described as "octagonal-shaped," with "strings hanging off of it." There's an assumption that some payload was originally attached to this object by those strings, but that it was jettisoned at some point. It was floating at the lowest altitude yet: only 20,000 feet.

2. The UAPs aren't the same as the first balloon.

There are several notable differences. First, the UAPs have been described as car-sized where the Chinese spy balloon was the size of three school buses. The UAPs were floating at much lower altitudes; the rationale for shooting them down was that they were a danger to commercial flights.

Most interesting of all, China said that the initial balloon did in fact belong to them, but have taken no responsibility for the subsequent three.

And… the military said it knew what the spy balloon was right away. The response from the Pentagon regarding the UAPs makes it very clear they have no idea what they're dealing with.

The first of the three broke into pieces when it was destroyed, which doesn't seem very balloon-like. The Canadian cylinder is reported to be more likely a balloon; the third, again, not so much.

A little math makes the whole thing a little more… mysterious. In the case of the first UAP, a balloon of an approximate car size at that altitude would only be capable of carrying about 3.5kg, according to several independent calculations I've seen. Even if you generously don't include the weight of the craft itself, that doesn't leave a lot for any sort of sensor array, transmitter or storage medium, and a battery that would need to last for days or weeks.

Modern electronic warfare devices being used by the US military clock in at 25-30 pounds, or around 12kgs.

3. This is not new.

The US has been spotting craft that it can't identify for years. In 2017 The New York Times published an article about a few incidents involving Navy ships and pilots. Subsequently, four videos were released over the course of a few years showing instrument recordings of encounters with mysterious craft doing things that humanity is not capable of, and that don't even seem possible to us.

They accelerate at speeds an order of magnitude higher than the fastest human-made aircraft, and at a velocity that a human being could not survive. They stop abruptly and hover. They don't have any visible engines, wings, or other means of generating lift and movement. They break the sound barrier without generating a sonic boom. They can go underwater, too. And just for emphasis: this is not fringe crackpot territory. We’re talking about official government statements to the newspaper of record; actual sensor data; FOIA documents.

The Navy has said that these objects have been frequently encountered since 2014. Go ahead and search around; you can find a lot of interviews with pilots describing their encounters.

A lot of explanations have been raised to explain all of this; most notably, sensor problems, or an electronic warfare suite that produces false readings. But many of these sightings include multiple means of detection, including human eyes. The military has investigated and concluded that they don't know what they are.

I'm inclined to believe that.

4.  Our three new UAPs are being described in language similar to prior UAP sightings… sort of

Here are keywords that put the UFOlogy community on high alert: "no obvious means of propulsion." "Interfered with sensors." "Cylinder," "octagon."

I promised the next post in this series would be about the Five Observables, a rubric for determining if a UAP is something really unusual or not, but in lieu of that let me just link to this great explanation. We've got two of them here: an apparent anti-gravity capability, and low observability.

But others are very notably missing. These UAPs only seemed to move at the will of the jet stream, instead of showing the impossible acceleration of the prior Navy encounters. They didn't go very fast. They didn't go underwater (or into space.)

What Could They Be?

All right, now we venture into the unknown, and the region of irresponsible speculation. If they're not more Chinese spy balloons, and we don't know what they are, then… what else could they be?

The most prosaic answer is probably the right one. They're some form of device using a combination of high and low technologies for an ordinary purpose: spying, smuggling, whatever. Maybe there's a secretive billionaire villain who's developed these objects as a means toward ultimate world domination, who knows.

The prosaic answer is troubling, though, because it means that somewhere in the world, despite the grotesque amounts of money the US spends on military research and production, someone has run laps around us. And has done for almost ten years already.

It's also possible that the government is lying to the public for a purpose unknown. It's unclear why the Pentagon would want to make itself look weak by acknowledging things it doesn't know and can't explain or copy. But perhaps this is a double-secret US tech program, and this is a big show of pretending that we're not the ones behind it for the rest of the world, to keep it under wraps. That does raise the question: why call attention to it at all? I'm not one to unquestioningly believe everything the government says, but the motivations behind lying about this particular set of facts are opaque to me.

And then we get to the conclusion a lot of us leap to immediately. It's not human.

Just because it's not human doesn't mean it's space aliens; the UFO community has a lot of theories about what "the Phenomenon" could be, and interstellar aliens isn't even the top contender anymore. Other possibilities include visitors from some neighboring reality or dimension; time travelers from the future; even some species of beings who have been on earth hiding in remote underwater or mountainous areas this whole time.

There's also a theory that UAPs are projections from elsewhere and not physical at all, but if we're shooting them down, there goes that one.

But the truth is that we just don't know, and saying it's aliens is a way of grappling with that yawning uncertainty. Having an explanation feels more comfortable than not.

It's scary to know that there is something in our skies, it's been there for years, and the US military, without argument the most powerful armed force on the globe, has been caught flat-footed by it. I take comfort in the knowledge that whatever this phenomenon is, it hasn't done anything destructive so far, and could have at any time. So there's no reason to assign ill intent.

But I sure would like to know what it is for sure.

The Mysterious Case of Skinny Bob

This is part 4 of a continuing series about aliens. Here’s part 1 , part 2 , and part 3 .

"Skinny Bob” generally refers to a series of short video clips posted to YouTube in 2011, purportedly showing various scenes of aliens and alien paraphernalia between 1942 and 1970-ish. Skinny Bob is, of course, also one of the aliens; allegedly the one who crashed at Roswell and survived in captivity under military and scientific scrutiny for some time.

Here's the first video, to give you a taste.

You can watch the rest on the original poster's channel, ivan0135, or see all four videos collated into one on another channel. I recommend you take at least a cursory look before you read the rest of the post. Four clips went up, and then the account went quiet and it's been like that ever since.

So okay, on the surface, this looks like a leak of KGB info showing secret footage of live! Aliens! In an old-timey grainy B&W film kind of way. Is it real? Who can say! But there's a pretty good amount of evidence it might be fake. Let’s start there.

It's Obviously Fake

Yeah, okay, big whoop, somebody made some clips and put them online for the lulz. And yeah, there's actually a decent body of evidence for that.

First, the clips have been obviously manipulated in a few ways. The projector reel sound, for example, was almost certainly added in after the fact and might be a stock sound clip. The visual noise on the film — that's the graininess and "damage" that flickers in and out — is definitely a stock filter, and the specific one has even been identified. There are time codes in the clips, but they're inconsistent to the point that they might as well be totally made up.

And I mean c'mon, it's aliens.

And yet.

The Motive Problem

These clips were released in 2011. Video SFX of this nature were possible in 2011, but it would have been a professional effort — an expensive professional effort. And yet nobody has ever taken credit; no film or video game was ever associated with this; no money has been made from it. The YouTube channel ivan0135 isn't even monetized. There aren't so much as links to t-shirts to buy.

If this were a hoax, it's a costly one that would have required a full production crew plus the special effects people to pull off. In 2011, nobody was producing film from nothing the way it's possible now — there's no way this is some guy just screwing around on Blender, not back then. Which means a lot of people would have to know what this is and how it happened: actors, set designers, camera crew, producers, director, editor, SFX people, costume designers or maybe puppeteers, at the very least. The clips take place in several locations, in different lighting, and are very professionally executed.

The theory has been floated that this was a test of multiple options for some film that ultimately went in another direction or didn't happen at all, and some joker decided to leak it. The test idea is just… not how this stuff works in my experience. That kind of decision is made a long time before you're hopping around different locations, because again — expensive. Nobody is spending that kind of money on a test.

Most interesting of all, there isn't the accompanying cloud of rumors about how your friend’s cousin’s daughter was in the alien costume when she was 12, isn’t that cool? (I can assure you that industry people tell each other stuff that's supposed to be secret allllll the time.) And in the 11 years since, nobody has put it in a portfolio, mentioned it in an interview, nothing.

That's really, really weird.

It's a lot easier to explain why this is up if it's real, ironically. Somebody was gettin’ blackmailed over their super bad intelligence leak. If this were the case, the lack of rumors would be a lot less surprising, because spies, as a whole, are less loose-lipped than media folks. Or so I've been led to believe.

Wait, It Might Be Real

There's a fair body of evidence that it's not a hoax, too. There are touches in the film that strike people as oddly and non-intuitively realistic. For example, in that alien autopsy clip, the table holding the tools is draped in a white cloth. Modern audiences would have expected to see a stainless steel tray, but that cloth is in fact accurate to practices in the 1940s, when this was purportedly filmed.

In the clip with a flying saucer hovering near a house, there are no power lines leading to or from the building. It would be difficult to find a place like that to shoot now, but in the 1940s, the massive rural electrification effort hadn't yet taken place; only a third of rural farmhouses had power.

And despite the obvious editing of the footage — the filters, the sound, the cropping, the time codes — the underlying material is widely regarded as absolutely flawless. The alien's eyes blink like a real creature, with both an upper and lower lid moving. Shadows are accurate, proportions are accurate, and — interestingly — the vast majority of the material isn't actually aliens at all. When shaky footage is corrected for stability, everything is consistent.

And there are lots of minor touches that take substantial deciphering to notice, but are nonetheless there, such as footprints next to the collapsed alien in the crash scenes, and the subsequent the appearance of bruises or injuries on the alien's head in the medical/office setting. Indeed, in that medical/office clip, there's a sliver of a silhouette seen at the edge of the screen that's been positively identified as exactly matching the cuff and lower hem of an Eisenhower jacket… used as Army standard issue from 1944 to 1957.

This is an astonishing attention to detail — especially in light of ivan0135's lack thereof, including the spelling "Rosswel" in metadata, and other, similar signs that whoever it is isn't a native English speaker.

So What Do I Think?

I dunno, man. I don't have the answers, but I find the uncertainty incredibly compelling. On a personal level, I should say that I find the biomechanics of the neck and skull unconvincing. How can that skinny neck support that massive head? And JFC can you imagine if your center of balance was in your throat? But I guess there are some real implausible looking animals out there in the world, too, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And finally, credit where it's due: many of my details come from skinnybob.info, a fantastic resource that is a collective detective-style effort to figure out WTF with these videos, either debunking or confirming them, that has been unsuccessful for 11 years and counting. If you're interested in diving deeper, that's your place to start. There are several areas where they're asking for people to help identify locations, objects, and other outstanding mysteries. Maybe you can crack the case!

And that's it for today. Next time in aliens: the Five Observables!

the Mysterious Case of Skinny Bob

This is part 4 of a continuing series about aliens. Here’s part 1 , part 2 , and part 3 .

"Skinny Bob” generally refers to a series of short video clips posted to YouTube in 2011, purportedly showing various scenes of aliens and alien paraphernalia between 1942 and 1970-ish. Skinny Bob is, of course, also one of the aliens; allegedly the one who crashed at Roswell and survived in captivity under military and scientific scrutiny for some time.

Here's the first video, to give you a taste.

You can watch the rest on the original poster's channel, ivan0135, or see all four videos collated into one on another channel. I recommend you take at least a cursory look before you read the rest of the post. Four clips went up, and then the account went quiet and it's been like that ever since.

So okay, on the surface, this looks like a leak of KGB info showing secret footage of live! Aliens! In an old-timey grainy B&W film kind of way. Is it real? Who can say! But there's a pretty good amount of evidence it might be fake. Let’s start there.

It's Obviously Fake

Yeah, okay, big whoop, somebody made some clips and put them online for the lulz. And yeah, there's actually a decent body of evidence for that.

First, the clips have been obviously manipulated in a few ways. The projector reel sound, for example, was almost certainly added in after the fact and might be a stock sound clip. The visual noise on the film — that's the graininess and "damage" that flickers in and out — is definitely a stock filter, and the specific one has even been identified. There are time codes in the clips, but they're inconsistent to the point that they might as well be totally made up.

And I mean c'mon, it's aliens.

And yet.

The Motive Problem

These clips were released in 2011. Video SFX of this nature were possible in 2011, but it would have been a professional effort — an expensive professional effort. And yet nobody has ever taken credit; no film or video game was ever associated with this; no money has been made from it. The YouTube channel ivan0135 isn't even monetized. There aren't so much as links to t-shirts to buy.

If this were a hoax, it's a costly one that would have required a full production crew plus the special effects people to pull off. In 2011, nobody was producing film from nothing the way it's possible now — there's no way this is some guy just screwing around on Blender, not back then. Which means a lot of people would have to know what this is and how it happened: actors, set designers, camera crew, producers, director, editor, SFX people, costume designers or maybe puppeteers, at the very least. The clips take place in several locations, in different lighting, and are very professionally executed.

The theory has been floated that this was a test of multiple options for some film that ultimately went in another direction or didn't happen at all, and some joker decided to leak it. The test idea is just… not how this stuff works in my experience. That kind of decision is made a long time before you're hopping around different locations, because again — expensive. Nobody is spending that kind of money on a test.

Most interesting of all, there isn't the accompanying cloud of rumors about how your friend’s cousin’s daughter was in the alien costume when she was 12, isn’t that cool? (I can assure you that industry people tell each other stuff that's supposed to be secret allllll the time.) And in the 11 years since, nobody has put it in a portfolio, mentioned it in an interview, nothing.

That's really, really weird.

It's a lot easier to explain why this is up if it's real, ironically. Somebody was gettin’ blackmailed over their super bad intelligence leak. If this were the case, the lack of rumors would be a lot less surprising, because spies, as a whole, are less loose-lipped than media folks. Or so I've been led to believe.

Wait, It Might Be Real

There's a fair body of evidence that it's not a hoax, too. There are touches in the film that strike people as oddly and non-intuitively realistic. For example, in that alien autopsy clip, the table holding the tools is draped in a white cloth. Modern audiences would have expected to see a stainless steel tray, but that cloth is in fact accurate to practices in the 1940s, when this was purportedly filmed.

In the clip with a flying saucer hovering near a house, there are no power lines leading to or from the building. It would be difficult to find a place like that to shoot now, but in the 1940s, the massive rural electrification effort hadn't yet taken place; only a third of rural farmhouses had power.

And despite the obvious editing of the footage — the filters, the sound, the cropping, the time codes — the underlying material is widely regarded as absolutely flawless. The alien's eyes blink like a real creature, with both an upper and lower lid moving. Shadows are accurate, proportions are accurate, and — interestingly — the vast majority of the material isn't actually aliens at all. When shaky footage is corrected for stability, everything is consistent.

And there are lots of minor touches that take substantial deciphering to notice, but are nonetheless there, such as footprints next to the collapsed alien in the crash scenes, and the subsequent the appearance of bruises or injuries on the alien's head in the medical/office setting. Indeed, in that medical/office clip, there's a sliver of a silhouette seen at the edge of the screen that's been positively identified as exactly matching the cuff and lower hem of an Eisenhower jacket… used as Army standard issue from 1944 to 1957.

This is an astonishing attention to detail — especially in light of ivan0135's lack thereof, including the spelling "Rosswel" in metadata, and other, similar signs that whoever it is isn't a native English speaker.

So What Do I Think?

I dunno, man. I don't have the answers, but I find the uncertainty incredibly compelling. On a personal level, I should say that I find the biomechanics of the neck and skull unconvincing. How can that skinny neck support that massive head? And JFC can you imagine if your center of balance was in your throat? But I guess there are some real implausible looking animals out there in the world, too, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And finally, credit where it's due: many of my details come from skinnybob.info, a fantastic resource that is a collective detective-style effort to figure out WTF with these videos, either debunking or confirming them, that has been unsuccessful for 11 years and counting. If you're interested in diving deeper, that's your place to start. There are several areas where they're asking for people to help identify locations, objects, and other outstanding mysteries. Maybe you can crack the case!

And that's it for today. Next time in aliens: the Five Observables!