Peter Hunt Welch's Blog, page 3

Dear New York: The People Are Willing to Negotiate

These are the assumptions we'll be working under: There is no federal government. There is a potentially hostile military power several hundred miles away. They will not send aid; they may send one of the most powerful fighting forces in the world to impose martial law. That's going to make us all ...

Kill the Weak

The internet was never a good place for hypochondriacs, but it is uniquely frightening right now. There's an invisible murderer somewhere, maybe everywhere. Every twitch, every feeling, every ache, every pain, every sneeze, every skip of the heart might be a symptom. Tiredness and confusion might ...

Eat the World

I've been hooked on a game called hole.io lately. It's not the kind of fun that it sounds like, but it is addictive. You play a hole in the ground swallowing plants and people and cars. As you eat, you grow bigger, so you can swallow bigger things, like giant robots, ships, buildings, and the space ...

Notes from Ground Two, April 6th

I started spitting blood at one in the morning on April 1st. After ten minutes, Leah managed to calm me down enough to see what was going on. There was a bleeding wound on my tongue, at the end of a crimson line leading up and across the left side. At least it wasn't coming from my lungs. Leah helped ...

Notes from Ground Two, March 31st

I've been outside twice in the last two days. Yesterday, my cat needed a new medication for a new medical problem. He's had an upper respiratory infection((No relation.)) for several months. He's had trouble fighting it off because of the chemotherapy for his cancer, so we weened him down to one ...

Notes from Ground Two, March 28th

New York City is finally the center of the universe, and I happen to live in the approximate geographical center of the NYC metro.((This is according to something I did with strings and pushpins that I learned in 2nd grade. I can't remember if I included Staten Island or Hoboken.)) At some point ...

I'm Scared

I'm used to being scared. I've had panic attacks and anxiety my whole life. I have muscles that haven't relaxed since the nineties. I've learned to live with that kind if fear, because I know it's not real. I know my automatic responses to the world are broken, relative to the expected cultural median. ...

To All the Friends Whose Work I Will Never Read

So about this picture.((I went through Shutterstock for about two hours trying to find something vaguely relevant to the theme. I was stuck on a throwing paper motif, but that mostly led to "The young man, the businessman, in a dark business suit throws a pile of documents upwards, aside. The ...

The Most Recent Time I Sniped Myself

Self-sniping is the biggest problem in the programming industry among people my age. In my day, you didn't get this way without Needing To Know for no good reason. Worse, we grew up without much internet, so when we Needed To Know back in the day, we had to figure it out with protractors and Swiss ...

A Spoiler-Filled Review of Finishing The Wheel of Time at 39

I usually read 50 or 60 books a year. Not in 2019. In 2019, I read The Wheel of Time. I've started saying "burn me" and "light" in public. I think even "bloody ashes" slipped out once. I know how to get from Tear to Tar Valon without a map. I know how much toh I have with my parents. It's a lot.
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