SkookumTree
1yr ago
The pontification is an ad Hock commentary for posterity if I don't make it. Could just be the writings of a dumb jackass, but whatever. Am probably going to write a blog about this whole hock crap. I have been training and preparing in good faith for this journey.
Congratulations on your epic roast making the Quality Contributions list, though.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
The plan is to arrive in Fairbanks on the 11th and then reach the jumping off point for the Hock on the 12th or 13th.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I was fundamentally unsupported by anyone, including my colleagues or seniors
Medicine in America seems to work a little differently; when tough shit goes down people are at least a little supportive. This goes double triple quadruple on the pediatric oncology unit.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Base building for my Alaskan journey is going...okay. Still disappointingly unfit; my 5-minute power is a puny 200 watts at a body weight of 70 kilos. I can deadlift 275 and squat 245, though, so I have that going for me. Plan to get a used bike trainer and a rear wheel for it so I can do 1-2 hour steady distance rides. Hiking up mountains, too, on weekends...that should help build base fitness as well. Shit is boring and requires discipline. Valuable life lessons here. Seems like any badass shit runs off of a long-ass logistics tail to support the teeth. Lots of unglamorous prep work and grinding away at either low intensity stuff like 45 minute slow runs at a turtle-like 15 minute mile pace or figuring out how to line ski mountaineering boots that are three sizes too large with insulation both inside and out so I don't get frostbite. I could be deluding myself here, but I feel like I'm becoming a better or at least more capable person as a result of this training process. It at least seems cool. This whole Alaska crap might be dumb as all hell, but at least I'll be a fit dumbass...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I suppose it's a matter of degree, but at least in the 'hood you're not being treated like literal livestock. Tyrone is free to walk out of the hood and go where he likes; if he wants to go to a new city, nobody will be hunting him down with bloodhounds and mutilating or killing him if they catch him.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
larp
I suppose it's a LARP until and unless skis touch snow north of the Arctic Circle?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
February 13th, 2024.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Is it worse to die under the lashes of an abusive master or "in mutual combat" with another "free" black man?
The abusive master is far worse. Being enslaved sucks donkey balls. Fuck slavers; that dude in the ghetto is at least nominally free, he's not liable to get bought and sold like a fucking cow, and he has at least nominal rights. He may be killed by cops or something, but even if he gets murdered by really goddamn bad cops they have to at least half ass hiding the body. And this is being rather uncharitable about our hero's rights.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Counterargument: if every lonely individual chucked themselves in the Alaskan wilderness - leaving instructions to not look for the body or attempt rescue - there would be a lot more determined people in the world and a lot less lonely people. Yeah, it's nuts. Yes, it's dumb as hell; the risible idiocy fundamental to the Hock is, in my opinion, part of the whole fucking point of the Hock.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
No. It is for us all to bind up the nation's wounds. It's like your great-great grandfather dumped a bunch of toxic waste in the town square or something. You didn't have shit to do with that asshole's deeds. Maybe you benefited from them, but it's far enough in the past that you're just some guy that lives in the town...and if we're going to clean it up, both of us ought to pay into the town tax fund or something to clean the mess up.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
if they replaced Robert E Lee with John Brown that would generate so much public seethe you'd be able to say the change was a work of performance art!
Yeah, fair enough. Or maybe put up a statue of John Brown alongside Lee or something. A statue of John Brown represents this: the valorization of a man who attempted to overthrow an unjust system by force.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I think that it might be good to remove the statues to some kind of monument park or something like that: would we build statues of General Howe in our public squares? Of Nazi leaders? What about Soviet ones? These men committed high treason against the Union and in my view were handled very leniently; the traditional penalty for high treason is death. If they're still going to be sitting out there, I think they need some additional context...plaques or something...stating that these individuals were revered by the society that erected them but in the fullness of time, we have realized that these individuals were gentlemanly, polite slaveowning traitors.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.
The Nazis look like they were just saying "You need to conduct your mass murder in an organized way - none of this messy, disorganized, ad hoc murder. We Germans herd our victims into train cars and ultimately into death camps that churn dead bodies out like Volkswagens off the factory floor."
I would say Baron von Killinger was not horrified by the brutality - German concentration camps were just as bad - but by the disorganization and lack of efficiency that he may have seen. After all, the Romanians were using a lot of train fuel and freight car capacity to murder those five thousand people...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
This seems like a debate between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil. Your "righteous" (and possibly genocidal) Orc who's running a tight ship and whose men are only eating one PoW in twenty alive is probably better at running his ship than the Orc on the next ship over who are eating every single PoW alive and leaving PoW bones laying around on the ship deck. That "righteous" orc is making a greater contribution to the army of Sauron.
Everybody wants to act like their enemies are the absolute worst, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth - and they are almost universally wrong, and simply have never seen real scum in their lives.
Yeah - police officers in really bad neighborhoods, ER doctors in the same areas, maybe people in psych units, people in maximum security prisons, and combat soldiers might see stuff like this. I'll grant that the Nazis were orderly in their mass murdering. I've heard it said essentially that outside of the huge piles of bodies coming out of the murder factories they built, the Nazis behaved more or less decently...although that is one hell of a qualifying statement. It's like saying "Sure. Hans is a decent guy if you're not looking at the 50 bodies he's got buried out back. Ivan, however...Ivan's a bit more disorganized with his shit. And let's not even talk about Akira, he's hopped up on meth and eating the bodies."
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. Kind of facetiously: what if the gun had been used to kill a cardinal instead of the Pope?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
It's the same reason why in some places road racing cyclists that ride like dangerous jackasses and do things that are dangerous but not illegal wind up having accidents and crashing their bikes.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Basically: the Hock is a homebrew form of psychological chemo in your view. Its aim is to kill the neurosis or other bullshit before it kills the host as well.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I was thinking about Killian Jornet's account of his upbringing, but with social grace instead of mountaineering: raised by an alpine guide father and climber mother, he started going on family ski trips, cross country skiing up mountains and going downhill on alpine skis. By five, he was going up 10,000-foot mountains and traveling on glaciers with ropes, crampons, and ice axes. By the time he was ten, he'd backpacked across the Pyrenees with his family - a journey that took them over a month and which their family repeated yearly. By 13, his mother took him on longer trips on the mountain, where he would sometimes fail to bring enough to eat or drink. So he licked water off rocks for as long as sixteen hours.
Imagine a family like this...but a networking or political family. I'm reasonably sure that families and maybe smallish communities like this exist...there's probably like a small pack of climbers in Colorado or something raising their kids a lot like the Jornet family did. I've never seen or heard of this though. Yeah, it could be bullshit, but if even a quarter of it is true...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Anyone got an over/under on my odds of surviving this shit?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Interesting - would have thought it was political families to be honest. I know there are families of engineers, military families... probably bush league politics and networking families too.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
What do people there think about my plan to attempt this Hock?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Hell, even if you don't have a bike you ride outdoors, this seems like a better deal...just a beater to stick on the trainer is a few hundred bucks and something nice is a grand used.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Question: for the price of a Peloton, why not just grab a pretty solid used road bike for $700-$1k and a smart trainer to put it on? This way, you have a stationary bike AND a road bike...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Y'all sound like a bunch of hyperlexic autists...
The ski mountaineering boots in question are these, three sizes too large. I've added a beefy liner plus homemade sheepskin insoles scavenged from a thrift-store coat. I'll be knitting some...outer liner linings? to take up even more of the volume. I should be left with a boot that is much warmer than stock, slightly sloppy (I know, not great for ski performance, but many explorers use cross country skiing gear and this should be burlier and safer than XC gear) and theoretically usable for my Alaskan adventure. People climb and ski on Denali with setups like this or lighter; the 'using oversize boots and stuffing them' is a not terribly recommended technique that should be at least theoretically usable. The Scarpa Nero liners I bought for $50 on eBay are around 5mm thicker than the stock liners. Size 9 shoes are 25mm shorter than size 12 ones; with this beefy liner I've already eaten up 10mm and so have 15mm to go. I'm a decent knitter and should be able to fashion a decent outer liner for my existing boot liners that'll eat up the rest of the space and keep my feet warm enough. Over the top of the boot are going to go homemade sheepskin overboots; Forty Below has some good overboots but at $250/pair they're almost as expensive as my ski boots. I think I should be able to make something serviceable.
As far as the snowshoes and Sorels: I considered it, but snowshoes are slower, I have significant downhill skiing experience as a former high school racer, and Northern peoples have been using skis for millennia.
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