thejdizzler's profile

thejdizzler 4d ago

Having a bit of a conundrum. Screen time in the first few hours of the day sets the tone for me for the rest of the day. If I scroll social media in the early AM hours, I am likely to do so the rest of the day. Easy enough habit to stop though right? Unfortunately a lot of my AM exercise is screen dependent. I use Zwift for indoor cycling, and often need to text friends for AM running. How do I get around this?

For the friends issue I'm thinking I can just lock in the night before and not worry about canceling. Zwift seems a bit more difficult.

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thejdizzler 4d ago

The Magicians does a pretty good take on adult wizard school (wizard school replaces college with all the associated neuroses of high-achieving college students included).

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thejdizzler 4d ago

I think this is partially deliberate. Harry needs to grow up through most of the books. Dumbledore tries to encourage this, but his own secrecy and special treatment makes this difficult. It's only during Deathly Hallows where Harry actually is thrust into leadership without any adult mentor figures that he really begins to make better decisions. I think this is pretty clearly shown in the choice that Harry makes about the Deathly Hallows themselves. Rather than make himself into superman by pursuing all the hallows, Harry chooses to follow Dumbledore's instructions and focus on destroying the Horcruxs. I think this represents real maturity.

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thejdizzler 4d ago

I thought there was a community building angle, but yea this would have probably been better suited to Fun Friday.

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thejdizzler 5d ago

I’ve been listening to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Italian over the past few weeks. This was my favorite book as a kid, probably because the series ended here for me for a while on my nightly relistens(1), as my Dad took a few years to get the audiobooks of Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows out of the library to illegally burn onto iTunes. While many parts of the book don’t hold up very well: this book is the only one in the series where I skip chapters, on the current reread I was struck by the thematic tightness of Order. The political aspects are obviously more relevant than ever, especially with the current Trump presidency, although was funny to see the millennial left circa 2010-2020 act exactly like Umbridge when it came to cancel culture. There is also a very powerful sense of dread throughout the whole book: Voldemort is out there but no one has any idea what he’s doing, people are turning up in unexpected places with unexpected wounds at the Ministry, and the reformation of the Order of the Phoenix is a constant reminder of how much the last war cost on a human level. But the theme that has stood out most strongly on this read to me is social isolation, and how this can be overcome through deliberate community building.

When Order starts, Harry has been back at his aunt and uncle’s house in Little Whinging for nearly a month with practically no news from the Wizarding World. Unlike in his second year, he is still receiving letters from his friends, but they contain almost no content related to what is actually going on with Voldemort. David Yates captures this in one of the opening shots of the film of Order, depicting Harry alone a swing-set that is far too childish for him (more on this later), surround by a bleak chain link fence and dying vegetation.

Things get no better when Harry does manage to return to the Wizarding World. After an attack by dementors, he is nearly expelled from Hogwarts, a place that he views as his real home. While awaiting trial at the Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, a paramilitary group that opposes Voldemort and his own paramilitary group, Harry is also systematically excluded from the operations of the group by its adult members. When it comes time to return to school, things get even worse. Harry’s traditional mentor figures are either absent (Hagrid), or distant (McGonnagal, Dumbledore, Sirius). He is excluded from the traditional forms of social advancement when Ron and Hermione are made prefects and not him, kicked off his sports team, and his favorite subject (Defense Against the Dark Arts) is basically not taught at all. He is even isolated from his own peer group: the Wizard newspaper has been slandering Harry all summer, so upon his return to school, a lot of the individuals he thinks of as friends have turned against him.

In the movie this social isolation is depicted brilliantly in a scene where Harry is arguing with classmate and friend Seamus Finnegan.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zc5SnGw21HQ

As you can see from even the thumbnail, the scene is constructed such that Harry is alone facing Seamus and a bunch of other students who are positioned as to be taking his side physically, if not literally.

In the book there’s no such scene, but another similar moment that reinforces Harry’s isolation, even from his closest friends. When he’s getting on the train, Hermione and Ron have to go perform their prefect duties, leaving Harry alone.

“I know you’re not,” said Harry and he grinned. But as Hermione and Ron dragged their trunks, Crookshanks, and a caged Pigwidgeon off toward the engine end of the train, Harry felt an odd sense of loss. He had never traveled on the Hogwarts Express without Ron.

Of course this is not the first time that Harry has been at odds with his classmates and the rest of the school, but importantly it is the first time that this isolation has been so complete, and that his adult mentor figures are so thoroughly unreliable. Even Harry’s rosy view of his dad is shattered in this book when he sees him tormenting Snape in one of Snape’s memories.

This isolation is an important part of Harry’s maturation process. Harry is undergoing parts of two archetypal transitions during Order. The first is the transition between the child and orphan archetypes. This is a typical transition during early adolescence, in which the child gains intellectual independence from his/her parents (or parent figures) and becomes skeptical of the broader superstructure of society. This is very much a deconstructive stage and is not long-term stable, requiring a fairly rapid transition to the adult stage.

In Order, Harry is reaching the end of his child to orphan transition. This transition begun much earlier, perhaps in books 2 or 3, where things like the wizard government, justice system, and social system are brought into question. In Order, even trusted adults, like Dumbledore and Sirius are questioned, and institutions that Harry trusted in the past, such as Hogwarts have the rug pulled out from under them. The isolation that Harry feels is a natural result of this transition, and we all feel it to some extent in our normal, Voldemort-free, lives.

Of course, the orphan archetype must itself be overcome in order for the individual to become an adult. The main form this takes is an increase in agency, a power to actually enact change in the real world.

As he completes the child-orphan transition in this book, Harry begins his own orphan-adult transition, which he will not complete until the end of book 7. Social isolation is not a problem that he just accepts passively. Harry of Order of the Phoenix is a very angry teenager, and while a lot this anger is wildly misdirected, he does begin to use his agency to redirect it towards external change.

The most important of these acts of adult agency is the deliberate construction of community. Harry has been denied membership in not only “standard” communities, such as the quidditch team, his peer group at Hogwarts, and the wider wizarding world at large, but also in the “alternative” Order of the Phoenix (2). While he does fight to gain acceptance in the wider Wizarding community throughout the book, doing an exclusive interview on Voldemort’s return for the magazine The Quibbler, most of Harry’s actions in this book center around building up his own alternative social groups out of people he actually likes and respects (3), in forming his own paramilitary group, Dumbledore’s Army.

In the film Harry’s overcoming of his own social isolation is shown literally. At the climax of the film, in the Department of Mysteries Harry is shown surrounded by his friends.

At the actual end of the film, Harry is also shown to be surrounded by the community he built.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=P7JB0ez_00E

In the book this transition is well highlighted by how Harry’s opinions of his friends shifts from the beginning of Order to the beginning of Half-Blood Prince.

She closed the door again, rather pink in the face, and departed. Harry slumped back in his seat and groaned. He would have liked Cho to discover him sitting with a group of very cool people laughing their heads off at a joke he had just told; he would not have chosen to be sitting with Neville and Loony Lovegood, clutching a toad and dripping in Stinksap. -OotP

“People expect you to have cooler friends than us,” said Luna, once again displaying her knack for embarrassing honesty.

“You are cool,” said Harry shortly. “None of them was at the Ministry. They didn’t fight with me.” -HBP

In an age of social atomization, where traditional and alternative community organizations have been corrupted or destroyed, the importance of deliberate community building to overcome isolation is more important than ever. It is essential for each one of us to build and participate in our own organic, grass-roots communities.

Perhaps an embarrassing fact about me: I listened to Harry Potter almost every single night from the ages of 8 to 18. I probably got through the series about once a year. This has given me almost no material advantages in my life, other than providing a very convenient series that I can use to supercharge my language learning.
It’s interesting that Harry never actually joins the order, despite being old enough in Deathly Hallows.
Rather than who others tell him he should like.

Substack link if you want to see photos from the film: https://substack.com/@joshuaderrick/p-177318643

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thejdizzler 7d ago

I have them in Latin too, but I have yet to try. Too difficult without some other form of study, which I am loath to do right now.

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thejdizzler 9d ago

Yea dude it's pretty interesting. Spanish translation did not do this at all, but apparently it's quite common in most of the other translations, especially in non-romance or Germanic languages.

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thejdizzler 9d ago

October 2025 Book Round-up

1.Niccolò Rising by Dorothy Dunnett

One of my favorite books this year- you know it’s good when you find extra time to listen to it via audiobook: I’m not usually an audiobook person!

I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Dunnett for a long time. One of my other favorite historical fiction writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote a poem about her work that I connected when I was a teenager, and I found the fourth book in the Niccolò series in a used bookstore in England in 2023 and had been meaning to start the series ever since.

Niccolò rising follows the most unlikely of heroes, the dyers apprentice Claes, on the first stages of his meteoric rise from artisan to prominent businessman. Claes (who eventually comes to be known as Niccolò or Nicholas) is a genius who initially uses his intelligence to perform outrageous pranks in his home city of Bruges, but after a few chance encounters with two Scottish noblemen who are out for his blood, he decides to change his ways and use his mind to make his way in the world.

Dunnett really makes Bruges, Milan, and Geneva feel alive, and the research that must have went into this book is immense in scale. Certainly puts Kay, and every other historical fiction author I’ve read to shame.

Claes’s relationships are the thing that made this book excellent, although the forced tensions between the noble and not so noble parts this nature was a little grating at times. There are some annoying parts of the book: one of Nicholas’s romantic relationships is clearly wish fulfillment on the part of the author, and some of his plots are way too complicated to be believable, but these are relatively minor quibbles.

4.5/5 Stars

2.The Nature of Training: Complexity Science Applied to Endurance Performance by Manuel Sola Arjona

Read this one in Spanish (you can find my original review of it in Spanish on my Goodreads). I checked this out because I’m a fan of Manuel’s substack, and his philosophy of training in general.

The central theme of this work is that most training plans focus on the wrong things. You can train and train and train and not get results because training is a complex system (because our bodies are). A plan might be very good, but no plan survives contact with the enemy. We need to listen more to our bodies and less to statistics or other fixed metrics.

All of this makes a lot of sense. As Gordo Byrn and Alan Couzens and others have said, the specifics of a plan don’t matter much. The amount of training is important, but compared to the rest of an athlete’s life, training doesn’t take up that much time. If there’s a lot of stress in the rest of our lives, we’re not going to respond positively to any plan. Period. What’s important is reducing the amount of stress in our lives and increasing the amount of daily exercise we do.

However, there are three major problems with this book. The first is that half of it isn’t about training but about complexity science as a whole. I didn’t buy this to read a recap of Taleb with examples about the environment and global warming, as true as they may be. I get that there needed to be an introduction of this stuff for new readers, but it went too deep.

Second, I think Arjona has too rosy a view of our sensations as guides. For an experienced athlete, I completely agree; RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) or perceived effort is the most reliable indicator of what we should do. But for inexperienced athletes, external markers, like heart rate, can be very helpful in learning what is too much and what isn’t. Heart rate training helped me between my senior year of highschool and first year of college for example, realize that I had been doing most of my easy days in the tempo zone.

Third, and what bothered me the most, is the focus on our evolutionary environment as a guideline for modern training. I have two problems with this. First, the goals of evolution and the goals of a professional athlete are very different. There’s not much point in using the former as a guide for the latter. Second, evolution (and this is something I see VERY commonly) doesn’t mean optimization. It means just enough to survive. Our diets and lifestyles weren’t optimized in the Stone Age. It’s possible to improve them (and also obviously make them worse), but we shouldn’t think of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as something to emulate directly. That lifestyle can provide us with hints as to what might be the right direction to take, but direct emulation reads much more like a just-so story, and much less of a practice that is strongly supported by science.

3/5 Stars

3. Harry Potter e il Calice di Fuoco by J.K. Rowling

I’m starting to work on my Italian again, and Harry Potter is my favorite series to work with when doing so. I got through the first three books in Italian last year, but put my work with the language on pause until I could pass my B2 Spanish test.

Harry Potter is a great series for me for language learning. I’m a firm believer in Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis: that is we learn language by understanding comprehensible messages. Since I know Harry Potter so well; up to a point in some situations where I can quote passages of dialogue verbatim with some prompting, it is much easier to understand its text in another language than it would be for another book. This effectively allows me to start reading much earlier than I would be able to otherwise, because if I can read the character names and understand some basic words, I can still follow the plot. even with only a sometimes ~20% understanding of the rest of the vocabulary.

The Italians, unlike the Spanish translators, changed around some of the names of the characters. Albus Dumbledore became Albus Silenti, Slytherin became Serpeverde and Professor Snape became Professor Piton. Apparently in earlier editions, there were even more character names changes, most of which are documented in the appendix. I liked this in general: it gave the books a little bit of a different flavor than reading them in English.

Goblet of Fire is the point in the series where the world of Harry Potter really starts to open up: we see other wizarding schools at the Triwizard tournament, learn much more about the wizard government, and Harry begins to deal with some pretty adult situations. Of course there are some problems with the book: the central plot is pretty unbelievable in hindsight and makes Voldemort look like an idiot, the foreign students are walking stereotypes of France and Eastern Europe, and the house-elf subplot never made anyone look good. However, that being said, this is still one of my very favorite books of all time, and I enjoyed being able to read it in Italian.

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thejdizzler 11d ago · Edited 10d ago

I think I agree with you. I have no problem getting myself to run/bike/swim 8-12 hours a week, but I can't for the life of me get myself to go to the gym and lift. I had no problem doing core and calisthenics in high-school and college with the team, so it's totally and enjoyment thing.

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thejdizzler 12d ago

November Goals

Want to try the “Getting Things Done” productivity system, which basically involves writing out all my to-dos in a notebook, and either doing them immediately or schedule them for a future time.
I want to work on becoming less anxious. GTD should help with this, but quitting porn, limiting internet time, and discursive meditation should all help with this.
Second half of November and first part of December will be time off from serious exercise. I’d like to use this time to rebuild metabolically, but also to do some of my other hobbies that I have neglected (guitar, dancing, reading) for a little bit. Will probably still aim for about 30 minutes a day of exercise, but no serious training. Before this I'll be running my age in miles on my birthday (28 on 11/19) and racing an 8k XC at Franklin Park.
Ask out this girl that I've been hanging out with from swim. Lots of mixed signals if she's interested or not, but only one way to know for sure....

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thejdizzler 12d ago

I stopped doing it a while ago. Seemed to be overkill with the amount of endurance exercise I'm doing. Although this might just be post-hoc justification for the fact that I took it right before my oral board exam+ drank coffee and nearly had a panic attack and have had a negative association since.

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thejdizzler 18d ago

Luckily do not have designs on this particular woman, so in this case it is merely frustration that my friend is causing herself so much inner turmoil. Yet, as you state, she may not see it that way in a few years.

It has been an epiphany that I’ve played this role far too often in other relationships and in other contexts (not romantic).

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thejdizzler 18d ago

Thanks for the advice. I have basically done what you suggest in the first part. We’ve had a long conversation over text, and I told her that I’ll talk to her on the phone if she wants, but she’s basically heard everything I have to say so she shouldn’t bring it up again.

Second section is also good advice. I generally need to stand up for my interests (all my interests, not just this) in life more. I can do this without violating any kind of moral code.

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thejdizzler 18d ago

I’m not interested in this particular women. She is a long term friend from undergrad.

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thejdizzler 18d ago

I (M27) have been giving one my friend from college (F27) dating advice via text for the past week. It's been frustrating on multiple levels. First, the situation. This girl is a grad student in ecology (American) at a university in Canada. She recently started hooking up with a French postdoc who is cheating on his long-term girlfriend with her. I don't see how this is going to end well. If this guy was going to leave his girlfriend (who he has been dating for a long time apparently) he would have done so already. Even if this somehow does happen, they're both academics not in their home countries, meaning a likelihood of ending up in the same place is very low. Finally, a relationship that begins with extended cheating is never going to end well because that reflects pretty badly on the impulse control of both parties. I told this girl this and that she needed to distance herself from this man, but she responded by saying that she "had to" pursue this relationship because she didn't know when she would "feel this way" again and that he was a "special guy". I'm frankly just baffled by this level of irrationality and naivety. Maybe from a 18-21 year-old women this would be understandable, but come on use your fucking brain. She is the sidehoe (at best) in this situation and the whole thing is causing such an unnecessarily large amount of stress while she's trying to finish her PhD that it doesn't take a genius to see that the juice isn't worth the squeeze in this situation. I'm continually surprised by the inability of smart people to make sensible and morally sound decisions when it comes to romance.

The second part of my frustration is more personal. I only have platonic feelings for this particular friend, but there have been many other examples with women in the past 5-10 years where my feelings have not been platonic and I have been asked to play the role of a gay best friend to give advice that will not be headed in an absolutely fucked romantic situation. This is almost entirely a me problem of setting boundaries. This most recent situation has made me realize that it's not good for me to be intimate friends with women who don't reciprocate my romantic interest, or with past girlfriends in general. The comparison game usually makes me feel really really bad about myself: why would women choose a shitty cheater over me? The solution is to not allow that comparison to be made by being more honest with those women about what my feelings are (I want a romantic partner, not another friend), and more honest with myself (it's not evil or mean to distance myself from a romantic situation that didn't work out).

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thejdizzler 19d ago

Impressive ramp rate. I think you could still do the 100k this fall. For context I did a century ride after thanksgiving in northern MD/south-central PA and had daylight on both ends. Was going about 14 miles an hour.

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thejdizzler 22d ago

Thanks man! I hope so too!

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thejdizzler 25d ago

No reading group is easy to run. People continually flake, don't do the reading, or try and take over the group to the kind of reading they want to do (despite a terrible track record of attendance). That said, it's been easier since I established a solid core group of 2-3 other people. I know they will do the readings and participate, so the other crap is just noise.