J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Vaccine Hesitancy and the Pursuit of Purity

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On November 14

In Culture Rants/Shares, Health/Body-hacking

Recently I unsubscribed from Chris Masterjohn’s YouTube channel. While previously I’d found his perspective on vitamin D and other nutrition research to be interesting and helpful, the fact that he got Covid twice and still won’t take the vaccine was just too much for me. I just don’t have any patience for vaccine hesitancy when there is so much evidence that the vaccine offers protection against severe disease and death from Covid. I don’t disagree with Masterjohn that some supplements (such as vitamin D and zinc) can also offer protection against severe Covid. And of course contracting and surviving Covid offers some natural immunity as well. But as I’ve written about before, continually rolling the dice when the stakes are so high just isn’t a good strategy. There are just too many cases of robustly healthy people who take all the right supplements getting severely sick from Covid.

So what’s behind vaccine hesitancy? Academics who have looked into the issue associate vaccine hesitancy with values such as purity and personal liberty. Many people are willing to accept the larger risk of Covid (or measles, or other serious diseases) to avoid the much smaller risks of adverse side effects from vaccines.

It makes me think of other health areas where priorities get mixed up in the pursuit of purity and optimization. For example:

  • Suffering from dehydration because you don’t want to drink tap water (which is mostly safe — though in some parts of the U.S. it isn’t)
  • Avoiding the sun so much (to prevent skin cancer) that you become deficient in vitamin D, and miss the blood-pressure lowering/nitric-oxide-releasing benefits of direct sunlight
  • Not getting enough calories or nutrients because of strict dietary restrictions (organic-only, veganism, etc.)

Tolerating some levels of impurity (in air, water, food, radiation and chemical exposure) can ultimately improve health outcomes.

Did I Plagiarize Lloyd Alexander?

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On November 4

In Personal Updates, Writing

Recently I started rereading Lloyd Alexander‘s The Book of Three, a fantasy novel I hadn’t cracked open in roughly four decades. My daughter was giving away some books, and this was among several I rescued. As a child, I remember being fascinated and slightly disturbed by the first edition cover art, and enjoying the entire series immensely.

But reading the book again, I was astonished to realize the opening scene is between two arguing blacksmiths — that exact same way The Sky Woman (Book 1 of Reclaimed Earth) opens.

Fortunately the similarities end there — The Sky Woman has no oracular pig, or princes and kings, or epic battle between good and evil.

But I’m sure it’s not a coincidence. The Chronicles of Prydain series was my introduction to high fantasy, well before I read the Lord of the Rings. The Book of Three sat in my subconscious for decades, influencing my thinking and decisions in who-knows-how-many ways.

The stories we hear and read when we’re young shape our lives forever. I wonder what other stories are rummaging around in my subconscious, influencing my decisions.

Personal Updates

  • I’m loving living in San Francisco. It turns out we’re in the East Cut neighborhood, not South Beach. After living in the Oakland/Berkeley flats for most of my life, the vastness and scale of the architecture (the Bay Bridge, the Salesforce tower, the Ferry Building) is refreshing. Walking the Embarcadero at night is stunningly beautiful. Of course the novelty will wear off in time, but I’m enjoying it for now.
  • We’re about to start remodeling our house in Oakland. We’re in a good financial position, and we have a good team, but still the money stress is getting to me. Even modest remodels are crazy expensive. But it’s what we need to do to make the house nice and rent it out at a good price. And if/when we ever move back in, we’ll appreciate the upgrades.
  • I got my Covid booster. So now I’m J&J plus Pfizer. No side effects this time except for a day of mild tiredness and a sore arm.
  • Still taking a break from all alcohol, approaching two months. The main thing I notice is that even though my stress levels are high right now, so is my emotional resilience. Usually high stress, for me, comes with some feelings of despair and hopelessness. But lately I’ve been facing my problems energetically with a non-forced sense of optimism. I would guess at least some of that emotional shift is from not drinking, perhaps related to neuromodulatory microbiome changes. Or it could be unrelated — no way to easily test. But for the moment, I’m happier abstaining from booze entirely.

I Manifested High-Density Housing

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On October 24

In Personal Updates

Well, here I am in my South Beach San Francisco high-rise apartment, looking out at the Bay Bridge, feeling surprised but pleased with the situation. If you had asked me two months ago where I would be living now, I would have bet serious money that I’d still be in the Oakland house that we own and have lived in for the last twenty years, in the same historically Italian-American neighborhood where my maternal grandparents met and lived in the thirties.

And I would have lost that bet.

If you’re wondering why we moved, read my previous post. This is about how we ended up here. The literal answer is that we didn’t have time for a long housing search, and many of the high-rises had available spaces at lower-than-usual rents (still expensive, but within our range). Covid has created additional availability and emptied out San Francisco in general. Many people lived here only for work, and remote work has triggered a migration to the East Bay and up the coast in search of larger living spaces, more green space, lower rents, etc.

But there’s also a figurative, or mental-model answer to the question of why we ended up here. Recently I was describing the apartment building amenities to Spesh. He commented “You’re moving into the ringstation.” This was an astute reference to the ringstations in my Reclaimed Earth series, which Spesh has read (good friend that he is). And he’s absolutely right. There are many similarities: the density, shared facilities, complex organizational systems, and so forth.

So I’ve been thinking and writing about high-density living for years. The trend continues in my new novel Saint Arcology, which (and I don’t think this is a major spoiler), features an arcology. And also the World One luxury high-rise in Mumbai.

My subconscious was pulling me here, I’ve realized. And so far I like it. Initially I thought our apartment was the same size as our house, but it’s actually nearly half-again as big. Having not moved in a long time, I’d forgotten that a space looks bigger when your furniture is moved in, not smaller.

Maybe I was sick of weeding and gardening?

Personal Update – Controlled Chaos!

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On October 17

In Personal Updates

Yesterday I dismantled the music studio and moved it to Pacifica, which will be the new site for Momu and Jondi & Spesh mixing and mastering (thanks Mark!). The reason? We’re moving to San Francisco, to a high-rise apartment. The new space is pretty much the same footage as our small Oakland house, but without the luxury of two separate home offices. And of course no backyard. On the plus side, the building has a decent gym, a very nice co-working space, and many other amenities. The building management appears to be well organized. It will be a much different experience for us, with a varied assortment of pros and cons. But it’s a necessary life change.

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Results of September Copy Practice

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On October 4

In Creative Work/Career, Writing

After revising the first draft of Saint Arcology, I decided to take a few weeks before starting my next project. But I didn’t want to stop writing entirely; I needed to keep my word brain active. I decided to go with some copy practice: copying the prose of some of my favorite authors.

I’d read about a particular method: reading a paragraph or two, then attempting to write out that section from memory. Then go back and notice how your prose decisions are different (and presumably worse, if you’ve picked someone good) than the writer you are copying.

I started with this method, but found it difficult and frustrating. I’m not great a memorization, and I was putting too much effort into trying to remember what I had just read, and not enough into noticing the author’s stylistic choices. So I switched to a simpler method: open a book at random, read a few paragraphs for enjoyment, then copy those paragraphs directly.

I started with Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Gibson’s prose is information dense. He conveys a tremendous amount of meaning with a tight word budget. But on this read-through I was also struck by how vividly and precisely Gibson describes internal states. For example:

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