# Blanklob

> A place for my writing and the things I keep coming back to.

The full text of every published piece, newest first.

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# Books are company

I think a book is the best thing you can put in your head, and I do not think it is close. Not a film, not a podcast, not whatever the feed handed you this morning. A book. Someone spends a whole life on one thing, working it out, getting it wrong, sitting with it for years, and then folds that entire life down into a few hundred pages. You read it in a few days. You get the essence of a person it took decades to become, and then you do it again with someone else, and again, for the price of a sandwich.

That part still gets me. Holding a book and thinking about how much of a life is in my hands and how little it cost, it feels close to unfair. Some of the ones that changed me cost less than lunch. It should be a crime that they are that cheap.

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What reading gives me is perspective, and I did not have a word for it until I had read enough to feel it happen. You sit inside enough lives and enough arguments and you slowly stop being so sure your own view is the only one in the room. Things that felt huge get smaller. Things I used to walk past start to carry weight. The mechanism I cannot fully explain, and I have stopped trying to. A book quietly changes the way you see, and you only catch it a few weeks later when the world looks a little different than it did.

Once that starts, the rest of the noise is hard to go back to. A week inside a real book, then a Twitter thread everyone is sharing, and it reads to me the way a kid explains something. Not because the person is dumb. Because I just spent a week inside someone who gave that same idea their whole life, and the short clever version cannot compete with that. It spoils you a little, in the good way.

## More than information

Books turned out to be company too, which I did not see coming. You carry some worry around for years thinking it belongs only to you, some private thing with a bit of shame on it, and then you open a book and there it is on the page, named plainly, and the writer is telling you it is the most ordinary thing in the world and here is what to do with it. It is a friend saying you are not broken, half the room is the same as you. Books have talked me down off worries I had never said out loud to anyone.

George R.R. Martin put it in one line:

> A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

Part of why I trust books over everything else is that they have already outlasted everything else. People have been writing them for thousands of years, and the good ones are still here, still read, long after the person who wrote them is gone. There is a book for almost anything you can go through, including the things you would never say out loud. How to be in a relationship. How to sit with grief. How to think about money, or work, or dying. Whatever I am in the middle of, someone has already been there, written it down carefully, and left it on a shelf for me. I do not know if the feeds and the videos will still open in a hundred years. I am fairly sure the books will.

## The habit

Reading works on me the way the gym does. You do not read one great book and arrive somewhere. You keep going back, a bit at a time, and it adds up quietly, the way training does. Fifty pages a day when it is flowing. Some weeks, nothing. No single session feels like much on the day, but a year of it is a different head.

It did not start with discipline. I am not a disciplined reader, or a disciplined anything. What happened is the internet came out of my home, and suddenly the evenings had hours in them with nothing to fill, and the book was the thing left on the table once the easy option was gone. It is the same move I lean on for everything else, changing the [room](/t/discipline-is-glass) instead of fighting myself. Reading is just where I watch it happen most plainly. Set the evenings up right and it comes on its own. Let them go and it is the first thing to vanish, which is usually how I know something has slipped.

## The ones that did the work

A few of them did specific work on me. Sapiens humbled me, it showed me I know only a sliver of the history I was sure I had a grip on. Atomic Habits is the rare one whose ideas made it off the page and into how I actually live. And [Project Hail Mary](/t/project-hail-mary), my first science fiction book, kept me up until two in the morning and quietly handed back three or four years of physics I had spent a long time calling wasted.

None of them were right about everything, and I stopped expecting them to be. A book is one person's answer, not the answer. Mark Manson has an idea that you should hold everything you believe as possibly wrong, and instead of freeing me it froze me, because if I might be wrong about the thing I am about to do, then why do it. That one never sat right, so I left it. That is the part of reading nobody warns you about, that you have to choose what actually fits you and let the rest go. You do not owe a book your agreement, and you do not have to finish all of them. You are not trying to read everything. You are trying to read what matters to you.

There is one on the shelf I have not let myself open yet. Man's Search for Meaning. I keep picking it up and putting it back, because I can tell it is heavy in a way I want to be awake for, not squeeze into a tired half hour before sleep. It sounds odd to be a little scared of a book. Careful is maybe the better word. Some of them you can read anywhere, in a queue, half asleep, and they still land. This one I want to give a clear head and a real stretch of time, so it sits there, waiting for me to get to it properly.

## Where it goes wrong

I go faster than I should. There are pages I swept through knowing I was missing something, promising myself I would come back and never did. Half of what I have read, I have probably only half read.

Reading on its own has never actually changed anything for me. I can close a smart book and feel like I became someone, and that feeling has fooled me more than once. A book I read and do nothing with just sits there as a kind of debt, one more thing I know and am not living. The ones that changed me changed me because I did something the next morning. Moved the fruit where I could see it. Put the phone in another room. Sent the message I had been avoiding. The reading is only half of it, and the other half is boring and happens off the page.

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Mostly what I feel about all this is grateful, with a little sadness under it. Sad that I came to books this late, that there were years the lessons sat there for twenty bucks and I never opened them. Grateful in a way that is hard to say without sounding soft, that people give a whole life to writing these and then more or less hand them away. And there is one feeling I did not expect. When someone tells me they have never really read, a part of me envies them, because it is all still in front of them, every book that reworked me still unopened and waiting. I would trade a lot to read a few of them again for the first time.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/books-are-company (Mind · life · 2026-07-25)

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# Discipline is glass

For years I was stuck in the same loop. I would decide, with total conviction, that this was the week I fixed my life. Wake up early. Eat well, cook instead of order. Gym. Read. Sleep on time. Real work, done with focus. I would do it for three days. Sometimes a week. My record was eighteen days, and I still remember the number, which tells you something. Then a bad day would land, or work would get heavy, and the whole thing would collapse in an afternoon.

And then came the part that did the real damage. I would blame myself. I would decide I was lazy, that I had no willpower, that other people had some engine I was born without. So I would wait a while, feel bad, and then try again, harder this time, with more conviction, and fail again a little faster. I did this for years. The failing was not the problem. The story I told myself about the failing was the problem, because that story said the fix was to try harder, and trying harder was exactly the thing that kept breaking.

## The day I admitted I was not disciplined

The day everything changed is the day I admitted I was not disciplined.

Not as an insult. As a plain fact, said out loud, with no drama. I stopped arguing with it. I looked at myself honestly and said: I have the discipline of a toddler. Put a phone in front of a toddler and he grabs it. Put a cake in front of him and it is gone. He is not going to reason his way out of it, and in the moment, neither am I. That sounds like surrender, and it felt like it too. It was actually the first useful thing I had ever done, because for the first time I was working with the truth instead of against it.

Here is what I finally understood about discipline. Discipline is a high-energy state you hold on top of your normal one. Picture hanging off a pull-up bar. You can hold it if you strain, but your arms burn the whole time, and the second something distracts you, you drop. That is what every disciplined day felt like. I was straining to hold a position above my natural one, and I was trying to hold it forever. But life is not flat. It goes up and down. Good weeks, bad weeks, stress you did not see coming. So the bar always won in the end. It had to. Nobody can hold a burning grip for a lifetime, and I had been calling my inability to do the impossible a personal flaw.

The strange thing is that the people who look most disciplined are not straining at all. [James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits) says it better than I can:

> Disciplined people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.

That was the whole trick I had been missing. The best self-control belongs to the people who need it least. I thought the winners were gripping the bar harder than me. They were not gripping it at all. They had built something to stand on.

## Change the room, not the man

So I stopped asking how to hold the bar longer, and I asked a completely different question. If I am a toddler, I do not hand a toddler willpower and hope. I change the room. What in my environment is doing the damage, and can I simply remove it, so that being good is not a daily fight but just the way the room is arranged?

For me the answer was obvious once I let myself see it. It was the internet. I was spending most of my waking hours on a screen. Comparing myself to strangers, ordering food instead of cooking, staying inside, sleeping late with a screen in my face. The internet was not one bad habit. It was the soil every bad habit grew in. So I took my phone, turned it off, and put it somewhere far enough that getting it back was a real trip and not a reach across the desk. I asked the person holding it not to give it back, no matter what I said later. Because I knew later-me would ask.

It half worked, and the half that failed taught me the most. I still had my laptop, and within days I had slid right back into the same habits on a bigger screen. Then I tried the usual toolkit. Blocker apps. Browser extensions. The quiet promise that this time I would just be careful. None of it held, and now I know exactly why. Every one of those tools still put the decision back in my hands in the moment of temptation. Be careful is just the pull-up bar with extra steps. A toddler always finds the workaround, and in the moment, I am a toddler.

## When luck did it for me

Then luck did for me what I could not do for myself. My home internet went down for a few days. A provider fault, nothing to do with me. And the first day was strange, almost physical. I kept reaching for a phone that was not there. My hands would twitch at a notification sound that never came. I was restless in a way I did not have a name for, so I ended up shadowboxing in the middle of the room just to burn it off, because there was suddenly nothing to fill the time with. That is the part nobody warns you about. When you take the screen away, the first thing you feel is not peace. It is withdrawal.

And then time did something I had not felt since I was a kid. It slowed down. That first day was the longest day I can remember, not because it dragged, but because I suddenly had all of it back, hours I had not realized I was spending. I went outside for no reason at all, the way a child goes outside, not to run an errand or get somewhere, just to be out. I had not done that in years. As an adult you almost always leave the house for a reason. I left for none, and it felt like getting away with something.

To keep working I started walking to a cafe, and those few days were some of the clearest I have ever had. Time felt slow and full. Without deciding to, I slipped into the life I had been failing to force for years. I did not become that person, I just was that person, at no cost. It was as if someone had been holding me up on that bar the whole time and had now slipped a brick under my feet. Same height, zero strain. And the only thing I had changed was that the internet was gone.

When the connection came back, I stood at a fork. Plug it in and return to the struggle, or protect the thing that was quietly fixing everything without my help. I took a knife and cut the cable. Not a metaphor. The actual cable, the kind you cannot just plug back in, the kind that needs a call and an appointment to restore.

James Clear has a name for what I had done:

> A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.

The example of his that stuck with me is Victor Hugo. In 1830 Hugo owed his publisher a book he had spent an entire year avoiding, chasing other projects and entertaining guests instead. With the deadline closing in, he collected all his clothes and had his assistant lock them away in a chest, leaving him nothing to wear but a large shawl. With nothing to go outside in, he had no reason to leave his study and nothing to do but write, and he finished The Hunchback of Notre-Dame ahead of the deadline. Cutting my cable was the same move. You make the bad option expensive in advance, while you are still strong, because you know a moment is coming when you will be weak, and you do not want that moment to have a steering wheel.

## Find your own friction

Now, I want to be careful here, because the point is not the internet. If you take one thing, take this. The internet was my friction. Yours is almost certainly something else. The move is what matters, not my particular enemy. And the move is a question you can ask about anything.

It goes like this. Instead of listing goals and bracing to force them, I sat down and asked what I actually wanted more of and what I wanted less of. Then, in front of each one, I asked a simpler question than any goal: what is the thing preventing this, and is there one change I can make once that slowly puts me on the right side of it without daily effort. I wanted to be fit. The honest blocker was not a lack of gym motivation. It was that ordering food was frictionless and going outside was rare, both of which came from the same screen. Remove the screen and I cook, I walk, I go out, and the fitness follows on its own. I never had to fight the fight I thought I needed to win. I removed the reason the fight existed.

That is the real reason systems beat willpower, and it is the part almost nobody tells you. A good system does not fix one thing. It pulls a dozen good things in behind it, for free, without you managing any of them. The fitness was only the first. I started sleeping like I did as a kid, because I came home honestly tired from the walking and there was no screen keeping my brain lit past midnight. I read constantly, because at night there was nothing else to reach for. My work got sharper, because a room full of people gave me back the focus I thought I had lost years ago. I did not build these habits one at a time, gritting my teeth through each. I removed one thing, and they arrived on their own, the way weeds do, except these were the ones I wanted.

## When the system breaks

Now the honest part, because I refuse to let this sound like a clean before-and-after. Systems break too. This is not bulletproof, and anyone who tells you their setup never fails is selling something. There was a stretch where life hit hard and I had to be online constantly for weeks, and it collapsed. Fast. A couple of days and I was back near zero, back to the old habits like I had never left. So no, the switch does not stay flipped by itself, and the floor is not permanent.

But that is exactly the difference, and it is the line I keep coming back to. Discipline is glass. When it breaks, it is gone, and you are standing in the pieces blaming yourself. Systems are concrete. Concrete cracks too, but you do not throw a wall away because it cracked. You repair it. The goal was never to never break. The goal is how fast you get back. When I slip now, I try not to spend a single minute on the guilt, because the guilt is just the old story sneaking back in. I spend that energy getting back to the setup that works, as fast as I can, before a slip has time to harden into a new life. A cheat day is fine. A cheat month is a different person moving in.

The one skill I did build, quietly, is noticing. I can feel a slip while it is happening now, not a month later when I look up and wonder how I got here. That awareness is the thing years of watching myself gave me, and it is the alarm that tells me to go repair the concrete. It is not willpower. It is closer to a smoke detector than to strength.

So I no longer believe in willpower, at least not for me, and I no longer think I am lazy either. I think I am a normal person who spent years trying to hang off a bar, when all I ever had to do was build a floor and stand on it.

This is just my story, and my friction happened to be the internet. Yours is something else, and finding it is most of the work. But the move does not change. Stop asking how to force yourself. Start asking what you can remove or rearrange so that the good version of you is simply the default, on an ordinary day, with no energy spent being good. Build the floor. Then you do not have to hold on.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/discipline-is-glass (Mind · life · 2026-07-18)

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# Good enough beats great

For years I thought the point was to be exceptional at one thing. Pick it, pour everything into it, and let the rest of your life wait its turn. It is a clean story, and a convincing one. It is also the one that cost me the most.

The thing I was good at kept getting better. Everything I was not paying attention to kept getting worse, so slowly I never caught it happening. Sleep, health, money, the people around me, the admin nobody thanks you for. None of it ever screamed. It just sat there going quietly wrong while I was busy being impressive somewhere else. Then the corner I had ignored the longest turned out to be the one that could break everything, and it did. It took the thing I had been protecting down with it.

## You cannot pour every point into one number

For a while I could not see the mistake, because the one thing looked so healthy. The way I understand it now is the way you read a player's ratings in a game. Everyone has a spread of stats and a fixed budget of points to spend across them. You can pour almost the whole budget into one attribute and leave the rest near zero. What you get is a glass cannon. It is unbeatable in the exact situation it was built for, and helpless the moment the game asks it anything else. On paper it looks incredible. In real matches it loses.

That was me for years. One stat near a hundred and a row of single digits next to it that I was almost proud of. I had decided the big number was the only one that counted. But life never leaves you in the single situation your big number was built for. It keeps asking the other questions, and a build like that has no answer to any of them. A balanced player is unremarkable next to it and much harder to beat. Nothing about it is spectacular. It just does not leave a gap for the world to walk through.

## The parts multiply each other

So I stopped trying to win a single category and started trying to be good enough across the ones that actually make a life. Health, money, work, the body, the people, a clear head. Not great at any of them. Good enough, and steady.

This sounds weak until you see why it holds. The stats do not just sit side by side on the sheet. They feed each other. Sleep a full night and my focus at work climbs. Focus climbs and the work gets lighter. Lighter work leaves me calmer, so I eat better and move more, so I sleep better again, and the ring turns one more time. Raise any single number a little and it quietly lifts the ones beside it.

That is why a six across five areas beats a ten sitting next to four zeros, every time. The ten is dragging dead weight through every situation it meets. The sixes are pulling the same way, each one making the next one easier. A high number on its own is a cost. A row of decent numbers that hold each other up is an engine. None of it shows up in a single place, and you rarely catch the week it happened. It arrives everywhere at once, as a life that holds together. You cannot rush that, and you do not need to. You only have to keep any one number from falling to zero.

## Balance is not doing everything either

Here is where I got it wrong for a good while, and there is no clean way to say it. The moment I let go of being great at one thing, I overshot straight into the opposite ditch. I tried to pick up everything at once. New hobbies, new skills, a whole list of things I was going to be good enough at, all starting the same month. I could not keep track of any of it. I dropped most of them, wasted money on a few, and ended up feeling worse than when I had the one obsession, because now I had ten half-started things staring back at me.

So good enough at many things is not permission to chase everything. Chasing everything is just a lopsided life in a new costume, spread so thin that no number ever gets off the floor. The rule I hold now is dull and it works: bring every stat up to a passing grade first, so nothing sits at zero, before I let myself add a new one. And when my head gets too crowded, I drop something on purpose. I just need to drop things so I stop thinking about them, and my mind goes light again. Subtraction is part of balance. The points are limited, the same as they are in the game, and acting like you can max every stat is the surest way to max none.

## Good enough is the only version that lasts

The reason I aim for good enough instead of great is not that I ran out of ambition. Good enough is the only setting I can actually hold for years, and years is the only span on which any of this pays off. Great is a sprint. You run it on pressure, at full output, until the day life hits hard and it snaps. Good enough runs quieter and closer to the ground, on the days I feel like it and the days I do not.

I learned this from my own work before I learned it anywhere else. I have shipped the same kind of thing two ways. Once as a two-day panic, twelve hours a day, running on nothing but pressure. Once as a small piece of it every day for a couple of weeks, calm and ordinary, barely noticing the effort. Both got done. The panic version is the one I hated, the one that left me wrecked and swearing never again, even when the result was good. The quiet version I could have kept up for years. That is the entire difference between great and good enough. One you survive. One you sustain.

Most of what actually holds a life together is small and easy to overlook. A real meal instead of whatever was fastest. Sleep. A walk. Money sorted before it becomes a fire. A message to someone I would otherwise let drift. None of it is worth showing anyone, and none of it will ever be the thing I get known for. None of it is impressive on its own. All of it together is the life.

There is a line from Naval I keep near me:

> A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought.

Three things, not one. A body, a mind, the people around you. None of them can be rushed to a hundred, or won in some other column. They come in slowly, in parallel, to someone who kept every number off the floor instead of pouring it all into one.

Great is one number you protect. Good enough is a life that holds.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/good-enough-beats-great (Mind · life · 2026-07-04)

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# I train so my body never says no

A while back, I thought I was strong. I had been doing bodyweight workouts for a while and I was decent, above average, or so I told myself. I was working at a yoga club then, and one day I sat in on a Pilates session. The room was full of women, and I caught myself thinking there was no way they could beat me at something that was just bodyweight.

The session was fourteen minutes. I lost it at ten. Everyone around me moved through it without stopping, one thing into the next, no rest, while I came apart. I had been training planks three days a week, and the woman next to me held hers long after I had dropped. The only person struggling in that room was me. I was twenty, and somewhere I had picked up the idea that a man is strong by default. That session took it apart in front of everyone. I got humbled. Really humbled.

It took me a while to do anything with that. For years I had it backwards, and backwards is a trap.

## Aesthetics is someone else's goal

The trap looks like this. You watch a one year transformation video, you decide that is the target, you put in three months, and you are not even close. Then the doubt starts. You wonder about genetics, about who is taking something, about what you would have to buy to catch up. That happened to me more than once, so I am not describing anyone here but myself.

What I finally understood is that looking a certain way is mostly someone else's goal. It is what other people want to see, not the thing I actually want. There is nothing wrong with the mirror. I look in it, I like what I see some days and not others, and that is part of it. But the day the way I look becomes the point, I am working for an audience, and an audience is a bad reason to do anything for the rest of your life. The goal has to be something I would chase even if no one ever saw it.

## A body for the things I actually want to do

So I moved the target to the one thing that is fully mine: what my body can do.

I want to climb the mountain when the chance comes, to say yes to the hike, the cold trip, the marathon if I feel like it one year. When I am old, the parts I will replay are the experiences, the places I went and the things my body let me do, not the months I looked a certain way. The worst version of getting older is being offered the thing you always wanted and having your body quietly answer no.

Underneath that is the boring truth you only believe once it is nearly too late: health is the biggest investment there is, bigger than any account. You learn its real price the week you lose it, when a fever takes over and every other worry goes quiet, because suddenly you only have one problem. I would rather put in the work now, year after year, than be taught that the hard way.

The honest catch is that this goal is invisible. Aesthetics is easy to chase because you can see it. A capable body and a long healthy life are not tangible, there is no scoreboard, and that is exactly why it is hard to stay with. I do not have a clever fix. I just decided the invisible thing was the real one, and then built everything around making it easy to keep.

## A fruit mix, not five bananas

This is the part I think about the most.

When you get serious about training, the pull is to go all in on one thing, and I felt it too. Some people max out endurance and end up running ultras. Some chase raw strength and twenty muscle ups. Some chase size, some live in yoga and mobility, some train pure explosiveness for a sport. Each one is eating a single fruit by the bowlful. Five bananas, every day.

I would rather have the fruit mix. One strawberry, one banana, one kiwi, a little of each in the same bowl, and it beats any single fruit on its own. That is the body I am after. Take maybe eighty percent of the good from each discipline: a real run once a week, pull strength, enough mobility that the joints keep working, a bit of the explosive stuff, and the part that simply keeps you from getting hurt. You end up able to do almost anything well enough. A mountain shows up, you can climb it. A long trail shows up, your legs are ready for most of it.

The mix matters, and the Pilates class is where I learned it. Strength has more than one shape. No single discipline makes you actually capable. The mix does.

## Show up, and let ten years do the work

None of this survives if it is hard, because if it is hard I will quit. So the start was almost insultingly simple.

For the first few months the only goal was to show up. The one number that mattered was how many times I went. What I did once I got there did not matter, I explored machines, did random things, half the time just cardio. There is a story in Atomic Habits about a man who drove to the gym, trained for two minutes, and drove home, every day, until one day he figured he was already there so he might as well stay. That was the entire plan. The single rule I held was never to skip two days in a row, because two in a row is where the other habit starts, the habit of not going.

There is barely any tracking. I weigh myself maybe once a month, sometimes forget for two. My sister noticed I had lost weight before I did, and only then did I check and find it was three kilos. The session itself is the win. Now and then I push one thing, the run from eight to nine kilometers an hour, a harder pull, just to know it is still moving forward. A plateau does not scare me; it only means the body adapted, so you change something and keep going.

And I stopped letting the clock frighten me. Ten years is not one year. The second you remember you have a few thousand days to get this right, the panic dies, because there is no deadline. There is no end date on something you intend to do for the rest of your life.

## The fear was never the workout

Here is the part I will not pretend away. The hard thing was never the training. It was being watched.

I used to dread walking back into the gym after missing a week, scared of what people would think about my consistency. A few skipped days, and the fear of being judged for them was the thing that nearly turned a short break into quitting for good. That fear only let go once it sank in that I was doing this for myself and for no one else in the room. The thoughts about how I look still come. I have not killed them and I am not pretending I have. The point was never to kill the thought. The point was to stop letting it set the goal.

Still a beginner at all of this, I might watch myself say these things in a year and laugh. But this is the first approach I have not quit, and I think that is because it finally stopped asking me to perform. I did not invent any of it. The habit piece came straight out of Atomic Habits, and the line about health being the one problem that quiets all the others is something I picked up somewhere I can no longer name.

The body was never really the point. The point is the day someone says come climb this, come see this, come try this, and nothing in me has to say no.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/i-train-so-my-body-never-says-no (Body · life · 2026-06-20)

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# 100 Meters

I found this one almost by accident. It was a Friday, I had decided to make it a cheat day, and I did something I almost never do, I brought internet home with me. The Formula One season had just started, so I subscribed to Netflix to binge Drive to Survive and warm up for it. The first episode was only okay. Then I saw the poster for this, red, a style I liked straight away, the kind of look the good ones usually have. I checked it expecting episodes and found it was a film, hesitated, and pressed play anyway. It turned out to be one of the best animes I have seen.

A short warning before I go on: I am going to walk through how it moves. If you have not seen it, go watch it first. It is better knowing nothing.

The art alone would have been enough. It is unique, refreshing, completely its own thing, and it did not surprise me to learn afterward that it is by the same people who made Orb, which is a masterpiece and one of the most underrated things I have ever watched.

What got me early is that you cannot tell who the main character is. I thought it was one boy, then the other, and only near the end did it settle. There are two of them. One figured his life out young and is so far ahead of everyone that winning has gone boring, he just outruns the whole field and feels nothing. The other is the shy one, quieter, a harder life behind him, the kind of kid who looks a little lost, except he has the one thing the fast boy is missing. He actually wants it. The fast one starts training him, they bond, and then they separate. Years pass. The fast one drifts, joins a club, eventually stops running and forgets how fast he ever was. The shy one goes somewhere else and trains relentlessly. The whole film is built so the two of them meet again as men.

Here is what I took from it, and I will be honest that I did not get it the night I watched it. It landed the next morning, after I had slept on it, and I might still be misreading parts because I never went back to check. The fast one lost his meaning because the thing he loved was racing that one person, it was only ever good with him. The shy one was running to break records, and records are a trap, because the moment you break one it is empty and you just need the next. The film ends without telling you who won. It shows you the start, everyone on the line, and then it simply does not say. Because it does not matter. What matters is the person you are racing and the act of racing itself, not the position, not the number.

That hit me because it named something I have been living. I started karting a few months ago and I love how competitive and tactical it is, it is talent and body both. But lately I enjoy the competition itself less, the being first or second part. First is a little lonely. I used to chase my own lap times, I started with exactly those goals and I liked them, and then somewhere I switched. Records make me sadder than the sport does, because some days it rains, or you are off, or someone beats you, and you go home down over a number. The act is always there. The best thing in karting is overtaking, will against will, fighting to get past someone. The happiest I have ever been on a track was a race where I fought one guy the whole way, defended like crazy, and finally got past him. Afterward he laughed and told me it had been a blue flag, that he was a full lap behind because he started late, so the pass did not count the way I thought. I told him I did not care, I had wanted to overtake him and I loved every second of it, and he had loved it too. I was maybe seventh that day, or twelfth, I genuinely cannot remember, and it did not matter at all. That is the whole film.

The second thing I took is almost the opposite warning. It is a bad bet to stake your whole life on one thing. The runner whose life is only running ends up insecure, and when an injury takes it from him he collapses, he says twenty five years went downhill. I do not fully buy that one injury ruined him, but he had nothing else to stand on. Most athletes are like that, all in on the single thing they do best, and I think it is a mistake. Be obsessed with something, keep the thing you love, but do not let it become your whole identity, so that you always have somewhere to land. By the end both of them are laughing, which to me is the sign they finally understood it.

I would give it an easy nine, and then I would tell you the score does not matter, which is the point of the whole movie. What matters is watching it. The good ones hand you back a piece of yourself, and the more meanings a thing gives you the better it is. This gave me a lot. Just go watch it.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/100-meters (experience · 2026-06-13)

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# Spirited Away

I just watched a masterpiece. I came home from a football game with my legs hurting everywhere, knowing I would be dead sore the next day, and I put it on while I ate. It is almost midnight now and I am tired, but I want to get this down while the feeling is still here, right after finishing it.

I had seen pieces of it before without knowing it. The shot of the girl on the train, I had seen that as a wallpaper somewhere, more than once, and I never knew where it came from. Part of me thinks the whole thing passed through me as a kid, four or five, the way Hunter x Hunter must have at that age and left nothing behind. I don't actually think I watched it. But it felt familiar before it had any right to. It is from 2001.

To me it is not an anime. It is a piece of art. I want to personally thank everyone who made it, because I have never watched anything, anime or film, with this much attention to detail. The small things, the parts that get no screen time anywhere else, the quiet moments other stories rush straight past, here it is all about them. That is the whole thing, and I cannot hand it to you by explaining it. You only get it when you are watching it.

No one told me to watch it. I asked an AI for something different, something outside my usual taste, because I had started to feel like everything I watch is milked, the same stories over and over, and I wanted something that would hit my brain like nothing else does anymore. This was one of those.

The voices got me in a way that almost never happens. I watched the Japanese version with Arabic subtitles and I do not understand a single word of Japanese, and my ears just loved it anyway, the speaking, the sound of it. There is a scene near the end, where the names matter, that I went back and watched a second time before I let myself move on.

The story itself is very simple and I did not care, not for a second. Normally I argue with a film while I watch it, does this make sense, does that hold up. This time that never happened, not once. The story was never the thing. It is how slow it is, how calm, how every single screen is just good. And the hero is the most ordinary kind, a normal girl, completely natural, and the film trusts that.

There is a lot in it I still do not understand, and I am going to go read about it tomorrow. It never got in the way. If anything it landed harder for the parts I could not explain.

It is one of those you are meant to see before you die, and I do not care what it won. It is unforgettable. I went looking for something new and the thing that hit hardest is twenty five years old. It is always the old ones. It is always the old ones.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/spirited-away (experience · 2026-06-06)

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# Bullet actions

Most of what builds a life is invisible. It is the small things you barely
notice you are doing: what you eat, whether you move that day, the cigarette you
did not smoke, the hour you did not lose to a screen. None of it feels like
anything in the moment. You cannot point to a single day and say that was the
one that mattered. But it stacks. It compounds quietly underneath everything,
and years later it turns out to have decided almost all of it.

I think of these as background actions, and they work the way money works in an
index fund. You do not watch it. You do not get a thrill from it. You put it in,
you do not stop, and time does the rest. The only real skill is not interrupting
it. I trust this part of my life completely, because it is already working, and
because I have arranged things so the good version is also the lazy version.

But there is a second kind of action that runs on a completely different engine,
and I think most people never do it on purpose. I have started calling these
bullet actions. This is about both, and mostly about why you need the second.

## The background runs on systems, not discipline

People look at someone who has kept a hard habit for a long time and call it
discipline. I do not think it is, and I do not think discipline is the thing
worth chasing. When you run on discipline, you run on pressure. You force
yourself to be a certain person, and it costs energy you do not always have. The
day you slip, you feel like you failed, and now you are carrying the slip on top
of everything else. That is not freedom. It is a quiet, constant tax on your
life.

So I stopped betting on it. I bet on the room I am standing in instead. I have no
internet at home. I did not defeat the urge to scroll for hours every night
through willpower; I removed the option, so the easy thing to do in the evening
is to read, or cook, or sleep, because there is nothing else there. I did not
become the kind of person who reads. I built a place where reading is the path
of least resistance.

I think almost everyone who looks disciplined is really just this. The people we
call disciplined are usually not grinding harder than the rest of us. They have
fewer distractions and better defaults. Their lives are arranged so the good
choice is also the easy one. They are not stronger. Their environment is quieter.

That is what makes the background reliable. It does not depend on me being
impressive on any given day. It runs on systems, and systems do not get tired.
Going to the gym, not smoking, eating something real, going to bed, the small
unglamorous things repeated until they are automatic. I do not expect any of it
to pay off this week. I do not even expect to feel it. But I have no doubt the
version of me five years from now looks back and thanks me for it, and that is
enough. The quiet, compounding things are boring and invisible, and they decide
everything.

## Bullets: what actually counts

If the background is what you build once and then stop thinking about, a bullet
action is the opposite. It is a single, deliberate thing that scares you a little
and that you will not forget. That is the whole definition. It is not measured by
whether it was productive or smart, or even by whether it worked. It is measured
by two things: did it cost you something, and will you remember it.

I cook almost every day. That is not a bullet, that is background. The bullet is
the thing I have never done before, the thing with an edge to it. Swimming for
the first time in years. Reading a book outside at a cafe instead of at home.
Saying something true to a stranger. Asking someone if they want to come to the
gym. Ringing the bell of neighbors I had been avoiding for two weeks, heart
pounding, just to welcome them and tell them they could knock anytime they
needed anything.

None of these are reckless. A bullet is not about doing something stupid for its
own sake. It has to align with what you actually care about. But it has to have a
real edge, the kind that makes you hesitate. If you do not hesitate, it is
probably just another background action wearing a costume. And the edge is
personal. The same act can be a bullet for one person and nothing at all for
another: dancing in a crowded room terrifies me and costs an extrovert nothing.
There is no universal list of brave things. The things I remember from the last
six months were never the ordinary days. They were the few moments I reached for
something slightly outside myself.

## The two ways to invest

The cleanest way I can explain the difference is through investing, because the
two map onto each other almost exactly.

The background is index investing. You buy broadly, you hold, you keep adding,
and you do not touch it. There is no drama and barely any thinking. It works
because of consistency and time, and the worst thing you can do is panic and
stop. Most of a good financial life is just this, repeated and ignored for
decades.

Bullets are the other thing. They are venture bets, and they are how a certain
kind of art collector buys. You make many small, deliberate bets on things, or on
people, that you genuinely believe in, knowing going in that most of them will
amount to nothing. The collector buys a hundred pieces. Ninety never go anywhere.
A few hold their value. And one of them, bought for almost nothing, turns out to
be a Picasso worth a fortune. The investor backs a long line of founders
expecting most to fail and one to pay for all the rest.

The whole point is that you cannot know which one is the Picasso at the moment
you buy it. It is not gambling, because you are choosing things you actually care
about and you would be glad to have backed them either way. But the payoff is
asymmetric and impossible to predict. And you only ever get the Picasso if you
were buying in the first place.

## The math of one a day

So take that mechanism and aim it at a life instead of a portfolio.

One bullet action a day is three hundred and sixty-five a year. Now assume you
are bad at it. Assume only one or two or three percent ever really hit, ever turn
into something that lasts. That is still around ten things a year that would not
otherwise exist. Ten doors that opened because you knocked, against a baseline of
zero, which is exactly what you get if you never knock. That is a remarkable
return on something that usually costs nothing but a few seconds of fear.

And the size of a hit is not small. The highest-return bullet I can imagine is
not a clever one. It is a single conversation that becomes a friendship that
lasts the rest of your life. That is the Picasso, because the thing that decides
how happy a life is, more than money and more than work, is relationships. So you
are firing cheap, scary little shots into the world, and once in a while one of
them comes back carrying something you could never have bought directly.

## Fear is the price, and the day starts to matter

Here is the part I will not pretend away. Bullets are frightening by definition.
Asking someone to the gym genuinely scares me. Telling someone something true,
saying it to family, going somewhere alone I have never been, all of it carries
real fear. That fear is not a sign something is wrong. It is the price of the
ticket. If it were free, it would not be a bullet, it would not be memorable, and
it would not work.

So you do not wait to feel ready, because readiness does not arrive before the
action. It arrives after, as the reward, never as the condition. You move while
still afraid, and the calm comes later. And you have to judge it honestly, by
whether you fired and not by how it landed. The stranger who says no, the favour
that is declined, the message left unanswered, those all still count, because the
only thing you ever controlled was the shot. The outcome was never yours. The
moment you tie the win to the outcome, you stop firing, and the fear of a bad
outcome is the exact thing the bullet was built to walk you through.

There is a strange gift hidden in this. Owing yourself one real action makes the
day itself matter more. When I know I still have a bullet to fire and the hours
are running down, I feel time the way you are supposed to feel it. If someone
told me I had four hours left, I would look at the clock and think, then one of
them has to count. That is not stress. It is presence. It pulls me out of
drifting and into the actual day. The background can and should run on autopilot,
but a single deliberate, brave thing is what makes today different from
yesterday. It is the difference between time passing and time being lived.

## Keep it light

The only way any of this survives a real life is if it stays easy. I know myself.
If it is hard, I will not keep it. So the bar has to be low enough that I cannot
talk myself out of it. A bullet can be tiny. It can be reading outside, or saying
one honest sentence to one person. It does not need to be dramatic to count. It
only needs to be real, a little scary, and new.

It may not even be every day. Daily can be too much, and too much is just another
way to guarantee you quit. Maybe it is a few a week. The frequency is not the
point. The point is that you keep firing on some rhythm you can actually sustain,
for years, the same way you keep doing the quiet background things for years.

That is the whole idea, and it is two engines. The background, which you build
once and then simply do not interrupt, and which carries almost everything. And
the bullets, small and scary and deliberate, most of which go nowhere, a few of
which turn out to be the best things that ever happened to you. Build the floor.
Then, every so often, reach for something you will never forget.

Most days, you just do not stop. Some days, you fire.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/bullet-actions (Mind · life · 2026-05-30)

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# Hajime no Ippo

I was about to go read before bed, the way I usually do, and instead I was watching this, and at some point I just thought, forget it, let me talk about Ippo. I have not even finished it. I watch a couple of episodes at night, some nights two, some nights none, and I am somewhere in the Dante fight, around episode fifty something. So this is me partway through, not from the end.

Here is the thing I have to start with, because it is the whole reason this one matters to me. I had never watched an old anime. Never. I have watched a lot of the good modern ones, Hunter x Hunter, Orb, Chainsaw Man, the well animated stuff, and I always told myself the old ones would let me down, that they would look rough, that the animation would be nothing next to what we have now. I have the same fear with old films. I tried Fullmetal Alchemist once and did not get into it, or did not get it, and that kind of sealed it. So I just avoided the whole shelf.

And I did not even come to Ippo through Ippo. I found a guy on YouTube who made a four hour video about it, and he narrated it so well that I sat and watched three hours of a recap before I had seen a single real episode. I had seen Ippo before without knowing it, the shadowboxing at the lake, the sunset, the bullying scene, somewhere, socials probably, and I never knew where it came from. After the recap I just thought, I need to actually watch this.

And it is not what I expected at all. It is not really about boxing. It is comedy, it is brotherhood, it is a hundred things a man just relates to. I lose it every single time Ippo runs into Mashiba, every time. And the face Ippo makes when his crush is around, his cheeks all puffed up, it is so stupid and so funny. Then the next episode you are locked into a fight and it is all adrenaline and the comeback, and the one after that is pure comedy again. That is the rhythm of it. Some episodes hit you hard and some just put you in a good place, and I like it exactly like that. It is a mood.

Every fight is its own little story. Each fighter has his own background, his own thing. The Russian, Volga, I really liked him. And the fights got me curious in a way I did not expect. I started watching real boxing on YouTube, highlights, looking at the actual moves, the technique. It even got me thinking I might box one day.

The fight I am in now, with Dante, hit closer than I thought it would. Dante is the old one and Ippo is young, all stamina and flexibility, and the old guy is just trying to keep up with the youngsters. I relate to that more than I would like. I would love to play football the way I did at eighteen, when you would get hurt and the next day it was just gone. Now I am doing rehab for my ankle, there is a whole thing called injury management, you do not just play, you manage. That is the fight, basically. That is what I like about this anime. It keeps turning out to be about real life.

I will be honest about the parts that bug me, because I do not want to pretend it is flawless. There is plot armor, you can feel it. There are holes in the story, moments where I think Ippo could have done the obvious thing and did not. And the money never sat right with me. He is one of the best in the country and his mom still has to work, he almost quit to cover for her when she got sick because she cannot afford to stop. That does not add up for a top boxer. Maybe boxing paid less back then, or was not as big, I genuinely do not know. But it is a little fishy. And somehow none of that ruins it. If anything the fact that it is not perfect gives it its own thing. Nothing in life is perfect, and this is the same.

What gets me most is the animation, on an old anime. The Volga fight, especially the end, is just peak. And I am watching this on my Mac at some tiny old resolution, it is not 1080p, it is barely pixels, and it still looks legendary. Whoever made that, kudos, seriously.

But the real reason I am grateful for it is bigger than the anime. I avoided the old ones for years because I was scared they would be worse, and the first one I actually sat with turned out to be one of the best things I have watched. It killed that fear. Now I have a list of old ones a friend kept recommending that I used to nod at and ignore, and I actually want to watch them. That is what Ippo did. It was never just boxing. It taught me to stop flinching at the thing I had already decided would let me down.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/hajime-no-ippo (experience · 2026-05-02)

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# Project Hail Mary

I spent three or four years on physics after college, then left it for tech, and for a long time a quiet part of me counted those years as lost. This is the book that handed them back. It is the first science fiction book I have ever read.

But that is not why I could not put it down.

A quick warning before I go further: I am going to talk about the whole thing, including the end. If you have not read it, stop here and go read it. It is better the way I got it, knowing nothing.

I read it faster than I have read anything. It is a big book, and there were nights I started around nine and looked up and it was two in the morning. It became the thing my mind reached for. When a thought I did not want showed up, I would catch myself thinking about Project Hail Mary instead. By the last pages I was crying, and I honestly could not tell you whether it was sadness or something closer to joy. A book had not done that to me before.

[Watch: My first sci-fi book](/w/my-first-sci-fi-book)

The science is a real part of why it works, at least for me. It is full of small "oh, that actually makes sense" moments, problems set up and then solved in a way you can follow, and every one of them landed because I had the background to feel it click. I did an internship in astrophysics once. Reading this felt like that part of me getting to come out and play. And the aliens are the best I have seen, because the book does the hard thing and makes them genuinely not human. It asks the questions most stories skip. How would something hear if it lived by sound instead of light. What would it breathe, what would kill it, how would two species that share nothing ever build a way to talk. Rocky is one. Astrophage is another. Taumoeba another. None of them are people with a different forehead. They are actually alien, and the book earns that.

But the heart of it is Rocky.

The friendship is the whole thing. Two creatures who start with no shared anything and slowly build a language out of nothing, who end up trusting each other completely, who keep saying "question" before they ask one. The line that took me apart was Rocky offering to watch over Grace while he slept. It is such a small, wholesome thing, and it wrecked me. And there are two moments I will not forget: Grace going back for Rocky, and Rocky saving Grace. Both of them. The second one, with Rocky almost gone, is where I lost it completely.

Under all the science, this is a book about friendship, sacrifice, and redemption. Grace faces the same kind of choice twice. The first time, before, he flinches, he looks out for himself. The second time he does not. He redeems himself, and he does it not by being a hero but by choosing someone else. And the ending is the part I keep coming back to. He does not go home. His people on Earth are gone, and the connection that is actually his, Rocky, the kids he ends up teaching, is where he already is. So he stays. That should be sad and instead it is the most right thing in the book. The opposite of friendship is loneliness, and this story knows exactly what it is worth. He did not choose status, or heroism, or going back to nothing. He chose the friendship that was real. That is the whole thing, and it is why I cried.

I will be honest about the one part that worked less for me. The flashbacks to Earth, and the woman handed nearly unlimited power to run the whole project, felt the most like a movie. Next to how careful and true the rest of it is, that thread rang a little staged. And I wanted more of what actually became of Earth. We get what we need, we know it survives, but I would have traded a few of those power-broker scenes to know how it really turned out.

The small things I loved are everywhere. Rocky's "question." The way the numbers work in base six, so a chapter count means something other than what you expect. The way the book gives Rocky's speech a kind of music. These are the details that tell you someone cared.

It is not really a book to me. It is an experience, the kind you do not forget and would give a lot to read again for the first time. There is a film coming, with Ryan Gosling as Grace, and I cannot picture anyone else in it, partly because he is somehow in half the things I already love. I am saving that one for a real cinema. Some things you do not watch on a laptop.

Somewhere in the middle of it, following the problems Grace works through, understanding most of them and actually enjoying them, I realized I did not regret those years at all.

If you have never read science fiction, start here. And if you have a few years behind you that you have been quietly calling wasted, maybe start here too.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/project-hail-mary (experience · 2026-04-18)

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# Blade Runner 2049

This is the second film I have done this for, after Drive, and honestly I am not sure it is a review. It is more me trying to get down what I took from it, because I watched it and then I just could not stop thinking about it. I had planned to wait a month after Drive before watching another one. I made it about a week.

I watched it years ago and got almost none of it. Watching it now, with different years behind me and different things to care about, it was a completely different film. The story did not change. I did. That is the thing about going back to something, the context you bring is half of it. Almost all of it is shot at night, dark and late, and that is how it sits in you afterward.

I should probably say what it is about, except I got so excited I almost went straight to the part that got me. It is set in a time where Earth is wrecked, famine, most people gone off to colonies, and there are replicants, humans that are made instead of born. An old company built the first ones, it went wrong, there was a war, and a new company under a man called Wallace took over and built a new generation that obeys. Wallace has a god complex. He wants to know how the old replicants once managed to have a child, because a child born from them changes everything, it means they are not just property. Our guy, Kai, is one of the new obedient ones, and his job is hunting down the old ones. He pulls on a thread, a date carved into a tree that matches a memory of his, a wooden horse, and piece by piece his life starts to mean something to him, because piece by piece it looks like he might be that child. The miracle.

The thing that got me, and I think it gets everyone, is the question of how special you are. I think about this a lot. I see life through my own eyes, so some part of me assumes I am the main character, that I am the one, that I am special. And you are, in a way, the odds of being born at all are insane. But it gets louder when you are lonely, when you are low on people, because then you only ever see through yourself. That is the whole theme. And it hit me hard the moment Kai learns he is not special. He is sitting in front of the resistance leader, the woman missing an eye, and she tells him the child was a girl, that he was never the one. You think you were the one. You're not. I saw it land on his face more than in anything he said. Ryan did an incredible job, I could not picture anyone else in it, I said the same about Drive and I will say it here too.

The part I keep coming back to is Joy, the hologram girl who lived with him, made by Wallace. Her whole job is to make him feel loved and chosen, and the entire time she is telling him he is special, that she always knew. Then there is this scene with a giant Joy advertisement, and it leans down and calls him Joe, the generic name the product gives to every man who buys one. The billboards behind her say everything you want to hear. That landed strangely close, because it is a little like talking to AI now. Sometimes the thing answering you is built to tell you what you want to hear, and it is worth remembering that. I think you can relate to this film more today than when it came out.

So Kai finds out he is no one in particular, just another stranger handed memories that made him feel chosen, and he loses his meaning. And this is the question the film answers, the one I had in my head before I even put it on. Can a life mean anything if you are nobody, if you are meaningless?

The answer it gives is why it stays with me. Near the end Kai has two orders pulling at him, the resistance wants one thing, his boss wants the opposite, and he ignores both and does what he thinks is right instead, which is getting a father, Deckard, back to his daughter. He stopped being obedient. He made a choice. Deckard asks him why he is doing this, why he is saving him, and Kai just says go, go see your daughter. And he dies in the snow, and he is smiling, and that smile hit me really hard. His life meant something at the end, not because he turned out to be special, he wasn't, but because he chose one thing and did it.

If I had to put down what the film is saying, it is three things. Meaning comes from choice. You should not romanticize loneliness, because Kai looks stoic and quiet from the outside and is actually living a pretty miserable, lonely life, and the film does not let you make that look beautiful. And agency is everything, agency over your own life is the thing that gave his any weight. I have read the same idea in other books, in different clothes, so I do not think I am making it up.

That is what I took. I am probably misreading parts, I am not even sure whether Deckard is a replicant or not, and it does not matter. The guy turns out to be nobody, and he still finds a way to make his life mean something. He chooses, and then he goes.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/blade-runner-2049 (experience · 2026-03-07)

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# Drive

I wrote this one off years ago. I put it on as a teenager wanting something like Fast and Furious, watched maybe twenty minutes, decided it was boring, and turned it off. I came back to it this year almost by accident, a recommendation I followed without much hope, and it is now one of the best films I have ever seen. The movie did not change. I did.

What got me is how quiet it is. It is slow, and it trusts silence to do the talking. The main character barely speaks. He stares, he waits, and somehow you always know exactly what he feels. The first time I watched it I wanted noise, so I missed everything.

He has two sides, and both are quiet. One is a simple, almost ordinary man who fixes cars and does stunt driving for film shoots. The other, the one in the scorpion jacket, is dangerous. It is not a superhero switch, there is no transformation. He stays completely human, and as the film goes on you realize how dangerous he actually is, while the ordinary side of him gets more and more vulnerable. A man who can do terrible things and mostly chooses not to is far more interesting than a man who only fights.

The thing I keep coming back to is that he lives by a small set of rules. He gives himself five minutes, no more, and works only on his own terms. They are his rules, the kind nobody else would understand and that you could never really explain, and they quietly run his whole life, and they work. Watching someone hold that much control, do only what is necessary and say only what is needed, felt less like watching a character and more like watching a way of living.

And it is not cold, which surprised me. A man that dangerous, and the film is full of feeling, tenderness even, the vulnerable side sitting right next to the violent one. Most of that feeling comes from the woman next door and her little boy. He falls for her quietly, never pushes anything, just shows up for them, and almost everything dangerous he does later is to keep the two of them safe. He protects her and asks for nothing back. Most films like this keep the guy a blank wall. This one does not, and that is why it stays with you. It is human in a way that hit close.

The soundtrack is one of the best I have heard, the kind I went back and played on its own. Ryan Gosling is the only person I can picture in the role, the quiet dangerous man. And the ending I did not see coming, which almost never happens to me. I usually call an ending ten minutes in. This one I had to sit with.

Here is the honest catch. It is slow, and it takes a good half hour to find its feet. It nearly lost me once already. If you sit down wanting action you will bounce off it the way I did the first time. It asks for patience, and it asks to be watched the right way, alone, at night, somewhere calm. Give it that and it opens all the way up.

I am not really reviewing it. I am admiring something. It is less a film than an experience, a piece of art, and the most useful thing I can tell you is what I told a friend: do not ask me why, just go watch it.

Source: https://blanklob.com/t/drive (experience · 2026-02-28)

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# My first sci-fi book (transcript)

It's insane. It's insane. I just finished reading... It's just an insane book. I can't believe... This is my first sci-fi book, by the way. First sci-fi book.

Andy, you nailed it dude, you nailed it. You really did. I just watched, I just read the end. It's insane. It's like, I was crying guys. I was literally crying. Like I was crying. Um, like, the end is really good. It's not that I was crying like that, having cried. No, no, it's actually, oh, water is dripping out of my eyes. I don't know if it's sadness or if it's joy. Yeah, like it's a legendary book. Fucking legendary. This is really good stuff.

The ending is legendary.

You know, I predicted some of it. I predicted some of it. Just a little bit of it. Just a little bit. Somehow. No, no, no. A little bit, but I didn't predict it like 100%. I think I predicted maybe 40%. But not the ending, though. The ending was it... was... I didn't predict like what happened exactly, but yeah. It's a perfect ending. Like, really like it. I don't regret it at all, but yeah. Legendary book from start to finish.

There is a lot of stuff. This is where I might spoil stuff. Um but yeah I was, I actually thinking like should I spoil? Should I not spoil? Like why should I care if I spoil? Yeah so yeah I should be, I should not be in this mental state, I really hate it.

Anyway, what I was saying is the book, like I've never read, probably never read a book this fast, especially last few days. I just want to finish it and get through the ending because it's just like, it's just so good, like I wish I could slowly analyze every page and understand deeply what everything means. But there are places where I swept really fast because the details like didn't matter that much to the story but still like I understood like all of it you know. It just, there are places where details like are there and I wish I could have like read deeply because it's very, when you read this kind of book you actually need to really try to understand why things do this, why things do that.

And this book made me not regret doing physics. It's crazy. For all my life I've always regretted, kinda like kinda regretted in a way, um, my, me majoring physics in science after like college, because that's what I did. I did like three years or four years of physics after college, didn't, switched to tech. Um, kind of that like was like, oh, maybe, damn, I lost four years, and this book made me actually appreciate those four years or three years because I easily understood a lot of things and it's super fun as well. I'm really glad I actually did those three years because like everything makes sense, like the way it, like everything just like, there are places where some stuff just like obviously feels a bit weird but, sci-fi, you know, but most of it like is, like can be read and be like oh this actually makes sense. Oh, and you have these oh moments, these wow moments everywhere and they're like, oh so that's like that, that, those moments are the thing, the ones I live for while reading this book.

Um, yeah, Rocky man, the thing that I like most is how Rocky talks. The shared language is just insane to me. Like, I think what this book is all about, to me at least, it's about friendship. It's about sacrifice, it's about redemption, you know, because the way Grace redeemed himself at the end is insane. Like, he redeemed himself. He got his memory back, of course, and he, which is kind of like exactly like it, like he made it, like he was faced the same problem, same situation two times. The first one he made a mistake, it's not, he made a mistake is he didn't care much about even his own species, right? Yet the second one he cared, he redeemed himself. Now I really like that. Really do. Like, the character development there is just insane to me.

The other one is friendship, dude. Like, the friendship. The watch me sleep thing. Watch me sleep! Like, that's the most wholesome thing ever, like, holy shit. Like especially at the end, at the end when he said watch me sleep, Adrian. I'm like dude stop, stop, work. We're so emotional right now, just don't make it, just stop, stop. Yeah.

Yeah and just how solutions come and go and stuff like that, the way they... You know what's also funny is that I started reading this book like maybe two weeks ago. It's a huge book. Finishing it in two weeks is... You'd ask me if you have ever finished like an almost 500 page book in two weeks, I would, I'm gonna say like that would be insane, but yeah. Um, the, when when I started reading this book I think when I got like to maybe a few early chapters I liked it instantly. The thing is like I saw, I opened YouTube at some point, I don't know where, and I checked, I found there is trailer for... I was like what? Trailer for this movie, I was like what? The movie just came in. And it like, it like, I like, I need to finish this book, I need to watch the movie on IMAX or something, I just need to watch a movie on cinema. Because this is legendary you know. And I'm reading the book and I already know the author, I liked The Martian, one of my favorite movies. I really like sci-fi, especially like space sci-fi, like Passengers and Interstellar is one of my best movies ever. And yeah, and I like, I even like did internship in astrophysics, so yeah.

Yeah, you kind of get like, this is like, this is exactly what I'm living for, like these kinds of books. I didn't understand what Hail Mary was at the start. There is a lot of stuff to learn at the start, but yeah, it's a, yeah, it's, and I saw this and I'm like, I need to finish this ASAP. I don't want to miss the thing in the, in the, in the, like, in the, like, I don't want to miss it at cinema because I...

At the beginning, at the start of the book, I was imagining the other ship as well, the Blip-A. I was imagining a lot of stuff, the entire like, the entire like world building is happening in my head. And I'm like, and I said, you know what, I don't want to watch the trailer because I want, I don't want to be spoiled. And I said, you know what, let me actually just watch the first, the first few episodes, no not episodes, so the first few like seconds or something just to see the few and I hope understand everything just makes sense, everything is that like just like as he imagined it you know. Because the book is so good, the book is really good how it detailed like, how it detailed like the environment, how it details like the characters, etc etc, it was so good. Um, yeah, that's exactly like when I saw Rocky in the trailer, I'm like damn that's actually how exactly I imagined it. It's so cool. And I watched that, I was extremely excited, like dead excited. I was like I cannot wait to watch this. So I'm actually going to watch this this weekend which is like two days from now. But yeah it, oh man this is good, this is good honestly. I highly recommend reading this book. I recommend it. Hands down one of my favorite books ever. I wish like I took more time to deep, deep dive into each page. You know there are pages that are easy to understand. There are other pages that are complex and actually talk a lot about science and problem solving etc. But yeah, really solid book.

It's like when I saw chapter 13, 30, 30, like three zero at the end, the detail of putting like six based, uh six based like Eridian, uh like numbers is just like, that good, that's really good, I like it, that's a good detail, that's a good detail. Um but yeah, really solid book, highly recommend it, I highly recommend that. Legendary book. This is a really fun book to read. It actually like, it's not just like, I think one of the things I really like about it is how, not realistic I would say, but it changes a lot of my perspective about how alien life would look like. Obviously it's still like it's a bit different you know, I still, I'm a bit still suspicious about how alien life would look like, meaning it made a lot of things obviously align in one way or another but it asked the good questions you know, he asked a lot of the good questions like how they hear with sound and us we use light and how all of these things like co-live together, the environments as well. Well, a lot of the questions that so many people have unanswered, which actually makes sense, or never asked actually, because they just think alien is just another like different human essentially you know. Like when you see like that green like, you know, guys that you see on other movies or whatever, that's actually like a human you know, it's not, it's not an alien, it's like a modified human or something, because he essentially, they can, they can essentially live in the same environment as ours, like that kind of a setup. It doesn't, it doesn't, it changed a lot of my perspective on that I think.

There's so many aliens in the book. It's not just Rocky. It's also Astrophage, it's also Taumoeba. There's a lot of aliens in the book and all of them are different. But yeah, it's a book asked good questions, good problems, solve them. And when Rocky says, when Rocky says question at the end of every question, that's just so, that's so awesome, man.

You know one of the biggest moments, like super emotional moments I had in the book is when Grace came to Rocky, when he came to save him. That to me is pure cinema. Like I was reading that, it was like oh when Grace, when Rocky saved him, that was a good one as well. Rocky saved him. That was a good one as well. Like both were good. And when Rocky like is about to die, I'm like I lost it there. I lost it. But yeah, there are like many moments where I just stopped reading the book, I just went crazy like this because they're just so good. There is many moments like this. This is, it's really good. Like there are moments where I would literally stop reading and be like this is insane. This is actually good. So yeah, highly recommend it.

It's really good. A lot of like, I specifically what I might not like, which feels a little bit, my cliche to say, is the earth part. Every time there is earth memories I feel like it's a bit biased, not biased I would say, it's a bit like how movies would do this kind of like, all this woman who has all of world power or whatever, like that kind of like dynamics is very like hollywood style you know. Um but yeah, overall it's a really good book, uh highly recommend it. And what else I like about the book: the music tones, you know when he talks and shows the music, the music like tones you know, like that's a little one. Yeah, and a lot of things I learned from the book, like a lot of fun facts, a lot of things that the book teaches because essentially like the guy is a teacher, which teaches a lot of you know science facts etc. Maybe some of them I know them already but like there's a lot of things when you actually take like some real facts and you actually add them to really good context, you actually learn new stuff. But yeah I think the book is really good. I just going through every page thinking like what could be, anything I missed storywise.

And you know what's also funny is that one of my favorite actors is actually Ryan Gosling. Really like the guy, he acted in literally every movie I like. Drive, Blade Runner, so yeah, like when I saw him in the trailer I'm like, this is insane, this is going to be insane. So, yeah, it's perfect, perfect cast, perfect cast essentially.

I don't wanna, like, I think the takeaway is... I, yeah, this, enjoyed this video.

Other ones like love, you know, I feel like that's, that's a, that's one other detail. It's also like funny how some like, some like things that are, might be like regular to us like the watch, watch me sleep thing, eating is another one, and also how, how one, how physiology is...

Really good details. The thing I would have wished is to actually get back and see what Earth would look like. I wish like there is like, like I know like at the end it's, we got everything we need to know about Earth, which is great. Or we got the most important info, right? Which is that Earth survives, of course. I wish we got much more, meaning what actually happened, did they manage to survive or not, etc. But yeah, I also like how Grace didn't care about status, pride, heroism, and actually like sacrificed for friendship. But yeah, that's why I said the ending is top.

So yeah, that's everything about this book. Like I don't want to talk about more in details, I think like... If I had to reread this, recommend this to someone to read it, I will definitely do that. This is like an experience. It's not even a book, it's something that you definitely, I will never forget this, this thing. This thing is just legendary. This thing is just like... Yeah, I cannot wait to watch the movie. I wish I could watch the movie in a year or so, but cinemas are like... I still want to watch it in cinema because I know it's a complete experience watching it in cinema. But yeah. So yeah, that's basically it.

I will have to go. I still need to shower just after gym. I didn't even shower when I came from gym because I had to finish this. I had to finish. There was a time, I swear to God there was a time when I was reading, I was reading from probably 9pm till 2am. I never done that with a book except for this one. It's insane. Like aahhhh, like it's not a chapter per day or something, it's like multiple chapters per day, this thing is just so good.

Let me just pull one, one thing, let me just pull one page and see what I can get. His voice in serious distress, he clicks... Yeah, and like, like I said, when when he realized his astrophage is gone, one saved. Friendship you know, friendship, commitment. Like the entire story is about that. It's just having someone by your side. There's also loneliness as well, there's also that. Which is kind of like, what's the opposite of friendship? Of being loved is of course loneliness, you know.

Yeah. I'm really glad he didn't go back at the end, because I feel like he even said it himself, he said, he said, I didn't have friends back home, even if he went. I don't think he would have friends. His friends died, essentially. And his friends will actually die if he go home. So, he said it, he said, like the only people I have at the time were his kids, the kids in the class. That's what he cared about. That's what Grace cared about, were those kids. And obviously the friends he had made during like the building of the Hail Mary. Right now he had, he made a friend you know, and staying in Erid, or Erid I think it's called, it's actually good because that's where his friend is and that's where his, the kids are. So yeah, like that's why I said it's a perfect ending on every single metric. I like, the only thing could probably be missing is what would have happened to Earth? How did Earth manage, essentially? But other than that, it's great. It's a solid ending. Yeah, I will have to go. Peace.

Source: https://blanklob.com/w/my-first-sci-fi-book (Mind · video · 2026-07-24)

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# Morocco World Cup run (transcript)

I'm super fucking happy, like the happiness just went by right, I mean I'm still a little bit in... I'm in shock because of what just happened. I watched like, the game of Morocco and Canada just finished 3-0. I watched the game horribly, meaning I didn't watch it how I'm supposed to. I used my phone, it was a bit clingy, the internet, wifi. I watched 80% of it because there was internet issues and stuff like that. Especially in the first half where the only thing I watched is Canada dominating us.

And then the second part of the game is here and I started watching, I keep seeing Canada domination, they have really good players, good players, they have good players, really good tactically, especially tactically. I think they studied Morocco in every way. Like, they're probably the hardest team we've played against so far. And yeah, and the game was hard. I was afraid that we could lose. Then I started hearing shouts from the outside and I know we scored and I was happy before even watching the goal.

It's insane. Really insane. It's legendary dude. It's legendary, the run we currently have in the World Cup. It's legendary. Super proud of being Moroccan. Like you can hear the noises right now, everyone is outside just like, just enjoying the day or whatever. But yeah, really happy dude, really freaking happy. Really proud of my country. Really proud of our run in this World Cup, and even last World Cup 2022 was a great run, and this one as well. This one is even more legendary because scored a lot of goals. We had high expectations. I was afraid because we had, we, we have a lot of... A lot of people have high expectations about Morocco's running, especially our Moroccans, you know, because what we did in 2022 was a miracle. And everyone started to expect that it's no longer a miracle, you know, it's like we're supposed to be doing that again.

And man, and I was afraid because I was like, with high expectations, usually comes disappointment. But no, man, I wasn't disappointed. It was one of the best runs and we're not even over yet. We reached the filter. We reached the filter. The thing that filtered us in 2022, it's here again. It's France. And France this year is one of the most goated teams ever. Like I never seen a team so super stacked than this France. Probably the only team I can remember that is super stacked as this France is Brazil 22. Brazil 2002. That was a legendary team. And even like Brazil...

I'm very proud man. I'm like, it's like having a son and you're proud of it. That's how I am right now. I'm really proud. Certified Moroccan. Yeah, certified Moroccan. Super proud man.

We tied with Brazil. It was our game. We did tie with Brazil, but it was our game. It was just... They were a bit creative at some point and we slacked, but it was our game. Scotland. I felt bad for Scotland. In that game, I felt really bad for Scotland because they weren't even touching the ball. You know, but Scotland played really good defensively. I think then Haiti, legendary team, legendary goal. One of the best goals scored against us. Really love that goal. Haiti played well as well. That game was legendary. Love to Haiti players, people. That game was... I watched that game with having no expectations. It was like Brazil. It was just super good. We scored a lot of goals, but it was a really good game. They scored really good goals. It was a really good one.

The Netherlands. I never thought I would see, like the Netherlands game was something special you know, because I lost hope at the end. And man, we scored the back, we got revived. Oh man, I watched the Netherlands game 2am in the morning and I didn't regret it. I still woke up for work, but yeah it was a really good game. Especially the last minutes when we scored back, the penalties as well. It's just good games here and there man. It's just good games.

You know, now Canada, Canada made us like, I thought we were going to lose. Canada showed us that we're weak. Essentially, this is Canada. Canada told us you guys are weak. And I don't know how we thought of, but the moment the second half started, we just like, learn something. It was like you put a different team on the table. There was still a little bit of domination from Canada at the start of the second half but the moment we scored the first goal, that pass from Hakimi man, I'm very proud of every freaking person who is in that Moroccan team. Everyone, literally everyone. You know, everyone. Legendary run dude.

If we win France, if we pass the filter, it's not France, it's the filter. If we pass the filter, the great filter, we win. We win the World Cup, dude.

The thing is, the thing with Morocco is that football is our biggest activity. Everyone here does football. If you ask any kid what do you want to become, football player. Like, football is in our veins. Everyone in Morocco, like literally. It's our first sport, everyone who plays outside, do kids play outside, they play football. It's like Brazil here, football is just like Brazil. The thing is imagine something, it's not like the US where, well they have a US football team but the US main sport is probably basketball or the NBA or like American football and stuff like that. They have these sports. What is your favorite sport... You should expect these guys to win a hockey world cup or something or to own it or to be dominated or to dominate it. But us, it's not the case. Until just recently, I don't know what happened. I believe what happened is this.

I think a lot of the good talent we have usually goes and plays for other international teams. Biggest example is Yamal, right? And I don't say, I'm not saying they shouldn't. I mean, if I was in Yamal's place, I would have probably done the same. Because Yamal's main goal obviously is to be competitive, is to play, is to... win titles, right? And he has a better chance winning titles if he's with Spain than if he's with Morocco. At least this is what all like Moroccan talent outside or abroad is thinking because like if they're going to play with a better team, why not go for the better team, right? This is logical.

Obviously, there is like a lot of things which is like patriotism and like love of the country and stuff like that. Of course, there is that but you have to be logical, you know, you have to be. Yeah, so there is also like a lot of stuff which is identity, which is like your teammates already play for that team. If you play in a French team like PSG, and all of your teammates are in the French team, obviously, you would love to still play for that team. Play with them because you know how to play with them. I mean this makes sense. I mean just go and play football with a bunch of your friends and every time you would go in to play football you would play it together. It wouldn't be like oh hey guys I'm going to leave you, I'm going to go to play a different team. It doesn't make any sense. You know you have to be in these people place to actually understand why they do that. But recently something changed. Recently something changed. And I don't know exactly what changed but the biggest player that I saw that changed with is Hakimi. When Hakimi moved to choose Morocco, that's huge. Guy is stacked. He won many UCLs, the most prestigious title in football, aside from the World Cup of course. Choose Morocco man, over Spain. He was, he grew up in Spain, probably was even born in Spain, you know, just like Lamine Yamal.

The main reason why I think the shift is going is because it's becoming a bigger team. It's becoming like in the top 10s and the top 5s. The Moroccan players that are going to choose France or Spain or whatever or Netherlands, they rather choose Morocco because, or Belgium, they rather choose Morocco because Morocco right now has a better chance of doing something at the global level except probably...

I'm super happy man, super freaking happy. I just want to win against France. If we win against France, we win the World Cup, dude. To me, winning against France is like winning the World Cup. That's a huge filter. France this year is just... 2026, France.

I just hope Paraguay does us a good favor and just make sure France, if they go, I hope Paraguay wins. No, I hope, I don't know, whoever wins. If France wins, I just hope they get really damaged from that fight with Paraguay. So that way, because that's how we lost in 2022. 2022 we lost because we had a lot of injuries. But I wouldn't say we would win if we didn't have them. But it would have been a really solid match, you know, really tight match. It was a tight match, but it's still to me we could have at least went with them to the end. Penalties, you know, but yeah.

Dude. Honestly, just to run right now. Start moving to France. To me, this is really proud. Even if we lose, I would be proud of Morocco because the run was legendary, every game was big, was good, we dominated it, we showed the world that we're here to play football, we're here to play the thing we love, you know, the sport we do since we were kids, we think about. When you see like your team finally goes out there and pushes like the Moroccan flag at the global level, that's just like... I don't have even words to explain that. Thank you.

To be Moroccan, I would choose this country 100 times, 100 lives, every time I would choose Morocco. Every time I had been reborn I would chose Morocco.

If we win the World Cup dude, if we win the World Cup I would lose my, I will lose my man, I would lose my mind if we will do it, we win it. If we beat France, our chances go from 10% to probably 80%. If we beat France, we'll be in tight. If we beat France, 180% we would win the world cup. I don't care about Spain, I don't care about France. I don't care about Argentina, I don't care about, you know, because, yeah, honestly to me, if we just beat France, it's like we won the World Cup, you know, I would be just as happy.

We played with friends so many times, I have so many French friends you know. I will be dead reaper on them that day if we win. They just have no idea what's coming for them. I would come to them at their lights and bed and whatever and I would, I would like scream at them, we won. There is another hopium that comes to my mind which is, I think, I think Ivory Coast or Cameroon played with France just recently and they won one, and I'm like okay, an African... One day less than us, which is another advantage, I would say. Because if we play early, I don't even know. Maybe they have a game today. I don't even know, dude. I don't even know. We can win this.

Anyway, that's all I have to say. We have to roll off. But yeah, amazing. Peace. Thank you.

Source: https://blanklob.com/w/morocco-world-cup-run (Sports · video · 2026-07-06)