Cinemorphosis

Blog

  • Typepad, R.I.P.: Obituary for a Dinosaur

    Typepad, R.I.P.: Obituary for a Dinosaur

    In 2006, I wandered into the Wild West of self-publishing and signed up with Typepad. Back then, blogs felt like a revolution: you could pour your obsessions straight into the digital void without begging gatekeepers for approval. I created three: Herculodge, where I indulged my radio fixation; The Breakthrough Writer, course content for my freshman comp class; and The Critical Thinker, the companion for my critical thinking students. Typepad cost me about $150 a year—a fair price for a soapbox in the dawn of the Blog Era.

    But by April 2025, my soapbox had turned into a rickety stool. Typepad was wheezing like a geriatric dinosaur stumbling into an unfamiliar world: constant downtime, glacial load times, the unmistakable stink of neglect. Research confirmed my suspicion—it had been sold, stripped for parts, and left to rot. I canceled my subscription. Out of nostalgia, I kept Herculodge in basic mode, mainly because its archive of radio reviews was still linked to Thomas Witherspoon’s venerable SWLing Post, a site that embodies everything good about radio: community, continuity, and voices across the airwaves.

    But in truth, Herculodge had gone dormant long ago. After the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, I went on a spree, bought a dozen radios, reviewed them all, and then, slowly, stopped. The flame flickered, and I moved on.

    Yesterday the official death notice arrived: “We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025.” Translation: pull the plug, bury the dinosaur.

    This little obituary for Typepad drags me back to the Blog Era, when voices as sharp as Andrew Sullivan’s rose to the level of public intellectuals, while hobbyists like me tinkered in the shadows of niche obsessions, broadcasting to niche audiences. Blogs felt cozy, almost literary: you in a robe, cat on your lap, coffee steaming, ruminating about Virginia Woolf before hitting “publish.” Compare that to today’s Hot Take Era: dopamine-charged combatants spewing rage, preening for likes, and mistaking tribal points for thought.

    The end of Typepad is the end of that quieter world.

    I’ve since migrated to WordPress, which works better, loads faster, and hasn’t collapsed into irrelevance. I have mixed feelings about AI image generators: sometimes they hit the mark, but mostly they’re garish clip art pretending to be art. Still, I pay two hundred bucks a year to carve out a little order from the chaos, and it’s worth every cent. Cheaper than therapy, and with fewer platitudes.

    Typepad’s death isn’t tragic—it’s just the final shovel of dirt on an era already gone.

  • The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    The Difference Between Thriving and Withering on a Vegan Diet

    Like many people, I want to believe that a plant-based diet can deliver optimal nutrition for everyone—from casual gym-goers to powerlifters and elite athletes. It’s a hopeful vision: strong bodies built on beans and lentils instead of beef. But a memory from 2019 lingers in my mind and keeps me cautious.

    That year I had a nursing student in my class. She was sharp, disciplined, a straight-A student who also worked as a personal trainer at Gold’s Gym. On top of all that, she was a powerlifter. Under the guidance of an experienced coach, she decided to go vegan. For the first several months, everything looked fine. But after about nine months, the cracks showed. Her skin grew pale, her training stalled, she felt weak and lightheaded, and worst of all—her hair began to fall out in clumps. When she abandoned the vegan diet, her health rebounded.

    At the time, I didn’t know what I know now. Maybe she was missing key amino acids like lysine or leucine. Maybe she wasn’t using vegan protein powders that could have filled the gap. Maybe she didn’t know that a vegan diet contains no creatine at all, and a simple 5-gram daily supplement might have made the difference. The truth is, neither of us will ever know.

    This is what haunts me: a vegan diet can be excellent for cardiovascular health and a powerful humanitarian stand against factory farming, but only if it’s done with knowledge and precision. Done carelessly, it can lead to exactly what my student experienced—decline, weakness, and disillusionment.

    I can’t know for certain whether a few smart adjustments would have allowed her to thrive. But I can’t shake the suspicion that with the right tools—a quality vegan protein blend, a steady supply of B12, an algal omega-3 supplement, and a scoop of creatine—her story could have ended very differently. Instead of decline and disillusionment, she might have been proof that a plant-based diet, done right, can power even the most demanding athletic lives.

  • The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    The Fallacy of False Priorities, Watch Edition

    “The double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” Guilty as charged. Case in point: my tortured relationship with FKM Divecore straps.

    The Notre Dame study had me spiraling—researchers tortured the material with solvents, heat, and abrasion until they squeezed out PFAS “forever chemicals” and then warned these might leach into human skin. Ever since, I’ve gone back and forth, back and forth, like a malfunctioning metronome, on whether to keep wearing the straps I love more than any other rubber I’ve tried in two decades of watch collecting.

    Of course, no one wants to think of their wristwear as a poison delivery system. But context matters. First, FKM is highly stable under real-world conditions; the lab tests were more horror show than practical scenario. Second, it’s the manufacturing process that endangers workers, not the end-user. Third, if we’re ranking PFAS risks, drinking unfiltered water, eating from PFAS-coated packaging, or cooking on scratched Teflon are solid tens on the risk scale, while wearing an FKM strap is a lonely little one. That’s the Fallacy of False Priorities: panic over the trivial while ignoring the obvious.

    Even so, the issue isn’t a Nothing Burger. Divecore’s own Paul admits handling FKM worries him, and he’s working on alternative materials—silicone, vulcanized silicone, HNBR—to protect his workers and reassure consumers. That’s just smart business.

    Meanwhile, I’m not without options. My strap drawer holds factory Seiko silicones and urethanes, plus top-tier Tropic straps made of vulcanized rubber. They’re fine, but none hold a candle to the sleek perfection of Divecore FKM. I tried swapping them in, but they feel like consolation prizes—serviceable, never glorious.

    So I made a deal with myself: enjoy my pristine FKMs for now, and when the new HNBR or silicone Divecore straps arrive, I’ll switch. Sounds reasonable. Except once you’ve let the idea of PFAS seeping into your skin lodge in your brain, it refuses to leave. I’ve written about it on Instagram, made a YouTube video, and now I’m stuck in an obsessive loop, second-guessing every strap change as though I were rewriting my will.

    Which brings me back to my original point: the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. And right now, that man is staring at seven watches, toggling between glory and paranoia, wishing he could strap on peace of mind.

  • The Influenza of the Mind

    The Influenza of the Mind

    Last week, one of my teen daughters caught a cold. She shrugged it off with the stoicism of a soldier, and I barely noticed she was sick. Then my wife came down with it five days ago. It hit her harder, but she still managed to run errands, wrangle housework, and conquer the Everest of six laundry baskets stuffed with clothes that needed folding.

    Then there was me. Yesterday, after my afternoon nap, I felt aches and pains and immediately began writing my obituary. Sprawling out on the couch in the living room, I put on the docuseries The Kingdom on ESPN but had to close my eyes, then take another nap because I was “so unwell.” 

    Convinced I was succumbing to something sinister, I staggered into the kitchen and cooked dinner. The salmon, broccoli, and rice all came out overcooked—not because I was incapacitated, but because I was deep into Internet articles about PFAS “forever chemicals.” Nothing like a side of toxic paranoia with your charred protein.

    My family tolerated the burnt offering, attributing it to my alleged illness. But once I slumped onto the couch after dinner to watch Below Deck, I went full opera tenor: sighs, groans, complaints, the whole libretto of impending doom. My family, unimpressed, mocked me. “Illness always makes me morbid and lugubrious,” I explained, as if quoting from a Victorian diary.

    My daughters laughed. My wife rolled her eyes: “Here we go. The man flu.” I thought about citing research suggesting men actually suffer more with the flu, but even I knew I’d already overshared.

    “Maybe you’re just tired,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t work out tomorrow.”

    I declared that one missed workout would cause my muscles to shrivel like neglected houseplants. “I’m doomed,” I muttered, then retreated to bed before nine like a bereft invalid.

    This morning, I awoke braced for catastrophe—a full-blown cold, a fever, the Grim Reaper at my door. Instead, I felt…fine. Perfectly fine. My wife and daughter had been right. I wasn’t sick. I was just tired.

    The truth is, when I sense illness creeping in, I go from zero to tragic opera in seconds. I suffer from Influenza of the Mind, a performance illness that turns me into a paranoid man-baby. Last night’s theatrics were not the noble struggle of a fading patriarch, but the wailings of a melodramatic hypochondriac in need of nothing more than eight hours of sleep.

  • The YouTuber Who Burned My Masterpiece

    The YouTuber Who Burned My Masterpiece

    Last night I dreamed I had once written a masterpiece—a semi-autobiographical novel that would have crowned my life’s work—only to lose it for decades in the chaos of distractions. Out of nowhere, it was unearthed not by me, but by Bernard Lackey, a famous YouTuber with the kind of smug, slightly spoiled face that screams, “My inheritance bought me this jawline.”

    A global literary society—the self-appointed guardians of human genius—summoned me to Bernard’s lair to reclaim the book. His home was a McMansion with pretensions, and I descended a spiral staircase into his basement, where shelves groaned with knickknacks, toys, and tchotchkes. There, seated like a smirking gatekeeper of culture, Bernard admired my novel, which hovered inside a glowing, enchanted box on the table.

    The tribunal announced that Bernard was a fraud: he had no right to my work, and he was to hand it over immediately. Bernard, ever the brat, feigned obedience with a sly grin. Then, with some petty sorcery, he scrambled the manuscript—pages twisted, words mangled, paragraphs reduced to gibberish. My once-coherent novel became a ruined artifact, obliterated beyond repair.

    It was obvious he resented being forced to surrender the book. If he couldn’t keep it, he would vandalize it so no one else could glory in its brilliance. It was the sabotage of a small, envious man who would rather destroy beauty than admit his own mediocrity.

    And yet, instead of rage, I felt only pity. Bernard was less a villain than a case study in insecurity, a man hollowed out by his own poverty of imagination. My manuscript was gone forever, but what remained was the consolation of clarity: masterpieces can vanish, but pettiness never dies.

  • Classroom Playback: What a Football Player Taught Me About the Hedonic Treadmill

    Classroom Playback: What a Football Player Taught Me About the Hedonic Treadmill

    I’m starting a series I’m calling The Classroom Playback, where I revisit conversations from class discussions and reflect on how they challenged my assumptions. More often than not, I’ve found it isn’t the instructor who does the teaching—it’s the students. This is my first installment.

    I teach a college writing class to the athletic department—an eclectic mix of football bruisers, soccer strikers, volleyball hitters, and water polo warriors. Two days ago, in the context of an essay that addresses a generation of young men who don’t work or study but play computer games in their bedrooms, I introduced the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the cruel little loop in which humans adapt to pleasure until the buzz wears off and they need to crank the dial higher, faster, and louder, until finally the machine spits them out, exhausted and miserable.

    To make the point vivid, I shared a story from a former student. His older brother had dropped out of college, moved back in with mom, and made a religion out of lying in bed. His life consisted of Netflix marathons on a laptop, constant texts to his girlfriend, and a bong glued to his lips. A self-sedated sloth with Wi-Fi.

    So I asked my athletes, “Does this guy sound happy to you?”

    One of the football players, a psychology major with a grin as wide as the end zone, shot up his hand and said, absolutely—this guy was living the dream. No responsibilities, no alarms, no essays. Everyone, he insisted, would be content to live such a life.

    My jaw dropped. A psychology major dazzled by the ecstasy of permanent adolescence? I reminded him—gently but with a sharp edge—that life demands connection, structure, and purpose if humans are to flourish. Without it, the brain rots. He smiled, nodded, and conceded my point. But the nod was polite, the smile indulgent. I wasn’t sure I had actually shaken his conviction that the guy with the bong had cracked the code.

    After the football player declared his envy for the bong-hugging bed-dweller texting his girlfriend, I scanned the room and realized my grand metaphor had belly-flopped. My hedonic treadmill example didn’t land, to use modern parlance. What I intended as a cautionary tale of mental rot registered instead as a spa brochure: Netflix, weed, and endless texting looked less like disintegration and more like a vacation package.

    With fifteen weeks left in the semester, I’ve had to remind myself of two things. First: I can’t demolish their fantasies in one lesson. The hedonic treadmill requires repeat assaults, examples from all angles, until they feel—not just know—the despair of a life without meaning. Clearly, Bong Boy failed to deliver the emotional punch.

    Second: these kids belong to the “I’ll Never Buy a House” Generation. Their skepticism is hardwired. To them, the fantasy of collapsing in bed with Netflix and THC isn’t just laziness; it’s an antidote to the endless hustle culture they know they’ll never escape.

    Therefore, my football player presented me with a lesson: As an instructor, I can’t be myopic and teach ideas such as the hedonic treadmill from a limited point of view. I have to see things through my students’ eyes. 

    I’m close to sixty-four. My students are nineteen. If I want to reach them, I need to remember the golden rule of teaching—or sales, or persuasion of any kind: know your audience, speak to their anxieties, and try to see life through their eyes. Otherwise, you’re not a communicator—you’re just an old, out-of-touch crank with a lecture.

    I want to thank my football player for opening my eyes and reminding me that the classroom is instructional for both instructors and students alike. 

  • The John Deere Shoulder Massacre

    The John Deere Shoulder Massacre

    A month ago, I developed “golfer’s elbow”—a tender, nagging ache in my inner right elbow, courtesy of my stubborn devotion to single-arm kettlebell rows. Instead of backing off like a sensible adult, I “modified” the exercise into something more idiotic: a lawnmower pull, yanking the kettlebell skyward like I was trying to start a rusty John Deere.

    The good news: within a couple of weeks, the elbow pain disappeared. The bad news: two weeks ago, my left rotator cuff staged a protest and tore, lightly but persistently. The pain has lingered, not as vicious as before, but enough to remind me that recovery at sixty-four runs on geological time. If it truly is a minor tear, I’m looking at six to twelve weeks before my shoulder forgives me.

    When—if—this shoulder heals, I have no illusions about returning to my “factory settings.” The glory days of kettlebell carnage six days a week are behind me. The new plan: three or four sessions, lighter weights, and absolutely no more lawnmower rows. Instead, I’m pivoting to Zone 2 circuit training—steady sweat, elevated heart rate, endorphins over ego, sanity over low-rep bravado.

    For me, exercise isn’t just exercise—it’s therapy. It’s the way I shut down the mental chatter and scrub the cobwebs out of my skull. A life coach wants me to analyze my feelings. I’d rather blast them out with sweat and iron.

    Still, I know this is whack-a-mole. One injury heals, another pops up. That’s the deal when you insist on playing Atlas with kettlebells well past the warranty period. The only answer is to be smarter. The lawnmower row? It was my dumbest idea yet. Never again.

  • What Is the Risk of FKM Rubber Watch Straps in the Overall Scheme of Things?

    What Is the Risk of FKM Rubber Watch Straps in the Overall Scheme of Things?

    PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals,” deserve our attention. They accumulate in the body, persist in the environment, and have been linked to cancer and organ toxicity. The question is not whether they are harmful—the science is clear enough on that—but how much risk each type of exposure carries.

    To live reasonably healthy lives in a world saturated with PFAS, we need to focus on reducing the high-risk exposures. Think of a scale from one to ten. At the top end—a full ten—you find firefighting foam, Gore-Tex fabrics, stain-resistant carpets, certain cosmetics, fast-food wrappers, fish and meat from contaminated waters, Teflon pans, unfiltered drinking water, and some dental flosses. At the bottom—a one—are minor exposures like wearing athletic clothing, sitting on treated upholstery, applying certain sunscreens, or strapping on an FKM watch band.

    On this spectrum, FKM straps rank very low. The lab studies that raised alarms subjected the rubber to extreme torture—solvents, high heat, and abrasion—to force PFAS out. That doesn’t resemble daily life. Normal wear—exposure to sweat, sunlight, or water—isn’t nearly enough to release meaningful amounts of PFAS. Compared to drinking contaminated water, eating food in PFAS-coated packaging, or scraping dinner out of a Teflon pan, the risk from a strap is trivial. If the PFAS risk ladder runs from one to ten, FKM sits squarely at one: background noise against the heavy hitters.

    In the end, acceptable risk is a personal calculation. For me, the sensible path is to avoid the high-risk exposures and stop fixating on the negligible ones. That means changing out my water filter, skipping fast-food packaging, and ditching old Teflon pans. But when it comes to wearing my FKM watch straps, I’m not going to lose sleep.

  • No Age Is for Cowards: Worry as Full-Time Employment

    No Age Is for Cowards: Worry as Full-Time Employment

    When I was six, my Grandma Mildred came to visit us at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose. This was around 1967. Like any neurotic little kid, I peppered her with endless questions about an upcoming event. Most of them revolved around food: what would we eat, would there be enough, and what if the deviled eggs ran out? Eventually, Grandma sighed and told me, “You worry too much.”

    Really? Another thing to worry about? Thanks, Grandma. Now I could add “chronic worrying” to my list of anxieties. Would it turn me into a puddle like the Wicked Witch? Would I self-destruct under the sheer weight of my own nerves?

    Flash forward fifty-eight years. Spoiler: I still worry like a professional. My bandwidth jams up with the dumbest obsessions—like finding the right rubber strap for my Seiko diver. I’ll lose sleep and dive so deep into Internet rabbit holes you’d think I was chasing doctorates in linguistics and ophthalmological physics simultaneously.

    Food isn’t any easier. Reading How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, I encountered Hillel’s famous line: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?” Roberts added that anyone who would sacrifice millions of lives to save a finger is “a monster of inhuman proportions.” Cue existential panic: If I chow down on Greek yogurt and whey protein while ignoring the industrial torture of animals, what kind of person does that make me?

    That question dredged up a memory. Years ago, while doing valet duty at my twins’ school, I chatted with Lucianna, a Brazilian parent. She told me about growing up on her uncle’s dairy farm, where calves were torn from their mothers so humans could have their milk. She remembered the calves wailing all night, a sound so haunting she’s sworn off dairy for life. Her story still rings in my ears.

    So here I am, designing my new plant-based meal plan: buckwheat groats, tofu, tempeh, nut butter, soy milk, a stack of supplements, and protein powder. I’m ready to begin. But, of course, my inner worry machine kicks in:

    • What about my omnivore family? My tofu will feel like an accusation on their dinner table.
    • What about my friends and relatives? I’ll be dismissed as a moral buzzkill, banished to the Lonely Dungeon.
    • What about vacations? Hunting for vegan options in Miami or Oahu will turn relaxation into reconnaissance.
    • What about protein and Omega-3s? My muscles will wither, my brain will curdle, and I’ll be left a vegan husk.
    • What about cheating? What if, in a moment of weakness, I scrape a lemon-pepper shrimp into my mouth while clearing plates? Then I’ll hate myself, because I’ll have violated both my morals and my macros.

    And so the worrying goes. Yet maybe this is the point. Doing the right thing rarely comes gift-wrapped in comfort. It comes with sweat, tension, and plenty of struggle.

    My grandfather once told me when he was eighty and drowning in doctor visits: “Old age is not for cowards.” I’ll amend that. No age is for cowards. Living—really living—means confronting fears, fighting cowardice, and resisting the bondage of compulsive worrying. And if anyone has the secret sauce for escaping this mental hamster wheel, I’m all ears.

  • Bong Hits and Netflix: Teaching the Hedonic Treadmill to the Hustle Generation

    Bong Hits and Netflix: Teaching the Hedonic Treadmill to the Hustle Generation

    I teach a college writing class to the athletic department—an eclectic mix of football bruisers, soccer strikers, volleyball hitters, and water polo warriors. Two days ago, I introduced the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the cruel little loop in which humans adapt to pleasure until the buzz wears off and they need to crank the dial higher, faster, and louder, until finally the machine spits them out, exhausted and miserable.

    To make the point vivid, I shared a story from a former student. His older brother had dropped out of college, moved back in with mom, and made a religion out of lying in bed. His life consisted of Netflix marathons on a laptop, constant texts to his girlfriend, and a bong glued to his lips. A self-sedated sloth with Wi-Fi.

    So I asked my athletes, “Does this guy sound happy to you?”

    One of the wide receivers, a psychology major with a grin as wide as the end zone, shot up his hand and said, absolutely—this guy was living the dream. No responsibilities, no alarms, no essays. Everyone, he insisted, would be content to live such a life.

    My jaw dropped. A psychology major dazzled by the ecstasy of permanent adolescence? I reminded him—gently but with a sharp edge—that life demands connection, structure, and purpose if humans are to flourish. Without it, the brain rots. He smiled, nodded, and conceded my point. But the nod was polite, the smile indulgent. I wasn’t sure I had actually shaken his conviction that the guy with the bong had cracked the code.

    After the wide receiver declared his envy for the bong-hugging bed-dweller texting his girlfriend, I scanned the room and realized my grand metaphor had belly-flopped. My hedonic treadmill example didn’t land, to use modern parlance. What I intended as a cautionary tale of mental rot registered instead as a spa brochure: Netflix, weed, and endless texting looked less like disintegration and more like a vacation package.

    With fifteen weeks left in the semester, I’ve had to remind myself of two things. First: I can’t demolish their fantasies in one lesson. The hedonic treadmill requires repeat assaults, examples from all angles, until they feel—not just know—the despair of a life without meaning. Clearly, Bong Boy failed to deliver the emotional punch.

    Second: these kids belong to the “I’ll Never Buy a House” Generation. Their skepticism is hardwired. To them, the fantasy of collapsing in bed with Netflix and THC isn’t just laziness; it’s an antidote to the endless hustle culture they know they’ll never escape.

    I’m close to sixty-four. My students are nineteen. If I want to reach them, I need to remember the golden rule of teaching—or sales, or persuasion of any kind: know your audience, speak to their anxieties, and try to see life through their eyes. Otherwise, you’re not a communicator—you’re just a crank with a lecture.