PhilThePill Dot Online

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  • ‘Vacation,’ Day Three

    I’m wondering if there’s ever a point where you have your kids and you don’t feel like you need to keep one of your six senses on them at all times. Like, surely some parents just….let their kids exist, secure in the faith that their kids will persist in this reality.

    Sometimes I feel like a fairy tale goblin is just out of sight and looking for an opportunity to steal one of my children. Real Rumpelstiltskin shit. Real David Bowie from Labyrinth vibes.

    (My brain tried to protect me from the memory that his name is Jareth, but alas, here we are with another testament to my inability to do things like schedule a medical procedure, but a slightly damaged reference guide to pop culture).

    This anxiety I have about my kids getting into trouble or getting hurt. I share this with others, right? But before having kids I thought of them as the overly anxious ones. I thought of them as helicopters. I thought when it was my turn, I could just be.

    And when I test a sense of trust, they do things like draw on the couch or crawl up the stairs. The goblin is real. The goblin is everywhere. How do those mythical parents who just veg out and let their kids do whatever exist? I think they exist. Did I make them up entirely?

    We all saw it coming, of course. I have not remade my job searching strategy with the goal of getting out of this alienating employment situation. I have not built an amazing recipe book which will save me thousands of dollars and feed my family nutritiously; deliciously. I have not called my parents, sent a Discord chat to my brother, gotten in touch with old friends.

    I spent $300 at Costco and watched a Spider-Man movie.

    We all saw it coming.

  • Thing I’m Working On

    I walked into the cave, which was decorated in a friendly fashion. A nice quilt draped on the rocks with block lettering that read “I’m here to help.”

    For the past year, I’d been navigating this network of caves. I’d found the first spirit next to a pool of muddy water. I asked it for clay. It gave me slime. The slime was acceptable.

    Then, I found a cave with a goblin in it. The goblin was erratic. Constantly distracted and it peered leerily at me and beyond me as if trying to see what else I had to offer. I asked it for some books and it gave me some scrappy notebooks.

    Now I was in the third cave. And this spirit was large and gregarious. He was over-full. Frankly, his gluttony might have been mirroring mine.

    “Hello, Phil!” The spirit smiled.

    I looked down at my shoes.

    “I would like….a website,” I said.

  • YouTube Videos That Are Better Than the Platform Deserves

    June 2026

    Gregiffer runs the Pop Arena YouTube channel and the Nick Knacks documentary series, which breaks down classic Nickelodeon shows with true behind-the-scenes and history-of content. It’s pretty much tailor made for people who watched this content as 7-10 year olds in the 90’s. Impressive stuff.

    Pop Arena is on:
    Patreon, Ko-fi, Bluesky, Discord, Tumblr, and TVTropes

  • Therapy Check-In

    Therapist was six minutes late. Could’ve been worse, he’s ghosted before.

    I did a lot of talking. So I guess this is the kind of therapy it is, where I’m revealing things to myself and he’s kind of like a sounding board.

    We were talking about the tension between the career I have for money, which itself exists to support the liberal capitalist lifestyle I have set up for myself and my family and the activism work I do for very little money.

    And he did say one thing that helped me. “They say you should talk about your goals.”

    I reflected on the fact that I don’t love talking about my day, because even when it comes to simply putting a post out there on the Internet on behalf of a good organization, that’s not exciting. I bore myself at the thought of talking about that extensively.

    But something I could talk about would be the observation I’ve had – of the past activist organizations I’ve worked with, they’ve been heavily reliant on the corporate web as part of their social media strategies: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – all these platforms actively working against the missions of the activist organizations.

    We’ve been monitoring this attempt to break away from the centralized, corporate internet and introduce the world to the decentralized, human internet. Wouldn’t it make sense to work toward platforms that specifically are for activists and people who want to use the Internet without providing DAU metrics for evil tech giants?

    This….this I’m interested in talking about.

  • A Thread from Bluesky About Some Medical Stuff

    Post from one month ago: "Tune in tomorrow morning to find out if I'm going to need surgery for this weird lump on my stomach." Quote-post on April 26: Okay, so update on this. I got a CT scan and it turns out what I have is a 2cm hole in the layer of fat between my skin and my organs. It's a hernia.

    The lump itself is that layer of fat squishing through the hernia hole. I’ve literally got everything plugged up. When I eat poorly enough to trigger something like acid reflux, it gets inflamed and pretty painful.

    I could get it operated on now, but the doctor’s like “with your BMI, there’s a higher chance of recursion.” So I guess the hole could open back up again. And could you guess what the doctor at the “Duke Metabolic and Weight Loss Center” thinks I should do?

    The Doctor recommends a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Zepbound.

    And he’s happy to show me his work. He types in my current weight and target weight and he shows me this custom text file that tells me the percentage success rate with GLP-1’s.

    I’m seeing what’s happening and I’m thinking of asking him. I’m thinking of asking him The Question. But I don’t have to, because he tells me. “Yeah, this is just something I whipped up with ChatGPT.”

    Now my basic stance on GLP-1’s is…okay, that’s interesting. It really seems like they’ve been prescribed with a lot of more frequency in the past five years. But, I’m 38. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could take the resources that would pay for a lifelong medication and direct them toward lifestyle?

    Like, let’s at least try, right? Maybe I can talk to nutritionists. Dieticians. Workout coaches. But my insurance won’t pay for any of that. And the funny part is, given the weirdness with insurance companies and GLP-1’s, there’s no guarantee they’ll pay for this for the rest of my life.

    And also, like, I probably don’t need to get to BMI 30. I have a sense the odds of my surgery would go up if I lost something like 15-20 pounds. But this guy framed it as if I needed to lose 40 and fast. Is that because ChatGPT tells him to or did he have a cool conversation with a pharma rep?

  • 6AM, Good Friday 2026. Just finished “Roofman”

    Because of a joke I made to a Discord server, I am now compelled to listen to Soundgarden’s “Spoonman,” as well.

    I woke up and I really did feel the need to listen to some Jesus Chris Superstar songs, which is eerie, given the timing. When I first started dating Erin, the theater company she worked for was putting on a staging of JCS around Easter time and that’s how I became familiar with the music.

    Anyway, Roofman, the movie, was kind of flat to me. Just like….a straightforward look at how this real-life criminal played by Channing Tatum lived kind of a boring existence while creating felonies against the corporation of Toys ‘R Us. And, hey, I’m sure the shareholders of Toys ‘R Us are not sympathetic victims, but the movie in 2026 doesn’t provide the same righteous defense of noble criminality as if he were ripping off Jeff Bezos. Clearly not what the movie cared about, but it’s how my mind works.

    Said mind wandered and I started looking at Letterboxd before the movie ended, which “spoiled” the fact that “Roofman” is based on a true story.

    They cut out the entire part where the Roofman had to leave the Toys ‘R Us Store and live in an abandoned Circuit City, which I think would have been more of an interesting commentary on our life and times.

  • My Latest Backloggd Review

    Pokémon Legends: Z-A

    Challenge: Engage in criticism of this game without mentioning “windows” or “voice acting.”

    Legends Z-A excels as a prototype of the new kind of Pokemon city we could get. Sidequests integrated with the city. Imagine if modern cities had locations like the museum, the sewers, the abandoned laboratory and some – some – of the key wild areas.

    The Battle Royale is initially an extremely compelling gameplay loop, working alongside the new battle system to create a sort of mini-stealth hunt-and-deploy tactics game. Unfortunately, LZA does not want to put in the time to keep this compelling for more than 30% of the game, so it eventually becomes a barrier to progress rather than an end unto itself. Still, I want a version of this real-time system to return.

    On the whole, this does not reach the revelatory heights of Legends: Arceus. Limiting you to Lumiose shouldn’t be a main part of the reason, but the limitation is felt due to the initial lack of wild areas. Imagine if there were unique Pokemon and battles to be found in the museum, the old building, Quasartico, etcetera. But the wild areas are the limits of ingenuity for this game.

    Still, if you’re a Pokemon fan who’s been enjoying the Switch era and not a weirdo who gets personally enraged whenever the Nostalgia Factory fails to hold up a mirror to your imagination and clone whatever $300 million production budget chimera you’re imagining, then Legends Z-A is worth your time. There are great Pokemon to find, a fun new battle system to engage in, and some discussion to be had about the dangers of nostalgia.

    Also, I don’t care about windows. I hope the windows in Gen 10 are even worse.

  • An Organizing Note

    I’ve been working with some groups that try to get tenants organized to push back on the abuses of various types of landlords. This was my first campaign seen from beginning to end.

    Tenants in Durham came out to City Council’s late October meeting to support an ordinance that would make it a misdemeanor for landlords to collect rent on slum-like conditions, including lack of water and multiple fire hazards.

    Four members were initially skeptical and hostile to the ordinance, hemming and hawing on whether it would put Durham in conflict with the state legislature. But dozens of people came out, pushed back, and spoke out.

    The ordinance passed 7-0.

    This isn’t a magic wand for tenants living with these conditions. It’s not within the scope of the city’s powers to enforce a penalty for the crime of being a slumlord. But it helps tenants put such landlords on notice. It helps tenants in a lawsuit seek rent abatement. And it helps tenants in eviction court to get the resources they need.

  • I read The Satanic Verses for Book Club

    Our book club theme for September was “banned books” and our nominations list included this one, Looking for Alaska by John Green, Sold by Patricia McCormick, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier.

    Interestingly, the one we settled on by a substantial margin was the book that wasn’t banned by a typical Western and Christian-influenced censorship apparatus. Whereas books like “Boys Aren’t Blue” and “Fun Home” are banned for exploring queer identities, “Verses” was censored in over 20 countries due to controversy over its portrayal of Islamic mythology. The book’s place in history is anchored by the fatwa declared by Iranian religious leaders more than thirty years ago. The bounty placed on Rushdie’s head did eventually lead to an assassination attempt by a random New Jersey man just a few years ago. (Rushdie survived and published a memoir revolving around the violence).

    The uncomfortable thing about online discourse of this book is that there seems to be a micro cottage industry of people who use this book as a way to grind an axe against Islam as a faith. Looking for videos on the book will often surface a dark muttering of commenters who say that the fatwa controversy surrounding “Verses” justifies everything they think about Islam and Muslims.

    A befitting irony for the novel’s themes of narratives that are imposed on people and events is that this is hardly a book dedicated as a polemic or committed to poking a finger in the eye of Muslims. It can be irreverent – cheekily so. There’s cynicism about organized religion and since Rushdie was born into a Muslim family, he uses the backdrop of Islamic history to make some points. But if you’ve ever read a satirical retelling of Christian Biblical events, like Lamb by Christopher Moore or seen The Life of Brian movie, you’re already familiar with this approach from writers emerging from Christian worldviews.

    Ultimately, my favorite chapter of Satanic Verses is one of the several allegorical visions that alternate with the main plot. It involves a village that has become extremely devout due to the power of a prophetess and is now embarking on an arduous pilgrimage on foot to Mecca. The chapter’s title, “The Parting of the Arabian Sea,” indicates what the final obstacle will be for these pilgrims. I suppose one could walk away from this chapter and say “wow, Rushdie really portrayed some truths about the darkness of religious extremism,” but I came away feeling like this was Rushdie’s acknowledgment about the power of faith and some of the downsides of steadfast skepticism.

    Faith is a well. One can draw strength from it, but that well can be poisoned. In a desert with no other reservoirs, one can become so dependent that it leaves you vulnerable to corruption. But in the harsh conditions of reality, an oasis can still be the only reason we preserve and find respite.

    I guess I just felt like Rushdie’s views on the faith background he came from are a little more nuanced and complex than the discourse would have you think.

  • 6AM, Waiting for the Oven to Preheat for My Kid’s Crescent Rolls

    I’m watching Drop and it’s a solid thriller – sort of displaced in time, because it uses the sort of broad strokes that I imagine an old school thriller would, but it’s dependent on modern technology.

    Do you know I’ve never seen Rear Window? Hell, I’ve never seen Psycho. I have the DVD. I picked it up at a library sale all the way back in Arlington, but I’ve never “made the time.”

    Making the time. What a concept.