LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 8 No. 2
Nick’s LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 8 No. 2
THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION
Hello again everyone. It's been a few weeks. Much less weeks between the last few newsletters but somehow feels like a year has passed. Weeks of waiting to see how long it will take for people to realize the leopard will eat their face. Weeks of making plans and hoping the world (or more specifically, American capital markets) holds up so they can be executed. OH GOD.
- Learning about Japan in a non-tourist way (see more below) and found out about a system of redistribution of wealth that brings joy to my socialist heart. It’s called Furusato Nōzei (“hometown tax”). People can allocate a certain amount of their local taxes to another municipality and in return they can receive gifts from that area. It would be like, I pay taxes in Minneapolis, but send some of it to Wisconsin and they send me some cheese in return. It is a way of people moving out of the rural areas to send money home. What a weird, wonderful thing to do with taxes.
- I bought one of these, then another one at a discount because I helped the creator troubleshoot an issue. This may be the dumbest thing I have bought all year. I love it way more than I should.
- This is one of the best things I’ve seen the last few weeks and if Melonie understood the reference I would buy one for her. The fact this has to exist makes me very sad, however.
- “Weird” Al has his Truman Show moment in the new Clairo video. What a dramatic turn.
- I remember reading this a year ago and boy, every week it gets closer.
- In September 2017, I ran my fastest 5k at 27:00 minutes. It was outdoors, chasing my wife in her snug running tights. After about six months of pushing and training, I have finally beat that time. Almost eight years later, I got this old man bod to move 5k in 26:30 on the treadmill. No butt to chase and I did it! I’m very excited I could do this in my 40’s.
- Reason 15,323 we are fucked with AI - Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” - “The researchers also found that “users with access to GenAI tools produce a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task, compared to those without. This tendency for convergence reflects a lack of personal, contextualised, critical and reflective judgement of AI output and thus can be interpreted as a deterioration of critical thinking.”
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Good news for fans of golden handcuffs and my misery. I was put into a long-term retention program at work since they are fucked if my knowledge leaves. Good part is that they are pulling up the money train. Bad news - I’ll be there for another three years. 🤮
Me, celebrating in the office
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One of my most old white man problems is forgetting where I put my slippers. I bought a safety pin clip for an AirTag to put on them and it kept coming off. Thankfully Melonie has designed and implemented SLIPPERTRACKER 2.0 and it is working wonderfully. It is a functional pocket with a snap on it that keeps my AirTag close and doesn’t come off with all my fidgeting and racing around the house.
You won’t escape me now, Slipper!
ITEM THE FIRST:
THE AMAZING THINGS OF 2024 (2024 EDITION): 2024 was an epic year. Full of travel, experiences, amazing music and times with friends. Full of hope and then the absence of it. It was the year of WRITING AND EXPRESSING GRATITUDE. What were some of your favorite things of 2024? I would love to find out and share them with the GROWING RANKS of the LIFESTYLE.
BOARD GAME OF THE YEAR: Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West. I played 236 games last year and 12 of them were this legacy game. For the 50% of you that don’t follow board games, a “legacy” game is a game that changes as you play. Often time you add new rules, components, parts of the board or destroy cards based on decisions you make and there is often an overarching storyline that carries 10-20 game sessions. They are truly epic and fun games to play with a set group of people. In LotW, you start a rail company in the mid-1800’s in the Northeast and as the story evolves you branch out to the rest of the country. As a group, we collectively “discovered” Florida last because who wants to add that to the United States? Over the 12 game campaign we did a bunch of redacted things and had a super fun time doing them. Games are about the people you play them with, for me, and I will always remember those games and the fun we had.
VIDEO GAME OF THE YEAR: Alan Wake 2. This came out in 2023, but wasn’t “content complete” until October of 2024 and I wanted to wait until everything was released until I played. Alan Wake was one of my favorite games and I figured it would never get a sequel after so long, but it did. Alan Wake is about a writer who, facing writers block, goes on a vacation in rural Maine and discovers his words can shape reality. It is a hell of a ride and Alan Wake 2, 11 years later, picks up the story with Alan trying to write his way out of a dark place of his own creation. The story is a ouruboros of incredible genre-bending story telling, mixing game and live-action story and game play. Not to veer into spoilers too much, but it contains one of the most incredible sequences I’ve ever experienced in a game. DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE GOING TO PLAY. Soundtrack is banging as well with a bunch of Swedish bands, the in-game universe band, The Old Gods of Asgard, and they even got Poe to write some new music that might be the first of her songs I enjoy.
VACATION OF THE YEAR: Picture this, Japan 2024… (Said in your best Sophia from the Golden Girls telling a story about Sicily).
SOCIAL EVENT(S) OF THE YEAR: Our (mostly) monthly karaoke nights. I appreciate all of you that have come and hope we have provided a fun and safe space to sing your heart out. I’ve enjoyed drumming for you and the excuse to buy leather pants, wigs and Ziggy Stardust jumpsuits. If you are not on the list and want to be, let me know. Over 2200 songs!
HEALTH EVENT OF THE YEAR: Losing weight and putting on muscle has been wonderful. I have well defined muscles now in places I’ve never had them. It’s awesome. I feel good, I feel strong, I can bike 40+ miles, run 7+ miles and now can just randomly drop dead in my peak condition.
REMODEL OF THE YEAR: Kitchen, obviously.
BEST LOCAL GAME STORE: Tower Games. AGAIN! What a streak!
ITEM THE SECOND:
GRATITUDE JOURNAL (REDUX): If we can recall that time in the before-times, the 2024 LIFESTYLE COMMUNITY PROJECT was WRITING AND EXPRESSING GRATITUDE. (see Vol. 7 No. 2 for the recap
I will say this one was harder than I expected. Overall, I wrote 6 to people I knew and 2 parasocial ones. I started to do even more, but when I was writing them, I realized I had already said a lot of the same things in person or in previous issues of the LIFESTYLE gratitude section, so it would have just been a bit redundant.
How did everyone do? Did you participate? Did you find it harder or easier to write letters?
So, now onto some good news/bad news. The 2025 LIFESTYLE COMMUNITY PROJECT is…
Nothing. I’ve been at this dumb newsletter for a few years now and much like everything, it changes. Early days and COVID days were marked with much more response and interactivity. This newsletter has changed to become more of you reading my shouts INTO THE VOID and less of a public bulletin and exchange of information. That is fine, the secret sauce of the LIFESTYLE is that you make it what it is and the readers have chosen and THAT IS FINE.
In light of that, I hope you find a personal project and crush it this year. Find someone who needs help that you are uniquely able to provide, prove love, hone your critical thinking skills, design an amazing game, write that next (or first) novel. Or just try to survive because it is going to be brutal.
ITEM THE THIRD:
この場所を去る時が来た。
Ok, so I promised less Japan stories, since I’ve been there once so obviously I KNOW EVERYTHING AND WON’T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT, so maybe don’t think of this as about Japan per se.
When we were in Japan, I think we both loved it. I felt a peace that I haven’t. Melonie felt a safety that she doesn’t here. Obviously, we were tourists on a vacation, but given things and being closer to that magical retirement dollar amount, we told ourselves, let’s maybe think about moving to Japan, but not talk about it until 1 January.
Well…on 1 January we had our Semi-Annual Money Meeting to discuss the past, present and future of our rich life and could open the flood gates on Japan talk. We both agreed to launch an EXPLORATORY COMMITTEE to move to Japan, hopefully in five to seven years and retire. Obviously there are two major factors in play:
- Hoping that the dipshits steering the boat don’t completely tank the world (or US) economy. It took YEARS to recover from the housing crash that de-regulation caused.
- Finding a way to get a visa/permanent residence in one of the hardest places to get it. Japan, for a rapidly declining population, is hard to get into. There is no “golden visa” but wealth will help, just not so blatantly as in other places.
So, as all good projects go, we started a project on Basecamp (which opened up their free tier again this year! LOVE IT). To start with we’ve split it into a few key things:
- Cities to consider/city information.
- Real estate information.
- A kanban board where we log any questions we have, we pick it up, research it and report the findings.
I have 0 experience with moving more than about 15 minutes from where I grew up, so if any readers have suggestions of other things we should start considering this far out or tips on international moves, let me know!
I’m hoping to return to Japan this year for longer and explore more candidate cities and obviously before we commit to anything we will spend months in the town to make sure it is the right choice, because LAVELY’S OVERTHINK and have LOW RISK TOLERANCE and this is the riskiest thing to ever do, in my opinion.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (please mark "ok to print"):
Dear LIFESTYLE Newsletter,
As a long time fan of you and your work, I want to take the opportunity to say how much joy your publication has brought me over these past 8 volumes. I can't thank you enough for your kind words about Conquest Princess: Fashion is Power. We only hope to live up to the love you've sent our way.
Every bit of this light helps. In these "exciting" times, when others attack our happiness, it's imperative not to surrender it to fear & anger. Joy is a protest.
Thank you very much for the kind words, it warms my heart and keeps these fingers banging away at my CLICKY KEYBOARD.
Totally unrelated, but RUN DO NOT WALK and back this Kickstarter: Kaiser Cucumber's 3-Night Heist: Card Game & RPG.
FAVORITE THING TO GO IN MY EARHOLES THIS WEEK:
It’s been a slow start to 2025 with music, but I’ve been really digging the new FKA twigs album, EUSEXUA. It’s a super empowering feminist techno pop album. In someways it is the counter to Charli XCX. The lead single has one of the eeriest, sexual videos I’ve seen. It’s a horny horror movie based in the corporate world. Enjoy!
THIS IS THE END OF THE NEWSLETTER
THREE WEEKS FEELS LIKE THREE YEARS RIGHT NOW.
THIS IS GOING TO BE A LONG 100 YEARS.
CAN WE SURVIVE?
THAT IS ALL.