I don’t have a snappy quote for you here, although I did do searches for “debt quotes” and found a lot of nonsense. I thought of using the Tyrion Lannister quote, but didn’t want that vibe necessarily (still a good quote!). So today I wanted to dive into the etymology of the word “debt.” Undoubtedly this is a topic often on many people’s minds, considering all the credit card and student loan and other debt out there (student loans are a sore subject for me, ugh). But I think the word is interesting and worthy of further study.

“There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt…” - Radiohead, “Pyramid Song” (from the album Amnesiac)

In these uncertain and doubtful times, well, I thought it would be helpful to go through the etymology of the word “doubt.” Now, of course, before it makes its way to English, it goes through a lot of intermediary languages, but my concern is generally with penetrating back to the source. “Doubt” comes from Latin dubitare, which means “to be uncertain, to be in doubt, to waver in opinion or judgment” (L&S, i.e., Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary, s.v. dubito). More directly from dubitare, we get things like “dubious” (= “doubtful”), “indubitable” (= “undoubtable”), “indubitably,” “dubitation” (though that’s admittedly rather archaic; lit. “the state of doubting, the action of doubting”). And of course, once it morphs to “doubt” (through the French, which lengthens the Latin long -u- to the diphthong -ou), we get “undoubtedly,” “doubtful,” and I’m sure there are others I’m missing. English “redoubt” is not related, though; it comes, via French, from Latin reducere, “to withdraw, draw back,” meaning “a place of refuge” (= a place to which one withdraws).

CWs: US politics, trump, death mention

I’ve been playing a really nice mod for DOOM/DOOM II called Brutal Doom. I hadn’t played either game in quite awhile, but generally use a source port like Chocolate DOOM vel sim. if I do. Friends on the Classic Gaming Today Discord recommended it, and wow, it is a nice mod. I’ve played through all of DOOM and most of DOOM II at this point. But I think I’ve overdone it. Too many dark corridors and surprise ambushses. I think I might need to take a step back from it. I’ve been playing it a lot lately, between rewatching Seinfeld (I’m on season 5; I am rewatching the whole series, then plan on media mailing the lot of it to my sister, since I don’t want the DVD sets anymore) and doing whatever else in my free time.

“I just want to go back to bed and hibernate for the rest of the year”

Welcome to the first Ichneutymon post! I’d ideally like to do this roughly weekly, and I hope it will be fun but also informative for y’all. Since winter is kicking off in the northern hemisphere, well, I thought hibernate would be a fitting word to inaugurate this feature. Just like in the example sentence above, I love sleeping in and sometimes I envy bears and their ability to hibernate for ages at a time. At the same time, I really love doing things when I’m not sleeping, so it’s probably good I’m a human!

CWs: death, food, sex mention

“Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air” - The Little Man From Another Place, Twin Peaks 1x03, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”

I learned of David Lynch’s passing, sadly, on 16 Jan 2025. Although he was a complicated figure, as many people are wont to be, it will be a great loss, not only for culture in general, but for myself more personally. I remember years ago, one of my friends spoke fondly of Twin Peaks, with random snatches of information about Agent Cooper and other strangeness within. I had heard of the show, naturally, but had never watched it. I remember the Fire Walk with Me theme being on Pure Moods back in the day (ha!), but I really had zero context for it. It was a weird pop culture artifact that had somehow passed me by, probably largely since it had come out in 1990-91, when I was around 6-7, and it was something I just never followed up on, although I love just about everything weird and strange. My spouse recently showed me a bizarro Sesame Street parody of Twin Peaks with Cookie Monster called “Twin Beaks,” which was pretty amusing, but undoubtedly everything would go over the children’s heads, unless their parents had them watching some weird stuff! Hollywood and the fandom in general have been mourning for the last few days, and understandably so.

I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile but haven’t gotten around to it. I’d like to start doing a regular(-ish) feature on etymology and my love for words in general. My focus tends to be on those with Greek and Latin roots, of course, since I can break them apart and put them back together pretty easily. As it’s the end of the week, I’m too tired to come up with one for tonight, but this is forthcoming.

CWs: physical health, food, errands

It was a busy week, like most are. I wasn’t feeling well over the weekend, and ended up calling out of work on Monday. I do not like calling out when I’m on phones, but I did not feel up to talking to people all day while having a sore throat. I’m mostly better now, thankfully. It was just a frustrating nuisance of a cold, y’know? Did my phones on Tuesday, then the rest of the week has been pretty chill since then. I had my meeting on Wednesday, per usual, which went well. Ever since getting the new car, which shows real-time information about tire pressure and othr fun stats, I found that the tire pressure is a bit low. All tires are recommended to be inflated to 42psi, and some were as low as 35psi. Low tire pressure can reduce performance, so I wanted to get that sorted ASAP.

CWs: death, morbid, finances

I’ve been thinking lately about contingency plans. Specifically, what to do with the remnants of my digital life if (let’s be honest, when) something happens to me. That includes taking down this server, deleting online accounts or transferring ownership, and basically closing everything out. My spouse is comfortable with tech, but I wouldn’t say they’re “techy.” I have them set up on Bitwarden at the very least, to help with stronger passwords, and that is about the extent of it as far as involvement with this server. But my stuff is all over the place on here, and on the internet in general. There are subscriptions that would need to be cancelled (Patreon, &c.), and accounts (like utilities, &c.) that are in my name. I have recurring bills each month, whether it be my bank account or credit card, often accessed via PayPal and such. All of that will just keep going, ad infinitum/ἐς αἰεί, until it’s shut off or my accounts run out of money.

CWs: holidays, depression, food

I am not great at coming up with titles for posts, but here we are. We have made it through the holidays, including New Year’s (Happy New Year, friends!), relatively unscathed.

We didn’t do a whole lot for Christmas. It’s just my spouse and I and the cats. Our families are on both coasts, so we usually just spend the holidays on our own, which is fine with me. I think I mentioned this before (forgive me if I have), but I haven’t spent Christmas with my own family since probably 2013, so I’m used to not being around them, y’know? I like our low-key little celebrations really. We had a nice time, and it was great to have some significant time off from work to recharge.

Just a few stray thoughts. We’ve had our EV (a 2024 Chevy Equinox) for almost a month at this point. It’s lovely. We have a charger that can use 120V for slow charging (about 1.4kW/hr), or 240V for fast charging (I think like 11-12kW/hr, so much faster). We don’t have the 240V outlet yet, though, and would need to get a new breaker box for that to be possible, and it won’t be cheap. So for right now we’ve had to charge the EV for a couple of days to get it back up to 80%, where we ideally want it to be.