Griffith's favorite hobby is spending time with his dog Cassiopeia. After work today, he pets her a lot. "Who is a dog who usually performs in accordance with my requests? You are! Though I haven't tried making requests of other well-trained dogs much recently. You're also very pretty: your breed is highly rated for dog appearance, though many of the raters fail to account for the rate at which your breed sheds! I would prefer you shedded less, but I am overall very pleased with you!"

Every other weekend Griffith attends a gaming group. He's a fan of hidden-information games, in which the rules require players to refrain from asking each other most possible game-state-related questions. Obviously asking somebody how many rice tokens they had would be cheating, but if it's not banned then obviously everyone would do it. He brings cut vegetables and dip, repackaged in some Tupperware as people in his group seem to approve of homemade snacks, but when asked whether the vegetables are storebought, he says yes. On some level he wishes he could have just told them not to ask, just like you can't ask questions like that in Island Explorers.

When he gets home, he turns on the TV and flips through channels.

"This evening on Visual Experiences, we have footage from the summer solstice festival of a distant subcontinent, celebrated by throwing colorful powder at each other! We've equipped our camera with its very own active lens cleaning to ensure it's ready to film the action…"

"…and Smith has the ball! The majority of the crowd is chanting his name. A few years ago, Justin Smith admitted to usage of banned performance-enhancing drugs, but this year, he said he's clean…"

"…reenactment village. We model different scenarios of what our past may have been like, and volunteer historians live in a crude simulation of these scenarios which nonetheless lacks many details!"

He likes the historic agriculture show, so he sticks with it.

During his lunch break on Tuesday, it's time for one of the more annoying parts of his death-avoidance plans: arguing with endocrinologists.

"Look. A lot of studies show that supplemental estrogens have a positive impact on lifespan for people with low estrogen levels. I am going to keep seeing endocrinologists until someone will write me a prescription, so your refusal to write me one will not in expectation lead to me not acquiring one, just to me annoying more of your colleagues. Eventually I will probably just give up and resort to illegal bribery or theft."

"I find you obnoxious. Why don't you just get certified as being a transgender woman?"

"According to the screening criteria, and also my best model of what the criteria are attempting to measure, I am not a transgender woman. Please prescribe me estradiol anyway. I do not only want it for its effects on immune health and lifespan, I also at one point tried some in a country with fewer regulations on its sale and it felt mildly pleasant, not unpleasant."

"If this goes horribly wrong for you, do you expect to sue me? Are you good at self-modeling?"

"I am reasonably above-average at self modeling and do not expect to sue you for this even if it goes horribly wrong."

"Fine. I'll write you a prescription for 'reasons not on the checkbox list'. Go tell your pharmacy you're authorized. And don't bother me too often, I'd really rather be playing Aquarium Simulator than talking to you."

"Thank you. I expected this interaction to be extremely unpleasant. Instead it was only somewhat unpleasant."

A few weeks later, he's about to get in line to buy lunch at the salad restaurant closest to his workplace when he discovers that it's being blockaded by protesters. "Based on our models of moral relevance and animal cognition, the fact that this restaurant sells factory-farmed eggs is an atrocity!" one yells. "You're only blockading this restaurant as opposed to McDonalds because you think customers here are more likely to be sympathetic to you, not because you think this restaurant is morally worse than McDonalds!" he yells back. Another disgruntled would-be customer says that she thinks the protesters' methods do not belong in a well-ordered society and that she hopes other protests get in their way when they try to do things, so there.

He goes home and researches animal cognition. He's not very happy about the findings. They're not in his opinion conclusive, but the field seems underfunded. He finds Animal Charities America's website and emails them with a "medium-urgency: possible opportunity" marker about it, as well as checking the box to indicate that he's read their FAQ. They write back to him saying that they're actually putting together a project, and based on his and other emails they're going to add information on viewing their near-future projects to their FAQ since they seem to get too many emails about that.

In the late evening, Griffith finds himself thinking about his sex life or lack thereof.

He'd tried going on dates with women in the past, but the thing with that was that, in his experience, all the sensible ones opened by very bluntly asking about both his intentions regarding sexual assault and various proxy metrics for impulsive crimes. It got a little frustrating after a while, especially since it was mostly just confirming his answers in OkCupid hadn't gotten mangled in transit somehow. Even worse, the women who didn't ask him those questions also just … seemed less sensible, or at least not the kind of paranoid-sensible that he wanted in a partner. And then there was the discussion of "yes, bisexual men may in theory be more likely to transmit diseases via sex than straight men are, but I assure you I am very scrupulous about biosafety and I'd be willing to abstain from sex entirely for the first several months of a relationship for testing purposes if that'd make you more comfortable, no seriously I'm not impulsive I've taken the Johnson-3 Impulsivity Test, I'm willing to also take other impulsivity tests if you aren't familiar with that one I guess", and other comparably obnoxious discussions, and … this whole irritating thing where women tended to have highly gendered expectations of him that he didn't really love.

He'd visited a local gay bar once, but even though he was able to pass the legally-mandated screening for intent to illegally have sex on the premises, when an attractive man offered to buy Griffith a drink, Griffith commented that alcohol was a poison and anyone who voluntarily ingested it was making stupid decisions, and were it not for the presence of several witnesses Griffith has the feeling he might have risked being punched. So bars are out.

He'd also driven to a bigger city to attend a kink event, but something about being told "you are probably physically incapable of moving away from me under your own power, in order to make this stop before I decide to stop you'd have to retract consent and call over a safety monitor" while receiving pain turned out to be fundamentally inadequate, like it was boring and sad and something was missing.

His mind returns to the sickening temptation of doing research into some of the wildly unethical historical norms that got alluded to in his classes when he was younger, but he refrains, takes a cold shower, and goes to bed.

Griffith's friend Natalie calls him up and says that her team figured out some improvements to graphics card design and she's finally allowed to tell people! They're doing demos of how well some high-difficulty real-time animations run on their chip to highlight its potential for gaming devices. Griffith, as Natalie's friend, is invited to a demo as long as he agrees to be filmed reacting to it, and he agrees.

The demo is pretty impressive! Most notably to Griffith, they show a horse being brushed and having ribbons tied in its hair, and waves destroying a sandcastle. The bouncy castle laser tag sim really highlights the gaming potential, too.

Elsewhere:

A gaming group is playing an abstract multiplayer strategy game, the kind with dark colors and music that gets the heart rate up. "Are you playing this badly because you find losing to me hot?" someone types in chat, which is responded to with "Rudeness is linked to parental neglect".

Home bakers interested in competing on television are being filtered for the right level of dramaticness: enough to get the viewers invested, but not enough to irritate them too much. They're also being filtered on visual appearance and vocal quality.

A sports game opens with the national anthem.

O say could Key see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly he hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts he watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does our star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er a land that is free where the people skew brave?

Griffith takes Cassiopeia for a walk. A man sees dog poop on the sidewalk and goes on a rant about how disgusting and irresponsible dog owners are. Griffith interrupts to comment that it isn't Cassiopeia's, and the man replies "ugh, that's kind of disappointing, I want to have someone I can justifiably yell at about this mess".

When Griffith next goes to listen to the radio, he encounters a policy debate.

"…and my opponent here may on some subconscious level harbor sympathies to criminals, because he doesn't support my bill to require train and bus passengers to affirm they won't commit crimes on the vehicle!"

"Not only does that go against my best model of the spirit of the Constitution, it also seems impractical. You said just last month that requiring new cars to be built with interlocks that require the driver to affirm they're licensed and not drunk before starting the vehicle would likely be unreasonably expensive. Consider how much time it would add to a public transit boarding process for every single passenger to affirm they won't commit crimes! Likely, this policy would end up not being consistently enforced."

"Asking whether passengers intend to commit crimes on the vehicle is a narrow search that is well within my model of what the Founding Fathers would have considered acceptable. Furthermore, I think cars are probably more fundamental to freedom than shared transit is. Also, the current interlocks are easy to remove from cars, but hacking a transit station seems like it would be much harder due to the number of people present."

"You say that like you haven't read the recent shocking report on how many people were able to board airplanes without affirming they weren't terrorists, managing to circumvent airport security!"

"Gah! My prep team forgot to tell me about that before I came here, the idiots."

In Delaware, a college football game cuts to a commercial break.

"In order to get your files back, you'll need to transfer money to us or you won't get the decryption key."
"So, what is the decryption key?"
"You likely think you're clever, huh? I don't know the decryption key and I don't want to look it up for you!"
"Who are you? Where are you operating from?"
"I'm Boris working for LockBit, and I operate from Petersburg, which means you can't just send local police forces after me for hacking!"

A voiceover cuts in. "Interactions which this is a representative sample of happen to American firms hundreds of times per week. If you think this is horrible and its prevention should be prioritized more, you may wish to elect Daniel Chu for the Senate, as he intends to prioritize cybersecurity and international prosecution agreements while in office."

It's raining the next day, but Cassiopeia still needs a walk, so Griffith takes her for one while singing an old weather song.

I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain!
What a glorious feeling this is to attain!

I will mock the clouds that darken the sky:
I remember the sun, and will again be dry.

So let the stormy clouds drive fussy people inside:
Come on with the rain, I will not rush to hide!

I walk down the lane, with a catchy refrain,
just singing and dancing in the rain.

He does an awkward twirl for the last line. Thankfully, he isn't observed, except by Cassiopeia, who can't model human social norms enough to be judgemental here.

Griffith enters his username, "griffith_dogfan" to log into the main Anglosphere transhumanism forum. Due to a spate of accidental logins recently, they've instituted a new security measure, so he reads over the account creation metadata and confirms that no, really, he entered the correct username, it seems pretty unlikely that a second person would have created an account with his usual username while at his old address during a time when he was living there.

Someone's posted yet another thread about how it would be nice if, given that dying is awful for most people, it would be nice if they would spend more effort on avoiding it, because he also doesn't want people to die, but doesn't care enough about them to solve all their problems for them for free. The thread continues into the usual repetitive discussion of how evolutionary instincts left humans badly configured for a modern environment such that they make a lot of stupid decisions. yay_walnuts suggests that someone should engineer a virus to modify people's time preference, but says that she doesn't want to do it because getting away with crimes is really hard, and other commenters point out that virus design is also difficult and yay_walnuts seems somewhat unintelligent for suggesting the idea.

He checks an old thread of his asking for advice on having a good social life while also doing a bunch of weird and socially inappropriate things such as wearing a car helmet, actually accepting the implications of alcohol being poisonous, et cetera. Someone's come by and called him a dorky loser who's an idiot for pursuing life extension since there can't be much point to his life if he lives like this, and others have responded by proposing that account registry questions include "are you a transhumanist" to filter out people like that guy. Someone points out that if he were wealthy and attractive, him being weird would seem eccentric not inappropriate, but he isn't, so he probably doesn't have very good chances. Someone says that she doesn't have advice, but she hopes it'll help him cope to know that others are in similar positions.

The site encounters loading issues while he's on it. Once these resolve, he figures out that a newbie broke the 'no asking a sitewide question' rule and the thread got flooded before it got shut down by moderators. He feels a moment of sympathy for the newbie: it must feel really embarrassing to have broken one of the first rules of the internet on a forum about something you actually care about.