2024-25 Formula E Year in Review

Last week was a pretty bad one as I felt a pretty strong decline in cognitive functioning. It was my most absent-minded week in a while even by my own poor standards. On Monday, when I went to visit Mom, I left my keys at home and was terrified (not for the first time) that I had left the space heater on before I left, but it was never on when I came home. On Tuesday, I had my follow-up post-colonoscopy appointment and I scheduled a Medicaid cab to come pick me up but I missed it and it had to be rescheduled for March. I pretty much have some kind of diarrhea every day now thanks to my years of nutritional atrocities and my eating disorder and I still haven’t gotten over my cough from my virus three weeks ago. Yesterday as I was laving mass, a car was turning as I was trying to cross ad slammed on the brakes. I was not hit. I streamed a couple times last week, most recently last Tuesday when I uploaded a one-hour video of my trip to Washington, D.C. in 1994. The footage was really bad though and the audio came in too loud because I’m not using a set of speakers and only using my computer’s audio, which comes out quieter on my machine than anyone else’s. I’m thinking I’m going to stream again tomorrow or Tuesday because I do want to keep plugging away to see if I can get back to 4,000 watch hours and see if I can monetize it. One of my subscribers told me the images of me were coming in too dark. Yeah, one of the light bulbs blew and my mom and I have only been using incandescent bulbs and they were since outlawed several years ago. I still have bulbs in various light fixtures we don’t use, so I typically raid one of the other bulbs from somewhere else to plug in to one of the fixtures I use, but I don’t know what I’ll do when they all blow. None of the replacement lights I’ve ever found have given off nearly as much light. I’ve also had a smoke detector beeping every minute or so and it got picked up on one of my streams. My mom hoarded lots of smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors as well and even though I’ve been looking on and off for several days, I can’t find which one it is. And I know I need to give away my mom’s car that hasn’t been running for five years (it can’t be sold because the nursing home will take the money), but I can’t find the title. I knew where it was several months ago but I had it sitting on a table that my cat has been jumping on (and knocking papers off of) for months and I haven’t seen it since…

I know there was that article several years ago about how millennials are struggling with basic tasks and I feel like I have personally become the embodiment of everything the grown-up world hates about all of us. I imagine a lot of my executive functioning issues also stem from my autism on top of that. I know there are a lot of people with both autism and ADHD who assume that anyone who has one has both, but I don’t really think I have ADHD. I do think society and technology addiction have conditioned everyone - even neurotypical people - to act in both a more autistic and ADHD manner than they would have in previous generations and obviously everyone’s attention spans have diminished, but do I think I have had a particularly noteworthy decline in attention span beyond just the generational cohort effect? I don’t really think so. But I do think the issue for all of us is that it is more difficult to compartmentalize one’s life in terms of separating time spent on work, chores, time spent with family, recreation and whatever else and everyone being forced to multitask and do several of these things at once has made everyone less efficient at everything, which probably explains the burnout (I haven’t read that article I linked in years so I might have just paraphrased it). Trying to balance my four part-time jobs including this and visiting my mom has been kind of a lot, and I find myself envying both the people who have one and only one stable job that doesn’t intrude on private life (which I know is rapidly becoming a thing of the past) and the autistic people who are collecting disability benefits (I know several). But I’m in that dead zone where I’m not autistic enough to be considered disabled and too autistic to be an employer’s wet dream. I can really see why it is counterintuitively the high functioning/Level 1 autistics who are most likely to have mental health issues and suicidal thoughts because we are both more likely to understand what we are missing and less likely to have real world supports.

But I’m still trying. Last night, I found a podcast with a guest from the Central New York Autism Society, and I attempted to join their A Team in search of support. As I’v said, I badly want people to socialize in real life with. The problem here is that it is a group for older teenagers and young adults and my extra large age is probably too high to qualify as a young adult so I wouldn’t be surprised if they rejected me. I was also talking to Phil, one of my subscribers on here, on Bluesky about game shows and I mentioned how I interviewed with the guys for the new Scrabble show but I never heard back and he told me that game shows these days were recruiting from online quiz leagues like LearnedLeague. That jogged my memory because I actually joined that in the year 2016 and played one round before I quit because I didn’t want to pay dues. I had a major in there with Andy Saunders, who was one of my friends from the tournament Scrabble world back before I quit in 2017 and mostly pivoted to focusing on my typing book. Andy was one of the founding archivists for J! Archive and currently runs The Jeopardy! Fan blog. Anyway, I did not do terribly as a rookie (I finished 15th of the 32 rookies back then (see below) and I’ve decided to pay to rejoin. It could be a way of making an additional coterie of friends and I have some ins in this world. The next contest doesn’t start for three months, which still gives me some time to focus on some more important stuff. In addition to making connections to fellow nerds, I also thought I could get good content out of it for my YouTube channel. I think doing Sporcle quizzes on there or something could be an interesting way to pivot from my usual typing content to something else, although I admit it’s probably stupid for me to take something else on. But if I can replace my doomscrolling with learning stuff, I suppose that would be good. I’m sure I will continue to miss every single food question thanks to my trailer trash diet.

Of course the biggest thing last week was I walked over to the bank on Thursday to apply for an emergency loan for the roof repair. There’s a part of me that doesn’t even want to do this since the estimate I received was for $25,400 and I’m almost like, “What’s the point if I’m just going to be forced to give up the house to Medicaid after Mom dies?” I have no idea whether I’m going to get the loan or not. I’m guessing I won’t since I have multiple credit cards in default, although one of them I paid off with a partial payment, I started a payment arrangement for another several months ago, and I started a payment arrangement for one of the others the day before I went to the bank last week. I think that leaves only one or two more that I’m not paying on and I’ve also obviously taken over my mom’s housing loan and I haven’t missed a payment yet on that, so that helps. My credit score actually wasn’t in the Poor range, which shocked me. It was in the bottom of the Fair range, so I might get it. Now my question is what do I do with the loan if I do get it. Apparently, the roofer is only demanding I pay half the money up front so I’m wondering if it might be better to use the rest of the money (if I get it) to pay off the remainder of Mom’s mortgage loan and my credit cards, leaving only the payments to the bank and the roofer beyond my monthly bills, which might be more stable and preferable to having a bunch of bills to pay off at once. I’ll have to think about it, and I’ll also have to do more research and check whether the student loan mailer daemons are going to want a cut if I get it.

Okay, on to my main content. Even though the Formula E season ended months ago, I didn’t finally complete my statistical table for it until last night. I was already pretty sure I was going to include Oliver Rowland in my global top five this year and Sho Tsuboi losing the Super Formula title in the last race has likely cemented this. Assuming Broc Feeney wins the Supercars title and Max Verstappen does not win the F1 title, I am pretty sure Feeney will be first, Álex Palou will be second, Verstappen will be third, Rowland will be fourth, and then fifth is up in the air. Maybe I’ll give it to Lando Norris but I’m admittedly not knocked out by him and his year reminds me a great deal of Damon Hill’s 1996 (who I initially had in the top five and then later removed). His advantage over Oscar Piastri honestly wasn’t as much as it should’ve been for most of the season, so I could totally see me leaving him out of my top five, even though I suspect most folks would scoff. If Sébastien Ogier comes back and wins the World Rally Championship title despite skipping several races, I’m probably gonna want him in the 4 or 5 slot too, and I don’t think I’m gonna be swayed from making Rowland my highest-ranked British open wheeler this year. Rowland clinched the Formula E title with two races left while his teammate Norman Nato finished 20th in points, while Norris’s teammate is either going to finish second or third in points. I feel Rowland’s intra-team advantage overrides Norris competing in the more competitive series. In this article, I’m only going to evaluate the drivers who didn’t also compete in the World Endurance Championship. I don’t really think Norman Nato and Stoffel Vandoorne deserve to be listed based on their Formula E season, but they might if you consider their WEC accomplishments, and I haven’t gone through their sports car data yet. Sébastien Buemi and Nyck de Vries probably belong on the list based on either their FE or WEC accomplishments alone, but combined, they’ll likely be higher, so I’m going to wait to rate them also until after I’ve worked through the sports car data, and that will likely be at the very end.

I’ve also been slowly working through all the lock drivers for my 1,000 greatest drivers list (going through one driver most days but not every day) and their season-by-season grades. I don’t think I’m going to do separate posts for these drivers like I did for the bubble drivers. I’m instead going to wait until I write each individual lock driver’s entry for the drivers I haven’t gone through yet. I suspect there will be a few of the drivers I have in this tier who aren’t actually locks who I might have rated too highly (even Oscar Piastri now, but he will be by the time I’m done). Nonetheless, all the drivers I’ve gone through alphabetically so far still meet the 25 points necessary for lock status and I will at least tell you how many points I awarded them. So far, it’s Rauno Aaltonen: 84, Nasser Al-Attiyah: 41, Markku Alén: 110, Olimpio Alencar, Jr.: 38, Uwe Alzen: 76, Joe Amato: 52, Michael Ammermüller: 44, Chris Amon: 41, Greg Anderson: 66, Paolo Andreucci: 29. So I do consider all those guys locks still, but I suspect there are drivers in there who I haven’t gone through yet that I will be downgrading. I think there are only a little over 200 locks that I haven’t done yet.

Finally, I must share a few thoughts about NASCAR’s equivalent of the Epstein Files. After it was revealed that NASCAR President Steve Phelps stated in a private chat that Dale Earnhardt’s ex-car owner Richard Childress should be “taken out back and flogged”. Phelps’s similarly-named successor Steve O’Donnell made a series of nasty and threatening comments towards the ex-drivers who competed in the SRX alleged all-star series. While I never liked Childress and I found SRX to be unwatchable, it’s still impossible to take the side of the monopolists here and I think what I found the most shocking was the lack of professionalism. Having grown up in the ‘90s when NASCAR was erroneously trying to position itself as a “family sport”, this sort of locker room smack talk is not what I expected. And as someone who was convinced one of the reasons I wasn’t more successful was my lack of professionalism, seeing people in positions of power being this unprofessional is again jarring. What it reminds me of is when Mark Suckerberg’s chats got leaked in one of his lawsuits and there was that quote about how he was going to fuck the Winklevoss twins “in the ear” and also that quote about people voluntarily posting information on Facebook, “they trust me… dumb fucks” and if Zuckerberg is the first person you’re bringing to mind for me, you’re doing something wrong. I guess I’m just always naive and gullible about how much professionalism is actually needed for success because I figured that was what I was lacking, but no, these people talk worse than I do.

Finally, I was amused that Bob Pockrass misspelled Justin Marks’s last name “Marx” in the aforementioned tweet and I decided to riff on that with a joke that I thought wrote itself. I already posted this on two separate Discords and it flopped, but I will try it again here. I wrote, “Who is Justin Marx? Richard’s son?” and then followed with a parody of the latter:

♪ Wherever you go, whatever you do /
I will be riiight here waiting to sue ♪

You may now commence throwing tomatoes at me. Thank you and good night.