Looking For Quacks In The Pavement
Last night, out of a mix of boredom and mild curiosity, I watched They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. It’s a weird, somewhat confusing window into a very specific portion of the life of a famous film director. And right out of the gate, a thesis statement of sorts is presented to the viewer: The title is a quote ascribed to Orson Welles… and immediately other voices claim that no, he never said that.
Huh.
Continue readingLiterally every working person I will ever meet possesses skills and knowledge which would take me some notable amount of time to fully grasp, if I even ever could. Yes, even garbage collectors. Maids. Clerks. Delivery drivers. Agricultural workers. Even the migrant ones.
The fact that it took years (decades?) to realize this is a tribute to the social stigma about “unskilled labor” and similar class-divide-enforcing concepts.
If you want to look down on someone, look down on the idle rich who have money to (figuratively, and possibly literally) burn and all they do to get it is… have money to burn.
We live in the future, and it’s both awesome and horrifying.
Collectively, many of us have spent the last few decades adding data to the Internet. Words, pictures, sounds, and so forth. And now, people with lots of money to buy lots of computer equipment are going to use what we’ve made to make themselves an even bigger pile of money.
Continue readingSeriously, can we just stop doing DST changes? Nobody actually wants this, right?
I know it’s only an hour, but throwing off my sleep schedule absolutely wrecks me for the four or so days afterward. Today, for instance, I’m struggling to type these words despite “only” losing an hour of sleep. And yes, I went to bed on time last night and (more or less) slept well, inasmuch as I ever do.
It’s annoying, pointless, probably causes actual harm (it’s a good thing I don’t drive, I’d almost certainly crash into something or someone today), and should just get done away with.
So say we all. Probably.
I love building things. Heck, I think I wrote about that here recently.
Sometimes, people even appreciate and/or make use of those things. That sure feels good, doesn’t it?
Usually, though, nobody really does. This goes back so, so far. Heck, my last really successful endeavor was when I took over the Anime Blog Muyo forum (well, kind of… I built my own and everyone migrated over when RadicalBender was done running his forum) and that lasted for… a couple of years? The Wayback Machine stopped indexing AEIOU’s content in mid-2008 and I genuinely don’t remember when we closed up shop there for good. We had some good times back then, the handful of us who remained…
(Side note: Nailing down some of the details in the previous paragraph involved reading through a lot of my own blog posts of the time and boy howdy was that a dark couple of years for me. Yikes.)
Then there’s stuff like the Mastodon server (I had two other users besides myself, and only one of them “tooted” more than a small handful of times). The home-theater computing rigs that only I would use in the household. Various purchased and/or assembled gadgets like that. Websites, forums, what-have-you. I ran a webcomic for four entire years with a readership of… half a dozen entire humans? Maybe?
Never mind this website that almost nobody reads. (Ha ha, how meta.)
It happens at work, too. A wiki almost nobody used. Fancy scripted automation stuff that only I ever actually use. Documentation nobody reads. (Well, I do: I don’t always remember how I did the fancy scripted automation thing the last time, after all.)
I can’t help myself, though. Not really. The challenge of getting something built has its rewards, and what else am I supposed to do? Just… not make stuff? Be serious. This is why I’m probably going to fire up another Mastodon instance (the one I’m on currently is shutting down, which may be ironic, I dunno). It’s why I’m still hoping to do more GoPro-footage YouTube videos that nobody will watch.
It’s fun to make stuff, dagnabbit. So… as much as some recognition would be (hugely) appreciated, I’m going to keep at it.
The alternative isn’t worth considering.
Look, between the annoying people with annoying over-loud explosives and the general atmosphere of feeling like we are bound & determined as a nation to make things worse for literally everyone (other than rich people, they’re better than us after all) and the absolute uncaring incompetence of our collective response to an ongoing pandemic (no, we’re not “post-COVID”)…
… why am I supposed to be happily excited about anything today?
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