Author: harold

The amount of entertainment we have is ridiculous. It is directly correlated to our inability to shake some stuff up in this society of ours. So I feel like we should pay attention to this but anyway, I was overwhelmed during Christmas break even though I barely use any entertainment. I had:

3 or 4 movies (but virtually all of them). 2 documentaries. Noita. My friend’s PS4 with a dozen games. 4 or 5 books. Eating candy.

I was overwhelmed. I ended up reading a book in the sun and watching one movie. That’s not even a quarter of the amount of entertainment I had available to me! And I totally suck at entertainment. If I didn’t suck at it, I would have binged 24/7 on anything and barely remembered anything either.

I have an immense back catalog of things to entertain myself with. 48-hour days, when do we get them?

Dear Tyler James Williams,

My man, you need to stop aging that fast. Totally unnecessary. Love you bro.

This is where the Super Bowl is happening. This picture gives me the runs. I can only imagine the floodlights all evening and the noise when there’s an event there. Must be nice.

On one hand, my fellow Americans are partying around an annual event centered around a game of “football”.

On the other hand, we have one of the biggest stadium ever built right in the middle of a 30+ year black and brown enclave, displacing folks and doubling the rent or mortgage for others since the construction of that concrete whale started, to watch a bunch of mostly black men destroy themselves on a field while mostly white folks from across the country and the city watch, yell and scream for hours from their $4,000 seats, during Black History month, in a still going pandemic that hits black and brown neighborhoods the hardest.

Lovely.

“California will end its indoor masking requirement for vaccinated people next week but masks still are the rule for schoolchildren, state health officials announced Monday amid rapidly falling coronavirus cases.”

No one has a granny out there, apparently??? Cases are down but deaths have been constantly up for weeks; right now in the US, we’re #2 peak death (17K/week) after last year’s January (23K/week). That’s with vaccines VS no vaccines. That’s really bad.

Omicron is still a real danger for elderly folks. I deal with them a lot and this is not good. They barely mask up.

No masking requirement for vaccinated people means no masking requirement for anyone.

This is dumb, and will kill more people. Because masks are so hard, right? smh

I’m just going to point that out:

My Windows 8 laptop with 8GB of RAM and a USB hub with a dozen devices on it cold boots FASTER than my Windows 11 laptop with 16GB of RAM and no devices attached to it, WAKING UP.

Barely faster, but still. Twice as much RAM, waking up, still slower. That’s so messed up.

I think the most beautiful thing about Windows 8 in 2022 is that I don’t have to worry about updates; I control them. I’m a grown man.

The stress of automatic updates is unbearable. Will my settings be gone? Did I save? Did it crash, what happened? I absolutely hate automatic updates.

Look, I’m not nostalgic about the ’80s. Lots of things were wrong with the politics of the ’80s. But think about what happened here. The science was explained to ordinary people. They listened, they distinguished it from lies and conspiracy theories, and ordinary people banded together and pressured their politicians to act. And even quite unlikely politicians who were very hostile to government regulation, like Margaret Thatcher and George Bush Sr., came together. And as a result, the ozone layer is now healing. I feel absolutely confident that would not happen now if the ozone layer crisis happened.

I think you would get some people who would wear ozone layer badges, you would get other people who would film themselves spraying CFCs into the atmosphere to own the libs and make them cry. You would get people saying, “How do we even know the ozone layer exists? Maybe George Soros made the hole in the ozone layer.” We would become lost. We would not be able to summon the collective attention.

Sobering truth. Still giggling at “own the libs and make them cry” by spraying CFCs into the atmosphere lol. That would definitely happen.

The positive thing is that pressuring politicians and investing in elections and civic stuff, still works! We just need to be mostly together on topics.

And these days, that’s the most complicated thing.

I hate thinking about it. We were eight years in power, as Ta-nehisi’s book says. The thing I keep hating to think about is:

What’s Barack Obama’s legacy? Outside of being the first?

There’s none.

Nothing changed. The only thing I can think of that started with that administration is incorporating social media with politics. That’s like, not a so great legacy to have. I wish it hadn’t happened at all.

What else? Obamacare, but it’s still getting beat up by states and political opposition every now and then. The drone attacks never stopped (and no, I don’t blame him specifically for that; the US military is its own independent system and government at this point). Same sex marriage legalized, sure.

His swag was obviously much better than any previous president but the bar was in hell, so.

Those eight straight years with a black president feel like they didn’t happen. The 2010s will be more remembered for social media and 45 than Barack’s tenure in the White House.

I hate thinking about this.

But I love remembering them. This photoset is carved into my soul. A partnership that is quite a model.

Wonderful article over at The Atlantic. Allow me to quote.

“To survive, all living systems tend to maintain stable conditions as best they can.”

And that goes against our economic system, which pushes us not to maintain stable conditions but rather, pushes us to disrupt stability, to gamble for more. Even though this is not sustainable nor healthy.

“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.”

The very interesting thing here is that what wealth is has dramatically changed: wealthy people prior to 2010s had access and owned things only wealthy people owned. Now? Not at all. Someone broke can have a 65” 4K TV, just like a wealthy person. A wealthy person will poop using a smartphone just like a broke person.

It’s called diminishing returns in economics. That is, being wealthy today isn’t all that, at all.

That’s a HUGE difference to me. There’s something pointless in wealth now. Same with fame! Who really wants to be famous these days with all the trolls, paparazzis, scams, etc? So you stay on your couch, shades down, scrolling Twitter like non-famous people? It’s weird.

The hedonic treadmill really, truly shows its limits in the 2020s.

“When people see themselves as little more than their attractive bodies, jobs, or bank accounts, it brings great suffering. Studies show that self-objectification is associated with a sense of invisibility and lack of autonomy, and physical self-objectification has a direct relationship with eating disorders and depression in women. Professional self-objectification is a tyranny every bit as nasty. You become a heartless taskmaster to yourself, seeing yourself as nothing more than Homo economicus. Love and fun are sacrificed for another day of work, in search of a positive internal answer to the question Am I successful yet? We become cardboard cutouts of real people.”

Sir. You too close, bro.

“As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards.”

Yes, that’s what I said last month, talking about “old ass Eastern philosophy”. It’s about the little, true, quiet things in life because when you achieve something big, it doesn’t last. It blinks. Frustrating.

“We can, in fact, find immense fullness when we pay attention to smaller and smaller things.”

I’m a master at this. I love to observe, see things switch, notice changes. I will enjoy every single sunset and sunrise in my life, even though I’ve already had so many of them. All the little things that bring me joy, never cease to bring me joy. Grabbing a loved one’s face and kiss it will never get old. Thinking about it satisfies me right now!

“It’s a lifelong battle against our inner caveman.”

You mean our inner capitalistman because cavemen I’m sure, were mostly chilling after running errands. Looking at butterflies and wondering what the fuck they are and why they fly so erratically.