Addendum

00:26 Friday, 9 January 2015
Words: 290

In a bit of follow-up to Greatest Hurts (1&2), yesterday I reached out to David Golding via Twitter and mentioned that the link to his Cast Away notes was dead. He just tweeted me that it's been fixed! Here it is!

As I recall, the post was something of a distillation of our online conversation, so it may sound familiar.

With the benefit of hindsight and, perhaps, the perspective of 13 intervening years, I have to say that I think David was right on the money regarding Bettina in this paragraph from his e-mail:

My thoughts on the angel wings: Bettina uses FedEx, but she always takes the time to personalise each parcel she sends. As we see, even birthday presents and divorce papers become depersonalised inside these parcels. They're all about the ticking of the clock that leads Chuck. But Bettina subverts that. I think Chuck sees it and recognises a different way of living, a way that he realises is worthwhile before he even adopts it. Bettina already lives in a quiet still place, so we see the destination of the film right at the start, and she's waiting (and not waiting) again at the end. The question of why do the angel wings connect Chuck to Bettina is really the question of why does Bettina make the wings. (I think I'm expressing this poorly.)

That's a remarkable insight, and I'm surprised to read that I didn't recognize it as such immediately. Pride of authorship on my part, I'm afraid. I think it really draws the narrative together in terms of where it all leads. Bettina inhabits a world where FedEx exists, but is not of it.

We're all trying to get off an island.

Easily Distracted

13:32 Wednesday, 9 January 2019
Words: 1146

I recently read about the Warren Buffet method of success, these things always seem to come around at the end of one year and the beginning of another. The method is to write down your top 25 most important goals, and then rank them according to importance. The trick is to work on the top five and ignore the remaining twenty. It's somewhat more cleverly stated in the usual presentation where the unenlightened offers that he or she will work on the remaining twenty as they "have time," or words to that effect. No! You must kill your darlings! Only five! No more!

And no capes!

Which is remarkably similar to Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and the four quadrants.

I'm retired, so I have the luxury of choosing what I want to work on. People ask me what I do with all my time and I usually respond, "Whatever I want."

The problem with having too many desires is that none of them is adequately addressed. So I have been making an effort to focus more narrowly on a few activities. Some success to date, but it's limited. An early win was putting away the Wii U. Now I need to address social media. One thing I like about Twitter is the ability to aggregate certain accounts into "lists." I have a Climate list, a Local list, a State list, a Retro Computing list. I can jump into a list and get a quick update on topics I'm interested in. Local and State are in good shape, pretty high signal to noise. Climate is too large and I need to pare it down. I followed a bunch of people because I wanted to help raise their profile, but it becomes counter-productive after a while.

Facebook doesn't allow you to create lists. Your timeline is whatever "the algorithm" determines, though I've read that you can modify it somewhat. But I really think the next big gain in my retired "productivity" is to simply stop viewing Facebook. So I need to work on that. Maybe I'll confine it to a single window, or a couple of windows, and whatever I "miss" is just a reflection of the transient nature of all phenomena. I'll keep you posted.

Read a post at 3 Quarks Daily this morning about the utility of writing at a typewriter as a distraction-free environment. I can see how that might work, but I'm writing this in Tinderbox, and I have all my other apps hidden. I recently cleaned my Desktop to a plain beige background and three folders, so it's a pretty benign writing environment. I have a couple of links, in this paragraph at least, that I'll have to go back into Safari after I finish "writing" to grab the URLs to incorporate into the post; but I can press on for the moment until I figure I'm "done."

The author of the piece also suggested that the mechanical nature of the typewriter, and the inability to edit oneself easily, makes the writing progress more efficiently. Maybe. I go back and edit myself as I go along, but I don't feel as though it's slowing me down. Sometimes I'll be working my way through a point I'm trying to make and realize I've painted myself into a corner, which is a big part of why I write blog posts anyway, so I'm happy to just delete all that faulty reasoning and start over. Sometimes I don't even delete it, I just don't publish it. I move it up into a "Drafts" topic that doesn't get exported. I used to have one called "The Cooler" where things would go that I wrote in the heat of the moment.

One thing that always surprises me is the number of typographic errors, or mis-writing. I'll finish a post, read it in Tinderbox, export it to an HTML file, then view a preview of that in another app and find errors I didn't see in Tinderbox. Interesting. Even then, they sometimes elude me and I don't notice them until they're "live." It's a pretty straightforward process to just switch from Safari to Tinderbox, edit the post, export the document, then drag the updated files to the server in the FTP app. It'd probably be easier to just edit in the browser as Tim Berners Lee intended, but then I'd have to learn another platform, like Dave Winer's Fargo, and I'm not up for the cognitive load. This is pretty easy, although Tinderbox is like a CNC-machine for text, and a bit of overkill for static HTML pages. It works for me.

Mitzi and I watched Solo on Netflix the other night. Wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I didn't recall that Ron Howard had directed, which may account for it not sucking too much. My favorite character was the L3 droid. Han was okay, but it just felt like young Jim Kirk in the Star Trek reboot. ("Now with more lens flare!") Anyway, good light space opera entertainment. Don't get bogged down in canon.

We also watched A.I. the other night. I'd never seen it before, though I've owned a copy from iTunes for years. It was interesting. Not a profoundly moving motion picture, which is a bit surprising since Spielberg did it. But maybe I've just grown too accustomed to human-like androids with Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, and the like. I suppose it was perhaps more thought provoking in its time.

Watched the playoffs yesterday. The Saints were robbed. I didn't really have a favorite, but I was hoping to see Drew Brees go up against Brady. I normally detest the Patriots, but I have a petty reason for wanting the Chiefs to lose, and I'm happy they did. But the Super Bowl holds no drama for me. I expect the Patriots will win, but I won't care if they lose. I think the officiating in the NFL is horrible, but such is the absurdity of life. Our president is a failed game show host, how can you expect the refs to call pass interference?

Saw the kerfuffle about the high school boys from Kentucky in our nation's capital. A failure of adult leadership if you ask me. High school boys in unsupervised groups are a disaster waiting to happen. Surprise! And yeah, the kid was smirking, and he was an ass. The whole thing would never have occurred if any adult responsible for those children had done what they were there to do, but that's probably asking too much. Like refs calling pass interference. Or the president keeping the government running.

On that cheery note, I suppose I've achieved whatever it was I set out to achieve here. I'm going to devote some attention to some other projects I have underway.

Let's hope we have a decent week.

! Pennyworth

10:50 Monday, 9 January 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 51.62°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 53

Mitzi and I have been enjoying Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman's Butler on HBO Max. I probably enjoy it more than Mitzi because she doesn't care for graphic violence. I hadn't heard any buzz about this series from 2019, but it's remarkably good. Dorothy Atkinson as Alfie's mom, Mary, standout performance. Love it.

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! Jack Ryan Season 3

11:00 Monday, 9 January 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 51.62°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 41

While I'm reviewing streaming series, we watched Season 3 of Prime's Jack Ryan. Meh. Better than Season 2, nowhere near as good as Season 1. I think they should just drop the "analyst" bullshit and make him a "double-nought spy."

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Last Night's Moon 1-8-24

07:31 Thursday, 9 January 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 31.89°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 13.8mph
Words: 567

Off to a slow start this morning as I was up rather late last night.

Caitie was in the evacuation zone for the Hollywood fire. I'd made her a go-bag when she moved out there five years ago, expecting she might need to use it in the event of an earthquake. I didn't expect her to need it for a wildfire. Her neighborhood is pretty "urban," at least as LA goes. But I guess stuff can still catch fire.

She called me and asked me what she should do. I had difficulty figuring out whether or not she was actually in the evacuation zone, being unfamiliar with the street names and the maps the TV stations were showing omitted most of them. Her neighbors were leaving, and she was getting invitations from friends to come to their places, but traffic was going to be a problem since she didn't have much gas in the car.

She got an alert on her phone, which made it pretty clear that she was in the evacuation zone so she started packing and I left her to it and told her to text me when she got someplace safe.

It was only a matter of an hour or so between the fire breaking out and the evacuation being ordered.

I recalled that she's on my FindMy list, so I was able to watch her as she travelled. She headed due south on side roads and she moved pretty steadily. It still amazes me that I can follow her progress like that. I could even watch her driving around, seemingly aimlessly, apparently looking for a place to park. She's south of West Adams street now, so hopefully that'll be safe enough.

I read Kevin Drum's blog, and Heather Cox Richardson's, so I'm exposed to more political news than I would seek on my own.

The amount of bullshit coming from social media, specifically X and the Orange One's vanity project, is astonishing. Social media of the hyper-interactive kind with tens of thousands or millions of "followers" is a disease. Believing bullshit and conspiracy theories is one of the symptoms.

9/11 and the subsequent elective wars demonstrated the futility of the internet to prevent a catastrophe by means of "reasoned discourse." Technology magnifies the best and worst aspects of human nature, but it's the worst ones that get us into trouble. It expands what we do in space, and compresses it in time (it can also do the reverse, but it's mostly the first thing).

I've been "ranting into the void to no discernible effect" for more than twenty years now. Iraq, climate change, Trump, fascism in America, social media, ubiquitous surveillance. Nothing matters.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is a woke cuck.

There are some reasonable, rational people who believe that they're immune to the illnesses spawned by swimming in the sewage of social media. They're not.

But I no longer have any illusions that I can save anyone.

All I can do is look after myself and try to protect the ones I love, and many of them are addicted to it as well.

Everything is about to get worse.

Consider this an evacuation order.

We're headed for the hills in New York. You should probably figure out where you want to be as this plays out to its tragic and inevitable conclusion.

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Depression

07:55 Friday, 9 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 42.96°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 21.88mph
Words: 384

It's nearly impossible to generate any enthusiasm for anything as I witness this country being destroyed by Donald Trump and his sycophants, his mob, his cult.

Who are these people who sign up to work for ICE? Are they damaged? Broken, somehow? Angry? They want to dress up in tactical gear, get guns and run around bullying people? That's what's fulfilling to them?

This "administration." This assembly of clowns. Horrible people. Not a shred of "good faith," or "good will" among them. Despicable people. Liars. Proudly lying. Manifest incompetence masquerading as "leadership." Do they think we're blind? Stupid?

Stephen Miller. Vomitous, arrogant, racist prick. Or, "Assistant Chief of Staff." Because of course.

This civilization is in collapse, and this is just one dynamic of that process. We're not even pretending anymore. "Obey or die," and millions cheer.

Lindsey Graham. Another clown. A caricature. A spineless lickspittle. Proudly submissive, obsequious. Makes me want to puke.

This gets worse, and I don't know that it will ever get better. It just gets worse until it reaches some bottom where nobody cares anymore, because everyone is just trying to survive. I think we've passed the tipping point. It's all accelerating collapse from now on.

Sure, "life goes on." Until it doesn't. There will be a Super Bowl. There may, or may not, be mid-term elections. China takes Taiwan. World semi-conductor supply chains are thrown into chaos. Who knows what happens between India and Pakistan in a world of cascading climate catastrophes. Nuclear exchanges? Probably.

What does an emboldened Russia do?

The tech bros? Delusional. Utterly detached from reality. Or selling swampland to buy time until they can use their fortunes to build their fortresses.

Learn to grow food. Practice good oral hygiene. The future will be full of opportunities for exercise. "Run, hide, fight."

What the actual fuck?

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!

Is this one of those posts I should just delete?

I guess I'll return to "normal" posting later. Pretending that what's happening isn't happening. Writing about how fucked up Apple's UI has become, or the weather, or something super-relevant like that. Oh, like what font the State Department uses. Because that's a hill to die on in some alternative universe somewhere.

And no, I do not feel better now. Thanks for asking.

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