Week of Feb 2: I’m just sayin’ that anything can be pickled

I can’t even remember most of this week. Caretaking and doctor’s appointments make up the bulk of the activities. Between that and the occasional snow clearing, my body’s been hitting the bed exhausted every night. The resulting deep sleep certainly has a rejuvenating effect on my energy levels, but my old bones take advantage of my prone state by going stiff. Thankfully I’m still young enough to work it out with some early morning movement, but it’s hard not to feel like you’re carrying the crap of the world in your body. It doesn’t help having to dodge the constant flow of negativity in my immediate surroundings. But, even if you get baited into an argument, you have to try again the next day to be the person you know you truly are.

Also, fuck it.

HBon mot of the week:

“The day got away and now I don’t wanna do nuthin’. I did eat some pickles though.”

Links of the past week:

• “So what is the alternative? If we log off, what exactly are we supposed to do instead? How are we supposed to get information without constantly raising our antennae into the noxious cumulonimbus cloud of social media?” You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Janus Rose, 404 Media

• It’s rare that a car makes me stop in my tracks (aside from literally hitting me), but I remember seeing a car in the parking lot with this color. I kept telling myself to look it up, and this week I finally did. This red is such a showstopper. It’s magnificent in person! The story behind “soul red crystal metallic.”

• “The Clinton era shifted Democratic rhetoric in a way that conceded the conservatives’ position on government; the only point of contention was that only Democrats had the wonky technocratic juice to run it properly.” Primary Every Democrat | Meredith Shiner, The New Republic

• I spent some time later this week trying to restructure my Obsidian vault and only succeeded in not getting anything else done. I do recommend No Boilerplate’s video if you’re thinking about using Obsidian or starting some sort of personal knowledge management system.

• You can interpret his gurgles and farts anyway you like!We are all so willing to contort the entire world into the gorilla channel for this fuckhead. The sad thing is, he doesn’t really care about any of this stuff. Even his recent announcements about Gaza, his ideas about a “Riviera” or moving the Palestinian people to a “nice place” is just his riffing off the only ideas he’s ever had, land grabs and development. He’s not a builder, but a developer: a middleman who’s just one step above a contractor (whom he never pays) who gets to call himself a mogul (or, like his work wife “founder”) and point to something someone else built and say, “I did that.” He cares about land only in as far as he can imagine building a hotel on it. It’s not that he’s not serious (at least in his own head), it’s just he’s so intellectually shallow and single-minded, every evil troll in the world has figured out how to use that to their advantage. The biggest problem this term (the terminal term in a lot of ways, none of which are hopeful) is that the evil trolls are inside the house. How is it genocide where we’ve build the biggest and most beautiful casino?

• I Finally Figured Out My Decade-Long Reading Slump | The detriment of being “pulled along by the plot” where the author described the contentification of novels. I don’t wanna end up getting fried on Bookthreads, but I kinda agree.

• “If you have an iPhone and don’t want Apple AI monitoring/reading/learning from every single app you use, you need to make these changes (not just for Signal).”

Photo by Dale Jackson