Yes, I’m a few days early, but unless there is a radical shift in the weather in the next few days, we will not only not see snow for Christmas, it will continue to be unusually mild, with most days averaging 10-11C, where the norm is 5-6C.
As I look out my office window, I can see green grass and, well, weeds, but everything is pleasantly green. I don’t need to wear five layers to go outside. I might get wet, depending on the particular time and day. It’s nice.
And yes, could this be climate change? Is this mild weather secretly bad and a dark omen of a crazy weather future? Maybe, but I think this time it’s more due to the effects from El Niño, which came in this year and didn’t really affect summer much (last year’s summer was a lot hotter and humid), but does seem to be taking the chill off winter. And I’m not going to object to that.
Tomorrow it is officially the first day of winter. If it is snowing, I will update this post to add a nelsonlaughing.gif aimed at myself.
Last night I dreamed I was back living in my basement suite at Tim’s old place (I last lived there in 2011), but as is the case in dream versions, the layout was different and it had a hallway where one did not exist before. Apparently we were having water issues. More specifically, something broke or sprung a leak because I was walking through water (rather unperturbed, too. I think I was barefoot and enjoying it in a way).
Rather than have a plumber fixing the issue, we appeared to have an entire crew working on whatever the problem was. One especially cheerful member of the crew stopped to explain to me how the problem was fixed and confirming it was fixed, and they were leaving. Even in the dream, I was curious why the whole place was still flooded. I approached another worker who was moving the fridge (back?) but then it turned out to be a mattress. It may have actually morphed when my sleep-brain decided a mattress suddenly made more sense, somehow.
But the best part was when about half a dozen pigeons flew into the hallway (which was not flooded) and started milling about as pigeons do. This was treated as essentially a normal thing in the dream and I bent down to one pigeon and moved an index finger under its belly, toward its feet, the way you would do to a budgie to get it to hop on your finger. The pigeon hopped onto my finger. I then carried the pigeon around on my finger for most of the rest of the dream.
Then I woke up. It is dry and pigeon-free as I type this, so my dream does not appear to be prophecy–so far.
After a two-year break, it’s time to interview myself again, to see what’s new and/or exciting as I and 8 billion others continue to experience life on Planet Earth.
Previous parts in this series can be found at the links below:
At the end of Part 4, posted June 22, 2021, promised future topics included:
Writing
Drawing
Programming
Other stuff that ends with -ing
Vague promises to discuss dating experiences from days of yore
Not mentioned but implied: More exciting foot news
As always, the interview will be conducted by my doppelgänger, who in this particular interview will be known as Ned.
Ned: Hello again.
Me: Hello there.
Ned: What’s new and/or exciting since the last interview, lo those 30 months ago?
Me: Much has changed. Much has not changed. My underwear has changed. I do that every day.
Ned: Let’s dig into some specifics.
Me: About my underwear?
Ned: …no.
Me: All right. I’m feeling cooperative right now, so seize the moment!
Ned: When last we talked, the world was still in the grip of a global pandemic. How are things now, in December 2023?
Me: I had a COVID-19 vaccination less than two weeks ago.
Ned: So the pandemic is still a thing?
Me: Yes and no.
Ned: Explain.
Me: No, in the sense that life has pretty much reverted to pre-pandemic behavior/reality for most people. Masks are optional, everything is open, and so on. Yes, in the sense that COVID-19 is still around, mutating merrily away, but it’s no longer clogging up hospitals with patients due to vaccines and everyone otherwise catching it at some point. Long COVID is a concern. I’m also unsure if I should capitalize covid or not. Anyway, it’s more a background thing now, unless you’re squashed into a bus with 500 other people, then some guy without a mask next to you starts coughing into your shoulder, and you start thinking about how it would be nice to have a giant hamster ball you could just roll around in public with instead.
Ned: Sounds kind of terrible. I mean, the hamster ball part sounds neat, the rest sounds terrible.
Me: It’s not that bad. I’m sure in a hundred years we’ll all look back and laugh at this pandemic thing, as heads in jars.
Ned: Like on Futurama?
Me: Yes.
Ned: OK, what other big things have changed that you want to talk about?
Me: Define big.
Ned: Pressing global issues and concerns.
Me: Doom.
Ned: How so?
Me: The rise of authoritarianism, the invasion of Ukraine, the invasion of Gaza, probably some other invasions I’m forgetting. The climate is also still getting worse. We are doomed, slightly doomed, or maybe not doomed, depending on what reports you read or which people you talk to. There is generally a fair amount of doom, though.
Ned: How do you cope with all the doom?
Me: I stopped checking the news.
Ned: Really?
Me: Totes for real. Anything truly big still gets to me, so I’m not living in a complete news-free bubble. But it’s nice to not actively and voluntarily read about doom all the time. It makes it easier to relax when I’m having a bubble bath.
Ned: You have bubble baths?
Me: Of course! They are awesome. I do some of my best thinking when immersed in bubbles. I am a fan of Dr. Teal’s bubble bath, specifically elderberry and citrus, both of which smell great. This is not a paid promotion. But it could be. Call me, Dr. Teal, I’ll be your marketing shill!
Ned: So you avoid the news now. What else?
Me: What else do I avoid?
Ned: Sure, let’s go with that.
Me: Social media, by accident. You see, I would always post photos to Instagram and then check it and Facebook when I was tucked into bed every night. Then I thought the blue light from my iPad might be keeping me awake, so I started reading with my non-blue light Kobo ereader instead. My sleeping improved. And then I never found another regular time to check social media, so I just kind of stopped. It’s been nice. Not as nice as a bubble bath, but nice.
Ned: So you are one of ten people on the planet who does not do social media?
Me: No. I still check in every few months. And I am on Mastodon, but the experience there is very different, because there are no ads or algorithm. If I want to see nothing but photos of cats, I can get that on Mastodon. On Facebook, I get an avalanche of ads, a billion “Suggested For You” recommendations that grow increasingly bizarre and questionable as I keep scrolling, then, a lone post from someone I actually know before the avalanche starts again. As an experience, it is gross and awful.
Ned: Have you tried other social media besides Mastodon?
Me: I have peeked in at Bluesky and Threads. I have no idea if Blueksy will amount to anything. They tried making the word “skeet” a thing, which is cringe times five hundred billion. Threads is owned by Meta, so it will eventually be ruined by ads and garbage, just like their other platforms. I deleted my Twitter account, though I rarely used it.
Ned: Oh right, Twitter.
Me: More doom. In one year, it has been transformed into flaming wreckage full of Nazis, conspiracy theorists and racists. Kind of impressive, in a way. Yet it shambles on, because the doom is powerful. But enough about doom. I’m trying to end the year on a positive note and you, sir, are not helping.
Ned: Right, sorry! Moving on, let’s talk about your feet.
Me: I have feet, two of them.
Ned: Last time, you were having problems with your feet.
Me: I am happy to report my feet have been problem-free since then.
Ned: That’s great.
Me: Yes. I have happy feet now. But don’t ask about my knees.
Ned: What about your knees?
Me: I think there’s a strong chance I was awful in a past life, and I am now being punished in this life via my knees.
Ned: Sounds bad. Yet intriguing!
Me: It could also be a hereditary thing. My dad had famously bad knees. Well, not that famously.
Ned: What happened to your knees?
Me: Once I quit my job in IT–
Ned: You quit your job?
Me: Yes. Ask me again later, I may elaborate. Or not. But after I quit my job, I had time to resume a regular running schedule, and eventually was back to doing 10K runs at Burnaby Lake. It felt good to be on the trail again, touching trees and such. I never actually touch trees while running, though. That’s probably dangerous.
Ned: Go on.
Me: In the spring of this year, I noticed my knees staring to get stiff after runs. It got worse. It then got a little worse again. I was concerned my knees would explode or something. I took pictures (of my knees). I went to my doctor. He identified a Baker’s cyst™ behind my right knee.
Ned: That sounds gross.
Me: It is, kind of. Basically, your knee cap has a bunch of fluid under it, to keep it lubricated and allow it to shift around without horrible things happening to it. With my right knee, that fluid was instead pooling up behind my right knee. Sort of a squishy bulgy thing.
Ned: Yuck. Did they amputate?
Me: This isn’t the 14th century, you know.
Ned: I know. I just wanted to say that. So what happened?
Me: I went to a physiotherapist, and he poked and prodded my knees and legs. By the way, when a physiotherapist says they’re going to do apply pressure to a part of your body in a way that “won’t feel great” believe them. Eventually, my doctor and physio guy cleared me to resume running. My knees are mostly better now, but I’m still mainly doing 5K runs, building back to 10K eventually. It’s meant I have run less in terms of distance, but have still managed to run regularly for most of the year. The whole thing lasted longer than the foot thing, but was less painful.
Ned: So you are now fit as the proverbial fiddle?
Me: Well, my weight keeps going up, despite efforts to lose it.
Ned: Have you been on an all-donut diet?
Me: No. But now I kind of wished I had been, because the results may not have been that different, and I’d have had a bunch of yummy donuts in the meantime.
Ned: Any new plans for fighting the fat?
Me: Less snacking. Vaguely hoping for a miracle. Things like that.
Ned: Excellent. Now, let’s talk about that job you quit!
Me: My last day was August 27, 2021, about a week before the school would have re-opened to in-person classes. I was vaccinated, but the idea of going back, and of enduring that commute, was not something that made my socks roll up and down with excitement.
Ned: Did you quit because of the pandemic?
Me: I’d say it accelerated the process. I had reached a point where the work was immensely unrewarding, even boring. I did not want to keep doing it. And the manager of my particular section of IT assured me that there was nothing else for me there, just working on the service desk, doing the same monotonous stuff with no foreseeable hope for promotion or a new role or anything.
Ned: That sounds less than ideal.
Me: Indeed. But it brought clarity to my position and made it easy to leave. Then I left!
Ned: And then what?
Me: I started learning how to program, so I could make my own games. I figured if it didn’t work out, I could just dig ditches or something until my body was reduced to a broken heap.
Ned: Fun! How is the programming going?
Me: Math is hard. I started working with the game engine Unity, then the executives there decided to enact a bunch of idiotic policies and destroy all trust with their users, so I switched to Godot, which is free and open source. I am making progress. It has been an interesting experience. It’s better than having a Baker’s cyst.
Ned: When is your first game due out?
Me: Next year. And by next year, I don’t mean in 19 days, when it will technically be 2024. But some time in 2024. I am keeping the details mostly mum for now.
Ned: That’s quite a change from working at a service desk.
Me: Yeah. I’ve gone from soul-crushing work to brain-crushing. But it’s by choice, plus I get to make my own hours and the commute can’t be beat.
Ned: Let’s talk about stuff you avoided talking about last time.
Me: I hear my kettle boiling.
Ned: You big fat liar.
Me: I’m not that fat. Fine, ask away.
Ned: Writing?
Me: Yes.
Ned: You are writing?
Me: Yes.
Ned: What are you writing?
Me: Mostly blog posts about whatever pops into my head. I also started a Substack newsletter which features some writing. Newsletters are hard. I did five issues, with the time between issues growing more…expansive.
Ned: Is the newsletter dead and buried now?
Me: Nothing is ever dead and buried on the internet. That’s what makes it great. And terrible. But for my newsletter, I decided to reboot it and start again in 2024.
Ned: 2024 seems like it will be a busy year.
Me: You know it, baby. Maybe all this work will help me shed some flab. *sobs*
Ned: I have complete confidence in you, unless you are secretly hiding cookies.
Me: No cookies, except for the internet kind.
Ned: Anything else, writing-wise?
Me: I’ve started noodling around again on my novel, The Mean Mind.
Ned: Aren’t you just the ambitious little go-getter!
Me: With so many plates in the air, I’m bound to, uh…hmm. I think I lost the analogy there. But yeah, I’ll be working on that, too, plus comics and things. And the game. And vacuuming.
Ned: Excellent. I look forward to hearing about the success of your many projects in Part 6!
Me: Whoa, let’s not get crazy here.
Ned: Sorry. A final writing thought to share?
Me: Just this random piece of trivia: I once wrote and submitted a teleplay for Star Trek: Voyager, called “Worlds Apart.” It was decent. And rejected.
Ned: Moving on, you refused to talk about dating last time. Let’s hear you dish now.
Me: Kettle boiling.
Ned: …
Me: Someone is at the door. With my boiling kettle.
Ned: …
Me: What? What is there to say? I’ll give you a very short summary, and you’ll have to try again in Part 6. Or Part 60.
Ned: Fair enough.
Me: I lost about 40 pounds in 2008. I was feeling spunky after this, and started dating again. I had many experiences, that ranged from, “What was I thinking?” to “What was he thinking?” to “This guy seems to want to end the date suspiciously close to the start of tonight’s episode of Survivor.” (It was 2008, people still watched regular TV.) You’ll have to wait, possibly forever, to hear more than that.
Ned: Aw. Just a little more?
Me: If I wrote a book about my dating experiences, I would call it Fruits and Nuts.
Ned: Any other personal, embarrassing experiences you’d like to share?
Me: No.
Ned: Not even one?
Me: Let me think. No. Also: No.
Ned: No?
Me: Correct.
Ned: Until next time, do you have any inspiring words to pass on to anyone reading this?
Me: Yes, actually.
Ned: !
Me: At the last scrum on the last day I was actually working in my previous job as a drifting, directionless slob at an IT service desk (my last two weeks were on vacation, which is a nice way to quit a job), I was handed the proverbial mic. After nearly nine years of being there, I offered my soon-to-be ex co-workers this: Do what makes you happy. Unless it’s being a serial killer. Don’t do that.
Ned: Great advice! See you in a couple of weeks.
Me: What? That’s not in the contract!
Ned: Haha, I’m kidding. Maybe in 2024, the year you do everything.
Me: Maybe.
Stay tuned for Part 6 of this apparently endless interview, coming in 2024. Or some other year. Probably not, like, 2397 or something, though.
This is another test post written in iA Writer (which just had a big, though non-publishing on other platforms, update), and then magically sent to my WordPress blog, where you are reading it right now, if this worked.
Also, here is a photo of some freaky, somewhat face-shaped fungus at Burnaby Lake:
Fake edit: Publishing from iA Writer is clunky and requires clean-up after. iA Writer’s documentation on this is incomplete. I won’t be doing it again, but without experiments, how would we ever blow things up learn?
Her name was Ms Anderson, and she was the first teacher I had who went by Ms. She was very modern. I took Foods and Nutrition (a fancy name for Cooking) with her for Grade 8. Back then–the late 1970s–cooking was still widely perceived as a “girl/woman” thing1I made history at my junior high by being the first male recipient of the year-end cooking award in the groovy year of 1978. This was reflected by my class only having four guys in it (I was one of the four).
Looking back, the three things I remember most were:
A mystery recipe she put on the board, tasking each unit (four people) to figure out the recipe and then make it. There was no internet to cheat with back then. Our group correctly guessed baking powder biscuits. Another unit incorrectly guessed cookies and the results were more akin to lethal projectiles than anything edible. And were treated as such.
The other two were things Ms Anderson said:
Most breakfast cereals are basically candy. It was true then, and I think, is even more accurate now, as a lot of “adult” cereals are very high in sugar content, even though they present themselves as “nutritious.” I still feel a bit guilty when I have a bowl of Reese’s Puffs because of what she said (I only buy them on sale, I swear).
Clean as you go. This is one of those little nuggets of kitchen wisdom that is transformative when you first hear it. I still clean as I go over 40 years after taking her class, and nothing beats finishing a meal with minimal dishes to clean up afterwards.
So a thanks to Ms Anderson. She was young, so might only be in her 70s now, probably retired. I’d love to hear the kinds of stories she’d tell.
They’re also laying off 17% of their workforce (over 1,500 people)
On the second item, I do wonder why they needed so many people. Like many tech companies, they got silly with hiring during the pandemic, so some cuts were inevitable.
But the layoffs, Uruguay demanding fair payment and Spotify essentially saying, “We can’t pay artists fairly and also survive” made me wonder if we’ll eventually reach a point where music streaming transforms from what it is now–a frankly shockingly inexpensive way to have what is essentially endless music–to something else. Some possibilities:
All music streaming services start raising prices…a lot. Let’s call it The Netflix Effect because if anyone knows anything about regular price hikes, it’s Netflix. I think most people would grumble and keep paying as monthly prices climbed from $10-11 to $15. They’d get cranky at $17-18, but would still keep paying. $20 (or, let’s be realistic, what the companies would bill as $19.99) crosses a psychological barrier. We’re now twice as expensive as what people were used to. But still, I think few would bail. In fact, I feel they could raise prices to at least $30 before you’d start seeing people go without, and even those numbers would be small enough to be more than offset by the price hikes. I figure you’d need to hit around $50 a month to really get people to stop. And then we’d probably be looking at Napster: The Next Generation happening.
Streamers that aren’t currently owned by big tech (like Spotify) would be gobbled up by big tech. People idly speculate about Microsoft buying Spotify, for example. Why would this happen? Because the music streaming business is so marginal (Spotify has over 200 million paid subscribers and still manages to lose money) that it’s only appealing to big tech companies that can subsidize the service, keeping it as a way to get or keep people in their ecosystem (people using Apple Music will buy iPhones to listen, etc.1Yes, Apple has an Apple Music app for Android phones, but I suspect it’s a tiny market vs. iPhone)
A less likely scenario is companies giving up on streaming services altogether, and we go back to music as it was 15 years ago, when you listened to the radio (“Mommy, what’s a radio?”), bought albums on iTunes (iTunes, shudder) or went to a physical store to buy an actual spinning disc. I mean, most people would do the latter through Amazon, but you get the point. This would have a couple of interesting effects: I think people would buy far less music and, by that same token, listen to a lot less new music. People would get picky again, and more conservative, sticking more to known bands and performers. It’s even possible the album format could see a revival of sorts if it was no longer ridiculously easy to flip through dozens of songs with a few clicks or taps. Maybe those cheesy CD music compilations would become a thing again. But I think the odds of streaming music going away entirely is very unlikely, so this is really just playing out “What if?” scenarios for fun (but not profit).
Of the above scenarios, I think the first–price increases–is the likeliest. And we’ve already had some recently. I’m sure more are on the way.
For some time I’ve had an informal rule on this blog to write a post per day or what works out to be a post per day by the end of the month (30 days = 30 posts), then I started going a bit overboard and making it two per day.
At the end of last month, I was 16 posts short of that two per day goal, but I took it upon myself as a challenge and cranked out 16 posts on the last day of the month. It was a little nutty, and kind of fun.
I have been even more derelict in posting this month, meaning I would need to add 24 new posts this month to come up to the magic number of 60.
And I am not doing that.
23 more posts to go!
But I will provide another amusing cat image for having read this far:
I wanted a faintly absurd stock photo for this post. Done! Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com
At least going by the promotions sluicing into my email inbox this month. At least I didn’t see eggnog on the grocery store shelf before Halloween. Or I didn’t notice it.
Anyway, happy shopping holiday thing to everyone! I will accept any and all gifts you may wish to send that aren’t alive, harmful or versions of Windows prior to 95.
A little while back, I gave myself permission to post whatever I liked to this blog, with no filters:
Complaints? Sure! Though I try to minimize them.
Lists? I love lists.
Writing prompts? The sillier, the better. My inspiration.
Running updates? These are very skippable if you’re not me, though I started adding photos in the last year so at least there are pretty pictures as you scroll past.
Drawings and doodlings? When I have stuff to show, sure.
Self-referential posts about the blog like this one? Oh yes.
Recipes? No. Or not yet, anyway.
Things I like? Sometimes!
Reviews? I review every book I read, though my book reading cratered with the pandemic. I also review movies, but watch far fewer now, also a change since the pandemic. And sometimes I do not choose wisely, like when I thought watching Moonfall might be a good use of my time.
Other random stuff? I like random stuff.
All of this is a way of saying that I am again having a hard time coming up with stuff to write about, though there should be lots for me to ramble on about. I think I am afraid that anything I write might come out as a complaint because the world is, in many ways, kind of awful (See? I’m kind of doing it right now!) and it feels hard to avoid. I don’t want to just slap on a happy face and pretend everything is groovy, either.
Usually this is where I end with a random cat, but for a change of pace, here is a random sign I photographed a few weeks back1It’s found on the bins in parks for disposing of dog poop. It looks somewhat cooler when seen in isolation :
“Prime Time” is the first song and a single from The Alan Parsons Project’s 7th album, Ammonia Avenue. As songs go, it’s catchy and poppy. I had somehow missed the video, which dates back to the album’s release in 1984, and it’s like “What if that mannequin episode of The Twilight Zone, but as a music video?”
It’s also, in its own way, very 1980s (the thumbnail always makes me think a Village People video is about to start).
Behold the story of mannequins come to life, then try to reconcile it to the song lyrics1:
You can kind of match the video to the lyrics, with a little (lot?) of poetic license: “And it’s a prime time/Maybe the stars were right/I’ve got a premonition/It’s gonna be my turn tonight” ↩︎
