I’m not sure how I feel about this cat being impossibly cooler than me. But at least I still have opposable thumbs!
General
Why are YouTube comments so weird? They are weird.
Or “Nice song…IF YOU’RE DEAD AND/OR DYING.”
The algorithm burbled up Queensrÿche’s “Silent Lucidity” on YouTube, and it’s been awhile since I listened to the song, so I watched the video.
It’s still a very nice song, and yes, it still sounds a lot like Pink Floyd. I submit that if Dave Gilmour recorded vocals for it and had included it on The Division Bell, no one would have suspected a thing. In fact, it might have been picked as the best song on the album. Zing!
Anyway, I started reading the comments because I wanted to see if people were still making the comparison to Pink Floyd (the song was released as a single way back in 1991), but instead I found what almost feels like a parody of YouTube comments, where everyone is proclaiming how old they are for reasons (??) or how the song means something to them because someone they know died or nearly died or maybe they themselves died, which I guess are things that can happen, but most especially happen in YouTube comments. Am I a bad person to find these comments weird? Probably. Here are some samples:
I played this song after I was dealing with health issues 4 years ago. And 3 years later today, I’m now cancer free! 85 years old and music is my life. Just played at my Mother’s funeral. Boyfriend of 6 years only ever played this song for me after he was diagnosed with cancer. PLEASE SHOW YOUR CHILDREN THIS MUSIC I’m a 97 years old man and i love this song so much!!!. OMG Im 55 years old and heard this song yesterday It’s my late husband’s birthday today Reminds me when I was in rehab for a year My mom would play this song for my brother and I when we were younger. She passed away 5 years ago today. This was the first song I heard in ICU after coming off sedation . My late husband practiced and practiced until he got this just right on his guitar. My son is special needs, almost died at 20 days old My dad passed away one month ago because of covid-19, he dedicated me this song when I was just a kid
And an actual Pink Floyd reference!
Una obra maestra a nivel Pink floyd. En mi top 10 de temas preferidos del rock! Translation: A Pink Floyd level masterpiece. In my top 10 favorite rock songs!
Oh, and here’s the actual video, for reference:
On why venting doesn’t work
A few months ago, I stopped reading and posting at Broken Forum, after being a member there since its inception in January 2012. The main reason was pretty simple: I got tired of most threads and discussions being complaints about everything. The forum is dominated by a few voices, and these people are largely given to complain about things. I am certainly not complaint-free myself–though I’ve tried! The last couple of posts I’ve made here have been more negative than usual. Who knew monitor stands could rile me up so much? The general state of humanity is perhaps a bit more understandable.
I came across this article on Slate via Pocket: Venting doesn’t work
Here’s a quote from the end of the article, with some techniques on how to counter the urge to vent. I especially like the imagery of the macarena-inspired technique:
There are lots of other things you can do when overwhelmed by negative emotion. Try “square breathing,” four breaths in and four breaths out, in order to take your body out of fight-or-flight mode. If that doesn’t work, there’s another schoolteacher trick: Cross your arms in front of you like steps five and six of the macarena; make fists, pretending one holds a bouquet and the other a candle; breathe in the roses; and blow out the flame. Psychologists call techniques like this “psychological distancing,” and studies show that they’re an effective way to defuse upsetting emotions like anger. When a modicum of calm descends, try to identify the root of your frustration by asking yourself: “Why am I so upset about this?” Ultimately, anger is like smoke. You have to get at what’s feeding the fire. After sitting with your emotions, move forward by problem-solving, scheduling a future time to discuss underlying issues, or using any number of other healthy coping mechanisms.
I like the excellent timing of this article showing up just after I lapsed into a bit of venty behavior. It’s helped me step back and calm back down. I am not committing to the macarena, though. Not yet, anyway.
Now with less social media!
I’ve removed the share links to social media from the site because:
- I don’t think they have ever been used
- They add code from the sites to my site, and can cause browser issues for people who may be using things like Firefox’s Facebook container add-on
- Social media is bad and should feel bad. I’m just doing my tiny little part to help save democracy. I think.
There are still a few options, though:
- You can still send a post link via email. Yes, email. How quaint!
- You can save to Pocket to read and enjoy later a post later. I have several posts where this is actually not a terrible idea!
I’ve added a Like button, to either boost or destroy my ego. I wonder if bots can click it? I’ll find out soon!I did not like the Like button being slapped on everything. No one should like that much stuff. Removed!
Leaving things
Specifically, leaving one thing–a community that I’ve been part of since 2012, and really, going back further, closer to 2000. This was a break I made as a positive step, a way to help get away from not doomscrolling exactly, more like complaint scrolling.
Here’s the background, in convenient list form, because I love lists:
- It started with Quarter to Three, a gaming forum that originally had two gaming writers as admins, Tom Chick and Mark Asher.
- Mark eventually gave up admin, making Tom the sole admin.
- Tom has some, uh, quirky personality traits that sometimes led to interesting interactions between himself and various forum members. These interactions often resulted in bannings, sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent.
- Eventually (in 2011), Tom seemed to have enough of his own forum and banned…himself! For about four months, the forum was ostensibly run by the hands-off tech guy who monitored the forum software.
- Tom returned and created what amounted to a honeypot to ban more people. He banned a lot of people.
- So many people were banned that an entirely new forum was created in January 2012 for the exiles. It was called Broken Forum (named after the website that hosted it, Broken Toys) and was created by Lum the Mad (Scott Jennings), who was not actually banned.
- Broken Forum grew and thrived in the early days, and experienced many of the issues that typically befall an open forum, with trolls appearing and getting banned. But things eventually more or less settled down, and it was a pleasant place to have conversations about games, tech, entertainment and even politics.
- Lum grew increasingly hands-off for whatever reason(s) and eventually allowed another person to act as moderator for the two (!) politics forums. This person eventually came to effectively moderate the entire forum in Lum’s absence.
- During the infamous Gamergate harassment campaign, a bunch of trolls showed up to attack the female posters on BF. It was as awful as it sounds. The forum was locked down after this.
- After a long while, the forum was opened up a bit, but with stringent new rules in place for new posters. This had the side effect of making it hostile to all new posters, not just trolls-in-waiting, and the forum became increasingly insular as fewer people joined the community. On the plus side, it made it easier to get to know regular posters, because traffic became relatively light.
In the last few years, I’ve come to realize that much of the forum has become dominated by a few voices and there is an unspoken requirement to fit in, to toe the line, not just by following the actual rules, but by following the implicit rules as well. Deviating from these will typically result in a dogpile. I never experienced this directly because I don’t express any particularly controversial opinions and had long ago lost the taste for debate on public forums, anyway. But I did witness it, and it was off-putting.
The other thing I noticed was the complaints. The regulars on BF love to complain about everything. EVERYTHING. There is a venting thread that is thousands of posts long. The tech forum is filled with threads that all have variations of the title, “What has [company] fucked up lately?” And yes, there’s also a generic one as a catch-all for all the tech companies that aren’t big enough to warrant separate threads. There is no real discussion here, just complaints about whatever.
The sheer volume of negativity began to wear on me. Several of the most prolific posters have always rubbed me the wrong way and when one of them started a thread with an especially bitter title, it finally made me sit back and consider if reading the forum was still a good investment in my time. And I found, on balance, it wasn’t.
It’s been a few weeks since I last logged in, and what has surprised me the most is how little I actually miss it. I suppose that means it had become that poor a fit for me. I may pop back eventually, just to see what may or may not have changed, but right now there is no urge to do so. I feel a weird sort of relief at not subjecting myself to all the rants, complaints and negativity. It’s even inspired me to try to be more positive in general, including on this blog. I’m not giving up on writing about bad design or anything, but I am being more mindful of complaining just for the sake of complaining. I want to get away from that and after many years of being an active member of BF, I regret that leaving that community has turned out to be a key part of making this change.
UPDATE, July 26, 2023: It's now been over a year and a half since I last looked at Broken Forum, and I've yet to feel any urge to go have a look. Someone still there asked if I might reconsider, then admitted the forum is much as I had seen it last in January 2022. I did not reconsider!
UPDATE, June 18, 2022: It's now getting close to six months since I last logged onto Broken Forum, and I've still had no desire to check in on it. I installed the LeechBlock extension in Firefox back in January to lock the site out in case I was tempted to look, but it's never been needed, because the temptation is just not there. Again, I think this emphasizes how the forum had evolved into something that simply wasn't for me anymore. And I'm okay with that!
2021 in review: This blog
I counted, using all of my fingers and toes, the number of posts I made to this blog in 2021. My math skills are questionable, but it appears I made 399 posts. If I had known I was that close, I would have written one more to hit an even 400.
Still, it works out to more than a post per day, which is my intended goal, and while one can argue the quality of the content, I’m happy to meet that goal.
Really, that’s the only stat I can be bothered to look up. There was no real pattern, otherwise, just lots of random stuff about everything, as is my way.
About one-quarter of the posts were drawings, which is a new high. I’m happy with that. This year I’m hoping to do better.
On this site itself, the redesign I have planned is still in the works. It’s tricky since WordPress doesn’t really have a way to create and maintain a staged environment. I sometimes think about moving to something else, but would the grass be greener elsewhere, or would it just have its saturation turned way up in Photoshop [nerd joke]?
It’s been over ten years since my first tweet
This is not a momentous occasion or anything. Twitter is one of the social media sites that can be both a dumpster fire and pretty useful simultaneously. Looking over my history, it’s clear I’ve been content to be an observer.
As an observer, I still find people posting screenshots of walls of text composed elsewhere to get around the 280-character limit of Twitter to be weird.
Here’s that first tweet. While I still like the quote, I would not exactly jump at the chance to quote Woody Allen these days. I probably should have known better in 2011, really.
Thinking about it now, I have no recollection at all what my last tweet was. Let’s find out!
It turns out that was my only original tweet. Every other tweet was a reply to someone else and amounts to 12 total. Eight were to Nike Support, which forces you to use Twitter, the other four were inane responses to friends. A captivating Twitter Time Capsule, this is not.
2021: Well, that was a year
As the final days of 2021 draw near, and we look forward (?!) to 2022, let’s reflect on the year that was. And it was a year.
Unlike previous posts, I’m mixing everything together–personal victories, political nonsense, the state of the world and so on. Let’s call it Earth Blend, available for $11.99 at your local Starbucks.
The Good
- I left a job I had come to actively not enjoy (hate is too strong a word)
- I did three and a half months of drawing prompts to start the year
- I did an Inktober prompt. Yes, one. Hey, it’s better than nothing!
- Summer forest fires, while bad in general, only led to a few smoky days in Metro Vancouver, down considerably from previous years
- I ran a lot more than in 2020, even with a late start of August
- I got a mirrorless camera (Canon EOS M50) and have had oodles of fun taking photos with the telephoto lens (nothing pervy, just naked birds)
- Dodged getting sick for another year
- I kept blogging. Funny cats, hooray!
- Contributed art and a trailer to an actual video game that will be for sale on Steam soon™
- Trump is no longer president
- The world did not blow up
The Bad
- Will no one rid me of this meddlesome pandemic?
- The COVID twins of Delta (“more people will get infected”) and Omicron (“everyone you know will get infected”)
- My weight is basically unchanged. It should be down. I blame myself and salty/sweet snacks.
- The heat dome (seriously, I never expected it to be hotter locally than the times I travelled through the Mojave Desert in the summer). 42 °C is pretty warm.
- The frozen dome. Yeah, that’s what I’m calling it. -14 °C is actually probably easier to manage than 42 °C, but it’s still, you know, rather chilly for these parts. We shattered temperature records at both ends of the thermometer in 2021. 2022 will reveal if this was a fluke or the start of a fun new climate trend.
- My fiction writing was, uh, moribund-though I did one writing prompt, so that’s a start!
- I didn’t read as much, since I no longer have a commute. This is both good and bad.
- I got a DisplayLink adapter, so I could fudge using my MacBook Air with dual displays, and have yet to get it working. A minor thing but still technically bad.
- I’m ending the year with sinus issues, possibly related to the cold weather, but likely not related to COVID-19
- U.S. democracy is looking a little beat-up after four years of Trump, the January 6th riots, and 40+ years of Republicans pushing for one-party rule
The Rest
- I still haven’t seen a movie in a theater since watching Onward in the first week of March 2020 and can’t say I miss the experience. I love being able to pause and go pee. It’s especially handy now that the average movie is ten hours long. To clarify, I go pee in the bathroom, as civilization expects.
- Justin Trudeau smelled a majority government within reach and instantly doomed any chance of it by calling an unnecessary election. The result was a Parliament virtually unchanged from before the election, proving the whole thing a waste of time. You’d think Trudeau might learn a lesson from this, but…we’ll see.
- Discovering a prominent anti-vaxxer was living in my building and later died of COVID-19 was a little weird
- I still like lists
Boxing Day 2021
I have no idea what the malls were like today. With snow on the ground, the high temperature of the day being -6C and the Omicron variant of COVID-19 doing a variation of Oprah’s “You get a car and you get a car and you get a car!” with the entire general population, it seems unlikely the stores were packed.
But people do love a good bargain.
I went for a walk but otherwise stayed inside, warm and content to avoid crowds, plague and things.
I did a quick drawing to celebrate Boxing Day, though. In hindsight, I wished I had put flaps on the box. I mean, I still could, but maybe I should just move onto bigger, better boxes.
I’m also thinking about restarting some art lessons, to better ground myself in the basics. I’m a bit rusty.
White Christmas 2021 (not a remake)
As the ancient elders Environment Canada foretold, we have indeed been bestowed with a white Christmas in 2021. It’s time for a list!
Snow good
- It’s pretty!
- Makes things nice and quiet
- I don’t have to drive around in it
- Forces some people to slow the heck down for a change
- Building a snowman helps hone art skills and provides exercise
- Making snow angels is good, clean fun
Snow bad
- If it rains after, snow becomes slush, slush becomes slushpocalypse with continuing rain
- Makes walking around, a task that is normally pretty easy, suddenly and annoyingly more difficult
- I don’t have to drive in it, but others do, and they make the roads more dangerous because Vancouver drivers and snow, amirite? (I am right)
- If it’s snowing, it’s cold. Brr.
- Unless you have proper attire, making snow angels will leave you wet and frozen
And today’s evidence:
Brewing up a bad dream
Last night, I dreamed that I returned to work at Starbucks as a barista, a position I last held 24 years ago. Yes, it’s been awhile.
Here are the details as I recall them:
- The store was either very big or in a very big space. The ceilings were vast, like the kind you would find in a convention hall. The store had two bars arranged opposite each other in a square, but there was something in the square between the bars, so to go from one to the other you had to walk all the way around, which seemed like a vast distance in the dream.
- I was wearing a black long-sleeved shirt and had the sleeves rolled partway up. I think it may have been a turtleneck.
- We were either post-pandemic or in a dream version of the world where COVID-19 never happened, as no one was wearing masks. This was the only nice part of the dream.
- It was very busy. Orders were coming in fast, and I was clearly out of my depth. Everything I knew I’d long since forgotten. A customer asked for a triple, and I looked at the menu board, trying to figure out what a triple might be. He wanted three shots of espresso, of course, something any noob barista would know.
- I don’t remember if this happened, but it seemed like at least one customer remarked about how they knew more about my job than I did–which was accurate.
- I don’t remember how the dream ended, but I do remember waking up and feeling kind of crappy about it. On the other hand, the idea of working retail anywhere again gives me the willies, so perhaps the dream was just my mind’s way of reminding me, should I seek out some additional income from part-time work on the side.
In conclusion, I would like a nice dream about fluffy nice things tonight. Or winning the lottery and not having it turn out to be an ironic horror or something.