I did that thing tonight where I watched a particular video on YouTube and ended up going on to watch a bunch of mostly-unrelated videos. One of them was Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” which is a catchy song with a well-choreographed video (seriously, it’s obvious the director is meticulously timing the entire video to the actual music, something you don’t see that often).
One of the things I noticed is the video has over one billion views. It was released in 2009 so it’s had time to acquire those views, but it’s still a staggering number.
But more than the number of views, I was struck by the number of comments.
802,810.
If you read one comment per second, it would take you 223 hours (over nine days) to read them all. Also you would be insane.
This was posted on 9to5mac.com, and while many sites covered the story, I like the way they use Facebook’s explanation in the headline, which I imagine is meant to be read deadpan-style:
What an interesting accident. I like the cheek of the person who arranged for the “accidental” printing of a message onto a physical Facebook product stating “Big Brother is Watching.” It’s a great thing to read before strapping on a VR helmet and blocking yourself off from the “real” world.
It finally appears that Kobo has stopped recommending books by Bentley Little to me.
I have nothing personal against Little. He’s a prolific, award-winning horror author. I’m sure he’s a very nice man. Or maybe he’s a monster. I don’t actually know.
What I do know is that I read his book The Store and did not like it. I rated it one star, both in my Goodreads review and on the Kobo site itself. I almost never rate books on the Kobo site.
But because I had purchased the book on Kobo, it kept recommending his other books. As I mentioned, he is a prolific author, so he has a lot of other books that can be recommended. Perhaps I would like one of them, maybe even several. It doesn’t matter, because the one I did read I DID NOT LIKE AT ALL. This killed all interest in experimenting further with Mr. Little’s oeuvre.
If I am wrong, then I feel an apology of sorts is owed to Mr. Little. I mean, on Kobo, The Store has an average rating of four stars. But even if I am wrong, I am still entirely content to never read one of his books again because The Store was so very not to my liking.
And the good news here is that I have now purchased and read enough books to finally push Little off my recommended reading list on Kobo. The moral of the story is, obviously, capitalism works. Buy buy buy and it will all work out in the end.
The Store is currently available on Kobo for the low price of $6.99.
I think about this sometimes, but not often and not in any great depth, because it’s incredibly, horribly depressing.
But when I do, I wonder, what is the default nature of people? Are we inherently generous or inherently selfish? The latter seems better-suited to survival, but since humans are also social, the former would seem to be necessary, too. The general attitude of “I got mine!” would appear to be self-defeating over the long term.
Are we maybe both generous and selfish and these values shift, they ebb and flow over generations, swinging one way, then the other? Does the key to our continued progress–however slow it may seem at times–lie in never swinging too far toward selfish?
I don’t know. All I do know is Trump still hasn’t been kidnapped by Bigfoot, so something is obviously wrong.
My only answer is to be nice to people and hope that due to the butterfly effect, everything will work out A-OK! Somehow.
Translink, the local transit authority, offers a wristband that allows you to tap in and out of buses, the SkyTrain and other transit-y things. I decided to get one but because you can’t transfer funds between Compass cards (or bands) without visiting one of their two customer service locations, I had to wait till the start of the month (this one, April) to put my usual two-zone pass on the band.
This worked as expected and I was set for my morning commute.
I tapped in at Sapperton station. Success. Hooray for technology!
I tapped out at Waterfront station. Success. Hooray again.
I tapped in at the Canada Line Waterfront station. Success yet again. Smiles all around. No more fumbling to get a card out of my wallet. All I had to do now was deftly(ish) flick my wrist at the fare gate and I was set.
But when I arrived at the Langara-49th Ave station, things changed. For the first time in my commute I had someone right behind me as I tapped out. This, of course, was when the wristband failed to work and I got the “LOL Try again!” message. But before I could try a second time, the guy behind me tapped his card. Why he did this, I don’t know. Morning brain? Inability to read? I mean, the message was obviously not for him, as he hadn’t tapped yet.
I was thus unable to tap out. I took note of this, as I’d have to call customer support and have them fix the missed tap out.
I wanted to confirm my suspicions online, but the Compass site was crushed by the first-day-of-the-month traffic and I was not able to get on. Then I left work early due to a weird fire/police situation (see other post for more). Sure enough when I got to the station and tapped, I got an “Insufficient fare” message. I used my Visa card to tap in and tap out downtown, which worked fine, but cost me money I shouldn’t have had to pay.
I went to the customer service at Stadium station and the woman who helped was very nice and switched the stored value of the band back to the card, then, because it wouldn’t process immediately, she gave me a two-zone pass to get me home. Which it did.
When I checked tonight, my Compass card is again showing the two-zone pass and the band is showing $0.
The reasons I didn’t just get the charge fixed and otherwise keep using the wristband are as follows:
It’s actually a little awkward to use the band. The area you need to tap is clearly meant for a card you’re holding in your hand. If you could embed the band in your palm it would work a lot better, plus be futuristic and also gross. If the tap area was on the side of the game as you walked through, it would work great with no surgical implants necessary.
This happened on my very first trip. It seemed an omen. If it had happened a week in, I would have shrugged it off.
I can see this happening again. Because the band is more fiddly to tap and because I travel during rush hour and often have people both ahead and behind me at the fare gates, it’s quite possible the same situation of “tap failed, next person taps before I can retry” could occur again. And again. I was wearing a jacket today, which probably contributed to Mr. Tap Happy’s confusion, as he never actually saw what I was tapping with. When people are rushing through fare gates, they are not really paying attention to much more than MUST TAP AND GET THROUGH.
So I’m back to fishing the card out of my wallet, which is inconvenient, but generally reliable. Maybe I’ll move it to a pocket or something and just hope I never lose it. Or maybe I can find a time travel machine and go into the past and make sure the fare gates never get installed.
Or maybe one day they’ll have the gates automatically detect payment without you having to do anything but walk through them. That would be nice. And probably impossible for another hundred years.
But at least I tried. And I kept the band, just in case.
As I type this it is currently 15°C and sunny. The temperature is higher than the seasonal norm and the season–officially Spring as of today–has debuted in spectacular fashion. After a good six weeks of below seasonal temperatures in the last month and a half of winter, this is welcome indeed.
Flowers are flowering, trees are budding and people are already getting sun burns. It’s great.
Cooler, more seasonal temperatures and showers are forecast for next week, but for now we bask in the glory of an early spring, the restorative powers of the sun providing an extra boost to the trials of a typical work day.
I’m still kind of impressed when the site reports no hits at all, like it did yesterday, March 11, 2019. Sometimes, in a remote and distant way, it bothers me that it can happen, that absolutely no one, not even by accident, will happen upon the site.
But then I remember there’s nothing specific to draw people to the site, there’s no hook, no “omg this site has the best listicles/photos/articles/kitten pics ever” and I’m okay with that, because I never intended for this site to have a big audience. In fact, having virtually no audience is kind of nice in a way. Traffic is low, expectations are similar, it’s more a place for me to exercise my writing discipline (certainly not the quality of my writing) without worry. A journal of miscellany mostly relevant to only me.
Or am I actually crying tears of anguish as I type these words, crushed at being left all alone on the web, which is now 30 years old. Also, how do people put so many links in their posts and articles? That stuff takes serious time.
I am way too lazy to have a good website.
But I’m still posting something every day.
And a random list to complete this post:
Apparently bananas are in danger of going extinct again. This makes me sad, as I like bananas.
I still think it’s weird no one has gone to the moon in 40+ years. It’s right there!
The amount of plastic in the ocean is gross. I had a soda at a restaurant the other day and it came with a paper straw. I could have eaten it, if I’d wanted to, a small step to saving our world.
Even weirder than not going to the moon: I’m actually starting to kind of like the horribly flat keyboard on my MacBook Pro. This would be about the point that it starts failing, so that I may hate it again.
Speaking of Apple, its March 25th event, presumably to reveal its streaming service, excites me in the same way as putting on my socks. To clarify, I find minimal excitement in donning socks.
I hope my efforts to reduce the soreness and discomfort in my knees work, because I can’t afford bionic replacements. Also, I don’t think they exist.
This is the date that The Weather Network is promising Vancouver will reach double digits for the daily high for the first time in 100 years. The temperature is alleged to reach 10ºC. I will lay out my shorts and t-shirt that morning in anticipation. They are also forecasting showers, so I will also include an umbrella next to my shorts and t-shirt.
With spring approaching this month and the promise of un-cold weather in the near future, let’s review Winter 2018/19:
December: This month was a bit of a throwback to winters of yore, which is to say it was relatively mild and not-so-relatively wet. It rained a lot and I spent many-a-minute eyeing the traffic roaring at highway speed along Brunette Avenue, hoping to avoid being sprayed by a giant wave kicked up by an 18 wheeler. I was mostly successful. No snow. Yay.
January: Mild with some cold days and pretty dry. This is similar to a lot of the winter weather we’ve had in recent years. I like it. Only a few traces of snow. Yay.
February. The entire month was pretty much 3-6 degrees below seasonal temperatures. And it snowed. Not once, not twice, but more than that. Some snow was wet and gone the same day, but the last snowfall has become semi-permanent as daytime temperatures have been too low to melt it much and nighttime lows have been consistently below freezing. We had an actual snow day at work. I am kind of over the cold and snow now, so no yay.
Early March has been more of the same, with cold temperatures, though it seemingly got up to 9ºC today. While it has been getting slightly warmer, this has been offset by sharp winds that end up making it feel even colder than when it’s cold. No yay.
If I was actually running outside right now…well, I wouldn’t be, because there is too much compact snow on the trails, as was the case two years ago during The Great Snow of 2017. At current rates of melting, the trails might be comfortably run-worthy in two or three weeks–assuming we don’t get more snow or another polar vortex or a frost giant heavy-breathing over the region for a week.
The final question is: Why are people so fascinated by the weather? I can only assume it’s because there’s no way to avoid it. And getting soaked by an 18 wheeler hellbent on hydroplaning is an experience you are not likely to forget.
I’ll expand on this later, but Google Maps and its street view mode, is incredibly handy for scoping out a place ahead of time (assuming the street view is recent enough to be reasonably accurate).
But you can also use it to travel back in time, in a way, by using a slider to select previous street view scenes, some stretching back 12 years. This may not seem very old, but Google itself only existed for eight years prior. It’ll feel like looking at ancient history in a hundred years, when everyone is driving flying cars.
These snapshots in time can also produce a sense of nostalgia or, in my case, a kind of melancholy.
I used street view to travel around my hometown of Duncan. I last lived in Duncan in 1986–32 years ago as I write this–and while I’ve visited numerous times since then, the frequency of the trips has dwindled over the years and my last visit was in 2011. So I turned to street view to see how it looks now.
Some things are virtually unchanged. The Duncan Lanes bowling alley is still there. All of the schools I went to are still standing, though some have been repurposed. But other things are gone. The 2009 street view shows the small building that housed Paks Grocery, owned by the father of one of my school friends. By this point it was no longer a grocer. By 2015 it was gone altogether, replaced by a new residential complex. I have distinct memories of going there to buy candy and gum, goofing off with friends, and it is odd to think I can never step into the store again.
The same is repeated around the town, with many businesses and places I recall fondly replaced with new buildings and businesses, or, more depressingly, reduced to nothing but a vacant lot.
It’s a reminder of the eternal march of change, and underscores how precious memories are. The Duncan I knew in 1986 is long gone. Where the McDonald’s that opened in 1978 was a major event, the area is now home to every chain store and restaurant you can imagine. The Duncan I grew up in is not preserved in amber, but in my memories and the memories of others. Every time I forget a little detail, another piece of the Duncan I know is gone forever. It kind of bums me out.
The title is a slightly mangled quote from a John Denver song released in 1981. The actual lyric is:
Some days are diamonds, some days are stones Sometimes the hard times won't leave me alone
I have no explanation for my brain’s interpretation of the lyrics, apart from possible confusion with David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. This would be weird, but in keeping with the way my mind sometimes works.
The reason I bring this up is I have been in a bit of a funk all day, literally from when I woke up in the morning, fresh from a couple of unpleasant dreams. They weren’t nightmares (these are extremely rare for me as an adult), nor bad dreams per se, just…unpleasant. One I recall was being with co-workers in some sort of room and a woman from outside our work said something to me that the others could hear that was effectively, “I’m going to deal with you later, you troublemaker.”
I’m not a troublemaker, I swear! The dream never continued on to where the woman dispensed justice/clever put-downs and/or hit me in the face with a cream pie. Or it did and I’ve subsequently blocked it.
But it started me off feeling kind of lousy and I could not shake the feeling for the rest of the day. I can’t shake it now and it’s 9:46 p.m. as I type this. There are other things in the background that are weighing on me (which I’m not going to discuss here, because this is a blog, not a diary, so no dirty* secrets for you!) and they are no doubt contributing to the current funk. Maybe a good night’s sleep will help. Maybe I will draw a cat. Or dream about drawing a cat.
It’s not all bad, though. I feel I am making continued, if slow, progress on a number of fronts, so I say: Excelsior!
