random thoughts

Trite or profound? Maybe both.

I saw this, uncredited, on Mastodon. On the one hand, it’s kind of trite. On the other, I like the actual colour and composition of the photograph and agree with the sentiment. It seems so much of our world is built around competition and while competition is not bad in itself, it perhaps shapes too much of what we do in our society, and encourages a kind of selfishness that isolates us from each other.

Anyway, that’s my deep thought for the morning!

I like Mandarin oranges

We’ve gone through one box and are working on the second. They’re small, sweet and juicy. No seeds, no weirdness, what’s not to like?

Probably the best thing about December.

I haven’t tried any eggnog yet. I’m not sure how it will hold up. It’s kind of the anti-Mandarin orange, in a way.

JOMO

Joy Of Missing Out. I am totally into this. Or not into this, whichever is appropriate.

Sadly, I did not see any attribution to the concept or the illustration. Seen on Mastodon.

If you’re going to be wrong about something, why not be super wrong?

I don’t actually have a follow-up on this, it just felt like a catchy thing to say.

But if I was trying to boil it down into something meaningful, it would be something like this: If you really believed in something and it turned out to not just be wrong, but very wrong, don’t beat yourself up over it, just acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on.

It’s kind of fortune cookie wisdom, but it’s mid-week and my watch told me I’d have a harder time thinking today, so that’s what you get.

But also this artsy black and white photo of my feet next to a pipe by the river edge as a bonus:

Random things I enjoyed this past month, September 2024 edition

  • The song (and video) for “New Sensation” by INXS
  • A Coffee Crisp ice cream bar
  • Toast with strawberry jam, from a loaf of bread I’d just freshly baked
  • An elderberry-scented bubble bath
  • Using Linux Mint without any crashes or weirdness
  • Learning new keyboard shortcuts
  • Getting back into coding/programming (it still hurts my brain)
  • Drawing more
  • Writing more
  • S’mores1Not really
  • Rewatching Gravity Falls yet again
  • Running regularly without my legs falling apart
  • And other stuff

It’s the Olympics! Somewhere! Right now, I guess!

That means everyone in Discord is sharing YouTube clips that look like this to me:

It’s okay, though, the Olympics (in Paris right now as I type this) are yet another major cultural thing I just don’t have interest in any longer. It’s weird, because I don’t know why this changed. I used to watch and even get excited in anticipation of the Oscar broadcast. Now I often struggle to remember the last film to win Best Picture (I do remember this time–it was Oppenheimer, which, like most movies, I haven’t seen. The last movie I watched in a theatre was Pixar’s perfectly fine Onward, in March 2020). In fact, the full list of things that once engaged me that no longer does is both extensive and maybe a little unnerving, because I really don’t know what has changed.

The drop-off in reading has actually kind of disappointed me. It turns out a long commute was really important to enforcing a good reading habit.

On the plus side, I have spent more time doing other things that are engaging or even healthy, like running and drawing. I guess it all balances out.

This concludes my Monday Semi-deep Thought™.

Sometimes when I think

Sometimes I get a jolt of self-awareness, except it’s not really a jolt, it’s more something that gently pops to the fore of my thinking and I ponder it for a moment.

For example, yesterday after finishing my shortened run, I was walking along the top of the Cariboo Dam, which has railings on both sides and is fairly narrow, except for an expanded middle section where one can stand and look for herons. As I began walking across, I noticed a jogger coming down the path from the entrance to the park. The jogger might go straight and head counter-clockwise down the lake trail, or they might hook left, cross the dam and go clockwise instead. I wasn’t sure, but I figured I’d play it safe and paused in the enlarged area midway across the dam, so the runner could easily pass.

The runner did indeed ascend the stairs and ran across the top of the dam. Once she passed, I resumed my walk out of the park.

A simple thing, but it required me to observe what was happening and then change what I was doing for a few moments, to make things a little easier for someone else, in this case a person I did not know and would likely never see again. Am I patting myself metaphorically on the back for being a nice person?

Yes.

Am I doing it to puff up my own ego? No.

I point it out because this thought process occurs automatically to me. Did I inherit it from my parents? To a degree, I’d say yes. They were both kind and thoughtful people who helped others, so I am, in a way, carrying that forward.

But I also think this is how I’m wired. While there are people out there who might clear the way for the jogger, I wonder how many would see the jogger and calculate the possible results and, in a way, pre-accommodate her by moving out of the way before it was known if it would even be needed? Kind of like being pre-nice. Not many is my hunch, but it is just a hunch.

I wish more people could look at situations like this and react the same way I did. I’m an imperfect mess, but I try to pay attention and I always try to be kind to others. And as the last few days have underscored to me, there are people out there that calculatedly do the opposite, who seem to enjoy architecting misery in others in order to preserve what they’ve got. It makes me sad. It makes me a little angry, too, but mostly just sad.

Try to be thoughtful, try to be kind.

Random thoughts, June 25, 2024 edition

In random order, of course:

  • Only six months until Christmas!
  • R.E.M.’s song “I’ll Take the Rain” is lyrically bland and the music is a weird mix of synth strings and other stuff, yet I can’t bring myself to skip the song when it comes up on shuffle play.
  • I don’t remember the last time the grass was so green at the end of June.
  • I don’t trust authority. Neither should you.
  • Facebook, as bad as it was, is even more awful now. I don’t know how any reasonable person can use it, or would even want to use it. “Inertia is a hell of a drug” may not be catchy, but it might be accurate.
  • I am inordinately pleased any time I draw a long, curving line and nail it on the first try.
  • I wish I could swim better, but I seriously doubt I will ever try lessons again.
  • It delights me to see the EU and other countries kick giant tech companies in the junk.
  • Posting on any kind of social media is apparently something I just don’t care about anymore, even on sites that have no ads, no algorithm and you control the experience, like Mastodon.
  • I can never remember how to spell “algorithm”.
  • I should post more.
  • Cats are funny people.
  • It would be nice to spend one day in the pre-internet past, I think. Maybe two days. I like the internet, but, you know.
  • The AI hype bubble may burst before the end of the year.
  • Getting sick still sucks, but appreciating how great it feels to not be sick after is nice (but not worth getting sick in the first place).

Here’s a random GIF I found in my blog’s media library:

Inserting a USB cable