Two things:
If anyone in the future ever wonders when the fall of civilization began, I’m pretty sure it will be answered with, “When everyone on YouTube thought goofy faces on thumbnails would make people watch.”
I made a terrible mistake. Actually, I made two terrible mistakes:
On the other hand, I’m now a Sr. Gemfinder1This is kind of a dumb rank. I mean, the screen is literally filled with gems. Or maybe it means I’m a senior, age-wise, and because of my old and ailing eyes, I should get an award for just seeing the gems at all., see:
I mean, I don’t need to be solving the climate crisis or brokering world peace here, but I feel like I should be doing something more substantial.
I have a solution! I’ll switch to the Mac. There’s no Bejeweled there!
Right after just one more game…
I told you it was a short list.
This post sponsored by Post Something Positive!™
It means coming back from the grocery store and realizing I forgot to get the main item I went there to buy. I get everything else, just that one more thing…
This is why it’s important to put everything on your shopping list and not assume your giant brain will remember anything not on it.
I knew I should have added dishwasher soap to the list. Do I really want to go back just to get it?
I got an email from Kobo this morning, titled thus:
Except I have not finished reading Fairy Tale (for those wondering, it’s the generically-named latest novel from Stephen King). I’m reading the book on a Kobo device, so Kobo knows I’m reading it…yet apparently is just guessing that I am done, maybe based on how much I’ve been reading per day? (I didn’t read last night because my nose was being super mean to me.) Or maybe the email is from the future where I have, in fact, already finished the book. Or maybe this is the fault of AI because it’s everywhere now, and who knows what it’s getting up to.
Anyway, this is my 63rd post of the month, and I have given myself a made-up award for posting so much, even if most of it is nonsense. Maybe especially because of that1Actually, the real answer is I gave myself permission to basically post anything I wanted, no matter how trivial, weird or silly. I’m enjoying it so far..
An article on the alleged new Pride Apple Watch band and face has comments disabled (see screenshot below).
The only plausible reason I can think of (as they allow political discussions on the Macrumors forums) is the editors don’t trust their readers to not be bigoted trash.
But I’m open to other explanations, too!
Sometimes I think if we truly figured out the human brain, it would be the end of humanity.
That’s my deep thought for today.
First, it would be cool, if somewhat corny, if I could play the actual fiddle musical instrument.
Alas, I cannot. I can barely play a kazoo.
But I do like non-musical fiddling, and this occurred to me while I was adjusting the fonts and icons in Obsidian, two things that have no real effect on how the program works, but make it look nicer or more personal.
I mean, I love these little custom icons I added through a community plugin (certain folder names redacted). They’re cute, and also functional, because I am a visual person. And yet I have probably spent way more time fussing over them than would seem logical:
What does this say about me? That I’m a silly person? Probably. That I care about aesthetics? Almost certainly? That I am a fiddler? Oh yeah.
Yeah, it’s not spring yet, but I feel like my brain could use a good spring cleaning. Lately, I’ve been coming up empty for writing and drawing. Is it the time of year? Is it lack of sleep? Is it some other unpleasant thing in my life, like mismatched socks?
I don’t know.
So consider this post a cry for help.
But also, here’s an amusing cat image:
Recently, I’ve been feeling nostalgic and watching old episodes of Siskel and Ebert on YouTube, having regularly watched the various incarnations of their show when they were still new, going back to the 1890s or thereabouts. Siskel died in 1999 (Ebert was felled by cancer in 2013), so it’s closing in on 25 years since they last appeared together reviewing films.
One of the things that struck me in watching them, captured in that timeless way old TV shows have, is how life is as much about loss as it is about anything, especially as you get older. Your life is framed increasingly by losses. Sometimes they are cruel–how Ebert must have felt to lose Siskel at the young age of 53–and sometimes they’re just silly, like losing your hair. And sometimes the losses simply have that weight of inevitability to them, as when an old actor or musician succumbs to old age and your mind shifts from thinking of them as here and now to being in the past, forever locked there.
But the losses can be other things. Your childhood home might be replaced by an apartment building, your old neighbourhood all but unrecognizable as time sweeps away what once was. You realize that the pace of change is relentless, that so many things we take for granted as always being there are far more ephemeral than we realize.
The McDonald’s in Duncan seems eternal, though.
I remember riding my bike through the freshly-paved parking lot with a friend the day before it opened in the summer of 1978. It’s still there today, 45 years later, though it looks contemporary, thanks to a remodel a few years back. No matter what else changes in Duncan–and Google’s Street View confirms that so many things have since I moved away way back in 1986–there are some places that seem to just stay on forever.
I don’t really have a neat wrap up for this, and I’m not saying getting older is a downer because your life becomes filled with all the things you lose, it just struck me tonight when watching Siskel and Ebert dissing on what would be Gene Wilder’s second-to-last movie as one of the worst of 1990, that so much of our lives is impermanent, even as we don’t realize it until much later, when we begin to look back.
Except that McDonald’s, of course.
As of today, I have logged into MyFitnessPal for 3,600 days:
That works out to 9.86 years. I’ve been logging in since I had hair.
When we were in Manning Park back in 2017 we had no cell reception. The place is, as they say, off the grid. But north of the campground we were staying at by Lightning Lake was a mountain called Blackwall Peak. We drove the long switchback-filled route to get to the top, and right at the apex was…a large Telus cell tower and building. I was able to get one bar on my cell phone and keep the MFP streak going.
I later found out that if you logged into the app during days you had no connectivity, they would comp you for them later through support. This was later still built-in to happen automagically once you had connectivity back. I think my streak was in the 800s back then.
The weird thing now is I don’t really care about the streak anymore. In fact, I’ve been on the lookout for a better tracking app but so far I’ve found none that are a worthy replacement, despite its flaws and niggles.
Anyway, just a random thing I noticed today.
Here’s a shot of me preparing to throw my mid-summer snowball, with the cell tower behind me.
