I’m an excessively simple person with limited bandwidth. For as long as I can remember, I’ll have one big interest at a time, and that’s it. Maybe one big interest and one supplementary one.
It can change from day to day, but I tend to go on days-long benders of interest, so I’ll block out whole “past interests” for weeks at a time.
Egregious is one of those interests, and I mostly work on it when I’m in a worky-thinky mood but I’m not deeply into another thinky project. It might coexist with crochet or drawing, but usually not writing a book.
Writing a book is where I am now. I’m still trying to finish Insomniac Cafe. But truthfully, I haven’t been working on that a lot either: it’s the highest thinky priority, but access to time and bandwidth for anything thinky is extremely limited right now.
It’s the end of the school year for Little, for one thing. My spouse has been working a lot so I’ve been primary parenting on some days. With the onset of summer, that’s going to be a lot of my attention, and there’s no two ways around it. But I’m also back in the gym a little bit. Gym takes a deceptive amount of time because I also have to focus on getting enough protein for muscle synthesis, transporting myself to/from the gym (I hate driving), showering, outfitting, the actual workouts, etc.
Games have also been gobbling my time. We won’t talk about how much Red Dead Redemption 2 and Bitlife I’ve been playing.
Point is, Egregious remains eternally in the queue of Things I’ll Get Around to Doing, but it’s pretty far down the list at the moment. I’m not gone. I’m just not always here. Even though it’s been a while, I’m not catching up on links in this post; I’m on my way outside the house, so here’s just a few observations.
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They’ve announced a new DOOM game for 2025 that looks incredibly ridiculous. (Engadget) I started out scoffing and then I started laughing and I don’t know! Maybe it’s just ridiculous enough. I’m a ridiculous person. If it’s as stupid as it looks (it looks REALLY stupid), then I might actually like it.
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Kenan and Bowen from SNL did a thing in Variety where they discussed SNL’s various controversies, in part. The impression I got from it was the guys saying, “Please leave us out of this conversation.” There’s a lot of Matrix dodging actual answers to anything.
I mean, when SNL has been so dominantly white over the years, is it really fair to ask a Black cast member and the gay Asian cast member to take the burden of responding to the stuff notorious shark Lorne Michaels allows? SNL is the McDonald’s of New York comedy. The pockets are deep, and it’s been less common for nonwhite and not-straight to dip into those pockets. Shouldn’t they get to do their jobs and collect their paychecks, if anyone does?
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NPR reports on how *utterly baffling* it is that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed in public schools. You mean schools where we pack thirty children into rooms without any sort of disease mitigation issues in an era of heightened sickness and ongoing pandemic? Weird!
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I’m always struck by how modern humans (or Americans, at least) think that we’re so much better or different than past humans, and how seldom that seems to be true. In many ways, we’ve just been incrementally refining things that other humans have been up to for a very, very long time. This thought today provoked by Ancient Egypt attempting surgery for brain cancer. (Ars Technica) Here’s another article on the same subject from Quartz.
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I’ve been working on a bit of a compost pile and following around conversations online about them. One frequent complaint is how much plastic finds its way into compost — especially produce stickers. So it definitely caught my eye that Tesco is looking at laser tattooing avocados instead of stickering them. (The Guardian)
I’m also on this cultural wavelength: killing lawns in favor of more environmentally friendly options. (NPR) I’m killing off my backyard right now. The plan is to put something like clover in its place next year.
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Al Jazeera English has a video about some younger folks ditching smart phones and general connectivity. This has been on my mind a lot because I’m probably leaving the Apple ecosystem after one last phone upgrade. This piece is a lot about reclaiming time — no longer falling into dopamine holes.
For me, it’s the general disrespect and way my data is being used. I don’t like the direction of AI-powered phones (Quartz), and it seems like they just expect folks to swallow it. The alternative is to opt out. I’ve spent literally my entire Millennial life on devices since home computers were even available. It’s wild to feel so sick of it. But here we are.
