Same.

There’s a song by the Armenian band Ladaniva that’s just a few lines about a mountain home with a table that sits under a fig tree for the season. It’s relatively vague imagery with beautiful haunting vocals. Makes me ugly weep every time. No idea why. It’s the only song that has ever affected me like that. But there’s something about the idea of just a homey, simple life and how gar away that is that makes it seem all the more important.

Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.

I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.

Yeah, same with my dad. Best thing that ever happened to him was a Nigerian scammer tried to hijack his account and FB suspended the account for 6 months.

But then a week later he had some new account with no friends just for the reels. ಥ_ಥ

Wait…purchase? With what money? All that savings from Elon’s DOGE fantasy that hasn’t done anything yet?

Zuck just realized that his main FB user base is older conservative people that he can either lose even more to X and Gab, or he can let FB turn into the wild west the users want.

His IG user base is stable, young, and left-leaning. So he still has those users in another segment of the business until some mass exodus to pixelfed that won’t every really happen.

Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.

Oh…

I’m also not getting them.

Are…are we robots?

Or are we too human for the robots?

The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.

Exactly this.

Rule of law is dying, and things like this are what will kill it dead. Thinking you can put a stop to this with lawyers is for the naive or the wealthy.

Not at all. Trying to exist in the modern world is exhausting.

The world now is an attention economy. What you have of value that everyone wants is for you to see just one more thing. Click just one more link. Smash just one more like and subscribe button. Respond to a text immediately, otherwise you might be dead. All of these things exist in a space where they assume the world is only you and them in that moment.

It’s really important that people start to learn how to unplug. Even just for an hour or two a day, exist in the world where you control the stimulus. You can go for a walk and leave your phone at home. Or turn it off.

Also consider seeing your phone to greyscale during certain times of the day. It helps as well.

Just a civilian guess, but 2 or 3 Delta V or Falcon Heavy to put 1 payload into LEO with a command module and lander, then 1 booster with fuel. Short of using prototype lander, fabrication would take months at best. Then a Starship or SLS to get a crew, food, and water into orbit.

“Please update your credit card and subscription to access premium colors such as red!”

It’s not even that.

The technology never, ever works as well as it’s hyped. It’s a sales ploy, not a feature.

The purpose is always data collection, and the data is always leaked.

Vulnerabilities and the progression of tech make these kinds of bells and whistles age out of practical use faster, costing the consumer more over the long run.

F this kind of noise in particular, this is not progress.

Well, there’s always me after 3 whiskeys.

Greece. Food is usually good, but spice is a totally foreign concept.

And Mexican food in Greece is hilariously bad. Like they can’t even Google a picture of nachos?

Once years ago when I used to smoke, on was visiting Ghana and people were literally yelling at me for smoking in public. It’s illegal to smoke in public in a few African countries at this point IIRC.

Ugh…Just laying on that couch… Can’t defeat natural causes with a wooden stake.

The gut punch was Gina Torres, and Zoe not being allowed to grieve and be with Wash.

I watched Serenity again a couple years ago, and it was just as harsh and abrupt as I remember it. It’s a hard emotional jab at anyone who has ever loved a partner that’s a part of their everyday life.

Depends on the origin, but a freshly fermented and dried whole bean from the farm is like light drugs. Your heart skips a beat, you inhale, you smile, and life gets noticeably better.