https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.3161#d1e687
Cool.
I'm averse to throwing many things away. More because it feels irrational to me to discard useful things prematurely, but also to be more minimalist (minimalise? minimise? minimize? minimalize? minimalizt?), to reduce the amount of waste I generate, to be efficient.
How does holding on to something encourage minimalizm? I'm talking about the case where the object still has real use, and simply discarding it would mean needing to replace it. Preserving the existing instance of it helps save time, energy, and waste. W00t.
Oh, right, so sponges. I like to wet mine, microwave for 90 minutes, then after they cool, drain and soak them in vinegar for a bit. Then they're possibly ready for another week of cleaning. Or ready to kill me? DUN DUN DUN.
I used to romanticize romance.
I also use to consistently write -ise instead. Things change.
Here is an AMV of the song Melodies of Life from Final Fantasy IX. Spoiler warning: contains spoilers if you watch the video; you could just listen, I guess.
This song was very important to me growing up. It captured a lot of my feelings on the concept of love before I ever really loved anyone by choice. Things change.
This past decade, I now wonder at so much cultural media and social understanding of Love. For me, I don't think this song would be healthy to indulge in. I think a lot of things now.
It's slightly terrifying, these machinations of emotion we've built monuments to.
Typos are the children you didn't expect, but ought to love anyway. Nurture your typos. Love your typos. Type your typos.
- The Committee for the Preservation of Autoincorrects
Keep your towels dry. Hand towels, dish towels, bath towels, beach towels, et cetera towels. Dry. Them. Out. Let them breathe. Let them spread out. Stop bunching up your towels. Spread them out and let them breathe, on all sides. Do not put a wet towel on a towel hook. Do not bunch up and toss a wet towel in the laundry. Do not leave dish rags soaked in the sink. Let your towels dry out.
The water wants to be free.
It's been hard to engage with the world, with the news cycle, with current events. I find ways to, to try to act. To act. No try. Act. Like watching a train wreck slowly unfold, pre-emptively. It cannot but happen, perhaps. The limits of x, the limits of human potential. Limitless limits.
Cycles and patterns, I'm sated of their details. Tomorrow might as well be procedurally generated by pseudo-RNG named determinism.
Care about others.
Blogger. Who are you? I mean you, the audience. Who? For whom would I write if ever I did write? Audience. Voice. Forget having a practical, real audience. I do not even have a target audience. Would I write for me? For a specific friend or group of friends? For a non-friend, via indirect communication? I have had all of those audiences before. What is there even to say?
Voice. Where is it? When did I last see it? What were we doing? Was it at a proverbial Christmas party? I open my electronic mouth and only ellipses come out.
...
Voice.
Everything is bones now. Structures. Relationships. Abstractions. Skeletons of reality dance before me. Meatless, like me.
I was once afraid that I would too easily devolve into being the passively entertained. I watched a couple seasons of Supergirl and Gotham; not because I particularly liked them, but they helped remove me from something inscrutable. Was I doomed to chain one aimless spectacle to another ad nauseum till doom?
No, it would appear not. Attention. Audience, voice, and attention. Where has my attention gone. My average attention over the past 3 decades might have remained approximately comparable. Perhaps actually sharper now than at some points. But not for TV. Not for Netflix. Am I sated? I play some video games, and they are never as engrossing as they once were. Still are, but fleetingly. Then a chore. A chore to play. Play.
Play. One of the two people that I ever chose to love is obsessed with the concept of play. It's important. Important to not lose as you mature and decay. Play. I think I got that even without extra guidance. I had a harsh reminder of its importance once, when I realized I failed to play enough. Play. Now it requires effort. Work to play. I'm still grateful for it. For play. Even if it requires work. Sometimes it doesn't, and that is a delight.
Audience. Voice. Attention. Play. The bones of my thoughts.
I believe that She-Ra may officially be my favourite television series to date. It's hard to say that, as some media fluctuate a lot over time, or have different favourites that meet different needs. But sometimes it's clear. Scott Pilgrim v.s. the World is clearly my favourite film since I was first taken to see it in theatres. Breath of Fire II has been my favourite video game since elementary school.
Some past favourite televisions shows or candidates have included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sailor Moon, the Vision of Escaflowne, (maybe even Last Exile?), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Orphan Black, and (very recently) I am not okay with this. Some of them may still be favourites within certain specific categories. I'm probably missing a dozen series right now that have been formative but whatever reason escape my memory at this instant.
It's also hard to say, as there's a strong recency effect. Often I'll see a movie and be in awe of how perfect or amazing it was, but a week later, the feeling has subsided a bit. I felt that way a bit about Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and it subsided a bit. I felt that way about Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens, but it remains one of my favourite Star Wars films. My favourite films are much easier to list, though. My top five include: Fucking Åmål, Garden State, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Amélie, Excalibur, Zootopia, and the aforementioned top of the list, Scott Pilgrim v.s. the World. (Don't try counting those.) What happened to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou? I'm not sure, but it was on the list once.
Music also jumps around a bit. Aqua, Evanescence, the Human League, Josh Ritter, The Frames, Grimes, and now Kitzl.
She-Ra has had five seasons, which is a lot. But the first episode aired in November 2018, which is recent. 5 seasons in 18 months. A strong recency bias. But, it's so re-watchable in a way that still hits hard each time. I don't think I've cried this much due to a story in long time (or perhaps ever so much, with Sailor Moon perhaps being the second most moving?). Its characters have a depth and richness that I often feel lacking and they have priorities I care deeply about.
I haven't cried much in the past 4 years for a variety of reasons. I think about that a bit here and there. It's been very important for me to able to empathise with characters again so strongly. I'd talk about specifics of the story that contribute to this, but as I'm adamantly against spoilers and I adore this show so, I won't. Let me know if you ever watch it, though. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings to share.
Something fairly depressing in the realm of technology is the lack of monotonic progress messaging has made in the last 30 years.
Recently, Instagram finally started supporting messaging from the web (theverge.com). It still doesn't allow me to organize messages by archiving them, though.
Facebook Messenger lets me archive them and message from the web or my phone (yay), but it's horrible trying to actually read their history; trying to search or browse back in time is incredibly painful. That was something that used to be so easy a decade ago.
Every few years, a new messaging platform rises up, and with it a classic set of limitations. How many times have I been compelled to use a new platform to find that, once again, group messaging or video chat aren't available? Or that there isn't end-to-end encryption?
I briefly had hope a decade ago when it looked like XMPP was going to help standardize messaging protocols and that I'd finally be able to interoperably chat with friends across networks. Now they're more siloed than ever before. I almost hope for Facebook to integrate Messenger, Instagram Direct and WhatsApp so that people will stop pestering me to install yet-another-privacy-violating application.
On a positive note, I really enjoy per-message reactions that a few services like Facebook Messenger and Signal now support.
Java 13 is coming out in September, and, as usual, IntelliJ IDEA is ready for it. The IDE provides support for the Switch Expressions preview feature (JEP 354) and its new syntax, and for the Text Blocks preview feature (JEP 355).Yes, Java will soon support multi-line String literals and more compact and versatile switch statements/expressions. Wahoo!
I think a big reason I blog less these years is because I don't spend much idle time at a full computer anymore. There's also a much more significant reason in that I feel like I've figuratively lost my voice (what is worth saying anymore?), but using the Blogger app on my phone has been unsatisfying for a variety of reasons.
It would be easier if I could set up some shortcuts on my phone's home screen to pop open the composer with some different pre-templated text. E.g. for my general posts, have "[General] " in the title box and #General in the labels. Alas.