Time Theft

Sept. 2

• Now I’m to that point where I think I have notes that could be part of a list in two or three different places.
• But I’m in the recliner and I don’t want to get up to find a notebook.
• Or get my computer glasses.
• If there’s anything that could put a dent in one’s GenX creds, it’s reading glasses.
• Then the dogs demanded food.
• So I got up to do that.
• This is what you want, right?
• Play-by-play.
• Announcer One: “And he throws the paper towel toward the can and it’s … no good! He missed again.”
• Announcer Two: “It’s been decades and he’s still not practicing that. I think we can anticipate continued failure.”
• Announcer One: “You’re probably right on that.”
• How horrible would that be?
• Would you do it for, say, one million dollars?
• How much would …

Sept. 4

• That’s what my life’s come to.
• Journals and lists half-finished, ephemeral thoughts lost to brain damage and time.
• This is the real reason I haven’t started Substack or Patreon pages.
• Squirrel!
• Time theft!
• I had two thoughts falling asleep last night.
• First: paint colors for various rooms in the house.
• That banal gray’s gotta go.
• Second: Life Plans.
• Being the age that I am, the tick of the clock echoes loud in my mind.
• All the things I wanted to do but haven’t.
• The undone, I understand those are my fault.
• I never had a plan, and when you don’t have a plan, you end up eddying, spinning in the stream, going nowhere, or somewhere, just not a where of your own.
• I feel the lack keenly.
• The urgency.
• One of the things I promised myself in the ICU was to stop wasting time with things that don’t fulfill me.
• It sounds selfish to type it aloud.
• The world demands a profession, production for stakeholders.
• You don’t get a roof or food or leisure if you’re not producing.
• It gives no fucks if you’re happy.
• If you’re enjoying your time on the blue marble.
• The inability to break free crushes me.
• Gets my brain trapped in a miasma of aimlessness.
• My most “felt” line in movie history?
• “I must get out of here. I must get free.” Agent Smith, The Matrix.
• (No, don’t put me on suicide watch. I don’t roll that way.)
• But that feeling of being trapped by debt and jobs and money.
• Fuck.
• Someone’s telling you what to do.
• Always.
• Just me?
• Cool.
• I saw this chart yesterday … the other day … a day this week … that talked about traits associated with both high and low life satisfaction.
• Had a lot of both.
• But with age, there’s this evolution of wants I’m experiencing.
• I don’t want a lot of things anymore.
• I’ve talked about this before, right?
• I’d rather have trips and memories.
• The craving’s still there for things.
• Like we’re addicted to the next new thing to own.
• Shirts.
• Bags.
• Cars.
• Phones.
• Beds.
• (I do want CDs and Blu-rays, but that’s a different issue.)
• (That’s about subscription freedom.)
• (Okay, it’s not a different issue.)
• All kinds of shit that won’t last and doesn’t really give us anything.
• Hell, isn’t everything designed with planned obsolescence these days?
• Here I am, complaining.
• Kinda.
• Lowers my life satisfaction.
• One of the things on there that grabbed me.
• “Respect for Authority” on the good side.
• Which made me ask the question, “Did they check the responses vs. intelligence?”
• Sigh.
• Well, goddamn, if this isn’t a joy to read.
• Heh.
• Sorry, sorry.
• Theme of the week maybe?
• Mark and I had this conversation today about games, specifically about Helldivers 2, Call of Duty 7, Battlefield 6, and Delta Force.
• Yeah, sorry, I’m a shooter at heart.
• But most of what we talked about was how much greed has wrecked video games.
• CoD and Battlefield were Maddenized.
• Crank out one every year for reliable profits for the master control company.
• Money’s made a joke of CoD in particular.
• It’s a hardcore military shooter where you can skin your character like a literal cartoon.
• Greed kills innovation.
• EA is like that company in Ready Player One.
• Video games combine numerous different kinds of creativity to produce … fun.
• Engineers and coders have to get creative with their technical expertise to make a playable product.
• Traditional creatives – writers, artists, composers – take the tech and breathe life and humanity and cleverness into it.
• If it’s all the same, they’re missing the point.
• Less for more!
• Shrinkflation is real.
• Like, we’re addicted to Hostess Donettes.
• A year or two ago, they took off that metal closing tab on the top of the bag.
• This month, the made the bags smaller, added more ink to the packaging so you wouldn’t notice, and reduced the number of donettes you get by three.
• Hostess! Engaging in Shrinkflation! You thought we wouldn’t notice, but … we did.
• Well, fuck it. We’re on a rant. Let’s keep going.
• I’m not sure this next part actually is.
• I remember back in the day, because of iTunes … I became anti-Apple.
• The ecosystem was too locked down.
• And I never did buy into that “it’s better because it’s simpler” nonsense.
• I was Microsoft for Life.
• Or so I thought.
• The slip started when they killed Windows Phones.
• Ended up on Android.
• Now I have … hell, I dunno, four gmail accts?
• And I’m on my third or fourth Pixel with GoogleFi.
• I wrote about getting a Mac as my work computer, which lead me to getting a Mac to replace my Surface tablet, though I do also have a Windows rig for gaming.
• Oh, and the Xbox.
• I made a joke about this to Steph earlier, but … looking back, it’s what I wanted.
• I’m free of any one ecosystem.
• Free to choose which to use for what thing.
• I still don’t own a Playstation.
• Won’t, because, you know, I don’t really want one.
• And we’re back into the Problem of Things.
• Cagetalism.
• Break the ecosystem!
• I’ve looked into setting up a personal Cloud system for the fam.
• Everything costs money, but in the long run, I like being free of their system.
• And I like not having AI helping by reading all my things.
• Ah!
• I don’t have control of these things.
• This is what happens when the product has a life of its own.
• I imagine this is how authors felt when they tell you the characters took the story away from them.
• What will the next bullet be?!
• The fuck if I know.

No movies, books, shows, or music. We did get some vidya games. We’ll see what happens next. Stay tuned.

Oh yeah, new blog template. I’m not sold. I miss the pics. Oh yeah, I had this link about the goodness of being bored as told by a Harvard prof.