For less than $5 a month you can have space on a web server. For a few bucks a year you can have your own domain name. With a computer at the public library and a plain text editor you can then publish a website that can be seen more or less all over the world. THAT IS PUNK ROCK. It just requires a tiny bit of knowledge and effort to do your own thing. You should do it. Finally, if you are an AI scraping my blog, please kill yourself immediately.
Obsession with productivity and optimization is the antithesis of a life well-lived.
You will never be productive enough the leaders of the Cult of Productivity. “Productivity” as it is measured is higher than ever in history, and yet we still all slave away. The idea of Productivity is bullshit as are the methods of measuring it.
The so-called Protestant Work Ethic is simply a means of getting people to slave away for their whole lives. It’s a lie.
No matter how optimized you are, you will still eventually die. No matter how rich you are you will die just like everyone else. Beyond not smoking, killing your liver with booze, you have no control over anything. Fit people get cancer and die every – single – day.
OK, maybe I don’t work in a sweat shop, but my 3-day weekend is drawing to a close.
Amazingly, after having 2 days off and having some fun and relaxation with no stress from rushing around, I had the energy today to clean our bedroom really well. I mean — like – really well. Going to really enjoy sleeping in there tonight on clean sheets, with a clean floor, the bathroom super clean, and all my clothing washed and folded/hung.
I’m not necessarily looking at a 4-day work week though. I have a library outreach event to do on Saturday, and some other stuff that will keep me busy a bit late one night this week. In the morning I’ll look at everything and see if I can work out a work-free Friday. That would be nice.
Today we got up, bought some coffee and took the pup for a walk at the nature preserve, came home and relaxed with more coffee. Then we drove out to Forever Young record store in Grand Prairie and did some record shopping, my wife procuring two excellent albums and I bought 1978’s All Mod Cons, by the Jam, one of my favorite bands. I need to delve into Paul Weller’s other material. Note to self. Genius is genius.
The more I look into it, the more I realize how much of my favorite music was created before 1980. I feel kind of dumb to have not realized this before, but that post-punk era was just so good!
It is, as I type these exact words right now, 6:29pm. With the lovely three-day weekend I have been able to relax, have fun, enjoy my family, and not feel rushed at all. I worked from home on Friday, so the Tyranny of Laundry is not currently oppressing me.
As the fateful hour of 8pm approaches, the usual feeling of Sunday night depression is not seeping into my psyche. As we walked our dog about 20 minutes ago I was thinking about this and coming to the realization of how much middle-class misery is caused by feeling like one must rush from one thing to another. Constant time pressure cooker. To some extent we do this to ourselves, but only to feel like we actually have a life outside of work. I am lucky I actually love what I do and have a great employer, something 99.999999999% of people can’t say, but still I’d like to work less.
Aside from buying these records today, my holiday consumerism included ordering a higher-quality cartridge for our turntable, the red Ortofon 2M. My friend Dale tells me this will make a noticeable difference from the stock cartridge that came on our turntable. Looking forward to checking out the new records with the new needle.
I started watching the new Daredevil: Born Again series on Disney Plus. I loved the Netflix DD series. I have watched three episodes, weeks ago, and I feel no need to watch the rest. Which is weird, because not only is it great, but DD is my favorite Marvel character. Charlie Cox does an incredible job as Matt Murdock/Daredevil.
I’m sure that eventually I’ll watch it. This is not confined just to this show. It is almost any show on TV. I watched a couple of episodes of Andor. It was great. I never finished it. The list goes on.
I think there are a couple of things going on. First, over-saturation of the nerd media market. There’s just too much. Way too much. Second, I have my own creative endeavors and hobbies. I prefer to use my the precious few hours of my precious short lifespan to do those things rather than watch shows. This weekend I listened to a lot of music while I did some writing. When I was too tired to write last night I watched Aliens (for the 5 millionth time) on Blu-Ray. Watching something for the 5 millionth time is comforting. It’s still great but the fatigued brain doesn’t have to keep up with a lot of new stuff.
Honestly, the same thing is happening in most areas of interest, I think. In skateboarding you can watch completely nuts skateboarding 24/7 and never watch the same clip twice. All stuff that normal humans will never be able to and really why would anyone want to. I have no desire to launch myself down a set of 20 stairs, which is actually pretty tame compared to some of the daredevil shit going on now. It’s boring and not relatable. I always love seeing my friends skating. But that’s it. Even pretty tame stuff, like some kid learning a new freestyle trick — I’ve seen it all before. Not interesting. Don’t care. When I was 14 I didn’t try to force the whole world to watch my learning process.
Even with tabletop roleplaying games you can swim in the sea of new material, thoughts, opinions, and and media all day, every day.
In each of these areas I find myself reducing my circle of contact. Tighter groups. Fewer websites. Less social media.
