Stupidity is contagious. Maintain appropriate social distance.

Why is it that, no matter the product/service/company, "up"grading to a more expensive option happens immediately, but "down"grades/cancellations require a month's notice or more?

Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. (Stewart Brand, https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2)

Twitter: that wasteland where nuance goes to die.

“When theory and practice disagree, practice prevails”, M Meilgaard
"Theory and practice always disagree." @mikro2nd

Nothing takes you as deep into a technical problem as having to implement it in code.

Say something nice.

You are a unique and special snowflake. Just like everyone else.

A personal blog is not for the reader's pleasure or education, it is a tool for the writer to think with.

Thinking back to the heyday of CB radio ca. mid-70s: "Breaker, breaker, smoky bear at Ol El Paso". It was an early iteration on social media/social networks that should have served as advance warning of how bad this idea could be!

Despite all the downsides of social media, it's still pretty cool that you can contact someone who has touched your life - author, musician, teacher - and say Thank You, or Hi, or I liked your work. It used to be obscenely hard to do stuff like that. Now it's easy. So do it.

People living in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones.

Climate change:

With an arrow buried in our chest we argue over the scent of the wood the shaft was hewn from, and the song of the bird whose feathers make the fletching. [GPT-3]

Climate change is just like the Coronavirus: The sooner countries get to Carbon-zero (or, better) Carbon-negative, the fewer people will die. Inaction in this constitutes genocide.

Doing away with what you don't want doesn't get you what you do want.

"Nature" is a human construct, a figment of human imagination.

This list is maintained by humans, so may contain inaccuracies.

This list is maintained by a computer, so will never be accurate.

I can only try to imagine the cognitive dissonance of America's MAGA dipshits, totin' a gun to defend against the gubmint comin' after "the citizens", only to find themselves on the wrong side of that firefight.

"Covid Fatigue" is not what plagues me, nor "Lockdown Fatigue". Right now it's Conspiracy Theory Fatigue that's wearing me down.

If I hear one more time about Bill Gates's conspiracy to implant us all with mind-control microchips, I'm afraid I'm going to have to vomit on somebody's head.

I heard this exact same conspiracy back in 1982 in relation to HIV...

And again in relation to Avian Flu...

And again in relation to SARS...

And again in relation to MERS...

And now it's Covid, and I'm thinking...

"If Gates can't get it right with the fucking mind-control chips after all these epidemics, he must be utterly incompetent." Clearly the epidemic strategy is not working and it's time for a strategy rethink!?

Reach out to me, O' Evil Overlords. Strategy is my game, and it's time for a NEW conspiracy. This one is just old and oh so very, very tired.

No, @amazon, I'll NOT buy a rights-restricted, usability-crippled "Kindle edition" at R270 when I can buy a perfectly good paperback of the same book for R110. Or ever, for that matter.

With all analytics removed from my websites, having written some provocations, I suddenly find myself hungering for feedback. Is anybody reading me?

The silence/tension is unnerving.

An interesting lesson in living with ignorance and uncertainty.

Only one explanation fits all the facts of SA's illogical, irrational, inconsistent, counterproductive lockdown regulations: ANC internal faction power-politics. See also Cyril's meakness/weakness in the face of public challenges to his leadership.

Internal power games at the expense of the very people they're supposed to be serving and helping.

All food is psychedelic. What you eat alters your brain chemistry *all the time*.

So what happens to our brain when we eat junk food? Lettuce freshly harvested from an organic garden? Meat riddled with industrially-added hormones? Fruit laced with pesticides?

There's a whole lot of research that needs doing here...

creator mind must be unleashed from judgement

Evidently I'm in a parenthetical frame of mind, today. (This frequently portends an unproductive day.)

People whose job is forecasting change, forecast change.

People whose income is entrenched in the way things were forecast a return to the way things were.

I don't need another fucking text editor. I need the inspiration and psychic energy to write.

Lotta overweight, middle aged men finding out that maybe, just maybe, the guy who usually mows their lawn outside of quarantine times is getting underpaid.

Regarding the virus pandemic: Who chose the term "lockdown" (which is more usually applied to prisons) over the term "quarantine" (which is more usually applied to epidemic control)?

My internet line is so slow and modern website so very, very bloated, that I can often read the content of entire web pages and exit before all their tracking and analytics JS has finished loading.

I don't understand why it's called a 'flashmob' when a bunch of musicians perform something wonderful out in the streets. It's neither spontaneous ('flash') nor a 'mob'.

Convenience trumps everything

It is only in our conversations with creatures of other species that we discover our own humanity.

It's not so much artificial intelligence that bothers me so much as all the artificial stupidity.

Words put on @Twitter, like little turds in a river, float away on the stream and are soon gone, lost in the downstream eddies of time. If you have something more durable worth saying, get a blog.

Even more humbling than putting visitor-analytics on a little-known vanity website is: Reading the accumulated posts from the 15-year archive of a disused blog, only to find that not one of the posts is worth transporting over to the new blog.

(Alright, one post *was* worth salvaging... but the image accompanying it was lost in the mists of one of the many "picture hosting platform" failures of decades past.)

New acronym for the internet-surveillance vampires: The GRAFT: Google, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter.

Microsoft should be there, too, but can't think of a suitable acronym that includes them.

A Goal is not a Vision. A Vision is not a Goal. Though both are statements of desire, of how we'd like the world to be in some imagined future.

A Goal has a definite pass/no-pass outcome. You achieve the Goal or you don't. Measurable.

A Vision is unattainable, can *never* be reached, only asymptotically approached, though results in good outcomes along the way to attempting some worthwhile ideal.

This notion that heads-of-state have to fly home from whereever when something out-of-the-ordinary happens and demands a head-of-state-level response is an antiquated absurdity.

Do they not have phones in the Caribean? Internet? A Hangout with relevant officials and ministers?

If the rest of us are working out ways to be successful working 'remote', why not Prime Ministers and Presidents, too?

Leaning back to create a space in which actions have room to eventuate themselves does not mean doing nothing. Rather it's an active sweeping away of irrelevancies and unimportances so that energy can naturally focus, can organically direct onto what's important.

It's not really plain 'immortality' that we want. I mean, who wants to live forever whilst just getting older and older and creakier and slower?

No. It's Eternal Youth we really want. Body like it was in our mid-20s (or thereabouts), judgement like we had in our mid-30's (mid-40's for some of us, I suppose; seems like *never* for some of my mates) and wisdom like in our 60's (I suppose).

But just getting older and older,... no thanks!

Deepfakes and fake news. Welcome to the Neomythic Era.

Malice comes and goes. Incompetence is systemic.

Do android sheep dream of flying?

Hullo, @pinterest. I just wanted to look at a single image that someone put on your site. You insisted that I sign up and sign in before you'll show me that picture.

I guess I just won't look at it then. I wonder if the person who put it there knows that you don't really want people looking at their stuff. That all you're really interested in is tracking and surveiling every drive-by viewer.

Fuck you.

I wrote, "Everybody's got their pet wants."
I read, "Everybody's got their pants wet."
What is the meaning of all this?

"Please send me your price list," I said to the supplier. Three days later, still waiting for a response, I thought, "This. Is. A. Test."

"Lips that touch wine shall never touch mine," she said.

One look was enough. I went out and bought a couple of cases.

No left turn unstoned.