Scarred Brain murmurings – Page 19

Another Saturday

Three days more of work, then no work until next year.

Maybe.

I, because I am who I am, will monitor things, and be there as long as there’s still mutual desire.

But I’m finished, and I really can’t bring myself to care about much of anything. I did get this from someone who’s actually been reading what I was writing.

But I’m finished with this year, really. Kind of appropriate background music.

What can I do, more, to get away from the craziness? I don’t know, and I’m not really thinking clearly.

I started to lay things out specifically, but I’m not sure there’s a real reason to do that.

Though, if everything goes well, it’ll be a late ending on Wednesday, and I can just step away.

News.

Last night, during our weekly pandemic get-together, there was a lot of discussion about what’s going on with the whole SolarWinds thing.

This was in my go-to online news feed when I’m writing.

The news source gets the conclusion wrong, I think, but I shouldn’t expect more, really. This shit is confusing, and you’ve got competing groups who don’t want to change what they do once they’ve become accustomed to operating in one way.

That goes to politics, too, I guess. The article is irresponsible, but it makes the fifty-something editor feel warm inside.

Saturday, again

I’ve been spending a lot of day so far continuing to piece together my writing bits for next month.

I also signed up for a ProtonMail account.

Seeing what’s happened over the past two weeks with tech editing make me feel very uncomfortable with what’s going on with “Big Tech” lately.

Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account for posting a story that was potentially-damaging to the Biden campaign.

Looking right now, just after 1300EDT on Saturday the 24th of October, and they’re still suspended.

So start your own Twitter. Start your own Facebook.

I don’t have the resources.

They also don’t have the resources to block everything forever.

The tagline of this site is Everything Gets Deleted Eventully.

Yes, it does. But everything can come back.

Search your own name in one of the search engines. and enter your name in quotation marks.

Bing shows me, as I’m signed-in to Office 365 with my corporate account; had to do my timecard. DDG doesn’t show me on the first page of results. The totes-didn’t-used-to-be-evil engine doesn’t show me on the front page, either.

Five years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case.

I’m listening to the clearly-Canadian Texas Senator, Ted Cruz who’s talking about this on his podcast.

But by putting things somewhere outside the control of the tech oligopoly, and the US government.

It used to be that if you searched for me, you’d find things like interviews about Slashdot’s tenth anniversary in the NYT.

But even with the mass deletions, I do refuse to be permanently-erased.

I’m probably not going to have a legacy through posterity, but somebody, somewhere, might find what I’ve created.

Whether it’s of any value to anyone is unimportant.

So I write. It’s what I do. It’s something I still can do.

Learning to Relax

I started writing this on Thursday, but got distracted. I’ve sortakinda been off work since Tuesday, and trying to figure out what to do with myself. See the title.

I’ve been trying to burn built-up leave. When you go, what, five years without any paid time off, you grow accustomed to just working all the time.

Because of a change in my company’s policies just before the lockdown, I had a ton of time built up that I needed to spend before the end of the calendar year.

A few weeks ago, I told my boss that I probably just wouldn’t be working on Fridays through the end of the year.

So, after I finished paying my protection racket to the “professional organization” that has a protection agreement with the government, and demands money from me every three years just so I can stay working.

My psychologist thinks that I should try doing my writing via a microphone. I don’t know what to do with speech-to-text stuff, and I’m not sure what to do with the resultant audio.

Do I try to record a podcast?

Nobody wants to listen to that shit.

Besides, who knows if I physically can even do it. This morning, after doing my normal things, I’m slowly calm down.

But when can I get some continuous sleep?

I don’t know. I’m not sleepy at this point, but definitely, as the kids would say, woke as fuck.

So work on the NoJoMo stuff for next month.

11/1: Intro, etc.

11/2: ???

11/3: Election Day

11/4: Election Day reactions (if we know the winner….) Other things in the week, relatives’ birthdays.

11/11: Veterans’ Day

11/26: Football, especially Thanksgiving Football. (As I write this, the games are evenly balanced among conferences; if you look at some previous years, I was complaining about the paucity of AFC teams….)

11/27: Thanksgiving

11/30: Final/wrap-up

Another thing I did this morning was clean up some Shmoocon entries I’d accidentally had under the NoJoMo tag. Oops.

I think what I did during the summer was somewhat-effective. Maybe I’ll try to incorporate that in. My first thought was to do that for every entry, but given everything that has been, and will be going on, I worry that I’ll be writing far too much.

Resistance is futile

Or is it government?

Today’s news is that President Trump has COVID-19. That is on the heels of Ralph Northam also has it.

One flaunted his sparing mask use. The other wore his as a badge of honor.

Both got the virus.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s no omniscient answer?

I come back to, “Government Doesn’t Work.”

Buy things that support the science that’ll knock this out. Pray if you believe in God. (And understand that belief in God doesn’t preclude science….so says the guy who’s entrusted his complex medical issues to a medical center at a Catholic university…)

Continuing On The Theme

Per last entry, I’m seriously limiting Facebook access.

Im happier for it. I did end up checking in yesterday, because I was concerned about my oldest friend’s family. No news, but I did see that I had a message.

Email.

Fuck Zuckerberg, his content moderation, and data mining.

I did watch The Social Dilemma.last weekend/early this week.

You can leave. To quote a former company slogan, “Just Do It.”

And I’ve gotten disrupted by the news of Ron Paul’s live steam stroke.

But it leads me back to what I was about to say about the cesspool that is Facebook.

Yes, I plan to revisit more frequently after the election.

And I will be “unfriending” people liberally.

If you’re not offering anything other than annoyance, I don’t have time for you, and I will eliminate you from my experience.

Time To Go Away On Holiday

Background music is this. (You’ll need to click the link because I’m consciously avoiding the totes-didn’t-used-to-do-evil company and its video site…)

I was messing around in the sewer that is Facebook more lately. This was largely in order to get my fantasy league up and running, but that’s finished, so why stay? I will miss looking at some of my favorite podcasts’ private groups. “Blue-pilled” friends’ posts about the various conspiracy theories too nutty to even make CNN, on the other hand.

The place is a wasteland, and I’m going away again.

Maybe I peek in periodically, but probably not.

I plan to write here in November, perhaps despairing about whichever of the two major parties’ candidates garners a sufficient plurality to be president. (And if it’s not the guy from his basement in Delaware, the posts about how by voting for someone other than him, I’m voting for Trump…)

If I miss out on something you think is very important, my cell number has been the same since 1999. My email address is still sean@757.org.

Adiot.

Karen Taught Me In Sixth Grade

I do wonder sometimes how Ms. M., and her “roommate” are doing

(Yes, it’s pretty clear in retrospect that they were lesbians, but that doesn’t matter in the least, now does it?)

But she wouldn’t have been happy about people not wearing masks.

The materialistic nature of so many things lately has me a bit dismayed.

One of the things that’s crossed my mind lately, and I’ve seen it reinforced in some of the things I regularly consume, is that the war on “assault weapons” is the new War On Drugs.

I was living in Suburban DC when Marion Barry got busted for smoking crack in a hotel room.

Given what I was taught in the mandatory DARE classes, I wondered then, as I still wonder now, how did he not die? I mean, if you smoked crack ,you died. Look at Len Bias. Crack. Perhaps the first time, and he died.

Debates on Twitter after seeing this from Ron Bailey over at Reason.

Now that weed’s been “decriminalized” throughout much of the country, we need to find something for the police state assembled to fight it to do. Guns!!1! Those are scary, right? And the ratings spike on MSNBC every time there’s a school shooting!

I get it, Chuck, it’s dangerous, that I don’t trust you and your outfit, exclusively.

On a related note, two things I noticed from “alternate” media.

I need to go watch the Vice bit about the Antifa fucker who died while the police were trying to arrest him. I know, I know, Jerry Nadler says Antifa violence is a myth, but people are really dying because of this.

There is organization going on. People are coordinating to make sure it happens. The question is whether the truth will ever come out about it.

Or, maybe, it’d be easier to pass off things as discredited stories about foreign connections, as “debunked conspiracy theories.”

Were the fine censorial folks at CrowdStrike helping tailor a narrative to prevent even the sympathetic corporate media from looking in to things that’d make the resurrected, and blessed duopoly candidate look better? I don’t know. Does it matter? To the average MSNBC viewer, not in the least.

But when you see things like this, if you don’t take a moment’s pause, that’s your issue.

Eight

And eight is great!

Or something.

The story I mentioned briefly has become national news. (Choosing the Miami Herald mainly because that was the first thing that came up when I searched on Bing News.)

I didn’t notice that I wrote much about what I was doing with the Newport News CWA.

There were other things going on in the fall of 2001, of course. I was still working in news radio while juggling a fledgling radio career.

Would I go to law school? Yeah. That was the plain.

After almost diverting on to my whole spiel about how I never really wanted to be a lawyer, but a judge, I ended up in IT.

What I was doing at the CWA was assisting the Victim-Witness program.

What happened here is definitely needs investigation.

Let the justice system work. If the punishments are insufficient, change the laws in Richmond.

You can look at the political recriminations, but those are for after all the criminal proceedings are finished.

That said, the judge who let the guy out of jail was appointed by a certain Virginia Senator, and some blowback should ensue.

But, hey, Keep Virginia Blue! Permanent Democratic plurality rule just as Harry Byrd, et. al., intended.

Other news. Looks like the grandpa in the basement with a major party’s backing might be backing away from his essential promise to pick a “black” woman as his VP candidate.

One of the things that floated across the news stream the past couple of days was that the governor of Michigan. (And writing it that way makes me think of Tecmo Super Bowl, where one of the top quarterbacks was “QB Bills,” because they couldn’t reach an agreement for some of the players or something.) But searching around a bit, yep. Michigan State. She’s not going to be VP, even though she’s, objectively, far superior to the folks who’ve been commonly put forth. But she won’t get it because she’s outside the circles of power, especially Harvard and Yale.

You man to say that you shouldn’t pay $150K for two MAs from a state school? Why do you hate young people?

I get it.

Please, please, please don’t talk about the development of a US Caste system. It, like Antifa, is a myth.

Realization – 8/8/2002

I’ve realized something…..that I’m generally unable to relax in the presence of other people. Gotta figure out a way to work through this one…..

This is still very true. I’ve tried so many things, but I’m still anxious around others.

My wife is the only person I’ve ever met with whom I feel comfortable. I don’t have to act.

*shakes head*

Listening to this might be affecting my thinking right now….

Seven

Listening to podcasts, and finding myself questioning a lot of things.

I spent time when I was younger dubbing Sharyl Attkisson‘s reports for the corporate media site where she worked. I thought she was a good reporter who was really doing interesting news.

Some of what she’s been accused of is confusing. If I took the right pill, and hadn’t followed what she’s done….

I started this entry by starting to head to my old-is-new news site to look for headlines, then I remembered seeing and retweeting this on Twitter.

To be perfectly clear — I generally think that prison sentences are too long, and parole should be happening more quickly than it does.

At the same time, this guy got out, then went and killed the woman who’d accused him.

But the priority is on defunding the police, and sending people into poor and minority neighborhoods to take people’s guns.

Also, protests don’t cause COVID-19 outbreaks. That’s the story, and don’t attribute anything to the protests.

Similarly, don’t ever reconsider stories that don’t fit the corporate media narrative about the whole story. Please ignore the stories that show the leaked bodycam video, or show that he was on Fentanyl.

But there’s an official story that was locked-in shortly after all this happened, and that’s forever true. Chuck Todd and MSNBC said so, and it’s dangerous that people don’t take the initial take, and use it as gospel forever.

Please don’t look at Nick Sandmann/Covington Catholic. The settlements might have been for little money, so it makes what the big outlets reported okay, okay?

Facts roll in as time progresses. Sometimes you don’t find out for a long time what was actually going on.

Altered State – 8/7/2000

It might be interesting to take something that would make me feel differently than I do now. Or as of late.

But, now, I’ll try and recreate the entry I did last night, but wouldn’t save because they didn’t do maintainance on the POS micro$oft database.

Okay, so, the dreams I had the other night. There were several, but the most memorable was one involving sex. Now, I don’t dream about sex very often at all. But in this dream, I was trying to get it on with someone whom I’d known in high school (Yah, I don’t know where that came from, but I’m not complaining). We were in the midst of our preparation for the real act, but members of my family kept walking into the room. She and I were quite chagrined by this, so we retreated to my flat, which was interestingly enough, upstairs in the dream.

The dream also was another interesting mix of places I’ve lived. I’m sure it was set downtown where I live now, but buildings from other places were in the neighborhood. Lots and lots of red brick. Also, there was a stark contrast in the environments indoors and outdoors. Indoors, it was hot (her skin was very salty….I can’t seem to remember ever tasting anything before in my dreams, but if it continues, great). Outside, it was cold and rainy. So figure that one out, because I’m beyond stumped. But I think the dream, on the whole, is about my desire for privacy….that my flat is my little slice of privacy where my desires are uninterrupted? Maybe?

~~Redacted~~ is back in town….we’re supposed to hang out with her on Tuesday night. Yay. Been thinking about the ex lately, for what reason I don’t know. I’m so tempted to call her. But I found one of her necklaces in my room at my parents’ house. I’m wondering how I should get it back to her. I’m thinking of writing her a letter. Any suggestions?

Two things on this.

Part of the reason I sought professional help was that I was having very vivid, sometimes disturbing, dreams. I think some of it might have been attributable to a medication I was taking that cause me to sleep deeply. Some of the more vivid dreams have stopped, but I still have some doozies, and have for a long time. See the entry.
I have no clue who the name I redacted was. I think I know, but I’m not sure. *shrug*

Maybe I’d be better off not paying attention to pretty much anything, ever.

I can’t do that.

Against the Patriarchy

As I’m listening to podcasts today, I was roaming around the Intertubes looking for places I could buy products advertised on the various podcasts I routinely consume.

I’ve taken a committed stance against what is perhaps the most-prominent support site for various content creators..

They exercise control over content they don’t like.

*fires up Bing News, because F the company that didn’t-used-to-be-evil*

Ah. That was tough. I’m no fan of Owen Benjamin, but they shouldn’t be withholding money from him.

And they’re having to stop.

Good.

He has a right to earn a living, even if some of his personal choices aren’t the ones I would make. Moreover, his kids shouldn’t be destitute because he believes the wrong things. Same goes for Gavin McInnes. Or even Alex Jones.