It’s February tomorrow! Somehow, the world still turns.
The world: Somehow the most viral world news this week doesn’t seem to have been about any kind of politics, but rather about capitalism. The Gamestop/stock market brouhaha was a sage of retail investors on reddit going head-to-head with hedge funds over the stock price of a dying gaming company (among others) that dominated most of my feeds for the week. It’s actually a lot more compliced than that.
Archive for January 2021
Posts (14) :: Photos (40)Posts
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Wow, January is almost done. Wouldn’t you know it. The world: Biden inaugurated as US president, world celebrates US getting rid of Trump. Biden isn’t exactly unproblematic, but he is at least sane and boring. There will be time enough to criticize him later, for now let them be enjoy victory. My expectations of him are at least moderately higher than the ones I had for Trump the internet gets inundated with an inordinate amount of Bernie Sanders memes locally: the govt continues to bombard us with controversies, this time stirring up a red-tagging hornests nest by abrogating the DND-UP accord, paving the way for militarization of campuses and stifling of free expression Links of interest: Someone made a Mandalorian trailer in the style of old-school spaghetti westerns.
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Discussions on tech censorship came to the forefront in recent weeks due to the aftermath of the Jan 6 capitol insurrection in the US. I’ve been writing down a bunch of thoughts about the complicated issue, let’s see if I can hammer them into a blog post. (I also wanted to defer posting about it until after the Biden inauguration, in case more things of interest happen.) Here’s where I am now:
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I finished the book The End of Everything (Astronomically Speaking) by Katie Mack. I got a Kindle copy on sale on Amazon at the top of the year, figured it was a good way to kick off a year of hopefully reading more books. This is a short review. I figure it’s probably not a spoiler to tell you the book is all about how the universe ends. Or at least, the many possible ways it could end.
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This is 2021 week 3. Or week 2. Two and a half? How do calendars work? The world: relatively calm compared to the chaos of the previous week. However in the US, a storm may be brewing over Biden’s inauguration next week locally: still a lot of confusion/inconsistencies around the vaccination plan. Or at least some senators think so. Meanwhile, we are close to breaching 500k cases. Links of interest: I’ve been reading a lot about personal note taking recently, in a bid to find ways to improve my own systems.
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We are barely more than a week into 2021 and it has already been quite a year. The world: the week started off with something as innocuous as a guy going viral for making his daughter work six hours to figure out how to use a can opener and open a can of beans. I can’t explain Bean Dad, but it was so weird and surreal the way it took over the internet for a while.
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I used to collect quotes a lot. Maybe I still do. Here are a couple of collections I’ve posted online. Tang In Cheek - a list of quotes (allegedly by me) Email signatures - a list of quotes I used as a pool to randomly select an email signature from. I rarely send email these days, and when I do it’s usually web-based, so I can’t use these anymore. There’s probably a better way to organize these.
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One habit I now have that I wish I had started much, much earlier in life would be conducting regular, periodic reviews. These reviews are a sort of written introspection of the time period in question, the target audience being future me. I’m reminded of the important of this because I had been going through old files the last few months and I really enjoy reading through some older entries and basically traipsing through younger me’s mind.
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A while back I saw this tweet talking about drawing memes from before the internet, and I was reminded that was a thing we had around here too when we were kids! We had our own version of that “giraffe in the window” drawing, except the one I remember was made so that you could switch the answer to “cat hugging a pole outside the window” to troll whoever you were asking to guess: -
Word clouds! They used to be a thing right? I was reminded of them yesterday and I wish I had thought of this in time for the 2020 year in review, but here we are. I thought I’d generate some word clouds for the blog anyway! Here’s the word cloud for all my blog posts for the year: 2020 blog post word cloud (Click to view full-size) 2020 blog post word cloud
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I’ve been using the Flipboard iOS app as my daily morning news reader pretty much since I first got an iPad. It offered a nice, magazine like UI where you can flip through pages full of images and short article blurbs until you can find something you want to read. The past couple of years and iOS versions though, the app has been performing terribly. Crashes a lot, reader view often fails to load, or flickers and reloads continuously and so on.
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It’s a brand new year, a brand new week, a brand new day. There’s no real reason to believe 2021 will be a better year, but we can choose to try to be better, and maybe that in itself is better. Last week’s New Year’s Eve transition played out pretty much as expected. We just stayed at home, actually had an early media noche dinner (around 9ish) and observed the fireworks for a little bit.
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It’s always weird for me when people do their “year in review” or “X of the year” any time before Jan 1st of the next year. You’re making Dec 31 feel left out. It’s one thing the Oscars get right. Anyway, here’s my personal year-in-review, such as it is. Essay-writing section It’s probably impossible to talk about 2020 without talking about the Covid19 pandemic that has ravaged the world. My country is sadly still under a state of quarantine/lockdown, I believe the world’s longest.
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Happy New Year! Something I’ve gotten used to as the New Year rolls in: make a checklist of things to do for the new year. I generally copy stuff over, but the list changes a bit every year. In no particular order: Ponder why people give so much significance to the transition between an arbitrarily-chosen pair of 24 hour periods Take stock and reflect on the past year Count your blessings for the past year and be grateful Greet your loved ones and friends and anyone else you hold dear.
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