Josh Writes a Blog

A Life Blog about My Life, Dawg

  • Cooking & Meditation

    Look at the absolute monstrosity I made this morning for breakfast:

    A plate with absolutely too much breakfast food on it.

    What you’re seeing here is:

    • hashbrowns
    • cheese (taco seasoning flavor, it’s the only shredded cheese I had)
    • deli sliced honey ham
    • two eggs
    • MORE hashbrowns
    • toast with blackberry jam

    I have notes. You have notes, I’m sure. Turns out, two small potatoes make more than enough hashbrowns. I won’t make that mistake twice.

    I woke up at 6am todayJowers was a big fan of this. An hour earlier for food? Count me in! She seemed to say. as part of my new scheme to see if I can survive off of seven hours of sleep at night, and actually did things instead of lay around in bed until 8:30.Side note: I’m trying to refrain from apologizing for the good things in my life. Like this, for example. Sleeping in. Being able to work from home regularly. It’s a privilege and I’m glad to have it, but I won’t apologize for it. I know other people have it worse; other people have it better, too. Life is life, enjoy what you have and don’t envy what you don’t. Cleaned and organized my bedroom up a bit, started laundry, meditated and wrote some positive intentions, and then, an impromptu decision to make hashbrowns. I haven’t made hashbrowns in ages and I am always bad at them. This time was olive oil, maybe too much for the first batch and too little for the second. Yes, I washed the starch off of the potatoes. Yes, I drained the starch water out. Yes, I dried the potatoes afterward as best I could (with a paper towel pressing the raw potatoes in a strainer). In the end I still had a bit too much moisture but they were still fairly crispy and tasted better than they looked, except for the second batch (the one on top), which I put too much salt on. The entire thing was overly salty. Salt should not be white so you can see it better on things, you know? Like pepper, pepper is doing good work. Pepper’s like, “Here I am, mister!

    Over the years I’ve gotten slightly better at cooking. Not a gourmet chef by any means, but good enough to make myself breakfast. I make myself a lot of breakfasts (as opposed to just pouring a bowl of cereal, which I also do often). The best breakfasts are potato-related, usually fried up chunks of potatoes with garlic salt. Simple and effective. I cook in olive oil now instead of butter, just for health reasons, and olive oil is not but not the same. Butter is where it’s at. Bacon grease? Even better. But a doctor told me once to stop cooking in bacon grease because my cholesterol was a little high. She told me this as I was cooking bacon. So I switched to olive oil, except for eggs; I’ll be damned if I ever cook an egg in oil. Take that, Gordon Ramsay.

    The truth is, I cook because I’m broke most of the time. Like now, I had to pay a few bills that pop up every year (like the hosting for this very site!) and after that I had just enough for some groceries. I’m at that fun point where I’m not broke enough to need food stamps or anything, but I don’t make enough to live 100% comfortably. American capitalism in a nutshell. It’s ultimately good though. Learning how to cook is good. I haven’t done any baking though because baking scares me. Baking requires preciseness. At least with cooking I can burn the hashbrowns but they still taste good and like hashbrowns. You put one extra teaspoon of baking soda in your bread and suddenly it’s … well, I don’t know what. Extra poofy? I really don’t know baking very well.

    Re: meditation, I highly recommend doing it. I use the Medito app which is free, but not paywall free. Totally free and supported by donations. This, to me, is the way to go. There’s something about a meditation app that has a free bit that you can use but pushes you to buy the full app that irks me. It feels very … not meditative. Thankfully Medito does not do that, and comes with lots of meditation practices. Thank you very much, The Netherlands, for bringing meditation to us in a way that feels good and not like icky capitalism.

    Meditation is great. I started meditating in grad school; I needed two extra credits to be full time, so I took a weightlifting class and, immediately after it, a meditation class. We sat in a gym room used for jiu jitsu and the instructor turned off the lights and we just sat in there for a whole hour. Some people slept; the instructor was fine with that. “That’s just your body telling you you need to sleep,” he would say. I learned later that we were basically doing vipassana meditation, which is apparently one of the hardest kinds of meditation as it doesn’t focus on anything besides your breathing. It’s not like a meditation where you focus on peace or destressing yourself or things like that. Instead, you just sit and experience your breath and let the thoughts and feelings you have come and go and, most importantly, you don’t attach judgment to them. It’s harder than you think. I oftentimes find myself feeling fine and then realize I’m in some thought spiral about something. But the point is to, if you get to that point, just realize you’re there and re-focus on your breath. It’s all about the breath.

    I used to meditate at night before bed, but that just made me sleepy, so now I’m trying it in the morning after I’ve woken up and had a glass of water. That’s another thing I’m doing: glass of water right after I’ve woken up. I hear about this one a lot. Helps wake you up and whatnot. I’m down for that. You can never drink enough water.This is untrue in the technical sense, but you should still strive to drink more water. It is very difficult to drink enough water to develop water poisoning. This footnote is just for the pedants out there who like to be right about stuff.

    I often think about people who don’t meditate, or go to therapy, and when you ask them why not they give you a reason that is the very reason why you should meditate, or go to therapy. “Oh, I can’t meditate, my brain is too all over the place, I’d never be able to concentrate,” they say, as if the moment you start learning to play guitar you should be expected to play a flamenco.

    The point of anything is to be bad at it at first. Jake was right:

    So do yourself a favor. Meditate, five minutes a day, for 30 days. Do it at work on your break. Put your phone down and close your eyes and just listen to your breathing for a while. Listen to the constant breeze of life that enters and exits your body. Be thankful that you exist. Because you deserve to exist, to be here, to be present, and to be counted.

    You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been writing something in this blog every day. This is to keep up the habit. Don’t expect constant daily blog entries. Again, I’m using this to stave off my Twitter addiction. It’s going well, although I’ve found that without something like Twitter to mindlessly scroll through, I’m not sure where to go to see things. My brain wants to check Twitter/social media because it’s constantly infused with content, and I’m trying to remind myself that I don’t need to do that every five minutes, especially when I’m watching a movie.

    Speaking of which, it’s time to go for a walk.

  • Sleep

    I’ve decided to adjust my sleep schedule.

    See, until today I’ve been getting roughly 8.5 hours of sleep a night. Every night. I set an alarm, and Google has a nice bedtime mode thing that reminds me when it’s time to sleep. I generally have a “no screens” rule in my bedroom which I routinely break thanks to TikTok, but still don’t spend much more than 15-30 min a night scrolling through the funnies. I can safely say that I get around 8-9 hours of sleep a night.

    Is that too much? Maybe. I’ve been running on the hypothesis that I personally need more sleep because I’m a tall guy. To me, more body mass = more hours of sleep required to replenish my energy stores. That makes sense, right?Also, I’m a Taurus. But I watched this video recently:

    In short, one of the myths centers around the amount of sleep you get a night. Dr. Lieberman says that most people get around 7 hours of sleep per night and are doing fine. So now I’m thinking: maybe I sleep too much! I’ve decided to adjust my alarm to 7 hours a night to test this updated hypothesis.

    Obviously there is no definitive answer to the sleep question, and not everyone gets the same amount of sleep every night due to all sorts of factors. But I’m in a position where I usually get the same amount every night and I’d like to see how I work on less.

    The schedule was 10:30pm – 7:00am. Now it’s 11:00pm – 6:00am. I could do 12-7 but I’m not a huge fan of staying up late. I used to be an insomniac/night owl but the older I get, the more I enjoy the sunrise and the quiet hours of the morning. So we’ll see if I enjoy the winter darkness for an extra hour. Hell, I might even do a workout in the morning or something!

    I will say that my 8.5 hours of sleep has resulted in me often waking up in the middle of a dream, which is not ideal. But Sleep Cycle kept “naturally” waking me up at around 7-7:05am, which I think was more Jowers somehow making the app wake me up than it was me actually waking up naturally. She’s a smart cat, when it comes to getting food.

    On the other hand, I’ve slept 10 hours before and woken up fine, so who knows. I think the optimal amount of sleep is “what feels right when you don’t have an alarm clock.”

    That’s all. Just something to think about re: your sleep schedule. I’ll let you know how well it goes.

  • On Blogs & Newsletters & Content

    or, thoughts on consolidating your internet life

    Before we begin, very important announcement: I am drinking eggnog. It is now officially Christmas season.

    Perhaps you live on the planet Neptune and have been far too engrossed in the drama between Mme. Pilgrix Meflmlork at the Skurzzzzz Awards1 to see that Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion dollars a week ago. Judging by his behavior since the purchase, he seems to be attempting to keep the ship he sank afloat by tossing weight overboard in the form of Twitter employees, while also asking Stephen King what he thinks about charging $8 for verification, thus completely obliterating the concept of verification. He is the capitalist version of Donald Trump; a grifter, in other words, who flounders when actually put in the hot seat. Thankfully, Elon’s decisions with Twitter do not impact actual Americans/people of the world like the ones Trump made. His other companies, on the other hand….

    I joined Twitter in 2008 and long story short, I liked it. It was the perfect spot for writers, a place that felt like a chat room except it was more like a bunch of people shouting into a collective pot to make a “word stew” that other people could eat from if they wished. Twitter was especially fun before News came and fucked everything up. The moment people realized that they could get millions of views disseminating news and information, and then politics, the site became less weird and fun and more “Thank god we can make money off of this now.” That’s the plot, see: find what reels everyone in and then trap them so you can start showing ads at them.2

    Recently though, since Elon’s purchase, I deactivated my Twitter account on a whim, for a few reasons which all centered around the purchase and the general response by everyone to the purchase. On both sides were smug assholes, either for or against Elon, and I was just kind of sick of it. Gone was the fun, weird Twitter that I enjoyed posting absolute nonsense on. Trump already ruined that during his presidency, and when he was banned I thought we might return to a bit of silly normalcy. But alas, it was not meant to be, for websites are capital now, and capitalism is anti-fun.

    Thus, with the blue bird to my back, I signed up for Mastodon. Mastodon is a more communal social media app which is open source (I think?) and has multiple “instances” which are basically communities. You can sign up for an account at any of these communities but are still able to access the whole “fediverse” as they call it. On paper it seems fine, but the problem is that it feels like a thing on paper and not an actual fun, enjoyable experience. I’ve signed up to this site three separate times (the third being my current), and each time it feels like tech bros talking to other tech bros about the site and how great it is more than anyone actually having fun or interacting with each other in any meaningful way. It’s a reaction to Twitter, which is the inevitable problem; it’s not a thing of its own. It’s a sequel, and we all know that sequels often aren’t as good as the original.

    Another issue I have is that people on Mastodon seem to be looking for other people within their network, whatever that may be. Like, geologists looking for geologist communities, for example. Why? Why are you doing that? People’s jobs are not their personalities! You’re turning this into a networking site.

    Most recently (read: today) I logged out of Mastodon. It’s just not it. The vibe feels like a LinkedIn Slack channel, not a cool group text thread where no one is really listening to each other but everyone’s saying something funny. Right as I left, people were arguing about the concept and deployment of the Content Warning system (and even attempting to redefine what the letters CW could stand for, instead of Content Warning). It’s just banal chatter to me. Content warnings are great but the discourse was either “All CWs for everything” or “No CWs for everything” and then people of color came by and were like “We’re not putting CWs up for racism, btw,” and white people were like “But that’s what CWs are for,” etc etc etc.

    The policing of speech is a difficult one; I definitely want people to feel safe and comfortable where they are online, but I also, truthfully, don’t want to look at every single piece of thing that I write and assess it carefully for any type of content that might trigger any type of person. Maybe that’s the artist in me talking. Some people get triggered by things I wouldn’t consider triggering, while other people aren’t triggered at all by incredibly traumatic things. A lot of people are doing content warning screens on political topics on Mastodon, which I think is what incited the argument in the first place. Are politics triggering? Shouldn’t they be triggering? If you don’t find politics triggering then what’s your deal? So people began to discuss what “CW” could actually mean, especially in the space of a “federated” social media app, where not everyone is receiving the same information all the time, since the whole thing is meant to be decentralized. It’s like … didn’t you guys figure this out years ago? You’re still arguing about it? Sure would be nice if you hired some content management people or something.

    In the end, I think there is a lot more nuance to the content warnings discussion than conservatives give a shit about, which sours the whole experience, making it near impossible to come to any sort of concensus on how we should implement them. Honestly, I’m surprised we don’t have AI capable of reading whatever it is you’re writing and cross-referencing the concepts with whatever the reader doesn’t want to read. Instead we just have photo AI stealing base images to make Richard Nixon eating phở in the style of a political cartoon.

    Anyway, without Twitter and feeling less-than-good about Mastodon, I decided to restart my blog. Yes, my blog, like a 2000s era technophile. A place where I would write more freely about whatever the hell I wanted. No text limit, no concern about Elon Musk buying my website for $44 billion dollars. (I would sell it, though, if he wanted.) No real concern for readership—hopefully somebody will read it, but I won’t cry if they don’t. Somewhere where I could feel like writing a bit more personally and a bit more concretely, as I had set an app on Twitter to delete my tweets after a month because nothing gets you cancelled-and-then-eventually-rehired-because-you’re-a-white-man faster than a tweet from 2012.

    With that in mind comes the obvious question: what do I do with a newsletter? Well, I think I’m going to just put the best two or three blog posts in here, gussy them up a bit, and post ‘em. That way if you’re not into reading blog posts, you can read a couple of my insights and be done with me. Otherwise, things will be the same. In fact, I’m hoping to get a podcast episode up by the end of the week; I’ve been surprisingly busy with stuff this week!

    That’s all. I just wanted to say that I’ve got my blog up and you can go check it out if you wish, but instead I went on a diatribe about a meaningless social media app. Whatever. This is MY newsletter!

    Thanks for reading!

    1

    Pilgrix was robbed, btw, and the Academorgz Flimblejaxx should’ve known.

    2

    News is good, don’t get me wrong. But Twitter is not a news site, it’s a social media site.

  • Coffee Talk

    Last night I found my lil mini French press, which brews but one cup at a time! and this morning I used it to make coffee. My normal, to-go method is pour over. My reasoning is thus: out of all the methods one can use to make coffeeThat don’t include a machine., pour over is the easiest. All you do is grind the beans, heat the water, put the grounds in the cup with the paper strainer, pour the hot water over the grounds, the end. You got coffee.

    But recently I’ve been watching James Hoffman‘s coffee videos on YouTube, specifically one that I can’t find right nowSide note: James’s videos are great. He is a very pleasant sounding man and he is rigorous with his research and experiments. Highly recommend if you’re into coffee.. The gist was that the finer the coffee is ground, the better it tastes in immersion brewing (i.e., French press) vs filtration brewing (i.e., pour over). The problem with filtration brewing is that when the coffee grounds are too finely grounded, water makes a channel in the grounds which prevents it from thoroughly steeping in all the grounds. I’m saying grounds a lot. Water is super lazy and once a channel opens up for it to travel through, it just does it. Immersion brewing, on the other hand, means that all the grounds are immersed in the water and thus you get a more even brew.

    At this point you’re probably thinking, “Josh, buddy, you said that pour overs were super easy, but this immersion brewing sounds even easier!” Well the problem with immersion brewing is time. You have to time the immersion. Too short and the brew is weak. Too long and the brew starts to taste like an ashtray. The latter is not as big a deal if you add things to your coffee, like cream and sugar, but if you’re a black coffee drinker like myself, it makes a huge difference.

    Pour over, on the other hand, you just pour and let it strain. There are variables to consider, yes, but none of them are time related. It’s more temperature based, for me at least.

    Since I hadn’t had a French press coffee in a long time, I made one this morning. Since my lil guy only makes about 8oz of coffee when done, I ran it twice, using the same grounds both times. I also paid absolutely no attention to any of the rules because, in my mind at the time, it was easy: grind, pour into French press, add hot water, stir for about 30 seconds, let steep for four and a half minutes. But I think I screwed a couple of key factors up.

    First, brew time should’ve been a minute less, I think. Also, according to Stumptown’s French press brew guideI think this would make a decent band name, by the way., you should heat the glass with hot water first to have a more stable extraction temperature. I didn’t do that and I think the brew suffered a bit from it. Nothing that, again, would come through if you added milk and/or sugar, but straight black, it was definitely more on the ashy side.

    Somehow, I also had a lot of fine grounds in the bottom of my cup, something that never happens with filters because, well … they’re filters. So that was annoying. That might have also been caused by me brewing twice with the same grounds; something something the grounds disintegrated further into finer bits. Drinking the filtery little fine grounds is kind of gross, so I just had to toss the bottom bit of my coffee. Oh well.

    Speaking of lil, I went for a lil run today. Not even with the C25k app, just a 5 minute run followed by a couple of short jogs. Just to test out my legs, you know. Results: still kind of tense. I’m not sure entirely what’s going on. They’ll feel fine before the run, they felt fine for about half of the 5 minute run, and then my shins started to feel tense again. I’m sure it’s something like shin splints caused by that damnable Mt. Tabor run. The fact that it goes away and mostly stays away when I’m not running is a good sign, and I’ll just keep that going by not doing any significant runs until my next 5k in two weeks. Just long walks to keep the circulation going!

    That was my running update on running.

  • Politics Hangover

    It’s the day after Election Day here in the United States and you know what that means: lots of hand wringing. I, for example have been wringing my hands greatly over the Oregon governor race, where Tina Kotek is winning by 1% over Republican Christine Drazan. I am also fist shaking at independent Betsy Johnson, who pretty obviously was on the ballot just to take votes away from Tina; though, last I checked Multnomah County ballots are still being counted which means that Tina will likely win anyway.

    Meanwhile, human waste pile Lauren Boebert might lose her seat in Colorado. Raphael Warnock is pulling ahead of Herschel fucking Walker, thank god. If Herschel Walker won a Senate seat I would apply for asylum in Canada, I swear.

    I really wish American politics didn’t feel like I am watching an episode of American Idol or something. News channels have really hopped on this concept of elections being nail biters to the point where the whole thing almost feels rigged. Like, I kind of get when people think this shit is rigged. Our Senate race might literally end with a 50-50 split, like last time, which means it’s going to be harder to get anything done. How is this even possible? More people live in the large cities of the U.S. than they do in the rural areas–so why is it an even split between Democrats and Republicans? Seems rigged, right?

    Don’t worry, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, other than that the American political system has basically been rigged in favor of rich white men since its inception. That’s not really a conspiracy though, but a feature that we’re slowly but surely patching out.

    We’re probably going to lose the House, which means absolutely nothing is going to get done for the next two years because the GOP House will introduce bills that Tim Minchin I mean Joe ManchinThis is literally just a joke because I keep getting the names confused. and Kyrsten Sinema will vote for in the Senate, Biden will veto, then it won’t get past the 2/3rds vote. They’re just going to lame duck Biden until the election and then Donald Trump will be resurrected with the flashing red lights, appearing on stage to absorb the conservative Supreme Court justices and attain his final form.

    In other, more awesome political news, Portland is finally, FINALLY after over 100 years going to scrap its stupid-ass commissioner style government–the last of its kind in the U.S.!–and turn it into a more traditional city council-style government. This means that five commissioners will no longer be the people that run the show. Also, candidates will be voted on in a ranked choice system, hopefully keeping the Betsy Johnson’s from stealing votes.

    Rene Gonzalez is usurping Jo Ann Hardesty’s commissioner spot but hopefully it won’t matter due to the gov’t change. (Though I don’t suspect that the change will be immediate.)

    Other measure results: 111, which would make healthcare a fundamental right in the Oregon constitution, is currently failing but with only 71% of the votes counted. I was leery about this one because while yes, I do want healthcare to be a fundamental right everywhere, all the time, the measure links it with our education budget, which might mean that education takes a dip for healthcare. Both of these are fundamental rights in my opinion and both should be independently funded.

    Measure 112, which removes slavery from the OR constitution, is passing. Excellent. Measure 113, which vacates a legislator’s term if they accrue more than 10 unexcused absences, is also passing. This is very good, as we had a few moments where the GOP members would just not show up to votes, which is A) cowardly and B) shitty. Glad we’re fixing that.

    Measure 114 is apparently the strongest gun control laws in the country, and is slightly passing. We’ll see if that holds up. I’m imagining some lawsuits if it passes, ones that will rise up to SCOTUS, where beer-laden Brett Kavanaugh will puke on the docket, destroying the bill.

    The cities of Estacada, Sandy, Molalla, Banks, Cornelius, and the entirety of Clackamas County all passed measures to prohibit psilocybin-related businesses within their areas. Cowards. Cowards! Someone send an educator there to explain that magic mushrooms aren’t fentanyl and that most people have better lives on psilocybin.

    Mult County is amending the charter to replace gender binary terms with gender neutral ones. Good. Take that, gender binary! Also, county officials will be elected via ranked choice voting, also good. BIG win on Measure 26-233, which will have annual jail inspections by commissioners, with volunteers reporting. This is very good, and will very much find more corruption within the jail employees than the prisoners, I guarantee it.

    Overall, locally the election seems to be doing some good. Hopefully Tina Kotek will win the governor spot and we can get some real work done with Oregon and Portland. Nationally … I’m not expecting much. Just give me my $20,000 student loan forgiveness at least.

  • Musings on a Monday

    More Running

    It’s raining in Portland. What can you do. I am resting a bit from running because I think I overdid it and my lower legs weren’t happy with me when I started week five of the C25k program. A significant uphill 5k run after only four weeks of 5k training will do that to a person. Makes me anxious though; I’m concerned that I will slip back into a sedentary lifestyle. Let me show you a picture:

    pic of my puffy ass feet from june 2021
    This has become a foot fetish blog.

    Those are my feet, in a photo taken in June of 2021.Fun fact: I don’t have this photo in my personal backups, probably because I didn’t want to keep a photo of my puffy feet. But I happened upon it while scrolling through my Google Photos backup online. Google, it never forgets. The reason why I took this photo is because I looked down at my feet and was like, “Hey, my feet are, like, very puffy right now, maybe I should take a photo to show a doctor.” I didn’t end up doing that. The puffiness of my feet has gone down considerably since last year, especially in the last couple of months because, you guessed it, exercise. They’re basically unpuffy at this point. Humblebrag. I ate a lot of salty foods and hardly moved a year and a half ago. Now, I eat salty foods but at least I get up and walk around to get the circulation of fluids going.

    So, I’m concerned about being sedentary again.

    I tried running again today and failed halfway through. My shins and feet are just telling me to take a break. So I will, even though it is discouraging. I have to break though because I have another 5k to run in two weeks, which I simply will not be able to complete if I don’t rest. So, I rest. I’m worried about sliding back into bad habits, but I’m also somewhat confident that I won’t do that. These aren’t my Depression Days, they’re more like me … Very Contemplative Days. The days where I find things depressing in the same way one would find a painting beautiful: recognizing that I am not the painting.

    D&D

    We’re playing D&D tonight, starting the second chapter of my Portlandia game. This is a game where all the ice has melted following a nuclear warYes, I know that nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter. In this version the bombs eroded the ozone layer and accelerated global warming. Just deal with it. It’s fantasy! and the sea levels rose about 200ft. Portland and the surrounding area are islands separated by shallow seas. Around 2,000 years have passed since the Lost War and for some reason, the vibe is “western.” Chapter One was supposed to be just a couple of sessions but ended up being twelve. One of those sessions was streamed on Twitch, which was fun and also felt strangely like doing a play; I felt that nervous preshow energy, you know?

    This first session tonight I’m bringing in my friend Kati as a guest. Kati is an old friend. That is an understatement, but I don’t really want to get into the tides that are our friendship because it’s mostly embarrassing on my end. It’s one of those larger issues of mine that I am very glad I’ve been to therapy to work on. Maybe a blog for another day. But I’m glad she was eager to play in my game. She used to work at Wizards of the Coast. She is very popular and cool and I feel like I’m bringing, like, Tom Hanks to play at my softball game or something.

    It’s good to have D&D to fall back on these days. I honestly am not quite sure where I would be now without it, after the pandemic hit. I think I would feel much more alone and sad.

    Well, I was going to write more and got sidetracked. Maybe tomorrow!

  • Mastodon is Not Nicoderm

    It’s Monday, the Monday after a full week of Elon Musk owning Twitter. I deactivated my Twitter account on a whim after just kind of being done with it. Not my account, per se, but the vibe of Twitter in general. It’s just off. It’s bad. The sociological decay rate of social media seems to put the Best By date around 10-15 years after its inception. So, I once again signed up to Mastodon, after deleting my previous two attempts and then realizing that I can’t get my old usernames back. Oh well, who cares.

    A lot of Mastodon now is reactive: people reacting to Twitter, mostly. It’s not really a society as it is a shared trauma experience, one where we’ve all collectively escaped from our abuser and are now qualifying ourselves in reaction to that. It’s annoying, is what I’m saying.

    This Monday, I feel the itch. The itch to tweet. To say something dumb on Twitter. I’ve tried on Mastodon:

    This is what I would call a Quintessential Josh Tweet. A QJT. Something dumb that would pop up in my head and that I’d type out on Twitter as fast as humanly possible. This is Weird Twitter. My type of people are people who would see this tweet and appreciate the humor. They don’t have to laugh, just appreciate.

    But Mastodon doesn’t scratch that itch, for two reasons: one, I don’t know enough people there. That’s fair, I just started up again. And two, this is not what I’m seeing on my timeline. This one’s a little more difficult to fix. You have to find the right people. But in a way, I don’t want to find the right people. I don’t want to join a “comedy” instance because then it’s all people trying to be comedians. Plus, as Mastodonians continue to remind us, instances don’t even matter because you can see other people’s postsI refuse to call them toots. across all instances. Fans and friends, that’s all I want. And not even “fans” necessarily, more like … appreciaters.

    Mastodon is a poor nicotine patch for Twitter, despite all the tech folks trying to convince us that it is. Decentralization is good perhaps but for social media? The concept of “decentralizing” a thing where the point is for people to come together doesn’t make much sense to me. I read a post from someone saying that they should rename “instances” to “communities” … like Google+, which failed. I think Google+ failed in part because a social media concept like Twitter–fast paced, short messages–wants to relate to people in a general sense, rather than a specific, community sense. In other words, you don’t want to have to negotiate a bunch of community “threads” to find things that you want to read. Plus, you can already create your community on Twitter by curating who you follow. Now you want me to split that again into communities?

    There’s a vast, vast difference between what people in tech think social media should look like, and how the general populace operates social media. Tech wants to bring in features, but most people want the app to be as simple as possible. People don’t want to know about instances. They just want to post things and read things, and they want to know how to block people. Mastodon is pretty much this simple, it’s just that the users are making things confusing by constantly elaborating on stuff that I don’t care about. I don’t really care about instances; I do care about Mastodon being able to quickly and effectively “sever the limb” of alt-right/extremist instances. But I want no part of that. I just want to read and post things, and I want the things I read to be things I like, not people constantly telling me how great Mastodon is and all the multitudinous things I can do with it.

    Thankfully, Elon Musk is absolutely fucking up when it comes to running Twitter, which is delightfully hilarious in a way. Guy’s like a five year old who got handed a $1,000 camera and thinks he’s going to take Pulitzer Prize winning photographs with it, but then the first photo we see is just a blurry dog’s anus. “I did it!” he cries. “Give me my Pulitzer now.”

    Something makes me think this is one big misguided attempt to try and get Grimes back. “Look, Grimes, I bought Twitter!” he types into his phone. Sends text. Is left on read.

    I think Mastodon will mellow out over the next few weeks as the adrenaline of leaving Twitter wears off and everyone realizes it’s just another app. They’re all just apps. Meaningless, ultimately. Get food, get sleep, procreate to extend the life of the species. Then very far down the list: check social media accounts.

  • A Running Update … on Running

    So, I ran a 5k. I talk about that in the newsletter. It, like most runs, was one of those things that was good before it started, agonizing while I was doing it, and then great after I finished. It sucks to realize it, but your body actually likes it a lot when you’ve exercised. It’s funny how at odds it is with your brain, which oftentimes (for me at least) likes to eat a lot of bad-for-me things until my body forces it to stop. You’d think my brain and my body would be more connected, considering they are both inside of me and are me. But no, instead, there is my brain, my body, and then whateverthefuck it is that is watching and judging both of them right now.It’s my brain, I know it’s my brain, but my brain talking about my brain is weird.

    I’m a runner now; Wolf Parade was right all along.

    Running is one of those things that is easily rewarding. You move forward quickly for a bit and then stop. It’s hard work, but when you’re done you’re like “Hey that was good!” (Maybe you have to do this a couple of times to achieve the effect.) Now I’m at a point where I must go exercise every day. Either a run or 5,000 steps, whichever is on the docket for the day. Today I walked, because the 5k plus finishing Week 4 of my Couch to 5k training has caused my legs to send a message to my brain, that message being, “Hey, take it easy for two days instead of one.” But I walked twice, once to get an absolute fuckload of day old bagels from Henry Higgins through the Too Good to Go app. Seriously, I had to freeze most of the bagels, there were so many bagels. The second time was to Safeway, to buy cream cheese for said bagels.I ended up spending too much money at Safeway and my account was overdrawn, but thankfully I still have credit on my credit card, so it took the hit. I may be 39 but I am still bad with money! Ladies, I’m single!

    In November I am tackling the Turkey Trot, a 5k at Portland International Raceway, where I will be racing some of the fastest cars ever built. Just kidding; they put Christmas lights up there and you get to drive around and see them. But we get to see them first, apparently! Last time I went to this event I was in a friggen car! Now, I’m on my feet? Insanity.

    The plan is to sign up for some sort of 5k every month up until Shamrock Run time. Then, my triumphant return to the Shamrock Run, after being gone for, I believe, five years. I’m just going to keep running until I grind my legs into a pulp and then grow new legs, which is the custom of my people. I want to be one of those guys who has a million medals hanging off of a wall in his den. I need a den first. Baby steps.

  • Detaching Writing from Content Creation

    I’m in the hobby of making stuff. Not the business. I’m terrible at the business stuff. I don’t know how people do it. “You built that entire chair? And somebody bought it? That’s a goddamn miracle.”

    No, I make things and then haphazardly try to get people to check them out. The things are various levels of “good”; some of the things could be better, some of the things could be worse. But I’m always making something. I can’t help it. It’s kind of a burden, honestly. I can’t not create things. “Ohhh, such a probleeemm” you sarcastically say to me. But it’s true. I wish I could just not make stuff, but my brain doesn’t work that way. It’s like MichelangeloA man who is just like me in terms of creativity, not in the “gay and possibly asexual” way. staring at a big chunk of marble and being like, “I can make David out of that.” Except for me, the chunk of marble is “A foggy void inside my brain” and the David is “A podcast” or “A song” or “Some poetry.”

    The problem is that I have no discipline. Creations slough off of my brain like old skin, festering on the ground, waiting for a vacuum. I could be using a skin care routine, but no, I just let the dry stuff waft away on the winter breeze. Twitter does not help this! Twitter is the place where you say whatever you want into a void that their PR team has convinced you is actually reading your dumb shit. It’s the textual equivalent of your grandmother sitting you down to watch blurry slides of her trip to Italy from 1952, except instead of the beautiful Tuscan landscape, it’s every single thing everyone has ever thought, ever, times 20.

    Can you tell this is a blog about me convincing myself to delete my Twitter account?

    Every Reddit thread about social media has like five guys who are like, “I deleted all my social media ten years ago and I’ve never felt better.” They type that on reddit.com. Was life better before social media? No, and if anyone tells you different they’re lying. Life has always been the same. The same amount of bullshit, the same amount of joy. It’s a bell curve. It’s this:

    Some people are slightly left of the bell curve, some people are slightly right, but everybody’s gotta shit, you know what I mean?

    So the question is: does social media make life worse? Or does life make life worse?

    Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion dollars. In comparison, 44 billion seconds is 1,394 years. You know what happened in 1394 AD? Richard II started giving Geoffrey Chaucer 20 pounds a year for the rest of his life for being a diplomat. You know how much those 20 pounds are now? £19,924, or $22,694 US dollars. What does that have to do with any of this. Nothing! I just thought it was neat.It’s also amazing that the Bank of England has inflation values from all the way back to 1209. I’m getting distracted! Anyway, Elon, this guy, this fuckin’ guy, likely bought Twitter for way more than it was worth. And now he’s going to charge $8/month for Twitter Blue, which he knocked down from $20 because Stephen King complained. It makes me realize that businesses don’t always tank because people want them to–sometimes they tank because the guy who bought the business is a fucking idiot.

    So here’s the thing: Twitter is content creation. It is meant for you to churn out content, so that people will read it, so you will see more advertising, so the advertisers and Twitter will make more money. Content creation is a farm meant to grow food for rich people. And you’re the lowly serf who thinks your TikTok carrot will make a difference in the pile of billions of carrots. Art is not an assembly line. Content creation dilutes good art. The necessity for people to constantly make TikTok videos or YouTube videos or podcasts, etc, ruins the lot of it. Imagine is Michelangelo made a new statue every day. You think the quality of those statues would go down?

    This is an argument toward me deleting Twitter. And I think it’s winning. People need time to think, to grow, to write and edit and delete. And then release. We’re too inundated with content creation, and younger generations are indoctrinated to believe that the internet is content creation. But it’s not. It’s content consumption. It’s the snake eating its own tail. And it’s all ultimately meaningless. It’s jokes and cats falling off TVs and it’s the most important thing and the least important thing at the exact same time. Social superposition. Quantum physics in macro.

    So what is it? Do we continue feeding the content creation monster? Or do we divest ourselves of these apps and go outside and look at a tree?

  • Josh Writes a Blog (Again)

    Josh.

    Yeah?

    A … are you starting a blog again?

    Yeah, I am.

    Don’t you have a newsletter already?

    I do.

    So … what’s this for?

    Well, I was thinking about it, you know —

    Oh no.

    — and I thought — what do you mean, “Oh no”?

    I just don’t like to see you thinking about stuff, is all.

    What is that supposed to mean?

    Well, you start to think about something, and then that thing turns into two things, and then those two things turn into four things, and —

    I’m just thinking about —

    It’s exponential, you know.

    Right, right. I get it.

    This is all about Twitter, isn’t it?

    … Sort of.

    Alright, explain.

    I signed up for Twitter back in 2008 and have more or less enjoyed the hell out of it until about 2015. Or whenever Trump started being more of an issue on it. Really, I could say that it was when news and politics became a thing in general on that site, but it really stopped being a fun site during the Trump presidency. My interest in it has waxed and waned since then.

    I’ve written some type of blog since forever. 1998? But when Twitter took over, instead of blogging, I tweeted. If I didn’t start auto-deleting my tweets a few years ago, I’m sure I’d have around 30,000 tweets by now. That’s a lot. Most of it dumb jokes that were topical and wouldn’t make sense now.

    Anyway, Elon Musk bought Twitter and that guy is a real dumb piece of shit, so I’ve been thinking about leaving Twitter for good. It’s hard because I like writing and I like the microblogging that Twitter offers. But I’ve also noticed over the years that I’ve become less introspective and honest in my writing, which I miss. So I thought I would start up a blog again, to keep that going.

    How’s that sound?

    Eh, it’s fine I guess. You’re talking to yourself, though, so you’re already worried that you won’t ever update and nobody will ever read it and everybody hates you forever.

    Damn, you really know me, me.

    So what about the newsletter?

    It’s still going to happen. I might copy blogs from here into it though, spruce them up for the newsletter crowd. I don’t know if that’s a good idea or a bad idea, but who cares.

    Gotcha.

    Blogs for the blog crowd, newsletters for the newsletter crowd.

    Alright. Well, good luck.

    Thanks, me.