Random thoughts... - by Tocky
mxleader on 3/8/2023 at 09:37
I was just thinking today that since I just got laid off from work yesterday that I now have time to go for longer walks and to play some video games. I also thought, very randomly, that I should begin my job search but that was a nasty intrusive thought that I quickly made go away.
Azaran on 3/8/2023 at 15:55
A FB contact of mine posted something about online outrage and the media that got me thinking: Media bias isn't just about pushing a misleading narrative or view of reality. It's about getting people outraged and riled up, so they share the story, drive clicks, and give prominence to said media source.
E.g. It's easy to get outraged about some X cause protesters getting beaten by riot police, if you're not told that they tore up a neighbourhood earlier in the day.
And here's the thing, most media sources do it. The right wing ones are more likely to just make stuff up based on sketchy claims, while the 'liberal' ones will leave out key details that could completely rewrite an event (the right wing ones do the same).
Even BBC that I used to trust the most for objectivity, had some misleading stories over the years.
Sadly, media objectivity is impossible to enforce. You can force a media house not to make up stories out of thin air, but you can't control how they'll frame a factual story, what they'll leave out, etc.
And even when a story is bogus, once it's gone viral the cat is out of the bag, and the damage is done, which is what they want. Any rebuttals or refutations that come after will fall on deaf ears.
Tocky on 6/8/2023 at 01:03
I'm just hanging on for five more years. If I'm honestly needed I'll come in for a while after. I thought of working some simple job when this one seemed on the verge of ending but I did like I always do and waited to see what would happen. Now my days are the easiest of my career. I make tickets. I make work orders. I answer the phone. I talk to customers. Sometimes I unload a truck or cut glass. Mostly I sit at my desk with my feet up waiting for something to happen. But if I had to I could get some sort of job to tide me over. You can too mxleader. If you aren't too afraid of your application being accepted.
Manufactured outrage is what sells. We let plain old news telling die back in the last century. Or at least when Trump began labeling real news fake news and fake news real. From now on we will have to weed out where we are being led to discern the truth. We will have to know where we are being led and why.
As for me, I was right. He took down all the trees along the highway on the other side of him now. He wants his brick monstrosity seen from all sides. I had hoped to live out my days in wooded obscurity. Now I can be seen from the main road. Life never just lets us slip by. It always has to fuck with us.
heywood on 7/8/2023 at 18:10
Quote Posted by mxleader
I was just thinking today that since I just got laid off from work yesterday that I now have time to go for longer walks and to play some video games. I also thought, very randomly, that I should begin my job search but that was a nasty intrusive thought that I quickly made go away.
Sorry to hear that. Hope it wasn't a complete surprise.
Were you working from home? I imagine it will be harder to find the motivation if you were, since it's not as big of a lifestyle change. You get a phone call, your computer locks up, and you send it back in a box. And then you wake up the next day and it's business as usual, except no business today so you just fill the hours with casual time.
How's the job market where you live? Around here, everyone's working but people aren't jumping around for raises like they were a year or two ago.
Sulphur on 10/8/2023 at 13:46
Sometimes, at the end of a long bout of exercise, usually when I'm supine on the floor in the post-workout stretching bit, I stare up at the ceiling and wish some warm and benevolent deity would slide its hands into my chest and scoop out my soul, too long nestled in its too-tight cradle, and let it slip loose into the space between now and forever, to let it wend along some star-dimmed ethereal stream threshing with every other spirit as existentially tired as I am in that moment. This entire train of thought lasts only a second, but at the end of that second there descends upon me a sense of composure I don't otherwise have ready access to.
I also usually try to hold in a fart during those moments. Correlation and causation? Maybe. Note to self: eat less beans.
demagogue on 10/8/2023 at 17:48
Well that's a mood.
Some of the moments I most cherish are when I take a walk on an overcast late afternoon down some neon lit street, best if early spring or late autumn with some breeze and earphones on playing some kind of chill electronica like CMA, Carbon Based Lifeforms, or Ascendant. I'll feel almost disembodied like a pure cloud of consciousness drifting through the scene. Easy to see why (
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122433&page=182&p=2502970&viewfull=1#post2502970) this video spoke to me.
Azaran on 10/8/2023 at 18:32
Somewhat related to your mention of neon lit streets.
I prefer the old amber sodium street lamps. Most places are replacing them with harsh white LED's, often twice as bright and almost fluorescent, and it ruins the nightscape. Especially when they're used in historic and heritage areas. I understand that LED's are more efficient, but considering that nice, amber LED's do exist (the city I live in actually uses them in its old town and they look great), governments should have implemented those instead and considered aesthetics instead of pure functionalism. Just because you can light everything up like a hospital, doesn't mean you should. If not amber led's, at least lower the brightness.
A village in Portugal. Look how off putting that looks. Considering just one of these can probably light a whole city block, why would you put a ton of them in a small stretch???
Inline Image:
https://i.postimg.cc/pL7WkRBm/IMG-20200318-203148.jpgRome (local residents have actually complained)
Inline Image:
https://www.wantedinrome.com/i/preview/storage/uploads/2017/03/led-rome.jpgdemagogue on 10/8/2023 at 20:47
It's a testament to my years of Thief mapping that I'm immediately thinking about lowering the lighting placement, radius, and brightness on both aesthetic and gameplay grounds. Over saturation is for sure a way to kill an atmosphere.
Azaran on 10/8/2023 at 22:09
Quote Posted by demagogue
It's a testament to my years of Thief mapping that I'm immediately thinking about lowering the lighting placement, radius, and brightness on both aesthetic and gameplay grounds. Over saturation is for sure a way to kill an atmosphere.
Right? Looking like
light_bright over here
Tocky on 11/8/2023 at 03:47
I grew up with blue sodium lights which gave an other worldly feel to the night. Me and my buds out at 2:00 AM up to some mischief knowing everyone was asleep. By that time of night any dragging had been done, any dates over, maybe we had been playing pool at Pervis Pool Hall in Oxford or maybe we were camping at Jackies lake but we often came back to this little one store and post office town to finish off the last beers rattling in the cooler while Bad Company played on someones radio. Another world in another time. Nothing stays the same.
I would like to see it again. Isn't that what happens in Buddhism? You only get to move on from this life when you gain ultimate enlightenment? You get to move on out into the stars and become one with the universe like Sulphur if he can hold in the fart long enough? Something like that. I don't want the universe though. I would settle for how it used to be. Even recently. "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone". He is going to put up lights all around his house. I can feel it. I've thought of letting my central Wisteria go and the creeping vines along the ground make it all the way to the edge of the yard and build a fence there for them to climb and block him out. I've let them go enough to do other things like this-
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/sVFUC8h.jpgAn old daybed made a nice trellis gateway. I don't know. I'll think of something if he keeps trying to let too much of the world in. It's not that I can't appreciate cities. I remember Waterloo station and how it felt to walk around London by myself with nobody to guide me. Often the best happenstances occur that way. But when I'm home I want a cocoon of green and the feeling the world can't find me.
