Social Smoking, Social Media

I had a friend who smoked when I was in my twenties. One day she left a cigarette pack at my apartment, and because I was young and was testing boundaries, I grabbed the pack, went out on my balcony and smoked a cigarette.

Of course, not being a real smoker, I coughed. I didn’t particularly like the smoking part... so I sucked back on it as fast as I could.

As I started to feel the effects, I felt great. The world was sharp, and I felt like I could cut through problems. I suddenly understood why smoking had taken over the world for a while.

Immediately afterwards I threw the rest of the pack in the garbage, knowing full well that if I ever smoked a second cigarette, it would be the beginning of addiction and dependency. That day built a huge amount of empathy for smokers, as I knew full well that I could be there too but for a few different choices.

Anyhow, this is a post about why I haven’t posted on Mastodon in a while.

Facebook was great when I first got on there. For young people seeking connection, it felt like suddenly we’d gone from having a small web of people to a huge one. Of course, it didn’t last. At least to me it seems like the social graph got bigger, but then we started to realize that posting everything to everyone wasn’t so smart, and then it all fell apart as we tried to curate and sort who could see what.

Twitter was great when I first got on there. Funny people, smart people, influential people. You felt like you were watching a whole river of incredible conversations -- and you could just... partake. Sometimes you’d even get a reply! A hero read your tweet! Of course, it didn’t last. I was complaining about it feeling toxic in 2018.

Mastodon was great when I first got on there. A small community of interesting people who had self-selected into this world. The linear timeline felt like the features you wanted, federation would be the salvation from degradation of commercial interests.

Unfortunately, what I have realized more than anything else is... I’m just not built for social media. I can’t seem to figure out a way where I partake and I’m happy with it.

There are people who can be “social smokers”. I myself am a “social drinker”. At the same time, nicotine and alcohol addicts exist; the human experience runs the gamut.

For me, I think I will choose to just abstain from social media. It’s better for me.

I’ve basically not logged into Mastodon in months except to post a couple of my blog posts. I realized at some point that every time I opened the page I was rolling the dice: If I was lucky, I’d find something cool, get a nice dopamine hit. If I wasn’t lucky, I’d find someone who was mad. Or something would be posted that made me mad, or sad, or scared.

When I stopped logging in... I just felt better. Again.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll really learn the lesson this time.

I hope so.

I won't post this there -- different people feel differently and that's fine, but I don't need to lob some sort of meta argument onto Mastodon.

I may post other blog posts there. I do like people reading my writing sometimes!

What about blogs? What about newsletters?

I think they’re more my speed.

You can just say "Thank You", and should sooner rather than later.

This turns out to be almost exactly the one year anniversary of me writing a letter of gratitude to a blogger whose work I really appreciate. The reply I got was roughly “Thank you! A note like this makes my day”.

It’s something I absolutely can and should do more of. Recently I sent a note to a small musician when I realized their song had been popping into my head for nearly 15 years. I appreciate so many people in the world, but I don’t always say it.

I had been procrastinating on setting a similar letter to Victor Mair, who I know from Language Log, a blog I read and loved in the Google Reader era. What prompts this blog post is that, while debugging some feed reader issues I’d been having with Language Log, I realize… I am too late. Dr. Mair passed away on the 28th of June.

So, dearest gentle reader, I exhort you: Go forth and tell people you are grateful for what they put into the world, and do it eagerly: You never know when it could be too late.

Fuck Energy

In 2019 I wrote the kinder gentler version of this blog post. You want the happy version? Read that. I still believe in the vast majority of it.

But in 2026 — Fuck Energy. I’m so fucking tired of the fucking oil and gas business driving the terminology bus. This rhetorical spin of “Energy” and “Energy Superpower” is a fucking con-job, and I am so done.

Energy from oil and gas means burning shit. It means putting carbon in the air, or spending more energy to sequester the carbon as you burn it. It means dirtying up your air! It means living a shittier life, spending your (personal or societal) wealth pumping up the bank accounts of oil producing nations.

I THINK HUMAN THRIVING IS CONNECTED TO OUR ABILITY TO HAVE ENERGY BUT I AM ALSO AGAINST OIL AND GAS.

HUH. ISN’T THAT A NUANCED TAKE.

Technology Connections had a banger of a video talking about this in January (pre-Hormuz Cluster Fuck), and the point stands. You spend money on oil, you use it, and it’s gone. You spend money on Solar, Wind, Geothermal… and it’s there for the lifetime of that asset.

Why do we accept this rhetorical con-job? OH RIGHT OIL PRODUCERS HAVE MONEY AND A VESTED INTEREST IN CONFUSING THE ISSUE. Honestly, I’m really fucking disappointed in the Canadian Government for normalizing this bullshit.

Here’s a thing: Most countries on earth are oil importers. Most countries on earth are getting an object lesson in what it means to be beholden to world markets.

If I take any solace in the absolute bullshit of our present, it’s that the lessons of Hormuz are going to make a whole bunch of places realize that they should be looking elsewhere. I live in an oil producing area, and I have to say… methinks there’s a fucking train called electrotech coming for us, and when our province is fucked over by this… well, anyone who says “who ever could have seen this coming” should be laughed out of a room.

The world is going to be a better place when oil and gas are dethroned. I can’t fucking wait.

Image Generation Progress, 2 years 4 months

This is mostly a blog post for my own reference. I wanted to revisit the prompts I used to test out DALL-E in January 2023 against the new OpenAI image model.

The Tree

“A painting of single poplar tree in fall with leaves falling, lit just before golden hour, that evokes feelings of nostalgia and warmth.”

2023

2026

The Farmer
“A fine art painting of a farmer holding a microprocessor"

2023

2026

Tuscan Hills

“A John Constable Painting of the Starship Enterprise over the hills of tuscany”

2023

2026

Van Gough Clouds

“Vincent Van Gogh paints Mammatus clouds over stonegenge” (spelling mistakes copied from previous prompt)

2023

2026

Ansel Adams City

“ansel adams photo of the moon rising over a city skyline, wide angle long distance shot high contrast dramatic” — once upon a time prompting was really a whole deal

2023

2026

Streamliner Modern

“A Streamliner Modern apartment building, line drawing, sketch”

2023

2026

Haiku Clip Art

“A black and white pencil drawing of a computer with arms using a fountain pen to write a haiku, simple art style suitable for printing, clip art”

2023

2026

Space Parents

“Two parents on a space station watching their child go to sleep on a baby monitor, digital art”

2023

2026

Cool Hijab

“A marble bust of a woman with a hijab and fashionable sunglasses, studio lit, soft focus”

2023

2026

Rockwell Bat

“An annoyed bat eating ice cream by Norman Rockwell”

2023

2026

Impressionist Baby

“an impressionist painting of a baby drinking from a bottle 1887"

2023

Vaporwave Roman

2023


A Note on Boulding Psychology

For the last 8 months or so I’ve taken up bouldering; the indoor climbing-sans-rope sport. It’s been a really interesting journey. So far it has been one of my favourite forms of exercise.

There’s a whole bunch of things which factor into my interest in bouldering:

  • There’s a ton of variety and novelty. One of the challenges I had with doing strength training at a gym was... well, a deadlift is a deadlift is a deadlift. And while you get a lot out of gaining strength through traditional training techniques, I really started to get bored, and getting bored meant I didn’t want to go, which meant... I stopped going.

    Whereas at my climbing gym, there are new sets every week. There are a variety of problem types in bouldering (slab, underhang, vertical), and each climb tends to be unique in its own way.

    Frequent new problems and frequent change means that coming to the gym is different every time.

  • Speaking of problems, I really appreciate the extent to which climbing matches thinking and doing. While sure, if you’re strong, there are many climbing problems that can be done with brute force, more often than not there’s a much ‘easier’ way to climb a specific problem, and some problems really can’t be brute-forced without figuring out the ‘trick’. So there’s a huge aspect of climbing which is problem solving, which I really appreciate.
  • It’s also a fairly full body sport. There’s not a lot of muscle groups that get missed by climbing, and can be pretty great cardio, and so climbing has been over the winter my dominant form of exercise.

I recently really had a bit of a revelation about bouldering that I wanted to write down.

In bouldering, problems are “graded”. There are some standard grading scales, though at the gyms I go to it’s basically just 1-9. For a long while I was climbing 3s, frequently being able to do them my first try (‘flashing’ them -- climbing is filled with terminiology), yet aside from a single 4 accomplished in November, I’d not done any since.

Recently though I went from having done a single grade 4, to having done 6+ of them. It all started to come at once. The thing that’s interesting to me is how much of this was entirely a psychological barrier. There’s something fascinating about how merely having done ‘some’ of these routes suddenly made accomplishing more of them much easier. It is as if my brain and body suddenly gave me ‘permission’, in a way that hadn’t happened previously.

One of the most interesting videos about climbing I have watched actually covers this directly. Louis Parkinson of the Catalyst Climbing channel talks about mindset frequently (actually, I think it’s noticable if you watch his older videos how he’s actually grown on this front), and this is a whole video where he walks through the importance of mindset and how it is possible to train a more helpful mindset.

The revelation I really had is “grades are nothing but a number”, but that actually holds true everywhere.

Go See Project Hail Mary

Reasons to go see Project Hail Mary

  • A faithful adaption of a well loved book. Don’t want to see a movie? read the book

  • More excellent comedy work from Ryan Gosling

  • Good Sci Fi results might beget more good sci fi movies? We can hope.