markjgsmith

Everything is basically a hell hole of escallations at the minute. These seem to always coincide with the start of the month, which is a problem because it makes me look very crazy to potential employers from monthly job boards. Catch 22. To potential employers, for what it’s worth, I’m actually quite a well balanced person, just been caught up in a difficult situation since COVID.

Anyway, here are yesterday’s escallations:

• People outside egg and hot water shop saying good liar after I bought an egg but no sandwich, after avoiding them walking into me. They made no effort to correct their walking path as we crossed the road.
• Was then called a liar at least twice in the next 2 minutes by people along the street that seemed to be waiting for me to walk past them.
• Was told ‘maximum’ by the shop staff when paying and I asked for how much. When I asked again, she said 15, but only gave me 4 change. When I asked why she short changed me, she pointed to receipt and didn’t accept that she told me the wrong price. She hadn’t rounded up the amount correctly which was 15600, but the till calculator did.
• A group of young men, one of whom had green hair, said ‘we won’ as they were leaving, then started laughing after I made a gesture like I have no idea what you are talking about, because I literally had no idea what they were talking about.
• Strange security guard bloke from yesterday that tried to create a manufactured situation where making it look like a piece of my bread packaging had fallen to the floor, by picking it up and throwing it away. I am pretty sure it was there on the floor when I arrived and sat down. I remember thinking how strange that the previous person who sat at my table before me had eaten the same thing as me, especially given how early it was. Note he only did that once I had thrown away all my garbage AND the girl shop staff who pretends to be an angel but actually regularly tries to metaphorically shiv you, had cleared all the bins, so no way to check my garbage. I’m pretty sure when I opened the bread package there was no separate bit that came loose. It was still attached to the main packaging. Note I was gifted the bread the night before by a strange slow moving car that appeared to have a bag with a bunch of things, so somebody knew I would open a bread while sitting there. To me it all looks very much like yet another malicious manufactured set of situations.
• Weird young boy teenager at the shop cafe when I arrived, who was loitering and standing uncomfortably close right behind me. Kept standing on front of power outlet and staring at it and also did some strange thing with one of the bar stools.
• Shop staff bloke quietly saying ‘go’ as he walked past for no apparent reason.
• Shop staff women are randomly shouting ‘pain!’. Note somebody has been leaving empty pain killer packages in places I go for the past few days.
• My iOS device plug which stopped working right after a weird incident last week, started working again. I tested it and it was working again. Even unplugged it out and plugged it in again several times and it was fine. About 15 minutes later it started doing the weird on / off thing it was doing last week. Odd.
• Note that the security guards seemed to have replaced the tutter bloke and his occasional girlfriend. That appeared to start the day my phone got smashed on the floor while I was getting to the very end of listening to a mr obnoxious podcast about innocent prisoners. I was very cognitively overloaded because of harassment and massive reality inversions in the situation because there were so many similarities by what the interviewee was saying and my situation. That was the second time in two days my device got smashed on the floor and I had slipped and fallen twice badly in the previous 2 days, all following intense harassment. I was quite shook up by it, because for me loosing my device would be very similar to actual death for me.
• Random other customers at shop cafe saying ‘you no’ / ‘you know’ for no apparent reason to each other and finding it quite funny.
• The bloke shop cafe staffer that earlier was saying ‘go!’ as he walked past, now is saying ‘work!’. Oh world, trying to front run everything again aren’t you. It ultimately just ends up creating traffic jams and blocking everything and offending everyone, including yourselves.
• Quite a lot of people shouting ‘mother’ at me the past few days
• The standing place at the internet place has been blocked by a wheel chair
• Westerners walked past me at the internet place, one casually Up! harassed me, and that was followed by another westerner who shouted Cunt! directly at me. I’d never seen him before.
• Butch women walked past shouted boy! at me
• White clothes wearers tsunamis everywhere all day
• Butch woman and man start having a very animated and quite loud discussion right in front of me, making a point to stand directly in front of me only cms away, lots of pointing by the woman who was wearing red T-shirt pointing at the man who was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt. It felt very manufactured. Eventually I have them both piece signs, they left, as they left the woman said ‘you know’ / ‘you no’. I have started sneezing a lot in the last hour and totally blocked nose. The bloke at the sandwich shop earlier where I got a pork bun was behaving very strangely. I seem to very often get ill after eating there. He said something about a cold as he got the pork bun. Then was angrily muttering something to himself.
• The cold is one of these surging sneezing colds that seems to mirror the escalations. There is a surge, a bunch of sneezing, it calms down, nose clears, goes away then comes back worse. This happens again and again getting worse each time until I’m sneezing and runny nose constantly.

No time to make sense of all that.

I’ve made significant progress on my static sitt generator’s item has links feature. I’m just trying to get the CSS working. Soon all post types on the main page will have item hash links by default.

Not much else to add. #

cat << EOF > JD Vance on Kamala’s talking style

JD Vance who is running as the vice president pick for the Republicans in the US elections, was on Rogan’s podcast a few days ago. Putting aside political party preferences for a second, I thought this observation was kind of spot on:

Vance: The only way I can describe it is that she talks in circles.

Rogan: Tim Dillon says it’s like she does gypsy curses. She speaks in gypsy curses.

Vance: [Big Lol] That’s very good. [...] There is actually a skill to this. I think that she is the Michael Jordan of using as many words as possible to say as little as possible. There’s actually a certain gift that she has because you listen to her talk, and you are 100 - 200 words into it, you’re 500 words into it, and you are like what the hell did she just say? She didn’t say anything.

So yeah there’s a certain political skill in saying a lot without actually saying anything. But it actually worries me about her being president [...] what does she do when she’s in a meeting with a world leader, and she has to know the details of public policy to negotiate with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jin Pin? [...] and I don’t know that she has an ounce of curiosity about public policy. That’s what scares the hell out of me.

It’s both a funny bit but also, it’s true! I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. I could certainly see her way of speaking be used to frustrate opponents and as a stalling tactic. But it’s worth noting because if it’s her only 'mode' then she might not be so great at getting things done. It’s worth listening to the whole bit as they do some impersonations which are kind of hilarious.

Of course Trump has his own unique way of talking, now being refered to as "the weave", which some would argue can be quite difficult to deal with, so perhaps it comes down to preference. One thing I will say about Trump, based on his recent appearance on Rogan, is that he’s willing to sit down for long unscripted interviews, and though his style does definitely get in the way sometimes, he seems to be aware of this, and I thought he does show curiosity and empathy in the people he talks with. He listens. He’s prepared to learn in public. At least there’s a chance of getting a message through to him. I’m not so sure about Kamala, could be her talking in circles thing makes her impenetrable.

It was an interesting interview with Vance. The two biggest things that stood out to me is that he’s very smart, knows his stuff, very well spoken on so many things, but he’s also clearly from a different generation to Trump. His dynamic with Rogan was totally different. Could be a great combo with Trump if they get on well. #

cat << EOF > A better metaphor for growth

Daniel Susskind was on the Keen On podcast this week. Lots of interesting topics covered centering around our current obsession with economic growth, from it’s historical origins, to the current moment and how it might be affected by AI.

His comments about how he thinks we should update the generally accepted metaphor for growth struck a chord with me [24:00]:

DS: Very often when people talk about economic growth, the kind of metaphors they have in mind is a kind of train, and they are sitting in the drivers seat and they can push forward on the throttle and go faster or pull back and go slower.

AK: Marx’s locomotive of history

DS: Yeah exactly, and in that spirit the direction of travel is set, it’s predetermined by the rails that are set down for us to trundle along, and the only question is do we want more or less growth [...] that’s the dimension in which the debate takes place. I’m saying that actually a far better metaphor is a nautical one. We are sitting in a boat and we can put up our masts and go faster, or we can put them down and go slower. But also, the direction of travel is far more open. There are many possibly directions our economy can take. The choice is not simply do we want more or less growth, but it’s also do we want a different type of growth as well [...] I think there are ways for us to pursue growth without destroying those other valuable things we care about. Whether it’s the environment, the level of equality in society, the health of local places and communities etc.

In some ways what he’s saying seems like common sense, like it’s obvious. But sometimes the obvious things need saying, because at some point in time, believe it or not the obvious things weren’t all that obvious. This feels like one of those things.

The rest of the discussion is super interesting too, worth listening to. #

cat << EOF > Electronic music range

Two electronic music mixes I’ve been listening to a lot recently really show the variety in the landscape of electronic music:

• RA.954 Rey Colino
• RA.958 Slipmatt

I listen to these on my earbuds and I can visualise myself listening and dancing to them at outdoor festivals, underground clubs or beaches in the sun, on massive sound systems at some ridiculous hour in the morning. My entire body and mind is momentarily transported through time and place. The human mind is friggin’ amazing.

I spent the early part of my life listening entirely to band based music. There was a time when I used to hate anything that wasn’t created on real musical instruments. I was into alt rock and metal, and looking back I was really closed minded about what I liked, about what I thought was cool.

At some point along the way I gave electronic music a try, at first pretty dark stuff like drum & bass, break beat and tech house, I think probably because these were were most similar in vibe to metal. But over the years I found my way into so many other genres, some faster some slower, some happier, some darker. Entire universes exist behind each of these.

It’s completely mindboggling to me how much my tastes have changed, expanded and refined over the years. Things I would previously have considered way too comercial, I now realise I just haden’t heard in the right place, I didn’t know the history, hadn’t sensed the vibe properly. Hadn’t been to the right parties, absorbed the culture from others. I love it all now. Tunes lots of tunes.

I’m so glad I got into electronic music, it was a portal into a multiverse I could never have imagined before. And I’m also glad I started out listening to band music, I still return to that too, and that side of my music tastes has expanded too.

All this to say it’s been a crazy amazing journey, can’t wait to see what the future will look like. #