❄️ ☃️ 🌨️

There’s too many ideas to cram into one post in the last eight months. First, my bad for struggling to keep this updated. Life has a way of distracting you when you have two young kiddos. Secondly, a lot of things have weighed very heavily on me this year. Based on previous posts you can probably gather that the state of the American, and frankly western, political world isn’t exactly thriving.

🌎 ♻️ 🌳

Continuing on his psychotic warpath of breaking the government and society….wait, didn’t I already write this? Yes it turns out that things have not gotten better politically. We managed to eke out some little wins: the liberal victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court on its 10 point margin was enough to critically embarass right wing oligarch Elon Musk who is now whining that he wants out of politics since he did not get his way, and people are being too mean to him. Nevermind the real reason he was likely slapped down was interfering with Peter Navarro, Trump sycophant and policy advisor on tarrifs. Musk has decided to cross Navarro and therefore Trmp offending perhaps the only actual belief Trump holds about anything: that tariffs are good for America.

😠 😡 🤬

Continuing on his psychotic warpath of breaking the government and society, I want to draw your attention to a somewhat silly but relevant story. The story I am talking about is Trump forcing a rename of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Additionally this story includes a renaming of Denali to Mt. McKinley, undoing over 50 years of established tradition deferential to local Alaskan tribes. Presumably because it owns the libs sufficiently with the added bonus of sticking it to the groups of people the American government has repressed throughout history.

🖥️ 🔍 📱

Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know that Donald Trump has won reelection. Rather than prognosticate at length about where the campaign failed I am going to focus on a short list of changes that I am making in my own life from a technology perspective.

Firstly, and this began before now, I have been closing more accounts than ever. It’s long and very tedious but it is made much easier if you use a reliable password manager. At the time of writing I recommend Bitwarden. This process is useful because over time you can accumulate all of your accounts and see how large your footprint on the internet really is. Closures of accounts can be nightmarish processes but thanks to European regulation like GDPR, more sites let you delete and export data than ever before.

⛩️ 🗾 🗻

It’s been nearly two months since I left for Japan. In that time I’ve had a lot of opportunities to wrangle my thoughts into something more coherent. My trip lasted ten days and had me covering Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nara. I stayed in one neighborhood of Kyoto and two in Tokyo to cover this territory. I travelled with two other lifelong friends with a loosely coupled schedule so that we could be free to re-arrange at a whim.

At long last, my trip five years in the making, whose planning began in 2019 and was sadly cut short due to COVID-19 in March 2020 is finally coming to fruition. Myself and two of my best friends are finally making our way to Japan for ten days, tomorrow. Not only that, I began a new job role this week at my employer which will prove to boost my skills towards modernization in the software development.

Welp I went ahead and did it AGAIN; I switched to the warm embrace of Apple and purchased an iPhone 14. My current Google Pixel 5a is a nice phone in working order, but its over two years old and so I was feeling the itch to upgrade. I managed to catch a Black Friday promotion for some money off of a new phone and figured, why not?

See there’s some backstory here: my growing frustration with Google as a money. It’s clear to me that they’ve lost their way from their days as a plucky startup, onto a large but loveable tech giant moving the internet forward. Now they’ve atrophied into a directionless company that, addicted to the heroin drip of ad money, is not sure what they want.

Yo I am trying out Hugo as a replacement for Wordpress! Content will be restored as I figure out ways to port it.

The internet sucks lately. Well, not lately. There has been a rot that has been setting in for years, now more accelerated by rising interest rates making “free money” technology ventures very unpopular and risky. What we’re seeing today is what Cory Doctorow famously coins as Enshittification. Quoting him directly from that link:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Today bums me out. Why? Because the Peoria, IL Round 1 location is closing tonight at 10pm for good. For those who aren’t familiar, Round 1 is an arcade chain in Japan and the United States which offers a mix of food, bowling, karaoke, classic arcade games but most importantly to me, Japanese rhythm games. Back in its pre-COVID heyday, it was opened until 2am and allowed adults only after 10pm which made it an excellent spot to have a beer and play some games with friends or sing our hearts out.