deathmtn

Oh, yeah, the Small Findings RSS feed is here.

It was pretty easy to create the podcast with Anchor, but in the end I still had to pull down audio and edit in Audacity. I don't know if I'm comfortable with it being hosted entirely on services that could just go away with the business. Maybe I should generate my own podcast RSS? Or I could just regularly back up Anchor's.

Hey, I made a podcast! It's a collection of bits of information I gathered and processed during the week.



If you can't see the iframe, you can listen here.

Man, it was a lot of work to edit out all my accidental mouth smacks.

All this week, I've had full nights of sleep but have felt incredibly sleepy from mid-morning to evening. Yet I feel fine and alert later in the evening when painting or relaxing.

Is it depression? Conditional workday depression?

I don't think I've ever said it here, but I've been contributing to Hot Garbage a links newsletter that I've been a fan of for a while. You should subscribe! It delivers a great variety of interesting things on the web (mostly) every week.

The latest one links to this series of Japanese gum commercials that is amazingly weird and surprisingly dramatic. It was an escape that I really needed right now.

My frustration with my job is peaking. This is the worst possible time for that to happen.

Read about Trump suspending all environmental regulations and affirmative action. Felt gutted. Worked out. 10-4-4-4-4-10. A little more grounded now, but still disoriented.

Workout was mild: 1.5 mile run, 12 pull-ups.

I don’t have a cough, but I am incredibly sleepy despite only being up for 12 hours.

I had 8.5 hours of sleep last night, yet I'm already very sleepy.

take-a-break.exe, essay version. I'm personally trying to do more thinking instead of doing, myself, even though it — insanely — feels wasteful.

I was listening to this episode of Talking Politics in order to start getting some sense of the economic effect of the coronavirus. I also listened to a few other podcasts about this, and I still don't know. But from that episode, it appears the Fed did a better job of containing the economy-crashing effects of the coronavirus than the federal government did with containing the coronavirus itself.

The guy is forming opinions about music. He announced about a month back that he no longer likes Baby Shark and is tired of hearing stuff from Frozen in his afterschool program.

Now that we’re home all the time always, we’ve been listening to a lot of this playlist, which he curates aggressively. A song has been added or removed each day for the past few days.

I'm trying Zettlekasten, this one weird old German trick, in an attempt to more effectively be able to use what I know. In part, I don't believe this will really change things, but I'm going for it just as a sort of invigorating measure, like doing some wacky exercise or reading horoscopes. Though, my collection of markdown files on various tech topics has helped me, so there's not a zero percent chance that this New Way Toward a Better Life will yield something useful.

A Facebook recruiter emailed me recently. He linked me to articles about Facebook lending money to small business affected by coronavirus shutdowns and making some effort to contain false information about coronavirus. I actually thought for a moment, huh, that seems nice. Maybe they're turning a corner? Then, I remembered. It's been a while since I've thought about Facebook. It is amazing how much recency matters in your judgment of something.

Here is my response.

Hi,

I dislike the way Facebook pays opposition research companies to smear its critics: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

I also do not like its role in promoting hatred in Myanmar: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/16/facebook-myanmar-failure-blundering-toddler


And there's quite a lot of other things I've seen Facebook do over the years that have hurt a lot of people. I don't trust it enough to use it, much less work for it.

However, I appreciate that you are providing an opportunity to work, which a lot of people do not have. If you ever happen to move on from Facebook, we should connect, and maybe I'll be looking around that time!

Jim

It may seem stupid that I even bothered to reply, but I thought maybe I could plant a seed that someday convinces someone to stop aiding something harmful. I do a few other things like this that probably just seem annoying, but if I believe there is a tiny chance that someone can change their mind when you point something out, it's worth the gamble. The payoff is big, and the effort is low.