A much earlier day than yesterday as I actually have to play a human today – I have people coming to work on the property.
I’ve been doing much better about avoiding social media, however that came at a bit of a cost – watching TV. My wife and I started watching The Last of Us at the behest of a friend during the week before her trip, and unfortunately it was really easy to fall back into that old habit and I had the TV on most of the weekend. Thankfully yesterday I was too busy bouncing between projects (although getting little accomplished) to get sucked into the box.
The box. I remember a talk Marilyn Manson gave at the Disinfo Con 2000, where he pointed out, “we’re kinda conditioned to listen to people when they’re in the shape of a square.” That line stuck with me all these years, though it is more rectangular these days. And he’s not wrong – our media is fed to us through a particular shape and aspect ratio. It’s a reason the videos taken with phones in portrait mode just “feel” off, though that is now changing with the rise in popularity of certain social media apps.
Even most of the popular podcasts, which started out like talk radio, are video oriented now. Listening engages the temporal lobe which has more information filters than the occipital lobe which processes visual information – this means when you listen to a podcast or news report, your brain will more aggressively challenge the information than watching and listening to something as the video portion will tend to corroborate what they are saying and bypass some of those filters. This is a reason meme imagery is so effective – it bypasses parts of the brain commonly used to filter information.
So I’ll be working on rebuilding routines that do not include TV or social media, and do my best to avoid information gathering through video. I did, however, discover a neat show called The Devil’s Plan…
Interesting Tidbits
IMPORTANT: If you’re in GunCAD and have been redistributing Bambu Studio or Orca Slicer 3mf project files, STOP doing that NOW – The short of it: if you’re signed into the slicer, your account ID (a number) is saved to every project file you save. This is a Bad Thing.
Marilyn Manson’s Speech At Disinfo Con 2000 – discussing media and violence.
Puerto Rico wants to ditch the US and rejoin Spain – sounds like a win-win for everyone?
National Guard troops are in L.A. Here’s what they can and can’t do
US Healthcare Was Designed To Serve Profit…And Politicians – “Providers profit from a fee-for-service model that rewards quantity over quality, procedure over prevention. Politicians reap campaign contributions and avoid blame through delegation, diffusion and plausible deniability.”
Bizarre ‘boil in a bag’ funerals where bodies are LIQUIFIED & flushed down a drain could get the go-ahead in UK – The process is called “alkaline hydrolysis” is something used to dispose of animal remains (particularly large ones) and is legal for disposal of human remains in a few states. It is certainly a more ecologically friendly way to manage remains and is much less expensive. (When I last looked into this, the operating cost was about $5 for alkaline hydrolysis and about $80 for traditional cremation.)
The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think – “If I could offer Democrats a couple of notions as they begin their process of renewal, the first would be this: Cultural elitism is more oppressive than economic elitism. The welfare state era gave Democrats the impression that everything can be solved with money funneled through some federal program. But the populist era is driven by social resentment more than economic scarcity.”
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