gru:Bz
Average millennial living life on the edge (of the Midwest). Probably too immature for Micro.blog but I like it here.
Notes
I'm learning Mandarin
The great (American?) firewall
I love that people are migrating from TikTok to Red Note in droves. Our oligarchy is banning TikTok under the guise of national security; never mind the fact that any American reading this post is likely doing so on a device manufactured in China.
Never mind the fact that SHEIN and Temu are both Chinese apps that collect the same data as TikTok but no one cares because there’s no actual threat. Nothing beyond what Facebook or X does with our data anyway.
They’re banning TikTok because it’s the biggest social media app that the US government has no control over. So people are directly, knowingly and willingly handing their data over to an app that actually is controlled by the Chinese government in protest.
What a time to be alive 🤭
TikTok got one thing right (its ads)
Thoughts on Kagi, The Assistant
I resubscribed to Kagi recently, only this time on the Ultimate plan with The Assistant.
I swore off of them for a while after the little bit of drama about integrating Brave Search, but who really gives a shit, you know? You gotta pick your battles. Separate the art from the artist.
I’ve been fighting this respiratory bug for the last month. It almost completely cleared up for about a week, then it came back full force. I decided I was going to urgent care today but they’re closed.
Still had a great Xmas and managed to get pretty hammered for New Year’s Eve last night while watching Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen with my better half <3
We have a lot of terrible shit ahead of us after Jan 20th but I’m still optimistic about 2025. They say it’s always darkest before the dawn.
I hope everyone’s having a good day off today and I wish you all a happy 2025 🎉
I think I’ll have a shot of Mucinex now.
Retro vibes, pop culture and a little nostalgia
I was jamming to The Selecter this morning and it got me thinking…
Bands from the 80’s and earlier are a different breed than the pop stars of today. One obvious thing is the whole debate between analog vs digital recordings, vinyl vs cd’s and other digital formats.
Bugs: a new year resolution
Raw honey and concrete geese
Holiday reflections
I’m writing this around 11pm on Christmas. I’m sick as a dog with a respiratory thing so I wasn’t able to go out with my partner to her parents house for the holiday stuff this year. Pretty bummed out about it!
I got the spider from my stepdaughter (!) and my partner got me a refurbished Apple Watch and some Air Pods. Super fucking thoughtful gifts from everyone. I thought we were just doing little things this year and not making a big fuss but man they really blew me out of the water.
This is cheesy but the biggest gift I got out of all of this was feeling loved.
I don’t know why it took so long for it to hit me, but we’ve grown so much together over the years. When we met a little over six years ago, we were both spending most nights out at the bar getting shitfaced and going home to our terrible apartment in the hood with obnoxious room mates. Now we’re living in a nice little neighborhood in a three bedroom house of our own and the fucking cats even have their own room. This is the first Christmas we’ve had over here.
Life gets so busy you don’t really feel anything changing until you’ve already been there for a while. I feel like Adam Sandler coming to in Click. I feel like I just got hit with the goddamn ghosts of Christmas.
I try so hard to act like all of this is just dumb capitalist bullshit; I’ve never been big for celebrating holidays or exchanging gifts but it’s a downright emotional experience exchanging thoughtful things with people you love.
Even though I’m coughing my lungs out and missed out on a lot this year, this has been the best Xmas I’ve had in a long time.
Not sure if I’ll post this tonight or tomorrow but I hope everyone’s doing good out there <3
So my daughter got me a pinktoe tarantula for Christmas! I’ve been watching this thing all day. Fed it a cricket last night and then transferred to its new enclosure when it was done. It’s mostly been hiding behind some bark since last night, but now it’s making a little web at the top of the cage!
It’s too young to determine the gender right now but I’m hoping it turns out to be female. They live up to 12 years while males only live for maybe four if you’re lucky.
It’s a bizarre thing but it’s one of the most thoughtful xmas gifts I’ve ever gotten 🥲
Then you really might know what it's like...
I'm STILL obsessed with Warp Terminal
I posted about this a few weeks ago but man Warp Terminal is a godsend. I know there’s plenty of debate around using AI for writing or generating silly little images, but Warp integrates it into the terminal SO WELL!
I’ve been dealing with a lot of issues with the Surface Linux kernel over the last few updates because it broke so many things on Debian 12. One update couldn’t load the filesystem right, the next one broke wired connections and only WiFi worked, then the next update broke WiFi and only wired connections worked.
I’m still skeptical about the drone sightings around the country but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued 👀
I like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s tongue in cheek comment on whether or not they’re aliens:
“I can’t claim to know the motives of aliens…but of all the places to show up on earth, they pick New Jersey‽”
I’m just not sure aliens would comply with FAA lighting requirements like these drones do though 😆
Thoughts on Meta and the TikTok ban
I get in at least a few hours of TikTok brainrot every week. It reminds me of Vine for the obvious reasons, only with a bunch of ads, sponsored posts and about the same amount of viral misinformation as Facebook: a metric fuckton. And as a bonus, both collect a nauseating amount of data from whatever devices you’ve installed them on.
But they’re entertaining.
I’m a broken record about this but ever since Twitter went to shit I’ve become pretty comfortable joining new social networks on a whim and deleting my account out of the blue if I get bored or fed up. There are just too many options out there. I’ve built my home base on Micro.blog because of its die-hard indie web roots; just about everything else is for doomscrolling and shitposting as far as I’m concerned.
That said, I fully support the TikTok ban - as long as Meta gets the same treatment.
Both are two sides of the same coin, but an American oligarch owns one half of that coin while China owns the other. If Meta was based in Beijing you can bet your ass it would be on the chopping block for the exact reasons as TikTok.
But it’s not, so it’s going to be fine.
That’s the post.
Going back to Skyrim
I’ve never been a big gamer aside from cute Nintendo stuff. When Skyrim came out (what, like 12 or 13 years ago?) the most powerful hardware in my house was a 2011 MacBook Pro.
Everyone was obsessed so I found a… not so legit copy with a janky Wine wrapper so I could play it on OS X, albeit with all the graphics settings turned way down. It was super buggy but I still made it pretty far before I eventually gave up and forgot about it.
Finally picked up a legit copy for the Switch all these years later and it’s still such a good game!
I know the Switch is pretty underpowered compared to other modern consoles but this is a million times better than the first time I played it. Makes me want to revisit Oblivion now too. I don’t even know if they have anything new in the series lol if so maybe I’ll play that in ten years.
What makes a blog personal?
Drones over Jersey
Some days are just bad, and that's ok
I have this delusion where I feel like everyone should be happy all the time. That’s what I was chasing the better part of a decade ago when I was battling with addiction and it’s the illusion I put on every day as a salesguy.
It’s not polite to tell people what you really think or how you really feel. At least not in rural America. It’s easier to pretend like you’re always happy and nothing ever goes wrong. Social media is excellent at amplifying this.
It’s pretty good at rage baiting and pitting us against each other too, but it’s mostly a place where you only show the best parts of yourself. Your best camera angle, the highlights of your vacation, the new promotion you just got.
It’s easy to forget that life has phases and cycles. Everything comes and goes in waves.
It’s okay to be pissed off sometimes, or depressed, or anxious. Everyone does it.
It’s about yin and yang right? You can’t have peaks without valleys.