gru:Bz

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

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.

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.

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.

I was in the middle of writing this post about how, pretty much until the middle of the 20th century, people took the law into their own hands if they saw fit. And they probably got away with it too.

Like this photo I saw on Reddit:

That’s a feel good ACAB justice kinda story, right? I’m not sure of the source or legitimacy of it; I mean after all it was just a random Reddit post, but OP had a little blurb to go along with it:

Farmers “arrest” the sheriff for trying to evict a woman from her farm on behalf of the insurance company. Michigan, 1952.

So basically the sheriff came to evict this sweet little old widow and some farmers from around the way stood up and (violently) stopped the him from going through with it. Back then that was just the end of it, right? There were no records logged in a police database, the cop wasn’t wearing a body cam; it was the 50’s.

…

…and I was just going to ramble on about how easy it was to get away with crazy shit back then compared to nowadays.

But then I actually thought about it. It was only white guys who got away with everything. If you were some old Sam Elliot type with a cowboy hat and handlebar mustache, you could get away with murder. Literally. If you were black? Or a woman? Or a black woman?

Different fucking story.

Segregation wasn’t that long ago. Women didn’t have fuck all for rights until pretty recently. White men ruled everything until pretty recently.

What am I saying; they still rule everything.

And that’s what MAGA wants to really hone in on and refine. That’s the “great” America they’re working around the clock to bring back. The US is a great melting pot alright. One made of racism, sexism, misogyny, and LGBTQ+ phobia hate, “but for a brief moment in time”, we’ll say in our future history books, “we were actually making some progress.”

What else is there to say?

All you have to do is open any news app you like and the screen populates with headlines too stupid to even be satire. If anyone would’ve pitched some of Trump’s concepts of plans ideas for the movie Idiocracy, they would’ve said it’s too unrealistic and in bad taste.

Who would joke about the kind of shit Donald Trump is about to do?