gru:Bz

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 🥲

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 😆

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.