May - May 2024 Part 1

Oops, I did it again. It’s the 14th as I create this blank document to start a new post. This never bodes well. In fact, it boded so not-well that I’m a day late publishing this, and the extra time did little to improve the post.

I’m going to go off-script and mention a couple things that are on my mind that don’t fit into the usual categories.

Social Media

I’ve more-or-less stopped doing social media in the last six months. I don’t log into X Twitter anymore. There’s nothing but angry yelling there, and I can’t easily switch between accounts anymore so I have to pick one flavor of angry yelling to see all the time.

I don’t read anything in the fediverse anymore. It’s too much of a hassle. So if anyone is replying to my scintillating microblog missives I don’t see them.

I don’t log into Discord very much anymore. Maybe once a week I’ll log in, scan, see nothing of interest, and log off again. It’s a weird environment there and I never feel like I fit in anywhere.

I technically have an Instagram but I never use it. I don’t go to TikTok except occasionally to see the latest behind-the-scenes buffoonery from Critical Role. I keep trying to follow the Glass Cannon TikTok but for some reason I can’t follow anything from the web site. (I don’t have it on my phone.)

I still have Facebook (I’ve never deleted any social media accounts because that’s weird) but I only log in maybe once every six months. I have a LinkedIn but I think I only log in once every job change, which could be years. I’m spammed by emails from LinkedIn every day and I don’t read any of them.

I’ve never seen WhatsApp.

Speaking of email, the absolute worst social media, I don’t read email anymore. It’s a constant bombardment of spam and there’s just no way to make filters that make email work. I’m extremely lucky that I’m still able to see emails bubbling to the surface from people I care about.

I barely even read my work email, which is also a constant bombardment of spam, because I work at a fairly large corporation and there’s some corporate announcement every other day.

Real mail, by the way, gets dumped into a pile in my kitchen that I almost never look at. So hopefully nobody tries to contact me that way, either.

I only occasionally read YouTube comments or Reddit to get a sense of why it’s a good idea to stop doing social media. (Following a long tradition of not reading blog comments.)

I recently stopped by a couple of Critical Role subreddits to see what the zeigeist was and found that everybody in the world absolutely hates Critical Role. I’m actually embarrassed to have ever said out loud (in this blog) that I thought Campaign 3 was worse than the other two, because it sounds like I sympathize with the truckloads of steaming garbage hate that is dumped on the show every day on the “fansofcriticalrole” subreddit. I wish I’d never said anything now, because the thought of ever being lumped in the same category as any of them is horrifying.

I honestly don’t know a good way for interested parties to contact me anymore. Every single communication avenue that I’m aware of has been sufficiently poluted that I never want to look at them. I keep thinking that I need to build a customized, proprietary “contact me” messaging tool into my web site.

Anyway. I don’t really know what the point is, except it feels like the usefulness of social media has ended. It’s a continuous game of changing rules that I don’t find fun to play anymore. Some people thrive on being angry all the time. I kind of don’t.

In fact, my withdrawal from social media is so great that I didn’t even know that Eurovision happened. That’s one of those things, along with the Superbowl, that you simply cannot avoid if you look at social media.

Gaming

For the most part, I haven’t even touched my gaming PC this month so far. I have occasionally opened Steam and reviewed the list of games in my library or on the store while I’m listening to a show, found them all lackluster, and closed Steam again.

However, last night I did play another hour of Lords of the Fallen, picking up where I stopped having fun in the Big Fiery Red Castle At The End (not the actual name). I can confirm that, even with the new 1.5 patch, the latter parts of the game are still not fun. Typically you want to avoid combat at all costs and run past every enemy, because it’s so painful to try to fight former bosses and groups of former bosses. Unfortunately running past all the enemies led me to another boss fight (The Chained King With Smashing Statue Head, also not the actual name), which I did not complete. I found it annoying, but I mitigated the annoyance by turning down the game volume and listening to a show while barely paying attention to what I was doing and hoping for a random win.

Random Tea Diversion

I’m trying to switch from coffee to tea. I had an idea that maybe coffee was irritating my throat and stomach, which could be a contributing factor to my nearly constant state of heartburn and acid reflux, which leads to bouts of coughing whenever I try to talk on, say, video recordings.

I can understand now why everyone in the U.K. is always so bitter and sarcastic, because tea is objectively disgusting.

Anyway, the only reason I drink coffee is to inject enough caffeine into my system to avoid getting a headache in the afternoon. Coffee is also objectively disgusting and it’s impossible to conceive of drinking it for the flavor. Yuck. But headaches are also pretty annoying, so there we are.

So the idea is to replace coffee with enough tea to get enough caffeine to avoid a headache in the afternoon. I started with black tea, which ChatGPT reliably informs me is the tea with the most caffeine (roughly 1/3 the amount of coffee). I drink the least-caffeinated type of coffee I find in the store, so I don’t need that much. There is a wall of teas at my grocery store containing roughly 45 million brands and flavors of tea, and I picked one called English Breakfast. It’s disgusting and I hate it, but on the first two days it did work for medicinal headache-prevention purposes.

It’s also more of a pain to make tea. With coffee, the machine just does it for you. With tea, I have to like boil water and shiz. So primitive. I need to find a similar machine that just does it for me, but sadly I see no products called Mr. Tea.

Media Production

I’ve mostly been on hiatus from making videos, because I don’t feel like talking. I’ve been in one of those “retreat inward” sort of moods for a while now. There’s probably a clinical name for it that people with various diagnoses would immediately recognize, but I don’t have any diagnoses so I just have to call it “my weird behavioral problems that nobody understands.”

Television

Continuing Taskmaster Series 17 but it’s a bit dull.

Continuing Dimension 20 Fantasy High Junior Year but it’s worn out its welcome and I end up not listening to the entire shows. The Bad Kids’ journey is somewhat less funny this time. It started strong then just kind of fell off a cliff, not sure why.

Still sort-of kind-of watching Critical Role campaign 3 but it mostly just washes over me and I don’t pay that much attention to it. I have no idea who or what they’re talking about 95% of the time.

Critical Role started a Beacon subscription service but it’s not as good as Dropout yet and nowhere near as good as YouTube. Every new subscription video service makes the exact same mistake: They don’t let you use the arrow keys to go forward and backward in the video player, which, to me, is the first fundamental requirement for any video player. They also don’t seem to have a subtitle track enabled yet. Same story as always: New subscription service, bare-bones sub-standard video player, and that’s why YouTube and Twitch are mandatory requirements for anyone to gain traction before you can even think about trying to move to your own service. Nobody would put up with such garbage video players at the beginning of a business venture.

Otherwise, I’ve been deep in a rabbit hole listening to Glass Cannon actual play podcasts (on YouTube). They are so funny and different in the actual play space that I can’t help it. (And I’ve learned a new word that I’d never heard before: jawn.) My favorite of their current shows is The Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (Pathfinder 2e), and Time for Chaos (Call of Cthulu). I’ve also binged all of their available Voyagers of the Jump (Traveller) episodes and am currently binging Androids & Aliens (Starfinder). Where most other established actual play shows try to turn themselves into improvised live stage plays, Glass Cannon persists in highlighting out-of-character fun, which is usually the thing that makes actual plays actually fun to watch. Also it’s very cool that they play pretty much all the things except D&D. Non-D&D publishers must love them because they get a lot of partnerships.

Having largely dismissed social media from my life, Glass Cannon podcasts are serving all of my parasocial relationship needs at the moment.

Day Job

Not into it.

World Context

As yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

• Has anything happened? I think there’s still some Trump trial going on that is constant fodder for newstainment. Kids yelling about Israel instead of Russia continues to be a theme. I think I also heard about a massive row in the U.K. over some Netflix show Baby Reindeer.
• Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!