My brain just can’t handle the doom scrolling anymore. I am very much aware of how awful things are in the “United” States these days. I need to focus on facts, and there’s simply not a lot in the way of facts out there these days.
I’m focused on personal blogs (that aren’t overly hysterical) and being creative. It’s not putting my head in the sand. It’s taking care of mental health.
Every once in a while I’ll look up this video on YouTube and revel in this performance. It’s been well over a decade, but back in the early 2010s, Gary Barlow hosted Agnetha Faltskög (from ABBA) at Children in Need Rocks. Agnetha and Gary had recorded “I Should Have Followed You Home” together, but they recorded the duet in separate studios in separate countries. They had never performed the song together until this performance.
Agnetha has always looked and sounded like an angel to me and I find Mr. Barlow to be quite the dapper gentleman. This performance is pure gold to my ears.
I’ve started feeling a little bit of creativity again. I feel like I’ve been in a bit of a rut for the past several weeks, but I’m started to feel a bit more “alive”, for lack of a better word. It’s a good feeling.
Just for fun, here’s two shots of me working on this lovely Monday. This is the side of the office no one sees on the Teams calls at work.
I’m solidly Gen-X. I grew up during the heyday of the shopping mall. The closest mall to our small town was Penn Can Mall in the suburbs of Syracuse. I can still remember strolling the corridors and visiting the bookstores, the anchor stores, and especially the two record stores (Gerber Music and RecordTown). I also always made a stop into Radio Shack because I liked being a geek.
I still like being a geek.
With everyone in a hurry and with their nose buried in their smartphones, folks don’t have as much of an interest in the shopping mall. Many malls across the country are dying or are long gone, but here in the desert southwest we have a few malls that are still quite enjoyable.
One of my favorite malls of all time is Scottsdale Fashion Square. Located in trendy Scottsdale, folks from all walks of life seem to visit this mall and it’s been quite busy every time we’ve stopped in. Yesterday we walked the perimeter of the mall twice (lower and upper floors) and clocked in a 2 1/2 mile walk.
The people watching was amazing.
People watching is awesome and in the 21st century of all things tech, and especially since COVID, it’s not something that people do much these days. But I revel in it. I could sit in an airport or a mall or a busy park and just watch folks for hours. It’s one of the reasons I love traveling all over the country. The people watching is fascinating.
Life is fascinating. It’s wonderful to get out there and experience it.
I was originally planning on hiking in the snow on Mount Lemmon last weekend, but the Pima County Sheriff’s department had a different plan, as they weren’t allowing anyone up the mountain unless they were a resident or an employee.
So, I went hiking in my familiar stomping grounds and tried to capture some decent landscape shots with new camera settings.
Here’s my latest video for your enjoyment.
I see Kate Mulgrew is in a new television series. This time she appears as an older mother in “Dope Thief”, an Apple TV+ action series coming out in the very near future. While the series is not really my cup of tea, I’m sure Ms. Mulgrew will be wonderful. She always is.
I watched the trailer for the show and I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been concentrating on video production so much, but this caught my eye immediately. Even though the shot is for a split second, this yelled out to me like a flashing neon light.
Look closely. All of the text in the scene is reversed. For all my life I’ve seen plenty of scenes were the film was played in reverse or there’s some other editing trickery used to make the scene more interesting. But I don’t recall seeing anything modern, in 4K or higher resolution, where it’s so obvious this type of editing technique was used because of blatant artifacts in the shot.
Before high-definition television it was easy to get away with this sort of thing. Movies and television shows shot on 35mm film but presented in standard 4:3 format hid things that were on the sides of the screen. But in today’s world where resolution is nothing like we’ve ever seen before and anything can be played and replayed repeatedly, this editing choice smacks of sloppy at best.
I still think Kate Mulgrew is going to be awesome.
Update: Someone on social media posted that maybe the shot is from a reflection in a window. OK, that’s fair possibility, but it’s not something I could garner from the trailer. I’ll move it from the “sloppy” to the “weird” column in my head.
In these chaotic times we are stressed out more than ever. I stumbled across the discussion about stress management and found it very compelling.
I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I did. I’m finding these tips helpful and a good start to calming down the chaos.
Everything is become a point of contention during this chaotic times. While I try to keep abreast of what’s going on in the news while simultaneously not burning my mental health to a complete pile of cinders, there are times when I want to step away from the noise and just engage in my various hobbies.
This is not easy to achieve in 2025.
Storm chasing groups and forums are full of political “banter” around the science of weather in general and if it’s valid or not. Because Oklahoma is trying to pass a bill that would involve issuing “storm chaser licenses”, there’s that whole political discussion and then, because the storm chasing community is composed of people from all walks of life, there’s some lively discussions of what type of person should actually be chasing storms. As an aside, one of the best storm chasers I’ve ever followed online (and met in person) is a trans woman. I have no idea how she deals with some of the folks in the more rural areas of the country but I applaud her for being her authentic self.
So when I step away from the extraneous noise around the storm chasers, I start delving into my geekish tech hobbies. While I am not happy with Apple these days for many reasons, for the average consumer I still think that Apple is the safest, most productive, and privacy minded option in the space. Tim Cook’s glee around Trump going back to the White House seems like a million years ago and while Apple has been making some questionable choices with their latest hardware and software releases, I still have thousands of dollars invested in Apple equipment that is perfectly functional. I have a whole blog entry in formulation around how I’ve moved away from some of Apple’s services, but I’m going to be running MacOS and iOS/iPadOS on my devices for the foreseeable future, especially if Trump the Tariff Taxation Man keeps lobbing tariffs all over the place and causing the price of everything to continue to skyrocket. I should not be shamed nor should I feel shame for using computing equipment I already have and needlessly throwing things into the landfill.
The other thing I’m finding exhausting is the number of people that seem to be outraged all the time about everything. There is plenty to be outraged about. There’s too much to be outraged about and the United States has turned into the biggest shitshow I’ve witnessed in 56 years. Yes, absolutely. But in order to maintain some sort of mental health balance one can not be completely stressed out about absolutely everything all the time. It is a waste of energy. I mean, screaming into your Facebook feed every 10 minutes about the latest thing F47 did is reaching… whom? One assumes your feed is read by your friends on Facebook. I would think your friends would think along the same general lines as you and share approximately the same moral foundation. If not, that’s a whole different conversation that should be saved for the next Thanksgiving dinner or Family Reunion. Maybe I’m intruding with my Facebook connection. Delete delete delete. And, I get it, as I get older I have more retired friends that have oodles of time to keep track of all this stuff and time to get outraged. It might be a good moment to step away from the Facebook and call a cherished loved one or something.
This chaos is (probably) going to go on for four years if not longer. It is imperative that we save our mental and physical strength for the really big things. Pick your battles and all that. What brand of detergent you buy or what coffee you drink should not be a reason for political debate.
Here’s another video from the grand ol’ days of real blogging and low resolution video. These videos I’m finding are pre-iPhone. I believe I was using a “Flip” camera at the time.
I’m loving the feeling of nostalgia as I convert these old videos to a modern format. I’m a little surprised to find out how serious I have become in life. One part of me is psychoanalyzing why I’ve become so serious, but most of me is finding inspiration in these little videos again.
Earl is always quick to point out that I use to have a really good beard. I’m always quick to point out that I wish my beard grew in its auburn hues today like it did back in the 2000s. I’m not ready for a grey Santa beard.
In this video (recorded in June 2008) I discuss the New York State Thruway, meatloaf, and terrorism.
For some reason I thought of this video while I was out and about this morning. I didn’t realize the link had broken on this blog entry from 2008. So here’s the link to the original blog entry, with the link fixed.
And if you don’t want to click the link, here’s the video in all it’s 2008 glory, converted from FLV to MP4.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!