I love Pam Ann. Welcome to Qantas, Spirit of Australia.
Narcissism.
Tech journalist Mike Elgan sums up a bit of 2022 quite well in this article (unfortunately it may be behind a paywall, I received it as an email).
And that’s why “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” is exactly the movie we need right now. Yes, it’s a fun murder mystery. But the theme throughout is: Most of these young super-geniuses lionized by social media are actually just narcissist morons.
Some other gems from the article:
Elon Musk ran his mouth about Twitter so narcissistically that he was forced to buy it, wasting $44 billion and destroying the social network by personally making all the major decisions and, in doing so, driving away its most active users and best advertisers.
Kanye West ruined his own business empire by expressing his antipathy for Jewish people and his admiration for Adolph Hitler. But behind this garden variety antisemitism was a more familiar trait of total narcissism — West’s longstanding belief that he’s an unparalleled artistic and business visionary genius. And Jesus.
And, of course, Donald Trump continued to dominate the news with his own special mix of malignant narcissism and criminality, caught stealing top secret documents (most likely to show off as trophies at his golf club) and lying about winning an election he lost.
I won’t share the entirety of the article here, but if you’d like to see more, drop me an email.
Ringy Dingy.
Today I learned how long distance dialing worked in 1951. I love these old videos. I find them much more enjoyable than the Chinese spyware known as TikTok.
Janelle.
Janelle Monáe wrote “Cold War” in 2010. This song still moves me 12 years later. She is an amazingly talented woman. We need more people like her in the world.
She Seems Nice.
I hear Twitter is having an outage. Thank God. I hope that platform dies an agonizing, painful, bankruptcy inducing death and the likes of Julia Hartley-Brewer, whoever the heck she is, goes away to the nearest rock as her new residence. Not cool at all.
Twitter is not a Town Square. It was never a Town Square. Don’t buy into the Silicon Valley hype of creating a virtual town square. It’s not. It has become a haven of horrible people getting way too much amplification of their hateful, inhuman voices.
They all just need to go away.
Money, Money, Money.
I’ve kicked off the Resolution Revolution for 2023 and I’ve been focused on finances. Over the years I have accumulated some recurring subscriptions (redundant?) in Apple’s App Store. They are for apps that I use with some regularity and quite frankly it’s unfortunate that the tech industry has moved to this recurring charge model.
I wiped out a LOT of little subscriptions today. To the tune of savings around $1000 a year. $50 a year for web access to a task manager? Gone. Nearly $400 a year for aviation software that does practically everything but fly the jet? Reduced to General Aviation levels. Linux servers in the cloud? Relocated to home, where they run for free.
I get that developers need to make cash but our bank account can’t afford to be so gratuitous to these folks. If there’s an open source version that I can support and run on my own server I’m going to do it.
I feel like there’s some turbulent times in the financial world coming for all of us 2023. It’s time to get things in a row so we can weather the storm.
More Than A Quarter of a Century.
It’s official. My husband and I have been married for more than a quarter of a century. Today we are celebrating 26 years of wedded bliss and honestly, I don’t know where the time has gone.
We are going out to dinner this evening at a nice place called Commoner and Co. here in Tucson. We may go shopping beforehand.
As long as we’re together, I’m good.
Christmas Eve Swim.
Chris and Jamie lit the pool room with a hundred tea lights and other ambient holiday themed lighting. It was very nice.
Caturday, Part 2.
Here’s Truman, looking like he’s investigating his shadow on the roof on Friday afternoon.
