My Little Pony is my binge watch of choice during this chemo cycle and I had forgotten how much this silly little song means to me, especially the moment at 1:35 which is so brief but was such an epiphany gut-punch to me the first time I saw it. That moment of vulnerability in the middle of an otherwise relentlessly perky song, and most especially the way she resolved it.
It me, trying to find enough happy in myself, even on dark days, to lift up my friends too.
It's been interesting watching the absolute chaos of my attempted planter boxes. Things thriving I thought would die. Things dying I was sure would thrive. So many mushrooms popping up. ?????
In particular I am baffled by two indoor-started seedlings that were mostly dead when I transplanted them but I couldn't bear to just throw them away, and here they are defiantly alive and getting bigger a month later. Weird-shaped, but alive and growing.
And the mushrooms! Soil from two different sources, but same mushrooms popping up all over it despite my watering only when the plants start looking visibly dry.
The quality I admire most in humans is integrity, because without that the other qualities don't matter too much. What do I mean by integrity?
Your beliefs about equity/inclusion are the same whether you are the under- or over-represented group in the current context.
Your beliefs about free competition/consumer-driven economics w/o government interference are the same whether your industry is currently competing well or not.
And on a more personal level, a person with integrity says, thinks, and acts in concert. Does not compartmentalize or live a double life. Is always who they are, regardless of the context.
Without that, I don't really know how to evaluate someone's character at all.
I'm thinking of writing a book about how a deep understanding of mortality leads to better living. When it's finished, I want to get the word out as widely as I can. I know I still know people who have fairly large platforms, but I'm not going to pester anyone individually.
If you happen to see this message, you have wider reach than I do, and you'd be willing to help me boost the signal when I'm finished writing my little "life manual," please get in touch.
It will be a lot like my many rambles online over the years, but in addition to philosophical stuff it will also contain practical advice on self-care hierarchy (how to "bootstrap" yourself from rock bottom starting with easy tasks that give you the energy to do the harder tasks).
Basically I want to make a little manual people can carry around to help them get the most of life and also help them understand and feel at peace with their eventual death (these two things are linked).
I keep going on about internet search, but it's fascinating to me. I have lived through an age without it, then watched geekdom awkwardly birth it, watched Google turn it into a pinnacle of knowledge-seeking that seemed to make human memory obsolete and earn a near-deserved monopoly, and then the same company, as gradually as the proverbial boiled frog, via the irresistible force of shareholder greed, render their name-making masterpiece so useless it was as though it had become uninvented.
Unfortunately this would posit some way for people to make their own pages the way they used to, and between developments in code and developments in corporate ownership I don't know if we can go back to that. So what IS next?
I'm asking, tech savvy folks! And don't say "doom" or some variety of that. That's boring, and we can do better. I want to know what will grow out of this as humanity inevitably innovates and adapts for the sake of innovation and adaptation. That is what humans do.
@henrik You either don't seem to realize I'm asking how humanity recovers from AI pollution of human endeavor or you're trolling. In either case you're clearly not here to engage with me in good faith so I'll say a polite farewell.