#but the dopamine boost from taking a walk and finishing four things on my to-do list is worth it

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

Today I woke up at a reasonable time, ate breakfast, showered, washed my face, walked to the coffee shop, came home and finished four things, three of which were on my computer and one of which was fixing some pants. All within like three hours. Look at me. I'm neurotypical now.

[junker-town]

Secret Base Reviews: Finding the right barber

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It can take some time, but get it right and your hairline will thank you

There are very few things that can compare to the confidence boost of getting a fresh haircut. A clean fade can turn your day around and cause you to forget about whatever woes might have been troubling you. Honestly, you simply can’t tell me shit after I get a sharp line up. Your overall look and potential mood lie in your barber’s hands, so finding your go-to barber is critical in life.

There are several factors that come into play when finding the right barber — price, convenience, whether or not they avoid the mundane small talk, etc. But the most important is whether or not they can get the job done to your liking. Even if you find a nearby shop that also happens to charge the cheapest price in the city, if you leave with an obtuse angle as your hairline then what’s the point?

Some people are fortunate enough to slide by the search their whole life. Growing up, my older brother took me under his wing. His barber was nice with the clippers, so he became my guy as well. When my brother switched barbers in my teenage years, his search led me to recognize not only what makes a great cut but just exactly how a barbershop operated. Knowledge of the latter was integral in finding my barber when I moved to New York City nearly four years ago.

A barbershop is more than just a place you go to get a trim. It’s a place where you go to speak freely with no judgment and learn not only about yourself but about the world around you. It’s a community. And like any community, it’s filled with unique characters, especially the barbers themselves. It’s important to take note of these characters in the search for a new barber.

When you walk into a new shop for the first time there’s always a sense of excitement, but there’s also the fear that you can later walk out with an NBA 2K created player type of fade. So take your time and be attentive. If a barber hops out of his seat as soon as you step through the door and is adamant about getting you in his chair, do not, I repeat DO NOT get in that chair. That barber’s excitement represents not having a client in at least a few hours, and if you were to be the next one, there is a 97 percent chance you’ll walk out with that aforementioned 2K fade.

In every shop, there’s also always at least one barber above the age of 60, and while we respect our elders, I highly advise not sitting in their chair either. Experience is great and the more you practice something the better you can perfect that skill, but fades nowadays just hit a little different than the ones that barber was accustomed to lining up in their heyday. Now that we got those two types of barbers out the way, it’s time to keep your eyes peeled and hone in on a barber who’s cutting hair similar to yours.

Take note of how they blend their fades. Is the line up crisp and sharp? You may find yourself sitting for a while, but take your time and be patient. There will be barbers that come up to you while you sit and ask if you’re waiting on anyone specifically, but again, just take your time. Ultimately this is your head, and it will either be blessed by a barber or be forced into a hat wherever you go. My go-to tactic is to identify a barber who takes a little longer than usual with each cut.

This person is attentive to details. With each buzz and interchanging of the clippers that person is diligently taking their time to get you right. Bonus points if you can find a barber who stops cutting hair midway through to enjoy a quick meal. This typically means they’ve been booked and busy all day and just managed to sneak in a quick bite because they haven’t eaten yet. Once you do find your new barber, cherish them. That person will be responsible for your hairline going forward.

You don’t have to be best friends with your barber. Some of the greatest cuts I’ve ever gotten have been from barbers that I spoke maybe 20 words with, max. That includes detailing what type of cut I would like and asking how much I owe them when the job is finished. The key is the outcome of the haircut, and how it makes you feel afterward. My grandma always said, “if you look good, you feel good.” Those words have always stuck with me and can be applied to many things. But when it comes to getting a haircut specifically, after a fresh fade, when I’m looking good, I certainly always feel good. So while the hunt at times can have you waiting hours before you get in a chair, your hairline and the dopamine rush that comes with a pristine cut will be well worth the wait.

8

[ecotone99]

[SF] Outside

It was a roll of the dice that changed the world, heralding the end of what we'd lovingly call the Last Great Era. As far as our best minds can tell, had the genetic sequence finished A-G-T instead of G-A-T then SARS-CoV-2, the Coronavirus -- covy to the likes of you and me -- would have gone down in the history books as nothing more than an unexplained and short-lived lethargy observed in populations of domesticated pig.

From where I'm sat on my formafoam couch, staring blankly at a wall-filling Standard Display that's doing it's best to convince me I'm in the Austrian Alps, it's pretty clear that at some point, one-hundred and fifty-six years ago, God decided to try his hand at playing dice.

My job feed terminal chimes a flutter of cheerful bells that have no doubt been crafted to coax a dopamine response from whoever hears it. The irony isn’t lost on me as I drag its screen towards me, the articulating tube that it’s mounted to squeaking in a way that sets my teeth on edge. The chimes are somewhat discordant with the work that’s on offer. Data cleaning. Three petabytes; immediate start.

It’s the kind of grunt work I’ve come to expect and I’m used to it now. I figure it’s pretty much what the old sanitation workers used to do back in the Great. Y’know, those guys and girls who cleaned the streets. But instead of cleaning up after someone who couldn’t be bothered to find an appropriate refuse point, I’m cleaning up after a group of Domain dev-heads who couldn’t be bothered to dee-com their redundant broadcast nodes.

I know what it’s going to be: four hours of gloves-on, elbow-deep groping through the Domain’s equivalent of a corporation's asshole. If I’m lucky, I’ll spot the nodes that are tainting the rest of the data and filter them out with one or two partial intelligences I’ve got hanging around that just love this kinda work.

I reach over to the job terminal keyboard, worn predictably blank by too many keystrokes and even more routine. I click accept.

Did they know? Back in the Great? When this all started? I’ve watched pretty much everything the 21st century had to offer. News bulletins, parliamentary debates, documentaries, exposé’s, talk shows, comedies. You name it. Hell, I even watched a bunch of Domain advertisements to try and gauge sentiment. I’ve run them through every iteration and permutation of socioeconomic simulation I can imagine. I even managed to call, well, trade in a favour and run my sims on the tertiary adjunct to my local unimatrix. That's big boy's toys. Cost me almost eight minutes to tell me what I already knew.

But did they know it would lead to this? The real people of the time. It’s a splinter. A piece of grit under the skin, whatever that feels like. No matter how many times I run the sims, no matter how many trillion facets of life I emulate; no matter how mundanely accurate I try to model things, they will always be just that. Models. Simulations. Eerily accurate approximations of what went before, but approximations nonetheless. I’ll never, truly know what it felt like to be there. To feel the tug of history all around you. Feel the weight of the machine of State grind its massive gears whilst being helpless to resist. The fear. The hope. The isolation.

The Outside.

That infinite blue sky. The endless chatter of birds. The smell of so much green. It’s a drug. One that we can’t live without; one that we can’t live within. When covy hit, the industrialised world was slow to respond. But eventually reality won out around the globe, and even the most orange-faced effluent-geysers couldn’t pass off the rising body count as ‘fake news’. So we went indoors. And there we stayed for what must have seemed like an eternity at the time but was, in retrospect, a three month weekend compared to what came next.

Well, if I was being accurate I’d say ‘what three things came next’. And since I’ve got enough EdMerits to make me a social scientist, and the fact I spend most of my life in a windowless box with roughly 50 square metres of floor space, I’m going to be accurate. Humour my inner, failed, academic if you will:

Firstly, and best I can tell, the people’s imagination was captured when an innocent post from an emissions monitoring company posted about how much the air pollution had dropped over mainland China since their lockdown. I mean, it's fine now, but back then the state of the environment had people worried. I guess this is the part where some commentators call it things like zeitgeist.

Second thing was the Great Ingress of 2020 and the subsequent transformation of all commercial activities to Domain-compatible. Everything went digital after covy, fuelled by the primitive proxies for presence that folk back then put up with; flat, low quality streams and pathetic audio. Apparently all we needed to do was see a smile and that made the world feel just right.

And finally covy’s mutation, bifurcation and subsequent mutations. This was the kicker. With the combined brainpower and focus of the entire freaking planet, we were churning out vaccines and antigens faster than ever before and solving a whole bunch of other, minor problems along the way. Like Ebola, HIV and even the common cold all fell to the medical onslaught. But covy? Nah. Every time we knocked her down three more of her would get up and start swinging back.

My terminal gives me another hope-filled chime, breaking my brood to tell me I’m halfway through my job download and I’ll be able to start working in ‘less than five minutes’. Another irony that’s not lost on me. Time is what I’m working for. One of the more subtle changes that worked their way in since the Great. I’ve read a bunch of lit’ from back then, too. Time is money they used to say. But they got the emphasis wrong. Time is money. It’s the ultimate currency and the cheapest commodity; everybody’s got some to give. Over the years it surpassed every other natural or manufactured resource to become the lifeblood of our metastasized economic system. But I, and a couple billion others spend our time gladly to get some outside.

Outside.

They took it for granted back then. Couldn’t they see? The gradual restrictions in movement. Why didn't they resist? The control over who you can meet. They could have stopped this. Forcing you to communicate digitally. Reducing the places you can go to. Controlling what you can buy and how much. Even taking on the job of paying you for your work. It was the largest coordinated peacetime high jacking of a civilization in history. But they did it with some serious freaking deftness. I’m talking a subtlety of manoeuvring that’d make an Icer weep. And those guys don’t make face salt easy. I mean the sharing of resources is one thing. Yeah, we’re all people under one banner and that kind of crap. International cooperation must have been a huge morale boost to the cats getting used to their cages. And when the third strain came out and we gladly, globally signed off on consolidating national powers, oversight and coordination to an international body, well the United Nations would have looked like the perfect fit.

Desperate times, I guess. And no one back then could have seen the fifty years of misdirection and positioning that had taken place, infiltrating what should have been the highest, most benevolent authority we had. So we handed them the keys and a full tank of gas. And a century and a half later, I’m sitting here in a thermosteel block called 'home' a mile off the ground with around twenty thousand other gen-pops trying to scratch out a living for… For what? A slightly larger box near the ground floor, where you get real outside breeze? Maybe I’ll get a Workers Union promotion and move to a whole new tower, even. Or stay here and save some more. What was it they used to say? ‘Do some travelling’. Ha!

I bring up the job details, my fingers navigating the screen subconsciously. I select the title and expand the details. Data cleaning required for three petabyte facility management control system. Blah. Alphabet Enterprises. has a fantastic opportunity. Blah; everything’s AE in this part of the world. I keep scrolling, listening to the emulated ambience of the alpine sublime about me, my eyes absently searching for the paragraph I’m looking for.

Remuneration: 00:18:00

Eighteen minutes. Of pure outside. To spend how I like. And I can take it in advance. If I add that to the two hours thirty I’ve tucked away over the past couple of months then I may just have enough...

I switch my attention from the terminal to the Standard Display. It senses my intent and brings up a chat box with my most recently contacted first. I scroll down a little past the recent work-related calls I’ve had to make until I see a name and user id that’s almost as familiar as seeing a face. Nervous, I open a line, speaking to the room and letting the chat intelligence do the whole talk-to-type thing; speaking and writing are different things, and will always be it seems. I sound like me, but it’s not how I speak.

Things have changed. Just got some time. Let's go for a walk. Now.

I send the message. It’s abrupt, I know. But real walks are. And I don’t have a huge amount of time to play with. I know I’m gonna have to split the time between the two of us if I’m to even have a chance of executing my plan. But that’s why I saved. That’s why I spent all these months wallowing in the crud. All for this. Now is the time.

Before I let my doubts get the best of me, I look down at the antique, silver-and-diamond ring nestled in the cushion of an old, threadbare velvet case. Allowing myself a rare smile of something that feels more genuine and real and meaningful than anything in this world, I send a follow-up:

Don’t worry, babe. The walk’s on me.

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