#but the more nuanced info... woof.

[wildwood-faun]

the more I learn about pda (aka persistent drive for autonomy/pathological demand avoidance) the more I'm like... whoa. that's me you're talking about...

[firespirited]

some unusual things took up my spare time this week: long post hidden under the readmore.

*My camera is a kodak early bridge with that very important “image stabilisation” bit, it recharges fast once a week and resets to 2008. I pop out the card and stick it into the computer all handy dandy. it handles shake really well and the lens is amazing, my doll photos often look like ass but when I meet a cool bug or flower it’s up for the job no problems.

So there’s this plastic dial to change modes and lately it’s been switching on me. Eventually the camera went haywire no matter what: constantly switching modes. I attempted to clean it again with the toothpick Qtips and a brush, still switching. So I put a spudger in the side and popped it out...but it’s a not a piece that’s supposed to come out, the “dial” is now a 4mm diametre by 0.5mm high snapped sprue. At least it’s stopped constantly switching and is now stuck on macro unless I rotate it with my nail ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. So I spent hours looking at cameras (including just bookmarking the one I have secondhand because everything’s so expensive and a bajillion numbers to compare like batteries that are the last piece of info you get) long story short I cut down bits off the the dial and superglued the dial bit to the sprue with great care and it’s working again. I love this camera more than ever.

*Lost use of my legs in the bath because a cramp was blocking some nerves so i just had to keep warm for as long as it took for meds to kick in. That meant washing my hair on a different day.

*I’m trying to wear shoes to strengthen my back as I’ve been leaning forward too much. shoes are somehow both too tight and too loose everywhere. Balance is all over the place. But i need this. it’s step 1 to being able to be upright for any period of time and actually walk more than a 10-20 steps. Feet are loud complainers.

*Nextdoor neighbour lost her elderly sister so mum went round as soon as she heard crying to check she was ok and give her hugs. There’s been lots of family visits since so we’ve been able to train Talia to not woof at hallway noises, this is a good opportunity but also means constantly having to get up and reward the dog for “no woofing” and jumping at the noise because Talia is 200%, she’s putting her whole body into it, she becomes the embodiment of fury, “fight me in the parking lot right now” energy. Usually this would be fine but we’re all so frayed down the the edge you know?

Okay, on to cool videos watched recently:

Twin Rabbit is a native American (?) anthropologist/sociologist with insight that’ll make you rethink everything you thought you knew, also does hilarious accents and leaves a bunch of links to follow rabbit holes in his wake

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_7FDEMkBBWWcol7QPzToaw/featured

Hakim did this “North Korea is wierd” video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzDhqXuELjo&list=LL&index=8 I’d already been pondering some wierd narratives i’d seen around the squid game reviews and seen a video on debunking american ideas about vietnam and my brain was tick tick ticking like “sounds like Cuba all over again” and of course it’s nuanced and complicated but you can have multiple facets of a story at once: I have ex-east german, polish and vietnamese friends since childhood and have met ukrainians and belarusians in the past few years. Some have strong binary feelings about politics and others are working on, how do i put this, a sort of patchwork-framework where you can salvage good things from ideologies and try and pinpoint where it broke and how to reconcile that with living in capitalist countries with weak socialist movements that paint your old country as “bad”. You end up having to rename stuff to reclaim it and having the vocab to do so really helps.

Special interest dump time: I was living very precariously around the 2008 crash and it seemed wild that somehow “americans not buying houses” would tank the worldwide economy. It seemed just so fake everytime I heard it on the news or in documentaries with the stupid pictures of vacant houses. Over the next few years as investigative journalists got their teeth into the real story I read and watched everything I could get my hands on; US, UK, french economy since WW2. I’ve never liked economics, remembered nothing from school and I hated every moment of this, every theorist and every bloody official involved but I absorbed it all until derivatives and the domino chain of events made complete sense. (Of note: I did the same about facebook and data mining and machine learning a few years ago) So this long, jargon dense video by Folding Ideas about NFTs had me hooked when he started out by mentioning the subprime mortgage scam: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g?list=LL, eventually i’d love a more detailed profile of the average nft griftees, if they were already susceptible to gambling, MLMs and lootcrates, what kind of community grooms them to invest in crypto to begin with. Halt and Catch Fire, The Social Network and the Netscape documentaries Valley of the boom and Code Rush go into what kind of people can and can’t afford to put their money into silicon valley and who’s in it for profit, idealism or just scammed. I can’t think of the names right now but there are either documentaries, video essays or very long form pieces on Peter Thiel, the winklevoss dudes along with with various “non fungible” investor projects like theranos and video game kickstarters over the years.

I have no money and count every penny and yet how very rich people play with money heartlessly is fascinating in a sort of gruesome watching animals hunt other animals way.

Finally “I’m not sorry” by Tyler Willis is a fabulous and prescient takedown of callout culture, the fact that it’s a woman in the frilliest garb imaginable with razor sharp wit just makes it so much better. january 2021! a whole year before Lindsay Ellis quit and people started to think a little.