d&f 8/15/22

Thanks for the well-wishes last week! Healing is going too slowly for my liking, but I got an excellent massage on Friday, and I’m hopeful if I treat my body right I’ll be able to attack the hills again sooner than later.

This weekend is full of movies, relaxing, and reading a bunch of fiction. I finally saw Nope with my friend Haley, and it was outstanding. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, find a screening.

If you’re online at all, you’ve seen the wild news this week about a former president stealing top secret documents. All I can say is that it’s really wild how the worst people outlive many of the best.

We may lead the world in amount of nuclear destruction controlled by one old man, but we sure as hell can’t build a good train. One of the things I miss the most about traveling abroad is enjoying functional intercity trains, with Japan being the absolute best. The channel in that video has all sorts of awesome experiences of Japanese train suites and high-end luxury plane travel. I don’t think it’s environmentally friendly to boug it up so much, but it definitely looks amazing.

Remember when people (definitely not me) used to steal music online all the time? The days before the $1 mp3 downloads from Apple, or the $9.99 a month all you can listen smorgåsbord times we live in today. Apparently all ads made to curtail this activity were only effective in increasing it. Incredible. I mean, you wouldn’t steal a car, right? An object both incredibly expensive and owned by a single person who would be without their car if you stole it, and possibly miss work or worse? That’s definitely the same thing as downloading an infinitely reproducible digital file instead of paying 90+% of the price of that album or movie to studios who try as hard as they can to keep artists and workers from getting fairly paid. Obviously. Lol.

If you’re still into being grifted for no real purpose, have I got the plastic discs for you! There’s certainly a discernible difference between good speakers and shoddy ones, and even between a 64kbps mp3 and 256kbps one, but time and time again in blind tests the vast majority of people can’t tell the difference between 128, 256, and lossless. The reality is, if you’re enjoying the music you don’t need to invest in the expensive and futile hobby of collecting tectonic-activity-proof record players and “warm” analog speakers—unless you just like weird hobbies. As for me, I listen to way more music now that I have little wireless white earbuds I can pop into my ear at any time, and a huge collection of music in various clouds I get to download or stream at will. Maybe this isn’t how the Beached Boys or the younger Neil wanted me to experience their songs, but hey, the artist is dead.

Finally, I shared this in my Slack, but as a poor lady raised christian who was then a broke lady, the amount of times I had to heard about Dave Ramsey and his budget advice was intolerable. Budgets, like diets, don’t really work because the solution is really just to have more money (or different genes in the diet case). There’s probably a happy medium, and tracking saving and spending when your needs and health are a given is a different thing than the idea that someone can scrimp their way to wealth.

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August is in full swing, and so is the Bay Area summer, so it’s sunny and gorgeous every day right now. I’m trying to plan a bit of travel right now, but figuring out a way to avoid COVID during my travels is pretty stressful. Hopefully an Oregon trip is in the books, and perhaps Europe or Japan later in the fall. Hopefully you’re finding time for yourself and planning a trip of your own too. Keep having a great Summer I’ll see you online next weekend, space cowgirls~

d&f 8/15/22

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