A 50-something French dude that’s old enough to think blogs are still cool, if not cooler than ever. I also like to write and to sketch.
Your thoughts are yours. Your notes should be too.
100%. And one of the two reasons I take all my personal notes using pen and paper. 100 % the analog way, as there is…
I don’t know what to do. What would you suggest doing? Thank you.
Re-learn there is something else than FOMO that makes your live worth living. How? 1) turn off news and social media. 2) Don’t turn them back on, even when it irks so bad.
My own blog is so not worried with deadline or algorithm (not a single ads, and no desire to make a cent out of it, nor to promote anything) that it has no thematic and zero publishing schedule. I just checked, the last published post is from April 1st (isn’t that funny). Some drafts have been waiting to be published… when and if I feel like it which may very well never happen.
I used to publish a lot more many years ago, on other blogs and on social media, for a relatively larger audience, but then one day I realized that was a rat race (one that was driving my nuts) and that was not what I wanted to do with the time I had left to live on this planet. So, I stopped using all my social media accounts and blogs without giving any explanation to anyone. I just left. A few years later, under another name, I opened this tiny blog that I don’t really promote, on which I seldom publish and that, rather unsurprisingly, barely gets any reader.
The interesting thing is that I kinda like this blog, and the handful emails (no comment form on that blog) I may get in a year from a rare lost reader, a lot. I enjoy these exchanges.
It reminds me of the good old snail mail, people my age (soon to be 60) and older may remember. How we used to write to people all over the world and waited sometimes for weeks if not months (people were already busy back then), to get a reply. And how a discussion could last for years. Heck, with my best friend we wrote each other for decades. Plural… Even when we happened to live in the same country and city.
A bit like we used to play chess before the Internet, through mail. It was slow and a school of patience.
Has not been social for a while, imho. I left Twitter some 7 years ago (or more? Can’t remember) because of that feeling… I joined it when it was first introduced and it was so much different, so much nicer and sincere. Not perfect but really great.
There is still that around here, just we lack more active users and we would also gain a lot by being less… obsessed with politics. Imho, at least.
As for sharing hobbies: irl gathering are still ok-ish. Alas, oftentimes such event will be wrecked by some asshole trying to turn it into something they can boast about on their social media.
Blogs are still a thing, even though it seems almost impossible to get younger people to read outside of their favorite social media platform, blogs are there, very much alive if slower, and they’re as much about sharing passions and hobbies as they ever were when they were trendy.
Indeed.
Like the saying goes, ‘hell is paved with good intentions’… It just so happens that in recent years we’ve drastically sped up that paving business, turning it into a speedway ;)
Like already mentioned, we’re all part of the system.The re is no such things as ‘they’ are the evil we should get rid of, we’re the good guys.
More or less intensely, all of us are contributing the worst parts of that world we like to blame… while some of us do also contribute to its best parts.
I’ve been procrastinating on meditating and yoga for years but this may finally prompt me to train my mind to keep comtrol with the experience.
I don’t do ‘official’ yoga/meditation but I have my own version of those, including the long walks I mentioned, and it helps. And not just with tinnitus. With my whole life.
Regarding visiting multiple doctors it’s something I haven’t thought of and is a great idea!
Not even considering the possibility that one of them may be incompetent, it’s always a good idea to get multiple opinions. Doctors are people and like all of us they may not know everything about the issue at stake.
To give you an idea how it matters: had I only listened to the first eye doctor I consulted (a years long practitioner of mine), I would have lost my eyesight some 10 years ago. Becoming legally blind (I had already scheduled a formation to learn to read Braille). I did not become blind (not yet) for a single reason: I decided to get another advice. Thx to a a first doctor that mentioned some experimental type of thingy that was going at some place I had never heard of, and then took on herself to ask the doctors doing that experiment to meet me, and thx to them considering I could be good candidate, almost 10 years later I still see. To me, it is not just a daily miracle (it is, even though I’m a non-believer, it is the miracle of people being able to do scientific research and experiment), it’s also an acute reminder that one should never settle with a single opinion ;)
And btw, the first doctor was not an incompetent one. She was just not aware of the latest things that were going on.
I also talked with my psych earlier via phone and she said that the meds she gave me are safe and that she never heard of something like this so I guess it may not be entirely related to them but I don’t take her full word for it.
And you should not. Get another opinion. I’m not saying those meds are responsible (no idea about that) but they could be. And that possibility alone warrants itself a visit to a different doctor, if not two. Se my previous remark.
Disclaimer: (classical) music lover, here. With a lifelong allergy to noise. Suffering from constant loudtinnitus for the last 20 years or so.
Sorry you got that. It’s a sad shit.
Mine appeared one night, out of the blue and never went away. The next day I got an appointment to have my ears tested and the doctor told me I got tinnitus plus I was starting to lose my hearing (which slowly got worse as the years went… now to the point that I’m really considering I should be using hearing aids).
I’m unable to cope with and this adds to the burden.
I was unable to, at first.
Don’t fight it. To me at least, it was making it so much worse as I was only thinking about that stupid noise, it was everywhere I looked, so to speak.
Nowadays, I’m able to barely think about it… It’s there, I can hear it, like right now I just heard them, but I can also ignore them like I will ignore the roaring traffic noise coming from the street through the windows. Not all the time though. And it shows, when I’m overwhelmed by that sad noise, my spouse instantly notices it as I suddenly look… exhausted and very much unhappy.
You might want to check with doctors (plural) what you can do but what helped me the most was to learn to consider that ugly noise part of myself… Accepting it for what it is: one more limit I have to learn to live with.
Like me getting older each year (nearing my 60s) and not being able to have all night long intense fu…, sorry, not being that physically able to provide long lasting efforts, anymore. Like me knowing for a fact I will be immensely lucky if I manage to reach 70 years old, because I’ve already been incredibly lucky for the past 20 years or so to be alive, as I should not be.
The level of noise constantly comes and goes. It mostly depend how stressed I am but it’s not just that (it would be too simple).
To this day, my spouse is impressed how ‘easily’ I learned to live with those two whistles constantly blowing their uninspired single note and loud music directly into my ears … but the real secret is that I did not learn to control them. I just capitulated to their invasion of my personal space. The only thing I did is to study those noises (as there is a narrow range of variations between loud as fuck and just loud) and teach myself to be fine with them being there.
One thing that often helps me a lot when it’s too loud to ignore it is to go out for a (long) walk, without any music/podcast… nothing in the ears. Just me listening around to nothing but random outside noise… Birds singing are great for that, plus they’re great to watch too, and I will often try to walk wherever I know I might hear them, even though there are quiet a few whose cute voice I can’t hear that well anymore.
Herbal infusions can also help, or even a good tea. And just having a calm chat with my spouse talking about mindless things (we would avoid talking politics or anything stinky like that).
So are the USA, to anyone watching what’s going on.
You should have a conversation with yourself if you let guns lying around for your dog to play with ;)
More seriously, even if it was free ticket or if I was getting paid to go there I would not go to the USA. Even for work, I refused to go there and did all I had to do through calls and videos.
<RANT MODE ON>
Why would anyone want to go there? USA despise the rest of the world, they don’t even appreciate those who were supposed to be their close friends (hi from the EU, guys). That’s fine with me, but then I’ll go spend my time and money elsewhere, with people who don’t consider it’s OK for them to spit in my face or put a gun against my head, and then tell me I should be thankful.
The USA is now a sinking country, with too much remaining power for his, and for our own good. Alas for the many good and great people that do live there and that I do miss spending time with. At least, as US citizens they’re still allowed to freely travel abroad, at least for now, to come and say hi… That is, if they’re are not too frightened (I’m not) by the perspective of most EU capitals being nuked by Putin, like his latest video/propaganda/love letter not so subtly hinted at… Which is, btw, another amazing achievement of that POTUS sad clown. To those US people too frightened to come say hi in Europe, afraid of being vaporized by a Russian nuke, I would happily have instead suggested they go visit their other close friends in Taiwan, but I’ve heard the mood is somehow not much better over there…once again, thx to the unique genius of the king of the deal. Maybe they would be more warmly welcomed in Iran or in many of the Middle East countries? Don’t quote me on that, though.
<RANT MODE OFF>
you do not find people for long-term friendship. You meet people and sometimes it turns into friendship. Looking after t is like looking to only buy a winning lottery ticket: doesn’t work like that ;)
So, you need to have some common interest to share with other people and spend time doing just that… expecting nothing, but the joy of sharing some common interest.
We can’t even pretend to guess technology from even 1000 years in the future, let alone 100,000 years. This is just a creative writing prompt with basically no constraints or rules.
100% but we should also consider ‘my’ (I certainly do not own it in any way) take on the prompt as another valid way to (try to) answer the OP question.
More than likely, we will not even realize we got handed over some tech wonder gizmo thingy… which we will agree doesn’t make for a great story. So, we would need either … to not be who we are (which kinda invalidates the question), or to be offered a much less advanced tech, something we could realize is worth something. Suffice to observe how UFO theories have always been flirting with our very own most advanced tech, barely a couple steps in front of it (some more joyfully wandering around than others, too), while discarding their previous ‘advanced’ tech/theories the moment our own reached a similar level. Something that, btw, makes for a perfect business model as one can easily write the same book/documentary, over and over again just changing a few words/gizmo/witnesses here and there. Not saying that’s what our UFO experts are doing, obviously not.
That being said, I quite like your humanoids bears with their bronze swords :)
I believe one of the best things the privacy community can do, is help our friends and families unplug too!
100%. at least help them realize it’s still an option in quite a few circumstances and the ‘drawbacks’ aren’t that bad, if there are any.
You can take photos with regular cameras you know…
I’ve been doing photography since 78 (still a kid, back then) when, while I was spending holidays at his big home in a big city, my photographer of an uncle gave me my first reflex camera and two rolls of Ilford (so far, I only had been using a tiny kid Kodak pocket camera, loaded with tiny cassettes), telling me how to load the camera and how to use a lightmeter to get a correct exposure (and what that was), and then he gave me some cash and told me to get the fuck out of his office and go out to shoot random stuff on the block until there was not a single frame left. Only then, I could come back home and we would develop said rolls together in his darkroom, printing whatever he would consider to not be complete trash. Yes, he spoke like that to his dear pupil, and yes he was the kind of adult encouraging a little boy (be it me, or his own kids) to go out and explore the city around us alone and unsupervised (back then, people were a tad less paranoid). He kinda had his own very personal way to motivate me and to get my attention.
Back in the darkroom, while I assisted him (technically speaking, I mostly watched him do his magic and pressed a few buttons) I was in awe when I first saw the image appear on paper in his bath under the red light. That was real superpower (so far, I had never witnessed developing or making a print out of it, it was done by some random lab handing me back a pile of prints in place of the cassette).
If anyone wants to know, I managed to get a few decent pictures for my first time. Using the Nikkor 55 f2,8 lens (a macro lens) he gave me with the camera (the dude had some taste, I would still love to use this lens) I used to get a decent picture of a… fly, sitting still on a window. Another one, of the entire block that was taken from… the very top of the big ladder of a firetruck (I simply went into the nearby firemen station and they were kinda cool with kid-me and ended up inviting me to climb the ladder with one of them (something nowadays parents would sue them into oblivion for… that probably decided my future career). It was a blast. I was seeing the town around like I had never seen it: I was standing on the fucking top of the buildings! I was in love with what happened that day, and with myself feeling, no it was more than just a feeling, me being that tiny version of a reporter and being not just allowed but encouraged to do incredible stuff I would otherwise not be allowed to. I was also very much liking the dude that climbed with me and moved the ladder slightly for me to get a good shot, and I liked his friends for being so welcoming to silly kid-me… I made a group picture of the four of them and that was the third print worth keeping. If I got rid of the fly print very quickly, I dearly kept the block shot and the one of the firemen, in my various offices until… i quit photography, a few decades later.
So, yes, to answer your insightful remark, I think I know I can do analog. I also think I know how to do digital, I started in the late 90s as an out of curiosity experiment (that was quite fun too). And I think I know how to make backups of both media. But, replying to the OP I did not imagine he was considering doing backups of analog photography at all, I may have been wrong.
Just so you know: analog-wise, I’ve had zero issue keeping prints in archival photographic boxes for almost half a century, and archiving my negatives and slides in paper sleeves. Prints are also great to share with friends and people as they’re long lasting even without much care… I kept the same way much older prints, I purchased from galleries or from fellow photographers, without any issue.
edit: typos.
Well, it does make sense the moment you consider my whole point is that I can’t trust those various elements (from taking the picture with my phone, to backing it up anywhere I fancy). Hence my first reply: me not using those anymore for personal use and therefore not needing to worry about doing backups. That’s all there is to my remark.
I can’t trust the operating system running on the phone, even less so as a non-us citizen since US law (android and iOS are US-products) recognize us even less right to any kind of privacy.
I can’t trust the network (here in France, my ISP is required by law to record my online activities). Network can be encrypted? OK, but I cannot trust the gov to not make it illegal for the average person to use real encryption (even on one’s own hardware) because, you know, ‘think of the children’, or the evil terrorists.
my bad, it’s not considered tech. Removed.
Nothing. I quit making (digital) photography for anything personal, aka memories worth preserving, the day I realized I could no longer trust tech (and the companies behind them, or even our own governments) to respect my privacy. I now only do ‘useful’ and temporary kind of photos, stuff that have no personal value to me and that I see no interest in backing up.
As for videos, i don’t do personal video either and for movies, well, I own the DVDs I purchase. Plus, I have two copies on external drives (not as much as a backup but to make my life simpler ;)
Very roughly speaking, 100.000 years ago our ancestors were using flint stones to hunt and do stuff, that was rightfully so considered peak tech. What would you think our ancestors would do if they suddenly got their hands on, say, a smartphone or a smart doorbell? Or maybe a ballistic missile or, say, a tiny little stent? Even their most cultured people would not know what it is, or how to use it.
So, what would happen if we suddenly got our own hands on a 100.000 years more advanced tech? Probably not much. We may not even be able to realize there is something worth looking at. And the few that may realize there is something there, say out of some intuition or because they’re somehow that smart, would probably be considered crazy ;)
Liberating.
That was many, many decades ago. Never looked back.