Month: May 2019

Dear Diary, today I finally got around to hacking my GH2. This is in 2019, mind you, seven years after the camera was replaced by the GH3, and an indeterminate amount of time after I bought the GH4 I never used in any meaningful way, and finally gave to my wife to shoot YouTube videos because her Canon 6D is a piece of shit for video.

Now that I’m ancient, I get a charge out of using older stuff and getting great results. My phone (where I’m typing this now) is an iPhone 6S+ and it’s still fantastic. No notch, big screen, 4K video, all fine. No need for anything more.

I mean…to characterize my stupidity, I bought the GH2 used on Ebay to learn how to shoot DSLR video. Because Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color used a GH2 and why not me? I shot maybe total of two hours of very bland home movies and that was about it. Then my brain broke and I forgot about it, because that kind of happens when you become dehabituated to your tinnitus and fall victim to a severe bullshit depression but I have said too much.

Long story short, I bought a GH4, never used it, and now I realize the thing to do is just make do. Which is what I’m doing and it’s way more fun than unboxing some shit you have now instead of money.

But I will write this anyway. Game of Thrones. The finale. Terrible. Not gonna talk about any of the main points so many have covered. No, I want to talk about one overarching point that I have not seen made and that is:

Is it really the end?

This was a season finale not a series finale. Think about it, and let’s pretend Jon Snow is still a character.

Dany was stabbed in a world where you can get stabbed and brought back to life by a red witch, by a dude who was stabbed and brought back to life by a red witch. Her dragon tenderly lifted her up and flew off to somewhere. Probably some place with a red witch just sayin. It ain’t over.

Tyrion leads the most motley crew ever. Sam is no way a grand maister, that makes no sense. Brienne is not a calligrapher, and Bronn as Master of Coin is idiotic. They will fail. It ain’t over.

Bran is not a human anymore. He’s the Three-Eyed Raven, and he has schemed and manipulated everything just to become Protector of the Realm. Even the anticlimax of The Battle of Winterfell becomes justified if it was all part of Bran’s master plan, whatever that might be explained to be. At any rate, a magic superbeing as lord of all humans? It ain’t over.

Arya Stark has set off for parts unknown, far from her family. I’m tellin ya: we still don’t know if it’s really even Arya anymore. She killed Frey and we never saw her faceless man shit again.

Jon Snow has returned to the north, where all this shit started.

It ain’t over.

What if GRRM told DB&D how “it ended” but “it” was not, you know, IT?

Ah who cares. I know you don’t. And now, I barely do either.

Ever see a fat personal trainer at the gym?

That’s a very important lesson about the universe.

As none of you know, I’m half in the market for a new gig. Not that my current gig is terrible but…OK it’s terrible but more than that, I’m just ready for a change.

To that end I got a subscription to LinkedIn Premium, because why not, I don’t find phones or gadgets interesting anymore, so I gotta spend my undisposable income on something.

Here’s what I have found after a couple of months of using LinkedIn Premium.

1. There’s this dude called Oleg Vishnepolsky and I’m not sure if he’s real. But he’s dominating my feed and I’m fascinated by it.

2. When I signed up for LinkedIn Premium, I had a 30-day trial period. I got a lot of engagement for very little effort. I spruced up my profile, said that I was open to recruiters and actually got some hits. Nothing great but considering that I put zero effort in, I thought wow, this might actually be value for money. Then my 30 days expired, I got billed, and…crickets.

3. #2 is just an observation. Obviously LinkedIn is a tool, and you get out of it what you put into it, but…I’m not sure that LinkedIn is for old farts like me.

4. Yeah this Oleg dude. He is an “Influencer” which brings me to my other point – LinkedIn is just another dopamine farm, a novel feed that is unreloadable and keeps presenting you with new bullshit, especially from influencers like the aforementioned Oleg. His profile says he’s a CTO somewhere but he seems to literally spend his entire life posting on LinkedIn. That’s nice but doesn’t he have CTO shit to do? Entry-level kids are constantly posting their resumes with an #Oleg hashtag and he likes and comments, apparently so 250,000 recruiters will see it. I mean, great but okay.

Anyway I’m going to stick with it. At least until next March when my term is up, or until I get a new job, which certainly could happen. But I am thinking that if I do get a job, it’ll have to be through that most horrifying of methods…

…actual human interaction.

Shudder.

Want to quit smoking? Cut down your drinking too. Start walking. Go to the gym. Don’t bite your nails. Cut out sugar. Nofap. Take up stamp collecting. Draw every day.

What do I mean?

Simply it’s this. Your psyche is an interlaced web of shit. If you are a habitual person, if most of those habits are bad, then it’s tough to cut down on just one thing because your internal mechanism for abusing yourself in whatever way you want to change, is used for all the abuses. To disempower the mechanism you must attack it whenever it works. If you cut down one thing but increase the habituation of three others – you are working against yourself and you’ll fall back hard.

But try to stop all the things and you will have a better chance of stopping the one thing you actually care about.

This article published by the Department of Things That Sound Good But Are Probably Complete and Utter Horseshit.

This is a test blog after all. And now I can publish from my phone, which is phun.

Not quite sure how this is going to look, though. I tried adding this image which shows that the fat you eat goes right to your ass, despite all the people saying carbs turn into fat (carbs make you store fat but it’s the fat you eat that gets stored – you gotta eat like 500g before your metabolism throws up its metaphorical hands and says “all RIGHT we’ll store the carbs as fat too!”

OK let me end this here.

But not before saying yeah, it seems like there’s not a lot of formatting possible for images when you do this on the phone. Alas! Or, alternatively: who cares?

You know that thing where your ears hiss and whistle and whine, and it changes over time and sometimes it’s really loud and other times, you kind of can forget about it and if you let it, it can drive you nuts nuts nuts?

If not, then you don’t have tinnitus and that must be nice.

Yeah. I mean, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. I know you like it. You were all into it, and you just want to share. But really, I don’t care. I can’t care. Not the way you do.

Remember Babylon 5? I loved that show. Holy shit. It’s the best fucking show I ever saw. You wanna know why? Because when I watched it I was a reclusive introverted fuck with no friends and the well-written ensemble characters in Babylon 5 were valid substitutes in my mind for relationships with actual people.

That’s kind of what I’ve come up with after 25 years anyway. Seems plausible. Either that or it’s the best show that was ever made.

That bored feeling you’re getting right now? Yup, I’ll stop here.

Suppose there is such a thing as a “life IQ.” This LQ wouldn’t just be your ability to excel at standardized tests, but would include all aspects of human existence from your physical health right down to relationships and attitudes. The average would be 100.

Now that we can quantify this, we can talk about it.

What would happen if your score decreased by 1% every day for a year? That is, each successive day, your LQ, whatever it happened to be, was decreased by 1%? In a year you’d be down to around 2.57. Since you’ll always have some positive value, you can never reach zero.

So that’s a 1% decrease over time. You can only reach rock bottom and then just sort of bounce around there. All potential personal tragedies and hardships aside, if you do the bare minimum to remain human and alive, there’s only so far down you can go.

Let’s do the opposite now. Suppose you improve your score by 1% daily? Where do you end up after a year? Somewhere around 4000. Your LQ is 40X higher than it was when you started. And that’s from a 1% increase every day.

The difference between great success and mediocrity is just 2% a day.

What’s the point? No point really. I just wanted to write an article and test my WordPress installation.

And that can be my 1% for today. Heck, since I’m already down around 2.57, that’s more like 300%. I can take the next 300 days off!