Caustic Ramblings

Whelp, it's now another "current year." And the concept of New Year's resolutions hasn't become any less cliche'd. Thus, I will not be penning an exhaustive list of high-minded aspirations and bad habit correct I will certainly not accomplish according to any sort of calendar-oriented schedule. The latter part, bad habit correction, should be an ongoing process anyway; something without any discrete deadlines or planned cessation periods.

Well, there is one commitment. That is, to keep this journal regularly updated, fresh with ideas, on-point, and all for a very long stretch into the future. I've failed at this many times over in the past. What happened each time was that I started some blog devoting to some singular interest of mine at the time of writing. The problem is that my main focus of interest always shifts from one or more things to another. The scenario would usually play out along these lines: six months to a year onto the project and I have lost the intellectual passion for whatever topic I was obsessively writing about. Each attempt yielded the same result: a dead blog. So enough for wasted efforts; here I write about everything and anything that crosses my mind which I deem worthy posting to a general public audience.

And speaking of audiences, I'm quite sure there's next to no people reading this journal, save maybe a tiny handful of close confidantes I can count on one hand. And that's fine. One of the reasons I fled from mainstream social media is that I did NOT want a lot of people reading my daily thoughts; at least not the sort of people who would be my "friends" on non-anonymous sites like Faceberg/Zuckerbook (Facesuck, really). Those sites are more geared for personal subject matter anyway, and I'm the sort of person who doesn't like sharing personal info with other people. Anyone reading this journal will probably take notice of the fact that I don't really talk about myself here, much less my personal daily details or emotional states. Most topics here are about my various intellectual interests and I write these posts in a rather impersonal manner. In fact, this post is probably the most personal I have gotten since starting this journal. There might be a few personal posts here and there in the future, but don't expect them to be all that frequent. I loathe talking about myself. Really. Mainly because I'm of the opinion that my personal life is quite boring. So why would I want to bore others with something supremely mundane and unremarkable? Anyone who stumbles across this blog in the future won't know who in the nine the hells I am anyway; beyond my interest persona of course. So maybe I'll build a tiny little audience on here? Who knows? I do know that I'm not looking for "likes" or any other kind of quantifiable e-validation. Qualitative validation is fine though; after all, I do need to allow my narcissistic side the occasional stroll around the block.

Actually, I do have a lot of interesting stories from my own past. But I probably won't be sharing many them, if any at all. I'm super paranoid about sharing anything that can reveal any bits of PIN (Personally-Identifiable Information); information about myself or the people involved in my stories. I respect everyone's privacy all around. And I have to be especially-privacy conscious in this age of the internet being chock full of perpetually-offended snowflakes. Yeah, the millennial generation just might ruin the internet. Boomers invented the internet (hey, at least they got one thing right) and GenXers made it fun in that savagely funny and entertaining kind of way. And maybe/hopefully Zommers (Gen Z) will resuscitate that spirit in due time. But those pesky millennials and their unrelenting fundamentalist PC puritanism -- they suck the living fun out of just about everything these days.

So 2019...What'll it be? I have no idea really and I don't like to insert myself into the business of making bold predictions. But I can guess that the culture war will probably rage on for at least a few more years as the cluster of moral panics gradually die down and the cultural scene returns to some semblance of normalcy. Big tech corporations will probably continue to censor those who boldly mock PC culture and retain their overall tone-deaf assessment of how the average person actually thinks and feels about this stuff. There will be new companies though swooping in and filling the growing market gap. And some of the big players may finally start to get the picture and thus get with the program and stop pretending that the majority shares the opinions of the 8% radical "progressive" (Neomarxist) fringe here in the US. At a more global scale, nationalist-populism (and populism in general) will continue to gain popularity and slowly begin to supplant the dying Neoliberal (Globalist-corporatist) order. Though this process will probably be quite messy.

I'm rambling on way too much here. It's starting to drone on like a list of silly New Year's resolutions.

Yes, I finally did it and it was much easier to do now than it was even just one year ago. Even though I was going to get rid of my facesuck sometime soon anyway, what really sealed the deal at this moment is the fact that I can keep using Messenger to chat with friends who are still exclusively using FB, while being able to keep my profile completely deactivated.

Freakin' good riddance. The endless "news"-feed of attention seeking, ideological parroting via dumb meme shares, lemming-like cultural-signalling, narcissistic selfies, and random mental burps in the form of status updates few-if-any people actually care about, ect. Sure, Facesuck was pretty "awesome" at first (think c. 2008-2013) in terms of keeping up with actual friends, upcoming local events, common interests via groups, and whatnot. I remember back when I first joined it was like a cleaned up version of Myspace; I took to the more formal and respectable appearance and format right away. It was a great place to share thoughts with friends and acquaintances (yes, my FB experience was still mostly IRL friends back then) that I didn't have the opportunity to hang out in person with very often. Then feature-creep started setting in. FB kept adding more mini-apps, site features and other little gimmicks, until the whole experience became a rather bloated affair. And then the smartphone craze happened and the subsequent "appification" of everything imaginable.

Facebook went to shit as the ever-swelling international user base necessitated a site moderation policy of over-accommodation of specific grievance issues and thus mass dumbing down of everything. And now people with even a modicum of tech savvyness are fleeing it like rats from a sinking ship. All I can hope for is a re-decentralization of the internet. Big, bloated nanny-state monolith platforms (remember AOL??) always end up getting crushed under their own weight. FB will eventually succomb to this and of course the normies will find a new or different platform to congregate in.

The great fun that the internet is, and could once again be, is an internet of massively- decentralized functions; something that authoritarians and busybodies fear and loathe. This is where I am headed back to. Deleting my facesuck was a major step in this unfolding process.

I've learned these are the kind of people to avoid like the plague. There's one big problem though....they're everywhere! I mean, there's always been an abundance of ego-worshipers pretty much everywhere and in every time. But now especially in the (post)modern West, it's like an ever-expanding plague. Now that the hegemonic ideology happens to be one that holds there to be no higher principle than the human ego, nor any abode which could accommodate such a thing, there's not justifiable reason for any run-of-the-mill NPC to even contemplate something higher than either their own ego, or if they happen to be of a more lemming-like nature, the ego of whatever person, party or institution they've placed all their trust in for whatever reason. So then trying to higher-reason with these kinds of NPCs is beyond futile and just a total waste of time for everyone involved. Best to just ignore them or simply nod along and not draw any attention to the disharmony of mental/spiritual wavelengths between me and the other party. That last statement should not be interpreted to be one of arrogance or anything.

On a somewhat-unrelated note, it's amazing to take note of the effect beer (or any other alcohol) has on me, after not indulging in it for a very long time. Tonight was Halloween, so what the hell, might as well knock back a few with my brother. Anyway, regarding observations, it's particularly the subtle ways a few frosty ones affect my overall state of mind that I found to be of interest. To observe properly, I found it best not to drink too many at once. Three is just fine according to my current tolerance level; that number is just enough to give me a slight buzz to worth with, while not being too much to get me swept up in the intoxication itself. My observations revealed the obvious: general mental sluggishness, a warm-but-dull feeling throughout my body, and most importantly, a slight lowering of psychic defenses. That last part is supremely important and clearly not something that very many people think about a whole lot. Because, well, the concept of psychic defenses (or psychic anything, for that matter) is not on the average radar screen. Before sipping down those oatmeal stouts I was in a rather calm, collected and peaceful state of mind; I was (uncharacteristically) working several tasks at a slow, methodical and content pace, as opposed to be usual nervous hurriedness. Maybe that clam state was owing to the Halloween energies; what an amazing time of year to begin with. It's this day when according to some very old folk traditions, the veil between the "worlds" is at its thinnest. Maybe I'll follow up on that some time. But for now,

Happy Halloween.

So I'm journaling again after a rather long hiatus...to put it lightly. I chose this site because, (a) it's not a megacorporate Silicon Valley platform, and (b) a refreshing throwback to magical springtime (i.e. early days) of various "Web 2.0" technologies.

This springtime was back before nearly all social interaction on the internet devolved into a game of fishing for as many dopamine-inducing "likes" and upvotes/downvotes as possible. And most importantly, there were a lot less people around during the "good old days" of the internet, and thus it had a lot more intellectual focus, owing to its more specialized and geeky user base. Not to sound like an elitist prick, but once the internet became flooded with so-called "normies" then it started to take on that sort of character. And thus the overall format became dumbed down as the tiny handful of social media behemoths rose to prominence, each catering to the instant-gratification convenience needs (more like wants) of the general user base.

So fast forward to today and everything has been further dumbed down to the stultifying convenience dictates of smartphone and tablet ubiquity. With the widespread use of these obnoxious micro-devices, the so-called "microblogging" type of social media interaction has become the default, i.e. the format that most effectively exterminates brain cells.

And hence why I am here, fully embracing this rather quaint format. It's the most "punk rock" (I was born at the ass-end of Gen X, so I get to use this particular cliche) thing to do in this day and age, in terms of online creative expression. I've experimented with a few of the "alt tech" platforms and they all seem to me to be too gimmicky and trying to half-ass mimic the big tech platforms, none in a sufficiently complete manner. I'll probably be ranting about those alt-tech sites at some point in the near future.

The long and short of it is this is where I get to blather on about my many eclectic interests, which will focus mostly on things like: history, comparative spirituality and religion, philosophy, tech, personal development, politics (ugh), the collective madness of modernity, general absurdity, ect. This should (hopefully) be fun, even of no one ends up reading my rants and conjectures.