riz#000000me

I was laid off from my job on June 1—but I have my regular pay through August 31 and an additional six month severance; I'm doing fine!—and have been mired in the job search, which has been...disheartening. However, I had a follow-up interview that I think went really well. That was a week ago and I still haven't heard anything. I've had something like this happen twice before and both times, the job ended up being canceled. I don't think this will happen now because the position being hired…

Some of the lists from Anthony Bourdain's li.st account. (Li.st was a social list-making site) The website is unavailable, but these were recovered by three different people here, here, and here. (Links added by me) Crimes Against Food The Brioche Hamburger Bun: The hamburger bun is designed to ABSORB grease, not add greasiness to the experience. A proper hamburger bun should retain its structural integrity, playing its role as delivery vehicle for the meat patty until the last bite. The…

I'm thinking about and planning on switching to a Light Flip, but that's not coming out for awhile. I've gone through the processing of dumbing down my iPhone previously, but then I've been thinking about if I really want to switch or not—what do I use and need my phone for? So I matched up the equivalencies for the apps that are on the Light Phone and the apps on iPhone (LightOS → iOS). Nothing surprising here, but it helped me see some things like, right, I need to get my transit card off my…

In trying to recover my attention, I've found a lot of that work has been rethinking my relationship to my things and the purpose of them all. I've found that I'm distressed by the layer of the technological over everything. (I really can't stop thinking about this since watching Cronenberg's The Shroud; here's the trailer on YouTube). Primarily, of course, I mean my cellphone and my laptop. It is hard to reckon with what to do with a small computer in your pocket, but turning off notifications…

I had my followup appointment for my bicep tendon surgery and luckily, the recovery continues to be very easy and straightforward. Aside from checking in on the recovery, though, my doctor recommended that I, essentially, back off from weightlifting and change to less stressful exercises. It seems my tendons (I guess? Or maybe connective tissue overall?) are somewhat weak, which is really what my doctor attributes to my injury. I'm inclined to agree with him because I didn't feel like I was…

I feel pretty distracted, usually, in the world. Where this came from or when this started is hard to determine...it just happened. I think that's the case for a lot of people who feel like they have no attention span, and so on, so I don't think there's anything particularly remarkable about it. Like everyone, then, I'm either giving in to what I see as a lack of choice or determination in my life or to take back that control. I think, like most people, doing something about this really comes…

Often, calling something (or some process, market, transaction, and so on) capitalism appears flippant, but the reality is that the problems of society today stem directly from the capitalistic logic developed and maintained at the Industrial Revolution. Referencing an 1800s analysis1 over and over again is exhausting—doing so, I think, is a large part of why calling something capitalism appears flippant—but largely the logic has not changed. The simplicity of naming it is useful because, since…

Over the last three weeks, I've been a TA in a college course designed for high schoolers. We had pretty much all seniors except for a couple sophomores. The students take a 100-level college course (for credit) over an intensive month. It's a lot. I didn't do any teaching of the content of the course, a kind of historical and politically scientific focus on "democracy," but I did teach and work with the students on writing an argumentative essay. This teaching on argumentative essays was what…

Okay, simple stuff to get privacy and security in a non-paranoid way that will actually make using the internet better: Use Firefox or Safari (preferably Firefox) on macOS. Use Safari on iOS. There is not a world in which you need to use Chrome.1 Install uBlock Origin for Firefox or uBlock Origin Lite for Safari. Use the default settings on both. What this will do is, simply, block ads. However, "ads" does not exactly cover what is going on with the code behind the web page. Many of these "ads"…

There's a ton of media in Gundam's Universal Century. The Gundam wiki gives the "canon" list per Sunrise, which seems to only require animation and not overbearingly conflicting plot to qualify. (That's a positive: No more fetishizing canon!) Here is the list reproduced: Early Universal Century1 UC0068 Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin (?) UC0079 Mobile Suit Gundam UC0079 Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island (?) UC0079 Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO UC0079 Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team…