Shameless Recommendations 2021-08-17

1. Read Why Fish Don't Exist, and don't read anything about the book before starting it.
2. Play Baba Is You. It's available for major computing platforms, smart mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch. If you get stuck, don't cheat! That ruins the whole point of the game. Instead, check out guiding hint sites like Baba Is Hint which help you think about how the game works instead of giving away the solution.
3. Get a therapist or counselor even if you don't think you need one. Really. If there's nothing "bad" or "painful" to talk about, you might still learn about yourself and learn to think about your own thoughts differently with a therapist's help. If things are already bad, it totally sucks to jump through all the hoops and forms and insurance and such to get connected with a therapist. Get started with therapy before your energy state is super low from grief, trauma, depression, anxiety, whatever. Future you will thank you.
4. Eat Joe Chips. Serious but non-damaging crunch with just the right amount of give, excellent flavor dusting. Try out the assorted chips linked, and learn what your favorite flavor is. The BBQ flavor of Joe Chips (BBQ is generally my favorite chip flavor) has just the perfect balance of salt, smoke, spice, and sugar. I have not encountered anything else out there so balanced. BBQ chips are often too smoky (I usually pass up "mesquite" labeling) or not sweet enough. Not BBQ Joe Chips.
5. Go on a walk through a forest or park, and try to find one object of each color of the rainbow. Maybe you'll find a red leaf or an orange peel, or even a yellow dandelion. Make a note of your discoveries somewhere, or even take photos of each object of each color and arrange them to form your own lovely ROYGBIV. This exercise was adapted from Why Fish Don't Exist, but it doesn't spoil anything, I promise.
   

Old Internet Will Make a Comeback

You heard it here first! (Maybe not.) Old Internet activities like Blogger and LiveJournal are going to be hot again. Longform soliloquies like this one will become popular forms of expression again as we tire of our uncles having something to say about everything on social media platforms. Widely-supported, probably-already-installed, instant-loading fonts like Verdana will make a comeback, and expensive fonts like Circular which have to be downloaded and slow down page loads will fall out of favor. Maybe this time these newly-hot old platforms will benefit from wide support for emoji. 🔥 (Maybe not.) I betcha there will be some "new" site that replicates the experiences of these classic platforms.

How refreshing that Old Internet sites load pretty much instantly. The Servo or V8 or WebKit engine in your browser is overengineered to load and execute poorly-written JavaScript faster than it really should run. It's not just the web developers' faults though; basically all software is enormous and slow these days. If you keep your site simple and low-tech, it's like driving to the corner store to get some milk with a souped-up Ferrari, which is a funny image. (But did we really need the Ferrari in the first place?) Maybe just keep it simple and low-tech because all computers require energy to run and we ought to be responsible about energy consumption. "Call 4-H to find out how you can do your part."

(My favorite part of Old Internet? Hyperlinks! Maybe I just wish web pages thought of themselves as simple documents on the greater World Wide Web instead of be-all, end-all experiences. You might have already guessed that I don't think Facebook is the bee's knees.)

Go grab a stopwatch, click this link, and start the stopwatch. You can stop the stopwatch when the page finishes loading. How long did it take to load?

If You Want to Write

Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write has brought me back from spiraling nothingness before, and gosh darn it, it's gonna do it again.