Trying to come to terms with not being dead yet

Discovered last year I couldn’t look at my 2015 MacBook Air without it triggering nausea and migraines, and figured the screen died. Have been getting by on my phone, but concluded I really need a laptop again.

Saved up, realised I could afford a brand new MacBook Neo, and got one.

-And I couldn’t spend more than five minutes looking at the screen without massive eye strain, nausea, vertigo, and if I pushed it, I-need-to-lie-down-in-a-dark-room-for-hours migraines.

Looking up MacBook and Eyestrain explained what is going on. The liquid retina displays that Apple currently has uses Pulse Width Modulation or PWM. In order to give the screens a deeper depth of colour and contrast, PWM flickers between several hundred to thousand times a second.

And there is currently no way to turn it off. There are settings and apps to reduce it, but there is no way to stop the screen from flickering. Checked Apple forums, called Apple Support, and the time I could look at the screen kept shrinking. Got the laptop Tuesday, returned it Friday, today is Sunday and I’m still dealing with a vertigo migraine.

For MacBooks, it seems to vary on the computer model and the software it uses. In retrospect, the issue with my MacBook Air started after a major software update.

And it’s not just an Apple thing. Current Windows and Android screens do the same thing. There’s even a Reddit for people who are sensitive to PWM flickers to help find computers and screens that won’t trigger eyestrain and headaches.

So, yeah. This week has been a learning experience. But for those who are prone to headaches and migraines, this may be something to be aware of, cause I was not.

so a long time ago humans were trying to figure out edible plant matter, right

and because they didn’t have fucking microscopes or anything they were like “okay we have to divide them in some way that is easy for us to figure out”

so they COULD have divided them up by like, color or some shit

like all the red things are called noogles and all the orange ones are called fuckips and all the yellow ones are called snarglebutts or whatever

but they didn’t

they divided them by taste, which makes sense if you’re trying to sort edible plant matter, the whole point is eating them so why not sort them by the most likely reason you need to know the difference between them

so all the sweet tasting things are called fruits and all the not sweet tasting things are called vegetables

except like other than that there’s no rhyme or reason to it at all??

like potatoes are roots and broccoli is a flower and pumpkins are fruits and celery are stalks

but we’re putting them together because they don’t taste sweet

and lemons are juicy and wet but not sweet but they’re fruit for some reason but tomatoes aren’t even though they’re also juicy but not sweet and carrots aren’t even though carrots can be sweet

meanwhile apples are genetically more closely related to fucking roses than they are to shit like blueberries but because they both taste good in pie we put apples and blueberries in the same group and roses are a different thing 

When I was a kid in about... Grade 8, I want to say, we had the Decameron in history of literature class. (For those who don't know, it's a book of short stories framed as "told by people trying to quarantine from the plague". It's mostly horror, humor and sex. Think COVID entertainment, but maybe more terrifying). We had a few stories from it selected in our reader, and the assignment was "pick a Decameron story and do an oral retelling."

At the time, me and another girl had just ceased routinely beating the shit out of each other with chairs, and instead had become friends in one of those delinquent-nerd duos. She taught me street smarts, I taught her weird intellectual shit. It was a beautiful friendship.

So of course when I saw the Decameron on the curriculum, I told her "you realize a lot of stories in that book are basically porn, right? Let me get you the unabridged version from my house."

My friend's eyes lit up. She read the whole thing in a few days.

Class time comes, and for the first and only time in our class one of the class delinquents shoots her hand up. The teacher goes, "oh wow, what just happened? All right, go ahead."

And of course my friend picked one of the pornier tales. If I recall, it was about a monk seducing a nun by telling her that men had devils, and women had hells, and occasionally one must contain a devil by sticking him into hell. The teacher has no choice but to listen because the assignment doesn't specify "pick a pre-selected story from the reader". It just says "pick a Decameron story."

The retelling was fantastic, as hilariously funny as the story itself, (she did voices and gestures!) and my friend got the class listening on the edge of their seats. My friend got her well-deserved A, the teacher got a pedagogical challenge, and it was a win-win all around. :P

Shakespeare is the grand meme king of early modern English. And Shakespeare was meming on classics everyone in his time was still reading like the Iliad and Odyssey.

Ursula K. Le Guin's is fantastic in isolation, and even better if you've read the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.

However, my kids came out of loudly proclaiming that this was what a Christmas story ought to be. Forget sugary, safe, kind of condescending stuff about how kids should believe in Santa. This, the original, the archetype, was about the evils of capitalism and raw spiritual terror, about how John Fucking Calvin was wrong and people can change, and it ends with actual joy rather than just a general sense of niceness. This, they decided, was the real shit.

And interacting with the roots of stories can inspire creativity in itself. Sometime I should ask my son's permission to show you guys his reworking of Ray Bradbury's "Black Ferris" story into an SCP foundation entry. Sometime when you hate a classic story you produce something worthwhile as you poke at its flaws. Sometimes saying, "But what about this?" leads you to a new realization.

trying to play peekaboo with my child but he's a European diplomat:

me: where'd daddy go?

baby: we must articulate a post-daddy vision of strategic autonomy

me: peekaboo!