when i was a teenager i used to catch myself thinking “i’m really glad i’m alive right now because of all the cool personal technologies that exist” and when i did i’d think it through and reckon that well, its not like teenagers in the 70s and 80s knew they didnt have ipods or facebook or whatever. they were also happy with the tech they had. and i’d reason that in the future there would be more fun technologies that i dont know i’m missing out on right now and the future will be an even cooler time to exist
anyway i was dead fucking wrong about that last part. i hate personal technologies now. i miss having an ipod that doesnt advertise shit to me and i miss when my htc wildfire didnt harass me 45 times a day to install an ai assistant and then install it anyway when i say no and i miss when the internet wasnt 5 websites all of which i have to log into and i miss when i didnt need an app to talk to my landlord. sorry past me you were actually right about 2009
recovery horror: where the process of healing from something reveals previously unknown levels of damage
seeing a smudge on the wall and realizing it’s mildew. examining the mildew and realizing it’s black mold. peeling back the wallpaper and seeing it’s eaten the entire house. going into the basement for a flashlight and realizing it’s flooded. spending every last bit of money at your disposal on fixing all of these things, only to move the box covering the trap door that leads to the seven hundred mile obsidian tunnel that leads directly to the gates of hell.
where exactly every individual’s collapsing point is located. where they stop in that process of uncovering and why.
the conflicts that arise from knowing FULL WELL about the tunnel to the gates of hell, but you’re stuck with somebody who has only just found out about the mildew.
pretending to care about the mildew. speaking with them calmly and compassionately about how mildew is definitely a real problem that people ought to take seriously, and waiting for them to take a good hard look at what’s really crawling up the walls.
my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who’s my best friend in the world and recently he was like “you’re too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!” and I was like “a niece might be more up my alley” and he just got more excited and said “ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful”
It’s actually kind of striking how rapidly the ads on ostensibly respectable platforms have changed in the last 12–18 months. I’ve been getting penis enlargement scams and pyramid schemes that don’t even bother to pretend to be otherwise on YouTube – it’s like every platform is now running the kinds of ads that even three years ago would have been restricted to porn sites, and I’m not gonna lie, the fact that everyone seems to be getting desperate all at once ain’t an encouraging sign!
I just saw full frontal erect penis on a weather app. It’s not the sign of the impending tech-bubble implosion I expected, but apparently it’s the sign we’re getting.
