I really should have moved to Canada or Norway or something twenty years ago. That would have been wise. My difficulty making huge decisions got me again.

Life of a sea cucumber:

Move along the sea floor eating plankton and decaying organic material.

Move along the sea floor eating plankton and decaying organic material.

Move along the sea floor eating plankton and decaying organic material.

Threatened. Expel your toxic internal organs, which is apparently terrifying to predators 🤷‍♀️

Regrow your internal stuff.

Move along the sea floor eating plankton and decaying organic material.

This has been a bad day, so I'm going to see if napping is possible. An hour or two of unconsciousness sounds very good

I tried to take a nap this afternoon. It's raining outside, and that should be the perfect environment.

But I couldn't sleep.

One might also want to visit Wales to see the Mari Lwyd.

What autumnal folk customs happen in Europe? I would love to find out more.

Can you feel the excitement growing? The season of joy approaches! Before long, winter will be here, and they shall build the Gävle Goat in Sweden.

I wish I could go to Sweden to see and cheer on the Goat. (And then stay there for the rest of my life, preferably).

Alas, I shall have to watch on the security cameras.

I’m tired of choosing the lesser of two evils. Why can’t we have a choice between the greater of two goods for a change?

I have a tendency to be very hard on myself after any social interaction. Anything from “that could have gone better” to “omg can I do anything right”

I’ve been trying very hard to go for the former and not be so hard on myself, but when I’m tired or stressed (which frankly is a lot), I can lean more towards the latter

I've been across that bridge several times. I never choose to. I'm accompanying people, or somehow I am on the Train. Either way, I enter that forbidden, harrowing land. What happens there depends on the dream.

What is under the bridge? A valley or ravine of some sort, usually filled with water. Sometimes the valley is huge, with landscapes down there. Sometimes it is a river.

2/3

In my dream world, there is a Bridge. It shows up now and then, and I have no idea what it means. But whenever the Bridge appears in my dream, it is a place of horror. In the way only dreams can do, it feels like the terrifying end of the world. Not that there is nothing at the other side; there is usually a forest, possibly with a town. On this side of the Bridge, there is often a Station which can look like a large building, or as small as a toll booth.

1/3

I’m really horrified by how many total sociopaths there are all over the world voting in droves for hate and nationalism. There is something deeply messed up about the human brain that so many go down this path.

Can we turn up the empathy and compassion output in all brains? I’d be willing to try and code that…

I got THREE VACCINES today, so clearly I believe in them wholeheartedly.

I think I'm going to take a tylenol and find the sofa.

You think about raptors having this enormous predatory cry, the joy of flight, a high-pitched roar, if you will.

I think movies did this. We expect raptors to fly around going "RAWR!"

So that's why I thought I was hearing a raptor one time. It turned out to be a Bluejay, a corvid that wants EVERY BIRD IN THE AREA to know it's around.

It seems that raptors tend to sound like newborn kittens. Other birds and small mammals are like "OMG KITTENS!" and they run away.

I used to have a good ear for music, but clearly that doesn’t translate to good ear for bird song.

I’ve tried listening to the songs for different birds, and so many of them sound the same to me. Like a very high pitched modem trying to connect to the air.

Oh I know crows of course (caw), and blue jays (SCREAMING), and mourning doves (OOOooo). But your basic small bird going tweet is like trying to interpret R2D2. “Come on, R2,” says the crow.

Clearly this is not one of my talents

I remember when the internet was awesome. Those were the halcyon days of yore

I’ve been following a person and/or bot that posts quotes from the Dào Dé Jīng translated by Ursula K Le Guin.

As I expected, I don’t understand a bit of it

Well okay, the vscodium installation went great, as did a markdown editor. But coreutils was supposed to give me bash... and it isn't found. Sigh.

I've just discovered scoop, a package installer for windows which works a lot like homebrew for mac.

I'm using it to install some things I've missed, like coreutils, as well as python.

I discovered scoop while figuring out how to install vscodium, a VS Code alternative that isn't microsoft.

Yeahyeah linux, but I use Unreal Engine and compile game builds for windows... which unfortunately requires windows.

Another PBS YouTube documentary this morning. I've learned that:

1. Humans hunt sea otters nearly to extinction for pelt
2. Without sea otters, sea urchins multiply
3. Kelp forests decimated

Even aside from the fact that hunting animals for pelts is barbaric, humans have an unfortunate difficulty in seeing systems in life, in nature, in everything.

We think every life form, including ourselves, is a complete thing isolated from everything else.

YouTube keeps offering me nature videos, which is awesome.

Seahorses are weird, aren't they.