Time Capsule – January 2025

I have started and stopped writing on this or other past personal blogs so many times I’ve lost count. Usually, I stick to a schedule for a month or two but get frustrated by the fact that no one really reads blogs, so what’s the point. This time I’m trying something different, going in with the intended audience being… me. Rather than hoping for some outside validation, I’m attempting a much simpler project here: capturing some of what I’m seeing, reading, and thinking about each month in a semi-organized fashion for future me to look back on.

I’ve never kept a journal, but I have found that writing, the actual process of putting down words, helps remember in articulating and remembering my thoughts. And at this moment I’m not feeling very articulate, and it seems there’s a lot of things that should be remembered. So, I’m going to try a simple structure and come back to it each month to see if that helps. I don’t get overwhelmed easily, but I want to create a system to hold myself accountable for the things that are important to me, to ensure that as parts of society erode around me, I don’t erode with it.

And so, each month:

• 2 bad things – news or events that should not have happened but did
• 2 good things – work by others who are trying to help improve the world around them
• 2 things I did – small and large, I want to remember the ways in which I spend my time
• 2 things I will do – I want to commit myself to setting down goals each month and tracking them
• A photo to summarize the month (up top)

So, let’s start with the Bad News.

The Bad

1: Learning Nothing from the Crash on the Potomac

Not only was this a terrible tragedy, but it has become (completely predictably) a political kludge for the President to further his Anti-Woke agenda. Of course, there is a process that should be followed in the wake of an accident like this to determine the root causes and derive new safety standards if applicable. And when the President inserts his own agenda into that process, he puts the prospects of learning the lessons that should be learned in jeopardy. Of course, Trump knows this and doesn’t care, which is not at all surprising.

I design and develop aviation safety products, and so I interact with a fair number of people in the aviation industry through work. While I am no longer surprised by the President’s disregard or disdain for protocol, I can still be disappointed in the lack of urgency to speak clearly about this from these people in the industry. Americans have lost the battle with anti-intellectualism on so many fronts; is aviation safety going to be the next loss?

2: You Did Not See What You Saw

The richest man on earth stood on stage at the inauguration ceremonies and twice threw a Nazi salute, but because [he’s autistic / it was a “Roman salute” / he was “throwing his heart out to you” / some other equally thin gaslighting excuse] I was told that was not what I saw. Or that “what about when the Dems did it” with a single screen grab of someone with their arm outstretched. Of course, these are not serious objections; everyone knows what Musk did. Nazis certainly weren’t confused, as they proudly and jubilantly declared their approval of the act.

This has been covered a lot already, but it is still quite jarring to see so many useful idiots rush to defend… this:

I’m fairly confident that the people rushing to defend the richest man on Earth from rightful condemnation know full well that this was indeed what it looked like, which means one of two things:

• they are good with Nazi salutes
• they think that it was done “as a goof” and they are good with that

The charitable version is the latter, but it neglects the fact that Musk indeed has a growing record of rather Nazi-ish behaviors. And to me, the only thing that you need to know is that Musk didn’t come out and apologize or try to explain this away as some big misunderstanding (as one might do if they had a problem with being characterized as a Nazi). And beyond that, the Rule of Goats applies regardless.

The Good

1: What is Your Rubicon?

I’ve followed Innuendo Studios for years. I always found the videos to be helpful or instructive in articulating a concept that I had previously only a fuzzy outline of in my own head. This video, however, is their first that I found to have a compelling call-to-action, to elicit some form of response from me directly.

I don’t have a firm definition of my own “Rubicon,” but maybe that is something I need to work on.

2: A Case for Optimism

It’s a little overwrought perhaps (and I’d excuse anyone who is not a fan of the music), but I found this a bit refreshing.

In particular I like the crosswind metaphor (care of Viktor Frankl):

If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him … we promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists, in a way — because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.

There is an inexorable trend towards entropy, towards things decaying and falling apart, but that makes it all the more important that you aim for a world better than what currently is. That’s not such a bad argument for optimism despite the indications to the contrary.

Things I Did

1: A Grand Coffee Experiment

Amy and I had a nice afternoon coffee experiment thanks to James Hoffman’s Decaf Project. The premise was to have a single source of coffee beans that was parceled out into four groups: control (regular coffee) and three different methods of decaffeination. Once processed, each batch was then roasted at the same roaster. The idea was to eliminate as many variables as possible, leaving only the decaffeination itself as the only difference.

We had a good time tasting the four cups and comparing, putting on our best coffee snob impersonations. And while the distinctions weren’t massive, they certainly were observable. I was mostly pleasantly surprised with how much of the flavor was preserved from the regular; I had always assumed that something significant must be lost in decaf, and generally avoid it. This experiment showed me that I can actually enjoy decaf, and that any issues I had with it in the past are more likely to have come from the other parts of the process (the beans, the roast, etc.). Good to know.

2: Deleted X

I created my Twitter account back in 2009 and have gone through ebbs and flows of using it. There were years where it was easily the most used app on my phone, the way I consumed most of my news and media, to the point that I had set timers on my phone to keep me from scrolling into oblivion. I had already been on a downswing before Musk took over the site and gradually found it less and less useful to me. Accounts that I used to follow for news or because I found them funny showed up less frequently, cryptoscams and ads for shitty fake products more prevalent. Around the election I joined Bluesky to see how it compared. I soon found myself going days without the inclination to open X-the-everything-app, and was more or less happy to leave it that way. Every once in a while, I would take a scroll to see what some of the right-of-center accounts I followed had to say about current events and was consistently uninspired to migrate back.

When Musk threw his salute (see above), that was enough for me to not just let the account linger and gather dust. If you had asked me any time from 2009 to 2023 whether I would get rid of Facebook or Twitter first, I would have never guessed the latter. Good riddance.

Things I Will Do

1: Get Reinvested in Lowell Makes

I have stood on the periphery of Lowell Makes, a community I helped to build, for several years now. I have maintained my membership, I sit on the Board, and I generally try to support the organization, but only so far as it has fit into my schedule. It’s been quite a while since I’ve devoted real time and energy to the makerspace, and I want to recommit to doing more. Even though I always feel good when I visit and I have pride in what it has become, it’s been a challenge for me to carve out time to participate or to work on my own projects.

I have been thinking a lot about third places and building relationships at a time that is straining a lot of people’s understanding of who they are and what they stand for. I don’t have any leverage to influence what it means to be an American, or a Republican, or a conservative, which are all labels I would have used for myself once upon a time. I can have (and have had) an impact on what it means to be a part of Lowell Makes; I should not squander that.

2: Set Up Archives

I’ve been working on a media storage setup for keeping track of videos and photos, feeling a need to have both physical and digital backups of things as the world around me seems increasingly prepared to start burning books. At the risk of mentioning him again, Elon is making noises about Wikipedia being “woke” and people are suggesting he could just buy it. I’m not the first person to want to archive things while DOGE throws the government in the shredder, but I do want to find ways to contribute to preserving what I can.