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Miscellaneous talk #44 Without social media, a month later
Posted on Oct 3, 2024
by Chung-hong Chan
A month has gone since the last post about logging out of Mastodon, my last narrowly-defined social media.
First, I just wanted to confirm that one can really live without being on social media. I don’t think I am less informed. I also feel more sane. To be honest, I was under an emotional drained period last month. So this dose of sanity was really timely.
However, the issue of not having a social media last month was the missing quick channel for me to drop down (or vent) spontaneous thoughts. The so-called System 1 thinking . To me, this blog has evolved from the past as a System 1 venting channel to a System 2 deliberative, quote-and-quote logical pieces. Gentrified thoughts, perhaps. Especially in this (broken) foreign language.
If I thought of something, I would want to write it down. But should I write it down as a blog post? Perhaps too lazy and then the though went away. In the past, the thought was fossilized as a SQL database entry on a social platform that would have been used for either training AI or as a data point in someone else’s computational research. There was a fossil. Now, it’s gone forever, due to my laziness.
I wanted to at least write something up here to record some messy things that I would want to write it as tweets or toots or whatever short messages would be called in the future . Here are some thoughts. They are more like a stream of consciousness.
- On YouTube, there are two things I really enjoy. One is the 2024 DeVane Lecture from Yale University by David Blight on Yale’s history with slavery. David Blight is such a charismatic educator and from him I know something about that System 1/2 thing. Another is the Crash Course Religion.
- Music: One day I discovered a Cantopop 80s-90s playlist and man, I can’t stop listen to that stupid playlist. Many songs in that period were covers. I found the original version of these songs (e.g. Sugar Free by Wa Wa Nee, Because of You by The Cover Girls) and man, I missed the period where my home town was so hip.
- I visited Karlsruhe for a workshop. At the workshop, someone said my English was so bad and he could not understand shit I said. Ok, it has some level of truth in that I think. But in that workshop, I was still being odd. My wife and I sought refuge in food there. The restaurants in Karlsruhe are much better than the ones in Mannheim. We ate some of best food this year there.
- I am reading Timothy Snyder’s new book - On Freedom. So lucid.
- I rage quitted several video games. (Perhaps this will get expanded into a full blog post.)
- I did something new in my research (which I hinted about it previously in another blog post). But I can’t tell you yet.
- 10 years before and after. I still remember 10 years ago in this month, I was on the road in my home town protesting and interviewing different people. Some for my assignment as a “journalism student.” Some for a music project. 10 years later, I don’t do any music anymore. And I am no longer in that place I don’t want to write about it anymore. But I think I still need to commemorate that memory of those few months.
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