Living video past.

I have become somewhat of an expert at living in the past.  One decade in particular fascinates me most: 1993-2003.  I have a large collection of NASATV footage, both on VHS and digital hard drive recordings from that period.  I also have a large collection of mostly VHS Mystery Science Theater 3000, from that period, much of it with the original promos and commercials.  Finally, I have many complete evenings of Adult Swim from the early 2000s with no edits, unfortunately mostly in 320x240 mpeg1.  Much, if not most, of the VHS content has since been captured to digital.

I have a high capacity SD card dedicated to days worth of this programming encoded as mp4 in 320x240, and a tiny little set-top box that will play a selected directory in a continuous loop.

With my gradually failing eyes, at a distance of some 10 feet from the 32" LCD screen, it doesn't look much different than it did on the NTSC CRT screens on which it was originally viewed.

I also inhabit times in which I never lived.  The 1920s fascinate me in particular, and I have a pretty good collection of short avant-garde and epic scale motion pictures from that period, as well as a lot of the symphonic music of that time.  And the golden age of Warner Brothers cartoons, minus the most racist shorts, is as much a part of my life as if I had lived when they were made.

The practice of living in the past is often maligned as being intrinsically, fundamentally, wrong.  A weakness.

Let me be weak.  Let me fail at contemporary life in peace.  I am old.

I see little about the present that elevates in from the past.  I see very little difference of substance in the entire sweep of human history.  In varying places and varying times, cultural freedoms and excesses, adventure and discovery, which we regard as exclusively contemporary, thrived with an intensity that puts today to shame.

I have lived long enough now to remember several iterations of  "people were so dumb back then; we are so much more enlightened now", and I look at these times and this culture and I wonder, really?  Have you really come so far?  Some things have jumped ahead, while others have fallen behind.  Where, for example, did optimism go?  Where did any form of futurism other than the post-apocalyptic variety go?

Enough overly tired ranting from this old man.  I need sleep, and dreams.

The Illusion of Freedom (from Facebook)

For the second time, I have deactivated my Facebook profile.  The first time I was naive enough to think it was permanent.  This time, I wonder if I will have the resolve to actually request a permanent removal.

Out of some two hundred, there were less than five people with whom my Facebook interactions could be construed to be analagous to the interactions of actual friends. Perhaps another another 5 or 8 were analagous to acquaintanceship.

I am being generous.  To myself.

To maintain this much semi-regular human contact, I found myself fashioning a version of myself edited to be acceptable to what I perceived to be an increasingly intolerant and narrow-minded peer group.

This is what people do.  It is normal in non-Facebook interactions as well.

I do not object to it, I simply find it difficult and fatigueing, and I am not very good at it. 

An often repeated anecdote of mine is when my then-employer told me I had "an honesty problem", by which he meant that I was too honest too often and it was causing problems.

I don't work any more, thankfully.  I am not as sure how thankful I am that I no longer have non-Facebook human interaction with anyone other than immediate family, and even that is for a small minority of the hours in a given day or week.

All things considered, including past history, this is probably all for the best.

I did not remove myself from the synthetic society of Facebook in at attempt to force myself into participating in more direct human interaction.  I removed myself because, as mentioned, I was failing to participate in a consistently correct manner, and my failures, or more specifically the responses to my failures, were becoming more painful than I was willing to continue to endure.

The only additive behavioural change I am hoping for is more time applied to other kinds of writing, such as this blog, where I do not need to concern myself with who I might alienate with what I say.

I choose a public blog instead of a private journal simply because I cannot motivate myself to write without at least having a credible basis for imagining that I am writing to some kind of audience.  That sounds egotistical because it is.  I see no point in being apologetic about having an ego as it seems to be a fundamental part of being human, and a minimal requirement for believing that there might be a reason to proceed to the next day.   I suspect that many of the people who lose the will to proceed to the next day are people who have lost all perceptible sense of ego.