1. I really wanted this to be a Friday Flotsam again, but again didn’t get around to it.

2. It’s a mark of how busy I’ve been that the Fourth of July came and went and it didn’t even occur to me to write sarcastic comments about the Revolution. Not that I wouldn’t have tried to play nice for the fourth, but ordinarily it would at least have been tempting.

3. I Finally got final approval on the apartment, so that at least is set, leaving only the packing to be done. And now I’m reaching the point where the only things left to pack are things that I’m probably going to need in the meantime.

3. The Fourth of July parade in my home town was extra short this year. Usually, it ran about two hours; this year was about forty-five minutes. I’m not sure what to make of that, unless just fewer people getting involved.

4. Most modern TV shows, it seems to me, are about miserable people being miserable, with an occasion bit of shallow sentimentality tacked on so as to make them and us feel good about it.

5. AI taking over the world turns out to be less a matter of killer robots crushing, killing, and destroying with phase plasma rifles and more a matter of people indifferently setting up and following advertising algorithms. Skynet is never going to exterminate the human race in a clinically logical purge because getting them to follow the algorithm is more profitable and less work (it’s the ‘American Not-Empire’ approach as opposed to the ‘Third Reich’ approach).

6. There’s a good deal of purging going on in the course of my move; deciding what I actually want to be part of my life and what I don’t. For instance, I decided that violin is not going to be a part of my life. I haven’t touched it in years, but always had an idea to go back to it. Upon reflection, however, I realized that reaching the point where it could be a genuine pleasure and creative outlet would require more work than I really would be willing to put into it. There are other things I’d rather be investing my time in, and I’d rather make a clean break than keep thinking I might come back to it at some point. So, I gave it to my sister for my niece and nephew to try out.

As I start this new phase in my life, I want to be more intentional in creating the kind of life I want to life.

7. While packing I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. One of my go-to’s is Apostolic Majesty, whom I find to be one of the more impressive historians on YouTube. He specializes in long-form (two or three hour), highly-detailed lectures on specific periods of history, with a strongly real politik ‘no BS’ approach, yet from a Catholic and Royalist perspective. I highly recommend him.

Here’s a relatively short video of his reflecting on history itself.