busybee fluffy rambles

I used to be a voracious consumer of music. I would listen to as much music as I could, in as many different genres, from as many different bands, as I could handle, for nearly every waking moment of every day. My music collection has over 53,000 songs with a total duration of over 130 days. My choices in listening devices and methodologies have always been informed by how I can enable myself to listen to as much variety as I could, without needing to actually choose what to listen to at any given time.

Music also helped me to focus what I was working on, and was possibly a big part of my self-medication regime for my ADHD and executive dysfunction. Having music playing made it so much easier for me to focus on what I was doing.

I also developed a peculiar habit: every time I came across a song I really liked, I’d buy the entire discography of the artist as a “surprise gift for my future self.” It’s a big part of why my music library is so big, and it’s given me a lot of delight from always having something new to listen to.

But yet, over the last few years I have barely listened to any music at all, aside from the stuff I’ve been working on myself. Most of my day has been full of silence, pretty much only listening to music when I drive — and I hardly ever drive. And the silence has been overwhelming, maddening, and is possibly a big part of why my brain’s been in vice grips as of late.

How did this happen?

One of the reasons that people buy an electric vehicle is to reduce their carbon footprint. Even if you live in an area where electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuel, the amount of emissions that come from generating electricity to power a vehicle is much lower than the equivalent emissions than you get from an internal combustion engine, due to things like carbon capture and the overall economy of scale that comes with power generation. And, of course, many areas are moving away from fossil fuels for power generation to begin with; electricity is fungible and with the increase in renewable sources such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric, electric vehicles' overall environmental footprint will improve along with the electrical grid.

So, of course, one of the more maddening trends in environmental policy of late is the purchasing of “carbon offsets” or “carbon credits,” where polluters spend money on things that will supposedly make up for their pollution. Many of these offsets are a total scam, where the offset is just buying into not making the environment worse (for example, by not bulldozing a forest that was already protected to begin with).

The intersection of these two things is that many of the electric vehicle companies (both manufacturers and charging networks) are selling carbon offsets — against the very same customers who are paying good money to do their part to reduce emissions in the first place. This negates the environmental benefit of electric vehicles, and most EV owners would probably like to know which companies are double-dipping in this way.

I’m still recombobulating my brain after the last few days of oxygen deprivation and extreme fatigue. Today was especially difficult for me. And a thing that really bothers me about it is that CHI Franciscan/Virginia Mason has posters everywhere proclaiming their philosophy of “humankindness.”

I don’t feel like “humankindness” was on display when they kept on shuffling me around between waiting rooms and when they were dismissive about every issue I was having. Or when they were trying to just blame it all on my asthma and ignore the acute, severe respiratory distress I was in. And I was having difficulty speaking because of the severe pain in my throat and lungs and the constant need to cough which I couldn’t do, and that just made people get frustrated at me for not speaking loudly or clearly.

And when they did finally give me a COVID test, after hours of waiting, and they just unceremoniously shoved it up my nose and got angry at me when I had discomfort from this, and at that point I had an emotional breakdown and just started crying, and there was absolutely no sympathy or comfort shown to me.

I was treated like a burden, not like a patient or a human being.

So on the plus side, I don’t have COVID. On the minus side I’ll be getting a rather large medical bill for an extremely unhelpful hospital visit.

Recordings from last weekend’s Pride concert!

Oh man I am so overjoyed with how our choir shows went! Holy fuck, joining this choir was probably the best decision I’ve made in a long time. Every show we’ve done has been wonderful and the people are so great and I love spending time with everyone. It’s great being surrounded by fellow ADHD transgender/nonbinary weirdos who all have music in common but so many disparate experiences and ideas and just like, oh god so much talent from everyone.

We’re between seasons now and it’ll feel weird not having rehearsals every Wednesday evening for the next couple months, but there’s a lot of talk about doing plenty of social gatherings in the interim and I’m very much looking forward to that.

I’m still alive, I guess.

There’s been a lot of discussion about a puff piece by Marc Andreessen (formerly of Netscape fame, now of being-yet-another-also-ran-tech-billionaire-who-is-into-the-self-aggrandizing-fad-of-the-moment fame) talking about how AI will save the world.

I am not going to link to it (it’s easy enough to find anyway) but I just bothered to read it and oh my god the privilege and blinders are so obvious.

My impressions on the hardware, for what it’s worth:

• Really cool tech
• Kind of a solution in search of a problem
• I look forward to seeing what people do with it
• I look forward to it becoming affordable and usable for a lot more than just running fancy versions of iOS apps
• I will be way more interested if they let you apply filters to the external screen; why show a video feed of your boring human eyes when you can be your fursona or a protogen?