Dispatching a backlog of unrelated items as part of a personal tabs-reduction movement
Remember when we could surf only one website at a time? Maybe we should reintroduce clunker desktop PCs, flip phones, and dial-up Internet speeds for two weeks to stop the spread
I use Google Chrome on my main laptop and have five or six windows perpetually open, each of these dedicated to a different general topic (e.g., covid-related mayhem, my own old published work, Links People Send). Each of these windows has anywhere from a dozen to around fifty tabs open, with many of these tabs relating to the same topic. (I never bother with incognito mode, as that’s a sham cloaking device and I long ago surrendered enough data to Google for a stable psycho-consumer profile of me to be constructed.)
In each case of an open tab, I have seen something I think might be worth writing about or at least mentioning in passing. The problem with this mostly passive strategy is that I’m great at ranting at length but inept at mentioning things in passing. As a result, the number of open tabs periodically grows unwieldy and catalyzes a desire to maintain a semblance of electronic order, of not a newly pristine browsing experience.
If someone gave me a ten-[age document and asked me to extract and summarize its half-dozen most salient features, I could do this with ease and probably pleasure. But sorting through the material in my own head is different, and the stuff I choose to keep available on my screen represents an extension of that material.
Every now and again I just close a bunch of tabs, knowing that any item more than three weeks old is likely no longer as interesting as it seemed when it was fresh. Today I am doing something different and mentioning what is in a selection of these tabs before closing them. In so doing, I am required to release myself from the self-assigned obligation to try to stick to at least a weakly coherent theme in each post, as otherwise I feel as if this project will lapse into spasmodic, ADHD-driven meaninglessness.
Some of the images below link to the parent stories. The embedded videos are meant to be watched and listened to, but this post will still operate normally if you decline to view these.
Okay then.
It’s early in the outdoor track season, especially for sprinters, but even non-runners can appreciate the significance of this one:
A good example of the legacy media pretending to care about climate change for the benefit of its shitlib readers, and doing a sloppy job at this pretense since these readers aren’t worth even waking up, is “Don’t Flee the American Southwest Just Yet,” published on December 31, 2023 by The New York Times. This is the key passage:
Because of a reduction in farmland acreage and better household conservation, Arizona now uses 3 percent less water by volume than it did in 1957, despite having a population that’s mushroomed more than 555 percent since then. Paradoxically enough, the steady march of master-planned communities to the horizon — an Arizona cliché — provides big hydrological savings because of the conversion of water-guzzling farmland into more parsimonious suburban uses, Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, told me.
We now use treated wastewater on golf courses and parks.
The affluent shitlibs and wannabes who read the Times don’t give a dry, scratchy fuck about water conservation or anything else of shared public importance. It’s fine with them is less food is grown for a shrinking overall population, as long as they have their own suburbs to retire to within range of well-watered Arizona golf courses.
Outside features three running-related brands, none of them worth fuck-all: RUN, Women’s Running, and Trail Runner. While all three technically produce content, their purpose is to serve as vessels of advertising for products favored by unintelligent, uncritical, and inexplicably vain people of means. One of the products these publications have pushed most forcefully on their readers is the social-media platform Strava, a company run by mendacious, sneering assholes that offers a paid membership option no self-respecting runner uses unless it reasonably increases his chances of getting laid. Otherwise, it’s where previously normal, emotionally centered runners cluster to see their stress levels rise and their training and racing slide into unrecoverable states of soul-crushing futility, with the worst aspect of these pratfalls being how hilarious they are to remotely behold.
According to Google Search, RUN includes about 60 mentions of Strava in the past year, with 10 of those occurring within the past month. But while Women’s Running boasts around 50 mentions of the platform in the past year and Trail Runner includes around 85 in that span, neither WR nor TR has made a new mention of Strava in over a month.
This could have no underlying significance at all, or it could be an indicator that Outside is planning to shitcan Women’s Running and Trail Runner altogether and shift its running content entirely to RUN, as the other two have been putting out very little new material lately.
The fastest men’s 5,000-meter time in the NCAA in the 2018-2019 indoor season, run by Tyler Day of Northern Arizona University, would not have been anywhere close to the top ten performances in the recently completed 2024 season.
This general pattern holds across all distance events and both sexes. Better racing shoes alone is a failed explanation, as is the whole “extra eligibility thanks to covid” a few wags have proposed. Either more raw running talent is flowing into the collegiate ranks, collegiate runners are somehow extracting better results from the same raw talent, or some combination. It’s obvious that some collegians are doping, although it would be rude to suspect the ones who are doing incredible things in running despite being limited from training for running competitions.
The “unique toughness” trope will remain a permanent explainer of the troublingly unlikely despite how one of its most infamous applications turned out.
The phrase “naturally occurring testosterone” is a liberal-media propaganda term invariably used in the context of a “DSD athlete,” that is, male with occult testes competing as a female athlete.
It’s easy for even devoted corruption-trackers to forget that even were Joe Biden not a demented warmonger with an authoritarian Department of Justice and a lifelong self-dealing imbecile, he’d still be ready for an orange jumpsuit.
It’s funny how reluctant Republican politicians have proven to really push for Biden’s impeachment, even given the horrifying prospect of Kamala Harris cackling and boozing it up in the Oval Office. Someone must have gathered some serious dirt on James Comer by now.
Dr. Cornel West is running for president as a bad joke, with his unstated but obvious aim being to direct voters to choose the Democratic presidential candidate in November, whether that turns out to be Joe Biden, John Fetterman, or Liz Cheney. He feigns a socialistic bent, but his words reveal him captured by the D.C. establishment.
Here are some thoughts from West’s choice of running mate, “Dr.” Melina Abdullah:
Abdullah is a former Black Lives Matter activist. No doubt one of her first actions as vice president would be cleaning up the movement she loves and maybe getting the influence of George Soros out of the American criminal justice system.
From the “Maybe the experts screwed the pooch on this one” department:
Finally, some heartening signs of interethnic and international harmony and cooperation from the capital of China:
That’s a start. As long as no one does anything unusually weird, suspicious, or plain dumb for a week or so, I can complete the tabs-reduction project or at least demonstrate enough project to get it funded for a few more years.