Horrible Friends

     A couple of months ago, a friend told me that another friend of mine did something pretty awful to some people without their consent. I will not go into specifics, but I was shocked. My friend had done some scummy things to women in the past, but it was more just jerk moves. It had nothing to do with consent as far as I knew. This time the news was bad, and I had to speak with him about this to see what it was all about. When I did he denied it, and told me some thing about how people were telling stories about him, which I thought was odd. Why would people be making up stories about you? We aren't in jr. high school anymore. My friend has been having some mental difficulties, so I still gave him the benefit of the doubt. 

    Yesterday another friend of mine confirmed the rumors, and I feel awful. Not only are they true, but I was lied to and made to feel like a dope. I think people have been avoiding telling me their stories about him because we were very good friends, and maybe they thought it would hurt my feelings to know these things. I wish I did know, though. I don't want to be associated with someone who treats people poorly. It's a pretty big gut punch, but I am glad I know and I can move on from this. I think deep down I knew things were not so great between us, and this is just the nail in the coffin. 

What a bastard.

Mail Bag

     I was listening to a podcast about the USPS mail service this morning, and it reminded me of the recent postal strike here in Canada. It was kind of doomed from the beginning. The government was sure to stop it, especially in December when a lot of people rely on Canada post to deliver holiday packages. But that is also the greatest time to strike! It shows us just how much people rely on this service, and how lost we are without all of the workers who help pus get our mail in a timely fashion. 

I saw many articles about the strike, and most of them boo-hooed the people who won't get their gifts in time for Christmas. It blamed the workers for all of this, and did not take into account what they wanted from the corporation. In a world where we rely more and more on packages especially with COVID hanging in the air, it is up to delivery services to work harder and longer. This can really take a toll on the body and mind. Let's not forget the crazy inflation that is destroying so many people. The requests from the carriers are important to the well being of so many workers, and if they get what they want, this can trickle down into other businesses. We have a lot to be thankful for because of unions. 

   When strikes like this or the Canadian Pacific railroad happen, my initial thought is always bad because I have the feeling that the government is going to force the workers back to work. Sure enough, the government did just that. I have zero faith in any Canadian party already, so to see them continuously put down every day workers is despicable. It puts less faith in the government, and I feel like because of this it is just going to be a common trend throughout time. The average person has no say in their livelihood. We are getting steamrolled by the greasy government until we are dead. They are all just here to do different awful things to us. Things are crumbling by the day, and we just have to deal with the fallout. 

Ho ho ho happy holidays!

Ending Early

    Hi! I started a new blog because I like to write, and it feels therapeutic to talk about the world in this way. It's nice to have my thoughts spew out somewhere, or they are left circling my brain like hungry birds. I was recently tipped off to this post by a friend. It touches on a lot of things I have been thinking about recently. I have heard Ed on podcasts in the past, and it was refreshing to sit back and nod my head going "mmm hmm" at every complaint about the world wide web that I agreed with. It is becoming clunkier, and more difficult to navigate. 

    Back in the early days of social media, mutual friends would always complain when there was a new change to the website, only to get used to it after a couple of days like nothing happened. This may have most likely been a positive change for the corporation, swaying the user to focus on ad pages or something else to boost the profit of Facebook or another site. I like social media. I was a very shy person and I think it was a good place to connect. Now it is overflowing with ads, bots, and all sorts of random slop I don't care for. I still like to know what friends are up to, but I think the frustration is mounting and people are posting less because of this. The overflow might eventually be bots just talking with one another and sharing misinformation until the internet caves in on itself. AI images being passed back and forth and being manipulated until the file is too giant and confusing to comprehend, and everything shuts down. 

    This blog is nice because I can type "blah blah blah" into my white text box and I don't have a friend request from "Faithcross_20287" on Bluesky. I will share this but there are no distractions. No hearts or likes or anything like that. Twitter became a place where I ended up only receiving spam and bot requests, the posts were getting weirder and the ads were all scams. It may become the new 8chan at this point, but who cares? It's easy to pivot. I guess I just think of everything on the internet now as frustrating, just like the link above. 

    I saw a link for a news article today, but the article waws from a Baltimore news organization. It said I couldn't read unless I subscribed. I don't think I will want to read another article from them for a while. It's like that everywhere. I don't want to subscribe to everything. I don't want emails from every place I buy from, and I don't want to have to do constant updates until my computer is too old to update to the latest OS. It's wild that we deal with this but it's all by design. Some days you want to just go hang out in the forest, but I will probably need my phone to take pics of a cool tree.