During my week-long hiatus from human-generated cacophony, I realized how much human noise bothers me, makes my life worse, makes me less cognitively-capable and less focused.

My IQ seriously drops. I bet if you gave me an IQ test after a week in a city, I’d probably score 10-15 points lower than after a week sans human aural clutter.

I’m not some Ted Kaczynski wannabe, desirous of living in a one-room shack with no electricity and no running water. No, my ideal is living 20 miles out of the city on a compound — with a fiber optic connection and an assload of 5K monitors.

No technophobia here. Just the desire to not have a bunch of chatter, clatter and the daily brutish batter of sonic assaults from every side.

This past week my partner and I toured many coastal areas that are almost certainly going to be inundated by the rising sea within the next twenty years.

We were discussing the inevitable in two senses: that the sea would rise (one can see evidence of this already, in person) and that since many coastal inhabitants are wealthy, it’d be — just as in the Great Recession — poorer people who would be bearing the costs of the wealthy for mitigation, insurance and relief claims, and finally migration.

Speculation on taxing or abandonment and all of that are good, but what will end up happening in the US at least is that the poor coastal residents will be left mostly to their own devices, and those with the $2 million houses near St. Augustine will receive full recompense for even the mildest inconvenience related to global climate change.

My future is more likely than any I’ve seen so far on this topic.

What I genuinely enjoy about the fat acceptance/celebration movement is that I often cannot tell and can find no way to ascertain when someone is trolling them and when they are making what they feel is a valid point. Poe’s Law, I know….

Like this.

I think this is not a troll as she makes other similar tweets and she is the size of a house (if that is her actual identity and photo).

But I truly cannot definitively tell. I’d say 70% chance not an Olog-hai and 30% chance troll. But god, I just don’t know.

One of the contradictions of modernity is that as empirical knowledge is solidified, social knowledge is de-codified and made yet another tradable commodity with all the newly-possible attendant representational distortions for purposes of signalling and tribal affiliation — all inherent to the relatively-novel ability for the previously-reliable signifiers to be obfuscated or self-generated.

Personae bloom in the shattered data stream like poppies colonizing a fire-marred slope.

OK, that’s a little too much social analysis for making fun of Miss Hammaspeikko. I’m out.

To see your public IP in Linux, this command’ll do it:

curl -s checkip.dyndns.org | sed -e 's/.*Current IP Address: //' -e 's/<.*$//'