svnsettia

I was on my way out of the health food store yesterday evening when I stopped to read the top headline from the stack of newspapers at the door. The paper said that Charlie Kirk had been shot to death. I was taken by surprise because I just recently listened to a podcast on which Charlie Kirk was a guest. I don't know when the podcast was recorded, but it's a relatively new podcast, so I'm guessing that Kirk was on no more than a few months ago, and possibly much more recently than that.

I was curious about the shooting because I knew just a little about the victim. I looked up news sites when I got home and found that he had been shot during one of the apparently numerous occasions on which he visits college campuses for speaking engagements. I did know that this guy has been credited with a surge in conservative voting among young men, and this activism immediately stood out to me as a possible motive.

Continuing my search today, I found that there is now a suspect in custody. And, according to Reddit, Charlie Kirk has expressed some horrible beliefs, including the idea that children should watch public executions (as a crime deterrent, presumably), that the Civil Rights Act was a "mistake," and that gun-related deaths are a reasonable price to pay for Americans to continue to have gun access. Well, there's a motive.

But damn, pro-gun people getting shot. It's almost like karma. But it's not because there are just so many shootings in this country that the probability of a pro-gun activist getting shot is relatively high, just like everybody's risk of getting shot here is relatively high.

I just got back from Whole Foods, where I just spent eleven dollars for two large chocolate bars and the price of the barbecue sauce I normally buy has gone from two to three dollars. I was going to say that food is so expensive, but the actual problem is that I'm so poor. The company that manufactures the chocolate I bought labels their vegan products and at least on their packaging says something about overcoming the human slavery element in cocoa manufacturing, both of which I appreciate and am glad to support, but damn. I'm down to twenty-three dollars worth of food stamps and I'm only five days into my monthly allotment. I have a decent cache of staples in my kitchen cabinets, but I need to continually replenish the produce so I'm going to end up having to buy food with my own meager funds again.

This laptop is so incredibly slow. I cannot get anything done because I spend half my time waiting for applications to open and shutdown. I try to limit my usage of RAM but it seems like the CPU is the problem.

Just finding out all the stuff about Charlie Kirk's activism and his detractors made me feel like not being on social media is keeping me disconnected, not socially but in terms of current events. The fact that various officials of my own government apparently post often on X and I have no idea what they are saying there makes me feel particularly uninformed. I can however keep up with important aspects of politics via websites such as congress.gov. I don't want to be on X, Facebook, or any other major social media site. I don't want to witness the toxicity or the lunacy, and I'm repulsed by the lack of privacy and abuse of user data. Anyways, I think I can't even get an X account without a mobile phone.

No walk tonight because I need to get caught up on my Mandarin studies, plus I need a break from listening to the same stuff I listen to nearly every night while walking. I might try going to bed earlier as well because I've been getting so little sleep lately. I need some new music and some new podcast episodes. I lost access to (youtube) music when the invidious instances started requiring Javascript and cookies.

Without TV, radio, newspapers, mainstream, non-privacy-optimized web browsers, a mobile phone, or people I regularly speak to, I'm cut off from so many things it seems. But honestly there is so much trash in the world, it's better this way (except for the lack of people in my life). I love it when my browsers don't load all the adds and tracking and cookie notices and shit and just show me the text instead; and when I come across a website that's configured to hide the text content from users who have js and cookies disabled, I click away and thereby avoiding wasting my time with abusive content providers.

I've finished making flashcards for all the new vocab from the second volume of my set of Mandarin textbooks, so I'm mostly ready to move onto the third volume. I need to review the last couple of dialogues and do the grammar drills, but new vocab is my primary focus. I'm now one-third of the way through this set of books; two textbooks in one year is decent progress. I feel somewhat accomplished and I'm looking forward to moving on to the next textbook. I'm always quite curious about how much the difficulty level increases in subsequent books and chapters. Also, the next couple of books contain only twelve chapters each (the first two contained fifteen), so I'll be done with them even sooner than I was done with the first two.

I've begun listening to Mandarin-language podcasts for native speakers. I couldn't take any more podcasts for learners. One is narrated by a guy who speaks too slowly, two others are narrated by people who, in the actual podcast episodes, verbally translate some of what they are saying into English (I avoid English translation when learning languages), and another ends her podcast in a way that triggers an unpleasant memory. I was also using videos, but finding new creators and converting the videos to audio files for use during my walks was not a good use of my time. Ideally I'd put more time into the audio that comes with my textbooks, but that gets tiring and sometimes I just want to have Mandarin in the periphery while I zone out. I also get tired of the high-pitched voices, exaggerated pronunciation, and excess emotionality in the textbook audio.