Late once again, but for a valid yet upsetting reason: I got sick. Last Sunday, I gave you my heart my partner tested positive to COVID. I didn’t, but started developing the same symptoms the next day. I think it’s safe to say I caught it too. Monday and Tuesday were really bad, making it impossible for me to work, so we just spent the day resting, drinking fluids and worrying about the effects of long COVID. Fortunately, other things happened in those last 2 weeks.

Since I’m sharing about my personal health, I had an appointment at a hearing clinic since I have been dealing with tinnitus for a while now. After running some tests everything appears to be fine, but they did notice a little bit of hearing loss that should not have happened at my age, which has been a huge slap in the face. This is most likely due to too much listening to podcasts and music at a too high volume. From trying to silence my own thoughts while dealing with anxiety to attempting to focus in a big and noisy open space, sound has always been my default coping mechanism.

For the past few weeks I have drastically reduced my usage of headphones at home, in the street and even in transit, trying to be more in the moment, whatever that means. My podcast queue is getting dangerously full and I’m afraid some hard choices will have to be made.

On March 18th we had the opportunity to see Sarah Keyworth live, after watching them for years on TikTok. Lots of jokes about their life, about being non binary (and trying to explain it to family members), about having ADHD and turning 30… A few weeks ago, we got (free) tickets to see a comedian that we didn’t know before and who turned out to be quite disappointing, mostly doing bad crowd-work and joking about women (on IWD no less!). I’m happy we got to forget about this experience and replace it one given by a wonderful comedian where I could feel my partner’s seat moving because she was laughing so much. If you don’t know Sarah Keyworth, here is one of my favourite bits.

I’m still somewhat practicing for my driving knowledge test, although I’m growing increasingly frustrated by the phrasing and the lack of context in the test’s questions. You can tell those questions have been written for 18 years people and not for overthinking people in their late 30s. I was originally planning on taking the test last week but had to postpone due to the aforementioned COVID situation. At this point I’m just looking forward to maybe failing once and see how much I need to adjust my thinking.

We’ve caught up on a lot of TV shows in the past 2 weeks, including Reacher season 3 (very satisfying season finale), The White Lotus (protect Belinda at all costs and setup a support group for the people who watched this week’s episode, IFKYK), Superman and Lois (satisfying series finale although maybe a little long and too tear-jerky for my taste).

If I may allow myself to share a little tip for my friends in Canada trying to watch HBO shows, I would recommend getting Crave and HBO as an additional package on Prime Video. We had to cancel our Crave subscription because all the shows were stuck in French with no possibility of selecting a different audio track (not a joke!) and we were dreading the day we’d have to re-subscribe if we wanted to watch the new season of The White Lotus. Being able to subscribe via Prime Video makes the experience roughly 15% less dogshit. We’ve also started a binge of classic British game shows such as “Would I Lie to You?”, “8 out of 10 cats does countdown”, again via an add-on on our Prime Video subscription for Britbox.

What’s that? Are we giving too much money to Amazon? Most definitely. In the meantime, I would like to give a minor shoutout to the current season of The Wheel of Time, the first TV show where the previous seasons recap makes everything somehow more confusing. At least, all the special effects for the “channeling” (all the magic bits) are very pretty.

I’m getting a little bit of AI overflow this week, probably due to the latest announcement from OpenAI and all the improvements on the generation of images. I could say it was the flood of images in the style of Studio Ghibli that did it, but it was just the last drop (of wasted water) that made the cup of my mental health run over. I hate that this is apparently what we want as a species, I hate seeing my friends already in precarious situations struggling to sign clients because they’ve found that the content or the illustrations they’ve been able to generate themselves were “good enough”. I hate it.

So, I’m declaring a ban on everything related to AI in my feeds. I’ve defined a whole bunch of filters on Mastodon and I apologize in advance if your name is Claude and you said something interesting in the past week. Chances are I missed it, feel free to send it to me directly.

Just to be clear, I’m not totally burying my head in the sand, waiting for AI to go away, because a) I’m pretty sure it’s here to stay for a while and b) under the broad spectrum of so called “Artificial Intelligence” are probably some interesting applications I’m curious about. For that reason, I’m still subscribed to a bunch of blogs and newsletters covering all this. But if I’m going to read about AI, it will be on my own terms (probably before bed, on my beloved Boox Palma)

Some cool stuff

• I’ve really enjoyed this piece titled “The Last Human Choice” by Tina He where “In a world of AGI, there may be only one meaningful choice left: whether to keep choosing at all”.
• After weeks of freeloading, I’ve decided to support Nothing Much Happens, the podcast created to make you fall asleep. I barely remember any of the stories but they’ve done wonder to help me fight the odd insomnia.

I’m just realizing that if I want to keep writing these posts, I need to be more careful about saving the things I’ve enjoyed reading. Some goal for the upcoming week!