World of Warcraft as a Shelter

It’s been over a month since I stopped using the YouTube recommended feed. I haven’t used it to go lookup funny videos. The only uses I’ve permitted myself to engage in are watching videos that teach me something for work, or listening to World of Warcraft (WoW) music.

I’ve been paying for YouTube Music for many months but lately I haven’t been using it anymore. I don’t feel like the singers I used to listen to have anything to say to me. The people I encounter while going about my daily life don’t have anything groundbreaking to tell me. My old friends stopped saying interesting things to me awhile ago. Why should I expect Jihyo of Twice to have anything to say to me? If she doesn’t, I don’t want to listen to her music. At least that is the thought that has popped into my head when I’ve tried to listen to Cactus, or other songs like Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus. So I haven’t been using my YouTube music subscription lately.

There are other forms of touch with my society that I cut off. I haven’t paid any attention to news outlets like Fox News or CNN in many months. I have no interest in ShoeOnHead’s commentary. I don’t look at Twitter. I stopped using Facebook years ago. Instagram I do not use. Reddit I do not use, save for when a Google search takes me there. I did experiment with TikTok but that came to an end months ago. I don’t use any of the streaming services. No HBOMax or Netflix.

The only site I’ve been using that delivers relatively current thoughts is twitch.tv. I don’t use it to watch wow streams because I’m afraid of spoilers. So I’m not sure what I see in it sometimes. But I’ll at least open it and browse around, as if I expect to find something there.

Wow is the thing I really enjoy. I love planning content consumption in wow. I play it because it is beautiful. It’s fun hiding in my room, doing a dungeon, chilling for an hour, then doing another. I get so cozy that I just order Postmates so that I don’t have to leave my room. Questing is tiring but also something I enjoy.

It’s so easy for me to steer clear of the world I live in, and to only interact with it through wow. Wow is like a shelter for me. It enables me to live my life with something to consume, while avoiding the vast majority of mainstream thought.

It’d be nice if I could keep this home for myself for a long time.

Trading in Honor for Sesame Street

I see an ocean of people around me who have given up on the pursuit of honor and substituted adherence to the herd in its place. I do not encounter people who think of fighting as a necessary skill to navigate life. You could say that one should learn to be a moral person in their life, but that doesn’t mean much unless a person is additionally willing to fight against others who live in disregard of morality.

A young person watches Sesame Street, the TV show. At least I did when I was young. You learn to count to ten. Sometimes synonyms or new words. There is an assumption among adults that you can’t prepare to live life just by watching Sesame Street. Adult life is complicated. It’s supposed to be. But I say to you, if the only complication you need to master in adult life is how to acquire a mortgage, then the assumption that adults know something little kids don’t has been violated.

You will meet adults who took up the most bland of batons being passed around to our youth, one that preaches to kids in school that they must get a job, get married, start a family, and then compliment themselves on a life expertly lived. Toil is the only currency to be exchanged for trust, such adults will claim. This mindset is that of the American herd. If you’ve been paying attention then you should recognize this tired message. It’s tired because it has been stretched out to conceal the truth from us, which is that the white-picket-fence strategy is by itself vacuous and vulnerable to the most trivial of inconvenient hardships, hardships that come from struggling to not just make money but make money legitimately. Hardships that come from struggling to break up with a foul person but do so by telling them they are foul. Hardships that come from struggling to eject a role model from your life on account of their spine not holding up to heightened scrutiny.

They don’t teach you how to fight on Sesame Street because fighting is for adults. But when was the last time you witnessed an adult fighting? Adults rarely fight. They quietly group together and huddle together. They stick to the plan. They flee from fights. They have only invisible honor because to showcase it in public or even at one’s job is to be cast out of the huddle. Out of the modern technological safe zone. A zone where it’s okay to walk around with pennies-worth of principles because everyone else is equally broke. Keep your head down and cling to hard work.

Life has turned into an extension of Sesame Street. Besides being intellectually empty, it’s also boring as fuck. I can’t talk to adults any more. Not really. They bore me and repulse me.

Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 to Dual HDMI 2.0 Display Adapter

I tried this thing out after having a failed experience with a $30 adapter. With the $30 adapter, I connected it to a Belkin doc which in turn was connected to my 2019 16 inch Macbook Pro. It only allowed me to use 2 monitors such that one mirrored the other, rather than extending the desktop.

But this Sabrent one extended the desktop across the two monitors I have. So that's great. 

I found blog posts saying that MacOS didn't support "Multi Stream Transport" (here's one). I don't know what that is. But this device works.