Hello Everyone!

A new writing project, Experiments gone awry & The high price of viewer non-discretion!

Having spent the better part of the last two thousand one hundred and fifty-one days writing those daily entries I must admit that my mind has grown a bit numb to them. Recently I keep having the idea that I should (at the very least) try to write about something else or simply make a new series in which I can express some of the things that do not make it into my other writings.

As with most new ventures it is both daunting and exhilarating simultaneously. When it comes right down to it I am unsure of just how keen I am on the idea of committing to another writing project... especially since I have been neglecting my other project so much of late. So we will see what happens over time, how (and if) it evolves and what the heck the content itself will be centered around... or if it lacks a center altogether.

Honestly, it would be awesome to just psychologically vomit all over the page here and spew out whatever drivel comes to mind but alas there are reams of such pages already in existence... so why bother. Heck there are now even artificial intelligence frameworks available that can do that for me... so again the question is why bother?

For the most part I have been rather withdrawn from the world and doing a good deal of introspection and all that jazz that makes me feel like I am making some kind of progress and while in some ways I have... there are many other ways that I am not and have not made any meaningful progress. If that seems vague do not worry because it will remain so no matter how I try to spell it out.

Back at the beginning of this particular phase of my life when I was still in a tent and day to day life was much more challenging I was super stoked because after way too many years I finally had a decent cellular signal. Which yup meant I finally had decent internet access that was reliable and even consistent!

Anyway, I decided that I should try to do something that I had never quite done which was dive into the wacky world of one of world's largest video services and see what all the ranting and raving was about. At first it was kind of fun to see what the algorithms would serve me up, follow their suggestions and see just how my 'landing page' looked afterwards in regards to what content I was getting served based on my history.

To glaze over most of the relevant stuff there and get to the heart of things lets just say that after many different sessions (some lasting weeks and some mere days) I would clear out all the history that I could and start the experiment over. To put it bluntly every iteration produced slightly different results with a single common theme: The longer the experiment ran the more 'mindless' the results were.

What I mean by that is that even on my extremely focused experiments (of say searching for off-grid power solutions or homesteading stuff etcetera) the results would always (in the end) be dominated by content that fell squarely into the entertainment department. Obviously there was a trend towards pushing the popular, the trending, the superficial and like I said before 'the mindless' content to the very top... where of course it is hard to un-see.

From the sound of things you would think that would have been enough for me and I would stop my wacky self-experiment and move on to something else but nope I did not quite have the willpower for that one. It took me the better part of a year to figure out that in the end the algorithm had 'won' and I was totally addicted to watching whatever trash it served me.

Having in the past beaten both a phone addiction and a social media addiction I figured this newest 'technologically induced, algorithmically reinforced compulsive behavioral pattern' would not be all that big of a deal. Whoa was I wrong in that regard and have yet to find a real solution to ebbing that particular tendency.

The massive difficulty is that even when I am gaming or doing almost anything 'computer oriented' I wind up 'needing' information that can (as far as I know) only be found on that particular video platform. When looking a single thing up turns into realizing an hour or more later I am way off course and have watched half a dozen or more unrelated things... and feel compelled to only watch more... there is a problem.

What that problem (aside from my weak-willed addiction) actually is will probably be answered by future generations who can look upon our time and go: Now there were a people who did not quite grasp the fullness (and vast implications) of the technology they utilized... and whoa did they pay for it intellectually along the way!

I cannot speak for anyone else but for me personally I do not recall a single instance where I agreed to participating in a reality based on everything being dumbed down for me to the nth degree. In fact during my aforementioned experiment I intentionally sought out content that was not 'dumbed down' and oddly enough the result was (you guessed it) being served even more dumbed down content!

Sure it may sound like I am ranting and raving here a wee bit but I am actually not and merely writing what comes to mind in a way that I hope folks can understand. If anyone needs the previous sentence dumbed down for them then I suggest they read elsewhere... or do what I do and treat it with the humorous over (and under) tones it deserves.

Seriously though, that addiction stuff is no joke and since it appeals to both the visual and audio mechanisms it is a really tricky one for me but eventually I am sure that I will get a handle on it. I have not quite gotten to the point of blocking its domain altogether but believe me the idea has crossed my mind more than once and if it come to such extremes then so be it!

As much as the habit may sound kind of unchecked it is nothing like that. The main thing that I watch for to stop myself from starting the 'binge watching mindless shit' loop by accident (when looking things up) is to immediately leave the site once I watch the single thing I was trying to watch in the first place. Aside from that my best practice is to find the information and/or entertainment elsewhere if possible thus avoiding the site altogether.

Okay, I really had no idea what I was going to put in this entry but I think it has now reached a good stopping point so I am going to wrap it up and mull over the prospect of sharing it.