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You Dropped Your Halo

 Yesterday while binge watching episodes of a true crime YouTuber I follow, I was served an ad for Amazon Halo, their version of a fitness tracker. It tracks the usual stuff -- activity and sleep. But this particular ad was hyping a specific special feature: The Halo will track your tone of voice to help you optimize your relationships. I looked up the specs and the company specifically describes the feature as using "machine learning to analyze energy and positivity in a customer's voice so they can better understand how they may sound to others, helping improve their communication and relationships." Because nothing says relating like using a machine to check that you're constantly being the most palatable version of yourself for everyone around you.  For about the last 3 weeks I've been spending very little time on Instagram, the only social network I still use. I mean, I look at TikTok, but I view that as TV for people with extremely short attention spans. Ove...
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This Is A Mistake

I was going to write about how I relate to the character of Peter Campbell in Mad Men, but all I can think about is sadness. It's October 2020. We've been in this weird semi-lockdown state of the pandemic for 7 months. Hell, I'm blogging again -- a thing I and I'm pretty sure everyone else consciously decided to stop doing in 2013 when we all realized that tweeting could get us more attention with less effort.  I quit blogging -- and writing all together -- because I had a complete crisis about the whole thing. I don't really want this to be like a diary entry, but again the sadness comes and overtakes my thesis, supporting paragraphs, and conclusions. Back then I would sit down with an idea and the words would just flow out. Now I'm writing a sentence and slipping back onto another tab to watch a few moments of The Vow, the HBO docuseries about the NXIVM cult. I'm pushing through something. It feels like a something, but if I look at it and consider it for ...
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