All posts by Thunderscreech

Nerd stuff, Rant

iCan’t even

For a period of a few months until a recent update, iOS sorta kinda implemented a version of one of these amazing ‘bad volume interfaces‘. It ‘guessed’ what your volume should be based less on preference than on concern it had for your hearing. “You listen to music too loudly”, it would scold in so many words, “I have turned your volume down to…. 58% of maximum. You’re welcome.” There was also no way to disable this function and it would happen daily, sometimes more often, and the inability to turn it off came with an unspoken but louder ‘YOU’RE WELCOME’ from the iOS.

“This sounds a little annoying, maybe, but… I guess I can see the benefit. It wants to save your hearing, why do you listen to music so loudly? Let the robot lady do her thing.”

WELL, that’s the thing… it did it to all audio regardless of whether you had headphones OR, in my case, a Bluetooth stereo you were listening through. If you turn the volume down on the phone, it quiets the audio signal going to the stereo too and now you have to turn UP the volume on it even more and eventually you end up with mismatched audio levels, hissing and crackling from overboosting quiet signals, and general feelings of iRage against the machine that *you own* that’s acting like you have no authority over it.

Well.

There must have been a sufficient up-swelling among users who matter (I’m thinking Apple Execs with Airpods, maybe) because as of a recent update, there is now an option to tell it what KIND of Bluetooth audio device is connected and if you tell it something other than headphones, it now grudgingly leaves you in control of your volume and doesn’t mess with it while you’re out walking or dance fighting or all the other things people do while listening to headphones.

You know what, though, if I want to go deaf, I don’t need my phone telling me iCan’t. That’s for my parents to yell at me, and I was able to fix THAT by moving out.

Junk and stuff, Stories

Hey, I said I’d get around to it

I just finished a project! It only took roughly 10 years, but in my defense, it was a faucet.
 
A decade ago, I decided to replace the two 1970s-style chrome-plated faucets with the plastic ‘crystal’ knobs in our bathroom (which had always puzzled me because our house was built in the late 90s) with more modern, brushed nickel ones as one does. I was replacing everything with brushed nickel. Lighting fixtures, door knobs, actual nickels… just going bonkers with 2010-era design sensible brushed nickel everything. So for our bathroom, I bought a pair of faucets at the home improvement store and swapped out the one for our main sink easy-peasy, Josh-Lyman-squeezy. Turned it on, hardly any water blasted out from the insufficiently tightened hoses and then none at all after some panicked tightening.
 
It was done.
 
Oh yeaaaah.
 
Having spent upwards of a half hour on the job, I was le tired and the second sink was our auxiliary sink anyways (translation: the sink that was being used as storage) so I put the box up on the counter to take care of the next day. The next day, obviously, other stuff came up. Same the day after, and eventually it just became part of the landscape. After all, the sink we actually USED was upgraded and fine.
 
Somewhere along the line, the box with the new faucet disappeared. I noticed a few months later when I went in to industriously finish this project, but it was gone. The Case of the Missing Faucet occupied me for a couple days but then it too passed.
 
…until one day about five years ago when an archeological expedition into the garage revealed an unexpected find. Well, it was unexpected to me, you the reader would only be surprised if what I found WASN’T the box with the new faucet, and that was indeed what it was. Somewhere along the line, it must have been picked up and migrated into cold storage (the kind nickname I give the giant, unordered mass of Stuff that makes up a dry artificial reef in my car hole) but now it was right there in my hands so I marched it back up to our bathroom.
 
…where it sat. In my further defense, I didn’t have a wrench upstairs. When I was downstairs, all memory of needing a wrench disappeared like Mandy at the end of the first season of The West Wing. When I was upstairs, I’d see the box and nod my head sagely, remembering that I’d meant to get the wrench. More than once, I literally went downstairs specifically for tools and forgot by the time I reached ground level. This probably ate another couple years.
 
Eventually, I ended up under the bathroom sink with a couple of different wrenches and pliers, trying (and failing) to get the big plastic sink nuts that held the old faucet in place off. I didn’t have enough leverage to get them off by hand and I couldn’t get any tools around them either.
 
For the next year or so, I’d occasionally pull everything out from under the sink and try again and after efforting for upwards of an entire minute or so I’d give up and go do something more immediately rewarding like watch some quality White House fictional drama or 3D model and print stuff or write some code. Or basically just about anything because climbing around under this sink for no positive outcome just wasn’t doing it for me.
 
Yesterday, a figurative light went on. Pulling open the new faucet box, I verified that it had the same type of plastic sink nuts as the inaccessible ones. So I took some measurements then modeled a tool to fit over it that would give me more leverage. I 3D printed one out of PETG plastic and crawled under the cabinet and was able to immediately remove the intransigent fasteners that had obviously been tightened 23 years ago by some kind of sadist.
 
The extra leverage was perfect, and I sat there with those nuts in my hand and a feeling of victory in my heart.
The blessed nut twister
 
Minutes later, the ‘new’ (an asterisk may be appropriate too, I’m not sure what the right way to describe the age of an uninstalled but decade-old unopened water fixture is) faucet was installed and working. I’d shut the water off to the second sink 10 years ago in preparation but the plumbing seemed no worse for wear and everything worked perfectly on the first shot. At some point in the next couple days, I’ll no doubt towel it dry again and carefully place the temporarily relocated soaps and makeup kits and whatever other bathroom cabinet nonsense is appropriate back into our auxiliary sink so it can resume its service to the clutter gods, but by Jove, I finished that project I started all those years ago. I finished it GOOD.
 
Alright, what’s next?
Rant

Fuck off, 2020

It’s the last day of 2020.

I know there’s no real magic, no solid reason tomorrow will be better or the day after that, but there’s definitely a psychological difference between December 31, 2020 and January 1st, 2021 and I’m looking forward to it. Just because we don’t know why placebo studies show some folks improving when the real medicine isn’t administered doesn’t mean it’s not real at some level and I guess I’m holding out hope that it’ll be the same for this next year. Back when the pandemic felt like it had become ‘real’, I had just bought a new batik shirt. When I got it, I set it aside and figured I’d save it for when things were back to normal, but it’s been almost 10 months and here we are and I’m both here in this timeless Neverending Month of March and feeling like it’s the mid-2000s again. I’ll explain.

About 15 years ago, I got laid off and spent a terrible, no good, awful year-plus in flux, even after I was hired into a new job. We lost family to tragedy, we lost our savings keeping our home, we went into debt that was affecting our daily lives until just a few months ago, it was a bad year. The whole time, I found myself making decisions based on dealing with issues ‘for the duration of the crisis’. Everything I did fit into this model, fit into this structure of ‘I know this isn’t perfect, but this is the kind of thing I need to do for the duration of the emergency’. Going from one crisis to the next is normal for many folks for reasons ranging from financial to medical to situational and more so I was grateful that I could couch my plans in terms of ‘for the duration of the emergency’.

And one day, I was able to tell myself the emergency was over. That didn’t mean everything was fine, it didn’t mean all of our problems had gone away, but I was able to allow myself to start making longer term decisions that went beyond ‘put water on the fire’ or ‘hold onto the rescue rope’ or ‘don’t sink under the water’. The bad stuff had still happened, there was still uncertainty about the future and what would come next, but thinking beyond the immediate crisis suddenly felt possible again.

Since March, I’ve been living and deciding within the context of ‘the duration of the emergency’. I have what I have to acknowledge to myself is a serious medical issue that I may not survive, we’re going through a global pandemic that’s tearing families apart in so many different ways and has killed almost two million people so far, and as a nation we’re in the midst of an absolutely unbelievable schism of ignorance and arrogant, conspiracy-minded racist demagoguery that’s proudly embraced lawlessness and sociopathy. That shirt I bought in March, it’s sitting in my closet, unopened.

Things are not good, but there’s a chance they can get better.

My medical thing is being treated (if not improving yet) so there’s still a chance. The vaccines are being approved and administered, more than two million in the US have gotten their first shot so far. In three weeks, the General Services Administration will be sending a team of contractors through the White House to thoroughly disinfect every disease-ridden surfaces possible before a new administration comes in, but a new administration WILL be coming in. A month from now, I’ll probably still be sick, people will still be dying of an avoidable disease that was somehow politicized, and we’ll all still be burdened by the dumb, foolish, and uncaring monsters that were in our lives this whole time that we tried to ignore, but there are good things happening too and maybe things will trend towards better.

But that’s a month from now, for today I’m gonna try and ride out the last hours of 2020 knowing that a new year’s just around the corner. I’m going to hold onto that hope for the future that’s been so hard to believe because I need it, I need that hope, that hope that ‘the duration of the emergency’ has an expiration date because it has before. I’m going to put a lot of pressure on the concept of ‘Maybe’ because that’s what I need to move forward.

Maybe my medical thing will start to get better. Maybe the Constitutional and law will push back against some of the corruption. Maybe the racists will start to be afraid again. Maybe in two or three months if we’re all lucky and get get our shit together as a nation, I’ll be able to go to a ‘normal’ feeling meeting with friends, the kind where we can hug again and maybe…

Well, maybe I’ll be able to wear that shirt.

Rant

First time Burner impressions

I wash my face a third time, but the water still doesn’t run clean. I scrub at it, I use soap, I rinse… in the mirror I see the drops in my beard are still dirty.

I just got back from my first Burning Man, and the dust isn’t the only thing that’s stuck.

I am the joke, the parody of the first time Burner who can’t stop thinking and talking about this experience. I’m probably insufferable, but my family loves me and has listened patiently while I try to wrap my brain around this last week.

I want to talk about the communities I saw created out of thin air, the experiments in art covering the playa, the giant fire-breathing structures rumbling through the desert with 20-30 people onboard dancing or the tiny, one-person mutant vehicles made out of love, steel, and gasoline.

“How was it?” has been just a hard question to answer too. It was hot, it was cool, it was beautiful, it was ugly, it was physically uncomfortable and emotionally overwhelming. There were the smells that come with 70,000+ people camping in a tightly-packed mass in a waterless desert, there were also the ad-hoc families that formed and dissolved over a period of minutes. I talked and shared moments with folks I’d be intimidated to make eye contact with in the ‘real world’ for any number of artificial hang-ups and preconceptions, I pushed my own personal boundaries and challenged my hangups whenever I could.

I’m not trying to say I had a spiritual experience because I don’t think that’s right. Every moment was intensely earthly, where the physical (and often uncomfortable) reality was always front and center. There’s something unavoidably kinetic riding a bicycle in a desert with thousands of other people and vehicles on constant collision courses.

I had an experience and it was something I treasure. It was good, it was difficult, it was eye-opening, it hurt, it helped me reset some stuff, it showed me some things I’d never imagined, and, well, I guess it’s still stuck on me.

I think I might need to go back.

Rant

Spit-take

I have a secret talent that I’ve kept hidden long enough. I’ve been developing it since I was a child. It’s taken practice, required me to overcome social pressures that tell a kid they can’t do this, pressures that tell them they shouldn’t even TRY. Not just the practice required for building this skill, there’s also been the physical conditioning. Muscles need to be regularly exercised, physical body modifications that I’ve had to try and hide from my doctor because if they discovered what I’d done, they might try to fix it. I have developed this talent and this week for the first time as an adult, showed it to someone else. I can tell that they must be struggling to reconcile who they THOUGHT I was with the new reality. Imagine that you have a family pet that one day starts to speak english, you would be forced to go through your own adjustments, right? So when I did a Very Interesting Thing, I can only imagine something similar began for my son Alex.

The other evening, I was driving the two of us home when I realized it was Mouthwash O’Clock. This isn’t a time you’ll find on your watch, it’s that sudden knowledge that your mouth tastes like an appointment you’d rather cancel but can’t. It’s that special time where you think “I wish I had some mouthwash to clear this taste” and then curse the lack of forethought that kept you from putting a bottle of mouthwash in your central console. I don’t get to curse that lack of forethought anymore because one day, I bought a bottle of mouthwash that lives in my center console. It’s not a travel-size or anything because those are a rip-off and I’d be worried about emptying it after just a couple days of answering mouth-nature’s call. At the same time, it’s not one of those big industrial jugs of the stuff you pick up at Wally World because ain’t nobody got space for that in a car. It’s a very reasonable mid-size bottle that fits in the console and this week when that alarm went off in my head, I realized mid-swig that Alex was in the car with me and that my secret was about to be exposed because now I was committed.

If you’ve ever used mouthwash in your car, you know that the biggest problem isn’t the swishing or the gargling. It’s not the intense eucalyptus oils or peppermint flavors either because these are all challenges everyone faces no matter where they use mouthwash. Oh, it’s not the alcohol either because it’s 2019 and that’s just… just not a thing anymore. Those poor, dumb modern teenagers passing a bottle of Listerine around behind school… bless their minty hearts. No, the problem is disposal. Once you’ve finished swishing it around your mouth, you’ve got to spit it out. In no particular order, here’s what doesn’t work:

  1. Spitting it out the window. Even parked at a light, maybe half of it’s going out the window and the rest is splattering on the inside of your door. You might end up with some on your shirt and it’s bewildering because you’ve been spitting all your life, how can this fail so badly? One word: Volume. The half a cc of spit you usually hurl can fly free because there’s so little of it. You build up pressure, you expel air, there’s some lip stuff… gross story short, when you try this with a mouth full of mouthwash, maybe a fraction of that payload launches and the rest, well… it goes everywhere.
  2. Spitting it out a slightly open door. This seems obvious, right? You stop at a light, open the door a few inches, lean over, and… now it’s everywhere. Most of it’s on the ground and even if it looks like you’re barfing, you’ve largely gotten it free of your mouth except some is on the door sill, some might have stuck to your chin if you’re particularly incompetent, and also… it’s not ALL gone from your mouth. You’re now doing the frantic follow-up spitting that follows while looking up to make sure the light hasn’t changed yet. It’s a fiasco.
  3. Swallowing. Yuck. There are less unpleasant ways to coat the inside of your car with vomit.

This brings us to my talent, my special skill. For you see, I have learned a special way to spit. That’s right, I’ve unlocked an ancient secret that allows me to fire an uninterrupted stream of any non-viscous fluid up to 10 feet away, and there’s none of the volume limitations that come with normal spitting. If I can fit it in my mouth, I can firehose it with precision targeting until it is all gone. All of it.

This is my secret power.

This is my secret burden.

It is a burden because when you have a power like this, you might feel compelled to use it but… it comes with great responsibility because if I go around squirting fluids at things willy-nilly, well… they have words for that, and they’re unkind.

I’m not trying to suggest that my situation is “basically the X-Men Universe’s Civil Rights struggle for Mutants against discrimination by people without abilities” but if you choose to see it that way, that’s understandable. The thing is that I learned this when I was single-digit-years old and made the classic origin story mistake of doing it where someone could see me and they made fun of me for it for some reason so I learned the importance of secrecy.

Like the mutants, I learned to keep my ability hidden to protect both myself and those around me.

Please, I’m no hero, just another human who has to guard their special ability from making them or their loved ones a target. And now it’s the evening and now I’ve got a mouth full of minty freshness and now I’m sitting next to my teenager and now…. it’s time to expose my secret.

I realize that he’s going to learn my secret and see my power for the first time, so I take a careful deep breath and begin speaking.

“So, you’re going to see something-” I begin before some mouthwash pours out the side of my mouth by accident. I dart forward, slamming my mouth shut after catching the rest of it. The car hardly swerves out of my lane at all during all of this and Alex is gripping the door handle as I veer back into where we’re supposed to be. I can only imagine that at some level, he’s somehow picked up on the seriousness of what I’m about to tell him even though I was cut off by spillage almost immediately.

Tilting my face up so it doesn’t slop out the side of my mouth again, I take another shot. As I’m doing this, I’m rolling down the driver side window. We’re slowing down for a light so this will be about as perfect as a time as any.

“You’re about to see something totally normal”, I tell him in that special enunciation that people use when they’re speaking with a mouth full of mouthwash. We glide to a stop and he looks over at me skeptically.

“Behold!” I intone, then turn my head…. and let loose with an almost 5 second-long, 10+ foot stream of used-up mouthwash. Like some sort of curving laser, it arcs upwards into the sun before dropping down to the unoccupied land next to us. With one final special flex of perfectly tuned tongue muscle, I eject the last little bit and turn back for the amazed praise I know is coming. Friends, I cannot emphasis enough just how perfectly this demonstration went. My mouth: absolutely empty and fresh. The car, completely unmarked by the unsightly little specks or droplets of mouthwash a less-refined approach would leave. My mouth: fresh and pure! I turn to my son, ready for his questions. I know he’s going to have many. I’m wondering where he’ll start… will it be wanting to know how long I’ve hidden this from everyone? Or will he ask whether or not it’s too late for HIM to learn this skill? Maybe he’ll want to know about the different adventures I’ve had with this, the problems I’ve solved. I can’t wait to tell him about the-

“Gross.”

Wait, what?

“Did you just spit that all out the window?”

Ok, maybe I’d misheard him in the beginning, this sounds more like it. Enthused, I nod my head. “Yes, ALL of it!” I wanted to fill him in on the secret, that there was no followup spitting needed and I wouldn’t have to swallow any of it and to draw his attention to how I didn’t need to open the door or-

“Kinda gross.” He looks back at the car behind us where I’d noticed the wide-eyed, open-mouthed admiration from its occupants in the mirror after firing that glorious arc of mouthwash out the side window. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

Uncertainly, I think about what he’s just said. When he can’t believe what I did, is it… is it because he didn’t realize the human body was capable of such an achievement? Is he amazed by the… no, he’s giving me mixed messages because he also said it was ‘gross’. Perhaps this is slang. Maybe… he’s saying it’s 144 x cool? I’m going to roll with that for now. I laugh it off, best to stop while I’m ahead. There’s a part of me that wonders if I’m too late for that, but I ignore it.

The important thing is, he knows so when he’s finally ready to learn about the exercises and minor dental modification required, he can come to me. It feels like it would be sad if this secret died with me, after all, but then again, maybe it’s a lot of responsibility for someone so young. It certainly was for me, anyhow.

Since this happened a few days ago, I managed to somehow dump the entire mouthwash into my center console so my car smells like a koala threw up. Every origin story has downturns, that’s part of what shapes one’s character before they face that great challenge in life where their ability comes in handy.

Regardless, I have this talent ready and some day, it’ll come in handy in a way nobody can anticipate. Maybe I’ll save the day with a mouthful of something important. I’ve used it with flammable liquids to great effect, for instance, and only burned off part of my mustache. Perhaps a jet of water will arc out to extinguish a burning fuse that can’t be reached by hands that are tied to a railroad track or something! Ok, that’s probably unlikely, more of a cowboy/wild-west situation. I’ve got it, same scenario, but Monorail track.

Anyways, this talent will find uses that are more important than just mouthwash disposal from a moving car, and that day, everyone else will also recognize how ‘gross’-cool it is.

That Younger Ben who lives inside of me who was made fun of this will be happy to see that this skill has made me a cool guy after all and not just some weird little squirt.

Rant

A thought on Kaepernick Nike Ad Parodies

[Politics warning, it’s something I have been previously punished for talking about but feel strongly.]
 
There are clever remixes of the Nike Kaepernick ads out there, but I’m personally not gonna ‘Like’ any of ’em, and here’s why.
 
Someone who has a voice wants to make a statement against an undercurrent of white supremacy that’s infected some corners of society. It’s led to black people being disproportionately shot by cops under shady circumstances without any real consequences. Just this last weekend, for example, an officer pushed into a man’s apartment (mistaking it for her own), shot him in his home, then walked around free for days before being grudgingly arrested. She was out on bail within two hours. Try to imagine any of us receiving this same institutional benefit-of-the-doubt for this situation and it’s easy to start to see what the black community has known for decades.
 
A Green Beret reaches out to this protester and suggests he modify his protest slightly to take a knee instead, which he does. “Soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother’s grave, you know, to show respect”, the veteran says.
 
A nation goes mad. Conservatives smear the protester, the president threatens any players who join the protest, careers are ended and white nationalists lead the charge wherever they can. Big chunks of Middle-class white America buy into it and decide that protesting these shootings is anti-police for some reason instead of anti-racism. It’s uncomfortable to be complicit, maybe, and perhaps it’s easier to re-frame the narrative to something like ‘anti-police’ so that action isn’t required?
 
“It’s just a few bad apples” really only goes so far as an excuse, btw, because then shouldn’t the folks who honestly believe that be saying “YEAH, let’s fix these outliers!” …but instead, they either attack or ridicule the protesters.
 
So Nike, an imperfect company that has done a lot of shitty things, Nike has its own voice. It’s got the loudest voice in our culture, money, and like any company, it has to decide where it wants to put that amplification. There’s a roll of the dice and…. they publish this ad of Kaepernick.
 
The US goes mad again. “We’ve already talked about this”, the narrative goes, “institutional racism is over. You’re being ridiculous.” A man is shot in his apartment by an officer but “that’s a different subject”, the narrative says, “and not what we’re talking about”.
 
Mike Rowe writes an editorial that says basically “ignore this protest, let’s talk about real sacrifice like this white guy who died on 9/11.” The conservatives eat it up, this is way better than confronting a today-problem. FaithWire falls over itself to cheer how brilliant this is, it hits all the buttons: 1. Stop talking about racism, 2. Start talking about 9/11 again, 3. White heroes. The religious right absolutely loves this.
 
Then there’s the wave of parodies. There are some great ones, no doubt. There’s pop-culture characters saying outrageous things because that’s funny stuff. There’s the aliens from Mars Attacks and the Swedish Chef borking it up and there’s no doubt this meme has taken off. Thanos snaps his finger in another one, but instead of half of them disappearing, even more show up.
 
I love parody. I love it when smart people do funny things with the news or culture and I appreciate the talent that’s gone into these because humor’s my bag, my thing.
 
But I personally won’t click that little like button because I can’t get over the image of that man opening the door to his apartment. Of him becoming the next victim in a long line of essentially state-sanctioned killings. I can’t get past the fear that millions of my fellow Americans need to live with and teach their children to be careful of and the creeping, rotten smell of racism that some guy decided to speak up about and has the dead career to show for it. I’ve gotta believe we can do better, and making fun of someone who sacrificed so much by saying the same thing… that just ain’t my game.
Rant

How You May Be Accidentally Hurting People #3,715

"You have too much free time"

When you say this, do you mean to make someone feel smaller? Or is that just an accident?

It's a powerful method for making folks who create stuff feel bad. We're socialized to see working as good so this statement weaponizes the concept of free-time. Instead of recognizing that people have different levels of interest in different things, this places a clear border between 'useful' and 'screwing around' like they're objectively measurable things.

I build stuff, I create thing, I follow my passions and when someone suggests that I have 'too much free time' because I'm doing something different than them, I've got to disagree. No, we all have the same amount of fixed time, I'm just organizing how I use mine differently.

"Well, I don't mean it that way-" stop. For the sake of communication, your intention is not going to change how plenty of folks will hear it. Consider the possibility that you're unknowingly causing hurt with an innocent sounding phrase and that whether you intended to or not doesn't change that fact. Someone who slaves over a drawing or spends hours assembling a model or puts their heart and soul into an elaborate cosplay setup and hears an implication that it was just messing around because it's not Useful Work can't read your mind.

My request to you: stop accidentally shaming people (because 'too much free time' implies laziness) for making things. If you want to train people not to show you their creations and to make them feel bad about themselves, I guess this is a good way to do it. If, however, you'd rather _not_ be the person who punishes those around them for choosing to open themselves to a little vulnerability by showing you something into which they invested their hearts and souls, consider deleting this phrase from your vocabulary.

If you have the time, that is.

Rant

Grave commentary

Imagine that your highest rated social media comment at the time of your death… ends up engraved onto your tombstone. You commit to this as part of a self-improvement or self-help strategy because when the day comes, that’s your legacy.

Not everyone can make the same physical impact on the world. Wealth, circumstances, ability… these vary hugely. There can only be so many opera halls and libraries, only so many thriving industries, but the one thing that unites us all is death. We all die in the end (until we can be uploaded into the fabric of the universe, manipulating the quantum foam itself as a computing substrate maybe, but that’s a different post) so how can we leave a mark that’s US and not just who we THINK we are?

With grave markers, folks sometimes put a favorite quote or write something personal, but like a survey of self-selected survey takers, how representative can it actually be? Is it who we really are, or is it just our idealized presentation of how we want people to see us? That question is why I propose Grave Discussions.

Instead of picking a phrase out of a book or just filling in a form at a mortuary, let your ideas engage in mortal combat at the coliseum of ideas: The Web. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, but everybody sees your inner self. Sometimes it’s thoughtful, sometimes John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory takes over. Whatever way you decide to go, your contribution with the highest ranking at the time of your death becomes your WINNING IDEA, the one that’s presented to the world as your opus.

Will you change your life to put your best foot forward? Will you sharpen your skills and become a more effective you to bring about the legacy YOU want? Or will you let the tides carry you along to whatever’s popular at the time but isn’t really who you think you actually ARE?

Now take away the physical gravestone and you have… today. Your internet presence will probably be seen by more folks than almost any gravestone. Also, you don’t have to be dead for people to make judgments about who you are because shoot, they’re reading those comments now. Is a grave marker really where we tell everyone who we are/were? Maybe it was once, but now… now every comment and post we make is a little marker we leave that may outlive the planet. If we wanted to affect how the future saw our impact on humanity, is it too late? Or can we still take control and put our best selves forward?

Commit. Commit now, then start posting your best. Your legacy depends on it.