solarpsychedelic | Entries tagged with history

Of course, this is D Day.

Amazing to think that World War II was about 80 years ago. When I was growing up, it seemed very close. Now it must seem like ancient history to the younger generations.

And sad to think that many people have forgotten the lessons and sacrifices of this conflict.

Anyway, I think back to my youth when every June we watched this movie. This was among my favorite scenes.

Crossed off another title on my TBR list: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears.

(⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Some reflections:

There is a long, long line of women in show business who were treated badly: Frances Farmer, Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Vivian Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, and etc.

What I appreciate about Britney is how she cares about artistic integrity and authenticity, and that she knows it matters more than fame and money.

Britney deserved better.

OMG! My heart is with my beloved Palm Springs.

I hesitate to romanticize the Old Internet. I lived through enough flame wars.

Yet I think it was better for society and our collective mental health when we had to go through the following to use the internet:

- A computer that took a long time to boot up
- A dial up modem and waiting for the connection
- Static, portfolio type websites
- Long form blogs that were mostly text and functioned like newspaper columns or magazine articles
- An understanding that forums were a community
- And those forums were moderated (that’s necessary)

However, once someone gets convinced that they’re the main character and therefore entitled to attention, success, and money, and hand them a phone with apps…. Yeah, that’s the problem.

Just because a person takes a video of themselves yelling about something and posts it online does not make them an expert or a good source of information. Yet as a society we seem unable to understand this. Now our collective perception and understanding of how things work are so damn skewed.

I miss the internet that required effort, skill, patience, and an understanding of community. Once you had to wait to dial in, log in, wait for a site to load, etc., then the immediate reactions burn off simply through the sheer amount of work it took to get online.

Will there be a backlash against social media and smartphones? I’m not so sure. The millennials tried this already with the hipster movement. Created some nice things but the lifestyle got expensive.

This tech might be too baked into daily life at this point. But still, we have agency, and we can make choices to shift our behaviors to healthier activities.

I’m reading that people now think that if an essay has em dashes, is grammatically correct, and is well organized, that this is automatically a sign of AI?

I mean, did it never occur to them that LLMs are trained on 1.) actual human writing from previous generations, and 2.) we members of these older and previous generations received a good enough educations that taught us how to write well?

*clutches forehead feeling the weight of an entire history of educational standards that people struggled and worked for and understood was necessary for a civilized society and democracy*

Illiteracy is one thing and can be remedied with education. What concerns me more is the lack of curiosity, willful ignorance, and demand for spoon-fed answers that have become normalized.

Willful ignorance and outright stupidity are the tools that destroy a society. There is nothing good or useful about them.

Makes me miss the old days when we had to walk to the library and do the work. Moving through space and time means a commitment to learning and results in better understanding and memory retention.

Anyway, here’s the queen of the dashes and wisdom:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us—don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson, 1891

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light of the mind

fire of the heart

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June 2025

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