This work was done with watercolor crayons on canvas. It was a study for a larger work that was never completed.
Back when I lived in NYC I did internet dating. I went on some fun dates with interesting people and even met someone who I now consider a lifelong friend. When I moved to Minneapolis, I tried internet dating and had a totally different experience. The people I met here seemed like super bad communicators compared with the people I'd met in New York. One woman used a fake profile picture. Another got mad at me when the coffee shop we met at turned out to be hosting some kind of bible study. I thought it was hilarious. But she acted like I had somehow orchestrated the whole thing to personally offend her.
While I've had a few girlfriends here in Minnesota, I haven't dated anyone seriously in years. Recently, I thought about giving internet dating another try and stopped myself before starting to put any real energy into it. If I meet someone I really connect with, great. Chances are that won't happen on a dating site. And I have no desire to awkwardly entertain bad communicators. Maybe I'm just too old for that now.
On the Rstory front, I contacted the Electronic Freedom Foundation today and offered it 1M tokens. Since this org has a public Ethereum address to donate to, I could have just sent the gift and published the accompanying article without notifying them. My guess is they're too busy with more important matters to pay any attention to my little project. Still, I emailed them and am now awaiting a response.
Also today, I was interviewed about Rstory for a podcast. It was the first podcast interview on the subject that I've done and it seemed to go fine. I went further into the way Bitcoin saved Wikileaks from a financial embargo than I intended to but I feel good about sharing that story with the interviewer so no worries. I might have also used a word incorrectly but hopefully nobody will notice. I'll be sure to link to the finished product when it's posted.
Society's response to the pandemic continues to stress me out. There are a couple of events I'd like to attend this fall but it's looking more and more like the unvaccinated may be barred from these. I'm good with staying home to prevent the spread of the virus. But the vaccinated also spread this virus yet no one is proposing restricting their movements.
The botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan isn't stressing me out. But it is tragic. Now a Taliban armed by American taxpayers can operate its dystopia without military interference. The world would be better off if the US had never invaded Afghanistan to begin with. The beginning of this invasion was ill-conceived. The end of it seems dire. Especially for women.
I'm a peacenik who concedes that military forces may be necessary to secure national borders in the interests of lasting peace. This ideal is contrasted by a much uglier reality. For the US that means foreign policy articulated as militarized empire building. Collateral damage. Mental illness among veterans. The invasion of Afghanistan didn't stop terrorism. It furthered terrorism. And it never should have happened.
The trillions wasted on this debacle didn't just vanish into thin air. Much of this money went directly to big oil. Much went to line the pockets of unscrupulous contractors and arms dealers. Some likely disappeared into payments to warlords and heroin producers. How much? We'll never know thanks to the Pentagon's perennial inability to balance its books.
Reality notwithstanding, it was a good day. I didn't make any progress on the script for the first Rstory video but I did figure out where and how I want it shot. This script will come together eventually. I'm sure of it.
