The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a huge wave crashing into a building.'
Lately I've been in something of a coding rabbit hole. The last time I went down such a rabbit hole was a few years ago and enough has changed that I now find myself playing a lot of catch up. Fortunately, the stakes are low. While some of what I'm doing is for my job, mostly I'm just having fun. Once my current data science project is complete, I may try making an app with Pyscript, using a remotely-accessed csv instead of a database for backing, just to see if I can do it.
At the same time, I'm about 20% done with the next science fiction story. This work is shaping up nicely and I hope to have it finished by the end of summer. So far, it contains a little more action than I usually write. Although it's set far in the future, the characters all seem believable. Right now, I'm trying to decide if the main character, Harlen, is going to try to steal some valuable nanobots from a powerful corporation.
In the background, my life is unfolding in unexpected ways. My long-distance girlfriend is moving to my neighborhood in August and I couldn't be happier about it. My job at WantToKnow.info is getting better and better, with a total site upgrade scheduled for rollout this week. My chronic illnesses remain in remission, though this time of year tends to be high risk for cluster headaches. Things at home are mostly tolerable.
This is not to suggest that everything is perfect. Money is tight, particularly with crypto under attack by the government. And the broader world is coming apart at the seams. The specifics of this sometimes keep me up at night. The politics involved are atrocious.
And yet, even in politics, there now seems to be a little hope where there was none before. 2024 may still be far away, buy Kennedy is already polling more favorably than both Biden and Trump. I think Kennedy's candidacy is part of a broader trend towards idealism in the aftermath of the covid response debacle.
Our society spent a couple of years living under a tyranny that was predicated on lies that have now been publicly debunked. My hometown of Minneapolis also experienced civil unrest and brazen lawlessness from 2020 through last year. The government conspicuously did not help us with that that. And other cities have all faced their own challenges in recent years, likely producing similar losses of faith in their populations.
We are in a cultural moment where we're deciding how to move forward after being treated so poorly by the powers that be. Some people are deep in denial about it and might remain so indefinitely. Others are outraged and obsessed with punishing wrongdoers. Others still are despondent or psychologically imbalanced. But I don't think most people fall into these groups. I think most people are responding to the moment by trying to make the world better.
This means different things for different people. If your name is Kennedy, you might run for office. Where I work, we're figuring out how to educate more people on high level corruption and cover-ups. For most of us, sensemaking with family and friends is part of the equation. Our constructive responses to recent and future crises demonstrate our optimism. I'm hoping that all of these responses together begin to sum to a great wave of political and social reforms.
It's possible that this wave will simply break on the status quo and dissipate. But I feel like more and more people are going all in on repairing the world. That's a hopeful thing, regardless of how it all shakes out.
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