Month: July 2022

If you’ve never seen the Planet of the Apes movie series, then this post will spoil a whole lot of things.

In the original 1968 movie, Charlton Heston’s character, George Taylor, arrives on a planet where humans are mute and have developed to be no more than animalistic creatures. A far cry from the human civilization that Taylor is from, where humans were able to build spacecraft to get him to this far away planet. Of course, the apes are the intelligent species on this planet, capable of speech, critical thinking, and forming a complex society.

The famous twist ending to this movie is that Taylor has not actually ventured light years away from Earth, but instead has arrived at Earth in the distant future. Human civilization has collapsed, humans have become almost feral, and the apes now rule the planet. It’s never really explained in the original set of the movies how humans de-evolved into this lesser state.

The 21st century reboot of the movies series explores the origins of the intelligent apes in great detail. It is a lab-made virus that has unforeseen consequences that makes the apes intelligent but it is also the same virus that kills humans worldwide. In the third movie of the reboot series, we discover that the virus has mutated and renders humans mute and massively decreases their cognitive abilities. We finally get an explanation of how humans become mute and essentially too stupid to maintain any semblance of a complex society and civilization.

Ah, isn’t fiction so wonderful to take in and be entertained by? I will point out something in reality however. The coronavirus that has plunged the world into a pandemic often leaves people with a long-term condition colloquially called “brain fog“. The infection leaves people with the inability to concentrate and also plagued by memory problems. Tasks that require high-level cognitive ability become almost impossible. For a lack of a better term, people become “dumb”. Does this sound familiar?

While I don’t think this pandemic will lead to the entire human race becoming mute and feral creatures, the number of people experiencing “brain fog” from COVID-19 is statistically significant. Some of these cases resolve themselves in a few months but others are still dealing with effects with no end in sight. You have to wonder, who is being sidelined right now by “brain fog”? Was there a scientist who was likely a few months away from discovering a cure to a disease who instead got sick and now has “brain fog” and is unable to continue her research? How many more people need to get ill before statistically we’re able to measure a drop in IQ across the board? It’s scary to think about but you don’t really have to envision some fantastical Hollywood story for this to be a reality.

Oh, by the way, the ending to the Mark Wahlberg movie never made any sense. It was stupid.

For the next two days, we celebrate the life of Optimus Prime, who gave his life so we could get deals on Amazon, once a year. This joke has been made hundreds of times over and I acknowledge it is not original.

So far, for Prime Day, I have purchased a set of LED wifi-controlled light bulbs, toiletries, and a few jars of instant coffee. Nothing too exciting. TVs are really cheap but I don’t need another TV.

I am helping my Mom look for a new phone because she has a blood glucose monitoring system which requires her to use an app on a smartphone. For whatever reason, this app is only compatible with a small subset of the plethora of phone models out there. The search has been quite frustrating because obviously I need to pick from the list of phones that are compatible but on top of that, there are price and size considerations.

I don’t want to pay over $500 for a phone as my Mom is not a power user that requires the latest bells and whistles in a smartphone. She also would prefer a phone on the smaller side. Phones have had this annoying habit of getting larger and larger every year. It’s so difficult to get a new phone that is 6″ or shorter now. Large phones are difficult to hold and use with one hand. They also don’t fit into pants pockets anymore. My Mom has small hands, so she doesn’t want to have a tablet-sized phone, trying to shove that into her purse.

The options are really very limited at this point and so far, the best bet seems to be either a Pixel 3a or a Pixel 4a.

Phone manufacturers need to start making smaller phones again.

Not that I was looking to physically return to work but we received an update from the higher-ups recently and they said that our new studio space won’t be ready for people until at least early 2023. Apparently, global supply chain issues have caused delays, so it’s probably a lack of office furniture and equipment.

It’s all good to me as I’m in no rush to return to a desk somewhere, needing to commute both ways and spend money to do so.

In above segment, Dave drops item off a five-story tower. While entertaining, it’s important to note the context of when this was filmed. His show did this in 1984, on network television, albeit well after midnight. There were way fewer sources of entertainment back then compared to now. There were only three national TV networks and obviously no Internet and thus no YouTube nor streaming services. TV was downright boring at times just because you just couldn’t afford to screw around on a national network. A majority of TV shows were safe and you didn’t get a lot of weird stuff on TV. So for Dave to devote several minutes of national TV to just throwing crap off a building was quite visionary and unusual at the time.

I will point out that the various YouTube channels that exist today where people put things into a hydraulic press, destroys things while filming with a high speed camera, cutting through things with a red-hot knife, and so forth, all those popular videos, Dave was doing that kind of stuff back in early 1980s. He, his writers, and his staff have a legacy that will be hard to match in the history late-night television.

It’s a school night but I just wanna stay up all night and play video games and stream shows. Sometimes being an adult and having adult responsibilities gets in the way of having fun. I remember almost a lifetime ago, probably around 2006, I went to work and a designer told me he had stayed up all night playing a game of Civilization. He said the game was just too good and he couldn’t stop playing it. We were all much younger back then, so skipping a night of sleep probably didn’t cause him too much trouble. Still, back then I’m not sure I would have done the same.

Ok, I’m gonna go watch some more TV and think about when I might actually go to bed.

I had Friday off because of Canada Day and on Monday, it’s Independence Day for my co-workers located in the US. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, if I have to work on a particular day, it’s best done when it’s a US public holiday. There’s no interruptions, no Slack messages, just a day of quiet so I can work diligently.

I won’t have a case of the Mondays tomorrow.