Weekly Report: November 4th - November 10th 2024
The Week in Summary:
- The US Presidential Election was on Tuesday and though I intended to avoid doomscrolling, I failed as soon as a opened the Guardian's live blog that morning and I knew it was going to be a bit of a fucked day. Taylor and I joined a Discord chat with Avery, Dylan, Krystal, and Alexis as the results were trickling in (some of us were playing Unrailed). As the night went on, the results pointed towards a victory for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. By the early morning hours, it was as good as over for the Democrats.
- Reports, opinion pieces, and hot takes filled online spaces in the aftermath of Trump's victory all vying to justify the widening support for Trump or point blame at Democrats. For myself, while I do have a perspective on the reason for this monumental loss, I took the time to grieve an altered future now defined by a climate-denialist demagogue with strong fascistic tendencies. I won't belabour the point, but Donald Trump's victory is cataclysmic for the United States and the wider world.
- Starting Friday, I began what will be an autumn break from work (since students are out of schools for a bit). While Friday was spent mostly puttering around the house doing fucking nothing, Saturday was a lot more productive. That morning, Taylor and I traded and moved their gigantic loom out of our cren (craft room + den = cren) in trade for a much smaller, albeit more complicated, loom. After getting so much space, we reorganized the space to make it a lot more conducive to our evening pass times. During the evening, I got some Chinese food and we rented Napoleon Dynamite (Taylor has never watched it before). For Sunday, Taylor and I hung at home playing Age of Empires throughout the day, listening to music, and making a wonderful barley and vegetable soup for dinner.
- Throughout the entirety of the weekend, we played a lot of Age of Empires IV and started trying out some of the cool mods (mostly generated map scripts for some extreme forms of turtling). Additionally, I finished reading an essay collection written by Siddhartha Deb, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India, which explored the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism.
The Week in Images:
The Week in Links:
Trump Voters Got What They Wanted
Those who expect that Donald Trump will hurt others, and not them, are likely to be unpleasantly surprised.
Tom Nichols
"An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions." - Tom Nichols
The massive consequences Trump’s reelection could have on climate change
With control of the White House and the Senate, Republicans are poised to upend U.S. climate policy.
Tik Root
The Death of Search
AI is transforming how billions navigate the web. A lot will be lost in the process.
Matteo Wong
"Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity." - Matteo Wong