2023-07-20 - Pessimistic hotness and Nintendo
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Ok, so i've got the feeling i blinked my eyes and nearly eight
months have passed in an instance. It is nearly august, and i last
posted here in december of last year. Feels like last week, really.
Time is running so rapidly now in my experience, that it's no fun
anymore... But hey, i'm still alive and kicking. I'm healthy and
just had some lovely dinner i cooked. So no reason to complain.
I'm on the internet much less now and i've had a couple of months
with very minimal to no computering, and lots of bookreading. That
was very nice to do. Limiting my online time feels quite healthy.
The last few weeks i've heard and read many stories on the changing
climate, the increasing record temperatures and the extreme ocean
surface temperatures. They are the stories we knew since the 70's
would come at some point. But now they're coming it feels faster
than anticipated. Time is weird in that way i suppose. It's like
being at a great party when you were a kid and all of a sudden you
had to go to bed...
All this news saddens me deeply, and i feel i personally cannot do
anything either. Unfortunately over the years, i've grown
completely pessimistic about our collective ability to 'solve' this
problem. And i worry that the looming reality is that humanity will
not be able to solve this problem in the elegant 'utopian' way we
had probably hoped for.
Currently it stills seems that there is common hope that the
solution is found in planting a few trees, putting a couple of
solar panels on our roof and driving an electric car.
I believe this is false hope for a solution. In order to make even
the slightest change in the course things are heading now,
humanity (and especially the rich western world) needs to make a
totally radical change in the way we're living now.
The changes need to be SO radical, that nobody living with our
current common standards of living will be even remotely willing to
adopt such a different lifestyle. And even if everybody would be on
board and adopt such totally radical changes today, it would take
decades for us to experience any of the results of the changes we
make today.
So instead, climate change is bound to continue further and
further. And over the coming years and decades the weather systems
become more and more unpredictable, many places will become
uninhabitable, water and food will become more and more scarce in
mmore places and over time many people would die in misery.
Perhaps in the long run (in many decades/centuries) the system finds
some balance and the humans living then will understand how to live
while keeping a balance. Who knows...
I'm currently not sure how to deal with this pessimistic view of
the future besides being apathic and doing nothing...
With all this in mind i found the Interstellar movie striking;
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When I was a kid, it felt like they made something new every day.
Some gadget or idea. Like every day was Christmas. By six billion
people, just try to imagine that. And every last one of them trying
to have it all.
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In order to ignore all of this and go to a happy place in my head,
i've grown a bit of interest in programming for the Nintendo NES.
This is something i can do on a very (very) casual basis, during
the occasional times when i want to do some 'nerding around'. So
progress is slow, naturally.
I'm figuring out how the system works and try to make little
programs that i can run in an emulator.. It's something nice to do
completely offline on this old computer, using a 6502 assembly
programming guidebook and a handful of NES tutorial PDF's.
Maybe someday i write something which can be shared here. However,
with my current speed it will most likely only happen around the
end of the century. By then we're probably living in a Mad-Max post
apocalyptic era. But it is likely gopher is still running then. :)
