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. :)