🙅‍♀️ No Thanks

I’ve been trapped in Paris with covid and also there’s a war so this week has hit a little different ngl

Hello little ones. This week is going to be a bit different. Sorry if you just signed up and this is your first email — my newsletters are usually more like this.

I really wasn’t sure what to do this week, so I decided to just ‘sit down and write’ which sounds like a tip from a shitty online creative writing course but please try and enjoy it...

So anyway, on the 23rd of February I went to Paris with my girlfriend. On the 24th of February, I got covid, and then spent seven days in a small hotel room, having war news read to me while I did squat jumps and tried to remember what fresh air felt like.

I have to say, isolating in a hotel is nothing like how the first lockdowns felt. In 2020, I had so much extra time that I started a bunch of new projects (this newsletter is an example) and felt really excited and inspired, which was a great distraction from not being able to go outside. Okay but, when you’re in one room literally half of your brain shuts down and you forget about all the stuff  you used to do to amuse yourself.

It’s weird how being in a room with hardly any stimulus totally saps your energy and willingness to do anything. Oh, except ruminate about the possibility of nuclear warfare of course! Protip: if you’re hit by a nuke, you’ll probably just die instantly so try not to worry about it too much.

Oh yes and speaking of the war in Ukraine: I have very little to say, because this is completely outside of my realm of expertise. It would be great if other people who work in technology could try saying that exact sentence, wouldn’t it?

There’s definitely different flavours of superior ‘technology can fix anything’ ass holes out there: I’d say on one end of the scale, you’d got the crypto community who are refusing to block Russian users because that would ‘ruin the decentralisation’ (gimme a break). On the other end, there are the people who run hackathons and do the bidding of governments for free.  Somewhere on the scale is Elon Musk, who owns an entire ISP but won’t block Russian news.

At this point, I have no idea what to think. Misinformation comes from all directions. Sure, Russia has an unhinged, trigger-happy, scared, pathetic man as a leader — but ours isn’t any better. There are also people getting bombed all over the place all the time — not that we shouldn’t, but why do we suddenly care now?

Now that I’m finally back in the UK and With Computer again, I’ve been distracting myself by playing Just Cause 3, a game where you free communities from an oppressive regime by destroying property. It’s a simple concept, very satisfying to play, and has Michael Bay style explosions. It’s exactly what my brain needs right now.

What have you been doing to distract yourself?

Thanks for reading as always 🙂

Georgia