JW Consciousness Stream - 6 November 2025

JW Consciousness Stream - 6 November 2025

This entry represents something like my stream of consciousness for Thursday, 6 November, 2026. This may be the first in a series of entries that preset something like my stream of consciousness for days when I have nothing to do but use the computer. This means that after drafting, I don't intend to return to this content to add structure or correct anything but the most egregious errors and needs for clarification. It's basically like a journal entry that I work on throughout the day.

I woke up around 5:00AM at my house in Vientiane, Laos. I didn't sleep well last night. I took a pain pill around midnight, so I probably got less than five hours of sleep, which isn't exactly unusual for me at any time. Currently, I'm recovering from a motorbike accident that I had early in the morning of Saturday 18 October. That left me with two broken toes, which severely limits my freedom of movement. Most of the scrapes and bruises are largely healed except for something that feels like a broken rib near my heart (it's not; I had X-rays) and something else that feels like my flesh is ripping off my ribcage below that. At 52, I'm recovering slowly, and really glad that I had the accident this year rather than a few years from now, when recovery will be even harder. I get the stitches out of my foot tomorrow and the pins out around 20 November, at which point I think I will be close to fully recovered, but still not able to use my foot completely.

A friend of mine, who is a professional driver, wrecked his work vehicle recently. He says the cause was the sun getting in his eyes, but I have a feeling that a phone and/or some weed may have been involved. My brother totalled a truck last winter with his daughter, me, and my two sons in the vehicle. He had had a couple of drinks, but nothing serious (similar to me before the motorbike accident). His daughter went to the hospital while he dealt with the cops and towtrucks; my sons and I hitchhiked from Mt. Hood to Portland. A drunk driver killed my mother when I was 4.5 years old. Anyway, this is just a reminder to be more careful on the road, to avoid drinking or using drugs before driving, to avoid using the phone when driving, to prevent friends from driving under the influence, and to stay out of their vehicles.

I randomly found this guy Robert Sapolsky recently. I have always been interested in the human mind including psychology and religion, so I found the following video interesting. It's a bit slow but has a lot of useful perspectives, for example about the potential impact of biology on pathology and religions perspectives:

I'm also interested in the intersection of psychology/philosophy/religion/etc. with technology and found the following video about how some humans seem to be replacing religion with technology, specifically AI. I think all people need faith, as life can be somewhat depressing without it, and I see a great deal of risk here. I fear that some people have already replaced religion with social media.

Dick Cheney died recently. I created posted this summary of a relevent Slashdot thread to LinkedIn today:

My daughter Wendy woke up around 6:30. She's half Lao. She'll turn 6 years old at the end of November. I don't know if I can stay here that long, because this place is really boring and there's nothing for me to do, especially since I don't want to drink beer or eat at restaurants and I can't ride a motorbike or bicycle because of my foot. My tourist visa expires before her birthday and I need to decide whether to extend it and where to go afterwards - either to Thailand (where I rent a condo and where I have a friend that lives in a nice area for working on the computer and riding mountain bikes) or back to the USA to see my boys and take care of my house there. In addition to winter care for my house, the main reason that I need to return to the USA is because my ex-wife took me back to divorce lawyers in April because I'm not spending enough time with my boys. She seems to have dropped the case because I explained to her how evil she is and how this move is likely to backfire for numerous reasons, but better sfe than sorry. Anyway, I got an invoice from my divorce lawyer today.

Back to Wendy waking up. She came into my office and asked me to print some coloring sheets. This can be annoying because it disrupts my flow, the printer here is a real hassle and so many things come up on pinterest or other sites that make getting the coloring sheets challenging, but I support her efforts, especially because this is one of the activities that keeps her off screens. I don't believe that children should have much access to screens, but her mother apparently doesn't believe that parents should spend much time, effort, or money entertaining and educating children.

Wendy asked me to print coloring sheets of Kuromi, by which she generally means Sanrio's Melody character, and Barbi. Of course I want her to be happy, but considering that one of my original reasons for coming to Laos was to slow down its westernization, it's kindof sad how impossible it is to prevent foreign media including crap k-popish preproduced "music" from completely dominating local children's interests. On the other hand, there really aren't many interesting Lao coloring sheets, and she tends to simply discard such things if I push them.

Two related notes. I recently asked Wendy what she wants for her birthday. Her only response was that she wants a telephone. Again, this Lao girl is almost six years old, and screens are her primary interest. I try to fight it, but parents here use screens to avoid interacting with their children, and Wendy's mother is no exception. I threatened to break all devices in the house if I ever saw Wendy using TikTok again. It was really depressing to see Wendy interact with the garbage content on that site.

Children here also say six seven in the same meaningless context as anywhere else. Here they apparently consider it to be a cool American thing. Her male friends like Speakerman and she used to ask to watch Skibidi Toilet. I'm really disturbed by the world we're creating online for children. Wendy has a clear technology addiction at the age of six; there's no way I'm giving her a phone. She has access to a tablet that she calls an ipad. Her mom apparently gave this too her after her half-sister (who is now eleven years old) went back to school in person. Supposedly this device was bought for the older daughter during Covid, but really, parents here use devices to avoid interacting with their children, often so they can drink beer with other adults. I was at a restaurant last week where there were three adults and two children at the next table. Including laptop computers, phones, and tablets, there were seven screens in use. I appreciate that I grew up in the 70s when children did things like, play with toys, have friends over, and ride bicycles. I cannot imagine childhood in the modern era.

At breakfast, Wendy's sister (Namneung, which means Water One) told a story of a dog that went into a classroom at her school and chewed up a book, apparently because a child had been eating while looking at it and left some scent behind. In Laos, dogs roam free; there do not seem to be any dog catchers (who would fund such a thing) and the culture probably wouldn't support putting dogs to "sleep". So, dogs roam around in packs, which can make a lot of noise at night. I think the smallest dogs can't survive because they get killed or eaten and the largest dogs can't survive because they can't find enough food, so most of the dogs are medium-sized. They all seem to be mutts and mongrels and either wild (not all of which are dangerous) or something like guard dogs; few people seem to keep nice dogs as pets. Most people here probably wouldn't choose to waste money on such things.

I'm trying to write a book, and this rambling may be a distraction from that effort. Just as I like to prototype computer software solutions, I like drafting pieces in English, but I don't like editing and restructuring, and I really get bogged down with finishing work - nothing is ever perfect. I just like to write, similar to how I just like to code. Recently, I haven't been able to think of anything useful to code, so I haven't coded anything in a while. I was working on the Orchex open source orchestration engine earlier this year, but I couldn't get enough other people to make significant contributions for free, and political events distracted me from that effort. It was fun work in Rust and I think cool technology, but would have been really difficult to get any enterprise to adopt, so maybe it was a dead end anyway.

A friend I've known for at least a decade is leaving the company where I used to have a significant role. Another friend from the same period asked me to record a video to express appreciation and say goodbye. That video will be shown at the MVP summit, which is a group of people recognized for being experts in the technology that company sells. I recorded a short video, but even that made me uncomfortable. I have incredible stage fright, which is especially weird in this context because the root is supposed to be fear of being excluded from the group, and I really haven't been a member of that group in almost a decade already.

I'm supposed to keep my foot elevated, which helps with bloodflow. It's hard to sit at the computer for long even on a normal day, but even harder if I'm trying to keep my foot off the ground.

I'm not a huge MGMT fan, but I like the following songs:

I don't know any meaning intended by the artists, and I prefer to perform my own interpretation without or before researching those of others, so here are my takes.

To me, Electric Feel is about Internet addiction and dependence, but also how artificial it can make life, and how the consequence is something like a lack of real satisfaction.

Time to Pretend is about the transition from childhood, when everything can seem great, to adulthood, where everything basically sucks and there doesn't seem to be any real love, and how we all basically always want to go back to that feeling of childhood, but cannot. This is simlar to 21 Pilots Stressed Out. Again, I feel bad about the world we're creating for our children with technology. We increasingly raise children in soft bubbles and then release them into a world that is incredibly harsh.

3 billion views. I guess other people can relate. My older boy loved this record for about a year and this drummer Josh Dun actually rekindled his interest in drumming, so there's that. My ex-wife, my two boys in America, and I actually went to see them live a few years ago, which was a good live show.

Here's another one from a somewhat older perspective to which I can relate, about mental health and alcohol/drug and potential addiction issues and how this can lead to suicidal thoughts. I don't necessarily think that things were easier in the past, but the modern world seems very stressful for many people and it's causing a mental health crisis. Of course life was simpler when I was a child because I didn't underststand the complexities of the world, but honestly, things seemed to take a real dive for many people around 2020 (Covid) and that drastically accelerated in 2025 (Trump).

It's alomst 8:00. Now I will take a break from the computer and then hopefully try to do some writing.

Oh but before I do that, I just want to plug Ram Dass one more time, specifically the book Becoming Nobody, which I've been listening to again recently. This is about as close as I can get to meditation currently - I try to focus but sometitmes just let my thoughts wander, as I've already heard this once and expect to listen to it again.

Ram Dass was a psychologist that chose to explore psychedelic drugs and Eastern religions, but also has a grounding in Abrahamic religions (especially American Judaism), which is apparently the exact kind of person to whom I can relate best. I think that this book is really helping me to understand myself and people better and to develop greater self-control. It's nice to hear him talk about spending time with people like Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and Aldous Huxley. I am not familiar with Timothy Leary but Alan and Aldous I respect as great thinkers. Becoming Nobody is also apparently the name of a movie about Ram Dass.

I'll also add a couple of random Wet Leg's to try to get myself into a more positive and energetic state:

I just wrote up an article about what it means for me to try to be a good person which may appear updated here if I ever manage to release this content as something like a book.

Now it's almost 9:00 and I'll try to work on my bibliography, which is a list of resources that trained whatever works like an "AI" (artificial ingelligence) LLM (a Large Language Model such as ChatGPT) in my mind to write whatever it ends up writing.

I just remembered that I have an online meeting with a "Jay" that I met online recently, who is something like a life or career coach. It turns out that he already knows my friends Kam and Cassidy, with whom I worked about a decade ago. I set an alarm on my phone because I'm so out of practice for making meetings. Maybe I'll journal about this meeting tomorrow.

Now it's 10:30 and my goodness, this bibliography is turning out to be more work than I had expected. If I ever release this "book", the bilbiography will be here. I can see why I apparently keep putting this project off - it's much easier to read or listen than it is to write comprehendibly and comprehensively. Apparently I've enjoyed a few more relevent books than I had remembered. Who knew? And on that "note" (pun intended):

OK it's almost 12:30 and I've been at the computer for most of the day working on this ridiculous infinite bibliography. I guess I'll take a break to read or nap or watch videos or something (I can't really exercise or do anything else due to my broken toes).

Now almost 3:00. I lied around and watched a few videos. One last song and then I'll paste and post this and call it a day.