Zombie mode (work)
I am equally fascinated by the world’s fascination with zombies, as I am unfascinated with zombies. They appear to represent (in the modern manifestation) some kind of deep fear of the uncontrollable masses. LeCorbusier asked rhetorically, “Is there anything more pitiful than an undisciplined crowd?” The answer is yes. For instance, such a crowd trapped in mediated self-loathing, by way of a zombie trope.
Somebody suggested a zombie/vampire feedback loop that follows a right-wing/left-wing sentiment shift: when people are fearful of their prosperity due to competition from other workers, people shift right wing and zombie movies get made. When people are more fearful of the rich elites, they shift left wing and vampire movies get made. More or less.
The last decade was a bonanza of trope recycling. At one point I counted at least 8 different zombie/vampire TV series being produced at the same time. Man, that was such a shit decade for people who like creative narratives. So obnoxious. I wonder who people need to be afraid of for us to get some original storytelling going on? Unarguably, some of the best movies and TV shows were made right around the fall of the Soviet Union, when people stopped being afraid of nuclear annihilation and communists, and started being afraid of being inconsequential in a world that didn’t care about them.
Anyway, they’re not actually out to get you.
Work
I really try what I can to lump meetings together. Concentrating is hard, and if you’re doing anything non-trivial, you probably need 30-60 minutes of settling time to get back into it after a distraction. Today, I succeeded in lumping meetings together. They were even all pretty productive. Yay.
Before all the meetings, I got the last of the TypeScript work out of my way for now. I will say this: despite my many misgivings about the Javascript language and its ecosystem, the tooling isn’t entirely terrible. React in particular was obviously designed by people who are tired of hitting the refresh button on their browser while making trivial changes.
After the meetings, more code. This continued into the evening. On some level I am aware that working ridiculously long hours is a surefire way of making sure I burn out. But when the wave is there, you gotta surf it.