My partner convinced me to use the Starbucks app for incentives. Unsurprisingly within months, the company doubled the points requirements for all rewards. I now have a dollar and change held hostage on it, but refuse to keep topping it up. I imagine there are many people in my situation.
I once lent my copy to a friend of a friend prone to conspiratorial thinking, who professed to be open-minded and interested in my viewpoint. A few years later, after many reminders, he returned it to me. I asked him what he thought of it. He said he never read it, but it made for a great paper weight. This was the first of many realizations for me that magical thinking cannot be altered with logic.
Why do they link it to stress and not to the virus? Personally, I still deal with major digestive issues, primarily acid and silent reflux, after getting really sick from the second vaccination. (I'm not ruling out that I could have caught covid just before the vax, though my test was negative.) Prior to this, I was someone who had never once experienced reflux. Never took a Tums, etc. Now I'm on PPIs (Nexium basically), seemingly forever. What makes me think the symptoms are not due to anxiety is that they frequently hit me when my thoughts are elsewhere and not stressed or I'm asleep.
I recently discovered Tinker WriterDeck OS (https://tinker.sh/), which I’d been meaning to try, but this sounds like an even easier solution for repurposing old laptops and writing without distraction.
I desperately want to do this type of walking, but I live in a major city. There’s always something to distract me, which is great for boredom perhaps, but ruins any sense of zen or reflection. I would say half of every walk involves people yelling, loud vehicles, and louder music. Noise-cancelling headphones are only useful for distraction through podcasts and music, not for decompressing. I’m starting to wonder if the solution, the sad solution, is to walk on a treadmill at a gym during off-peak hours.
Yeah, wealth can be a great boon for developing talent. It's annoying for the rest of us peasants, but talent is talent.... A rich kid may lack a hard-knock life, which is great fodder for writing. But, she or he may be privately tutored in, say, world literature from a young age and given 1-on-1 access to great minds.
I wouldn't say PKD is gravitas. He is often funny and has a workingman prose. Gibson, yes. Though, I find his later works, like Peripheral, less stylized and serious.
I barely remember 2049. I remember so much of the original. Ridley Scott and team created the world from scratch and mastered the atmosphere. 2049 is very good, but it's basically a requel.
For the hell of it, I looked at the Chinese translation offered in the nav. I can’t read Chinese, so I wonder what someone who can read it thinks, but it looks very cluttered to me. (I know font options are very limited compared to English.) Interestingly, it also uses different photos.