What Interest Me This Week

Sick mode

I suspect there's an art of being sick that's more than simply "rest well and recover". I wonder what ancient sages had to say about opportuning iilnesses as a way of actualization.

Twitter Spaces, et al

I've been lurking in the Clubhouse-clone within Twitter just to see how the scene is evolving. I think a voice-only public voice-based chat room has some leg, at least in a pandemic era.

There have been many opinions about Clubhouse. I don't have an invite and don't intend to install.

Twitter Spaces is much younger and more raw. In comparison I think there are more junk than gem. But those are about coordination and it will improve with better behavior-influencing design.

躺平

An interesting meme got mainstream in the Chinese world the past week: the legitimization of slacking off.

From what I can glean, this has parallel with hikikomori but less about staying indoor and more about not giving a fuck anymore.

I may be wrong but it's not the point. What interests me about it is not the moralization or the debate of its legitimacy. It's the fact that it has manage to acquire this amount of resonance at such scale.

A meme like this don't get to succeed if the societal conditions are not in place. What those are would make an interesting speculation.