Loose Ends 2020

Here we finally are at the end of the weirdest year I've ever lived through with my summary of a lot of the stuff I experienced but I didn't bother to blog about.

The baseball season was cut waaaay short due to the pandemic.  The Atlanta Braves had a exceptional year, missing the World Series by losing the seventh game of the National League Championship Series to the team that went on to become world champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I blogged about all that but I did not mention how strange it was to have no baseball back to follow in the spring and early summer due to the pandemic.  That must have led to a pent-up obsession I had for the Braves after the season ended.  It was far too short and far too great to end.

So I ended up purchasing the latest version of Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP21), a PC major league baseball simulation game that I have enjoyed for many years.  I simulated the 2020 Braves season several times and they kicked butt in most of the replays.  I even managed the entire 2020 season as it was originally scheduled before COVID-19 ruined everything.  They more than competitive through that as well.  

The bottom line is that the 2020 Braves were one of the best teams ever in Atlanta, even with the fact that our starting pitching was mostly between wobbly to nonexistent.  I had the pleasure to enjoy many great Braves teams through the 1990's and, looking at their lineup, the 2020 Braves were better than almost all of those teams.  I'm excited for what the 2021 season will bring. 

In addition to the 2020 season, OOTP21 allows for the import of past teams and players with real schedules to depict any team of any season with reasonable accuracy.  I replayed several Braves seasons and got a good feel for comparisons across time.  I replayed the 1969, 1974, 1979, 1983, 1989, 1993 and 1995 Braves seasons. The '69, '83, and '93 teams were had decent talent to manage.  '95 was when we won the World Series, so it was a great team.  I had a surprising amount of fun playing the '74, '79, and '89 seasons.  Those Braves teams were inferior and the challenge there is to make it through a season without losing 90 or more games.  In many ways losing is a more interesting player challenge.  Either way, I amassed a large number of hours playing baseball this way.  If I could only have one game to play in my life OOTP would be it. 

After playing Ukraine '43, I veered off into an examination of wargames I purchased in the past few years but never got around to playing.  The best of them was Panzer Battles, a fast playing, fun experience.  This game depicts the 11th Panzer Division's famous battles around the Chir River in late 1942 as first detailed by F.W. von Mellenthin in a book by the same title I read about 30 years ago.  Naturally, I dustied it off the shelves and reread the section pertaining to the game.  In conjunction with my play I also read Order in Chaos by Hermann Balck, the German commander of these battles.  His autobiography covers his experiences in both World Wars and was an entertaining and informative read.  It was also slanted in many aspects, of course, as are most autobiographies. 

I came close to the virus a couple of times during the course of the year, but was lucky to avoid it (so far).  A friend who visited my house was infected literally less than a week after being here, maskless and carefree.  He pulled through fine after several days of feeling terrible.  I had multiple family members (including my brother) contract the virus.  We have reached a point where more of my family has been infected than has not.  Some experienced more serious symptoms than others but no one was hospitalized, fortunately.  For my brother, his most serious symptom was boredom during quarantine.  He had a high fever one day but otherwise, only minor aches and pains.

Interestingly, while my brother's son also caught it, his daughters and his wife never contracted it while living in quarantine with him.  Similarly, months earlier I had a cousin catch it.  She was in bed for several days and took several weeks to recover from the fatigue.  But her husband did not contract it until weeks later through exposure related to his work.  This fascinated me.  How can something so infectious that everybody must wear face masks to the grocery store fail to spread through family members living under the same roof? 

Jennifer and I estimate that, since we are both in good health and not over 65, it might be April or May before we can get vaccinated, maybe longer.  Until then, we will continue to do all we can to avoid it and to keep it away from our elderly parents.

The year offered plenty of time to read.  The Precipice was timely overview of the various challenges facing humanity's survival (nuclear war, global warming, asteroids, etc.).  The book also mentioned pandemics.  But, published in January 2020, just before COVID was widely known, the couple of pages devoted to such threats seemed wimpish compared to how many pages were devoted to "human-made" global issues.  It handled these with reasonable detail but reading the book during the global threat of a deadly virus felt strange to me.  It was as if all the threats were equal in my mind, distinctions blurred.  This book did not resonate with me anymore than reading Thoreau did back back at the beginning of the year.

Transcendence was an enjoyable, if familiar read.  The author had her own take on how we arrived where we are now as a species.  But her emphasis on the importance in evolution of our creating and telling stories was not that different from what Yuval Noah Harari said in Sapiens.  I agree with them both.  Further, similarly to Homo Deus, she saw humanity as transcending itself in the not too distant future.  She used the term homo omnis or "Homni" to demarcate the beginning of our new species.  She accepted global warming as an inevitability.  But she opined of Homni as the most adaptable animal on the planet.  We will go onward (and transcend ourselves) despite mucking up the climate and destroying much of the Earth.

More interesting was my discovery of Mary-Jane Rubenstein through her expert lecture on Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Being.  I laughed watching her, she was deeply insightful, even poetic, but she was also funny about how difficult Heidegger is to read.  In my life, I've barely been able to understand only a little of him.  Rubenstein made him not only more understandable (though still dense), her talk was an entertaining way to spend an hour.

So I quested a bit about her and watched her other YouTube videos, mostly interviews.  Her own project (this is is not spelled out anywhere, just my hunch) is about whether "the divine" is still possible in the modern world.  A 2010 work, which I haven't read but intend to, examines human wonder.  Having a sense of wonder is important to me, it is healthy living.  So her (alleged) project caught my mind's eye.

I read her Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters and found it to be superb.  Mostly, it informs the reader with a new perspective, or rather an old perspective refound and revalued.  It is a fascinating challenge to nihilism, one I think is worthy of considering.  What if we humans found the Earth to be filled with sacred things instead of profitable resources?  The book doesn't ask that question.  That was me valuing it as a reader.  I will be following Rubenstein and see how this turns out.

I read The Confessions of X because I wanted to learn more about the mysterious erotic coupling of Saint Augustine with his concubine - before he became a saint, of course.  The philosopher famously confessed of his sexual habits but then walked away from all of it, leaving his unnamed mistress behind to live a life of celibacy.  Not an everyday sort of story in history.  The book was a disappointment, more of a jazzed-up romance novel than anything else.  Though it was a nice distraction for a few days, I still don't know much more about this mysterious period of the saint's life.

When I completed reading and posting about The Silmarillion, and realized that there was no baseball happening, I decided to press on with Tolkien and reread the whole trilogy.  Starting with The Hobbit, my intention was to make note of any references Tolkien made in the text about events within The Silmarillion,  But I only made it to the end of The Hobbit before my mind was reading other things.  A rereading of the trilogy is near, with my intent still as stated, but my mind and interests lie elsewhere for now.

Lockdown in the spring gave me the excuse to catch up on my movie watching.  I saw 1917 for it's "single-shot" style, Joker for Joaquin Phoenix's excellent performance, and Parasite because it was a Korean picture that won the Oscar for Best Picture.  I'd give all three films a "7" on my scale.  They were solid movies but not that great.  Parasite reminded me of watching a Wes Anderson film.  I also enjoyed finally getting around to watching Daniel Day-Lewis give his final screen portrayal in 2017's Phantom Thread.  The film is nearly plotless but the extraordinary acting held my interest.  Overall, I'd give it a "6."  Day-Lewis is one of the rare great actors alive today, but some of the films he chose to act in during his later years were duds but for him.  Hopefully, his retirement, actually his second, is temporary.

I watched more Youtube in 2020 than ever before.  The platform had always been a constant for music and brief videos.  But this year I started watching more documentaries mostly on art, warfare and philosophy.  I discovered great content channels such as Rebel Wisdom, Philosophy Overdose, Integral Life, Time Ghost, George Thompson on spirituality and Taoism, and, most recently, Epoch Philosophy.  I hate the ridiculous and usually ill-timed ad interruptions but I guess somebody has to be making money to provide all this stuff for free.  For the record, however, I have never clicked on any advertising in Youtube or anywhere else on the internet.  Just don't do it.  Marketing and advertising are the most destructive forces in the world that almost no one is talking about, mainly because they are hidden in plain sight.  Don't click, don't like and the internet will be much better off.  As long as you don't click, there's nothing for the algorithms to make you do.

Another enjoyment I have on Youtube is watching various "reaction" channels, where young people listen to classic rock songs for the first time a record their reactions on video.  To my delight, many of these channels are exploring Pink Floyd's music.  Watching all these folks respond to something like "Comfortably Numb" for the first time was a lot of fun and nostalgic for me.  I like the recent explorations of D. Mont The Genius as he discovered the Floyd and now says they are his favorite band of all-time.  Right on dude, me too.

In renegotiating our service contract with AT&T, we got HBO Max for "free" toward the end of the year.  Jennifer and I both watched and enjoyed Bill Maher's show.  I also was entertained by Lovecraft Country, HBO's successful effort to turn one of my favorite genre writers, H.P. Lovecraft, on his head.  As I have written several times before, Lovecraft was the master of atmospheric horror, what he called "weird fiction."  He was also a complete racist.  With this in mind, the short series made blacks the primary characters and transformed racism itself into another "monster" with which they had to contend.   

Lovecraft Country also succeeded where virtually all previous attempts to portray the author's writings have failed.  All the important, twisted and macabre elements that make up a good Lovecraft story were prominent in the series.  The special effects were minimal and the series did a great job of focusing on the internal fears and anguish of the characters.  But when it came to depicting the "indescribable" horror of one of Lovecraft's creations, shoggoths, it was highly effective.  More so because these beasts from the beyond only appeared in a few scenes through the eight episodes.  This followed the Lovecraft maxim that horror is much more effective the more you leave to the reader's (or viewer's) imagination.  A superb effort all around.

Hand's down, the best short series I saw in 2020 was The Queen's Gambit on Netflix.  I was not expecting much but it managed to blow me away with the excellent writing, acting, sets, props as set in the 1960's.  The show effectively made chess a tense and exciting experience even for viewers who did not know anything about the classic game.  Jennifer and Avery both watched and raved about it.  I was not expecting them to like it at all since it was about the world of professional chess (fictionalized in this case).  But they really got in to the characters as well as the costumes and sets.  The soundtrack was fantastic too, with great choices of early rock music.  It added a bit more if the viewer knew the game of chess.  Several famous games/situations were depicted during the course of the series, though in real-life they were played by other people.  I might watch this one again if boredom rears its ugly head in the near future.

My 2020 resolutions were not fully realized due to the pandemic.  I will strive for something more modest in 2021.  I want to reread The Lord of the Rings at some point.  But I have backlog of books waiting on me as well.  Hopefully, by the second half of the year Jennifer and I will be vaccinated and able to travel again.  I'm thinking an off-season trip to sunny Destin, Florida next fall would be a great way to get used to going places again.  Other than that, I am going to continue to work on cultivating gratitude in my life.  It is a powerful force and the world needs a lot more of it to combat the epidemic of fear and anger that currently rules the planet.

Along those lines, I will be devoting much more time to working toward more completely articulating my personal philosophy.  My previous efforts in this regard, such as my "word doodles," are sprinkled throughout this blog.  I have always tended toward living a contemplative life.  I feel inspired to better formulate the results of my five-decade long (so far) spiritual quest.

One result of the pandemic that was terrific for my life was that the lockdown drove tens of thousands of online content starved readers to my curated Flipboard world, which now contains over 50 magazines, many of which are archival.  My Flipboard reflects the diversity of my life and interests pretty well.  Checking last year's Loose Ends post, I note that I had almost 5,000 followers as 2020 began.  Today I have more than 32,500, a hefty growth in overall readership in one year. 

At one point, just after the lockdown began, I was averaging 200 new followers each day of at least one of my e-magazines, mostly to my sex-related curations.  Gradually, that popularity shifted to my other topics.  Even in December I am averaging between 50-100 new followers each day.  

I continue to open every day with coffee and about an hour and a half to curating (skimming most content and actually reading pieces of greater importance to me) about 100 - 150 articles for my various e-mags.  I suppose this could be considered a form of addiction but I don't know what the harmful effects of it might be in my case.  It does not interfere with the rest of my day and I am better informed of the happenings of the world than ever before.  To be sure, the growing number of followers motivates me but I rarely choose a piece of content because I think others will enjoy it.  I do so because it brings me enjoyment - and often enrichment.

Here are my most popular e-mags as of this post, in order of popularity.  You can find them all and much more on my Flipboard profile page...

• Brain and Psyche - 4,100 followers, 87,600 page flips
  
• Notice: Philosophy - 3,000 / 38,000 
• Well-Being - 2,900 / 49,600
• Sex and Intimacy - 2,500 / 1,000,000(!)
• Religion, Or Not - 2,100 / 53,300
• Notice: The Future - 1,900 /15,300
• Notice: Nietzsche - 1,800 / 15,700
• Notice: Space - 1,700 / 58,000
• Notice: The Past - 1,700 / 19,500
• Eros - 1,700 / 1,700,000(!)
• Notice: Language - 1,600 / 18,000
• Other Art and Aesthetics - 1,400 / 96,500
• Notice: Art - 1,300 / 284,000
  
• Notice: Global Warming - 1,300 / 21,000
• Notice Reading - 1,300 / 13,000
• Loose Ends - 1,200 / 73,000
• SeXtEcH - 1,200 / 234,000