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Read: I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan ★★★ 📚

We had witnessed all of this unfold, quiet onlookers, none of us stepping in to teach him a lesson or reaching out to help the pregnant woman. At most there were some words of comfort offered to her. We each had our own pressures to deal with in the end, our own issues at home. No one had anything left over to give. A work environment like that squeezes all life from a person. You wind up emotionally overdrawn, and numb and indifferent, without even noticing.


The moral of this story: When disgruntled, the lowly among us only have each other to pick on, because going after the powerful will only cost us in the end. And if that’s too much, there are always animals. Love is blind, people like to say. But if you ask me, love sees clearest of all; it is the least interested in personal gain, and the most true to itself. What’s blind is hatred.

China doesn’t seem very socialist as the author runs through many gig economy jobs, working long hours. At one point going round different medical practices to find the cheapest. Quite repetitive as it goes through the daily grind. Didn’t love it, glad I read it.

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Over the last few years, my blogging has slowly became less social. I thought I might reboot that by responding to Knowember, get to know your blogger – Robert Birming. I’ve been enjoying visiting the sites of other blogs listed on Robert’s page. It is good to move outside your ‘local’ area and get some serendipity. Some great rabbit holes.

A photo

Autumn colours, cloudy hills and a valley reflected in the still water of Finlas Water reservoir.
Finlas Water Reflection

I take a lot of photos, but am no photographer. I think of them as notes of nice looking or interesting things, ways of telling a story, a memory. Recently I’ve been posting sightings of flora & fauna to iNaturalist where a not very good photo can still be useful. I also enjoy the #SilentSunday hashtag on Mastodon. I mostly post via this site: Silent Sunday.

Name or nickname

My name is John Johnston, mostly online as johnjohnston. Occasionally, when that is taken, I use troutcolor, but no one has ever called me that. I started on Flickr. I like trout; I used to love fishing. I usually spell colour colour.

Where in the world I blog from

I’ve lived in Glasgow for almost 50 years, apart from occasional posts from wee holidays or alway days, I post from home. One of the best things about Glasgow is how quickly you can get to some sort of quiet countryside.

The blog is WordPress and I like to type in TextMate & drafts.

What my blog is mostly about

It started off about my use of, what was then called, Web 2 technology in the primary school classroom. It developed to include some technologies I am interested in; walks, mostly short; photos, mostly butterflies in the summer; links I like and books I’ve read. Now I am mostly retired the classroom has dropped off. I still read some education sites. The bigger tags in my cloud are classroom, blogging & WordPress. I don’t write about family, feelings or politics very much at all.

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Likes Somewhere between a luddite and a cyborg by who even knows.

Doing a masters in computer science and AI has been a surprisingly soul searching endeavour. My memories of enjoying tech as a kid were usurped by this ugly reality of spying and grasping and selling. I do still love technology, just not the industry it has become.

I enjoyed the list of the way she would like technology and our relationship to it to go.