Thank you.

Does that work for Google Play books? Is it an app?

Almost everything on Amazon is cheap trash, and they promote the hell out of all that trash instead of products of any quality. I am also so sick of the click funnels where you search for a specific item and they just give you pages full of knockoff trash as search results even if you go to a specific brand store. It’s nonsense.

I’m just a bleeding heart lefty I guess. Thankfully I’m Canadian.

Exactly. It’s absolutely horrible the government doesn’t.

Ooh that’s awful.

I really do. It’s terrible. I acknowledge that there is a public nuisance and safety aspect that they bring to the community because of addiction and why people on the other side get frustrated by it, but nobody goes out in life and thinks “I’ll be a homeless drug addict, that’s the way to live”. It’s a product of multiple factors, poverty, etc. And it’s absolutely terrible to try and get clean off substances, especially when you have no home to go to when you’re done.

This is what happens when you have conservative governments. They’re absolutely fine letting these poor people rot.

That’s fucking awful.

I really wish we had very harsh punishment for drug dealers here.

I’m continually afraid they’re going to topple over.

I was downtown today and saw at least 6 people doing it. It’s just infected everything in the city, not just the people who are addicted and suffering, but the public nuisance and safety aspect because of them too. The library today felt so sketchy.

My neighbour who works downtown told me she flat out hates them, she goes outside to smoke and they’re screaming at her to give them one and threatening her when she says no. It’s terrible on both sides.

That’s awful. Holy shit.

It’s apparently a neuromuscular reaction to the drug in the spine. Called the fentanyl fold, someone told me in another comment. I wonder what the long term damage neurologically is.

Aww. It’s so terrible to see them this way, especially because it’s been an exceptionally cold December.

Ohhhhh! I didn’t know that was a thing! Thank you. Fentanyl is a real problem here so of course that would be it.

These poor people. It’s absolutely dreadful what’s happening.

Don’t blame it on Yokie!

Everything feels like it happens so fast now and yet I have nearly no free time despite all this convenience. I did things one at a time and had to make an effort to do things like shop or go to the bank or pay bills or whatever. I cannot believe how many books I read and all the time I spent in the local library just browsing the stacks of all sorts of random shit; it was not routinely pared down to popular books, but had all sorts of odds and ends. I deliberately listened to music by putting a tape in the machine, and it was active listening. Radio was creative and beautiful. The local bar I spent time at was home to all sorts of burgeoning local bands. Food was not “small plates” at trendy bistros, but was sizeable satisfactory portions of ordinary food. A trip to the mall was an adventure, and my mall even had a library branch in it. You went to fish fry dinners at the Royal Canadian Legion on Fridays. One restaurant we used to go to we had to write our order down on a pad inside the kitchen, and the cook would come and slap your food in front of you. If you phoned someone and they weren’t home, you just phoned later on.

Nothing felt shitty and overly marketed and ads just existed and weren’t tailored to you. Television sitcoms lasted 26 seasons and you had to wait until next week to see the next one.

Even social media was better before Facebook, it felt organic and you made friends for life. Even early Twitter felt like this constant humorous conversation even if you didn’t agree with someone. Nobody was routinely crucified for misstepping in public (not that they shouldn’t sometimes). Things were definitely more generic but didn’t feel fake and marketed and inauthentic. Google was better and actually found things and didn’t just spit out a few results and then start adding unrelated things.

I’m not trying to sing the ballad of the boomer in B Minor; I appreciate convenience. I am tired of seeing bloated companies turn everything into shit. I want art and music and local watering holes to flourish. I want food to be good and satisfying. I don’t want every episode dropped at once. I just want things to slow down.

So my advice is slow down. Do one thing at a time. Go places and do one thing. Go to old restaurants. Go read paper books at the library. Go listen to a band at a bar. Do things. Don’t reduce it all to your phone. This is my goal for the new year is to do things.

They’re morons, and they’re just conservatives who want to smoke weed. Whatever your opinion of size of government, you have to have some central systems to run a society.

I miss Livejournal, the original Livejournal where you were able to tell people intimate things about yourselves and make friends for life.

Oh, this drug company is absolutely not like that at all. They are super ethical and invest every dollar of their profits into research. The dinner was to present a new treatment which has become super standard for the clinic, which involved one of our doctors presenting, I promise it was not like that at all. They are truly generous to us. There are not many treatments for this disease and this is one of the best. It was purely educational.

I worked with a doctor whose in-laws were Saudi royalty. He didn’t need to work at all he was so wealthy.

I heard about him doing an incredibly greedy thing that blew my mind one day; he showed up at a dinner that a drug company was hosting for another adjacent program he had nothing to do with and did not practice in at all. He didn’t even tell them he was coming, they had to find him a seat, and then he sat down, ordered not one but TWO whole lobsters, and when they came he asked for them to be wrapped to go, and he left. Even acknowledging drug companies have large budgets for these kinds of things, to come to an event that has nothing to do with you and do that is insanely rude when you don’t want for a thing in the world.

I know someone else who is very wealthy, and he’s pretty generous and passionate about creating things, he’s far from perfect, but truly wants to make good things and runs a business that gives him zero profit, so the contrast was pretty stark. The doctor also stiffed his professional college for a very large membership bill.