Weeks and Weeks

Started some blog posts but they were not good. Even adjusting for lowered standards and long delays between content. I work, read books, do my PT, do my other hobbies (baking, watching League of Legends on youtube, and baking while watching League on youtube). Just trying to make my way in the world, same as you.

Here then is a very good ambient theme song from a movie (Sunshine) that started out promisingly and took a left turn into bullshit. Get down with some instrumental feels. Or not.

Around the time that this movie came out (2007) I worked with a person that I nicknamed 'Sunshine'. She was an aggressively cheerful and hilariously incompetent person. She worked in my department for about 3 years and she was good for some type of issue or challenge around once a month. The issues varied from wearing pajamas to work to having a nervous breakdown and needing to take a leave of absence. (Though these two things mayyyy have been related in some way.) When she had her final extended meltdown/leave and the company told her to take as long as she liked but to not plan on returning I took over her job duties. The saddest part about her issues was that she hardly did any work at all, and she still could not handle it.

The funniest part about her leaving was that IT gave me her computer so that I could access her files, and her password was "happiness". Sunshine, indeed.

Heavy Reading: Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

I finished Bloodlands a while back and have been processing, or, more accurately, attempting to process, the content ever since. Snyder paints a vivid account of the scale of the civilian and non-combatant slaughter in the territories between Germany and Russia that occurred between 1933 and 1945.

Is it the heaviest book ever written in English? Given the scope and scale of the material I think it might be. We have the benefit of contemporary firsthand accounts, and the numbers are overwhelming beyond human comprehension.

When you read that Stalin killed over 750,000 people in his great purges of 1937 and 1938, how do you wrap your head around that? If you read that Stalin starved over three million (!!) Ukrainians to death as part of his collectivization strategy in 1932/33 then what does that mean? Do you get caught up in the details of death by starvation, which are so harrowing I do not even want to reproduce them here? Or do you imagine what it would be like if all of San Jose (1.0 million), Dallas (1.3 million) and San Diego (1.4 million) were starved to death? What would that look like?

Once you get past Stalin's successful mass murders - if you can - then you come to Hitler, whose army and their compatriots killed even more civilians and POWs in a shorter span of time. The accounts of Hitler's/Germany's victims are every bit as horrible as anything that Stalin and his teams could design.

Though a difficult read, this is essential history, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.