hot hot hot

it is summer, my dudes! and here it’s… very… very… hot at the moment. i live in central italy which has mild autumns and springs but can have sorta extreme summers and winters, especially summers.

it just gets… really hot all out of sudden. (usually around the 1st week of july)

i honestly can’t fathom the level of physical and mental strength required to work outside in those conditions, honestly. being used to it is one thing, but doing it for entire workdays seems incredible.

so, i suppose summer can be an entirely different experience for office workers with AC on and construction workers. for some it’s barely any change at all, and for others it’s literally hell. life can be weird like that.

last week i’ve been quite the social butterfly. i’ve met an online friend i’ve been talking with for almost 10 years now, but they live quite far so we’ve never had the chance to see each other in person.

i felt a very stark contrast on how real-life, face-to-face interactions go vs. how they play out online. it’s especially BAD when you compare irl to online text only. the latter feels extremely alienating, also because some people behave very differently when they only have a keyboard and screen in front of them. and most of the time, it’s not for the better.

i think a lot of people act very toxic/mean online via text because they’re so terminally online they forget they’re talking to real people instead of npcs looking things on their screen. and it’s sort of a shitty feedback loop where you have an alienating environment and one person being mean results in more people being mean back at them, and more people get dragged in, and stuff.

i guess we could illustrate with a spectrum:

text only (most alienating)
voice/video online
irl face-to-face (least alienating)

i’ve made it a “soft” rule with irl people that i will not communicate important shit over text. if we need to talk about something, we gotta meet. obviously, within reason.

i mean, i don’t like having to meet people in general, but i’d rather meet irl than communicate anything that matters over text. especially emotional shit.

via text you miss any kind of emotion conveyed via voice, facial expressions, posture, etc. also, i like to use hands a lot while talking, so that’s also another incommunicable aspect.

but yeah, fuck textual communication for anything that matters. it’s fine for casual/low importance/technical/small talk, or just shitposting, i guess.