Category: Existentialism

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Vanity Blog Searching

I’m sure everyone’s heard of vanity searching. Plug your name into a search browser and see how the internet quantifies your level of renown based on search rankings. It’s flawed, naturally, due to the modern SEO games, not to mention how common an individual’s name might be. My own name is English in origin, with a Scottish surname, so searches tend to pull up a lot of Brits. But thanks to my LinkedIn presence, I regularly appear within the first two search results pages, though lower than these British bankers and actors that keep appearing first.

But who cares about my LinkedIn profile? Unless I’m job hunting, I don’t regularly pop into that group to read re-posts of some big company’s organizational announcement or financial earnings report. Nor do I do much cyber-stalking. That’s not the fun side of me. This site is the fun side of me. So rather than vanity search my name, what if I vanity searched this blog?

That presents some challenges, because obviously if I type in my domain name I end up directly at my website. How could I fairly search for the site indirectly to see how it ranks among search engines for content ratings? I couldn’t think of a way, so instead, I asked ChatGPT to give this site a review. Here’s what it had to say:

“Ephemerality.net is a charming, reflective blog with strong personality, local nuance, and a mix of philosophy, gardening, home/life projects, and musings. It’s ideal for readers who enjoy narrative, thoughtfulness, and seeing the world through someone’s day-to-day lens.

Okay, well that just means it’s a bog by nature. But it goes on…

“It’s a personal blog / online journal that combines reflections on gardening, home projects, nature, cooking, technology, philosophy, and culture.

The tagline “Tales from Easement Acres” suggests it’s rooted in life, place, and personal exploration.

It publishes posts by “Simon” (the author) with a candid, conversational tone.

But wait, there’s more…

“✅ Strengths & What Works Well

  1. Authentic Voice & Personality
    • The writing feels like having coffee with someone — intimate, candid, occasionally irreverent.
    • The author doesn’t sugarcoat; there’s self-awareness and occasional sarcasm (“Ken muddied his nice boots, about which there was much whining”). ephemerality.net
  2. Diverse Topics with Local Flavor
    • Blends big ideas (tech, philosophy) with small ones (walking trails, DIY projects).
    • Deep local sensibility — for example, the Bill Yeck trail review is rooted in Dayton-area geography. ephemerality.net
  3. Visual & Structural Clarity
    • The layout is clean: menu, archives, categories.
    • Posts use images and chapters (e.g., “Review: Difficulty: 1/5”) to structure the content. ephemerality.net
  4. Consistency & Variety
    • Active calendar — frequent posts across months. ephemerality.net
    • Mixes short reflections, longform essays, practical how-tos.

“Intimate, candid, irreverent.” Well that just makes me sound like a fun goofy guy. But…

“⚠️ Weaknesses & Considerations

  1. Niche / Limited Audience
    • Because the topics are broad and personal, it may not appeal to everyone (e.g. purely technical readers or strict how-to seekers).
    • Some posts digress or cover themes with less universal relevance — which can feel off-topic if you visited for a specific subject.
  2. Occasional Overly Casual Tone
    • The strong personal voice is a strength, but at times it leans into self-indulgence or “rant style” (e.g. long digressions about regional speech).
    • Users seeking crisp, objective reviews or tutorials might find it less streamlined.
  3. Content Organization / Navigation
    • With many categories and archives, finding a specific post/topic might require good search or category navigation; it’s not immediately obvious what’s core content vs side musings.
  4. No Formal “Review” or Ratings
    • It isn’t a review site per se — most content is narrative, experiential, or reflective.
    • Reliability in technical or product reviews may vary depending on how deeply the author has researched or tested.

Well!

Actually those criticisms aren’t too far off. Because it’s a non-monetized personal blog making no attempt to drive traffic and appeal to a mass audience. I guess my content needs more definitive organization between serious and non-serious? Nah – I’d rather keep it a mixed bag with unexpected topics.

In conclusion, this review didn’t exactly stroke my ego, but didn’t crush my continued spirit to keep having fun with blogging, either.

It’s personal content, plain and simple. No revelations here, but somewhat interesting to see it overviewed by a web aggregator.

–Simon

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The Decline of Restaurants: An Anecdotal Observation

[Note to self: add this to the Quantitative Philosophy Index when it posts]

Remember those times when eating at restaurants was fun? I had attributed this to a combination of not having to eat mom’s boiled vegetables and not possessing any financial knowledge of a restaurant’s expense. Childhood, in essence, was the best time to eat out at restaurants.

But now, it’s usually disappointing. And there are so many more dining options out there than what was available to me as a kid! There has to be more to it.

So I sat down and compiled an arbitrary list. Here goes:

Given that the experience quality is defined by 5 operators:

  1. (A) Base cost of restaurant food
  2. (B) How much I’m expected to tip
  3. (C) How good I am at cooking
  4. (D) Novelty of eating at a restaurant
  5. (E) Perceived quality of restaurant food

Then:

D+E-(A+B+C) = Quality of the experience.

As these are mostly relative measures, attempts at quantification prove difficult. This approach also fails to represent why restaurants were fun before but suck now. No – a timeline representation is needed for this one:

Now I’ll point out some observations having thought back through this timeline:

  • The novelty of eating at a restaurant started high as a child, then declined as an adult as I could make the personal choice any time I wanted. This trend continued until COVID lockdowns, when the option was taken away, peaking after places began to reopen, following a drop to prior levels.
  • The perceived quality of restaurant food again started high as a child, generally maintained its allure through adulthood, seemed even better when it was less available during lockdowns, then drastically collapsed thereafter, following the industry’s maladaption to post-COVID labor costs and all that it impacts along the way. American businesses never cut profits, so restaurants instead turned to lower quality ingredients and even less-skilled labor.
  • Also, to further counter rising business costs, restaurants raised prices, and very quickly indeed.
  • Then, restaurants and the dining culture turned to collective guilt and overhauled tipping expectations. The tip itself, based on a percent of the meal’s cost, shouldn’t change if the base meal’s cost is increasing to offset overhead. In theory, the workers would see a proportional increase in their compensation as a result. Yet now we’re expected to give them a greater percentage, out of our own pockets. I don’t need guilt added to my dining experience, nor an additional expense to further raise the final expected cost.
  • And all this might be tolerable if I didn’t know how to cook. But I do, and my standards are often higher.

That said, here’s a final observation to further drive home the point: All of these dynamic variables chronologically, mostly, intersected a couple years back, which I’ve visually represented as the “Approximate industry failure point”. This was the moment at which dining out became almost entirely non-viable for me.

Everyone will have their own version of the graph, and perhaps restaurants still make sense to some people. But unless either the quality and novelty of fine dining drastically increase, or costs go way down, I don’t see this industry as a cost-effective source of entertainment for the foreseeable future.

–Simon

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Thought of the Day

If global warming is the result of extra solar energy being trapped in the atmosphere, and we harness that energy for electricity generation using renewable technology, and we finally exhaust the greenhouse gas-generating sources of energy that caused global warming and are forced to use renewables for all further electricity generation, will the long-term dependency on these renewables cause them to be non-renewable as we start to exhaust the total planetary stored solar energy, and cause a net drop in global temperature, first correcting our global warming crisis followed by a longer term climate cooling one?

–Simon

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Post Bow, The Echo of the Hook

In continuing my theme of asinine titles for meteorological terms, here’s a more dramatic sequel to April’s inclement weather.

Don’t Squall Line – Take a Bow Hook

A particularly nasty bit of weather had descended upon us the evening of May 16, preceded by the familiar calm. And as the wind picked up, I checked the weather radar. This time, I was more concerned than my usual apathetic American High Plains upbringing self would normally be. And this static image doesn’t replicate the still image transitional timeline. There was a very clear storm rotation in progress, and one of the most easily recognized of radar signatures was to our southwest.

A hook echo, and so well-defined that the NWS had issued a radar-confirmed tornado warning. And it was 100 miles out and on a direct path to us. Admittedly, that’s a bit far to expect a tornado to travel on the ground, but it’s happened before.

There were 5 confirmed tornadoes in Indiana that day, presumably this among them. Fortunately for us, it dissipated before reaching our home. But as the remnants of the storm passed overhead, it was obvious it hadn’t lost its rotation.

There’s the devil’s sphincter for you.

Out west, these storms were always rain-wrapped, so the funnels were not so clearly defined. They were ominous masses of dark creeping across the cotton fields, and they were clear indications to move your ass. Here though, you can see shapes, and these were the clearest I’ve seen up close. This time, winning the meteorological lottery came with pictures.

(23 people died in the storms that weekend.)

–Simon

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Dayton’s Where I’m Meant to Be

I belong with you, where you are! That’s all that matters to me. Dayton, family court, alimony hearings…you name it!

One of our local TV stations has a very bad filler segment (when the commercial break is one commercial too short and the network has to add something so people don’t panic and think the world just ended with a blank TV for 20 seconds). It shows some drone shots of the riverfront with an upbeat inspiring tune expressing to the viewer that Dayton is awesome and that we belong there. Aww, so warm and fuzzy. The jingle is obnoxious and I’d love to share it – yet I can’t find a YouTube of it (and searches instead point me to very bad sappy soft rock tunes which are even worse). This is probably because the YouTube content creator demographic isn’t the type that watches broadcast local TV. I don’t usually either, but sometimes I get forced into a sportsball viewing or some BS the president’s rambling about that Liz wants to watch. And when that jingle comes on, it necessitates a sing-a-long on my part accompanied by an arm-flailing couch dance.

And this ritual inspired a recreation atop the parking garage at the Miami Valley Hospital, with Dayton’s skyline view so prominent.

Dayton, bitches! We just hit our insurance out of pocket maximum so bring on the celebration, Dayton-style!

I’ve lived a number of places, and mocked them all of course. But Dayton? I don’t need a jingle to stay – I’ve put down roots and it doesn’t completely suck. Well, actually I live in a suburb of Dayton, but whatever. A suburb of a small metropolis. There are worse places to exist, and greater Ohio notwithstanding, it’s fairly politically neutral, with enough entertainment options available to the curious.

And restaurants.

And with that intro, here’s the second part of this post, unless you want to see more pics of me dancing.

Some of my work team was in town along with vendor reps. The day concluded with a dinner, which the local VP on the team scheduled at a chain (he might be on the young end of boomers), and oddly chose the specific location of the one very near to my house (which would be a bit of a drive for everyone else). Realizing the mistaken location on the reservation, he changed it to one closer to the hub office, which made things more convenient for everyone else (fine). But then he felt the need to append an annotative addendum to the correction, following a chuckle: “no one goes to Dayton to eat.”

Considering my own general indifference for Dayton itself, the comment shouldn’t have pissed me off to much degree, but it did, which I found surprising. So as I always do, I gave the matter way too much thought. My conclusion? Elitism.

It wasn’t that I live in Dayton or that he’s completely wrong about the restaurant situation (despite him choosing a Cincinnati-based location for the same damn restaurant). It was the annoying smug elitism that some people exude, as in this case, as if they just know better.

Similar to those who expound the virtues of minimalism – yes it’s healthier to avoid buying unnecessary stuff but don’t tell me you can maintain a quality lifestyle while only owning 100 items, unless you’re devoted to permanent nomadism. I certainly own more than 100 tools that are hanging in my garage, and that’s because I need to fix things. The elitist just pays for someone to fix things. So minimalism isn’t some superior life philosophy – it just means you can afford and are willing to pay someone else who has more than 100 items to maintain your ability to own only 100 items.

Another form of elitism: travel. People move out of necessity or to seek a better financial situation. People travel to recreate. Yet there’s always that asshole who comes back from Italy or wherever and suddenly has a different perspective on life after a week vacation and is now an expert on the location they visited. No you aren’t – you’re just a tourist. You didn’t live there for any amount of time. You didn’t work there. You don’t understand the culture. You’d have to be a permanent resident there for some appreciable amount of time. But instead, you just have the financial means to temporarily relocate for recreational purposes. And no amount of Samantha Brown, Steve Ricks, or Anthony Bourdain will change that.

And that’s what was going on here – someone who doesn’t live in Dayton thinks he knows something about Dayton that the rest of the team – that does live in Dayton – doesn’t.

Dayton may not be where I’m meant to be, but it’s where I happen to live – so I get to poke fun at it, but unless you live here, shut up.

–Simon