view from the present
view from the present
drmollytov
an extended meditation on presence
Latest Posts
I’m currently reading Marion Nestle’s What to Eat Now and Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism at the same time (the former for enjoyment and the latter for research). The juxtaposition is convincing me of one thing: We live in a...
Title says it: Over the winter break, I rewatched Season 1 of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers because my inner eleven-year-old wanted to, and I wanted something that required absolutely no thought or insight. Win-win. I was obsessed with...
One of my students recently got into Fallout 4 (thanks, Prime), and they are talking my ear off about the game. It's actually fun to listen to. I don't play a lot of video games; instead I tend to find a game I like and play it to death....
It's a gross, rainy, wet, muddy day here on the World's Tiniest Farm. But I needed carrots and it's about to be a gross, snowy, icy, muddy night and rest of week here, so I picked up my spade and went out to the front garden to get some....
I'm reading back through my journal entries and blog posts for the past year, and two things stand out above all. 1. I really thought that switching to Linux/yeeting oligarch tech/etc. would protect my privacy and data security and...
One downside to working as a school librarian is that we tend to be siloed. I don't even see the other librarians in my district most of the time - let alone any other librarians. So when people hear I'm a librarian and say "yeah, makes...
All the Spotify Wrappeds have dropped, so for the past week I've had at least one student a day show me theirs - and ask to see mine. They get very confused when I tell them I don't have Spotify. They get even more confused when I tell...
While snowed in over my long Thanksgiving weekend, I started thinking about the stuff online and how it interacts with the stuff in our brains. As requested by absolutely no one, behold: a framework for sorting the stuff on the Internet...
So after I totaled my car and the deer it hit: https://viewfromthepresent.com/2025-11-20 I had to buy another car. I haven't actually bought a car since 2009, when I, a hapless twentysomething, overpaid for a 2007 Toyota Yaris. I loved...
On my way out to the farm for my niece's birthday this weekend, I hit a deer. I lost. The deer also lost. It is statistically inevitable, living where I do, that some percentage of drivers will hit deer in any given fall. It's actually...
My 2.3 readers may remember I spent the summer doing Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. One point she covers throughout the 12-week process is "synchronicity," or the idea that when you're on the right path artistically, things just sort...
I got an interesting attempt at phishing just now. It was a text message, modeled on the Google 2FA texts. The first sentence was identical to a Google text: "G-[number] is your Google verification code." The next two sentences, however,...
Long time no blog. I've been getting through the first marking period, doing Librarian Stuff including prep to receive a donation of Literally One Thousand Books, No Really, Ten Hundred Books Someone is Donating To Us, Can You Believe...
No, really. In Naked Economics, Charles Wheelan lists several factors essential to the growth and development of a national economy: effective government institutions property rights no excessive regulation geography openness to trade...
Good lord, it's like I'm an entirely different person. I started a list over lunch in an attempt to track what-all I've changed since January 7, when I clicked on Janet Vertesi's Cyber-Cleanse in someone else's CoSo post and thought...