Baldur Bjarnason, "Foggy feeds: the decline in my feed reader subscriptions":

...I follow a lot of feeds in my feed reader, most of them only updating at most once a month, maybe weekly, and only a tiny handful update daily. About seven hundred (700) of the feeds I follow are active and I’ve been following some of them since the early 2000s.

That’s a decent sample size both across fields – tech, media, and academia – and time – I’ve been following most of these since before COVID – and the decline in people’s thinking across many of these feeds has been noticeable because it’s incredibly fucking annoying.

My feeds suck, right now. My main excuse is I'm way out of the habit of blogging like I did 20 years ago. And I think part of that habit is thinking out loud, getting things out into words in front of me to clarify the thinking. Tweets and toots aren't really long enough to let a fully formed notion flop out of my head and thrash around on the desk for awhile.

I do know a lot of folks who got COVID, though. Gratefully, I seem to have avoided it so far. Is this like the notion that the Roman Empire collapsed due to lead poisoning? I do feel like there's a lot of stupidity out there right now, like more than I'd expect. I don't know if that's a conspiracy theory or just cynicism.