If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to my tangle of words and ask you to feel at home, just don’t touch my shiny new-to-me-but-preowned laptop with a light up keyboard. Might have to let you duel to the death with my nephew who wants to eat my laptop.
I have mentioned about how one day I would get myself a fancy laptop with a light up keyboard because, confession; for a “writer” I don’t know the locations of the keys on the keyboard as well as I should. Now imagine trying to type something in the dark and with our electricity challenges that are ever permeative, night time writing becomes a nightmare, unless one were writing a horror story.
First of all quick shoutout to all those who have bought me coffee over the past years, each small bit added up. Almost ¾ of my laptop budget was covered exclusively by the support of the generous patrons of Becoming The Muse, I am ever grateful and appreciative of you, you and you and yes you too. ☕
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that while the price tag was nowhere near as hefty as the ones our government almost contracted for $10 000 dollars a laptop this one came at a modest cost – being a pre-loved machine but still good condition. In my head I have nicknamed it Beauty, as in Beauty and the Beast…Since it’s a thing of beauty with beast specs and of course in some circles I am a Beast too.
I am still in awe of a laptop that can power up in under 30 seconds and be ready to handle whatever you throw at it. I cant even imagine how I used to operate with a machine that needed almost half an hour to fully start up. The other day I was uploading the video for an Afrobloggers Meetup while running a video editing software, jamming music, several browser tabs open and other things when I accidentally started running the whole Adobe Suite of applications which it handled without breaking a sweat – if anything I might have been underutilising its full resources.
Now that I have the processing power, I am calling the next Chapter Technology. I have been checking out ChatGPT and I think the singularity is closer than we think… The singularity will occur when computers will be able to delete us – incase you aren’t familiar what that means. Have you heard of ChatGPT, tried to use it or you still live under a rock? In one of my next articles I will muddy the waters with my thoughts on AI.
If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that speaking of muddy waters, Zimbabwe is opening up to the seriousness of a drug crisis. I once shared a bit about The Drug Pandemic. Now that the demographics show that even school kids are exposed to the scourge of drugs with drug dealers being on the prowl in schools the government has decided to change tact and take a stricter approach towards dealing with drugs…
The government has declared war on drugs through launch of a national anti-drug operation dubbed No To Dangerous Drugs And illicit Substances; See Something Say Something. Government has introduced new measures where drug abusers will now be treated as criminals and not victims; anyone found under the influence of drugs is eligible to arrest and they will have to confess when they sober up where they would have bought the drugs.
On one hand, I must commend them for their commitment to taking action, already the drag net has caught a couple of drug dealers with sniffer dogs carrying out random drug searches in public transport. On the other hand, an approach that stigmatises the drug user is not in the best interest of rehabilitation.
The people who have been caught so far are small fry, whispers on the streets seem to implicate powerfully connected people as being the drug lords and that those being caught are simply sacrificial pawns. My knowledge from watching investigative movies and tv series is that if you really want to make an impact on the war on drugs, you don’t go after the person with a few grams of drugs you shake up the tree at the bigger branches, at the points of entry.
Or maybe make positive use of Surveillance Balloons instead of just spying on each other and blowing them up for no good reason, use that tech to catch drug shipments or something.
What’s been going on in your neck of the woods?
~B
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