Including today's game, I'm now in the second half of my Memphis Tigers season tickets. GREAT win today against SMU. The emotional release with the game-winning intersection at the end was exhilarating!

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And while I have a lot of memories wrapped up in and about that stadium and about that stadium (especially as I lived across the country), this very well could be last season it'll be known as the Liberty Bowl. My knee-jerk reaction was to be saddened until I realized that it'll always be the Liberty Bowl to me.

I find the preservation in Europe to be enchanting: folks don't tear down buildings or rename them for whatever is popular that year. Even after World War II when Germany was obliterated, some cities chose their rebuild to feature new buildings that looked exactly like the old ones! And there's nothing quite like existing within architecture that has been around for a 500-2000 years or to absorb what it's like to look across Prague or Florence. It's delightful to feel so small within the context of the past history that took place in the place I now occupy.

Instead, what do I find when I'm on campus? They tear the University Center not even 40 years after it was built to replace it with...a University Center. OK, as this is a tired story, therefore the new has now become old: there's likely a blueprint in development somewhere on someone's desk for the next University Center that'll borrow another Caterpillar's tread to crush warm memories.

It feels good to be off Spotify! It is just another step toward trading in a streaming life for dial-up. I admit, back in 1998, I thought I was a cool cat with my always on Internet from Roadrunner, as many of my friends were running a 24-7 AIM client. Information was instantly at our fingertips in an age when we had to know things. We were knowledge barons.

The millennium turned and this tech became ubiquitous. Its novelty as a jungle gym for the mind was replaced by an industrial park pumping out paradoxes of mindless automata. The need to know things, to be one independent from the collective, fell away. No one ever asked if we should do this.

Well, almost no one.

Before the age of even the (not-so-)smart phone, I remember the warm cascades of a coffeehouse on a frosted-edged, Christmas season night when someone asked why I did not have a cell phone. Moments later, they received a call during our conversation...

I wonder what fruit was wrought by these two decades of our handing over our tickets for autodidact adventure? Now caught in the safety net of pedagogical security, we are shoved into a can and sterilized, then stocked onto a grocer's shelf to be just another bland component of a dinner stew for the vanguards of power. Instead of becoming savvy to tech, people are subjugated to the Alvin and the Chipmunks voice erupting from their pocket demon. En masse, people ravage the technological landscape and across society itself, like termites tearing down a house. There is simply no recognition that words have no added significance when given a type font.

Did my commercial printing childhood with all the typesetting therein inoculate me from these crudely-formed representations of a will?

PEOPLE ACTUALLY CLICK ON ADS—who actually clicks on ADS?!

With today's 182 lb (-4.5%) weigh-in, The 25th Expedition is now here and with it, the insertion of a change of pace! More of that in the coming days....

Last Sunday's The 500th Night Diet 5K foreshadowed today. That race ushered in a new era. Which, is an old era. Which is new.

With it, I brought back my earlier theme to promote clarity and improve my focus. In doing so, I....

• Implemented a line-by-line stylesheet migration;
• Revamped the Weigh-in table;
• Slightly changed the style of the Resolutions table and updated the Python objective;
• Moved Races to Status;
• Moved my Logs and Poetry to Me;
• Updated Weigh-in line chart for today;
• Reset the countdown clock for the next weighin.

Last night, I played around with bash scripts and Desktop launchers to make my life easier. Employing sshpass, I have a script that logs into my web host making it a single double-click and I'm in. I would have daisy chained that with another script I created last night to make a seamless experience, but I guess that's not possible—at least not with my current skill set! That second script:

• Pulls two .htaccess files and Let's Encrypt directory since every time I rebuild my Jekyll site, the process removes them;
• Builds the site with my new update(s);
• Moves the .htaccess files and directory back in place.

Sure, I could type all of that into a terminal by hand for that's exactly what I've been doing up to now, but I'd rather just type ./build.sh—I know, not the most creative name, but I was spent cognitively!

Finally, I threw together a script that kicks off my local Jekyll site from the Desktop because...well, I want to be lazy.

I spoke with the Spotify Bot last night and have deleted my account. In the past, I traveled from Expedition to Expedition through music and while I even had a playlist set aside in commemoration of The 24th, I'm doing something different. And honestly, when I tore down all of the old playlists from recovery, it set the tone for the future.

Spotify is a service that has been up for the debate, but ultimately it has failed to meet expectations. Customization is friggin' easy to do across the virtual cityscape! Even Burger King had have it your way Whoppers back in '74. As I get older, it just seems more and more like a die cut world.