I had a dream that I was attending a lecture on the german language, that turned quickly into a giant bollywood musical led by a beautiful actress. She sang sweetly to me about changing my life while back-up dancers in the thousands swirled around in her in beautiful concentric patterns. Each back-up dancer was also a fiercely devoted fan of the actress and wept for joy to hear her sing, reaching their arms out as they danced like teenagers at a Beatles concert. All I could think was: I just came here to learn german.
And, after I woke up: Maybe some all-dancing, all-singing ancient goddess is trying to tell me something.
Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.
Maybe, and most likely, my subconscious is trying to tell me something.
Maybe.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Important Stories
I have written a birthday story for my birthday, as my gift to you. Or your punishment, depending on how well you like it and what you know you did. Please enjoy, or don't, as is your custom.
Friday, February 01, 2013
Luddite 4 Life
It occurs to me that I should probably actually post to this blog once in a while if I want people to read it. And maybe post things worth reading, but we'll worry about that later. I've mostly been dragging my feet on "leaving adventism, part 2" because it's a big post, kind of a milestone for me personally, and I want to say what I have to say in a concise, but well-argued and well-rounded manner. In other words, I'm trying to put more effort into it than my usual toss-off posts.
So, in the spirit of getting back into the spirit of writing, I present this toss-off post, as written by a cranky old man.
Goddamn that twitter. I say goddamn it. I have reluctantly come to realize that not only is twitter just about the most worthless place on the internet to have any sort of conversation, I have a personal problem regarding people being wrong on the internet. And since 140char is not enough space to establish context and caveats for any given statement, any given statement is likely to be wrong, as read in plain english, absent the necessary context or caveats. So, I could waste my whole damn life attempting to fight for truth in a medium that is hostile to discussions of truth, fact, evidence and reasoning. In short, twitter is not a medium for discussing basically anything of substance.
"Well, duh," you say, "everyone knows that."
To which I reply, "Do they? Because, did you notice how rapidly journalists and politicians, ostensibly the keepers of the keys to complicated, nuanced highly-detailed arguments and ideas, stampeded to using the medium least capable of supporting a discussion about any of those things? And isn't it their constituents that dragged them there? Have you noticed how political argument has gone from bold, overly concise assertion on twitter to emotional appeal in the form of picture with out-of-context quote typed over it? Like 140char was a space just too big and terrifyingly open with which to construct a thought?"
And now there's Vine, because a one minute Youtube video is just too goddamn tedious to sit through. Okay, okay, I keed a bit. Much like twitter, on a technological level it's pretty clever. The ability to make a stop motion, or edited-on-the-fly little six second snippet and post it to your friends relatively rapidly is technology with great potential. Even greater, if the same tools could be used to create a video for beings with an attention span somewhat longer than a hamster. But still, I've watched maybe 20 of the things and while yes there was the usual cats, duck face and lunch pictures there were also "magic" tricks, stop-motion, time-lapse and loop videos that seemed genuinely clever and worth my time. And if this technology actually inspires someone to get more expensive and better tools and make even longer, more intricate little movies then frankly that's fantastic.
Among my many and obvious problems is, increasingly, a bias towards ideas and activities that take longer than a few seconds to grapple with, because, in my opinion, most ideas require more effort and more time to grapple with them properly. So I'm attempting to re-orient myself to the media I use, in ways that encourage honest grappling with ideas that I find important and interesting, and minimizing time spent looking at and then forgetting minutia in shorter time frames. In other words, the problem is not twitter, Vine or Facebook, the problem is how (and maybe whether) I use it. And honestly, if I don't find my preferred medium of communication on the internet, there's nothing stopping me from creating it myself.
For instance, I have an idea for a wrapper service for twitter that facilitates longer conversations. It would be presented largely in the same format as twitter, and wraps an entire thread around an individual tweet (with room to write substantially more than 140 char). I want to call it screech, because that's what the arguments on twitter would be akin to. So, instead of trying to reply to someone's tweet directly in twitter, you and your friends would be reading twitter in screech, and then any tweets that inspired a longer conversation in screech would be a different color or something, and when you clicked on it, you would expand a series of posts in screech anchored to that tweet. In essence, expandable threads for twitter with individual tweets as the first post of each thread. See, that would be useful. And if anyone wants to make this before I find the time to, that would be awesome.
Until that happy day, I am creating new rules for myself and twitter.
1) No arguing, ever. People are going to say some stupid bullshit on twitter. I am going to let them be wrong, because there's no space on twitter to argue a point properly. It's like trying to ballroom dance in a supply closet.
2) I like snark. Snark is okay. I might tweet stupid jokes, I enjoy reading stupid jokes on twitter. I will snark and not take it too seriously.
3) I will be careful of grandiose statements on twitter. There's only enough room to assert and not to support, and a big idea usually needs support, or at least context. No idea sounds particularly grandiose when shouted into a tin can. It's the wrong format for my Big Idea.
4) I am primarily going to use twitter to link longer, more thoughtful collections of words that I or someone else has written for the consideration of my followers. Self-promotion and/or links to longer bits of information, are really just the best use of twitter in my opinion.
I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about Facebook. Or Vine. Or Youtube, except I'm going to try and stop worrying about the pointless minutia therein. And maybe actively posting pointless minutia therein. And I'm still processing whether or when I'm going to start a blog of some sort under my real name, because I think there's real merit to doing that if I want people to take the things I write seriously. Whether the things I write are worth taking seriously, is still a matter of ongoing discussion.
But still, goddamn that twitter. You kids, I swear.
So, in the spirit of getting back into the spirit of writing, I present this toss-off post, as written by a cranky old man.
Goddamn that twitter. I say goddamn it. I have reluctantly come to realize that not only is twitter just about the most worthless place on the internet to have any sort of conversation, I have a personal problem regarding people being wrong on the internet. And since 140char is not enough space to establish context and caveats for any given statement, any given statement is likely to be wrong, as read in plain english, absent the necessary context or caveats. So, I could waste my whole damn life attempting to fight for truth in a medium that is hostile to discussions of truth, fact, evidence and reasoning. In short, twitter is not a medium for discussing basically anything of substance.
"Well, duh," you say, "everyone knows that."
To which I reply, "Do they? Because, did you notice how rapidly journalists and politicians, ostensibly the keepers of the keys to complicated, nuanced highly-detailed arguments and ideas, stampeded to using the medium least capable of supporting a discussion about any of those things? And isn't it their constituents that dragged them there? Have you noticed how political argument has gone from bold, overly concise assertion on twitter to emotional appeal in the form of picture with out-of-context quote typed over it? Like 140char was a space just too big and terrifyingly open with which to construct a thought?"
And now there's Vine, because a one minute Youtube video is just too goddamn tedious to sit through. Okay, okay, I keed a bit. Much like twitter, on a technological level it's pretty clever. The ability to make a stop motion, or edited-on-the-fly little six second snippet and post it to your friends relatively rapidly is technology with great potential. Even greater, if the same tools could be used to create a video for beings with an attention span somewhat longer than a hamster. But still, I've watched maybe 20 of the things and while yes there was the usual cats, duck face and lunch pictures there were also "magic" tricks, stop-motion, time-lapse and loop videos that seemed genuinely clever and worth my time. And if this technology actually inspires someone to get more expensive and better tools and make even longer, more intricate little movies then frankly that's fantastic.
Among my many and obvious problems is, increasingly, a bias towards ideas and activities that take longer than a few seconds to grapple with, because, in my opinion, most ideas require more effort and more time to grapple with them properly. So I'm attempting to re-orient myself to the media I use, in ways that encourage honest grappling with ideas that I find important and interesting, and minimizing time spent looking at and then forgetting minutia in shorter time frames. In other words, the problem is not twitter, Vine or Facebook, the problem is how (and maybe whether) I use it. And honestly, if I don't find my preferred medium of communication on the internet, there's nothing stopping me from creating it myself.
For instance, I have an idea for a wrapper service for twitter that facilitates longer conversations. It would be presented largely in the same format as twitter, and wraps an entire thread around an individual tweet (with room to write substantially more than 140 char). I want to call it screech, because that's what the arguments on twitter would be akin to. So, instead of trying to reply to someone's tweet directly in twitter, you and your friends would be reading twitter in screech, and then any tweets that inspired a longer conversation in screech would be a different color or something, and when you clicked on it, you would expand a series of posts in screech anchored to that tweet. In essence, expandable threads for twitter with individual tweets as the first post of each thread. See, that would be useful. And if anyone wants to make this before I find the time to, that would be awesome.
Until that happy day, I am creating new rules for myself and twitter.
1) No arguing, ever. People are going to say some stupid bullshit on twitter. I am going to let them be wrong, because there's no space on twitter to argue a point properly. It's like trying to ballroom dance in a supply closet.
2) I like snark. Snark is okay. I might tweet stupid jokes, I enjoy reading stupid jokes on twitter. I will snark and not take it too seriously.
3) I will be careful of grandiose statements on twitter. There's only enough room to assert and not to support, and a big idea usually needs support, or at least context. No idea sounds particularly grandiose when shouted into a tin can. It's the wrong format for my Big Idea.
4) I am primarily going to use twitter to link longer, more thoughtful collections of words that I or someone else has written for the consideration of my followers. Self-promotion and/or links to longer bits of information, are really just the best use of twitter in my opinion.
I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about Facebook. Or Vine. Or Youtube, except I'm going to try and stop worrying about the pointless minutia therein. And maybe actively posting pointless minutia therein. And I'm still processing whether or when I'm going to start a blog of some sort under my real name, because I think there's real merit to doing that if I want people to take the things I write seriously. Whether the things I write are worth taking seriously, is still a matter of ongoing discussion.
But still, goddamn that twitter. You kids, I swear.
Very Important.
People get that the title of this blog and the greek statue background are my way of poking fun at my own sense of self-importance right?
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