I’m 84% of the way along reading Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. So far the read has been a slow go, as he is setting up a lot of backstory and covering a lot of characterization. I don’t mind it, and it’s nowhere near the level of setting work that Stephen King is known for, so I am thankful for that. The twist near the end is quite good, and reminds me, yes Virginia, Hell is Other People.
The central questions, “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?”
I think of it constantly. I also dwell as much as I can within the Golden Rule. Would I want this recycling taken outside? Yes. Okay! I’ll take it!
The troubles come when you default to “Someone else will deal with it.” Only because everyone thinks that way. It’s the default. So, be obnoxious. Be different. Buck the default and do what must be done. Not for reward, but because it needs doing. Nobody is too pure and perfect to not pick up a mess. Partially I do it out of duty, partially to be contrary.
In a lot of ways, being contrary can also power pure altruism. You are altruistic because you learned that pure altruism is a fantasy and you like to confuse and piss people off, especially when they have decided what slot you should be stuffed into. And then you break out. Because you’re contrary. Then when you break out of one mold, that first time, you discover the liberty of being an ass. Of being contrary. And you catch that whiff that life could be different. That it’s refreshing to find a standard and bludgeon it into a new shape.
You could walk right past the recycling bin. You could. But you don’t. You pick it up and you grab other full ones too. Because it bucks a trend, it jumps the default, it isn’t expected and nobody is there to appreciate you for it. But you took the plainness of life out to the shed, hit it with a hammer, and now it’s ever so slightly oblong and different. It’s somewhat new again. Plus you really love to drive people who completely doubt anyone would behave in such a fashion totally apeshit batty.
Silently, without seeking approval or appreciation, without fearing punishment. Because the little things you emit into the world change everything. A flap of a butterfly wing. Have faith that your small unnoticed service will have an effect on the world.
The raindrop doesn’t believe in the flood.
Looks like there are absolutely zero parasites so we can drop quarantine! Still getting used to the house, then migrate to wet food, then introductions. The loonies are on the path!
The last time I was logged into Facebook was June 9th at 11:45pm. I was scrolling along the wall feed and I distinctly felt ill that I was on Facebook. It wasn’t making me happy, it wasn’t rewarding, it was a chore. More than that, it was an unpleasant chore, and at the time it felt repulsive. The kind of repulsion that makes your stomach go sour, hurk a little and the metallic acid tang at the back of your throat, that sort of raw physical displeasure. I closed the tab, and wrote a little in my journal.
It’s been 200 hours and a few since that moment. I haven’t logged on once since. I don’t feel like I am missing anything, except when I have something to cheer or gripe about. There are a few things that I could have posted on Facebook, and thanks to Yelp, some of that has made its way on to Facebook, but that was automation doing the sharing, not me.
I made a break with Facebook. I’m not going to close anything or remove anything, that would require more exposure to their platform. I simply won’t be there. I’ve got this blog, where I can share things, and of course my journal. Almost everything ends up in the journal anyways, the important things in the blog, and I will leave Facebook and Twitter to the machines, let them suffer it. The universal answer to “Did you see on…?” will default to no. I didn’t see it. I don’t really want to see it, but you’ll show it to me anyways. There may never be freedom, true freedom from Facebook, because it leaks in around the edges and is in the news a lot, so it will become something like a persistent fungal infection. Nothing that actually hurts me, but it makes my toenails ugly. Just leave the socks on.
Facebook, and Google both have contributed to the death of smalltalk. What’s the point of saying anything when nobody believes you and they tell you that you are wrong, up until they read it on the platform and then you hear in a small voice, “Oh, yeah… there it is.” So, whatever. It’s best to just leave everything to the platform, it has in so many ways replaced so much for us. The matter of record, truth, facts, and even basic conversation. The only thing left is to pretend to be a dullard. You don’t know anything, you have nothing to say, and everything is a mystery novelty.
The platform is very interesting. We created something we can’t control, it’s bad for us, but we don’t really care. We’re throwing flowers at Frankenstein’s Monster and celebrating it with daily parades, despite the fact that it rampages and burns down random buildings and causes such conflict and suffering. Hooray for the Monster.
I won’t see it on Facebook. Save your bus fare. Keep whatever it is to yourself. Whats the point of talking about it anyways? All the possible conversations are there, up on that platform, go there, knock yourself out. The Monster loves daisies.
While I’ve been enjoying Chicago, and we’ve been pretty much carless the entire time with the Santa Fe parked in the hotels parking structure and taking Uber rides everywhere it has done nothing to reduce the nightmares that I suffer every night sleeping in this place.
Car Theft.
These nightmares are riffs on a theme, different thieves, different cars, different lives, different settings. Cars without wheels, somehow rolling away, cars without any internal parts whatsoever operating as if they had them. Thieves that are anonymous or thieves that are caught but chatty occupy the dreamscape.
I’ve had three cycles of sleep here, and in each cycle, the same exact thing. My vehicle is stolen. When I try to stop the thieves, they explain to me that it has to be this way, that it always has to be this way.
And while I’ve had a delightful time at C2E2, I am going to welcome my exit from this place. I can’t stay in Chicago much longer, if nothing more that I can’t endure many more of these nightmares every single night, like clockwork.
Much like the elves in Tolkiens tales, sometimes the time is right to board the boats and head west. In this particular case, what to do with Facebook.
I’ve been using Facebook since July 2nd 2008. In the beginning it was wonderful, sharing and everyone seemed kinder, more conscientious, I suppose the world was better back then. Many people were looking for a new platform once LiveJournal collapsed, which if we are really serious about it, came when SixApart was sold to the Russians. Americans fled pretty much after that. And so, Facebook was a thing.
Mostly friends, it hadn’t taken off yet. Many of the later iterations that make Facebook the way it is today weren’t even thought up of back then, and in a lot of ways, it was better in the past. But then everyone started to join the service and we started to learn about the ramifications and consequences of using Facebook. I can remember that feeling of betrayal as Facebook posts were printed out and handed to my workplace management. That really was the first lesson in privacy and the beginning of the end of my involvement with Facebook.
Facebook has been on-again-off-again for a while. In time I realized that I was addicted to the service and the sharing. With enough time I realized that Facebook was actually fit more as a mental illness than an addiction. I had to stop it, because in a very big way, it was the service or my mental health.
So fleeing Facebook is the name of the game. First I downloaded all my content from the service, then I started to move the saved links from Facebook to Pocket for safekeeping. Then I went through and started hacking away at groups, pages, and apps. All of these tasks will be long-tailed, they’ll take a while for me to polish off because Facebooks tentacles run very deep, and in a rather surprising way, just how deep they actually go is remarkable.
So now I’m looking at writing more and sharing more from my Blog. This post is kind of a waypoint to this end. I installed a new theme with some new images featured, and the next step is to figure out a “Members Only” area where I can separate out the public from my friends. There are some items that I intend to write about that use specific names and I don’t want to play the pronoun game with my readers. I also don’t want hurt feelings or C&D notices, both of which some of my writing has created in the past.
I will detail my journey with disposing of Facebook here on this blog. I have eliminated publicity to Twitter and Facebook, but I left G+ on, because G+ is a desert.
So, here we go!
Some notable events from other July 1st’s
2003 – Installed a network aware fax machine, and then attached it to Groupwise. My god, Groupwise. This is such a walk down memory lane! And this of course was the first of a repeated meme that online shared mailboxes at work are upsetting to people because they aren’t “private”, in the same way that a regular fax machine is “private” by hovering over it and muscling out anyone who might try to use it. It of course begs the question, what are you transmitting at work that is “private”, that you shouldn’t be doing at say, a FedEx shop or Office Depot?
2003 – Toppenish, Washington was in the news because a keyword blocker at a library got upset because it found something it didn’t approve of in the text of the domain name itself. Nowadays we don’t search domains for text fragments, we actually categorize them.
2004 – Again with the Fax Machine. In this case, not having long distance on the line requiring the use of an AT&T calling card, with a 60-digit calling sequence just to send a fax far away. And the merry mixups when people who work for an Institution for Higher Learning demonstrate no higher learning by being unable to comprehend digits. Ah, those were the days.
2004 – Farhenheit 9/11 – Hah, those were the days, weren’t they? When it only felt like scandals were rare and maybe all the crazy conspiracy theories were just theories. Oh, the memories.
2006 – Sharing the photos of the bathroom rebuild. It was a long while ago that we tore the guts out of that bathroom and updated it.
2007 – At O’Hare, running through security, on my way to visit family in Syracuse.
2008 – Another trip to Syracuse. This time through Detroit.
2009 – The problem with the cloud is poor security and access points everywhere. What happens when people plant incriminating evidence via a route, like junk mail, that you pay very little attention to – and then make an anonymous tip about the evidence? It was an interesting consideration and helps reinforce how important it is to keep everything digital tidy.
2013 – I wrote a lot of things about the security threat that our very own NSA represents. And little did he know that in 2017, the tools they collected and wrote would leak out and turn into WannaCry ransomware attack. Thanks NSA!
2015 – Facebook Notifications get an enhancement and they can accept a GPG Public Key, so all the Facebook Notifications over email are all encrypted. This was a really good proof-of-concept option from one of the worlds biggest Internet sites, alas it won’t ever take off because GPG is an all-or-nothing technology, and since you aren’t going to have all, all you get is nothing. It was this day that I also gave a lot more thought to The Golden Rule and started to reshape my life around it as a moral compass.
One of the biggest headaches with my WordPress blog is remembering to write new posts with any frequency. It sometimes comes down to a test of many editors, which one do I like, and how smooth is the learning curve to upload my story to my blog post? Email is a pain, mostly because the instrumentation to add all the extra bits is rather annoying and I don’t really want to revisit and markup a blog entry after I’ve written it. Then after that, I looked at BBEdit, which is the big-brother to TextWrangler. The folks who wrote that application provided a free trial of BBEdit, and gamely informed me that TextWrangler was a dead duck. I never really got engaged with BBEdit enough to think of it as a source for blogging, and TextWrangler is still pretty good for what I need.
Since I’ve had this blog for a long while, and I feel a little bad about neglecting it, perhaps it’s time to dust off the old blogging tools and hop back into it. Facebook is the Walmart of Social Media, it’s everywhere you look, but you feel dirty using it because you know every time you walk in you’re being measured and indexed and categorized.
Facebook, like Walmart, brings a ready audience to the party, people who are happy enough to just waddle through and notice what you have to write and maybe drop a like down. Blogging has always been longer-form than Facebook, and way longer than Twitter. Plus since I host my own blog on my own domain, I can write things here that I wouldn’t or can’t write in other places.
So this test will see how well this little app called Blogo works on my MacBook Pro. If it’s good, we’ll likely have more stories appear in the blog in the future.
Sometimes it’s the best thing to assert you win and walk away from a toxic problem. So far today I’ve done that quite a bit. What have I abandoned?
I’ve walked away from Facebook. It’s been four days since I even logged into Facebook and since then I haven’t missed it. I’ve been catching up on my news; the Spiceworks Community board consumes a lot of time. Then after that, I turned my attention to my Pocket list. There just isn’t enough time anymore to deal with Facebook. When I logged into it, I had eighteen notifications, and I frowned and realized that I didn’t care that much. I’m writing a lot of my thoughts into my journal after coming to the realization that sharing with others isn’t going to be a positive experience. Now nearly everything on Facebook is an unpleasant experience. So, abandoning toxic things seems to be a good thing for me.
Another toxic system is Office365. Microsoft and I go back for a long while, right along with my almost palpable hate for that company and their products. Going into just how Office365 lets me down is very dull. Nearly every interaction has me wishing I could just close my laptop, put it in my backpack and run away from my life. Everything that has some Microsoft technology associated with it has me frowning in deep disappointment. Alas, there is no way to escape the Great Beast of Redmond, so we gnash our teeth and endure the horrors.
The final horror is WordPress itself. I use a stock theme, Twenty-Twelve. It’s not a custom theme. It’s not slick or responsive. It’s just a dumb theme. So while reading my blog, I realized just how much I wanted to change the line-spacing for my post entries. This is where my expectations fork, there is an Apple fork and an “Everything Else” fork. The Apple fork has been proven time and time again, that the answer is simple and shallow and easy to get to, understand what the change will do, and make it work. Then there is everything else. Here we have WordPress itself. I wanted to change the line-spacing on my theme. So I go to the Dashboard, and I spend ten minutes blindly stabbing at possible places where this option might be hiding to no effect. Then I do a Google search, which is the first and last place that most possible solutions are born and die. A good Google search almost always results in the answer you are after. So, “WordPress vertical line spacing” led to a place that eventually had the solution in it, but the theme didn’t match what I was expecting. This is the core of frustration, so I modified the search to include the themes name itself, and that helped. I found the setting, and it was in a CSS stylesheet file. I left the WWW when it was still HTML only. CSS irritates me. But anyways, hack CSS, that’s the answer. It’s a dumb answer, but that’s it. So I find about 130 places where line-height is an option. I laugh bitterly at the number. Which section to edit? Are you sure? So I gave it a shot. I set the line-height to 2.0 and then looked at my site. I can’t tell if it improved or not. But the most adaptive solution is to assert it did what I wanted. Mark the win as a notch and move on. Do I care? Well, I wanted to do something. I did something. Did it work? Probably not.
But then we get back to that first fork. That’s why I love Apple so much. Nearly everything they touch MAKES SENSE. I don’t have to struggle with some labyrinthine mystery. Maybe my edits will work, maybe they will break whatever it is, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe any setting I change will be overridden somewhere else, by something that was never documented. That’s the core design principle of both WordPress and Microsoft. I suppose we should just be happy that the most basic functions work. Much like the Internet itself, the fact that any of this works is a daily miracle.
So instead of writing a huge rant, one that nobody wants to read and nobody cares about I will assert that I won, psychologically move forward and be able to forget the conditions that led me to those particular experiences. The blog doesn’t work like you want? Don’t go there. Facebook a cesspool of ugly humanity? Skip it. Microsoft? Ah, if only it would burn to the ground. But we can’t have what we wish, even if we’d do anything for our dreams to come true.
So! Hooray! A Win! Facebook, WordPress, Office365! Just stop worrying about the bomb. It’s “Someone Else’s Problem®”