deathmtn

It is the guy's last day at his current daycare/school. He's going to a new preschool next week. It's been a long time! There's this nebulous but huge momentousness that's sinking in.

I went out last night and worked on some art with a friend. We got the beginnings of something working, which was great, but it was really nice to have focused time in a separate place for that, regardless of outcome. I gotta remember this. Making art with people is an end in and of itself.

I totally did not remember that there was some wacky Moog-type synth going throughout Public Enemy No. 1!

Oh, yeah, yesterday, I worked from home, and it was death-hot, so I just did a single set of 12 on the home bar.

Valuable affirmations! If you are losing hope, it's always helpful to think of a future skeleton army you could join to be part of something bigger than yourself.

Remy Sharp processing the death of a stillborn child. (He normally writes about web development.) Definitely something to skip if you don't want to see grief, but worth reading to have some idea of what that's like and how long it lasts. I think it may help one process their own life a bit, though I don't know exactly how.

I'm incredibly demotivated in work and art. Can I blame the sun?

Renamed a variable from `tfidfEntries` to `analyses`, even though it's less descriptive because I hated looking at `tfidfEntries`.

John Naughton on how a free and open Internet lead us toward fascism.

Trump’s capture of the presidency, says Turner, has comprehensively refuted the democratising promise of digital media. The key feature of authoritarian capture is the projection of the charismatic personality of the ruler. In an analogue era, that meant that the bodies or minds of his audience had to be brought together in one place so that he could work his hypnotic magic. Think Nuremberg rallies or regular speeches like the ones Goebbels used to transmit, via the inexpensive radio receivers he dispensed and also by loudspeakers in public places.

Although Trump has used mini-Nuremberg-style rallies to great effect, he displays most ingenuity in using Twitter to project his charisma. Turner highlights two aspects of this. The first is the way he uses the medium to project his personality: the daft, tempestuous tweets that so infuriate liberals are taken by followers as a sign of his authenticity as a person. He’s “just being himself” – so unlike conventional politicians – and so claims the right to their attention and political support. The second significant aspect is that his tweets come as part of a follower’s twitterstream, interspersed with tweets from friends and a range of other sources. In that way, Trump uses the medium “to insert himself into the company of a user’s chosen conversation partners”, much as Franklin Roosevelt used his “fireside” radio chats during his presidency.

The part that has me thinking the most, though, is the beginning, in which he discusses the assumption that liberalizing communication would necessarily improve democracy. It turned out like any unregulated thing.

Wot

I'm importing passwords from 1Password to pass and noticing, whoa, I have signed up for a lot of garbage. I gotta cut down on signing up for things.