deathmtn

Whoa, squirrels in (I presume) California are way more final-level-lookin' than the gray bois around here.

A little more thinking re: platforms and people.

I tend to think people stay on platforms, even platforms they don't like, because they have developed relationships with exclusive resources on that platform, like products, art, or people. In the case of people, leaving the platform can meaning leaving friends that are not reachable in other ways.

Now, though, it occurs to me that if those friends will not communicate with someone outside of a particular platform (assuming a non-onerous alternative is available), are they really friends?

I think they are like the kind of friends you might have at a club sport. You are friends when you are doing that activity, but if you leave the club, you won't hear from them again. The club and sport is the thing for them; and you are nice company.

I think this is fine, as long as you understand what it is. There's a lot of Twitter and Facebook that don't, and as a result, overvalue the criticality of those platforms.

I remember Republicans having a bullshit talking point about Obama being a Kenyan anti-colonialist. The idea was to scare White people, even though Obama had no history with Kenyan politics.

But: Why the fuck wouldn't you be an anti-colonialist?

I was just reading about the Mau Mau Uprising. (Got there because I was thinking about Twitter MAU.) As colonialists are wont to do, the British were stealing Kenyan livestock. So, an uprising started. The rebels were not well organized and complex, as they often are. The British reaction was to torture civilians:

Between 320,000-450,000 of them were moved into concentration camps. Most of the remainder – more than a million – were held in "enclosed villages". Although some were Mau Mau guerrillas, many were victims of collective punishment that colonial authorities imposed on large areas of the country. Thousands suffered beatings and sexual assaults during "screenings" intended to extract information about the Mau Mau threat. Later, prisoners suffered even worse mistreatment in an attempt to force them to renounce their allegiance to the insurgency and to obey commands. Significant numbers were murdered.[206] Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". Castration by British troops and denying access to medical aid to the detainees were also widespread and common.[207][208][209] Among the detainees who suffered severe mistreatment was Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of Barack Obama, the former President of the United States.

There's been this idea in discussions lately that the West does not torture. On one hand, I'm for any idea that reduced torture. On the other, it is clearly historically false, just like this idea that the British are very civilized.

12 social media checks today. I counted one as two because I actually posted something non-promotional to Twitter, which is almost always a mistake.

I'm now not sure where I am on the Meet Prople Where They Are vs. Providing Content That Makes Twitter Compelling to People continuum.

Twitter is a corporate entity that is motivated by whatever causes the most engagement, whether it's Nazis harassing people or Trump stoking outrage to push them toward fascism. Putting art on Twitter gives people on Twitter to experience art, but it also promotes Twitter and that the idea that it should be fed for the sake of things like this.

On the other hand, not everyone can leave Twitter. Some people can't contact people in other ways. These are the cherished network effects that VC-funded tech companies fight so hard for.

I had a pretty good day off, to my mild surprise!

I did a bunch of thinking about project organization, and I did end up reviving Portals, my old Trello viewer, and added cards for every unfinished tasks I had in my notebook, plus a few things that were in my head that I felt were important.

Portals was meant to do a few different things, one of which was estimating how long things will take. That's all I use it for now. As it is, the tasks I have down will take at least through the middle of November.

Once I add the "someday" projects from my notebook, I'm sure things'll go well into 2019. Then, I'm going to have to cut and rearrange.

It was kind of a pleasant surprise that it wasn't too difficult to use and alter projects that I wrote 2-3 years ago today. Not jumping to new tech stacks all the time has its benefits.

I was walked around with Katt, and we ate lunch at a nice seafood restaurant. It was incredibly refreshing.

I really enjoyed the space I had today.

Even the Kavanaugh confirmation has taken a mildly pleasant turn? Still likely that he'll get confirmed, but just slightly less likely than he was yesterday.

17 checks today.

I'm tired, but I feel like I shouldn't be? Things haven't really been that intense.