check in round up!!

viva · 25-02-21 05:16:40

Hey folks! Just a general post to say hi <3

Here at HQ we are feeling the seasons change... Autumn starts officially next week and while I've got my fingers crossed for a few more warm days, I wont hold my breath as is been a fairly chilly summer overall. I'm missing international travel so much and hoping by the next time summer rolls around, the whole world will be back on airplanes flying everywhere! Until then we are just chillin, making porn and just happy to be (mostly) on the beers in 2021.

How about you guys? How are things in your part of the world?

MS2020 · 25-02-21 05:20:02

Here up north it will soon be spring. While it took longer than usual for it to get frigid in Minnesota, I'm still a little rived up from being stuck inside over the last couple weeks. Things are slowly warming up and I'm looking forward. to that.

Oh incidentally Viva, I just started that new thread you recommend. Feel free to check it out and offer some insights if you like.

Last edited by MS2020 (25-02-21 05:21:29)

maurice_B · 26-02-21 14:40:10

This side of the Atlantic it's been a crazy month weatherwise, with freezing cold and some of the heaviest snow in years followed by springlike warmth over the last few days. Like you I can't wait to travel the world again but the plague is still with us so it might be another while. So many things to look forward to when our lockdown finally ends: Concerts! Movies! Partys! My favorite eateries! Massages! And most of all, meeting lots of friends and swapping the elbow greeting for a good 'ol hug.

ThatIndividual · 27-02-21 03:59:28

I"m an oddball and pretty much revel in it. (Yes - at home and dancing by myself!) From my perspective, much of the restrictions have been society acclimating themselves to my way of life. So in a sense going back to "normal" will be the odd thing for me. I'm hoping we can keep the masks. (I deeply resonated with "Wonko The Sane" from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.)

Spring's here soon, too. Though this place has had snow in May in recent times so who knows what to expect this year!

Last edited by ThatIndividual (27-02-21 04:00:16)

viva · 01-03-21 00:46:45

I love solo dance parties at home! We are just like Euphemia

privignus · 02-03-21 06:59:26

Saturday and today were bad mental health days for me. I am still unemployed and not making much progress job-hunting because I am too depressed to finish applications. Our local government in its wisdom has decided not to go for covid-0 just to keep on carrying on with no mingling of households and hope that the vaccines come faster than the new more infectious variants of the virus. Since I recently finished a degree, there is a bit of a time limit - I am already too many years after graduation to be eligible for some starting positions. Some flowers are blossoming and I am making progress on my second book because writing is something rational I can control. Why I can't channel that energy to write applications I just don't know!

ThatIndividual wrote:

I"m an oddball and pretty much revel in it. (Yes - at home and dancing by myself!) From my perspective, much of the restrictions have been society acclimating themselves to my way of life. So in a sense going back to "normal" will be the odd thing for me. I'm hoping we can keep the masks. (I deeply resonated with "Wonko The Sane" from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.)
Spring's here soon, too. Though this place has had snow in May in recent times so who knows what to expect this year!

The problem for me is that at the start of 2019 I had finally moved to action on something I had realized years earlier: the closed social media culture of today's Internet is not right for me the way that the open web culture of the early Internet was. I think its a combination of closed social media and smartphones, massification destroying the autistic evidence-based culture of the early net, and people promoting aggressive irrationality in some countries which tend to be very loud on the Internet. So this decade, healthy communities for me will be face-to-face and local (healthy communities for someone else might look different).

I see some people trying to use corporate social media to spread evidence and rationality, and if they are having fun why not, but the master's tools will never demolish the master's house. You don't get rid of the scummy casino by winning all its money at the roulette table.

Last edited by privignus (02-03-21 07:01:43)

viva · 04-03-21 07:54:18

Priv, I feel you. My partner worked his whole 20s to get his doctorates degree only to find there were absolutely no jobs for someone with his oh-so-specific qualificatons - yeah, not even academic ones. And the low-level academic jobs here like tutoring and the like have been casualised to death - but he was doing that, until Covid hit. Now he's retraining as a social worker, healing from the years of failed applications and disillusionment, and writing his novel as well. Sounds like you may have a lot in common and if your story is anything like his, I'm so sorry. It sounds so hard.

I'm interested in the second part of what you said too but I don't understand it too well. Are you saying the internet used to be a healthy place for you but now face to face is healthier cause the internet has changed?

privignus · 04-03-21 19:41:02

viva wrote:

I'm interested in the second part of what you said too but I don't understand it too well. Are you saying the internet used to be a healthy place for you but now face to face is healthier cause the internet has changed?

Yes. The autistic, evidence-centred, collaborative, thoughtful culture of the open Internet was right for me. The self-promotional, extroverted, impulsive culture of closed social media is not. You can see it if you compare old forum threads and geeky mailing lists, which have a high density of not-particularly-educated people citing good books, to FB/reddit/birdsite. You can see it if you compare the XKCD #386 "someone is wrong on the Internet" and the old rules "don't feed the trolls" and "don't get nosy about the real-life identities behind people's handles" to the vlogs and birdsite accounts which are nothing but screaming that someone is wrong on the Internet under their meatspace identity. We developed these norms through painful experience ("someone is always wrong on the Internet"), and a lot of people are choosing to pretend that they don't exist and do the exact opposite.

My worst heartbreaks have been with communities I thought I knew through the online but did not spend enough time with face to face to see the problems before they were too big to ignore.

privignus · 04-03-21 19:56:58

The kind of people who had a thoughtful blog on politics during the early days of the occupation of Iraq are putting their efforts into screaming slogans and soundbites. The kind of people who had a searchable geeky website are putting their excellent minds into making memes on closed sites which those sites can delete, hide from search engines, or mangle at whim. The things about Internet culture which were not right for me (its reactiveness, its self-referentiality, its attraction to people with too much time on their hands and too much confidence that they are experts on everything) have become the basis of social media culture.

I spend 10 years modelling my Internet culture and saying "hold on, these norms you speak of are not norms, they are something new and contradictory to how we do things ... why should we change our norms?" I failed completely.

viva · 04-03-21 23:51:59

Yeah, I hear you. I guess everything changes and all frontiers become part of the known landscape eventually. I get what you mean in a sense, though I was on the early internet and I didn't find it particularly restrained or dignified. Maybe your areas were! Mine were fandoms and adult chat rooms, and they were hectic af. Also maybe while I am an intellectual and logical person, I'm also emotional, silly, and love attention, parts of myself which I do not see as one being better than the other, but pretty much equal in importance in myself. The internet in all its phases has given me outlets for all these parts of myself - the social media circles I happen to be in (though yeah, I don't participate in birdsite) still have a people recommending good books, having deep and respectful conversations, and keeping science and academic knowledge centred in discourse - although, conversations which are TOO anal about gatekeeping and fact-checking people bore me, so I actually lean more towards theoretical and relational topics myself.

One thing I personally miss about the earlier internet is its heavily textual nature. I had a live journal and my friends and fans would read huge pages and pages of text I would write, and they would respond with long comments as well. That world was bliss to me, as a reader and writer. In those days a picture took forever to load, much less a video, and an animated gif was like, 3 frames of movement on an 8bit rendered torch - which we still complained about, haha.

The modern strong focus on imagery and pictures of text is less my "thing", so yeah I'm a bit sad that people don't really read that much anymore. But I do get that so many people are visual much more than me, and while making a place more open and welcoming (also, unfortunately, commercial) does inevitably change its vibe, I still think the internet is a cool and magical place.

Also yeah like one of the things I loved about the internet - IMing - now I can do from a park or the ocean - basically I dont have to sit at a terminal all the time, which I do love as well. I have been messaging with my friends since I was a young teenager, and now still it's my primary form of communication. I love texting.

TZO2K16 · 05-03-21 11:44:31

ThatIndividual wrote:

I"m an oddball and pretty much revel in it. (Yes - at home and dancing by myself!) From my perspective, much of the restrictions have been society acclimating themselves to my way of life. So in a sense going back to "normal" will be the odd thing for me. I'm hoping we can keep the masks. (I deeply resonated with "Wonko The Sane" from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.)
Spring's here soon, too. Though this place has had snow in May in recent times so who knows what to expect this year!

I am pretty much a hermit that spends months alone at home, so this quarantine was pretty much my normal, though I did discuss my breaking out of my shell little by little with my therapist as I have pretty much no one as a true friend/s, just a smattering of acquaintances strewn over here and there...

(The thought of mandatory venturing out on public transit later today fills me with dread, as I detest being out around the general public...)

I wish it would remain winter permanently even though spring is rather cool, I would rather it be actually cold outside as I overheat entirely too easy and the southeastern u.s. is an armpit-in-a-sauna-level of hot down here!

Last edited by TZO2K16 (05-03-21 11:45:26)

privignus · 06-03-21 04:27:26

viva wrote:

Yeah, I hear you. I guess everything changes and all frontiers become part of the known landscape eventually. I get what you mean in a sense, though I was on the early internet and I didn't find it particularly restrained or dignified. Maybe your areas were! Mine were fandoms and adult chat rooms, and they were hectic af. Also maybe while I am an intellectual and logical person, I'm also emotional, silly, and love attention, parts of myself which I do not see as one being better than the other, but pretty much equal in importance in myself. The internet in all its phases has given me outlets for all these parts of myself - the social media circles I happen to be in (though yeah, I don't participate in birdsite) still have a people recommending good books, having deep and respectful conversations, and keeping science and academic knowledge centred in discourse - although, conversations which are TOO anal about gatekeeping and fact-checking people bore me, so I actually lean more towards theoretical and relational topics myself.

Viva, thanks for listening. I like the point about the early Internet being heavily textual whereas corporate social media is more about images and video.

I try to start discussions about books or webcomics or TV people are in to right now on FB but have not had a lot of success.

I think its less about "respectful" than about community dynamics. In a small community, you can learn 'X is always asking questions but never acts on them' and 'Y does not post much but they are an expert on ...' You can also shape the culture . What the **** can I do to shape the culture of 300 million US persons or several billion Internet users? Especially when they have been teaching themselves slogans why asking questions or for more information and context is evil and wrong? The giant corporate platforms don't reward thoughtful people doing thoughtful things or let them create communities which match their values.

Texting is good! I wish people in the new country did not love WhatsApp so much because its owned by Facebook.

Last edited by privignus (06-03-21 04:30:41)

#1 25-02-21 05:16:40

check in round up!!

#2 25-02-21 05:20:02

Re: check in round up!!

#3 26-02-21 14:40:10

Re: check in round up!!

#4 27-02-21 03:59:28

Re: check in round up!!

#5 01-03-21 00:46:45

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#6 02-03-21 06:59:26

Re: check in round up!!

#7 04-03-21 07:54:18

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#8 04-03-21 19:41:02

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#9 04-03-21 19:56:58

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#10 04-03-21 23:51:59

Re: check in round up!!

#11 05-03-21 11:44:31

Re: check in round up!!

#12 06-03-21 04:27:26

Re: check in round up!!

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