inquiry

From this on kind words:

So I'm formally inviting you to send out some letters. Let others give you some encouragement, and try your hand at encouraging others as well. If there's one thing we need, heading into 2020, it's more Kind Words.

Fun!

Elsewhere:

U.S. Forest Service fire lookout Philip Connors is right that “[e]very culture should have a couple of outsiders bringing a message from outside of the dominant culture” but I'm not sure an old white guy sitting atop a tower in a forest is really outside the dominant culture.

That not all “old white guy” are remotely culturally the same reveals the phrase “old white guy” to simultaneously be an ageist, racist, and sexist statement/belief.

From this node:

I have been in my Uxbridge, Ontario apartment for 4 consecutive days now. I do not exit the building or walk around the urban areas. My mother has made up excuses to block my number and my dad and brother ignore my calls. I have –$27 in my bank account and a headache. I am disabled and rely on ODSP income support.

How sad that the great and powerful internet – and its incomparable participants – have come to the point where I no longer believe a single, goddamned thing said therein.

Mmmm to the following statement from here:

Artificial Intelligence is still hard it seems but sometimes they nail Artificial Stupidity.

Richard MacManus, of ReadWriteWeb fame, has an interesting analysis of email newsletter subscribers that gets into the question of whether or not people are willing to pony up for paid subscriptions, and if so to what are those willing customers subscribing, exactly. He talks a bit about the idea of “subscription fatigue” and as I've wondered before if “you could subscribe to all of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Medium for $17/month” why would you instead spend more than that to subscribe, for example, to just five SubStack newsletters? You've got to have a lot of casual cash sitting around to subscribe to anything more than a couple.

It's all opinion, all “facts” carefully curated to attain a desired bias vector, and there's still plenty of that available for free elsewhere online.

At read.write.as, for example.

In this here post, for example.

That anyone ever got someone else to pay them for their opinions – especially when the latter are already getting paid by advertisers (who generally seem to have a say in the aforementioned “vectors”) – remains hallmark evidence this species mostly has shit for brains.

The more I think about it, opinions really are mind's primary waste product. It's no wonder we often refer to its outbursts as “dumping”.

ETA: I got so carried away with the above that I forgot to reiterate something I've said before a number of times now: “Do away with likes in favor of highlighting. Do away with retweets in favor of commenting. Interaction over indication. Expression over excitation.”

How does it matter whether an ignoramus like me “highlights” instead of “likes” something you post? Either way, you don't want to know about it for having so efficiently settled my ignoramus status.

How do we attain justice when we are deciding to throw up our hands and wait for the president to “self-impeach?” These women know that, while Pelosi’s wealth and Whiteness

So... wealth and skin color determine being/behavior?

can act as her shield against Trump’s most egregious executive orders and policy maneuvers, they and their constituents don’t have that luxury nor do they have the time. When asked what, if anything, the Speaker was going to do about the recent allegations of rape made by author E. Jean Carroll against the president, her response was “what can Congress do?” This is not only outrageous but unacceptable.

The fact that people lie (especially in the vicinity of potential profit) is also outrageously unacceptable, yet it seems these days people are willing to pretend that couldn't possibly be the case for some narratives.

I definitely feel enoch's Linux pain.

My solution was to strive to care less about bells and whistles (read: fonts and formatting) than textural content, and thus leverage terminal/line-command tools for such whenever possible. Then I'm good in more vanilla Linux, in whatever Linux underlies MacOS, in the Linux accessible on a Chromebook, and in “cygwin” on Windows.

Grant it, sometimes emphasis is lost (e.g. the “elinks” terminal browser can't display italics), there are occasional SSL issues requiring browser intervention, etc. But for the most part it feels like an extremely sanely stable environment, not to mention one that provides much motivation to create one's own clever solutions to online information and/or interactions.

This love letter to personal websites echoed stuff I've read on read.write.as. Makes a lot of sense.

For those who've risen above “sheeple” status, that is.

I have a couple, but they're covered in digital cobwebs and dust because too many I love wouldn't understand.