inquiry

How can something be a scam if it is free? Well, because they (the college) are promising something that does not pay off in the end. An Associates degree and now, in 2019, even a BA/BS degree is nothing more than a job hunting license. It doesn't promise a bright and better future. It doesn't mean you will earn “X” amount of dollars more than someone who doesn't have a degree. These (bias) stats are worn out from the 1970's playbook of college being a “ticket to prosperity” (at which point it certainly was).

So it's basically like life in general?

Got it.

The Benefits of Ignorance

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” – Upton Sinclair ... Another version:

“Does my voluntary ignorance in this situation afford me something that I would lose if I faced reality?”

It perhaps depends on what “me” being referred to. Ego is essentially the purest form of ignorance, so lesser forms are likely to be to its benefit in a “peas of a pod” sense. (That's not to say lesser forms necessarily make ego feel better, but put more “woe is isolated/separate me” wind in its ignorant sails, i.e. feed it.)

But what of a deeper “me” apparent/obvious only when the thick cobwebs of ignorance are blown away – said ignorance fundamentally being the ignoring of said deeper “me”?

So, as always, context.

I don't know why I wrote a blog post about this

I suspect those are often the best kind, less based in contrivance, in gaming expectations of the ways in which they might be taken: simply pouring others a big tall glass of me straight up, quite possibly shaken and stirred....

So, how do we find that close friend who we can be vulnerable with?

By posting our vulnerability in interactionless places?

(Yes, that was definitely sarcasm given the mostly interactionless nature of this space...)

How do you find friends? There's lots of things written on the internet on this topic. I think the first step is to not isolate so much and be social. This is where I am at. This is the thing I can do at this moment. Before I go, thank you for reading this. I appreciate your encouragement and comments. Maybe we're friends?

It's possible.

But in my experience highly unlikely.

I've been at various forms of this for decades, and landed all of three friends at the very most. And that's quite the generous valuation of the situation, given one drifted off to incommunicado land, and another is kind of in the process of doing that – not “ghosting” per se, but just growing apart and/or life becoming too busy for lesser relationships.

It's a pretty solid reason to be wary of the value of all this screentilation.

Anyway, I'm going to attempt to post this via Matt's “writeas” line command. I messed with it a bit last night – although I became a bit confused by its “help” on the “posts” subcommand (not Matt's fault.. mine for not being able to read for shit, apparently):

NAME:
   posts - List all of your posts

USAGE:
   writeas posts [command options] [arguments...]

DESCRIPTION:
   This will list only local posts.

OPTIONS:
   --id           Show list with post IDs (default)
   --md           Use with --url to return URLs with Markdown enabled
   --tor, -t      Get posts via Tor hidden service, if authenticated
   --url          Show list with URLs
   --verbose, -v  Show verbose post listing, including Edit Tokens

I somehow missed the “This will list only local posts” part, and thus was temporarily confounded/frustrated that I wasn't getting a list of my non-local posts, even authenticated.

Uh, duh inquiry!!!

But, well, I don't really have time to debug the “new” subcommand possibly not working how I'm hoping/expecting it to.

I think the documentation is telling me that (perhaps with the options in a different place/order):

writeas -b inquiry --md --font sans new

will lead to an editor session (“vim” in my environment) whose results will be posted as though I posted the way I usually do when going to “write.as” in the browser.

I think. :–)

Anyway, I'm going to try that now while hoping for the best.

<a bit later>

Um, nope. No go a la:

XXX@localhost:~$ writeas -b inquiry --md --font sans new

Error posting: Unable to post: net/http: request canceled (Client.Timeout exceeded while reading body)
To retry this post, run:
  cat /tmp/WApost078583877.txt | writeas

I see the temporary file, so no idea how reading its body could have timed out....

So, anyway, in fact this was posted the usual way.