juliannechat

Only one question matters

 

One question for each of us: 

Are you working to keep our planet habitable by the living creatures and plants we have now?

Or are you ignoring the problem or even working against our common goal?

Now this is the only question.

 

Jacques Ellul said, don't get distracted. If we get distracted [1] we'll become extinct.

I don't care about people's reasons for working for change. Just so they act.

 

Two eloquent essays (rants): 

What Do You Call The Feeling Of A Dying Planet? by umair haque 

People Will Look Back and Regret How They Acted by Jessica Wildfire

If you prefer long form, read the compilation All We Can Save or anything recent by Rebecca Solnit.

 

[1] Not a distraction: dismantling structural racism and making reparations to people whose ancestors we enslaved. (The concept of "Whiteness," concocted by the ruling class to divide workers from each other, hurts us all. Tim Wise explains this at more length.)  

It will be easier to save ourselves, all of us, if we stop thwarting the energy of Black people. (You can download a Citigroup report that documents part of the damage.) Let's unleash everyone. For a start we could stop suffocating people and shooting them in the back.

Each group of Americans who are not considered "white" has its own issues. For example, see Lily Zheng's To Dismantle Anti-Asian Racism, We Must Understand Its Roots. Listening to people directly hurt by racism (without asking them to fix or save us) is a path forward.

 

Speaking of reparations, did you know that the US recently pledged to pay reparations to countries who are suffering the most (and may already be under water) from the effect that the US "lifestyle" has had on the planet? The amounts weren't enough but they were a beginning. And now we've paused paying them: another decision putting me as a US taxpayer (since 1973) on the wrong side of this one question. Here Lawrence Lessig explains why the modern (currently used) filibuster is fraudulent (his words) and (my opinion) needs to die. 

 

Personally I answer YES but I'm not doing enough. I tell myself I'll do more, once I at least partially recover from Covid-19, and once I finish helping my sister get our parents' house on the market.

Most of the readers of this blog know me personally. Let's connect and talk (but not here). 

 

Just now I heard birds singing in the trees around my house. They have no idea, I thought to myself. They may not be able to do much, but we can.

Remembering Marie Equi

In The Nation, Kim Kelly draws on many sources, including Michael Helquist's biograpy, to describe the life and work of Marie Equi. Thank you to Kim and everyone working to keep our history alive.

Good long read: Sundman nonfiction

I'm a fan of John Sundman's trilogy [1], and have written about one part of it.

But I'm writing today to say, my socks have just been knocked off by nonfiction JS wrote in 2003 in Salon. Still totally relevant, with plenty of useful interviews and links and brain twisting questions.

Friends ask me for good long reads and here's just the thing to distract us during whatever extreme weather you are experiencing. Link titles are mine, since the original titles had that Salon archness that today is not working for me.

Part 1: In which JS gives new meaning to "decoding" the human genome
Part 2: ... and continues to do so, with special focus on eugenics

 

[1] Amazon doesn't show them as a trilogy because John published each of them under a slightly different name (which relates to its plot/theme). Here's his own web site with more info.

Feelings from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop (ELO2021 - 2)

Among Laura Hyunjhee Kim's many roles is that of feelosopher.

As described on her website, "a Living Lab focuses on the body as a feelosophical medium and a somatic laboratory for art-in-the-making." And so her workshop "Feeling without Touching" included remote-friendly versions of her practices, which involve "attending to the everyday with a sense of critical wonderment," by means of "spontaneous and improvisational perspective-shifting experiments."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE ALL DID. (I looked up these words afterwards. In the moment I just experienced her suggested activities to the deepest extent possible.) 

Part of the documentation is an image of all of us dancing. I'm waving my large arms and also (it's probably not possible to discern) using my electronic recliner to fold and unfold at the same time. 

Laura asked us to choose an object. This was mine: an extra-large D20 for tabletop gaming. (With pencil for scale, and a view out my office window.) 

(Due to climate change there is thermal film on that window, and I'm featuring the number 17 because Stephanie Strickland has turned me on to prime numbers. You can see this same ledge in my Palm Sunday posting.) 

Up close, the die has glitter embedded in it ...

... which reminded me of the glitter we had played with in Katie Schaag's workshop the previous day. 

My most surprising encounter with the die was when I closed my eyes and simply felt. The hard edges and corners felt "safe"; they were not going to hurt me. 

And finally, when Laura asked us to drink water (all together), I didn't expect to have a flash of worry about the water molecules and their health and our health and the health of Gaia.

I'm now realizing that on a deep level this connection to water is always with me, and I have to ignore or tune it out for some daily activities, but when Laura asked us to be present, there it was!

THIS NEXT BIT IS OPTIONAL and involves "visions" /warning

In the 90s I "captured" some text from the point of view of the water molecules in my morning wash water. It turns out (I was surprised to "discover") that they were keeping an inventory of all living creatures and reporting back to a vibrating database (in the Sargasso Sea at the time; they might since have moved it). 

"Apparently," back in the day, water molecules pushed atoms and molecules together into chlorophyll and proteins and all manner of shapes, so that the (the water) could flow through these shapes and have varied and interesting embodied experiences. But the human-shaped creatures have been harmful to the biosphere generally, and (I was saddened, but not surprised, to further "discover") now water is conducting a referendum on whether to pull their creations apart.

Here are the sort-of-poems. 

Of course, rather than leave well enough alone, I buried them at the center of a hypertext called Murmur of Water. Depending on how you answer a question at the beginning, the reader is either stuck at MIT with some computers wondering where the humans have gone, or maybe it's not too late but this situation is tense. 

The hypertext was an artistic failure, which I analyzed last year in this infographic.

Thank you, Laura and everyone in the workshop!

 

Here's my self-intro for the conference overall. I hope it'll link to more notes soon.

time to Echo? yes, because art

I worry that if I get an Echo, I'll become even more Narcissus-istic than I already am.

Carrie, that one was for you. I'll keep working on my one liners.

The moment the Echo came out, people started making art with Alexa. Here's The Listeners, the first Alexa project I was ever aware of, from John Cayley and collaborators, which has now been updated multiple times.

Here's an opinionated and informative overview of the space by Jessi Hempel. 

In 2017 I will get one, because I also want to design for voice on these new platforms.  

While I'm thinking of pioneers who have passed away, I highly recommend Wired For Speech by Cliff Nass and Scott Brave. (Cliff is the deceased pioneer. The book's subtitle: "how voice activates and advances the human-computer relationship.") Their findings can be weaponized now. Is that a good or bad development? To be continued!

 

PS: I hung a poster of this painting by Waterhouse in my college dorm, and earlier this year I temporarily resurrected it, along with an early Yes album cover, to decorate the upstairs hall while Valerie and I were downsizing. Narcissus also has a cameo in a discussion of this art project: When I Think About You I Text Myself.

Prophet check-in

To quote prophet Shelley McLendon, "Don't wait for someone to put you in something! Put yourself in something."

I can check all of these boxes. I've posted the unmarked version of the list so you can check your own score.

After chatting with Val about this, I would like to clarify that I'm not planning to start my own religion; that would be a Messiah check-in. 

Hat tip to the long-ago WHRB rock djs who answered their phone lines with, "Mutant check-in, what's your mutation?"

Some of the things about me that you think are weird ... are on purpose.

It sounds pretentious when I say it out loud, so I just say it in my head: "I can't do that, I need to keep my instrument sharp."

For example: I chose not to see The Exorcist and can't recall that I have watched any visual horror made since. (For reasons explained below.)

Because I'm committed to my point of view.

 

My point of view (approach to the world) jelled in junior high.

(I know people whose world-views jelled both earlier and later. Some people's approaches seem never to have never jelled and other folks may think the idea of jelling is wrongheaded or unnecessary. This parenthesis has been a teensy glimpse into my brain. Ow!)

 

In junior high, my parents and their pastor (mentor, guru) included me in their deep study of Jacques Ellul. I began to focus my attention where Ellul said the action was, on movements of societies below the froth of daily news but above the shifts between epochs of geologic time.

(When describing this I formerly used the term "glacial movements" but the glaciers are melting rapidly so that descriptor's meaning has changed. And "evolutionary time" isn't accurate either because evolution also works more quickly than we had previously thought. My editing is stronger than my writing and therefore I charge more for it.)

My friend Kennedy (recent project) (video) recently said I offered "an almost 30,000 light year view of the topic at hand". Dude, that's Ellul, not me! And usually I try to be slightly closer to earth.

And I adoped Ellul's approach of living through and with dramatic contradictions.

At the same time I was also in a middle school gang whose foundational text was Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co., which I memorized long before I understood it. To this day, the lessons of Stalky (and Kim) explain how and why I fight. Number Four study making fun of the B.O.P. led to the name of my old livejournal. I stole their tactics to craft a surprise for my team's opponents during #freeklue. My favorite movies were Seven Samurai and the long version of Lawrence of Arabia and The Sting [1].

Stalky is about war, life, life as war. The military roles allotted to female-presenting people weren't exciting, when I was eligible for them, but I am now sad that I didn't join our military and collaborate with other stalky elements within it. I married a guy I would have loved to be (into computers and radio and maps and politics and theology and military history, knew Russian and Arabic and Persian, etc [2]). Support for returning veterans and peacekeepers is one of the extremely complex issues I expend energy on. (Long stories skipped.) As for Afghanistan ... I honor the US forces working there and wish we'd studied the experiences of the British and Russians before us:

When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.

I internalized the ideas of these two, and therefore I am fully aware of their flaws.

Ellul's chief flaw was his speed-writing, described by David Gill as including, "irony, sarcasm, accusation, petulance, overkill and whining." These prevented his ideas spreading more widely. Even now his ideas spread chiefly when others translate / transform them. If I ever run out of "things to work on" I will simply dive into Ellul and surface with another fiercely provocative question.

Kipling's chief flaw was his racism, along with his apologies and justifications for the racism of so many others. Not a reason to throw out all his work, but a huge issue to keep in mind, as I argued when I happened to post the one millionth review on AlexLit.com (of a Kipling book, naturally) and was featured in their press release and received a cool poster.

To grapple with Kipling's racism, I had to discover my own, which I did in the 80s thanks to This Bridge Called My Back and the work published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. "When women of color control their printing, books are different! There is an entire world I have been missing! Ow!" And then I had to confront my own racism, an effort that remains ongoing.

Upon the substrate of these two guys, I have layered ... that is, I have tried to learn from and take on:

...Bernice Johnson Reagon's approaches to politics.

...Oriana Fallaci's insights about the effects that the exercise of power has on humans.

...Simone Weil's both of the above plus her work on attention.

...Sara Ruddick's explanation of why holding multiple conflicting goals in one's consciousness at the same time is an important skill.

...Marshall Rosenberg's visions of compassionate communication as taught and extended by Lucy Leu (see also Freedom Project) and Miki Kashtan.

...John Clute's ideas about STORY.

...David Foster Wallace's ideas about the heroism of sanity and the adventure to be found in footnotes.

...along with all the art and music and books and dialogue that has moved me and changed my life ... (the creators of which are listed to the right - partial list) but it does so through these lenses. Academic study of history and theology and technology (not to mention technique) didn't materially change them, just provided more content for them to act upon.

I tried to use my lenses on "relationships" with staggeringly bizarre results. This comic sums up my current approach: eeeeeeee!

 

In summary, these fractured compound lenses let me see the sorrows and horrors in the bandwidth that can be called "everyday life". I avoid horror-focused movies and video games because I worry that they would be too overwhelming, would blunt the edges of the instrument I have spent decades honing [3].

I use my empathy and editing skills in my paid work, but otherwise, what I have written here is not something I frequently talk about.

(I'm not actually talking about it now, because this blog is practically a secret. Even though I worked with people who were, I wasn't part of the golden era of blogging. I used typepad simply to collect some links and thoughts. Now much of the work I've done on collaborative writing sites has been erased, so this is what's left.)

Maybe what I want to say is: aside from the obvious and staggering weaknesses and flaws that I'm still working to combat and heal from ... some of the things about me that you think are weird? Those are on purpose.

 

+++

I do not limit myself to describing my feelings with cold objectivity in the manner of a research worker reporting what he sees under a microscope. I am keenly aware that I am myself involved in technological civilization, and that its history is also my own. I may be compared rather with a physician or physicist who is describing a group situation in which he is himself involved. The physician in an epidemic, the physicist exposed to radioactivity: in such situations the mind may remain cold and lucid, and the method objective, but there is inevitably a profound tension of the whole being.

- Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society,
author's forward to Revised American Edition

+++

[1] I made a Tumblr consisting entirely of pictures from my travels with captions that were quotations from this movie, "Can you stay for breakfast, or do you already know HOW TO EAT?". Paid for a great theme and everything. It was moved to a space with a "-blog" extension because it wasn't active enough? or because I failed to respond to an email? For the few weeks when I thought it was gone, I figured that either the campaign against anorexics or the DDoS attack (first instance of compromised Things being used against The Internet, especially the US Internet) had taken it temporarily off line AND that this was almost as tragic as when my Open Salon postings - all my work from the years in Australia - were vaporized while my attention was elsewhere -

[2] Of course he was recruited by the NSA, and even took its lie detector test. "Did they ask you whether you were gay?" "Yup." [Oh, seventies!] He turned down the offered job "because I thought it would make my life lonely, and also by the time the offer came, I already had a job in commercial radio."

[3] To make up for this, my friends tell me about them. I know not to split up in order to search the house. I know not to poke the monster to make sure it's dead.

Reading Umair Haque

When I studied macroeconomics, my sorrow was that it wasn't macro enough. Umair Haque went much farther into the field than I did, and came to the same conclusions, except with more basis for them.

He's now writing big essays that can't be categorized, and are wonderful. Try The Beginning of the End of the World. I want to be one of the people who comes up with the visions that he is calling for.

He's also written a book on leadership that can be read in chunks.

When he calls himself a "vampire" he's not being sarcastic; he's extremely allergic to sunlight. If you read enough of his stuff you will get to that story.

Emotional impact: life goes on, and it's precious

This week, in one 24 hour period, two works of art made me cry. They did it by reminding me: of people I have lost, and to cherish each day I have with people who are still alive. And in a very small way I helped support these works of art that made me cry, so that crying felt like hitting myself with a tiny hammer.

In 2012 I wrote about Kickstarter campaigns organized by Rich Burlew and Amanda Palmer. (Links are to my writeups on this blog, which have links to their work. Direct links to the works that made me cry are below.) In crowdfunding terms, 2012 was an aeon ago; for their era, both of these campaigns were over the top: they had dramatic (then-unusual) features, and created unique rewards. Oh, and both creators spent years obsessively creating the rewards and delivering even more than they promised. 

The campaigns broke records because the artists had earned devoted fans for their ultra-niche works, and knew what we wanted, and gave it to us. A Kickstarter that can draw on an existing fan base can be very different from a Kickstarter that has to create a fan base. (Lookin' at you, Quantum Chess, entangling new fans with 3 days to go! A great team with actor Leah Cevoli as its crowdfunding campaign manager, which is a thing now.)

What has not changed since 2012: Kickstarters are hard work before and after the funding window closes. According to Rich's latest update, he still has crayon drawings and electronic stories to create, and he's spent all the Kickstarter postage fund (because lots of the fulfillment was international and postage rates skyrocketed), but he's supporting the final mailings by selling the remainders of the print runs of books that the Kickstarter funded. Amanda is now funding her projects partly through Patreon and sharing the ups and downs and lessons learned. (Example: Patreon lets her "do projects lightening-fast and molasses-slow, because NOT ALL ART IS THE SAME.") And because I'm a fan of both, I'm still following their sagas.

Having said that, Rich is famously private and Amanda is famously let-it-all-hang-out and in other ways they couldn't be more different ... 

So, I wept when I read episode 1025 of Rich's epic webcomic, Order of the Stick.

If you've never read the comic (or played D&D - read Rich's super-funny FAQ page here) you can still get the subtext of #1025 once you read Rich's news item from 18 May 2015, which to spare you scrolling I will excerpt:

Mark Monack, who went by the screen name "Wrecan," was a pillar of the message board community for many years. He was, among his other roles, the founder of one of the forum's odder traditions: counting the number of strips each character appears in, a project that continues many years after he began it. When he passed in 2013, I asked his wife Jodie if there was anything I could do to help out. She told me he would have loved nothing more than to have a walk-on character named Wrecan in OOTS. Now, there is one.

Those of you who have a taste for epics, while you're waiting for Homestuck to resume, might enjoy reading OOTS from the beginning, and/or buying the print books at your local gaming store (hint: they have lots of extra material that's not online). It's quite a ride! To avoid spoilers, do NOT jump directly to episode #991, which has a cameo by a D&D character created by my current wife.

[I am now being less private than Rich but more private than Amanda would be:] Back in the day Valerie joined a campaign of Rich's playing a "dwarven bard" - not allowed by the rules of the day - which made Squeaky the best dwarven bard in the universe. He appears for just a few episodes of OOTS, but don't look now, start with episode #1, which picks up when D&D version 3.5 came out.... 

I have not forgotten that Amanda Palmer also made me cry, with the part of her latest song A Mother's Confession about Helen, "who always says 'i love you'" because "you never know." And I don't have to say any more about that project because Amanda has said it all herself, and more.

puts hammer down

clicks "Post"

Thought-provoking rants on Medium

Jorge Ribs' Bridgefy pre-launch rant

Gonzalo Muñoz: Trash is Nothing More Than a Design Error

Nikki Lee: "There are two ways to be noteworthy. You can be the absolute best in the world at something. Or you can put together two things that haven’t been combined before.

You can be the absolute best in the world at the game that exists. Or you can make your own game."

[This is buried in a longer rant.]

@krave on Apple's App Store not letting developers post fixes

Jesse Saunders on house music and innovation

"The most interesting tech companies aren’t trying to sell software to other companies. They are trying to reshape industries from top to bottom." (Chris Dixon from Andreesen Horowitz, quoted by Roderick Morris.)

Scott Belsky on The Interface Layer: Where Design Commoditizes Tech