"Of all things I have loved and lost, I miss my mind the most."

I started blogging in 2005 as it seemed the next interesting step from having a homepage.
I thought it would be cool to show off what I was doing, brag about my accomplishments and interact with strangers. This was, of course, back when meeting strangers was interesting, and not a masochist exercise in dodging shitheads and rage monkeys. (Parenthetically now, I have a new respect for women on dating apps having to deal with dick pics)
And the thing about constantly dodging a barrage of feces and dicks?  Makes it difficult to think about anything else: now all I ever want to do is complain.

Up until then, the Internet had been a continuous stream of meeting interesting people! People all over the world! Describing the things I do, and talking about the things I thought about seemed like fun!

That is not the case now.

Some of the things I might have talked about became self-censored. As anonymity evaporated, posts became increasingly PR oriented.  Bland, flavorless pap.

Think about it! 

Do you want your boss reading about how you blew all the windows out of a 1980 Pinto using a device made from electrical junk and a wading pool?
Do you want your dating pool to shrink because you wrote ten thousand words on your comfort food activity of watching 'William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet' and 'The Crow' back to back while eating popcorn soaked with maple syrup?
Do you want your mother's hoity-toity friend to get bent IRL because you verbally crushed her son in a IRC argument over Gillain Anderson Nude fakes?

Well, no.

I have argued before that networks- and information - is more valuable when scarce. I don't have the chops to chase that intuition down and quantify it, but while I think the early Internet had better, sparser, links, the new tightly webbed one is less desirable in a lot of ways.*

Analytics.
I don't care if Zuckerberg knows I have a poor regard for him** , but I do care if Youtube thinks its a good idea to suggest a constant stream of anti-feminist, gun-worship or pro-bigot videos. Something in my patchwork of interests provokes this. I don't know what: amateur chemistry, watching 'Forgotten Weapons', researching UFOs.***

But I am tired of it.
The world is full of poorly made, over-hyped 'algorithms', and the more in their databases the worse they seem to get. Show me videos that a well-read middle aged guy with a interest in science and weird tales would like, and I'd be happy.
So presenting lots of data isn't improving my experience, and the Net just seems like a more horrible and toxic thing every day.

I understand there is a lot of things that can be done to rebuild anonymity. But there is a lot of really well paid or really well motivated people hammering away at that. Criminals. Dictators. Corporations. We are plankton to those Leviathans**** , and how much of my life and time do I want to burn trying to become unpalatable?

Its easier just to dodge the baleen by growing legs and crawling up on the shore.

Today I looked at my bannerhead and realized I wasn't writing about any of the above.
I realized every time I started to write something, (and there are many aborted drafts) it was just a whiny screed about how things were all shite, and that is what even this post is becoming too.

So on occasion, if I want to write and publish something, I will do it with a one-time, throw-away blog or forum post. I will tag it under 'Radiopsychedelica' which still seems to be a rare enough search term to be useful. I won't delete this blog because I have a natural archivists abhorrence of words vanishing, even poor words.

 "And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates:"  is not my style, thanks. 

 

So after much consideration,

This blog is closed.

*Marshall Mcluhan remarked on the institution of a Global Village, but never carried on to point out that in a village everyone knows everything about everyone, and only conformity is possible.


**Whereas I think Elon Musk wants to be Tony Stark, but is at best Justin Hammer.*****

***I really can't imagine what I did to get the constant stream of 'X but every time Y it speeds up' and 'White guy speaks Chinese' videos.

****Yes, that is a Hobbes reference.

*****You want to argue this? Really? Why don't we just fact-check what Musk has actually done himself and not just paid somebody to do and compare that to a fictional character.  And then, get a life. Both of us. This is EXACTLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE INTERNET.

"I am a patient boy; I wait, I wait, I wait..."

Ran across this breathtaking gem today while searching for something else:*

"What makes bibtex superior over Endnote and Citavi is, that Bibtex was invented by the UNIX Community. It is working on the command line. Before somebody can use Bibtex, he has to become a UNIX expert, which means he needs to be familar with the C programming language, the Linux kernel and textformatting tools like sed, grep and awk." **

So...in order to use what is well described as a very useful and well designed footnoting tool, a hapless paper writer has to become a Unix expert?

I am not going to comment on the ramifications of the idea that a bibliographic reference should demand familiarity with grep.

*Which I can't talk about because it would derail my indignation.

"What is Man, that thou should magnify him? And that thou should set thine heart upon him?"

' "...You think it'll be like that?"

"Don't you? You were there; you saw what's happening. The barbarians are rising; they have a leader, and they're uniting. Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don't appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can understand of it--luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for?"
 "...You know why? Our rulers are the barbarians among us. There isn't one of them ... who is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian." 

"What are you devoted to, Otto?" "You. You are my chieftain. That's another mark of the barbarian." '

---H. Beam Piper Space Viking

...Not really taken to far out of context, even if I do say so myself.

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." ---Arthur C Clarke.

O.S.I.R (some value of n where n > 'n previous')

Nice to know I am not the only one that suffers at the hands of Linux.
"What’s the point in telling a rabbit hole story if you just fix the problem and forget about the underlying issues that cause it to begin with? "

Epigram, via Poul-Henning Kamp : "...a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution."

The Goblin Market

(In which the Internet is imagined to be a bag full of cats and goblins, shaken by a Troll.)
 
'Like' buttons are everywhere, sprinkled across content like a cheap garnish. Mostly they do nothing useful, beyond the up/down vote gamification* of value. What we need is a 'Idiotic' button, which applys to comments, not to content.

My critical thinking skills were developed on dead-tree media and my taste is idiosyncratic, not cosmopolitan. I ignore the like-scoring of content as irrelevant at best and misleading at worse.
Comments, on the other hand...

The Internet still can't figure out how to deal with them. Comments are often useful, but picking the utility out of the sea of crap is labor-intensive. And the trolls are offensive. Its irritating even to the thick-skinned to read twenty paragraphs of hate-mail and general crassness. Anyone de-sensatized enough that isn't rankled by half the remarks under any typical Youtube video has got a real problem, and one that is not going to be solved by more Internet.

Its not just Youtube comments***. One of the problems I have with Stack Overflow is related to this, but I'll go into that another day. What we need is some way to penalize crappy remarks. We're dealing with baby trolls, with goblins.

Trolls are the worse case situations. How do you deal with a troll? If its your site you can deploy the Ban; if you're a casual reader, you are helpless. I'm not about to** create a ephemeral user account to quarrel with a bully, but by saying nothing, I'm giving him freedom to operate. Set a threshold, and drop the comment to the bottom of the page after enough Idiotic flags.


Implement such a system, and skeletorhatesmankind may be driven from the Internet!



*I'm going to pretend this a real word, but it sounds more like Pointy-Haired-Manager talk than an adverb.
**Read this as 'lazy'
***Notice to goblins...if you think a teenager's cover of 'Heartshaped Box' is the only place to discuss the Z-O-G, marijuana curing cancer, or Bizarro-World racism, you need to re-assess your scope of venues.