That made me think of the MidiMaze things. Even though I was a Commodore guy, the guy who organized that really lobbied for me to come - even though he never really seemed to think super highly of me. Thinking back, I think he saw me as an "attraction". "MetallicA, the Commodore user, will be there, Atari kids!" 

Either the chance to own me, or just a kind of circus sideshow event. I did own an Atari 1040 ST.... so maybe they were just trying to convert me.

The Atari scene did have nicer people in it than the Commodore scene. The Commodore scene was full of all the anti-social losers with dysfunctional families - like me. The Atari scene was full of kids who were members of the LGBT community, although not ALL of them knew it yet - who all had traditional values nuclear families. I'm not exaggerating. 

Then of course, I ended up owning everyone there - consistently. I was instantly great at first person shooters. Part of it was that I instantly realized to run away until I was in perfect health and then find a group that was in a battle, wait until the weakened one another, then come in and pick off the weak ones and get all the kills. :D 

Thu Jan 28 2021 22:45:03 MST from Wangiss

The Bantoom users would all meet on Monday nights at Albert Schweizer Grove and play laser tag with the old Fisher Price guns and sensors from the 80s. That helped the culture a lot. And we're some of my fondest and most epic memories of childhood. 

BBSs were surely social media in the broadest sense. And because it was largely a playground for the technological brotherhood, there was a sort of automatic camaraderie. We liked the same things. If there had been Kardashians, they would have been reviled. Social media has flipped to become the opposite, culturally: an extention of high school rather than an escape from it. 

Got a bunch of projects burning right now. I'm 3GB into a 25 GB file copy on a 68ec020. That'll take all weekend. 

I feel like all my interests and urges of late are combining into one big life project: The Ontograph.

In your head, you have a map of existence. (I can't remember if I've written about this here before, so sorry if this is redundant.) It's a map of the world, its inhabitants, and every object. But it's more. It includes the descriptions of those things and their relationships, and all your opinions of the same, and more that would be a long list to create. 

If you could write all of it down, it would be your map of existence, which I'm calling an ontograph.

I want a little drone to come and map my property so I can make a little model of it. I want to write down all my skills and see if there's some unlocked potential. I want a robot to come label all my stuff and share that with an organizing professional so I can live a more orderly life. All of this would be part of my ontograph. If I shared certain parts of my ontograph with an AI it could look for quick wins for me. Maybe my focus on trying to get more sleep is smart, but maybe it's misguided. Maybe it'll be smart to swap out my beefy laptop's SSD for a bigger one and use the old one in my Raspberry Pi, or maybe it would be faster and cheaper to ride the wave of outmoded flash drives as the next doubling hits the $5 clearance rack. All of these things are factors in your life experience, and we could all use a tune-up from time to time. How different things affect men or women, people with particular personality attributes, could be sorted out to see which low-hanging fruit an individual could pursue. Maybe talk therapy would be good. Maybe reading more... or less. And you could rate the outcomes and give tips to others.

All my anthropology, taxonomy, existentialism, technology, story writing, VR interests... it's all sort of congealing into this gristle of clustered wrinkles in my brain.

Content... dwindling... flame... flickering out... 

Progress, yes. But the term is a victim of semantic overload. It means too much to mean anything anymore. 

What I call progress is human agency. Facebook is an agency drain. Every time I go there I just see annoying people being stupid and it steals my motivation and offers no inspiration. So I'm learning Linux and basic electronics. Just bought a three-color LED! Next up: re-learning resistors, lol.

Moar Agency Pl0xthx

I've been playing a lot of minecraft.  Sometimes I don't check anything for a day or three lol

This is interesting. We all have side projects and we're all reclaiming our online time to spend more time on those projects. I'd say that in the past our projects WERE time spent online. 

The project for all 3 of us seems to continuously be some sort of rewarding self improvement. Intellectual growth and stimulation, interaction that improves the individual and hopefully, society. 

The conclusion all 3 of us seem to have reached is that, Facebook scale interaction has failed. There is very little positive in it outside of very limited utility. 

This isn't my blog. You're supposed to make posts, too. :) 

My blog gets more traffic than the BBS, anyhow... 

Yep, reflexively went onto Facebook and saw twelve idiotic takes in a row. So I came here and then I'm going to flash a new OS onto a micro SD card so I can try out the new micro HDMI adapter I just bought.

And I'm watching videos about machine learning. And I'm pretty sure my plan to make typing gloves is going to be the best thing ever. 

Onwards and upwards. 

Same thing here. Went back to Facebook yesterday - and some guy had posted a link about complications and side-effects of the vaccine. 

Some woman put, "the cure is worse than..." 

And friend's WAY LEFT friend did this baiting, pretentious, smug, 

"Oh? Go on..." 

And I went ballistic. He unfriended and blocked me. Good. He got exactly what he deserved. 

"She was suggesting the vaccine could be worse than the illness, you fucking partisan troll, which we know IS the case. The virus presents in the vast majority with very mild, few, and sometimes NO symptoms. For those people - the MAJORITY of people who contract Covid-19, the vaccine may be a higher risk of complications than the virus itself."

He tried to argue, I wasn't feeling particularly articulate, so I just beat him down, he unfriended and blocked me. Good. One more down, ~80 million more Joe Biden voters to go. 

There is a study that the vaccine may cause weakened immune response against the more virulent and lethal mutations going around. It is like getting a vaccine for the clap and finding out it makes you less able to defend against HIV. 

That study is ongoing - and not conclusive - but it speaks to the fact that the vaccine was rushed through trials and we still don't know what the repercussions of it might be. 

And - it speaks to our rush to get particular people vaccinated based on *job* as well as risk factor being (potentially) misguided. We're approaching this from a shotgun methodology - "Let's get the people most likely to be EXPOSED vaccinated, so that they'll be less likely to become infected and infect OTHER people." 

What if we're vaccinating the people most likely to be exposed, who are likely to have the LEAST complications (young teachers and police and healthworkers without comorbidities) only so that they'll be MORE likely to become infected with a more dangerous mutation - and more likely to spread it to other formerly healthy people without comorbidities because that is who they interact with most frequently - while also DELAYING the vaccine to the people MOST at risk from the version that the vaccine targets?

We keep doing stupid things - and it is driven by people on Facebook saying stupid things based on their partisan OPINION of Covid-19 and not DATA and logic. 

I'm not saying the vaccine shouldn't be pursued. I'm saying that it is denial to A:

Suggest it wasn't rushed through on an accelerated timeline without traditional clinical trials.

Claim that it is the silver bullet that will fix everything and you're a Trumpster idiot if you have reservations about its side-effects and repercussions. 

In particular I dislike when Liberals with lesser reasoning skills than me repeat what they've been told to believe without critical thinking and suggest *I'm* the one acting on unsound logic and reason. 

No. I'm not the stupid one - YOU are. I can tell because you repeat canned rhetoric that OTHER people who you trust told you is true - without critically analyzing it. GTFO. 

Citadel is banal. It is full of average and below intellects who think they're fucking geniuses - on both sides of the political spectrum. 

I'd rather hang out here. 
 

Fri Feb 05 2021 02:12:09 MST from Wangiss

Yep, reflexively went onto Facebook and saw twelve idiotic takes in a row. So I came here and then I'm going to flash a new OS onto a micro SD card so I can try out the new micro HDMI adapter I just bought.

And I'm watching videos about machine learning. And I'm pretty sure my plan to make typing gloves is going to be the best thing ever. 

Onwards and upwards. 

Fri Feb 05 2021 08:23:57 MST from ParanoidDelusions

Citadel is banal. It is full of average and below intellects who think they're fucking geniuses - on both sides of the political spectrum. 

Reminds me of the thing about survivor bias.  https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200827-how-survivorship-bias-can-cause-you-to-make-mistakes

I think you mean Facebook is banal.  This is citadel lol

I love how "kids in cages" just got expanded but they're calling it something else now.

Yes! :) 

To all of this. I love how the Left is "winning". 

Sat Feb 06 2021 02:18:11 MST from TheDave

 

Fri Feb 05 2021 08:23:57 MST from ParanoidDelusions

Citadel is banal. It is full of average and below intellects who think they're fucking geniuses - on both sides of the political spectrum. 

Reminds me of the thing about survivor bias.  https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200827-how-survivorship-bias-can-cause-you-to-make-mistakes

I think you mean Facebook is banal.  This is citadel lol

I love how "kids in cages" just got expanded but they're calling it something else now.

I think at the time what it had going for it - was that it was superior to the alternatives - which were mostly MySpace. 

Sat Feb 06 2021 17:54:52 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

The conclusion all 3 of us seem to have reached is that, Facebook
scale interaction has failed. There is very little positive in it
outside of very limited utility. 

It was a failure from the beginning. It just takes a while to notice. We see the fnords sooner.

Sun Feb 07 2021 06:29:48 MST from ParanoidDelusions

I think at the time what it had going for it - was that it was superior to the alternatives - which were mostly MySpace. 

 

Sat Feb 06 2021 17:54:52 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

The conclusion all 3 of us seem to have reached is that, Facebook
scale interaction has failed. There is very little positive in it
outside of very limited utility. 

It was a failure from the beginning. It just takes a while to notice. We see the fnords sooner.

 

My recollection of the era was that it was just like myspace except it also had fun little games you could play.  That's what brought me over full time.

LOL. I hated the games - that was, to me - a step in the MySpace direction of adding things that seemed like distractions. It is also when EVERYONE and their uncle started showing up. 

Mon Feb 08 2021 09:56:59 MST from TheDave

 

Sun Feb 07 2021 06:29:48 MST from ParanoidDelusions

I think at the time what it had going for it - was that it was superior to the alternatives - which were mostly MySpace. 

 

Sat Feb 06 2021 17:54:52 MST from IGnatius T Foobar

The conclusion all 3 of us seem to have reached is that, Facebook
scale interaction has failed. There is very little positive in it
outside of very limited utility. 

It was a failure from the beginning. It just takes a while to notice. We see the fnords sooner.

 

My recollection of the era was that it was just like myspace except it also had fun little games you could play.  That's what brought me over full time.

I'm going to try and leapfrog the next two social networks by hopping into whatever looks like

(a) DSpace as represented in Daniel Suarez' duology DAEMON and Freedom(TM)

and/or

(b) the metaverse as represented in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash

So I'm getting my IoT chops right now so I can set up a microbroadcasting antenna pair, which would enable an encrypted floating callout over my head when I want one. Standardizing the wave strength would allow accurate triangulation of the broadcast source. I'm learning Python and I'm glad someone decided to make a language with such natural syntax. It's probably only possible because of the enormous computing power available now, but to quote Max Bialystock, if you've got it, flaunt it. 

And I'm going to 3D scan my cottage office so I can have friends over and we can hang out in there. If we have too many people in there we can just go miniature. I have a funny little Japanese diarama bookend we could hang out in. Here's a link to the pic:

https://i.etsystatic.com/23452171/r/il/4af2b2/2367045018/il_794xN.2367045018_evab.jpg

And I could put other things in there. Anyway, we'll see if the latest update to the photogrammetry app on my phone is any better than the one that couldn't scan a wrench two years ago, lol.