changes

It feels like the last days of social media, looting, anarchy, the scattering of peoples and the confounding of languages, so I feel like I can post again with abandon now. Posts no longer feeling chiseled in stone, but wandering snowflakes that might melt away at any moment. Or maybe just blobs of semi-melted snow.

Also, my newish co-worker is motivated about sharing positive school library things and encouraged us to start posting stuff on our work social media accounts again, which helped me realize that posting things is not that big of a deal, and that I had built it up into a weirdly huge deal both professionally and personally.

So, I’m posting on my website again, and I’m setting up goofy RSS-triggered processes to syndicate those posts to micro.blog, tumblr, and ye olde twitter. These are the places I want to play around with for now, and this is the first test to see what happens with my syndication.

BOOM.

Standalone post link: scattering

Link: Tourism is sucking Utah dry. Now it faces a choice - growth or survival? | Gabrielle Canon, with photographs by Kim Raff

Type: News Article

Source: The Guardian

“It is getting loved to death,” [Martha Ham] said, noting the need to help tourists and locals connect more deeply to the waterways and landscapes. Time for change is running short. Without a shift, the desert ecosystems will be imperiled along with the industries and communities that have come to rely on them. “Regardless of where you live in the world, it is crucial to be in touch with the natural limits of your environment,” she said. “People who think of visiting Utah, I hope when they come they see more evidence of us being in touch with our natural limits.”

“Utah is right in the bullseye of the US’s climate change impacts,” said Jon Meyer, assistant state climatologist at the Utah Climate Center, noting the “buffet of climate impacts” across the state. From declining amounts of snow in the winter and summer heatwaves to drought and destructive deluges – the conditions have been “an inflection point that has driven home the idea that Utah, its citizens and its economy are very impacted by the idea of a changing climate”, he said. “People are finding themselves in riskier situations for more days of the year.”

“We are so disconnected from the land or the water that we don’t even think about it,” [Ed] Andrechak says, adding that the answer doesn’t lie in new inventions or dramatic new water supply diversions, but in becoming more water-wise. “We can save ourselves by ourselves. I believe that analytically as an engineer and I believe it spiritually as a resident.”

This isn’t really about the Great Salt Lake but I’m getting nervous about The Great Salt Lake.

I’ve taken it for granted that people in Utah will never do anything about water usage for religious/cultural reasons, because abundance of water in the desert is seen as a fulfillment of prophecy and a spiritual birthright. (I have a whole sardonic note about that, which maybe I should finish and post sometime.)

I used to just take this is as “whatever,” just one more thing I don’t agree with many of my fellow Utahns about, but now I’m realizing we might really destroy everything for ourselves, and I’m not sure I can be just “whatever” about it. (I’m confident the land will continue fine without us, eventually. Nature overall can adapt; I see climate change as entirely a problem by humans, for humans. A bunch of other species might lose as well, but nature will be fine.)

Standalone post link: Link - Tourism Is Sucking Utah Dry...Growth or Survival?

Link: Filterworld: Algorithm Cleanse | Kyle Chayka

Type: Essay / Newsletter

Source: Kyle Chayka Industries (via Substack)

“It has taken a while for my brain to get used to that novel sense of finitude, though I think the withdrawal is subsiding. Plenty of products offer a more curated, less overwhelming version of the internet, but I think we’ve actually become conditioned to its chaos and grown to expect it. It’ll take more effort to re-train ourselves to finding things without the help of algorithmic feeds and then being satisfied with what we find. We have to quieten that internal internet-pilled voice that says more, more, more, new, new, new every minute.”

This resonates with my experience after leaving social media wholesale about 9 months ago.

Differences:

• He has only been off of algorithms for a week and a half so far.
• He is a journalist/writer/“content creator”-type person by profession, so the stakes are higher for him. Stakes were pretty low for me -
  • professionally because I have so many other things to do at work besides mess with social media and my boss doesn’t seem to care, its not a priority; and
  • personally I don’t really have any friends, because I’m asocial or misanthropic or a sociopath or something. (No, probably not a sociopath - they usually cultivate a bunch of fake friends and followers so that they can manipulate them.)
• I got addicted to the Apple News app for a while after I gave up Facebook, Insta etc., and it was almost as much of a problem for me as the others had been. I’ve come to recognize my relationship to email to be a problem, too. I wasn’t recognizing or pinpointing a true source of the problem at first: that constant desire for random new inputs to fill and distract.

“Writers contribute to the feeds as much as we consume them, propelling the endless loop of vacuity. Posting is an addiction, too, and while I certainly suffer from it, I think all that energy is now expressed in my more serious writing, which is probably a good thing. Without the daily outlet of tweeting my random thoughts and getting instantaneous feedback — lols, likes, DMs — I’m also feeling grateful for this newsletter, where I can publish something and know it’ll get to an audience that welcomes what I’m doing.”"

• I’ve intermittently posted random bits of what I might once have posted on social media platforms (such as this very note) here on this little website. I’m not sure that anyone other than my son ever occasionally looks at this, so it might be sort of the equivalent of his fidget apps but for the posting/sharing side of things. This is something that gives me the feeling of having communicated or expressed myself without contributing to the mess of social media, without anyone ever having to see it. Or I like to think I’m following after Thoreau, Dickinson, etc. What if Emily Dickinson had had the Internet? Would she do hot takes on twitter, keep a weird indieweb website, or just still be offline making her handmade fascicles anyway? (People who never joined social media do exist. Conversely, I think some people who I know “in real life” and thought weren’t on social media might secretly be on social media. The transparently online with their real names are just a small subset of the population.)
• I’ve experimented with following RSS feeds, and might do more with that, but right now I’m not looking at them.
• And I might even get back into social media again at some point, in some way.

I’m excited to read this Filterworld book once it is finished. And Dirt is a newsletter worth subscribing to. I just signed up to lurk on their Discord. We will see if I get kicked off for ruining their scene or something - I don’t really know how Discord works if they can even do that; But Dirt seems like a cool place and I just feel like I have a long history, going back to before even the hipster garabe times, of my presence and interest in a scene or culture being the indicator that it is no longer cool. Sorry, I’m coming to silently ruin your scene.

Standalone post link: Link - Filterworld - Algorithm Cleanse

Link: Student Journalists Reveal a Changing World. Let Them. | Margaret Renkl

Type: Opinion Essay

Source: The New York Times

The high school newspaper is not the enemy of frightened adults. It is one of the few windows they will ever have into what is actually happening in their own children’s world, perhaps in their own children’s hearts. Isn’t that what a parent is supposed to want?

Censoring students like this just frustrates me to no end - even more than banning books. Not much respect from me for the adults who engage in this type of action - they appear to me fearful, incurious, and cowardly. Above all else, they are absolutely failing as educators and parents because of their unwillingness to actually listen to and engage with the thoughts and learning of young people. Or maybe the goal is not learning and thinking at all, just subservience? Prove me wrong.

Standalone post link: Link - Student Journalists Reveal a Changing World. Let Them.

Link: “Glass Sight” | Tyler Mitchell

Type: Poem

Source: Poetry, September 2022)

…If poets travel
from one image to the next, what comes of the ribbons
of roads breathing between letters? There are ways out of this sequencing broad shoulders flexing commas
young lungs. The crunching of leaves scrape the mind,
deer travel along the concrete. Their chance to exist,
the split second of impact when broken antlers become the page.
The crack on the window unfolds to a map…

Maybe my favorite little poem from this issue of Poetry. I keep reading it again and again.

Standalone post link: Poem Link - Glass Sight

Currently Reading: Moonwalking [29%]

by Zetta Elliot and Lyn Miller-Lachmann

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.19]

[Granite Sora ebook copy]

Currently Reading: Nightcrawling [28%]

by Leila Mottley

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.18]

[SLCO Library physical copy]

1. Not sure why but I deliberately chose to cover up the part of the Nightcrawling cover with the “Oprah Book Club 2022” sticker.

2. The desire to take this picture with the book displaying from the app on my phone screen forced me to finally get out our old Nikon DSLR camera. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, as I’m increasingly frustrated with the supposedly great camera on my iPhone 13 mini and its well-intentioned attempts to optimize and fix everything to how a photo is supposed to look for me - I like the mistakes and the limitations, though. Now I just need to learn how to use the old camera again, probably get it cleaned up, so that the mistakes are on purpose.

Standalone post link: Nightreading Nightcrawling Moonwalking

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out [66%]

by Susan Kuklin

[currently reading - started on 2022.08.15]

Another day, another challenged book.

Standalone post link: Currently Reading - Beyond Magenta

Link: “Summer Wind” | William Cullen Bryant

Type: Poem

Source: Poem-a-Day (poets.org)

It is a sultry day; the sun has drunk
The dew that lay upon the morning grass;
There is no rustling in the lofty elm
That canopies my dwelling, and its shade
Scarce cools me. All is silent, save the faint
And interrupted murmur of the bee,
Settling on the sick flowers, and then again
Instantly on the wing. The plants around
Feel the too potent fervors: the tall maize
Rolls up its long green leaves; the clover droops
Its tender foliage, and declines its blooms.
But far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills,
With all their growth of woods, silent and stern,
As if the scorching heat and dazzling light
Were but an element they loved
…

I just like this. Matches my summer-sitting-in-my-backyard vibes but from like 190 years ago.

And then I started thinking about this AM Gold…

Standalone post link: Poem Link - Summer Wind

2022.08.11 (committed)

• Added a [more of ‘Title’] link at the bottom of the main microblogish rss index
• Added [more/less] buttons to recent updates on homepage and ‘new/now’ list pages
• Improvements to the functionality of the ‘recent images’ section of the home page
• Moved ‘links’ into their own main section

2022.07.22 (committed)

• Added Breadcrumbs to default single and list pages (https://gohugo.io/content-management/sections/#example-breadcrumb-navigation)
• Started organizing reading updates and other content into non chronological sections

Related still to-do

• Standardize [more/less] functionality across all list pages
• Create a standard ‘gallery’ partial
• Re-create the jdw-gallery page (page showing just the images I consider to be my own creations not stealing/screenshotting/remixing
• Standardize breadcrumbs across all templates
• Update templates
• Much more post/static page reorganization
• Fix and standardize image tags in all old posts

Standalone post link: Changelog - 2022.08.11

Been thinking a lot about curation, both professionally and personally. Where, when, how, whether to do it.

I’ve been in a holding pattern about sharing things for a long time now - I have digital and physical notebooks full of things to potentially share (good and helpful things, I believe), but it seems too big a deal to share them. There are too many options, each with benefits and drawbacks, each with different audiences, or in some cases no audience at all.

Started playing hard with Pinterest at work last week as a potential way out of this, then promptly took vacation time and went camping out of cell range for several days. Now I’m having second thoughts about what I was starting to build there. Then third thoughts, that I should do more, and do it in more places.

Pinterest? Wakelet? Tweet threads? Some Google Doc? Destiny Discover Collections? My own website? My district library website? My district edtech website? Just leave it alone since my district has another new main webpage that kind of curates a little bit of what I was thinking but that I’m not involved in? Yes to all?

Do I go to where the most people are, even if it doesn’t always make the most organizational sense, or I don’t like the way it looks or works? Do I just use whatever platform is easy or makes the most sense to me? Do I belligerently insist on my own platform and expect people to come to me if they come at all? Do I let it go? Most other people don’t have this pressure to curate and share; maybe I shouldn’t either, and maybe it’s not even helpful or a good idea. Maybe it’s not actually my job. Guess I’m still kind of a mess, mentally uncurated.

Hey, take my little survey and let me know your dream curatorial format/platform, if there were no rules for any of us. I’ll share the results. (I first made this to get input from my co-workers.)

Standalone post link: The Opposite of Curation Isn't A Mess But Silence