Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The effects of being busy

    What actually does it mean to be busy? And what actually are the effects of being busy?

    I'll tell you what I've noticed in myself. These past few years have been a flurry of activity, with only increases in sight. This state of affairs is very much not something I typically seek. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, as they say. I think what happened is that the "slow is smooth" approach that I had been taking since 2021 actually did work very well. Slow smoothly became fast.

    To make this all a little more concrete. After several years of prepping and studying and thinking closely with my comrades, some ideas came to fruition. We started a non-profit, we dove head first into labor work, and our lives became entirely about our political work. I'm now a full-time paid organizer, in a ddition to being an organizer in *all* of my spare time as well. This is something we all wanted. But to be a Lacanian about it, fantasies are always also nightmares.

    I now have to *live* with getting exatcly what I wanted. I'm responsible for the political development and labor safety of hundreds of people. I'm responsible for gently and sometimes not-so-gently guiding things in the right direction, and doing so democratically, which is incredibly difficult, emotionally and temporally draining. I'm confronting the forces of evil and the backward forces of "good" daily, dealing with attacks (purposeful or otherwise) from both the left and the right, and all of these have real-world consequences. People lose their jobs. Politicians go down in flames. People are threatened with jail or deportationby ICE. Nothing is abstract anymore: Everything deals with "live amunition" so to speak. Success breeds far more stress than failure, because sussess requires maintenance, brings more responsibilities, more opportunities, more consequences. Failure is easy.

  • thaw

    the bog has thawed
    ready to take a lone body
    in its embrace
    
    
    the wind throws 
    branches around
    raging through the trees
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • To be in the World, not of the World

    I have dabbled with dumbphones over the past few years. I did so out of a desire to be in the world but not of the world. I want to cultivate a sense of semi-monastic apatheia, a disconnection from the world's comings and goings. To do so without becoming a shut-in is an exercise in balancing connectivity with convenience. Unfortunately, my day-to-day life seems to balance on my being in-touch with others. I will eventually write a magnum opus summarizing all that I think about dumbphones (feature phones), but today's discussion will center on a full smartphone in a non-traditional form-factor.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: My Butlerian hypocrisy

      Do we hate bots and scrapers, though? It seems to me that we hate /bad/ bots and scrapers. And what's a bad bot or scraper?

    • Posting Again

      I plan to start working on my Gemlog again! I have been busy with life, roleplaying (elves have to roleplay!!) different games - D&D, Daggerheart, another one that is custom, that a family member made, etc!

    • getting scared of my own blog

      I keep turning myself off of blogging.

      whenever I try writing a post, I always feel as though a blog post has to be this big, professional, marketable thing; something easily sharable on reddit or hacker news or whatever. I get caught up on word choice and sentence structure; struggle to make sure the ideas in my head are "extra-legible".

      in an age of social media, a blog sort of becomes professional by contrast.