Ashtoreth Hostility's Journal

The day after Christmas, I was walking down to the main drag to buy too much discounted candy, and I found a Christmas stocking on the ground. I presume someone was loading or unloading a car, and dropped it. Mostly to be helpful, partly to be amusing, I hung the stocking on a low fence surrounding the adjacent yard, and continued on my way. When I returned that way from shopping, there was a person crouching and framing up the stocking with her mobile phone... I watched from across the street as she took a photo. I was pleased to have brought a small amount of beauty into someone's life.

[Apologies to the three or four people actually following my journal. I've alluded to this rant, but until now saw fit to keep it out of your way. Now that tumblr has credibly dismembered itself, it seems relevant enough to post.]

I'm well aware that Twitter depresses me, and that it eats time and attention. I've actually given up on my OOC feed because it's an unending litany of the world's horrors, interspersed with banality, despite the fact that most of my RL friends are there.

The question arises: what does Twitter actually do for me, that wouldn't be served by a chat program or some similar approach? In most cases, my tweets only impact people who are known to me; I could speak to these people directly without any loss of impact. On only one occasion did a tweet of mine travel far afield; it was a visual meme, piggybacked on someone else's visual meme. Despite finding over 500 viewers willing to click the 'like' button, it did not result in any additional followers (nor should it have). My most favorited/retweeted posts almost always include artwork; again, this does not put Twitter ahead of presence on a dedicated gallery site, where I had equivalent or greater impact. And all of this assumes that 'impact' is something I need or desire, which is far from certain.

The absolute worst thing about Twitter and especially tumblr: these sites let other users oblige you to browse content you did not specifically choose to see. In aggregate, well-meaning users subject their followers to huge quantities of unwanted content. On Twitter these are called retweets. Twitter allows you to shut off retweets on an individual basis but not globally; tumblr does not allow you to turn off retransmission because it is the essence of the site's structure.

Tumblr is especially inimical to coherence; conversation threads cannot be maintained, because there is no master post; each reply to a post spawns a unique copy of the post, which may or may not contain any other given reply to another copy of that post. Your feed becomes clogged with multiple variant copies of the original post. The site is designed to indiscriminately bombard you with content which you cannot address in any deliberate fashion.

Both Twitter and tumblr discourage involved response. One is invited to 'like' or rebroadcast a post, while personal engagement is secondary and usually manifests shallowly if at all. What more could one expect, when the follower is ceaselessly bombarded with content?

I feel the distinction between 'Web 1.0' and 'Web 2.0' is best characterized not by bandwidth but methodology. 1.0 was an extention of what we might call 'web beta', which itself was largely user-constructed and thus reflected user interest. 1.0 attempted to monetize this, but still largely held to the idea of creating sites and products users wanted enough to actually pay for, or at least to traffic enough to support an ad-based revenue model. But profiting from this was often problematic. The model which developed in Web 2.0 was one which corrected user behavior; instead of giving users something they actually care to use, it stimulates addictive behavior by a combination of constant reward stimulus and low capacity for deep engagement with the content. The ideal Web 2.0 interaction is one which is quick, shallow and easily forgotten, so that the user never achieves satisfaction, and is impelled to move directly to the next interaction and the next. There is no conclusion to the interaction, no resolution, because it is never-ending. The capacity for mapping the personal taste of each user for later marketing, the outsized response to negativity and outrage stimulus, we need not go into. Current social media sites offer nothing to the typical user which is not served profoundly better by direct personal interaction and/or a narrower, more intimate online setting.

(And shall we talk about how I can't post an essay of this length directly into Twitter without breaking it into tiny, disjointed pieces? And how this degrades one's capacity to express organized thought?)

This is not an announcement of my intention to leave Twitter. But I think we'd all be better off somewhere quieter.

[This also says things I'm trying to say, but more scientifically.]

track listing:

1. "What are you people standing around for? I need THROWS AND WRAPS, stat!"
2. Coffee Ice Cream
3. Dirty Pastels!
4. I'm Not Wearing Enough Fake Fur
5. Elvis VS Madonna
6. Bag Ladies Need Earrings, Too
7. Close to the Toilets
8. Everything Shit is New Again

Fuck fucking cyber Monday. Fuck cyber weekend. Fuck cyber. Fuck it! Fuck it dead. Nothing so annoying as witnessing the birth of a great new way to weasel money out of the public. May I remind you that 'Cyber Monday' is a concept developed by Amazon, also known for such concepts as destroying all local bookstores, and using humans as forklifts.

Hello, Dreamwidth. :)

Is anyone still here?

For reasons I need not go into, LiveJournal is no longer suitable, so I'd like to start using this occasionally. I'd also like to eventually migrate all my LJ posts to here, but we'll see how that goes.

Currently reading an anthology(?) of two novellas by Russian siblings Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The novellas are Roadside Picnic and Tale of the Troika.

The context of this publication interests me as much as the content. The book came out in 1977, and is part of Macmillan's "Best of Soviet Science Fiction." The 1970s were the era of détente, before Reagan shitted everything up again with his 'Evil Empire' nonsense, and for a brief period we were allowed to contemplate the Soviets as human beings rather than slavering pigbeasts. In a way, the book represented a nearly taboo artifact of an exotic alien culture.

You may know Roadside Picnic as the story which S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is loosely based upon; I know little of the video game, so I'm coming into this the right way around. The premise of Picnic is that aliens briefly visited Earth, and their landing sites are littered with fragments of incomprehensible and often deadly alien technology; the story itself is about the people who traffic in, study, and attempt to control this technology.

At first I found the prose to be a bit meandering and hard to get through. This is not a bad thing. I enjoyed reading a story which unreeled things in a new way. I expect the impedance is deliberate; the story deals in the uncertainty which the characters experience in their unparalleled circumstances. It did become more accessible as I read.

I haven't completed Tale of the Troika, but the prose feels much more straightforward, and overtly satirical and humorous, in tone not far off from a Douglas Adams piece. Bureaucratic satire? A number of researchers discover that the elevator in their building is, at long last, prepared to take them above the thirteenth floor. What lies beyond the thirteenth is the subject of speculation and rumor. Two of their number are selected to embark upon this journey. It's difficult to know which details are 'real' and which are the characters' imaginings; still trying to get a handle on exactly what the setting is, within this range. Enjoying it so far.

(Was going to add, snarkily, that I bet the Soviet commissars weren't pleased by the Strugatskys taking the piss out of their bureaucracy. But I invite you to write similar satire about the business under which you are employed, and discover how delighted your bosses are by your sublime wit.)

The sky was really interesting and I wanted to take a picture of it, laying on the ground so I could get a lot of it in along with the scenery. I wanted to get a friend of mine into it-- I liked the contrast with her long black coat --but she wouldn't stay in one place. There were these ads for a company looking for repo men; instead of a flyer, it was printed on a kind of huge potato chip bag full of fake cash and coins, meant to intice the prospective dirtbag. I threw it into the back seat of my car, which wouldn't stay in one place even with the engine off and the brake engaged.

Then there was a touchscreen with a sort of railway map in a cluttered lobby or corridor. Harpold showed it to me. The map played music, and if you dragged the stops around the screen the quality of the music would change. I got it playing something I enjoyed. Other people seemed to like it, too.

I had three friends with very long dark hair. They had dyed green patches into it. "A Norwegian black metal band during the only two weeks of spring," I said. Later I was checking out my own overgrown hair in a mirror; I think this was supposed to be Tugrik's house, since he was there, too (with overgrown hair). I went into a glassed-in living room or patio area and outside on a ledge were a number of chicks of some predatory bird. There was a small creek separating the house from the land beyond; a buzzard and an eagle were struggling to reach the chicks. I don't know if one was trying to eat them and the other trying to defend them. At any rate, an enormous lizard climbed out of the creek and was trying to eat them, until an even larger Tyrannosaurus Rex got its jaws around the lizard and began eating it very messily; huge globs of yellow fat poured out of the wounds. The chicks were okay. Before long I noticed the patio was filled with various wild animals; also a cocktail party had started and guests drifted among them, though they tended to keep toward the side of the patio near the house.

The night before I had a dream where I was traveling, just me and my backpack and my stuffed animal. For some reason I was clambering over buildings, and I found that once I'd climbed down from a building into a cafe it was much harder to get back up... much of the dream involved me trying to reach a train station because I was unable to retrace my path up one of the facades.

A rebuild of this model, only with modules of 1/4 the size. I used the same Post-It notes, cut into quarters. The smaller stellated icosahedron is consequently 1/8 the volume of the larger.

( Construction photos... )

I should also note that I read Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats. I wish I had more to say about it.

Nominally, the book concerns itself with US government programs researching psychic warfare, but Ronson is more interested in the rationale for these programs and the personalities of the people involved in them. Some of the material was familiar to me from the film; some of it I'd turned up in my own research.

I found it a little less personal (or 'gonzo') than The Psychopath Test, and I suppose that's why it didn't interest me as much as the latter book. (Plus I'd already seen the movie.) The idea that the military entertained a countercultural approach to warfare during the 1970s didn't surprise me as much as it was supposed to. Not when Nancy Reagan was consulting astrologers on her husband's behalf while they were in the White House. But I was intrigued by the idea that research programs as weird as these can be carried out (and, according to Ronson's research, are still being carried out) without becoming common knowledge. That's useful to know. :)