Blogging again

I’ve had a few blogs in my lifetime. College. Grad school. First time parent. Pretty much every one of them had math in them. Yes, even when writing to my infant in some hypothetical future when they could understand me. Now I’m starting back up with my “professional” slice of life, but still with a fair amount of philosophizing and experimental thinking. I just want to tell stories again in a longer form and in a manner I feel more ownership of.

I need this post to be more than, ¨more soon!¨, so I’ll talk about why I feel the need to own this content more than what I post on social media. Ownership is the topic of this post. OooOooh, so adult. Don’t worry, I’m still financially illiterate intentionally because I ethically disagree with gaming the system of capital to enrich myself without adding any social good. Could I then turn around and reinvest any capital gains back into community? Yes, but that thinking is how we get to the system we have today, where communities that are systematically disenfranchised by the owning class are expected to tell sob stories for pity money that is a tiny fraction of what tax-based governmental support could otherwise provide. This is where I have to follow up with and also explain I’m not a monster and still do donate my money and time to community. Yes, that. The sob story comment comes from the frustated stories of a friend that is a former executive director for a reasonably large 501c(3) that provides services to victims of gender-based violence. This whole explanation is condemned by fascists as virtue signalling, and of course the truth is in neither extreme. I’ll probably have a post later about my understanding of “truth” but not in this post.

Popping the stack to get back from the meta-post to the post. I currently work for Google, one of the powerhouses behind “free” web-based products, and this is of course a topic of consternation for me. As a broke student, free was good enough. I didn’t care much about longevity, just access. Getting the invite to the gmail beta was amazing. Getting the invite to “the facebook” was amazing. I did still worry about longetivy while signing a license agreement that I own nothing of what I just paid for. I still signed it. There aren’t a whole lot of people with enough privilege to reject the license agreements and still maintain their ability to carry on with life normally.

I could go on about the inequities about access to art and history more generally, but honestly I just wanted to be able to share the things I loved with my child when they grew to an age where they could appreciate it. Children grow up in their own cultural context though. I didn’t care about my parents’ love for certain types of music and art. I complained during the museum trips. I have the math books that inspired me. The video games that defined me. The movies that shape how I process social situations with direct quotes as a means of forming a shared understanding. I’ve tried to share what I love, but I don’t have particularly inspiring energy, or a pedagogical skillset that could help convey why I love certain things. My kid gets to be their own person and reject anything I try to share as a means of connecting about something we could both love. I still do get upset at the thought that I couldn’t even have that chance to share a culturally meaningful artifact due to some servers shutting down or the legal nightmare emulator authoring can be to preserve old technologies. I’m not sure how dire it is though, of all things. I’m glad there are people that fight all the wall-building.

In terms of owning my own words, I’m just at a point where I’m more comfortable writing human-readable text files I can easily port to other publication methods. I don’t have my twitter posts backed up. They don’t maintain the context of the conversations I was having. They’re not particularly great at conveying a complete thought that could be revisited years later the way articles can. The fall of Twitter is not as much of a blow to me as it has been to other communities, but mostly because I’ve been rather insular since the start. Folks I wanted to maintain a connection to also had the opportunity to experiment with Mastodon before the truly unhinged days arrived. Still, even with my participation in the Fediverse on an instance I financially contribute to, the medium is different from here, where “the feed” is all me, and longer.

These words are published with no license. They are all under my copyright. I do not consent to their use in any algorithmic training dataset.