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The tools, protocols and culture of the fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists. The culture and technical systems were deliberately designed on principles of consent, agency, and community safety. It’s hardly surprising that the sorts of people who have been targets for harrassment by fascist trolls for most of their lives built in protections against unwanted attention when they created a new social media toolchain. It is the very tools and settings that provide so much more agency to users that pundits claim make Mastodon “too complicated”.
“Too complicated” for whom?
They don’t actually believe “arming teachers” or “hardening school perimeters” or “more mental health resources” are actionable or viable solutions. These talking points are just meant to suck the air out of the room so we don’t talk about what an actual solution might look like. You don’t have to engage with these “solutions” as if they are being offered in good faith. They are not.
Currently reading: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 📚
Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. … And it becomes a lot more intuitive to project your thoughts about your life into an imagined future, leaving you anxiously wondering if things will unfold as you want them to. Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed.
I’m only through the first chapter but I can tell this is going to be a corker.
I do not usually get excited about ““delightful”” UI design but the snow flakes piling up on top of this window in Apple’s Weather app made me smile this morning.
Spotify Wrapped is a fascinating case study in how much we trust AIs to identify our tastes better than we can identify them ourselves.
I’ve been listening to to The Jordan Lake Sessions, Volumes 3 & 4 by The Mountain Goats a lot lately. These sets were recorded live in August of 2020, before the third wave of Covid-19 ravaged the United States, and are fabulous (as are Volumes 1 & 2, of course.)
On my last listen, I was struck by this reflection from John Darnielle after “Against Polution:”
There’s this thing, when you play a song and if it really goes someplace really cool during this horrifying pandemic, you go, “Man, what a pity it is that we can’t play that in a room full of people who are excited to be there and everybody feels safe and all that stuff!” I’ve been working a riff like this for half my life, but… Basic things life safety, when you’re young, when you’re seventeen, and you hear somebody talking about safety, you go “Oh my god, you ancient person, you five thousand year old man, talking to me about safety. What do I care?” and then in a time like this you think, “You know what is awesome? You know what is truly spectacular? Like, really worth dwelling on? Safety.”
Citations Needed News Brief - Reconciliation Bill Negotiations: A Media Autopsy 🎧
These are human interest stories, right? Budgets are fucking human interest, but it’s never covered that way, it’s covered like a fucking receipt.
– Nima Shirazi on the horse-race media coverage of the Build Back Better plan negotiations
One of the really intereting things about critiquing “right-clicker mentality” is that the ability to right-click and see how a site was built is how many of us learned to create for the web.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Vanity Fair:
I used to, frankly, abuse myself mentally about how I’m nothing. I realized that I need to choose myself because if I don’t, I’m just going to waste away. I’m just going to give up.
This one really landed for me.
I knew nothing at all about Ellen Siberian Tiger as of two days ago, but this record got mentioned on The Key and honestly, it’s lighting my hair on fire.
Currently reading: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner 📚
Hard not to read this quote about AT&T’s testing of the Picturephone (an early telephone with video features) in the context of Zoom fatigue in 2020:
When the AT&T market researchers asked Picturephone users whether it was important to see the person they were speaking to during a conversation, a vast majority said it was either “very important” or “important.” To phone company executives, this must have been deeply encouraging. Apparently the market researchers never asked users their opinion about whether it was important, or even pleasurable, that the person they were speaking with could see them, too.
Some people baked bread, some people cut bangs, some people took up knitting. Maybe my pandemic coping hobby can be “needlessly replacing every tool in my productivity tool chain.”
If you think installing tracking software to spy on your reports would make you more comfortable with extended remote work, you have failed as a manager.
Now that I’ve had a chance to rewatch The Rise of Skywalker a couple times, I feel comfortable ranking the films. Posting it here for posterity:
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Rogue One
- The Force Awakens
- Return Of The Jedi
- A New Hope
- Solo
- The Rise Of Skywalker
- The Last Jedi
- Attack Of The Clones
- Revenge Of The Sith
- The Phantom Menace
Thank you for your time.
I’ve consumed a lot of “how to lead remotely" content lately (for obvious reasons) and so much of it boils down to:
- acknowledging humanity
- meeting your reports where they are
- demonstrating empathy
- active listening
So, like… what were leaders doing before last week?
Finished reading: Horror Stories: A Memoir by Liz Phair 📚
If you were expecting a linear memoir Liz Phair, or “here’s what happened the night I wrote ‘Flower,’ you’re going to be a bit disappointed. Phair abandons the linear format that plagues many otherwise interesting memoirs and instead presents a series of stories that seek to answer the question “why are you like this?”
She’s always direct, never pulling punches, even when she’s shining a light on her own behavior. She never apologizes, but rather presents her truth and leaves interpretation up to the reader.
Being a huge fan of her discography isn’t required to enjoy this book; in fact, she devotes vanishingly few pages to it. Most of the musical discussion that is present in the book focuses on the aftermath of her 2003 self-titled record, and how exhausting and uncomfortable her brush with pop stardom felt for her. It never comes off as pity-seeking, but rather “these were the consequences of choices I made.”
If sea levels increase a little under 2 feet by 2100, Delaware (the nation’s lowest-lying state) will lose roughly 8% of its land area, including nearly all of the state’s protected wetlands.
I never bothered to make a Best of 2019 music list, which is something I’ve done since my teenaged years, but I did make a “best beers I had for the first time in 2019” list, so there’s that.