Thoughts

After 15 years away, I’ve decided to start up this blogging thing again.

In the 2000s, I was never a heavy blogger, and while I used to sign up to every social media platform, I was usually just a lurker. By the early 2010s I became even more dormant and stopped posting. I just liked my life better without the extra work. 

But an interesting thing happened over the last few years — the enshitification of social media made me reevaluate things. I’d browse Twitter through Tweetbot daily, but when Twitter killed off 3rd-party clients, I left Twitter. I was a huge fan of Apollo for Reddit, but Reddit pulled the same move and I left Reddit.

Watching what is happening across all corporate social media has made me realize that their incentives aren’t aligned with what I want out of social media. While the culture of any platform is crafted by the people who use it and the policies that guide them, it’s a balancing act that’ll eventually loose it’s balance.

People left after Twitter went to shit and landed on Threads. Then Threads drastically changed their policies and people landed on Bluesky. There is nothing I can see that implies that the same won’t eventually happen at Bluesky.

This has led me to abstain from corporate social media platforms — and reading that back makes me feel like I’ve become a self-righteous nerd 🤓, but here we are… But the flip side of all this is that I’m inspired by the movements of people owning their content and words through the indieweb, or even open source social media platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy (I’ve even tried my hand at moderating on Lemmy — I’m running a community for Metroidvanias). These sites aren’t as slick as the others, but they’re insulated from a single owner being able to ruin that nice balance and there’s no algorithm to influence you.

I don’t know if this blogging thing will stick for me, but I’m giving it another go. Feel free to follow me on Mastodon, Lemmy, and subscribe here. I appreciate that you’re even on this site. 

Here’s to the next post not being 15 years from now.

Discuss on Mastodon

I had a bunch of people get together for my birthday three years ago and we all played a few rounds of my favorite board-game, Hoopla (seriously, I’ve played this game with the same set of cards for about 6 years and I still love it; and yes, I understand it’s technically not a board-game). For people who gave a unique performance during the game, I let them draw from a hat a description on a strip of paper of a fake prize that they had won. Examples include free slumber-parties at a mutual acquaintance’s that we barely knew (who had no idea he was involved in the prize) to a dance-off between two friends of the winner’s choice.

Hidden amongst all these fake prizes was a slip that looked just as made-up as the rest of them, but I actually had prearranged to make it into a reality. Some of my friends own a documentary company (Open Road Media, makers of fine films such as Pun Smoke and the Human Hambone) down in LA and I contacted them earlier in the day: Someone at the party would draw a prize of “A Free Documentary Of Your Choice By Open Road Media.” A choice would be made by the winner and I would discretely txt my friend, who would have a team of folks ready to take the chosen topic and turn it into a “documentary” as quickly as possible. They would then send me the result over the internet and I would play the video on the living room television for the winner and the rest of the party at the end of the evening.

Well, the winner of the documentary prize chose the topic of “Friendship” and the wheels were set in motion. About two hours later, I presented the documentary and had a very confused party, who were struggling to figure out what just happened.

Here is the 2min. 40sec. documentary on “Friendship”:

About three years ago, I had no idea that I would be anywhere close to where I am today. Around that time, my roommate came up with an idea to solve a problem: Music in an open space (Coffee shops, shared offices, etc.). Collaborative filtering of the collective collections from the open space could potentially be a better disc jockey than any single human with his singular collection.

About 4 of us would get together about once a week and kick around ideas for how to pull this off and generate a revenue model. We eventually drifted away from that when we got more excited about another idea: As the world becomes more and more digital, the tracking of the data that people pay attention to will be easier and easier to analyze. We could use attention data to notify people about events that they might be interested in.

At this point, it was a fun side project and I was always curious as to where it might lead to. It started off slowly and we got more serious about it, eventually convincing other people to join us. Soon enough, I would realize that we could really turn this into a viable business and eventually CultureMob was born.

But I still had no idea that today, I could walk around Seattle and overhear people I’ve never met recommending the service I helped start with 4 guys to other people I’ve never met. 2 weeks ago, we held our first event at Neumos with ?uestlove of the Roots. I never would have imagined that dorking out about attention data with friends in a coffee shop would lead to working with one of my longtime idols.

It’s not as if CultureMob has been instantly successful, but its really starting to come into it’s own. We’ve only been live for 7 months, and I’m already surprised at where it’s taking me. I have no idea where I’ll be in another 3 years, but here’s to hoping it’s just as surprising.

Greg and I had 10 hours to kill in Taipei on our flight. To kill the time, we decided to go visit the current tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101.

Finding an incredibly tall building turned out to be too much for our cabbie. Greg and I became curious as we got farther and farther away from the Taipei 101. Turns out that our cabbie loves his GPS system a little too much. We were well beyond the entire (massive) city before he realized that he was in the middle of the woods and began to apologize to us. He got off on the next ramp and then preceded to get right back on the same exact road because his GPS told him to.

By the time we got back into town, he had already doubled our trip’s necessary distance. He then felt that the advice he got from his GPS had served him better than we did and decided to drive into town in the opposite direction of the most obvious landmark in the world.

To end this story, we got there. Eventually. I’ve heard of people going overboard with their blind trust in a GPS device, but jeepers, this was enough to make me really really mad.

UPDATE: I’m telling you, people trust these GPS gizmo’s too much, even in Seattle.

Greg and I had a mantra before we embarked on our trip to Thailand: “Make as few plans as we could get away with.” We didn’t want to be tied down to an agenda when reading about Thailand was only going to give us a small window into the best way to travel here. We’ve lucked out so far, but were becoming quite concerned this morning that our luck had run out.

Pretty much as soon as we got to southern Thailand, it became completely overcast and spouting spurts of HEAVY rainfall. We just got into Phuket and it was raining just as much as our mood was souring. We were spoiled earlier with the courtesy and cheap prices of northern Thailand. In the south, the sun and scenery brings too many tourists and too much money. And now we didn’t even have the sun.

So we scrambled to figure out how to salvage our remaining days. We couldn’t get out of Phuket, so we decided to attempt to follow a very loose rumor about a “mom and pop” bed and breakfast joint that I heard about for $8 a night. “Down a dirt road about 2 kilometers from the Marriott” is all I had to go on.

But the cabbie spoke as much English as we spoke Thai and explaining “bed and breakfast” wasn’t working. He dropped us off at what looked like a pre-1989 East Berlin re-creation from the outside. At that moment, what turned out to be the hotel manager walked by and noticed our predicament. He offered to help us and allowed us to stay at what turned out to be a very secluded 5-star hotel for a fraction of the price. We now have our own private pool at our room and several kilometers of our own beach (!).

We were thinking of heading back to Bangkok early, but now we might be a little more flexible with our non-existent agenda.

Anytime Greg and I hit anything remotely resembling a tourist trap in Bangkok, we’re surely going to get asked by locals, “How many years?!” They then commence to point at our beards (occasionally even tug on them). Following this, we’re always propositioned to whatever service that they’re pimping. This happens with enough consistency that it’s clearly a script.

What I want to know is, who disseminates this script. Somebody once studied how spangers were able to consistently display the same sign (“Parents Killed By Ninjas. Need $$ for Kung-Fu Lessons.”) across the country by a matter of months. I wonder if the same logic applies in Thailand. Or if there is some sort of conference where they agree on the best street sale strategies.

There appears to be a parallel in Thailand to Americas obsession with being tan: I’ve seen tons of “whitening” products. All of the lotions in stores contain “whitening” and even most of the advertising here feature very pale Asians that clearly attempt do their best to emulate the “West”. But as curious as they are about Western culture and our beards (boy, do people like to stare at them), facial hair is apparently regarded in Thailand as unkept and frowned upon, unless it’s a single hair emanating from a mole.

I think I’d rather have a beard.

We just got into Chiang Mai and checked in with the woman at the front desk. The first thing she said was “You should shave that off. You’d look very handsome without the beard.”

Greg and I just got into our layover in Seoul before hitting Bangkok. Best plane ride ever. They have Tetris built into the seats! Greg and I were able to play vs. each other for about 9 hours. Outlets in the seats, hot towels applied to the face, spacious seats. I applaud you, Korean Air. Congratulations on superior air travel service and being awarded the BrumBrum Sky Travel Level Of Excellence Certificate.

Every now and then, I’ll somehow find my way into a conversation on social policy and individual responsibility. I might enjoy the conversation, but it doesn’t take me long to realize that I don’t have that Chomski-like ability to recite facts and recall quotes. And that’s where I loose: I can tell people how I feel, but I sure as all heck have a hard time telling them why.

Well thank all that is super for writer’s like this. This is one of the most concise and well said essays on class and poverty. It’s the type of thing that I wanna’ link to here so that I can just point people to that story instead of just being smart myself — the American way™.

I got stuck in the same way the other day when I was having a chatty-chat with someone regarding Kerry Vs. Bush Vs. Kucinich. She asked me what I had against Kerry; and even though I’ve read plenty about his voting record that I don’t think is perfect, I drew a blank. But I knew that I was a Kucinich fan (he’s vegan!).

She said, “Well, how about this metaphor: Your car (the economy) breaks down outside of town. Another dude (Kerry) in a car pulls up offering to fix your automobile, but you tell them no because you’re holding out for a guy (like Kucinich) to give you a fix AND a wax.” (Ed. note: She didn’t say “dude”. That was creative license at work. Also, she didn’t say anything in the previous parentheses, but man, they really make that metaphor clear.)

That got me thinking until someone else mentioned that the person who offered to fix the car would be using bubble-gum and toothpicks that wouldn’t last me the trip back to town. And that got me thinking about how I don’t want to get stuck again, ’cause I’d get hungry and probably try to eat the gum. And I hate gum.

But none of that matters, because by most accounts, Washington State is not a swing state. And it looks like it won’t be come November (What is the threshold for a swing state, anyways?). So I can vote for Kucinich and know that Bush will not carry Washington State. If I lived in Florida or Oregon, I’d have to re-evaluate my thoughts. But luckily I can vote outside of the shitty two-candidate system. I really hate the attitude that people are specifically voting for the lesser of two evils instead of voting for who they think is the right candidate.

Points on Kerry and Kucinich:

• Between 2001 and 2003, the Arab American Institute rating for Kerry went from a 75% rating to a 33% rating, while Kucinich has maintained a 100% rating.
• Kerry has a 63% rating from Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants while they gave Kucinich an 80% rating.
• Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel gave Kerry a score of -1 while Kucinich grabbed a +3
• Kerry voted yes on the Patriot Act while Kucinich didn’t
• And the biggest point, Kerry voted for the Iraq War Resolution and Kucinich didn’t.
• One knock on Kucinich that I can’t ignore: Kucinich voted with National Abortion Reproductive Rights Action League 0% of the time through 2000-2002. In 2003, he does a 100% turnaround. Kerry voted with them 100% of the time.

Any glaring points I’m missing? Add ‘em in the comments…