● 05.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 16/05/2023: Centralisation Concerns and New smolZINE

Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Years ago my mother told me that she still felt the same as she did when she was younger, but when she looked in the mirror she didn’t recognize the woman looking back at her. I’m feeling some of that these days: aging well (I tell myself), but still aging, wondering how I can in some respects feel so close to who I’ve been throughout my life, but also feel so far away from it.

• I am continuing my writing adventure. I have a secret project that only my close friends and family know about, that I hope to publish this year or next. I’ve made really good progress on that.

• But I am also continuing with my light-hearted stories, such as the one about me, Lantashi (the Dungens & Dragons character who also happens to post on Gemini!). I hope to keep publishing those here, on Lantashi’s Capsule.

• It’s really hard being perpetually watched by someone that’ll guilt you when they think you’re fucking up with respect to their interests in your doing things for them.

• Oh, the madness of performing for self-interested audience!

• Years ago I had a giant Argentinian bulldog. I would never own a bulldog, and the idea of ‘owning’ animals generally irks me, but that’s what happened. Our neihgbor kept putting a bulldog puppy into our kid’s arms, and after a while everyone wanted to keep it. And so we wound up with a bulldog.

• We also had another dog, a fast mutt obviously built for racing, and the bulldog grew up alongside, thinking she had to run fast. And she did — she didn’t have much stamina, but she could sprint! She was a bowling ball, knocking everything and everyone who stood in her way, to the delight of children.

• We spend almost a third of our lives comatose, hallucinating, mostly amnestic, automatically washing our brains, doing routine maintenance with elevated core temperature. You can wake us. If we go too long without sleep we get paranoid, hallucinate, forget stuff, get sick, intentionally kill ourselves, or accidentally crash our means of conveyance.

• And just like that, with a few games to spare, FCB won their 27th La Liga Title. Crazy! It was a really good domestic season for them and one that was hard thought. Xavi has been at the club for 1.5 Seasons and has improved the team’s defense dramatically. FCB has always been a club with a style that is more focused on attacking, rather than defending. However, after Neymar and Suarez left the club, the attack has been lackluster, and I guess one way to help with attacking is to make sure you don’t let any goals through. Idealistically, the club are not playing “Barcelona Football” anymore, Tiki Taka is gone, teams know how to defend against it. This is the difficult part for Xavi; trying to maintain that Barcelona style, but yet still winning all the trophies.

• I want to be the guy that made it by doing what he loves. IT is burning me out. I don’t want to stare at a computer all day long. But nothing else pays so well right now. And with my family it is hard to ‘jump into’ something else.

• Here’s a short story for you all. I did post it when I first arrived here at The Midnight Pub a couple of weeks ago, but I deleted it, because I got the feeling that some of you didn’t get it, misunderstood it, or even got offended by it. That wasn’t my intention, it’s just a story, a beautiful one in my (perhaps a bit screwed up) mind, not because of how it’s written (I wouldn’t dare have such an inflated opinion of myself), but because of what it’s all about. It’s my take on the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. A struggling carpenter’s son who found his true calling in life, a rich and well-situated man’s daughter who didn’t wanna get married to someone twice her age, someone she didn’t really know, didn’t love. A holy epitaph of sorts, a love story and an hommage to Harry Dean Stanton, the actor, singer and renaissance man, who I really admired for his candor, his singing and his straight-forward acting. I wrote the story a few weeks after his death in September 2017. I’ve put some autobiographical elements in it, but mainly, it’s just a made-up fairy tale to be amused by, or, of course, to be fucking outraged by, if that’s the reader’s inclination. It is what it is. A bit harsh, explicitly outspoken (x-rated), here and there, I know, but with this said, I truly believe that you beautiful people can see through all that and find your way into the heart of Mary – the character, the symbol, the woman who did what she needed to do to be able to follow her heart – to believe in herself, in the man she loved (platonically or otherwise), in something greater than herself, in truth, in forgiveness, in compassion, in humanity!

Politics

• I sometimes mention the owner class on here and I just wanna be super specific that it’s not a specific smokey-room secret society group of people, nor a specific ethnicity.

• [...]

• This means that 13% of the people have 87% of the stuff. (Pareto wasn’t too far off.)

• And then among the 87% remaining people, it’s once again true that 13% of the people have 87% of the stuff, and so on—the owner class is you and me, at one point, compared to the global poor.

• The throughline of fascism that’s been most resilient through modern day is the idea of class struggle being replaced by “workers should comply with owners against a common enemy”, and then that enemy is pretty replacable with the scare of the day.

• Pit-in-the-stomach feeling reading the news today as the brownshirts in Sweden are gearing up to delay climate solutions even harder, through outright denial. This is a horror show since the other parties are already bad and insufficient at climate stuff. We definitiviely can’t afford to add a big old stinking Overton magnet in the opposite direction.

• Over the years i’ve heard and read many negative experiences of psychiatrists. Most of the people relating these experiences are women and/or afab; most of the psychiatrists involved are cis men. Common themes are arrogance, condescension and dismissiveness – not particularly surprising, given the presence of not only gender dynamics, but also things like class privilege on the part of the psychiatrists involved. The stories range from “that wasn’t so great” through to “I was actively psychologically damaged or traumatised”.

• Although, in theory, one can lodge complaints about these things with various professional and government bodies, it’s unlikely to be a trivial process in practice. In fact, it’s likely to require a substantial amount of resources, both psychological and financial – and many clients of psychiatrists simply don’t have these resources. Worse, there can even be limitations on sharing information via informal channels: here in Australia, private Facebook groups can be held liable for defamation if people in that private group say “I had this negative experience with this particular psychiatrist”

• i recently mentioned that the mental health professions have gaslit and traumatised us autistics. Someone quite reasonably asked “In what way?” My reply got long, so i’ve decided to instead put it up as a post. tl;dr: If you’re at all concerned about the mental health professions’ historical and current attitudes towards us queers, you should definitely be concerned about their historical and current attitudes towards autistics.

• It’s weird how the shift from workers vs owners to pluralists vs populists has been presented as this new phenomenon by commentators like Norris and Inglehart, the latter arguing that it’s because of how the new generation has new values.

Technical

• I haven’t. I have nothing against AI, but I will not be delving into it with reckless abandon (or at all) like I did w/ the WWW in the mid-90s. A lot of headache (for me, my life) could have been head off if I had not gone down The Rabbithole.

• The Web is great. It’s also so elementary in “concept” (or was, now it’s a reality) that it’s hard to imagine civilization became so enamored with it.

• A server talks to another server. The messages can be, and are, fast. Fairly quicker than the postal service, and back and forth continuously should one choose.

Internet/Gemini

• It refers to itself in three different ways:

• First it describes itself in sufficient detail that a casual observer could identify whether any post is equivalent to my post; although of course they could not be certain that it’s the same instance or even whether it’s identical to my post.

• It has been some time since my last gemlog entry (or blog post for that matter)… Mainly because real life and work has been crazier than usual… I’ve managed to stay more or less up to date with content I wanted to read, but not with my writings… But when free time is more limited than usual, priorities and choices must be made ^^.

• /!\: This post contains what I believe will be a *very* unpopular opinion about bubble and how gemini is getting more centralized and dependant on a small number of users / services, if you disagree and might get angry, ignoring this post may be the best :). I don’t expect response to this post, so don’t force yourself either. /!\

• If I were to choose a core mission for the project, it would be to enhance social interactions inside the Gemini community. I think something fundamental was lost after the Gemini mailing list shut down. While aggregated gemlogs are a sort of a communication medium, the level of friction is very high and there are quite high technical barriers to participation. (The Usenet group is good to have around, but let’s face it: in the year 2023, Usenet is a relic.) I would be very happy if Bubble and, for now, Geminispace.org, can bring a sense of cohesion and connectedness to the community in a way that is “native” to the Gemini protocol.

• I do kinda agree with @bacardi55 that centralization is dangerous because it decreases resilience, even when the central power is as benevolent and kind as @skyjake haha.

• While it’s not currently having any negative effects, just the basic surface way in which browsing geminispace.org using Lagrange is analogous to using google.com on the chrome browser makes me a little uneasy.

• I’m glad to see the current wave of non-corporate social media. I’m also disappointed to see how most of them copy the worst feature of corporate ones – the feed. I know this might sound weird, especially if you haven’t tried out anything else – but bear with me.

• One of the issues with feeds is how they (don’t) handle the conflict between frequent vs. rare posters. Their posts are all mixed together. The only way to ensure that you’ve seen the posts from the latter is to try to scroll down as much as possible each time – which gets addictive. The alternative is to just take short peeks of the feed – seeing posts only from a small minority of the people you follow.

• We’re back! You’ve all been busy doing some pretty rad things around geminspace and that’s great to see. As always, if you are enjoying smolZINE and have any desire to contribute, please check out the Community Contributions section at the bottom and get in touch. HINT: The more contributions I get the more often I will publish new issues ;-).

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