works of wanderlust

Category: culture & politics

Warning, the sturgeon general says this category may contain fishy opinions about stuff going on in this crazy wide world.

  • weekend wrap, fourteen

    It’s September, and the last few days of August were a long weekend that was busy and activity-filled and definitely not wasted for the last day of summer holidays.

    Friday evening I got my board shorts on and sat in front of the computer for a a solid two hours attending the kick off board meeting for the start of the new orchestra season.  We start rehearsing again in less than a week, but being on the board (kinda—I’m more of a committee head) means sacrificing an occasional evening to make things work behind the scenes. Just too bad it was a Friday of a long weekend this year.

    With the heat wave, I hadn’t been out running all week, so I decided last minute to go check out Park Run. It just about killed me, but I pulled out a sub-30 five klick run.

    Otherwise it was a pretty quiet Saturday, up until Karin and I went out for dinner—and then stopped by the pop-up Night Market in the nearby Rec Centre parking lot. It’s a new event some group is trying to get going, and it seemed like a lot of fun and busy too.

    I went back later with my camera, walking over after the sun set, so I could play around with some low light night photography in a crowd.

    Sunday morning it was another normal day for a group run, which was a good thing that (a) we started early because the heat came on later and (b) ran at all, because the smoke came on later, too.

    Karin and I got rolling shortly after and got the kayak out on the river for a two hour paddle down the North Saskatchewan with the dog as our only passenger.

    But all that action darn near wore me out so we crashed on the couch that evening.

    Monday was a stat holiday, and as such we had planned a breakfast run meetup. The plan, as per usual, was to park near A&W, run five klicks and then go for breakfast. Sadly, the smoke had rolled in and the air quality was at a 10 plus. The verdict and consensus was to skip the run and just go for breakfast. Smart.

    I don’t really know where the rest of the day went. The kid has been filming her friends doing silly things in the backyard for a “Taskmaster” party she is planning, so we mostly just kept quiet and out of her way until dinner.

    I figured I should get some physical activity in, tho, so the Kid and I went to the Rec Center and I ran laps while she did some strength training.

    But that was that, and we came home so she could finish prepping for her first day of University (today) and I could settle back in for the end of summer… well, summer holidays.

  • periodical past

    Remember magazines?

    There are still magazines for sale, of course, paper ones… really. I know. I’m looking at some there off to my right even as I sit here writing this—but despite the physical evidence just out of reach from me, I do honestly believe we are clearly past the age of peak periodical. 

    I stopped for a coffee in a bookstore this morning and wandered through the magazine rack just long enough to thumb through a few familiar titles before heading for the cafe, a free table, and my phone… which has instant access to roughly fifty downloaded-but-unread issues of various magazines (which I may or may not get around to reading someday) all buried inside apps and services to which I subscribe. 

    I remember magazines—and I certainly didn’t need a paper copy.

    Oh, but heck if I didn’t used to be the core customer demographic for print magazines, subscribing to WIRED or Runners World delivered by postal mail, hitting up the convenience store for the latest issue of Popular Mechanics or that Playstation magazine that came with a free demo disc, and definitely buying a copy of some text-heavy serious content periodical like The Economist or National Geographic with habitual dedication at the airport before I hopped on any flight. And before you think I’m getting all high and mighty about those particular titles, I definitely still have a stack of MAD back-issues on a shelf in my office.

    Yet I cannot actually remember the last time I out and out bought a print magazine.

    (And to be honest I looked at the prices and that wasn’t swerving that decision any closer to a sale this morning, either.)

    The answer to what happened to magazines is obvious: the internet happened. 

    I mean, I’m sitting in a bookstore watching people still queued up to buy print books by the arm-load, but the magazine rack is a ghost town. 

    That’s to say, maybe the internet didn’t kill print mediums as much as it just killed print media. 

    And of course it did.

    I don’t buy magazines on paper anymore, though I’ve bought my share of bound books. But those things aren’t even really equivalents after they? Books vers magazine periodicals? I buy books to have them. I want magazines to use them.

    Because sure, I kept a few keepsake issues of those many hundreds perhaps thousands of paper-based magazines that I bought over the decades, but that particular ratio is likely something close to 5-10% tops. On the other hand, I still own at least 80% of the dead-tree books I’ve ever bought, and the other 20% that I have lost track of were almost certainly resold, loaned or given away.

    Magazines are, after all, by design transient media. Temporary. Longer-lasting than a newspaper, sure… but not by much. Magazines were always just a means to communicate something that was mostly never meant to endure beyond bursts of momentary information or entertainment. Then? Insert big blurry line here and cross over to the other side to find the realm of more persistent print mediums like novels and other books. (Magazines often try to be books too these days—weightier and collectible—but I would argue that the effort was flimsy and doomed. To most of us, magazines are things we buy, read and then… just toss.)

    I collect and read and savour books, but magazines? Far less. Magazines are disposable, fleeting, keep-scrolling kind of media.

    And that kind of media, transient and temporary, is really where the internet shines the strongest: short form transient content in a digital on-demand format. Read once and discard. Consume today, gone tonite. Words tangled up with timestamps and best before dates.

    Heck, you could even argue that apart from a few differentiating factors—like cost, quality, contributor count, etc—this very website is little more than a kind of digital periodical. And the one place where it is practically the same, sadly, is in readership. Sure I get some traffic, but this site is just as much a ghost town as the periodical aisle three metres to my right.

    We haven’t stopped reading magazines I suppose. In fact, arguably the digital equivalent of periodical media is probably in something of a resurgence. My own personal experience is that of reading articles from these kinds of publications almost daily in my news and social feeds.

    But as for that floppy bit of glossy paper rolled up and tossed in a bag, sitting in a cafe or on the couch or on a plane reading a bound anthology of that kind of writing? I recall it like a long-lost cozy sweater, but there’s pretty much no way I’m routinely shelling out fifteen bucks for something I have on my phone already—and then I’m going to throw away next week. 

    I remember magazines and to be honest I kinda do miss them… but probably not enough to do much more than feel nostalgic about it.

  • obscurity by design

    Blogs tend to get looped in with a broader definition of “social media” –and that is fair, to a point–but there is a much more modern attitude around social media fatigue and frustration to which that inclusion I may be less inclined to agree.

    I am going to write something that may make your eyes roll into the back of your head: I deleted Facebook. Seriously. But here’s the part where you can stop thinking of it as performative righteousness: I deleted Facebook over five years ago and have not looked back. People send me links and I ignore them. I am told someone sent me a message that I didn’t respond to there, and I say I have not logged in in years. Folks suggest I should check the online marketplace or visit their community page or whatever, whatever, whatever, and I shrug and tell them the same as I just wrote for you above: I deleted Facebook.

    This is a complex topic, social media.

    Our whole world seems to revolve around a handful of little corporate micro-blogging platforms that steamroll through the barriers to entry but, like a set of tire spikes at the entrance, create a troublesome blockade to escape again.

    So then that’s the thing. A lot of people “perform” the little notion that they have escaped social media apps, but like abandoning your car and walking out of a lot with tire spikes at the gate, you haven’t really deleted Facebook if your account is still there. You haven’t left Twitter if you could log back in and pick back up on whim. You haven’t escaped the doomscroll of Tiktok if you offload the app from your phone.

    I started blogging in 2001 and created my own little platform upon which I heaped countless hours of effort to write and post and share and converse. All of this was before the apps we know as social media were even twinkles in their tech bro’s thirsty eyes. And I write about it now because I am walking a fine line between grumpy old man yells at cloud (services) and clear-eyed neo-luddite looks at a world consumed by unidirectional experiences driven by inhuman algorithms that are literally destroying our society–and every day I feel like I need to say something.

    So, when I write that blogs tend to unfairly get looped in with social media what I mean to tell you is that sure, blogs are a kind of spiritual older sibling to the likes of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, but maybe more of an older step-sibling, born of a different first marriage between society and technology, built and nurtured in a more innocent time, still problematic and ripe for potentially harmful communication, but far less wild and spoilt by their parents bitter fighting. Blogs are related, but they shouldn’t just be looped in with the other kids.

    I tend to fumble over to analogy when I am stabbing around for my point.

    I deleted Facebook but I re-invigorated my blogging because there is something deeply toxic that is being nurtured on those social media platforms that is a little more under control on a private blogging site.

    I suppose we could deconstruct this a little more technologically.

    What is a blog?

    I have built so many now that I take it for granted, but essentially your modern blog, like this very one you are reading, is a giant database of text and images stored on a web server. I log into a piece of blogging software, in my case WordPress, which opens up into a friendly screen that invites me to do all sorts of things: manage my design, check the health of the site itself, change my account or add another user, and probably most importantly add or edit content. I can open a little word processor, type and type and type, upload images, add links and tags and a hundred other little design flourishes. And the big database behind that system keeps track of what I made, stamps a date on it, and let’s me push a publish button that sets that post I made to be visible to the public. All of that means that when you load up my blog, in a fraction of the second the blogging software goes into that database and shows you a reverse chronological list of everything I have created and made public. In my case that means you get a reverse chronological listing of (as of right now) a couple dozen long-winded, text-heavy personal essays with a smattering of photos and images. All of that is stored in a database I control, on a server that I pay for access to use, and no one but me–absolutely no one else–has any control over what appears here so long as I don’t break the rules of the hosting company or the laws of the land.

    You may be thinking that this doesn’t sound too different from, say, Facebook and you’d be right… to a degree.

    What is a social media app, then?

    Well, a lot of that stuff about databases and content uploading and profile management is actually pretty similar to a blog. You log into a piece of software that lets you write something, add pictures or video or links, drop in some hashtags, and press the equivalent of a publish button. But that’s about where the similarities start to diverge. This will be a simplification because (a) every platform is a little different and (b) a lot of this stuff is hidden, secret and proprietary to those companies. But just like me, those companies are managing a piece of software on a piece of technology infrastructure, it is simply a matter of scale. And just like what happens when you visit this site and the database and software work together to build you something to read and view and interact with, those platforms do the same. But where mine is simple and reverse chronological, those platforms have introduced something that we so often hear referred to as The Algorithm. All this means is that rather than a tidy ordered list of the stuff people post fairly, simply, democratically laid out like how I do in my blog, countless factors–from what the company wants you to see to what they think will keep you reading to what they think you might click on to buy, and the list goes on–weight into the order in which the software generates something for you to look at. And that’s it. That’s the difference… and in many ways it’s all the difference in the world.

    You will not be surprised to learn that not that many people read this website. I don’t have much visibility or profile on this big wide internet now dominated by a handful of massive corporate interests. Almost one hundred percent of the users of the internet (statistically speaking, of course) feed their time and energy scrolling through outputs of the software created and curated by Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok. And you go on these sites, you are entertained (by design) and you never leave… but you roll your eyes at the kinds of people who try to step away. And like trying to drive backwards through the tire spikes, most who try are unsuccessful.

    And then we yell at each other, on those very sites, trying to understand why we feel the way we do about them. Why do we feel empty. Why do we get enraged so easily. Why do we feel drained and broken and mentally bloated from the experience.

    I’m not going to sit here and write that there is any one reason, but I would contend that it comes down to something in the difference between a blog and Facebook feed… in which at the same time I would contend there is simultaneously very little difference, yet all the difference in the world.

    Whenever someone loops an effort for someone, anyone, to maintain a blog into the social media categorization that talks about the decline of the internet, whenever I hear that, I shudder. And I go write a post about it that you may never read, but which will be right here waiting for you in the exact spot where I put it, not promoted by an algorithm with an agenda, nor hidden by anything but my own obscurity.

  • when being annoyed is the whole point

    The primary operating mode of any bully is to get into your head.

    Fear is primal after all. Very few of us yearn for confrontation. We want things comfortable. We want to sit and enjoy our lunch in peace and quiet. We want to watch our show without being disturbed. We don’t want to be angry or shouty or have a need to knock fists in the driveway.

    So a bully threatens all of that stability with their words and actions. Threatens to cause an accident on a smoothly flowing highway by swerving wildly through traffic. Threatens to ruin your summer fun by burning garbage in their backyard. Threatens to topple your peace of mind by turning over the health care system to corporate interests. Threatens to take away your country and personal freedom by military annexation.

    The balance is sent off kilter. The seed is planted in your head, and it takes root. The fear of the bully grows…

    If you let it grow.

    There is a rumour going round these days that speaking ill of the orange dictator south of the border will get you in trouble. I am a Canadian. I consider myself a peaceful guy. I don’t own weapons and I have handled multiple bullies in my life with diplomacy and deescalation. But now here we have this rumour of a government bully, the resources of an entire nation being set on the “just following orders” dial mode where I as a peaceful minding-my-own-business Canadian am supposed to react to the bullying by doing one simple thing; just shut up and comply with the bully and you’ll be fine.

    And of course you know who the bully is. The bully is a nationalist government displaying the hallmark signs of fascism. The bully state. The do as we command folks literally pulling masks down over their faces and propping up their guns in threatening ways and wink, wink, winking that we should just shut up about their violent takeover of democracy down south or maybe some border agent will lock you in a cell next time you think about taking a flight to visit a theme park. Obey the bully state…or else. Just simply obey. But, too, obey in advance. Don’t speak up. Not now, not ever. Don’t talk about the bully being a bully. Don’t point out that these actions are eerily mirroring the actions that our grandparents and great-grandparents stood up to in eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. Don’t you dare suggest that we’re all heading down a road that leads into a dark age when the justified murder of millions will be driven by the political apparatus currently led by a clownish narcissist. Don’t question any of it or you might be next. Obey.

    Fuck that. 

    All that? That is the bully getting into your head. That is you watering the damn seed that the assholes planted there without your permission.

    This whole thing is annoying. 

    And that’s the point.

    I am insulated here, I admit that. I am far, far away from the border and have almost no reason to travel to it any time soon. I live a comfortable life and can probably get by even if society starts to collapse at the edges. It is in many ways a position of privilege, even in a bad situation.

    But still I’m annoyed. And angry. And, I will admit, a little afraid too.

    And again, that’s the point.

    The evil that sits on his fat ass in the american capital is well-practiced at being a bully who instills fear in people to get his way. It is, in many ways, his only real skill. He makes people afraid of losing their fragile political power, so they do and say anything to cling to it. He makes people afraid of losing their boundless weath, so they bow to him. He makes people afraid of each other, so they fight their family and friends because he commands them with disingenuous half truths. They obey in advance because they are all afraid of a little imbalance. None of them want to fight. They want to be comfortable. They want to sit and eat their lunch in peace and quiet.

    So? Democracy crumbles and fear abounds. Because that is the whole point, too.

  • monster blue fame

    Despite my protests about the fluxable nature of social media, I have been posting on Bluesky.

    That site, for now, seems like the developers have set out to build the anti-twitter twitter, and that appeals to me enough to participate. Again, just for now. But for now maybe creeping closer to and end because this weekend they rolled out verification. Blue checkmarks. A kind of quasi-fame bestowed from upon high by invisible criteria and processes.

    I don’t like it.

    Yet another popularity contest for which the rules are vague and unpredictable.

    Yet another bit of nigh unobtainable digital swag the rest of us cannot but hope to acquire to validate our own opinions and voices. To elevate our own perspectives above the fray once in a rare while. 

    But that said I don’t have a better or an alternative answer. Do we let algorithms decide who is heard? Or do we let corporate moderation decide who is heard? Or is it that popularity remains with the masses, even though the masses are turning out to be as many bad actors or sock-puppets as there are real authentic humans.

    That never-satiable quest for fame seems to me to be one of the harbingers of the slide of truth and reality into the abyss within our societies lately. Celebrities writing op-eds. TV hosts filling important government jobs. Influencers deciding if your product or idea or service is worthy enough to exist.

    There was a time when having two hundred followers would have been enough for anyone.

    Today, if you don’t have at least a thousand times that you are practically no one.

    What have we created?

    To be honest, fame frightens me. I don’t know how I would handle a thousand followers, let alone ten or a hundred times that many. I don’t know how I would sleep dealing with the inevitable onslaught of contrary illogical collisions that would create. Part of me is happy with a few people occasionally stumbling on my posts or my blogs, getting a little chuckle or insight, and moving on. Being internet famous would almost certainly shake me to my core.