works of wanderlust

Tag: the socials

  • social games, three

    I spent an hour curating. 

    Look, I’m sorry: If you follow me and I follow back, that’s the powerade of what is supposed to make social media work—but if I open up the feed and literally the only thing you do on there is repost angry memes and incite capital-lettered ranting commentary above links to random articles, I may need to unfollow you.

    I probably just did, actually.

    A fairly famous cartoonist I follow wrote something about his ideal social media feed, and it being free of algorithms and video reels, sorted in a meaningful (read: chronological) way, and a place for good discussion. Or, as he footnoted, he wanted the internet of 2008 back. I agree. Jokingly, sure, but gawd am I sick of whatever these spaces have become. 

    The flood of stupid is inescapable. You’ll notice that this blog, my site, and anything I control may be thought of as a highly managed and ordered space, but unlike the vomiting algorithms of The Socials, mine are purposefully curated to reflect a kind of personal expression on my part. That difference is important. 

    Dropping reshares and drivel into a big churning algorithm whose only job is to grab ahold of your attention and never let go, as is the case on social media platforms these days, is the polar opposite of what I attempt to do here.

    Yeah, to the untrained eye, they look pretty similar. But that similarity stops at a level so shallow that it would make the silver scratch off goop on a lottery ticket look like an atomic blast shield. 

    I curate what I post, I figured, so why shouldn’t I take more care curating what I see? Weed the garden, as it were.

    I mean, I need to spend less time online in these apps. I really do. And I barely spend any time at all in them, so I can only imagine what other more deeply entrenched social media addicts feel from their mainlining the algorithmic feed juice. Curating only does so much for that effort. And in fact, it may be that by curating I give myself more reason to stay on them longer. Sigh. But the hard reality is that I need to curate now so that when my energy levels are lower and more susceptible to the doom-scroll flow of the feed I have already done some of the work to reduce its potency. 

    So last night I unfollowed some of the people who I have incidentally picked up along the way. They will not notice. They don’t engage that way. They don’t comment or reshare or like. They are on there to firehose themselves, and give almost nothing in return.

    I had this rule: the courtesy follow. Had. If you are not a bot, and you seem like a real person posting real things that are not trying to sell me something, I would follow you back. But that rule has bit me in the ass. Angry shit-posters.  The hyper-political. The influencer repost machine. The caps lock granny. The patriotic sledgehammer. You all have a role, sure, but you are overwhelming me and you have created an internet that is dank and sickly. 

    My amendment to the courtesy follow has changed (even if it has not been posted so clearly elsewhere) that I will follow back anyone who is not a bot and who appears to be curating a web more closely resembling the internet of 2008: creativity, discussion, and something leaning in the direction of their own truth.

    I’m not rushing back quite yet, but I am trimming the digital weeds because I know I almost certainly will go back soon.

  • code monkey, one

    I have been writing code for nearly as long as I have been using computers—which, ugh, it sparks my nostalgic angst fuse to write it but that was in grade school in the nineteen eighties. 

    To that point, I have been coding increasingly more and more these last few years, and making more and more meaningful tools in code.

    I thought it was high time I started a reflective series of posts on the topic. 

    Oh, sure, you can toddle on over to one of my other blogs and read about the intricacies of my coding efforts when I choose to write about them. I am specifically referring to my game development blog where I was for a while simul-writing about the creative processes behind indie game design—but bluntly those posts tend to get into coding and design weeds quite deeply and are not everyone’s cup of joe. 

    Code monkey, part one then—and it begins with a wistful reflection on the recent overhaul of my Microfeed Applet. 

    Three years ago I was livid.

    I was so damn sick of the broken-ass nature of social media I set out to divest myself of participation on the platform which I had once loved and cherished, but which had betrayed my trust: Instagram.  Doesn’t that sound weird, to confess such adoration for a social media platform? Well, it was once a triumphant tool of personal expression and sharing. I could make comics or photos or art and spread them to friends and the world. It was like perfect digital self-publication tool made real and easy.  But those damn platforms do as those damn platforms are wont to do: they blurred the notion of customer and user and suddenly I noticed that I was no longer a customer, but just another user who flailed about in algorithmic hell of lost potential. 

    In reaction and protest, I wrote some code to upload my photos and text to my own server: 8r4d-stagram, I called it.  It kinda looked like a rudimentary version of Instagram, which back then was the whole point: if they are going to fuck up their platform, then I can just make my own. I can code personal projects, and it’s not like I was going to sell it so who cares how or who or what I replicated? 

    We went to New York a couple weeks later and there I used the new little photo posting system every day to post pictures from our trip. It was clunkier than Instagram, to be sure. Of course it was. It was essentially a home-brewed, web-based, beta-version of a billion dollar platform. It could never compete in real life, but it was good enough for me—and I took a lot of notes on what worked and what didn’t. QA on the fly, on the road.

    That was nearly three years prior to writing this post. In those years I have tweaked and improved the tool in fits and bursts, but improved it nonetheless. I have extended it, adapted it, fine tuned it and overhauled the guts of how it worked inside. I have added features, removed some of them days or weeks later, enhanced security, broadened the flexibility and made it work so much better than it did during that trip to New York trial period. 

    Code, after all, is one of those iterative efforts. A thing you make might never be done, so long as you can think of new ways of bending and blurring what you are trying to make it do, but then you can update it and improve it. That’s the joy.

    I have built hundreds of little programs over the decades, but only a handful have amounted to anything more than toys. My Microfeed Applet is one of those that has become in its own right so much more than a throwaway project.

    The last couple of weeks I have put my head back into the code and worked to push it even closer to maturity and even further from a simple Instagram clone. I reskinned the design. I added a menu system. I fine-tuned the back end code that you’ll never see but removes even more of the “clunk.” I refined the usability. All of this is not just in anticipation of another vacation trial period and me taking the tool to Japan to post our adventures in a few months, but because I am an iterative code monkey-type who thrives on continuously improving his tools, sharpening his blade, and enhancing his own skill. I use it. I learn from making it.

    And now that I have over a thousand posts on my own faux-social site, every code tweak it makes it easier to keep using it and not go back to broken-ass platforms.

  • social games, two

    We all start to sound a bit like junkies when we ponder aloud the idea of fleeing the social platforms once and for good, weaning ourselves off our feeds, setting limits and goals and self moderation parameters, or screaming digital curses to the gods of going cold turkey.

    It has been a week. A fucking week of social media garbage.

    Let me define my parameters. I used to vaguely claim that blogs and personal websites and sharing platforms all fell into some common harmonious categorization under the term “social media” and that posting on facebook or twitter or bluesky were just another form of socially participating online. No longer.

    When I write from here on in about The Socials I am strictly referring to the toxic sludge pool of low friction group-text platforms that slurp up our engagement vibes for likes and shares and algorithmically grind it into a type of endless digital slop hose. It may be photo sharing sites like instagram or discussion forums like reddit or hate-text engines like shitter, but those are the targets of my current ire.

    These machines had such potential for good, but humanity it seems had different plans. First came the artists and philosophers, sharing ideas and vibes. Then came the marketers spinning webs of greed and consumption. Next came the bots in their AI legions attempting to con us into clicking and buying and selling our secrets for a hint of fake human contact. Finally have arrived the ideologies, hate filled rhetoric machines set on dividing and destroying the fragile peaces of times through misinformation and threats and raw, unfiltered hate.

    Each time a new platform arrives I dip my toe in the digital river and see if the current is any different than the one I just left.  But people never really change, it seems. Even the most honourable approaches to creating a space of the kind we all seem to yearn is thwarted by sinister agents of chaos hell bent on shaping the world to their dark visions of division and rage. 

    Bluesky was my latest attempt at participation, and yet nine months on my efforts are once again beset by the unavoidable impression that it has become a whirlwind of political rage and a blur of misinformation. Post sweet nothings and you are ignored. Post creative joy and it attracts hoards of malicious bots bent on deception and digital theft. Post opinion and someone will set their heart on vengeance and attempt to destroy your life. Post truth and someone will dispute it with every fibre of their being.

    If there was a kind of metaphorical temperature dial to control all this, the ouija spirits of the internet cranked it up another notch last week upon hearing the echo of a sniper rifle. Orwell warned us of the dangers of crowdsourcing our hate to the masses and of handing off our power to an unchecked state. We did not listen. And in fact if the vibe resonating within the socials is to be analyzed with any confidence democracy is rasping it’s last breaths. The end of meaningful freedoms may not be completely over, but the front line of expunging them from the modern world will be on the feeds of social media.

    I may not be done writing and posting, but I am considering if I am now finally done writing and posting there, or if I am just another junkie who will never truly break free.

  • adventure dog adventure

    This may seem a bit silly, but I started editing together little one minute videos of my dog and posting them on Youtube.

    We go for a long walk, explore some trails, capture some 4k footage on my phone or go pro camera.

    I have a couple of these that I did with my last dog but I regret not taking more video of her when she was still around.

    The thing is, people seem to like them.

    Most videos I post get a few dozen views from friends or family.

    These have crept into the 1000s.

    Such as, our adventure walk through the snowy local river valley:

    Or, the new one I posted earlier today about a wandering adventure through some local suburban trails:

    I know she’s cute, but the interest has caught me off guard a little bit.

    … in a good way, of course!

    Check them out and tell me what you think. Cute dogs are an easy sell online? Or are people suddenly vibing for some dog-meets-world video fun?

  • Welcome to the Fediverse

    please note: This is an archive of a post that the author has flagged as containing a site feature or technical update that may no longer be active or in use.

    December 16 of 31 December-ish posts

    I think it’s fair to say that for anyone who has been online this year, 2022 has revealed itself as another parade of madness in the growing poli-cultural mishmash that we call modern society.

    I’ve decided to take a year long break from corporate social media for my forty-sixth year on this planet. Understanding that (a) blogs are social media and (b) I write a blog, it becomes obvious pretty quick to most readers that I’m not taking a break from ALL social, just the big, morally-terrible ones.

    Y’know. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit.

    I was active on all of them before and into most of 2022, but then…

    Describe your 2022 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    This is supposed to be a blog about uncomplicated things, right?

    Last year I wrote on this topic about my massively inconsequential place in the universe and how that shaped most of my purpose-seeking mentality in 2021.

    This year, here I am again ranting about social media.

    Tho, I be ranting because it’s worth being ranty about.

    And the cray-cray for the nay-slay, as my teen daughter would put it, has me thinking more and more about how I can use this space over the next year to focus in on the stuff that brings joy and meaning to my days, and not focus on the absurdity of politics, culture, and the universe.

    To that end, I’ve been dabbling in other ways to connect with people out there in that universe through platforms that are not owned and operated by lunatic billionaires. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what the content I put here is going to look like in 2023.

    I may have started all this to write about running and cooking, but those are foundation stones for a life that has a lot of interesting stories to tell… I think so, anyhow.

    While I should have spent the last ten days or so doing what I promised, which was, y’know, reflective writing and posting here, I’ve actually spent that little bit of free time doing something a bit more promising. I’ve written some software, I’ve built some networks, and I’ve drafted a script for a weekly comic strip that I’ll be launching here in 2023.

    (I even have two weeks off work, starting tonight, to start drawing!)

    I’ve also plugged this blog itself into that great big interconnected not-twitter network called the fediverse, so you should be able to search for @bardo@castironguy.ca on your favourite platform, for example, Mastodon, and you’ll get updates from me right there in your feed.

    Politics and culture might be crazy right now, but I think my newly-remeasured reaction has been to start adding my less-crazy contributions to the mix, to attempt to balance things as much as I can help do that.

    A million rational voices whispering wonders about the amazing universe in which we live might just drown out the thousands screaming madness.