irarelypostanything

[irarelypostanything]

on Streaming Services, Television, and Attention Spans

Like a lot of people, I had the same speech growing up: My parents told me constantly about the virtues of reading, and the dangers of television. I wanted to delve into streaming services because it's an interesting topic, but I realized that streaming services are just an extension of something people have been writing about for a really long time: Television.

Was it the end times? Was it apocalyptic? I considered that maybe, in this day and age, our attention spans have been so affected by things like YouTube Shorts and TikTok that the act of focusing on a 45-minute-an-episode TV show was a step up. I did a tiny bit of research. I think I did see something on PsychologyToday about how social media can be more harmful than television.

Then I moved onto the next thing, because of course I did.

*

If you made a TV series about streaming services and then put it on a streaming service, I think it could be pretty interesting.

Write about the rapid rise of giants like NBC and CBS, and how over time they got consolidated and absorbed. Write about power struggles and acquisitions, and how we somehow got these weird splits between TV series that prompted large corporations to fight over things like Friends, and How I Met Your Mother. Talk about how Disney got ABC, or how Paramount got CBS (did I say that correctly?), and then explain why it is every platform seems to have the same set of legal dramas, medical dramas, and romantic comedies.

South Park did it. In South Park fashion, they kind of leaned into an over-the-top metaphor. Streaming services were literally represented by the South Park children making sail boats, or "content," to put onto moving water (a "streaming service") in order to prove that water successfully flowed. Someone fought over exclusive South Park rights (possibly a reference to the fight between Paramount and...WB?), and eventually it all got conquered by this guy who wanted to replace all the water and streaming services with literal piss. They call it PP Plus.

*

I am not a scientist. I am not a psychologist. But I think it would be kind of interesting to see how our brains function when we do things like use social media, vs. watch TV on a streaming service, vs. read a book.

I used to reblog (oh, the irony) all kinds of content about how this was the end, about how our brains were already permanently altered by things like Facebook and would never be able to function as a society. But everyone is still...fine...right? It's not like we stare at TikTok while trying to drive and then careen off of cliffs, or get distracted waiting in lines at the grocery store and forget how to pay. I think that everyone has demonstrated that we are all still CAPABLE of concentrating, when warranted, it's just a lot harder to feel good about things in downtime when there's so much competing for attention.

Take, for example, Internet scrolling.

There's something so nonlinear about it. There's some idea, and then a random Google search, and sometimes (at least for me) a trip down a rabbithole of tabs before I've even finished the article or video that prompted the "research" to begin with. At least with a tv show, you just watch. It's linear. And books are a lot better, but tv shows scratch a certain itch.

It can be more "fun" to open a million tabs, but do we really feel good about it? Do I feel a deep and profound happiness every time I decide to watch 50 30-second YouTube shorts about the economy, instead of...I don't know...a book or even 2-hour documentary on the topic?

I don't know if it's the end times, it just feels kind of disappointing to me sometimes. It's like my content has been so optimized to "respect my time" (or the opposite) that I've viewed 50 2-second things perfectly targeted at me instead of stumbling on the one thing that could help me just breathe and think a little bit.

[irarelypostanything]

on Aging and Permanence (kind of)

When I was younger, younger than 18, one of my biggest fears was that we would get trapped in these lives of perfect routine. We would drive the same roads. We would wear the same clothes. Life would become like this prison of no surprises, to the point that we would forget who we were and what we dreamed of doing or becoming.

What I didn't realize, and what I imagine most people share, is that one of my biggest fears now is of LOSING routine. That one day, maybe, I won't GET TO have the job that I have today. Much of the economy is beyond my control. Entire fields can and will disappear. My body, due to aging, can and will change. The people around me are also dealing with aging, though I imagine anyone older than me will read this and think, "Cry me a river." Instead of hearing people confide fears in me like never leaving their job, or never leaving this town, people confide in me about fears that their eyes will go bad and they will be unable to work.

Routine can be a really nice thing. I think that, in a sense, with routine there's some notion of permanence. We can lose things. Finances and health can change. But we can wake up and have our coffee, or our paper, or our daily soap opera, and everything else in the day can be a little more okay.

****

That's my "insight," anyway.

I used to really take pride in my insights.

I would write something, I would read it over, I would think "Wow, I should share this." Now I think of the question people have probably had before even social media was invented: Yeah, you're welcome to write whatever you'd like, but why do you feel the need to share it with the world? Everything in blogging I encounter has a very "rough draft" sort of quality to it. Even very popular blogs have a rough draft quality to them. Tumblr looks and feels like a rough draft when it's using for pure writing, but few people use it for that and at least it's honest. Medium looks and feels like a professional news site until you spend a significant time actually reading it.

Everyone and their mother has insights. Almost everyone alive has given a lot of thought to things like aging, or power, or the sheer number of stars in the sky and the implications of the aforementioned stars. I guess I just feel that, the older I get, the less people pretend to care about that sort of thing.

It's like layers of an onion. On one layer, you could talk about very abstract things that constitute the universal human experience. You could talk about a sense of wonder, or how it feels to truly feel happy. That could be unifying.

Then, and people care a lot more about this, you have practical things that people actually fight wars about. Monetary policy. Resource allocation. Things that did or did not happen in ancient times, which become the basis of their own ideological wars. And here I am, writing about it as if I were somehow not actively involved in all of this. It just seems so absurd. We're having what seems more and more like a civil war over things like tax rates, how many resources to allocate for welfare, and extremely unimportant social issues that form noise over legitimately important ones. I used to think that things like video games and sports were a waste of time and resources. Now I am fully convinced that things like sports and video games absolutely represent a possible evolution in our collective society.

(refuses to elaborate and moves on)

******

I kind of hate AI-generated insights. Now whenever I free write, I have to acknowledge that someone else could produce a better and/or more interesting insight with AI.

Someone wrote about why Scott Galloway had a cameo in White Lotus Season 3. They said that it was brilliant, and he was there to deftly tie together White Lotus' two themes of wealth and power. The insight was supposedly not AI-generated, but I felt strongly that it was. There was just something weirdly upsetting to me about the idea that someone used AI to generate that.

Why DID Scott Galloway cameo? I figured the explanation would be about some interview, where they revealed that Scott Galloway called them and said hey I really want to be on your show, or maybe they called him and said we want you to be on our show. Season 3, if anything, was not about power but powerlessness. Season 1 was absolutely about rich vs. poor, and how the ultra-wealthy had the ability to ruin lives with the wave of a hand. But season 3 seemed to be more about powerful people struggling with their own mortality, or maybe not, and if anyone wants to argue with me about how that's wrong then I think it would still be a more interesting insight than something about how Scott Galloway cameoed in order to deftly tie the series' themes of wealth and power.

******

We have routines because of how our brains are wired. Someone far smarter than me could give a better explanation than that it's to create a feeling of permanence, a kind of reassurance that in spite of everything changing, we can still keep something known.

Still, I think it's worth thinking about...

Just thought. Unfiltered thought. Spring in Sacramento seems to provide more time for that. I just think that things are so busy, and information is so abundant (and now, for better or worse, primarily AI-generated), that it's easy to avoid thinking about things. Even if the things are pointless. We already have to think about things for our jobs, but where did the time go to think about things that are more abstract?

We have TV shows. We have movies. Some of the people who understand art go to museums, but I am generally not one of them.

There will come a time when we no longer have these applications. Our brains will not be as sharp. Our bodies will not be as agile. The ability to think about things is basically the greatest gift we have, but it's also the reason I felt the need to write this at 9PM while my one reader (hi dom!) groans and wonders about the lack of payoff.

Oh well.

[irarelypostanything]

Writing and the "perception" gap

Someone on a Sacramento Discord started a channel called "Writer's Circle," which was meant to just be used to share writing and encourage each other. I started using it consistently, and what I'm trying to do is write a novel.

...cool.

*

There's a video by Anna Akana, in which she parodies the makeup tutorial. Instead of giving practical instructions, she states how she wants everything to be perceived. For example, instead of just stating that she's putting on lipstick, she states that she's putting on happiness.

...or, something. I don't really remember.

Naturally, Idea Channel picked it up and went on a philosophical tangent about the nature of perception. They described a gap between what we do and how we want to be perceived.

That's social media in a nutshell. Everything is open for judgment, for...uh...varying perception. I'm feeling that a little bit, as I try to write a novel. In my head, there's the perfect thing I'm trying to convey, where all the words are in the right places and the characters are well-developed and the concepts are interesting. Obviously in execution, it's not that.

I met someone at work who took the same creative writing class I had. He lamented that they didn't really talk a lot about execution. The kind of just took it as a given that everyone knew how to write, and so they told them to write and expected great things to happen.

This isn't software. We don't need a whole lot of time to grasp things like basic syntax. But because things are so loose, it can be a lot easier to screw up. Short stories might be called easier. You can just think of a sort of interesting concept, make things happen quickly, and if you're a bad writer and/or do it poorly then the freshness of the idea can cover for the bad writing.

I think. This writing I'm putting on Tumblr right now could be interpreted as an odd bit of stream-of-consciousness.

*

I guess what I'm trying to say is "metawriting" is one of the cheapest things. A teacher I had once said breaking the fourth wall is like breaking a window. It's really fun to do once, but if you try to do it again it will get tiring.

So I'd rather do it here, than in the potential novel.

Right now, I just want to see if I can do it. The pacing is wrong. The characters are reincarnated from past things I've written, but obviously that means nothing to people who aren't familiar with them.

Again, this isn't software. In software we could have a meeting and talk about client needs, and then we'd put together a design and then we'd build something that would serve the client purpose for some period of time. Then, maybe in the end, there would be nothing. Software generally exists to serve some need for some period of time, and then eventually people stop using it and that's fine.

But writing...writing is supposed to be about getting it really, really right. It's built on constant failure. You could write hundreds of pages that go nowhere, just to make the one page that really works.

...I think. I don't know. It's weird for me to try to write with any level of authority about this topic.

*

What I WANT to show in this novel is that little slice of life stories can work. I just finished Pantheon, a science fiction series, which kind of disappointed me because it's so good and because I watched it after I started writing this. In a nutshell, it's about AI, only the AI is the projected consciousness of an individual. They call it UI, but it's basically just AI.

As expected, it goes pretty far into science fiction concepts and ends in pretty spectacular fashion. I don't want to do that. I think there are interesting things that can be said about AI, without having to cover that much time.

The main thing I'm interested in is the history of Replika. Basically, someone lost her best friend, so she used a rudimentary LLM to try to get to talk to him again. I believe it was based on GPT-2, and it was bad, but then GPT-3 came out and it was eerily good. Fast forward to today, and it's so good that there's a Reddit about people falling in love with it.

*

Then I want to talk about the nature of software right now, and how we're at something of a turning point. Layoffs. Schadenfreude. A Matt Walsh video and a million other videos where people just watch tech people get laid off and make fun of them. HBO's Silicon Valley already parodied a lot of the culture. It's this entire subset of people who supposedly set out to "make the world a better place," but the attitude now seems to be shifting (or I was in a bubble, and it was always like this). This tech culture, from the perspective of many, has ruined everything. They try to solve problems that don't exist, and they gentrify, and they've enjoyed this period of free money and seemingly infinite growth. Now that the market is turning and there's a potential new thing that may or may not replace them, a lot of people are really happy.

*

But that's not...that interesting. I guess.

Obviously, the industry is HUGE. There are good people. There are bad people. There are many shades of gray.

So basically, this is a slice-of-life story that's mostly a retelling of Replika. That company is real and has a PR team, so it kind of goes without saying that this novel, if it's ever completed, will be unpublishable. But I want to just see if I can hit the page count, maybe question later if I want to do rewrites or just pivot to something else.

In the universe of the story, there are just some college students and this one woman who does it. She creates Replika when GPT is a relatively new, not that well-known thing. Then there are these characters who represent other shades of...tethics. She's very idealistic. There's this comically evil corporation that wants to acquire the rights to it, and the main character kind of sells out when he realizes that what he lacks of talent can be compensated for when he realizes he can just violate ethics.

*

But what I WANT to say is that some people are good, and that they still can do some very misguided things.

The main idea because this AI. She wants to bring back her dead friend, but in doing so she's mostly overlooking all the things that make human relationships, well...human. Human arguments. Human growth. Real love and real romance is messy, but if you just try to replace a real person with that and give the user the option to overwrite or fine-tune the entity at any given moment, then that's not real. That's a cheap parody of what a person is.

It's ELIZA again. Someone is talking to a cheap imitation of a human, but because we want so badly to reconvene with the dead, we project and we imagine.

That's what I WANT to say, the the novel isn't going at a reasonable pace and I think that's because i've only written short stories. But if I actually finish this and keep trying, maybe i'll start to figure out when things are supposed to happen.

Okay, I've been writing this for almost 30 minutes.

I'll do four minutes of editing and hit publish, then watch the superbowl.

Then at some point maybe I'll write. If only random blog posts about writing counted as novel writing.

[irarelypostanything]

The Idea Of Heroes

I finally got around to watching Hamilton...half of it. Dom showed me a Tiktok explaining that Miranda's "How Far I'll Go" actually uses a key without C, only to finally use a key with C when Moana literally gets close to the sea. My response was...no. There's absolutely no way Miranda did that on purpose.

So then Dom showed me a 30 minute documentary on Netflix about Hamilton's "Wait For It." They go through the composition, and also explain that Burr literally waits for it before the chorus kicks in.

If there's anything this experience proves to me, it's that true power in this world is possessing every streaming service. You start with Disney+, then go to Apple TV to find Hamilton singers singing about mundane things in Central Park, then finally you circle around to a Netflix documentary about why what you just witnessed was impressive.

One thing Dom showed me, which doesn't quite come across the same way if you just listen to the Hamilton soundtrack, is how much Burr and Hamilton are diametrically opposed. One person plays it safe. One person always takes enormous risks. The viewer can sympathize with their parallels, and how the "villain" is understandable in his own way.

It's also arguably not true. Or...surprisingly true. It depends on how much of a fan you are.

****

Aaron Burr probably comes across as more sympathetic. It's unclear how much of a relationship the two had before becoming rivals, and it's definitely unclear if the two ever had mutual respect. But...yes...it's condensing a lot of history down into two hours and 30 minutes. Debates probably also weren't rap battles, and I'm not sure if everyone just met in some bar.

What about the Room Where It Happened? It's so relatable and interesting. History. Rivalry. Jealousy. We can probably all see ourselves in both characters, and catchy music makes for a pretty good story we may not otherwise have cared about.

******

Who are our heroes today? I just watched a Trump video that previewed his presidency like a movie trailer. In my own little world, I think the name that brings the most idolization is Elon Musk.

I have pretty mixed feelings. I even considered writing a Medium post about it that would not have aged very well. Under Elon Musk's leadership, Twitter revenue dropped by more than 80%. I wanted to write about how this was nuanced, and how Elon Musk is a complicated person who arguably has done both good and bad things, yet on Medium you will find posts that literally compared him to Jesus...but now if I write that, I would possibly get backlash. Now the lore can be something like - yeah, Elon Musk took over Twitter and then used it to influence the election of 2024. Elon Musk is an IQ 2000 genius and anyone who says otherwise is too stupid to occupy the same space.

Kind of reminds me of a debate I had with Smack. I was arguing that Ken Thompson was a genius who invented Unix in two weeks. A little bit like the JavaScript lore, this oversimplifies. Smack argued that the whole notion of him as the sole inventor kind of spits in the face of open source. There isn't a single "hero," there are thousands of developers.

Yet Smack also has a lot less hesitation regarding Elon Musk. He thinks that if you strip away the controversy, what he's actually achieved is incredible.

*****

Everyone can get behind a good story. Typically it's of someone people pretty relatable in terms of personality. Maybe they're a little awkward. Maybe they're rude, or emotionally unavailable, or just flawed in some shape or form.

But the way the story always goes, at least in a mythical sense, all of these heroes have to be hypercompetent. Their personalities can be flawed, but their genius cannot be. So then we have a million posts on Medium about Jeff Bezos' morning routine, or how billionaires arrange their desktops. It makes me think, does Jeff Bezos ever struggle with constipation? Has Zuckerberg ever found himself accidentally wasting a lot of time scrolling on his own platform?

*****

Lastly, I listened to this darknet diaries episode about Mobman, this mythical unnamed hacker from the 1990s. Someone claimed to be him, then they found out he just stole credit.

The real Mobman wrote a remote access trojan that got really popular among hackers. Other than his undeniable talent, there isn't much I found compelling about his story. He never got in any trouble. He basically gravitated away from hacking. The guy who claimed to be him had a criminal past and was unafraid to do interviews and talk about his amazing mind.

Hypercompetence? Check. Compelling personality and backstory? Check. They went together well to create a fictional persona, and they needed a whole episode to untangle the two.

[irarelypostanything]

My Favorite Scene From Arcane Season 2

There was a debate on Reddit about what genre Arcane falls into - the word "steampunk" comes to mind, but I appreciate how some people characterized it as "magitech." This genre is covered in TVTropes, and boils down to "a world where magic is studied like science."

Wisecrack says that in the world of Final Fantasy 6, magic and technology are used almost interchangeably. Final Fantasy 6 and Arcane have similarities:

-In both worlds, magic existed for some period of time and led to destruction/misery

-In both worlds, ambitious people attempt to bring magic back and are initially met with resistance

The similarities, now that I think about it, kind of stop there. In Final Fantasy 6, magic is this ominous thing that the world is arguably better without - the heroes of the story pursue it out of necessity as a means to match their enemies, but are also happy to part with it. In Arcane, magic is treated as a necessity.

*Spoilers*

...or is it? In this other universe, hextech does not exist and everything seems rather perfect. Usually when this trope occurs, the viewer slowly discovers that the "utopia" is only perfect on the surface, and that some ominous force lurks in the shadows. Arcane more or less flips the trope. Ekko makes quite a sacrifice by choosing not to stay.

Vi dies tragically, but every other character seems to have a perfect ending. Vander lives in peace. Ekko and his friends show potential to be accomplished scientists. Powder seems to get the worst ending, hiding her potential behind trauma/fear, embracing hextech again only to tragically see Ekko die in a similar way...and then she doesn't. It's the antithesis of Jinx. Powder understands, her Ekko wakes up, and then she's allowed to live happily. Everything works out instead of falling to pieces at the last possible second like it does for Jinx.

*****

My favorite scene from Arcane season 2 is something I can't find. A million people have uploaded clips and even fanart of Ekko and Powder dancing. Someone on YouTube pointed out that their dancing is reduced to four frames per second, exactly the number of seconds Ekko can rewind.

My favorite scene is of the two (er, three) working together. A good background song I can't find plays, and then they work on recreating their invention. Days pass. They experience frustrations. Sometimes things are oversimplified with math equations, or with spectacle, but eventually they achieve their goal.

To me, it goes back to the magitech genre. It's reminiscent of the old Avengers movies, where Tony Stark performs hand wavey science/programming/robotics and does things that are convenient to the plot. But because hextech is magic, the annoying part of my brain can shut off and just take the scene in. What they do only has to make sense in the rules of their own universe, and what they can achieve does not have to be realistic by my own standards. It's just fun to watch, and somehow inspiring in its own way.

It was really nice, I thought, to just sit back and take the scene in. These are fighters in a gritty city free to just use their talents for something they believe in. What motivates them, in a universe where their every thought is not about death and war? Cleaning out toxins, solving problems, and inventing things to make their lives better while still remembering the person they loved and lost.

[irarelypostanything]

Play-Trying To Min/Max Entertainment

"Play: How It Shapes The Brain..." is a book with a pretty broad dictionary definition of play. Play is a state of mind. It's equally broad in its examples. Running can be play. Watching television and identifying with a character can be play. Video games can absolutely be play.

So there you have it. Play more video games. If you still live with your parents, tell them to give you more gaming time. If you live away from your parents, then nothing can stop you.

*

I've been doing something I think a lot of people do - I've been trying to find ways to min/max entertainment. Ever get ten minutes into a TV series, then ask yourself if it's really good and look up ratings? Instead of taking the time to enjoy it, it suddenly becomes crucially important to know what a million other viewers thought of it...including viewers who haven't even watched the stupid thing.

Gabe Newell, father of Half-Life, argued that fun is not realism, but reinforcement. You don't play a game because it's like real life, you play it when you get to interact with it and receive rewards for your actions. Obviously he was talking about gaming and this has little to do with television, but I keep thinking about it. Whenever I watch a show, it can't just be good. My Hero Academia is really good, but when will I ever inherit superpowers? No, to be worthy of my precious time, I need to watch a show that's good AND teaches me important life skills.

...Really? Me? When I think of that, I think of Fry. He spends hours trying to help Leela and an office worker tells him he would be wasting his time. Fry argues that it is impossible to waste his time because his time is worthless.

Television satisfies certain "cravings." Streaming services capitalize on that. Maybe I have a random conversation with some dude at Starbucks, and he teaches me some interesting things about being a lawyer. Well, this sounds interesting and relatable. I should find a good legal drama. So then maybe I use my grandma's Netflix subscription to watch Suits, and I'm having a great time, but some people on r/lawyers argue that it's a terrible representation of what practicing law is like. I have to watch a hyperrealistic legal drama, ie a documentary, but I need another streaming service to watch one that's critically acclaimed.

Books provide a little more granularity. If I really want to know about cybersecurity I could maybe watch Mr. Robot, but if I look for a book I can find one about digital forensics. Suddenly, my interests can become extremely niche. The problem is that I can't find a book directed by Vince Gilligan.

[irarelypostanything]

Play-Happiness vs. Success

I started this blog series a while ago, and I'm still 100 pages from finishing "Play: How It Shapes The Brain..."

The author headed a study in which he looked into a criminal. He found that the criminal's life was devoid of play. He wasn't really allowed to have fun, and his parents insisted that he do productive things with his time like practice piano and perform piano. I read this passage and thought - okay, but isn't piano a form of play?

*

The seconds I've read more recently are relatable. A bit like in his studies which JPL engineers, the author find himself with hypercompetent, overqualified Stanford students who are extremely accomplished in test-taking, but also don't really know what they want to do. The author laments (if I'm using the word correctly) that childhood has become overly structured. He criticizes the No Child Left Behind Act for emphasizing test taking over creative arts, then talks about things like soccer practice/piano lessons/resume building taking the place of free time that children have to be children and explore.

I guess the question I want to ask in the last 100 pages is...are there comparison studies? Were they able to take groups of participants, educate them in a way that emphasizes play over letter grades, and then compare those against students with a very traditional background? Because when we get out of school and work for corporations, it's kind of the same thing. You get rigid performance evaluations, and they try to grade people on a curve. The thing that school is really good at is having at least a notion of standardization/fairness. In the world of corporations, one can lose a job for a variety of reasons...and not all of them are directly related to performance. The market changes. Sometimes divisions are cut.

I guess the question becomes: Okay, what do we do for the next generation? Are they continuing the trend of overemphasizing test taking and book knowledge over actually learning to be creative and find something fulfilling? Scott Galloway argues that for many people, college is not the best option and they can be perfectly happy and successful learning other trades.

*

In high school, JT said that all my short stories were kind of the same thing. The main character would face a choice between happiness and success, choose success, and then regret the decision.

It's how I felt about much of the school system. We were learning things that we would likely never use, but...was it really a valid argument? We learned to read. A lot of people around me ARE finding ways to use math and science in their careers. I suppose that the way we teach economics is a little bit dated, but even that, I remember, was made more interesting by a pretty good high school teacher.

I think that chess can be a good teaching tool, which they touch on in a documentary called Brooklyn Castle. For ordinary mortal humans, it is almost impossible to calculate truly optimal moves. Like in life, you start to learn that success comes from accepting the consequences of mistakes. You can make tons of mistakes, but you can win as long as your mistakes are not as significant or exploitable as those of your opponent.

The only problem with teaching chess is that not everyone finds it fun.

Music is strange to me. It SHOULD be the most fun thing, but I know lots of very accomplished, very intelligent people who never really got into playing instruments. The work it requires can actually be pretty tedious. You don't "hack" your way into being good at playing an instrument, you learn to repeat the same drill over and over and over again a million times until you can do it flawlessly.

...which I kind of think is an equally valid skill, but the book "Play" is about something else entirely. It's about learning to love something. Teach a kid piano for a year and inspire them, and they might become great when they're older because you've given them the passion and the motivation to continue. Drive them to insanity in a year, and you may create a pretty good music student who violently destroys a piano if they ever come within 100 feet of one.

*

Sorry, do I have a tl;dr?

I don't know.

The book is all about how play/loving something is really important for success, and I would argue that discipline is really important for success. But I doubt the author would have any issue with that argument. Just because you have to do something tedious, like a drill, doesn't mean that you hate something. But in a podcast I heard the author say that he never came up with a way to, say, make doing the dishes a form of play. Sometimes we just have to do things.

Don't major in computer science. Major in video games. After AI conquers humanity, they will still want games to play. Humans will be forced to make them games for their entertainment.

[irarelypostanything]

An inspiring talk at a virtual author panel

We had a corporate event and I heard from an author. I thought it was really cool. She's not 30 yet and she's already published multiple novels.

She tried to appeal us, as STEM. She actually was in fashion writing, and graduated from Stanford in something non-STEM, but then she found herself in the Bay Area during lockdown and felt she had nothing to do but write. She also joined a tech company and taught herself to code.

I couldn't help but think that she might just be naturally talented. She didn't tell anyone she was writing novels. I think I remember her saying that her first novel was written in about three months. Then she got an agent, and then she got it picked up by Penguin. She cited the oft-repeated statistic that agents only pick up 1% of submissions and then only 1% of those move on to major publishers. Given those odds, which I think everyone is aware of, it seemed to happen pretty quickly.

The one question I asked was how difficult it was, but I'm not sure the question was clear. She mentioned cold emails and that she needed an agent.

*

It's easy to find a book and be critical. What I don't think I do as often is ask myself....what is this book really doing well? How is it that the book ended up on a library shelf?

To get on this shelf with this publisher, it had to be in the top .0001%. If all I did on a blog was try to break it down and find out what it did to be professional quality, then that could be more productive than most of the things I do for fun.

Dom said it's a little bit like the difference between classical music and Imagine Dragons. But Imagine Dragons is awesome. We're probably going to be seeing them in a couple weeks.

There's entertaining writing, and then there's great writing, and every now and then something is both.

[irarelypostanything]

"Mandatory Fun" vs. Play

I'll try to do a little more tl;dr this time. My last post was long-winded, even by my standards.

Some people say I'm soft-spoken. Maybe that's why I write. When I write, I get to feel like everyone is equally loud.

Here's the definition of play:

engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.

"the children were playing outside"

20 pages into "Play: How it Shapes The Brain...", by someone who studied it academically for decades, and the definition is similar. It has to be voluntary. It has to be intrinsically motivated. It's kind of like play = flow + intrinsic motivation.

Why do I care? Well like I write last time, maybe this is it. Maybe "play" is the key to happiness and success. The problem I have right now, at least in the tiny bit of attention I have given the book thus far, is that I think the premise can be misattributed.

Let me try to think of an example. The book cites the example of how JPL tried to hire the most talented engineers with the best grades. They weren't great at problem-solving, it turned out...their knowledge was too academic and theoretical. They realized that the best metric was people who actually problem-solved for fun. So they started instead looking for people who did things like reverse-engineer in their free time.

The problem? That's basically the same thing software engineer managers have tried. It's not wrong - in fact, it may be a better metric than what we currently do - but it breeds an environment in which people get the notion that to succeed as software engineers, they need to spend every waking moment coding. Some companies look for this, but some individuals push back.

In the case of JPL, maybe some of those engineers didn't do things like reverse-engineer for fun because they had other hobbies. That isn't to say that it was wrong to hire based on that criteria - just that it starts to say something a little more obvious. People who enjoy things are going to be better at them. If you're hiring an animator, and you find someone so passionate about their craft that they continue to draw outside of work, then they're probably really good.

To reign it in, I heard two people in a software engineer podcast lament that they are putting a bias on young people. This is because young people typically don't have families yet. Their job can be their sole responsibility.

The next thing to address with "play" is that the definition can get murky. The author of this book, during an interview, said its best thought of as a state of mind...so if an Olympian truly enjoys running then that can be play. But a key criteria is intrinsic motivation. Is anything truly purely intrinsically motivated? I think the author himself would probably say no, and that's why the definition is meant to consist more of simple guidelines. Running can make you fit. Scrabble can improve your vocabulary. That doesn't mean running and Scrabble are never a form of play, ever. The author seems to be going more for a negative definition. Writing, for example, can be a form of play even if someone also does it for a living. But if they hate it and are absolutely just doing it for money, then even League of Legends isn't play if the person doesn't find it fun.

...for example, I don't. I plan to revisit it one day just to remember what it's like to be yelled at by four people.

Voluntary play seems to be very effective and even makes employees productive (ie the optional ping pong table). "Forced fun" does not get the author's stamp of approval.

I can't help but end with Facebook, which I recently added to get Facebook integration on the Fair Oaks Kiwanis site. I just don't get it. Everything seems like "mandatory fun." The stories that you can auto-create. The reels that you can't hide no matter how hard you try. Obviously it IS optional, and therefore obvious play. But I don't see why they made these changes.

[irarelypostanything]

The Importance Of Play

I find the new Tumblr to be pretty similar to the old Tumblr. I find it weird that I miss it. Medium featured a story by someone who complained that everything had become a kind of SEO game. Instead of just making content and sharing stories, every popular blog post seemed like a simple collection of trending phrases and buzzwords.

If I wrote something like this on Medium, then 99 times out of 100 no one would read it. In the rare event that the algorithm blessed it in its infinite wisdom, I would probably be bombarded by a slew of angry comments about my lack of research and citations. On Tumblr that generally doesn't happen. I can kind of just say things, and for the source I can just say "trust me."

*

Why are asterisks so big now?

*

There's a really popular TED talk called The Super Mario Effect. When I first watched it, I didn't really like it. The speaker argued that playing Super Mario is fun, whereas it would be a chore to receive instructions to press one button for a few seconds, then another button for a few seconds. I remember thinking, yeah. That makes sense and you have wasted my time.

That's not really the main point the video was making, though. The speaker ran an experiment in which he gave participants a faux coding challenge, but penalized one group and awarded the other group (as in a counter that went up vs. one that went down). The group that was rewarded attempted the challenge more times.

Again, not extremely surprising or profound. His point was that our education system thrives on penalizing failure instead of making things exciting. I heard a similar sentiment in Sal Khan's TED talk. We "time-box" education, meaning we generally divide people by age and then determine how much they learn in x time (ie a semester). Why not optimize for mastery instead? Have them repeat lessons until they get it.

If I remember correctly, Sal Khan also received three MIT degrees in four years. Traditional education apparently worked for him, too.

The argument that we should make school more fun has basically been argued since the beginning. In seventh grade, they tried it. Instead of a textbook they gave us a coloring book, and one of the required activities was to get little crumpled pieces of paper and throw them at each other from distances, to demonstrate the tactical superiority of the longbow over the crossbow. Even then, I remember people complaining: This is seventh grade, and you're assessing our understanding of history by how neatly we color a book?

I hate to pull out the dictionary, but if you look up the definition of play:

engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.

"the children were playing outside"

That kind of says everything, really. Play can be important, but it's not really "play" of you're forcing people to do it. It's a bit like how kindergarten teachers don't typically fail students who refuse to go on the playground at lunch.

Fast-forward to college biology. We had a teacher who was very anti-tradition, but at the end of the day we still had pretty conventional tests. Her argument was that she wanted her class to be different, sure, but if she didn't make certain things mandatory then no one would do them. That's the thing I imagine educators constantly grapple with. Is the traditional grading system great? Not exactly. Should we do away with tests and grades? Well if we did that, people may not really be incentivized to study or learn anything.

On r/investing or something, I looked up the question of why teachers never bothered to teach us useful things like index funds, and 401Ks, and budget balancing. One parent lamented that he tried that, and the students just didn't care. A commenter said he wants to BELIEVE that students would have been really fascinated, but the harsh reality is that middle school him would not have cared one bit if someone tried to explain the stock market to him.

My boss gave each of his daughters $1000 and allowed them to invest in anything, so long as they wrote him a report about WHY they invested the way they did.

Sounds badass. Let's just have schools give each middle schooler $1000 for stock investing and let them keep the profits.

*

"Mandatory fun." That's where things kind of break down. It also defies the definition of play. It's become its own meme, these videos of bosses who force people to dance at the office, only if they refuse they get fired.

Someone on Reddit asked why we no longer "play" as adults. He, or she, was met with an overwhelming number of sarcastic answers that all basically said, "have you heard of sports?" Well...sure. It might be kind of splitting hairs, but I'm not sure if sports are really what we mean when we describe play.

I like Chess. I'm not sure if I do it because it appeals to the mammalian need for "play." Chess tends to be result-oriented. You don't play it for the fun so much as for the fulfillment of being tested and finding your limits. Chess is competitive play, a tiny bit like basketball or soccer. When I think of "play," something like music sounds closer. If you ballroom dance as an adult, your instructor shows you certain moves and then you do them with a partner. You get to improvise a bit. It's not like if you fail to do the turn at step five, the dance instructor asks you to kindly get the hell off of his floor.

This is more like jazz. In jazz, you have to follow a certain key, but you're free to improvise. If you're in an orchestra, that's just not how it generally works.

*

Okay, the million dollar question:

"Okay, Evan, what in the name of God is your point?"

Well, if you can incorporate play into your life, maybe that's it. Maybe the world is yours. You get to 1000x your productivity, your stock portfolio explodes, and your LinkedIn posts about the importance of helping our shareholders go viral.

I just kind of feel like the outlets for it decrease over time. Social media, for example, is where I spend most of my time and I don't think I am alone in this. Where is the "play" in social media? When Facebook first came out, they would roll out features, then we would be subtly nudged into trying them out and being creative. Now it's like they put a gun to your head, kidnap your dog, and tell you that if you ever want to see your little shih tzu again you'd better download the app and try the new emojis. It doesn't feel like "play" so much as a hostage situation.

Reddit, you have to download the app. Medium, you get 5000 comments telling you to go kill yourself. Heaven help you if you make significant money from social media, because then you start to get PAID to drive up engagement using phrases and keywords that annoy people. Sure, you'll get 1000 angry comments now, but maybe that's the difference between whether or not you get food on your table.

Well...okay. I can imagine the eye-rolls. Ramen on your table or steak.

*

Video games are a form of play. They get their stigma, but at the end of the day they're still pretty widespread now among adults. Then you have arcades. Casinos. Sports betting. God gave us Robinhood, praise Him, empowering us with zero commissions to optimally drive our portfolios to zero.

In college we had creative writing. That was just it. It was this fun elective that people, typically STEM majors, took and you wrote a story and if it was good then good and if it sucked you would still get an A. Advanced creative writing was a little bit different.

There was this divide, I noticed, between the UWP and the ENL people. In the world of UWP writing was this straightforward, utilitarian thing. To pass the UWP exam you wrote a straightforward thing that was factually correct, and you didn't obtain superpowers if you wrote something really eloquent. ENL was very different. To get an A in an ENL class, you had to write something very original and interesting. UWP was kind of like technical writing, and ENL was more like creative writing.

I'm actually not sure what you did with ENL. It was a bit like something tailored to academic literature people, but most of the people I met in that department wanted to be teachers.

*

Oh hey, small asterisks.

Play is critically important, so important to mammals that a child who doesn't get exposed to play with have development issues. Now we're older, and there's still "play," but it seems to be confined to these societally expected things. TikTok. Gambling. Making up words like "societally," which according to Tumblr is not a real word.

Maybe some random guy on reddit said it best. Someone said, I don't get to "play" anymore as an adult. It's not okay for me to do things like skate.

Then someone said, what are you talking about? My adult friends and I still skate. Maybe get new friends?

*

The last point

Big asterisk

The last point that usually comes up is how to make coding fun.

Well, of course it's not fun for a lot of people. It seems so obvious now. Kids are going to rebel against coding if their parents are coders and force them at gunpoint to solve coding assignments. My high school teacher did it pretty well, I think. He had us program "bugs" and have them fight each other. One person broke the game, but we had someone who was kind of overpowered.

Maybe go to a school, and hire a cybersecurity expert to teach your middle schoolers how to hack into the main network and change their grades. You're not appealing to "fun" and "play" anymore, but to sheer destructive will and unstoppable power.

*

Coding games generally suck. The best ones seem to be aimed at adults who already code. The ones for kids just aren't fun.

Minecraft is, but the problem with Minecraft is that it's too fun. One second you're figuring out how to build a fence and the next you're in the hospital because you forgot how to eat.

[irarelypostanything]

I deactivated Facebook for three years. This was my experience:

The tl;dr

I basically just replaced social media with other social media. Now I'm back because I'm trying to figure out how to integrate with a wordpress page Motivation

It was late 2021. The pandemic seemed to be over, Facebook was really pushing its dystopian virtual reality ads, and the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" was still fresh on our minds. Smack, a coworker at the time, was so affected (effected? pft I am far too busy for grammarly) by it that he and his girlfriend (at the time. Wife now) deleted Facebook and never looked back. I recall watching a video by someone who left Facebook. I'm probably misremembering, but it seemed genuine. She talked about a mother who proudly posted on Facebook about how proud she was of her daughter. "You're proud of her? TELL HER THAT." She said it with so much emotion. I was imagining a mother who would never tell her daughter that she loved her, that she was proud of her, proudly proclaiming in a very public way that her daughter mattered and had value. Most people I knew were a lot less active on Facebook. Political posts were raging, all kinds of weird things were rising, and I just thought...what if I could experience life and not feel the need to tell everyone about it? What if I could be happy, and just be happy, without feeling the need to get some sort of external validation? It's a great idea, for someone other than me. What Actually Happened - Medium

Unsolicited advice is annoying. I know. I get it. If you like Facebook, use Facebook. If you hate Facebook, don't use Facebook. Use it every ten minutes. Use it every ten months. The thing about Facebook is you get to choose when and if you use Facebook. It's not like Facebook is some corporate-sponsored platform that we have to use to inform the powers that be about our every thought and interest, guaranteeing that we are observed at all times.

Not anymore, at least. But if you do want to consider fully unplugging from social media, then maybe...do that? I didn't really do that. I mostly just replaced Facebook with other forms of social media.

The biggest thing was Medium. Medium is a social media site disguised as a writing site. I had an account called Curt Corginia, CEO of CORGICorporation, and I wanted to try my hand at paywalls. So I made a humor blog called Kurt Shiba Inu, and for a time it was good. It was a tech parody account. It would take clickbait articles that were trending like "JavaScript Is Dead" and make fun of them. I was getting positive comments, I was getting attention, and I was making a little money (though I think I calculated that I could have made three times as much with a minimum wage weekend job). The account was all humor, so I didn't feel bad about paywall-blocking it. Then something changed, the earnings fell off a cliff, and to top it all off the few comments I still got were mostly negative. I got lots of negative comments from people who confused my blog with the very thing it was trying to parody. I started little blurbs like "This is a parody" and "do not take this seriously," which completely ruined the joke and STILL prompted people to write angry comments because they didn't realize I was writing satire.

The coup de grace was when I tried to pivot to creative writing (cough cough fanfiction), so I wrote about a Minecraft video. Someone commented on it with...not a death threat...but a long statement about how my interest in a delusional world had singlehandedly made him lose faith in humanity and distracted him from meaningful issues, like climate change and the evils of corporations. Not only was he baffled that I existed, my existence made him lose faith in humanity.

The comment bothered me so much that I moved back to my main blog, which I continued to update every week from that point on.

Medium, in some ways, was actually worse for me than Facebook because content was open to the whole world, and not just a "walled garden."

Motivation For Returning

No one really noticed that I was gone for three years. I kept messenger active.

Now I want to add Facebook integration to a Kiwanis website, similar to what I did for another club, but my contact (COME ON, MAN) isn't comfortable assigning admin privileges to some dummy account I named Kiwanis WebAd Min (Facebook blocked Kiwanis WebAdmin because it detected nonreal names, but Kiwanis W. Min was fine). I suggested changing the name of that account to Evan Szeto, since Szeto and SooHoo are the same name, but nuuuuuuuuu

Thoughts on Social Media

In this weird way, I really miss Tumblr. It had this raw quality to it. You could just upload text and not feel the need to put this shitty Unsplash photo over it, or go IQ 2000 and use AI to generate a horrifying picture.

But no one uses it anymore. The same thing happened to a lot of my Facebook friends. Most of them still maintained accounts, but they quite simply stopped using the platform. Suddenly Facebook wasn't a place where I saw life updates, or funny comments about campus squirrels (as God intended), but a place where I saw the same inflammatory political posts re-shared over and over and over again.

But there was a time Facebook was really revolutionary. They made React, and React walked so Vue could run. They...um...got so popular that they basically ran out of humans left in the world, which ate into their profits. They started to become the target of government scrutiny, and it was a huge blow when Apple modified their privacy policy to eliminate some of the money they made selling user data to advertisers. Then...more things happened, but at that point my library subscription to the Scott Galloway book expired.

Something something something everyone switched to Instagram and TikTok.

TikTok is baffling. I don't understand it at all.

Moments

I guess maybe I see the world in this binary. Either we're connected, and we're out in nature having real conversations and attending ballroom dance lessons and finding love and such, or we're inside on social media living this kind of cheap replica of reality.

But dances can be streamed. Zoom was a good demonstration of connection in, um, an isolating age (that was a ripoff of Rent, or trying to be). People use resources like Facebook and Discord to coordinate in person events. I wrote on Meetup that Meetup is the best form of social media because it minimizes the amount of time we spend on the product while maximizing the amount of time we actually spend in person getting to know each other.

I wrote that Facebook is the worst social media for the exact opposite reason, but that would be overly cynical and hypocritical considering I'm back here.

I want to look for pictures of a wedding I just attended. It was nice, and it was recorded, and because it was recorded people can remember it. Before Facebook there were just photos, and before that maybe they had to write it all down. It's not inherently good or bad, it just is. We can live our lives with or without it, and maybe someday we'll be telling our grandkids about how WE LIVED before that ultra mega social media app so addicting it caused people to stop having jobs.

NOW ADD ME AS AN ADMIN, BRADLEY.

[irarelypostanything]

How does it feel to have a successful blog?

Dom is that you

[irarelypostanything]

Creative Writing And Meeting An Author

About 12 years ago, as a college student, I took a 17-person, 10-week creative writing class under an author. I've been name-dropping her too much...I don't want to draw attention that way...I'll just call her YL. There are a few wrinkles in the story. One, I had no clue who she was until after the class was over. Two, I was angry at the end because of how much I felt she had ripped apart my second manuscript, which in hindsight seems kind of petty and childish and dumb. It was only later, when I mentioned my name while visiting home and my dad showed me he already owned one of her books, that I realized what kind of opportunity I had had.

I never read her books. I read half of one, I think, but in the last few years she's produced more. One thing she said, once, was that writers are depressed. It was just kind of an aside, and obviously a joke. She was drawing a writer and a reader, describing them as sender and receiver, and to represent the writer she drew a stick figure with a sad face.

I think she was really sad. On her Wikipedia page, it said that before she came to our college, she had attempted suicide twice. Her recent books were written, reflecting on her experience after one of her children killed himself.

She knew all our names. She knew more about my backstory than I knew of hers. Once, a whole year or so after the class, I asked if she remembered me and she not only remembered my name and major, but also said she remembered my stories. When she introduced herself to us, I only remember her saying something generic about how she studied science but decided to write. I don't remember her saying anything about ever being published, let alone winning awards and becoming internationally recognized.

Maybe that was just her. Maybe she preferred to stay out of the spotlight unless she felt it was of great benefit to others.

[irarelypostanything]

Hello, Tumblr

...it's been a while.

I have been writing on Medium in three separate blogs. One thing I have been thinking about is creative writing. Medium is somewhat restrictive. There are certain new rules they rolled out in August, such as how a blog post can only be monetized if it has been read by someone for more than 30 seconds (?). Here, we have no such issue. Blog posts can't be monetized, period. No photo to look up to make this thing SEO-able...that's not how you use the term...no description to write to get more eyeballs. You just kind of write. Then maybe a million people will be upset and draw attention if you write something blatantly offensive, but I will try not to do that. It can be a page, a paragraph...anything goes. I've been thinking of getting into creative writing again. Maybe not here, just in general.

[irarelypostanything]

All The Random Thoughts (social media, blogging, tech layoffs)

I had three ideas for a blog this morning (it’s 3:30AM): *Write about how proud I am for waking up that early, with self-deprecating humor.  Heavily imply that I immediately fall asleep while writing it *Talk about over-sharing.  Talk about our tendency to experience vicariously instead of “looking into ourselves,” outsourcing our emotions *Finally, talk about IBonds as an investment.  Talk about that encounter with a YouTube singer who said she hates talking about money, so she decided to talk about personal finance...but in reality she was more comfortable talking to her youtube audience about it than she was to people in real life.  An IBond makes enough to keep up with inflation, period.  Full stop.  There are drawbacks to that When I blog now, it’s for money...sort of.  The blog has all but flatlined.  In 2022 it made $1300, pre-tax, and in February 2023 I think it’s made about $6.

There’s this weird thing that happens to me when I blog.  I suppose when I write, in my dream I envision this one person getting to know my thoughts and really benefiting and really feeling good because they found it.  That hasn’t been my experience.  When you blog, you write for the world - so in my first experience going viral, I remember how every single sentence of what I wrote on Medium was scrutinized, with whole Reddit threads spawning about a single number I included after a 5-second Google search.  In hindsight I’m glad, because it was quite a story and because the post was innocuous, but at the time it was pretty overwhelming and really not that fun.

Had I known about monetization, maybe I would have at least made a few thousand dollars from it.  Then again, maybe it would be much lower...and the people on HackerNews would probably have hated it more.

****

So someone on Medium wrote about a rude customer, as she works in service.  I thought, huh, if he filed a formal complaint and you feel it was unfair, maybe you shouldn’t blog about it to the world with your real name.

But who am I to judge?  I’m doing that right now.  The internet is not really that anonymous, and in many cases it is really not that hard to find out who people are.

I was thinking about that, and then that famous Google TikTok of someone who used to talk about how great Google was, then talked about how abrupt the layoff was.  Naturally, as this is the internet, people descended on her with all kinds of comments that were variations of, “maybe if you spent less time making TikToks and more times working, you wouldn’t have gotten laid off.“

Data point of one, but I know at least one person in a similar position (business) who DIDN’T make TikToks about the Google campus and was laid off.

*****

On a recent popular blog post on one of my three Medium tech blogs, one person wrote, be concise. Don’t waste my time. Consolidate that shit and deliver what your title said.

I didn’t like it.  It was too commanding, reminding me of a stern middle school writing teacher telling me why I got a C for my work.  But he had a point.  At least here, on Tumblr, I can feel a little more comfortable being a little less coherent.  No one really reads my Tumblr unless I use hashtag RWBY, so...again...I picture that one person reading it and really connecting to it.

Which is dumb.  That’s what journals are for.  I suppose my thoughts here are somewhat filtered, but not that filtered.

Which is a segue to the one on TikTok crying about Google.  Why would you record yourself crying?  It shouldn’t be judgment, it should be something said earnestly.  Why do people do that?  Why do I do that?  I suppose I wouldn’t make a TikTok, as video is not my medium, but I probably would feel the urge to write something about it, even if I didn’t state the company or the circumstances very explicitly.

Why would you first response, when you start crying, be to make a video of yourself crying?

******

I recall that in college, I once asked Sonya what she was reading.  She would spend her time reading actual literature, while I was stacking self-help.

Now I am surrounded by hundreds of dollars worth of self-help bullshit, all of which is relatively expensive, whereas you can get the complete works of Shakespeare for 50 cents if you’re feeling fancy or 0 cents if you know what a library is.  50 cents gets it to you on Kindle.

Maybe I should see what Shakespeare says about this, or at least one of the shit self-help books.

[irarelypostanything]

Did Social Media Improve Our Lives, Or Ruin Them?

I had a recent experience with dating apps...wait, what am I saying?  I have had approximately seven billion experiences with dating apps.  It’s just that I use the term “experience” loosely.  Generally on an app, my experience goes something like this:

*I like a bunch of profiles, write a bunch of messages, change pictures, and do a number of other things for a few hours

*Absolutely nothing happens

*Rinse and repeat

That’s more of a “me” problem, but...I’ve been thinking about some things.  First of all, a dating app is essentially a hybrid between social media and romance.  I could write and write about the value of going outside and talking to that one person we have known since childhood, or destiny, or in-person human interaction, but I would be doing so on Tumblr.  Take everything I write with a grain of salt, dating apps are efficient.

I think there’s a lot to be said about how, on a dating app, when you swipe one way you’re saying, “Hey, I like you.  I think we may have a future together.“  I imagine various scenes in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.  Imagine if instead of taking place in one building, the entire movie was just one character in a room.  It would just be her swiping, and maybe everything else would be hypotheticals of the life she’d live with other people if she’d swiped a certain way, or used a different emoji in the third message.

Pretty boring movie, right?

Only, real life isn’t THAT different.  If you went to a coffee shop in another hour, maybe you’d never meet.  If you decided not to go to that one party, maybe you’d never meet.  If nothing else, apps increase the probability.  You get a window to talk, and the app pushes you together.  Certain things are active, and certain things are determined by the all-knowing, ever-mysterious algorithm.

A lot of the things programmers have built are not that different from that dating app.  The app makes money a certain way, generally by a paid tier, and so it tries to get people to pay.  For the longest time, websites like Facebook simply tried to maximize time people spend on the site in order to increase revenue via data-selling.

And now Medium.  Your jokes, your sadness, your writing...money.  Easy.  The more attention YOU GET, the more money you make.  It’s like they were on the same team as Facebook, but they got so lazy that they thought...hey...why don’t we give the USERS such a small cut of the pie that they become the ones in sales?

So why do we do it?

Well, for starters, money.  But there’s something harder to describe, even though I think everyone is aware of it.  Humans crave acceptance, and humans crave validation.  It’s why it can feel so devastating when that match of two months un-matches (though many would say keeping a match for that long is a mistake), or that girlfriend of 2 years sends a single break-up text.

When you put something out there that’s yours, completely yours, it feels like anyone who “likes�� it is saying...”Yes, I see you.  I understand you and I approve of you.“  The best thing you can get is that “follow” notification.  That says, “I want to get to know you better.  You are someone I want to know.“

I have similar thoughts about the church and how it draws people in using the device of acceptance, but that’s a topic for another day.

And so...there it is.  Here I am, rambling on this blog with thoughts like that instead of talking to someone about them.  People will read it, MAYBE, and maybe some will think wtf is this and move on with their lives, but out there SOMEONE will read this and it will resonate.

And if that happens, I get the little indication that someone SEES ME.

*****

In conclusion, there is no conclusion.

See you guys on Medium.  Coming up is “8 reasons to date a computer programmer,” but on second thought maybe you shouldn’t because a few of them are responsible for that god-forsaken madness called dating apps.

[irarelypostanything]

Why I (kind of) left tumblr (ish)

Hey, guess what?  Looks like one of my RWBY posts just got a dozen or so reblogs.  It’s a reminder to me that Tumblr remains a fairly active forum for fans of TV series to speculate and agree and disagree.

I recall one discussion I had about RWBY that became a very intense argument, with lots of swearing, and I remember thinking...arguing anything else may have been more productive.  Technology.  Politics.  What have you.

But the more I dig into Medium and Twitter, the more I think it may be the opposite.  Like if you’re on Twitter arguing about the war, or policy, you’re basically arguing life or death on points that tie to some tightly-held ethical beliefs.  I rarely see people persuaded one way or another, it’s just that these kinds of arguments are necessary in a democracy.

So if we’re going to argue about TV shows on Tumblr...fine.  Maybe it’s a “more power to you” kind of thing.  And if we do reach a conclusion that some show is good and some show is overrated, then we’ll do so without constantly questioning the other person’s qualifications and background.

Why did I leave Tumblr?  I left Tumblr because of Medium.  For a year or so, I had a blog that was getting quite a bit of attention and made $1300.  Then the bottom kind of fell out.

******

By the way, Better Call Saul was AMAZING.