Category: Highlights

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I always find it weird when someone insists that 1984 is warning about socialism because of the party name. The horrors committed by IngSoc are authoritarian, and have nothing to do with whether the economy is socialist, capitalist or communist, or the state is a republic, monarchy, etc.

You could easily imagine a libertarian state where a big enough corporation has the powers of ubiquitous surveillance, controls communication and information, has violent agents asserting control over people, etc. Same abuses, no socialism.

I mean, Cyberpunk corporate dystopia is an entire genre.

And we don’t even need to imagine giant corporations with microphones in homes, tracking people’s every move, mediating their communications and their access to knowledge, driving them toward the daily outrage.

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A few miles from Hearst Castle, a trash collector spent fifty years cobbling together his house out of junk and found objects. As Cambria became more trendy in the 1970s, neighbors wanted him to tear down the multi-level “eyesore,” while others saw “Nitt Witt Ridge” as a folk art monument. It’s still there, and still a controversy within the city and its historical society.

This seems like the kind of roadside construction that would fit in with American Gods’ cosmology. More like The House on the Rock than Hearst Castle, despite the proximity.

And it turns out that the first of Wyland’s 100+ whale murals, on the wall of a Laguna Beach hotel, was later painted over as an “eyesore.” (C’mon, really?) But since then, a friend of his bought the building, and he’s recreating the original mural. On canvas this time, so he can move it if anything happens to the wall!

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To keep myself from getting distracted by too many notifications on my phone, I ask myself the following questions whenever a new category pops up:

  • Will I need to act on it? (Likes/favorites are nice, but I don’t need to respond.)
  • How time-sensitive is it? (“Your ride is here” is more time sensitive than planning a get together for next weekend.)
  • How important? (“Server down” is more important than a project update. A conversation is more important than a newsletter.)
  • Is it actually for me, or is it an ad for the app service?

Then I turn off what I don’t need, turn off sound on the less urgent ones, and customize sounds for the most important ones.

So I hear when a text or instant message comes in, but not email or social media. When I pick up my phone I see emails, mentions & replies, but not favorites or boosts, etc.

It helps me a lot with alert overload. YMMV.

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Sign on a pillar proclaiming "Internet WWW Access."

Oddly enough, I did find gopher access down the block:

Close-up of a light-brown gopher's head, sticking up out of a hole in light-brown sandy ground with a few twigs and dried leaves around it.

Update May 2024: Coffee Cartel still has the sign outside, though of course they’d already switched to WiFi long before I took these photos. Come to think of it, I have no idea whether they ever did have a computer for guest internet access, though they’ve been around long enough. Despite all the other changes (and coffee shops) in the area, they’re still the kind of local place you want to hang out at, not just a trendy spot with walls that echo every chair movement.

(To be fair, I haven’t actually been to the Hi-Fi Espresso across the street, only the other location in Hermosa Beach, and the CBTL that used to be around the corner felt a bit more like someplace to stay a while than the Starbucks across the street, and was bigger than the Peet’s across the other street. And last I was down this way, Offset Coffee around the other corner hadn’t opened yet.)

Plus Coffee Cartel has outdoor seating within range of that WiFi, which is more important now than it was in 2019.

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Huge swaths of orange in a night sky view that wraps around the constellation Orion.
Photo by Andrew Klinger via Astronomy Picture of the Day

The first time I saw a picture of Barnard’s Loop (the arc running through Orion), I was astonished at the scale of it in the sky. I always had it in my head that (aside from the Milky Way, anyway), most of the astronomical features we see in photos are not just too faint but too small to see with the naked eye. The fact that I could instantly see the scale, because it wraps through a constellation I know, really drove home the fact that a lot of features don’t need telescopes, just long exposures. (And the right film/sensors and filters.)

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Sometimes you choose which social app to open based on

  • who you want to talk to
  • who you want to hear
  • what you want to talk about

Sometimes you’re just shouting into the void. At those times, I figure I’ll choose the void that feels less exploitative.

That’s part of why I still have a blog. And why I post more on Mastodon, while Twitter is mostly auto-shares from my other networks, retweets, and occasional cross-posts.

(And politics, because I’d rather keep that on Twitter, where it’s sort of the main topic anyway, than on the network that’s still fun. Not that Mastodon is apolitical. Far from it! But it’s a lot more varied than the overwhelming focus on US partisan politics I see on Twitter. And the culture and structure make the discussions at least somewhat less train-wrecky. Most of the time.)

Update: If you’re interested in checking out Mastodon and the Fediverse, good places to start are JoinMastodon.org and JoinFediverse.wiki.

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