Legends of the Sun Pig

A few weeks ago Kottke pointed to some people rediscovering the fun of just blogging.

Lockhart Steele:

Back then, we’d had a ton of stupid fun linking to each other’s blog posts for no other reason than that they existed and that it amused us greatly. Who wouldn’t want back in on that?

[…] But this is not primarily a promotional undertaking, because that would suck. I’ll also blog about restaurants, travel, the South Street Seaport, the great city of Charleston, the great state of Maine, ephemera, nonsense, whatever. My hope is to relearn the practice of daily blogging, which used to be the most effortless thing in the world for me but now feels terrifying.

Elizabeth Spiers:

When I was a kid, seven or eight years old or thereabouts, I used to make copious lists of things I liked and didn’t like. I don’t remember why. I think some of it was about asserting identity and defining myself by those likes and dislikes. I remembered it a few months ago when I was skimming Susan Sontag’s notebooks and found an entry from February of 1977 where she did exactly the same thing as an adult. A sample:

Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, Wagon-Lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, pen knives, aphorisms, hands.

Things I dislike: Television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.

Sontag would have been about 44 when she wrote that. (I too like the color blue and dislike baked beans, but I had to Google to find out what a traversin is, and I must confess: I am ambivalent.)

Since reading that, I’ve been mentally composing lists of things I like and dislike. I should write them down.

And (via) to Fred Wilson:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

When I started blogging here at AVC, I would write about everything and anything. Then, slowly but surely, it became all about tech and startups and VC. It is still pretty much that way, but I feel like I’m heading back a bit to the personal blog where I can talk about anything that I care about.

After using Twitter (again) on a regular basis for the last few weeks (leading up to the Referendum, and in its aftermath), I’m giving it up (again) for now. Mostly. The reason is that I usually find myself upset whenever I read my timeline. Some of this is Twitter’s fault, and some of it is the nature of a pervasive social network.

Twitter’s blame lies in the way it is manipulating my timeline to increase my “engagement.” I see a lot of spam now. I’m sure Twitter sees them as adverts, but it’s unsolicited commercial messaging, and I call it spam. So I use the tools on the website to block the sender (or “promoter”), and flag the message. This is tiresome, because there is just so damn much of it. (More in the UK than in NL, because of geo-targeting.) No matter how much I block, there is always more. When spam became a problem on email, we built adaptive filters that could be trained to recognize and discard a large proportion of the junk automatically. Twitter cut off the market for third-party clients, so I can’t just use a different app or site that offers a better blocker. On Twitter itself, I can block “@bmw”, but the next promoted tweet from “@bmw_uk” or “@BMWGroup” or “@BMWhateverTheFuckTheyThinkOfNextToAvoidBlocking” will get straight through.

In Twitter’s native apps, the option to flag a tweet as spam is even more deeply buried than on the website. It makes me wonder how long it will be around for at all any more.

Additionally, Twitter is now trying to make me read tweets that have a high engagement metric, by putting them in my timeline as “Favourited by @xyz” (whom I follow), and just last week by sending me a push notification to say that “@xyz and others I follow” have retweeted something. From here it is a very short step to removing tweets from my timeline altogether if they don’t meet a certain minimum engagement threshold, or to rewrite the timeline to push them below the/a fold, keeping higher-value tweets at the top. I know that the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, but really. Look at how Twitter has evolved to date, and tell me with a straight face that this isn’t just around the corner.

The second part of it is my own inability to cope with the volume of everyday anguish and indignation. Erin Kissane put this very eloquently a couple of weeks ago:

Mostly it’s not police killings or mourners being tear gassed or a new war. Mostly it’s a dumb thing a reporter wrote, or vile thing a politician or celebrity said, or a tech industry thought-leader defending sexist practices, or the latest schoolyard cruelty from 4chan, or a novelist nattering on about the wickedness of Muslims or gays or trans people or so on and so on forever. Often, these days, it’s an account of someone who’s been threatened and abused for having written in public while female or a person of color or trans or something else that angers the churning undernet of uncontrolled id. These incidents are necessarily anecdotal, but they’re usually representative of larger trends—and often sufficiently nasty and detailed that they’re hard to shake loose from my head. And there are so, so many things wrong that it gets hard to do anything but react (aka “engage”), in increasingly less coherent ways.

None of us are angry about everything, or even most things, but in the whole slimy pond of troubles there is something to injure every one of us in a particular and personal way that makes us turn to the stream and yell this is bullshit. And each shout makes the water rise a little higher, because how can you not respond to your friends when they’re in pain? Add in the flood of information and emotion from something like Ferguson (or war crimes or an epidemic) and there we all are, gradually drowning. So people get huffy about the volume emotion that these events arouse—angry that others are angry about the wrong things or too many things or in the wrong register. As with stampedes, we tend to blame individual or group character for these self-escalating conditions.(I am properly angry, you are merely “outraged.”) But as with crowd crushes, I think it’s more about the properties of bodies in space than about character or personal choices. PV = nRT.

Right now, I can’t handle this. I don’t like the feeling that I’m turning my back on the emotional outpourings of my friends and acquaintances, but this is oxygen mask time: I have to put on my own before helping others with theirs. I’ll be using Twitter strictly as a write-only medium (auto-tweeted links to new stuff I write here on my blog), at least for a while.

Democracy isn’t something that happens every four years. It isn’t something that begins at the start of the election campaign, and ends when the votes are counted. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be.

I was emotionally crushed by the outcome of Thursday’s referendum. Many of us were. It felt like there was this beautiful idea, that we had this one chance to go out and build a better, fairer country. To be denied that opportunity felt like a bereavement.

But it wasn’t our only chance. The referendum may have have returned a “No”, but the 45% who voted “Yes” are still there. The independence movement isn’t going away. It’s just retargeting its energy, and looking for another outlet. In the five days since Thursday, both the SNP and the Scottish Green Party have more than doubled their memberships. I don’t think that an 84% turnout means that everything has changed in Scottish politics, any more than a massive worldwide turnout for the 2003 anti-war protest caused Western governments to rethink their policies towards the Middle-East. But something is different.

I’m still sad about the outcome, but I can talk about it without crying now. I’m not yet ready to say “we need to do this” about any plan or set of measures to keep independence on the table, nor am I willing to let go of the idea of full independence because it’s a “settled issue” (it isn’t) and commit solely to building a better country by other means. Right now, I’m just listening and thinking.

Robin McAlpine in Bella Caledonia: Wipe your eyes. On your feet.

You don’t win by wallowing, feeling sorry for yourself, blaming the world or putting your efforts into conspiracy thinking. And you don’t change things if you don’t win. I played rugby for Biggar. We were good but always the underdogs. We lost games we needed to win. When I was a young player an older teammate taught me much about victory and loss. I remember winning a crucial game that got us promoted, against a team that should have hammered us. Us youngsters jumped about like we’d won the lottery. My teammate clipped us around the ear and told us ‘you ALWAYS walk on a pitch like you think you’re going to win and you ALWAYS walk off a pitch like you knew you were going to.’ But the advice is even more important for the loser. You ALWAYS walk off a pitch with pride, determination and dignity. Because that’s what you’re going to need the next time you walk on it.

Irvine Welsh in the Guardian: This glorious failure could yet be Scotland’s finest hour

The yes movement hit such heights because the UK state was seen as failed; antiquated, hierarchical, centralist, discriminatory, out of touch and acting against the people. This election will have done nothing to diminish that impression. Against this shabbiness the Scots struck a blow for democracy, with an unprecedented 97% voter registration for an election the establishment wearily declared nobody wanted. It turns out that it was the only one people wanted.

Jenny Lindsay in Bella Caledonia: Organise

Because of the reactionary nature of the campaign, which required quick decisions to be made in the face of serious opposition, many issues were swept to the side “for the sake of the campaign.” That excuse goes away now. There is time. There is. So let us pause. Let’s have a look at who is claiming authorship and ownership of this movement. Let us ask of them what their authority is for this. Ask how boards and appointments are being made in our progressive groups, whether that is in our political parties, in newly forming platforms, or in the grassroots movement.

Laura Eaton Lewis in Bella Caledonia: What we need now is Evolution, not Revolution

We can rewrite what politics looks like. Instill personal accountability, collective action for mutual benefit, and diverse representation that reflects the many complex and overlapping identities within our society. We have the potential, we have the means, we just need to remember our power and do it.

Unusually for me, I hadn’t listened to their new album (Barragán) much before the gig. The first impression I had of it had been “whale song”. Played loud and live, though, it was mesmerizing.

The trio appear to be shy performers, playing more for the music than for the crowd. (Which is fine.) When Kazu Makino was on guitar, she tended to have her back turned to the audience. In fact, towards the end she admitted that “it might not look like it, but we’re having a great time being here.” On the last song of the encore, 23 she let down her hair (literally) and danced around the stage, finishing the set with a powerful and memorable flourish.

The new Tolhuistuin venue has only been open a week, and this was my first gig there. It’s nice, compact, with a small balcony. The bar serves Heineken (meh), and it’s worth noting that they only take PIN cards, not cash. The merch stand was happy to exchange my paper Euro tokens for a lovely T-shirt, though.

Abi and I took part in the Dam-tot-Dam walk yesterday. We set out from the house at about 06:45, cycled to Zaandam station and took the train to Amsterdam. The starting line for the walk was on Dam Square, and the 26km route took us through central Amsterdam, out over Zeeburgereiland, through Schellingwoude, Noord, and finally skirting Oostzaan before curving round to take us back into the centre of Zaandam.

When we got in to Amsterdam Central Station, I noticed that my back was wet. The wet patches were where the backpack’s padding was pressing up against my lower back, and I thought it must have been that I’d got a bit sweaty from the cycle to Zaandam. When we got to the starting line and took the route maps and stamp cards out of the backpack, though, we discovered that it was because one of the cans of cola we’d brought with us had burst open and emptied completely. At least it hadn’t been dripping brown liquid down the back of my trousers, but everything in the backpack (most notably: spare socks) was completely soaked. The lower back foam padding had absorbed much of the liquid, and I spent most of the walk trying to ignore a moist chafing feeling.

The previous day’s referendum result had knocked me flat. Because of the early morning, I hadn’t fully caught up on sleep. Discovering the burst can sent my mood spiralling even further down. I was close to not even starting the walk in the first place, but I didn’t want to let Abi down. She offered to carry the backpack, but the thought of walking 26km with an uncomfortable wet back seemed like suitable punishment for…I don’t know, not having packed it more carefully, not having done more to persuade “No” voters, and being a terrible person in general. Depression fucks with your head.

The first half of the walk was miserable. I practically growled at a trio of women who asked me to take their photo at the first rest stop. Not my finest moment. I got a bit better in the second half. Exercise helps me, but it takes time for the effects to kick in. I think I managed to recover enough to smile a bit by the end, but I was awful company. I apologize to Abi, and to everyone I glared at on the way.

But we did another 26km walk, which is cool. We gorged ourselves on freshly deep-fried kibbeling afterwards, without fear of calories.

I was too tired to stay up beyond 01:30. I set my alarm for 04:00 and fell asleep quickly.

Turned on the TV a couple of minutes after 4, and saw that No was ahead 51 to 49 after 7 results declared. I couldn’t handle the feverish excitement of the TV commentators. I turned the sound off. Rather than stay up to watch more results come in, I set my alarm again for 06:00.

I tossed and turned for two hours, hoping that the later results might be positive enought to overturn No’s lead, heart pounding in fear they wouldn’t. Wondering how I would react to a final No outcome.

I checked the time at 05:59, seconds before my alarm would have sounded. Turned on the TV, saw the camera panning over cheering No supporters. 55 to 45.

First Minister’s speech following defeat. Self-congratulation over the high turnout, but no change.

So here I am, alone in a tiny hotel room, watching TV with the sound turned off, crying.