## introversion and comfort and pizza ##
There is an indepentent (-ish) local online newspaper that is celebrating
it's 2nd birthday. Rather, they celebrated it last night with some kind of a
shindig down in the arts district. I had bought two tickets, one for the each
of us, quite a ways back. I didn't, at that time, do a good job of thinking
ahead and anticipating my levels of exhaustion after having been on vacation
for 1.5 weeks and then immediately entertaining family and guests for a week
on top of that. So instead of going out and making smalltalk and chit-chats
with people I don't know--which I feel like is all I've been doing lately and
that's okay because I only fall Somewhat Introverted on the intro/extro
scale--we opted to stay in and order pizza and watch the two hour premier of
Grays Anatomy which I can't believe I've been watching for 13 years now. This
is how people end up spending a stupid amount of time--years and
years--reading a terrible fantasy series like the Wheel of Time: it's just
that you started it a really long time ago and it keeps coming out and it has
it's good moments for sure and it's just really comfortable and familiar and
is at this point just a sort of constant in your life. Anyway, the pizza
order was correct this time, unlike that last two times, so that's a plus.
## protest and how fucked we all truly are ##
There are protesters outside my office window. Outside and two dozen floors
down. Outside the courthouse. I was listening to a podcast through my noise
reduction headphones and it had lots of ambient noise so I kept getting
confused by the cheering and yelling because I thought it was part of the
story or part of the background noise and it didn't quite fit the content.
But then I realized, no, it's the protesters. Outside my window and two dozen
floors down. I assume they're protesting Kavenaugh specifically and the
celebration and promotion of sexual predators in general. And the silencing
of the abused. and the corruption of politics and process. Sigh. I too feel
like screaming. And possibly never stopping. I have one of those Five Year
journals, the ones with daily prompts, and then you cycle through the book
five times and answer the same question on the same day of the year five
times and see if and how your answer changes over the years. The question the
other day was something like, "What is the most outrageous thing you've heard
recently?" and I had to just put my pen down for a minute. This is the very
Age of Outrage and to be alive and paying attention, to be involved at all,
is to maintain and sustain a level of disbelief and protest and outrage and
protest over the silencing of the minority, the tearing apart of families,
the state sanctioned racism and nationalism and xenophobia and classism, the
neglect and abuse by the government of its own people, the rise and
endorsement and acceptance of white nationalism, the military industrial
complex, state sanctioned slavery in the guise of for-profit prison systems,
and it all just keeps coming and coming and it never stops, so yes, what
indeed is the most outrageous thing you've heard recently? Pick one.
## gopher ##
i've been spending a lot of time on tilde.town and elsewhere reading and
writing on the gophercube. (I'm not sure about the proper nomenclature here.
gopherspace isn't the World Wide Web but perhaps a Global Gopherhole. and if
the consortium of blogs gets a "sphere" then perhaps the gopher protocol gets
a "cube".) I've been reading on tilde.town obviously and I also wrote a
little script that--if all goes according to plan--will update
gopher://tilde.town/1/~cpb/recent with recently updated gopherholes. That
catches updated feels blogs, but also just reorganized hierarchies and other
stuff. Also been reading sdf and bitriech and circumlunar (where I requested
and then recieved an account but where I have yet to create any content. I
did however find Schismatrix, the book around which the server is themed, on
scribd.com and I intend to read through that. Perhaps before creating any
content there. It's not a role-playing server. But there is a theme and I'd
like to be familiar with and conversant in it.)
## Choose Your Own Adventure ##
through the gophercube I've stumbled across a couple of great content
creators like Cat and tomasino. tomasino just started a weekly Choose Your
Own Adventure show on anonradio. the gist of it is that he reads a CYOA book
on air and has listeners help choose the direction the story goes. Which is
pretty awesome. I loved those books as a kid, which I don't think is a unique
thing for people my age. He started with Ryan North's _Romeo and/or Juliet_
which is also pretty awesome. I think that being a R. North fan is also not
unique among people who grew up on the Internet at a certain time and place.
## tilde.town gossip page: joke, or building community? ##
Started a tilde.town gossip page on the intranet[1] as a gag, but thinking I
might actually update it from time to time with stuff from irc and bbj.
probably not from feels unless they're published publically because those
feels are often private. on the otherhand, if feels are shared only on feels,
it is still assumed that other feelsers can still read them ON feels, so they
are public within a private setting. And if they are refenced on the
intranet, which is accessable only within the same private scope, then I
don't think anybody's privacy has been violated.
I read a pop-anthropology book a while ago that had a blurb in defense of
"gossip" which asserted that humans are really built--socially, culturally,
etc--around being able to maintain and distribute narratives about people in
their social circles and it's in this context that I am interested in pursuing
this as a project: as a community building exercise in which people know about
other people, and not as a busy-body, nosy biddy, tearing people down kind of
exercise. Gossip for good!
[1]: tilde.town:12345/~cpb
## tilde.town discordian newsletter ##
found rubiximus's gopherhole through my gopher-update script and noticed
that--in addition to kirch and myself--he is yet another tilde.town
discordian. i suppose it should not be surprising that there is such an
intersect. "I like my Internet and my religion to reject convention
outright." it made me wonder whether there would be interest in some kind of
a tilde.town mail list--discordian or not--of a local, hand picked and
maintained kind of sort, in line with the retro-computing vibe of the
community. Kind of/sort of what I assume to be the goals of the nascent
tilde.journal, but different because it'd be plain text. and probably curated
differently. and distributed intentionally and solely internally. on
tilde.town at least. What would such a newsletter/bulletin consist of? Perhaps
snippets of classic texts and snippets of local content, and recipes!
