Thanks to my friend Patricia Stewart for reposting a Facebook post from Friends House Moscow, which led me to a fantastic visual “Queer Catalog of the Hermitage.”
Resistance takes many forms
Back to it?
John Scalzi recently responded to the trashfire state of much social media by recommending we “Weave the Artisan Web,” and I’m feeling inspired to try to back out of social media as the first place to share things and go back to blogging. There’s a lot of blogging rhythm and habits that I’ve fallen out of, and I’m not sure I’m interested in returning to blogging as it once was. But even if the short-attention-span-theater form of FB and IG remain, I do see virtue in putting it out there in my own space first, and the big venues second. We’ll see how that goes.
Scalzi has some good advice. In addition to actually posting via your own platform, he recommends reading online content in a way that you control. I’ve never stopped using RSS feeds to follow blogs and websites I want to, and it is the aspect of social media that requires more than just setting up a blog. He recommends Feedly. I use Feedbin on the desktop and to manage the feeds I follow, and I used Reeder if I want to read Feedbin on my iPhone.
I must say, it’s been so long since I was blogging regularly that WordPress looks and feels like an entirely different animal. It will take a while to figure out how I want to use it. I updated to the current default theme, and it’s clearly meant to be a canvas you can use to build out a custom look. It will take a bit of work to learn how to make it look attractive!
Trying out a Flickr embed
I’m likely to start blogging again to document a new adventure, and I want to see how well the current iteration of WordPress handles embedding photos from Flickr.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Oh my. Oh my goodness. Ann Leckie loved it, and I can see why. I am so very glad that there are three more on the way this year. The protagonist is a human/droid construct who calls itself Murderbot. I don’t love Murderbot quite as much as I love Breq (of Ann Leckie’s novels), but it comes very close.
The first sequel doesn’t drop until tomorrow, so today I started another of her series. (The Cloud Roads: The Books of the Raksura Book 1)
Ways to moderate Facebook’s influence in your life
Well, for starters, of course, you can just not use it. But if it’s a useful online watering hole/neighborhood pub/back fence, here are some ideas. I’m not an expert, but some of these are actually based on experience.
- Do your writing on a blog and post the links on Facebook instead of writing in the posts. You can either customize or automate an excerpt or teaser to get people (hopefully) to go to your blog to read it.
- And speaking of that blog, if you aren’t paying a webhost for it, that means there’s probably advertising on your blog that you may or may not have any control over, and which the blog host is using to make money off of you and your visitors.
- Join some other social networks and do the same thing there (post links to your own hosted content).
- Get your news from a news organization. If it is online, be prepared to pay for it.
- If you see great information or entertainment (on Facebook or elsewhere), take the time to go to the original source and share that link on Facebook. If you are not already familiar with the source and confident in its veracity, try to confirm the facts first (or, you know, just don’t share it).
- Don’t use Facebook to log in to anything that gives you an alternative.
- Don’t imagine that Instagram is where you will go: it is owned by Facebook.
- Google Plus is at least in the business of using your personal information for its own benefit, but don’t depend on it not selling your information to others.
- Always remember that if you are not paying for it, you are the product, not the customer. Keep asking who benefits and where the money is going.
- Recognize your own role in whatever you think is a problem. Learn how to set your privacy settings; be skeptical; unfollow or unfriend people and pages liberally; remove the app from your phone. (If you can’t stop checking Facebook, that’s not Facebook’s fault, that’s something you need to figure out a way to deal with. /end cranky old man mode)
- Don’t engage on Facebook with things you don’t want promoted. Facebook does. not. care. if you think something is funny, untrue, outrageous, or awful. If you respond in any way, it just increases the likelihood that your friends (who might never otherwise have seen it) will see it. If you share it, even to ridicule or debunk it, you are just helping to spread it around.
- Look for other, niche social networks that will meet some of your needs. I am on a very quirky, obscure platform called Plurk (seemingly popular with teenage Korean girls), which is an outpost for groups of people from Second Life. One of the original attractions was that it didn’t police identity or names.
The Musical Magpie: South Asia edition
My radio program from February 11.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
I finished this a while ago, at the beginning of a recent trip and have neglected blogging about it. For some reason, I remembered The Dispossessed as a long, difficult, not particularly enjoyable read. It was not! I liked it! And there were many details I had no recollection of. With more experience and less idealism than when I first read it in my twenties, the ambiguity of the situation appealed to me this time.
It’s interesting, however, that from the distance of just a couple of weeks, I once again don’t remember many of the details. In that sense, my original response stands, that this is very much a novel of ideas for me, and much less so about character or plot.
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Light is the left hand of darkness,
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.
Ursula Le Guin’s recent death has set me on a rereading journey (and a reading journey: there’s still plenty of her work I’ve never read). I decided to start with Left Hand of Darkness, and it was fascinating to reread it. It stands up to the passage of time, and yet has not aged well. It is still a suspenseful tale, and it proposes thought experiments that are still relevant today. But the gender norms that the terran diplomat Genly Ai expresses (written in 1969 and projected into some unstated but future time) are already out of date. Conceptions not only of roles but also of gender identity have changed in major ways that make parts of the narrative distracting.
This reread made me wonder why movies and television shows are routinely rebooted or redone but books rarely are (with the exception of parodies or pastiches that combine classic books with wildly different genre tropes). I’d really love to see a progressive, visionary, feminist author retell this story today.
My perspective on the two main characters has shifted since I first read the novel. The protagonist Genly Ai so struck me previously that I’ve used the name “Genly” in several online locations when I needed a handle. On this reading, however, perhaps because I’m now middle-aged and was then more Genly Ai’s contemporary in age, I identified with Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. Estraven is the moral center: restrained, patient, mature, visionary, committed to a greater good, capable of intentional self-sacrifice. Ai is no less fascinating as a character (indeed, flaws are often the most fascinating things about characters); it’s just that I’ve gained a fuller appreciation for Estraven.
Reunited with an old friend
For years, I have fondly remembered a novel I read when I was a kid. It was an adult novel, not a children’s book, and it was about people who moved from a city to the country to start a goat farm. I thought the title was Star Hill, and looked off and on over the years with no success. (Bear in mind I was reading a library book of unknown age in either the late sixties or early seventies.)
Well, recently I was made aware of Internet Archive’s book program, and took another try at search algorithms—and I found it! Turns out the title is Thunder Hill, and it is by Elizabeth Nicholds, published by Doubleday in 1953. I found a copy for sale online and am having a lovely time dipping into it.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Having spent a lot of time in Second Life over the past eleven years, parts of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash are downright quaint: the ways in which he needs to explain avatars, or virtual spaces, or the word “metaverse.” And there are things he describes that have been implemented almost word-for-word in Second Life, which is kind of creepy.
I enjoyed the story itself (and much more than Neuromancer, with which Snow Crash is often paired as precursors to parts of the internet and virtual reality). I’ve only read a few of Stephenson’s novels, but I rather enjoy the way they meander and take side trips.