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0 floating snips

Golda to RandomWrites  

if writing is the search for shape and meaning in life

is must be a selective one

the truth is full of distraction and laziness, napping in the face of urgency
forgetting oneself and remembering again and hiding from that truth

accepting maybe but celebrating nonsense? what is self anyway these ais have me questioning
if i am a self or just generating text
there is some inner thing
but it varies ‘i contain multitudes’ indeed but many are quite prosaic and merely hungry

luckily friends remember
perhaps its why we want to be seen

walking over a bridge in san jose, costa rica after talking to an Israeli ex-pat in the hostel and preparing for RightsCon tomorrow, i realized why i haven’t been writing, at least one of the reasons

the work is not so much to pull a thread of sense out of my tangled thoughts – that is work, but its the good part

(oh wow as a side note wordpress has gotton so awful about interrupting while i’m trying to write, i may switch but all my things are here. moving this to a plain text editor)

the bad part, or the hard part, is framing thoughts for an audience, in particular an audience that in my opinion has actively harmful frameworks and assumptions embedded. its exhausting trying to think of how they are thinking, being bothered at it, and then trying to talk in a way that will be convincing or compelling. that is why i do not write more, i think. also where to do it and probably no one in particular wants to read it anyway! the part about voice and personableness might have not a little to do with it as well!

but back to the frameworks. the one that exhausts me most is this assumption of a “state”. i realized, to talk to someone about Afghanistan, for instance, i would say first – hold on, lets back up. the words you are using in shorthand are actively harmful constructs in my opinion, or at least not useful. lets see if we could agree on some others, to make it easier to talk without constant battle over assumptions behind terms

“government” – lets agree this no where near applies. please don’t use that word unless there is some organization that represents people and where harm has recourse. words have to mean something. i met a historian at the book festival in tucson who wanted to say it meant “control on the ground”. there is so much wrong with that.

lets start with, there are a lot of people there, many of them right now have guns and steal from and hurt many women. lets call the ones with guns who fight and work with each other to take things, lets call them mafias. the women, lets call them ‘the unlucky women’ because that is what a group called themselves who i was working with and i love that. so now, here we have a problem, some of the unlucky women are having to hide from these guys with guns, some have trouble getting enough to eat, and also they don’t have a way to cooperate safely and organize and get recognition from other communities to, you know, work and live

so lets look at this problem, that the unlucky women don’t have a safe way to deal with the orgnanizations that have resources, to have jobs and maybe “aid” – that thing that people cooperate to make available to other people in unlucky situations. and when one person is hurt or disappeared there isn’t any system to tell someone about it and make it stop – that’s called accountability, that is a good word not often misused.

if you are trying to solve this problem, then i want to talk to you. lets figure out the words, the phrases, the systems, to solve it.

and sometimes, i will try to write for the people who don’t see it this way, who see other shapes and ghosts and maybe see the world in some geopolitical calculus of moving weapons. but most of the time i dont’ want to talk to you, if that is you.


logic exists (and a given problem is logical) if you can put 100 people in separate rooms with the problem and they converge on the same answer

a logical problem is interesting if they converge over time, but generally do not agree given a very brief time

So I was riding my bike back from Trader Joe’s on my lunch break, and a thought occurred to me (all my best work is on a bike, or in the shower…). If the universe is close to 14 billion years old, and the furthest galaxies we can detect are close to 14 billion light years away, have they been traveling away at the speed of light to get that far? Because I didn’t think stars moved that fast.

But yep – its the fabric of space that expands, and even faster at large enough distances. I hadn’t thought about that before.

This Is How Distant Galaxies Recede Away From Us At Faster-Than-Light Speeds

Need to write this up as another thought-provoking thing for kids just learning physics. There is so much we could do by letting kids think about the questions for at least a little bit before providing the answers!

0 rambling Saturday mind

Golda to RandomWrites  

Saturdays are for unwinding, expanding – my dad once said, the part that means you’re human. Yet for me now it still means typing on a keyboard, only typing things that spiral outward and don’t have to pass tests.

Today I found Ngugi Wa Thiong’o on the library display shelves, and given that is where I discovered Gene Sharp, and the whole literature of protest and democracy movements, stopped to read him. He spoke of keeping humanity by writing a novel on toilet paper in a Kenyan jail (now Kenya does have democracy – there must be a story there) and struggling to maintain spirit and self-worth thru words. Even outside of jail this need is universal, no?

I am glad that my project outside work, the what’s cookin’, is to help people express and connect, to create for each other. No amount of consumer goods produced in efficient factories can fill this need. Some of the modern sharing tech approaches it, but then turns around and uses it to manipulate the users. I am so motivated, to keep going on the work because the entire approach I want to succeed – the shared ownership, decision making – the problem with corporations of being T-Rex structures with tiny brains trying to control a large body – I am at least grateful to be able to be trying to do the work. Yet during the week, my self expression in exhausted state of mind becomes reduced to counting hits on tweets.

Strange that we have, like Emerson said, such ability to imagine and only one drop of ability to actualize it…

still nothing new here, only putting down some thoughts that circle around in my mind all the time – cleaning house, I suppose. I want to write about the patterns of society and corporations, the problem of the greedy ones seizing control, and how to simply counteract it by experimenting with legal structures, making it simple and easy to cooperate without central control. But my coding work presses on me, and I don’t feel like I can take the time to structure the argument, and anyway how many would read it? I will do it, but not today – today I will only ramble here.

Maybe I will code after all and write next week, or next. Or maybe I will work on the piece –
or get volunteers for long form nonfiction works.
Maybe I will start to write on paper again in the mornings. Only so much time for keyboards, after all.

0 small spaces

Golda to RandomWrites  

i have become am becoming
adept at
exploring small spaces
in small moments
when time is short to climb a new mountain trail
turn longing sharply right and down into nearby wash
surprising a rabbit in its run
desert broom pushing up through a rotten log I’ve
never seen before

sand shoved tracks telling some mystery about chase and run
exploring the space I am always confined in
the grey folds inside
and thinking about codes for opening spaces and aspects
to let all the lonely potentials flower

The power of making sense…

The positive side of capitalism is a free flowing distribution of efforts and resources

Downside is that it is subject to both parasites and cancers

The real thing is the flow of information, effort and fixed resources. And this flow is more interesting if one starts with information rather than an anonymized proxy for resources. So information about what efforts are going on, how one can contribute, and what the intended outcome will be, allows people to optimize their contributions. trust networks, transparency and long term voluntary relationships minimize parasitism and cancers.

This is sort of a draft, will polish this later…

I may not be judging this book fairly as a work of fiction – I wanted to read it because I had originally read the Rock and a Hard Place, the book published by “Pete”, when I was about twelve, and had really gotten into it. I’d felt a bit betrayed when I found out it was a hoax, and remembered the note from “Dad” assuring readers that “Pete” was real. So I wanted the story behind that, how Maupin had been hoaxed too.

The Night Listener felt like yet another hoax, unfortunately, a lie about how a lie came to be. Because it didn’t account for how the boy’s book _was_ published, with a long foreward from Maupin assuring readers that it was real. Why did the real Maupin do that? Did he have doubts at that time, was he trying to help the boy, or did he know it was false and it was some sort of coldhearted calculation in this strange world of elephants? I feel a bit more let down at the end, that this book was again some fantasy for suckers, and nothing to do with whatever the real motivations were in the real story that occurred.

If one likes a show, this book is all right. But if you want to see behind the curtain, not so much.

… And yet – thinking again – I think he did give some clues in the middle, in his imaginary conversation with the imaginary publisher, of why he could not really explain. So perhaps it is meant to be as true as he felt he could be. And he also mentions, how telling the truth would hurt and affect so many others. So perhaps this is as real as Maupin could be in correcting his lie to us readers, yet without telling truths that would wound others…a tricky dance indeed.

also posted at goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2922682464

if you give someone ideas, and they put in the work to bring them to life, it’s like

0 Vizzini…

Just finished “Its kind of a Funny Story”, great book, looked up the author and found he committed suicide in 2013, 9 years after he wrote the book about depression and real friends and creativity and his 5 days in a psych ward.

And tried to find his writings, like blogs, and found this – another fan, her words made a lot of sense to me:

“If there is one thing I have learned from Vizzini, it’s that struggles are not written in pencil. You can’t erase the past, and if you try to cross it out, it only looks worse. If you try to rip out the pages of your story that you don’t like, the book won’t make any sense.”

https://twloha.com/blog/thank-you-ned-vizzini/