On Twitter I recently posted this:

When it comes to seeming important, a small movement’s best friends are usually its enemies.

And got promptly asked what I meant by several people. So I might as well explain it here. There are three primary ways in which this is true:

1. Bogey Men Are Well Known

People often justify their own importance by the danger their enemies pose. Therefore they are prone to taking small groups and exaggerating the danger they pose to look important themselves. Doing this makes the bogey man they’ve chosen seem far more important too, though.

The classic example of this sort of enemy is somebody who is fighting a fight that’s already been won. They want to relive the glory days of old, but they just don’t matter any more. So they look far and wide to find some sign that the apocalypse is actually nigh and they are needed to fend it off. The result is that they seize on small groups and make them out to be a world-wide threat. It’s great publicity for the small group that they’ve seized upon. Unfortunately if the small group is actually bad, this is a net negative for the world, but people concerned with their own importance aren’t worried about that.

2. Rallying Points Rally

The thing about large groups is that they all have enemies. So when a large group attacks a small group, that small group becomes the most active place to fight the big group. This means that people who want to fight the big group will be drawn to the small group not out of any sympathy for the small group but only because that’s the place to be to fight the big group.

If the small group is extreme enough this can actually look like a tactical advantage to the big group. By causing their enemies to rally around the small group of wackos, some of the stink of the small group will rub off. This can backfire yugely, however, if the small group is not as generally unacceptable as the big group thinks that it is. The more extreme the big group, the greater the danger of this happening since somewhat mainstream groups look extreme to them.

3. Martyrdom Is Convincing

Having enemies gives you the opportunity to prove that you’re serious. It is only by having enemies than one can prove one’s courage and conviction. There is an almost Chestertonian paradox in this, but one cannot prove one’s valor on one’s own schedule. Real adversity can only come from the outside; it’s only adversity if there is an adversary. Or in other words, you can only show that you believe in a truth so much that you are willing to die for it if someone is willing to kill you for it.

Over at Amatopia, Alex writes about The Pinnacle of Flatness. To give a bit of the flavor of the post:

Extrapolate this line of thinking to cities and towns the world over. I’m sure you’ve noticed that Toronto looks like London looks like Los Angeles looks like Berlin, and so on. Not identical, but close enough. Modern architecture is but one way in which ideas of design seem to be converting on something universal…and kind of beige.

And then there’s urban sprawl and the explosion of squat, concrete strip malls, fast-food joints and gas stations, and big box stores everywhere. It seems like that’s all some towns are.

And this, of course, goes for the arts as well. Movies all feel the same, screenwriting formulae aside. Music, books, television shows, education, pop culture…the list goes on.

Then he asks the crucial question:

Is this just where things always lead? Is there an “ultimate design” that we as human beings have finally reached? Or is it the natural consequence of a society that embraces Adam Smith’s “capitalism” while rejecting the “guided by moral principles” part of the equation? In other words, is function driving this sameness, or is commerce? Or is something else?

Though Alex does have an important point which I’ll get to, I think even more important is to point out that his question is in some senses a very odd one. For most people throughout history, the big things tended to be very utilitarian. Dwelling places, transport, and to some degree clothing tended to be first utilitarian and second aesthetic. You have to be fairly rich before you can afford to spend money on non-functional design.

A manor house might well have heavily aesthetic influences in its design, but the average peasant’s hut would not have had a wide variety of designs whose purpose was to express the individuality of the owner. In the era before heavy machinery, those things take a lot of labor which a peasant could not have easily paid for. I don’t mean that people wouldn’t have decorated their houses to their tastes, but they wouldn’t have done much design to their tastes, since that mostly means varying the design from the most affordable one. There would have been variation in terms of adapting to the exact lay of the land, of course, but again that’s a result of not having the heavy machinery to turn anyplace into a decent building site.

Clothing is probably the biggest exception, but for the average peasant one’s clothing was made from fabric spun and woven by the women of the family, tending to limit one’s pallet to the colors wool and flax (etc) came in. And the designs tended toward those which required (and wasted) the least fabric to make, since so much work went into the making of that fabric. Modern clothing is unbelievably inexpensive since the spinning and weaving is all done by fast machines. There would have been variation because everyone made their own clothing and so it was all made differently, but that is a reflection of variations in workmanship, not in the expression of individuality.

But even more than the practical elements, aside from some people aspiring to fame and glory, human beings throughout most of history were not primarily concerned with distinguishing themselves from everyone else. They needed other people too much. Their primarily concern was solidarity with their fellow man. Your brothers and sisters and cousins and neighbors were all people you depended on for survival. Showing how special and unusual you are is a preoccupation of the rich, not of the common man. Novelty is also a luxury of the rich, who can afford to pay for it. But it doesn’t at all follow that novelty is all that good for human beings. Historically there were such things as diseases of the rich—chief among them obesity and various types of malnutrition caused by being able to afford things like white flour and white rice and foods prepared in expensive ways that also happen to leach the nutrients out into the less tasty part that the rich don’t need to bother to eat. I actually strongly suspect that novelty really isn’t all that good for human beings above a relatively small dose. People of above average intelligence—like Alex—can probably take higher doses—but on average novelty may actually be more destructive of happiness than conducive to it. Consider how important ritual—doing the same thing over and over—is to sanity.

Now, all that having been said, there is a very legitimate form of variation which is not available to the modern secular world. That is variation of virtue. A world which doesn’t understand virtue can’t tell stories of the interplay of different virtues, or how different men balance virtues in different yet good ways. As I’ve said, there’s That Story That Modern Screenwriters Can Tell.

It is ironic that the English language does not have any literally-true colloquialisms for “what I am about to say would be too complex to say in a manner that complies with normal etiquette so I’m going to say it without normal etiquette but do not take it to mean that I think you are unworthy of etiquette and still less take it to mean what it would if you were to apply the normal etiquette-reversal filter we all use to know what the other person means”. The standard ways to say things I know of are:

• “Honestly,”
• “With respect,”
• “With all due respect,” (this one really loses its effect since one isn’t bothering to figure out how much respect is actually due—which is not very respectful)
• “I love him, but,”
• “I consider him a friend, but,”
• “To be blunt,”

None of these directly mean what is intended, though usually the speaker understands it from context. There’s not wrong with this. It’s how a lot of language works. It is, however, ironic, that the way one says that one will not use circumlocutions is with a circumlocution. (If you’re not familiar with the word, it means to talk around the subject rather than directly to it, circum=circle, locution=talking.)

The question might arise why we need to do this at all. Why not dispense with etiquette all the time and just speak directly? That would work in cases where everyone knows everyone else extremely well. In small, isolated groups of hunter-gatherers, for example. Outside of that, we mostly only have a basic sense of what someone means and have an instinctive tendency to take what other people mean in its most negative light. It’s safer that way. Etiquette exists in order to deal with this instinctive tendency. It softens what we say in a manner that doesn’t trigger our instinctive tendency to take everything strangers say as badly as possible, while its standardization means that we also know how to invert it to get at the original meaning at a higher cognitive level where our comprehension won’t trigger our fight-or-flight instincts. It’s cumbersome and time consuming but all safety is cumbersome and time consuming. This is also why there are protocols for temporarily setting it aside without losing all benefit from it.

Silver Empire Publishing—the company who will be publishing my novel The Dean Died Over Winter Break—has just (as of February 2nd, 2018) announced an interesting opportunity for devoted fans of urban fantasy. (For those who don’t know what Urban Fantasy is but are reading this anyway, here’s the Wikipedia article on it. tl;dr fantasy in a modern-day setting.)

We’re looking for a few good contributors to our new blog! Applicants must be able and willing to provide regular blog posts on the following topics, all related to Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Fiction, or Supernatural Thrillers:

• Book reviews
• Movie reviews
• TV reviews
• Theory, critique and discussion
• Analysis

They’re looking for people who will do this primarily for love of the genre because the perks (in addition to exposure) are related to free access to lots and lots of Urban Fantasy. If you’re interested, check out the link to the full announcement for details and how to apply.

I recently got the 20th anniversary DVD of the movie Hobgoblins. Not the MST3K of it, mind you. Look as hard as you want, you won’t see Mike and the bots:

Granted, that’s not the best screenshot to show it. How about this:

What’s that, you say? You don’t recognize that from the MST3K episode? Indeed you don’t, and neither do I. I haven’t watched the movie yet, but I’ll be interested to see what it’s like as it was meant to be seen. In my previous experience watching the original movies (MST3K: Werewolf is the only one I wrote up so far), they didn’t cheat by editing the movie to make it more laughable, so I don’t expect that to here, either. But while I’ve only watched up to the title so far, the tone is quite different from the MST3K episode. The impression I got from the episode was that the movie was goofy; watching the original it feels more like mostly-incompetent horror. Certainly the beginning sequence is played entirely straight, even though the tension was so not-tense that you couldn’t cut it with a laser-chainsaw.

Once I watch the entire movie I’ll write up a review of it. I find this sort of dive into movie history to be very interesting.

I was recently looking up mills, and came across this fascinating picture of a Roman flour mill:

(Photo Credit: By Chris 73 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m so extremely used to the wheel type of mill that this almost shocked me. Just to be clear, I mean this kind of mill:

(Photo Credit: By Daniel Villafruela. (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

Interestingly, the wikipedia page called it an edge mill, and the wikipedia page for edge mills claims that edge mills were invented in China in the third century. Which, if true, means that the sort of mill stone I normally think of as a mill stone wouldn’t have existed at the time of Christ. Perhaps even more interesting, the sort of mill which quite possibly did exist then (the roman one in the first picture) looks to me far more complicated and advanced than the sort of flour mill which apparently superseded it. Very interesting.

The thing which led me to discover this was looking up Friedrich von Logau’s poem about the mills of God. The original poem is:

Gottes Mühlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein,
ob aus Langmut er sich säumet, bringt mit Schärf ‘er alles ein.

Which was translated into English (according to Wikipedia, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) as:

Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all.

It is widely recognized that centralization, such as one sees in most social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has strengths which bring concomitant dangers. Possibly the biggest danger, and certainly the most pressing on people’s minds, is censorship.

Distributed media, such as blogs, make censorship much harder. However, this has (so far) been at the cost of making discovery much more difficult. Finding new blogs is a very haphazard things, to a great degree relying on cross-promotion in blogs. By contrast YouTube is able to leverage its centralized information to provide a list of recommended videos to the user after each video. Given the massive data available to them of what people watched and how long they watched it for, this enables them to make recomendations for videos which are often good. Almost every YouTube channel I’m subscribed to I found through recommended videos.

It probably goes without saying, but unfortunately recomendation engines are extraordinarily succeptible to manipulation by hosts with an agenda. Moreover, it would be virtually impossible to discover such manipulation as it’s only relevant to people who are not aware of particular video makers anyway.

In order to make distributed media truly competitive with centralized media, what we really need is a system for making distributed recomendations. It’s not immediately obvious that this is doable, unfortunately. A system of distributed recomendations would be a spammer’s dream ifi they could figure out how to manipulate it. In fact, most parties would be deeply desirous of manipulating this system. This guarantees that a lot of effort would be put into trying to figure out how to game the system. Worse, the system would almost certainly need to be anonymous, so as not to track people’s reading habits, which makes fake recomendations all the harder to defend against.

The most obvious approach to avoiding spam would be to attach micro-payments to the recomendation system. That brings with it its own problems, but it also has benefits. There are probably other options, too. Especially if one were to somehow include negative reviews as well as positive reviews, the correlations required to spam people might need to be far too complex to allow for useful spamming.

Anyway, if you know anyone who likes to develop algorithms, try planting the seed of a distributed recomendations network. It may not be doable, but the internet would benefit tremendously from it if it is.

Over at Amatopia, Alex wrote a post titled On Boomer Hate. It’s a good post which I recommend reading. Here’s a sample:

t’s trendy to hate Boomers. Literally, everyone is doing it. I did as well. But when something is trendy, it’s usually garbage. But a funny thing happened on the way to critical thinking: I’ve changed my opinion.

The more I thought about generational struggles, the more I realized that generational warfare hurts us all: What I’m getting at is that I think generational warfare is stupid and counterproductive. And I’m not just talking about the young. Us older folks do it too and we should to stop it.

The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that the righteous Gen X indignation against Boomers is pretty hypocritical, especially since many of us express the same sentiments towards Millennials.

As they say, read the whole thing. What I find interesting about this is the way my mother—who is towards the end of the baby boom, but still solidly inside it—spoke about the demonization of her generation and the lionization of her parents generation. She objected to both.

The “greatest generation” were the people who endured the great depression then fought in World War II. It is certainly true that they went through a lot. However, they didn’t do it voluntarily. It was not an ascetic practice, nor (in the main) a job they volunteered for. It happened and there was nothing to do about it and they put up with it as best they could. The great depression, which overlapped Prohibition, was filled with crime, both organized and disorganized. If you look at divorce statistics they had been trending up since the 1860s and showed a dip during World War II followed by a much larger spike afterward:

That spike in divorces afterwards is somewhat typical of how much mother characterized the generation before her: finally done with deprivation, they finally wanted to get theirs. By the way, I added that trend line, and it brings us to another thing blamed on the boomers. People complain about the introduction of no-fault divorce, but if you look at the data, it really seems that no-fault divorce led to a spate of divorces on stocked-up divorces which then let off once the backlog had been processed. Granted, marriage is down and so one would expect divorce to be as well, but it’s very far from obvious that the boomers had any real causal relationship to the boom of divorces which happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Especially when you look up the history of no-fault divorce and find out it was done because people were lying about having cause for divorce so often that people feared that respect for the truth was going to disappear.

And so it goes with many of the problems of the boomers. To quote a famous boomer/songwriter, they didn’t start the fire. And they were handed quite a lot to deal with in the form of a deeply racist society, too.

Did the boomers do a lot wrong? Of course they did. Every generation does a lot wrong. We live in a fallen world. Which brings me to where it brought Alex: inter-generational warfare is stupid. There’s no way to judge the raw materials that any given generation was given to work with, and in any event it’s deeply ungrateful. The previous generation gave us life. Imperfect life, to be sure, but life that’s quite a lot better than nothing.

And thinking about it as a parent, it’s painfully obvious to me how imperfectly I’m raising my own children. I suspect something like this applied to every generation. Our children always suffer for our mistakes. It does no good to blame our parents. What we really should do is ask God to have mercy on us all.

The Rule of Cool is, I believe, actually a TV trope, it applies to video games as well. The variant I’m thinking of is when all inconsistencies between game play and the story are waved away as game play being more important than consistency with the story.

Now, in fairness, games must be unrealistic in order to be games. If a game was perfectly realistic, it would be a simulator, not a game. And people would mostly only do them to train for doing the real version. Thus wounds must heal in seconds or minutes, not weeks or months. Thus is should take minutes to build a hut, not days. And so on; there are a lot of things which need to be cheated in order to have a game and not a simulator. This I grant.

Having granted that, it’s important to point out that it does not follow that no thought should go into how one cheats reality in order to make a game. This is not true, of course, of pure games, such as tic-tac-toe or tetris. But in games that have a story, it is extremely important to consider how the gameplay fits in with the story. Recently I’ve been playing ARK: Survival Evolved, so I’ll draw my examples from there. The one thing that you need to know about ARK is that it’s a survival-type game (i.e. you gather resources and craft tools, structures, etc) with dinosaurs. An the dinosaur models are gorgeous.

Of course, the first problem is that ARK isn’t really a survival game. It’s a team assault game where the weapons are gathered in a semi-survivalist sort of way. I say semi-survivalist because after a certain point all of the resources are gathered by heavy machines. It just so happens that the heavy machines are dinosaurs, but aside from having a setting where they can aimlessly wander around and having a breeding mechanic, they are designed just like heavy machines would be. There are heavy trucks (brontosauri), light trucks (diplodocuses), tanks (rexes), armored assault vehicles (allosauruses), and so on. There are even spy helicopters (pteranodons), attack helicopters (tapejaras) and cargo helicopters (quetzals). You might think that flying reptiles would be more like planes, but they’re all slow, very maneuverable, and extremely good at hovering. The more heavily laden they are, the slower they move. It makes sense as a game mechanic but makes absolutely no physical sense. If a slow moving animal flapped very slowly, it would fall like a rock.

And the problem is that this takes you right out of the story. When flying reptiles are actually swimming through the air in entirely impossible ways, the beauty of the models loses most of its effect. The same is true of the walk-cycles which don’t adapt to the ground, but I think for different reasons.

Granted, walk cycles which don’t use physics to adjust the skeleton in natural ways for locomotion will never look entirely right, but I think that we’d forgive scripted walk cycles far more if the dinosaur which was walking imperfectly was actually moving with a purpose. But in ARK they aren’t. Or rather, they almost never are. On occasion a predator does run at another dinosaur to attack it. But under normal circumstances the dinosaurs simply wander around completely aimlessly. The herbivores do not eat, nor do the walk towards plants. They are simply on a random walk. And I think that the fact that their movements are completely pointless make you far more likely to notice that they’re not walking correctly.

And this problem carries over to appreciating the models for another reason. It’s great that the triceratops looks almost exactly how you’d picture it, but it’s hard to notice that when they’re not behaving at all like how you’d expect. They’re a herd animal. You should see them in groups and they should move around with some relationship to the others in the herd. That they don’t just breaks the illusion even more.

And of course everything has terrible eyesight in ARK. Predators don’t notice prey until they’re within about 50 yards. Prey doesn’t notice predators until the predators have  actually bitten them. No creature in ARK has a nose.

Of course, none of these are likely to be overly noticeable if you’re playing in team-versus-team since you have to be on constant lookout for other teams who will try to kill you if you’re alone.

I should note that the dinosaur taming also suffers from the idea of gameplay-over-story. With exceptions, dinosaur taming is accomplished by using tranquilizers to knock a dinosaur unconscious, then feed it its favorite foods while it’s unconscious. Once it’s eaten enough it then instantly forms a lifelong bond to you where it is willing to go on suicide missions on your command. Granted you have to cheat taming an animal somehow for this to be a game and not as simulator, but this is extremely stupid. Worse, as you are shooting the dinosaur with tranquilizer-soaked crossbow bolts in order to knock it out, once it’s torpor falls below a certain point it realizes that you are trying to tranquilize it and runs away at its top speed. This is very stupid because tranquilizers make animals slower, not faster, but it also makes taming dinosaurs frustrating. There’s also no way to vary the amount of tranquilizer being delivered per shot, so larger, higher level dinosaurs require very large numbers of shots to tranquilize. That’s tedious, not fun. (This is another case where the game is made for multi-player, because using one of the many multi-person dinosaur mounts makes chasing after dinosaurs much easier since one person drives the dinosaur while the other person shoots. It’s also the case that, for example, four people can deliver 4x as many tranquilizing shots so chasing may not even be necessary for teams.)

A mechanic where you feed the awake dinosaur until it likes you would have been much better. This does actually exist with a few dinosaurs, but even here this has been screwed up so that it isn’t too easy, by which I really mean, too fun. There’s a dolphin-like marine reptile which likes to come up to survivors (what the players are called) and nuzzle them. You can give them meat and this tames them, except that once they realize you’re trying to tame them, they run away. This makes no sense, and is no fun. Apparently the most important game mechanic is that the player must struggle for everything.

Ultimately, ARK is an absolutely beautiful games which isn’t very much fun to play in single player mode because its central theme is being a tribal warfare simulator where it takes hundreds of hours to build up assets that get destroyed in a few minutes during a raid. The later stages of the games are even fought with automatic weapons and heavy artillery; the dinosaur seem almost out of place among auto-turrets and C4 bombs.

But the upshot is that the game really doesn’t work as a single player game. It really looks like it should work as a single player game. There should be an enormous amount to do all on one’s own. But it’s mostly ruined by inattention to the story. It’s not possible to suspend one’s disbelief long enough to enjoy it. Which is a great pity because the dinosaur models are gorgeous.

At least, so says this biologist. Basically, the idea is that instead of being a splinter off of raptors (hawks and eagles) which specialized for speed, falcons are actually a splinter off of parrots who specialized for speed and meat eating.

The article goes on at length about how shocking this is, but having been very into studying falconry in my youth and having once had a pet parrot (well, a cockatiel, but it’s in the parrot family), I’m actually not very surprised. Eagles (mostly) look kind of like large hawks, but falcons just don’t look much like hawks at all. They actually look more like short-tailed parrots. This is especially true of their wing shape. Falcons have long, narrow wings where the flight feathers stick together forming a (mostly) solid surface. Hawk’s and eagle’s flight feathers stick out independently, looking almost like outstretched fingers. Parrot’s wings look extremely similar to falcon’s wings, with the flight feathers touching each other.

Granted, looks aren’t dispositive, which is the point of the original article. I just think it’s worth noting that it goes out of its way to emphasize the ways that falcons look like hawks but not how they look dissimilar.

And it should be noted that the results of convergent evolution are, in the end, convergence. That falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks means very little; you can train hawks and falcons for falconry (hunting), but you can’t train parrots to hunt. Falcons don’t talk like parrots do, and you interact with them much more like hawks than like parrots. Hawks, eagles, and falcons are all fairly solitary creatures.

So while it’s fascinating trivial that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks, it’s not actually useful information. You still shouldn’t name your gyrfalcon polly, or offer it a cracker.

I was recently reading about John Denver. Probably my favorite song of his is Thank God I’m a Country Boy (which described, to some degree, the life I aspired to as a child, not the one I had):

I was also extremely fond of Christmas for Cowboys:

Anyway, he had a somewhat tumultuous life and died in a plane crash where we was piloting an experimental plane that he was flying. He was also somewhat politically active, championing environmental concerns, being against the NRA, backing Jimmy Carter, and so on. Still, this was from the time when celebrities didn’t—or weren’t allowed to—mix their politics into their art by way of expressing venomous hatred for fans who disagreed. And without the internet, one didn’t tend to run into their off-duty political rants nearly as often. Ah, the good old days. But it brings up a very interesting point: John Denver meant something very different to a ten year old me than he meant to himself.

In one sense that’s obvious. To me he was primarily his music while to him he was primarily a man. But in another sense, it does bring in a fascinating point about God’s governance of the universe.  As I’ve written about, You Rarely Know What Good You Do. Electronic reproduction, which brings out lives into contact with people we’ll never meet, makes this even more obvious. I don’t know whether John Denver was a humble man, but I do know that his song Thank God I’m a Country Boy did help to teach a very young me about humility. I don’t know if he even thought of that song as being about humility. He may well have thought of it as being about not being suckered in by the promises of city life and/or living within your means. But even if he did, it still taught me lessons about humility.

I’ve never understood when people get hung about what their “identity” is. How on earth do they know? First, they’re a work in progress. Second, they don’t know most of what they do. How on earth are they supposed to know what their “identity” is. For the most part our identity is out of our control, anyway. How we relate to others is dominated by the world, not by us. Which means that it’s almost entirely under God’s direction, not ours, even in the limited sense in which our choices are not God’s direction of the world. (Which is a useful sense, even if not the truest sense.)

And John Denver is a good example of this. He was someone important to me but he never knew that I existed and consequently had no idea who he was to me.

Life must be lived in faith, since it sure as hell can’t be lived in present knowledge of what we’re doing.

Somehow in America we switched to predominantly saying “merry Christmas” instead of “happy Christmas”. I haven’t had time to look up when, but I’m curious when it happened since it can’t have been that long ago. The final line of Twas The Night Before Christmas is:

And I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

That poem was published in 1823. And yes, I know the original title was A Visit From St. Nicholas. Anyway, I prefer the original (and what’s still said in England, as I understand it) because “happy” is one of the translations of the Greek “makarios”. The other translation being, “blessed”. It’s the primary attribute described in the beatitudes in the sermon on the mount. Both are good, but happy just encompasses more than merry.

May you have a very happy Christmas.

This is a response to two posts by Mr. John C. Wright: The Fine Tuning Argument Needs More Fine Tuning and Argument from Design is Well Designed. While I think that Mr. Wright’s criticism of the argument in itself is correct, I think that he misses the context of why it is a useful argument none the less. (It shakes the poorly-founded confidence on which a belief in materialism is typically based.) As usual, you can also watch it on YouTube:

I recently got a chance to take some pictures around my yard. They’re not great, but some of them are a little interesting, I think. The gallery is here:

http://www.chrislansdown.com/photos/2017-12-07-Around_The_Yard/

And here are a few pictures from it:

This is sort-of a followup to Social Media is Doomed. If we take as given that social media is in the phase where its push-based notification system is creaking under the weight of its large userbase and stressing users as a result, if one does not simply abandon all social media, how is one to deal with this and stay sane?

I am not at present giving a definitive answer for two reasons:

1. I do not have sufficient time
2. I’m not completely sure yet

But I would like to sketch out some techniques I’ve found to work. They’re not rules, just heuristics.

Be Very Picky about Who you Follow

This is probably the most important thing. If people post too many things which would require you to come to terms with them in order to get along, don’t follow them. On social media where being friends and seeing updates are not the same thing, then by all means be friends with anyone you know but be careful to turn off status updates (or whatever the push notifications are called) as soon as you can tell that they’re not thinking of their status updates as public. It’s way better than losing friends.

Turn Off Phone Notifications

Everyone’s social media app loves to buzz you every time you have the slightest interaction with anyone, since they desperately want your eyes looking at the advertisements they show you. Just turn off the notifications for everything but direct messages and check on occasion. The number of times anything bad will happen because you didn’t catch somebody’s status update in a timely manner can be counted on no hands, for most people.

Don’t Use the Default Interface

The default interface of most social media is designed with one goal in mind: to get you to watch as much advertising as the social media company can manipulate you into watching. There are probably some exceptions, but however it is that the social media company makes money off of you, that’s what they want to trick you into doing, as often as they can. And they may not even realize that they’re training you through stress reactions and pavlovian training to do what they want; they probably only measure their success at making money, not what effect these things have on you. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether they mean well. You can do just as much damage by not realizing how to measure how much damage you’re doing. Protect yourself from everyone, not merely intentional villains. Most every social media platform has some alternative way of interacting with it that doesn’t get nearly as much attention. Tweetdeck for Twitter is the obvious example, but there are others. Maybe read Facebook via email that automatically goes into a folder. Whatever the platform offers that isn’t the standard, use that if at all possible.