Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

it's interesting to note the discomfort (much of the Twitter discussion is also people realizing that they weren't invited to participate) given that livestreaming something is a common online interaction, but it's a disappointment when being very directly contrasted to some (even low-fidelity) more interactive subset.

it's a direct exclusion even in discussing "new publics", and I appreciate the presentation noting that public space historically isn't egalitarian

ways to interact that aren't just a Twitter feed ... except if you're on the livestream the only way to interact is a hashtag on Twitter

it's kind of a bummer to hear about all the social tools and all the value of interaction and discussion for a festival -- we should all contribute and disagree, getting to know people is the most important part, etc. -- but then actually it turns out that only some people were invited to those, I'm not invited, I'm just supposed to watch the livestream video for the next few days #newpublicfestival

commit 30617f7069f7fd548d50e5e8d86f6c01bcbe3615
Author: Nick Doty <npdoty@ischool.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sat Dec 19 16:53:50 2020 -0500

filed dissertation!
readme and template explaining the exact manual steps for rendering the ucb filed version

the challenge of the long writing project is that at any time, I can ask myself, "could I write this better in some way?" and of course the answer is always yes, and so I keep going. but then even worse is the moment where I answer, "no, I can't do any better" because it feels not like the sense of completion that the work has improved to some local maximum, but rather that my own capabilities are exhausted
#dissertation

reached that stage of writing where I try to organize and edit to make everything cohere together and get that particular brain stretching discomfort as I realize that I simply cannot keep everything I've written in my head at once
#dissertation

we gave money, we wrote hundreds of letters and postcards, we emailed and called our families, I answered questions at the bus station and helped people get rides to early voting, J called absentee voters to help fix ballot issues, we drove out to a small town and dropped off literature and talked to voters

Ethan Zuckerman's list of properties for a "civic logic" of social media is surprisingly close to Mastodon/ActivityPub feature list:
* many, smaller communities
* creating their own rules for moderation/administration
* interoperability so people can try different ones
* different ways to support them financially
#DPinfrastructure

This speculative fiction about far-future college football is legitimately the most excited I've gotten about a sporting event in years.
https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020
I got so tense and excited watching the lateral play in Chapter 7. #20020

Writing letters to voters is one of the only relaxing things for me:
https://votefwd.org

Some alternatives:
* conferences and journals in languages other than English (although English as the lingua franca is certainly a benefit for me, and having a common language is a benefit for cross-country collaboration);
* more prominent writing centers in universities, and an expectation that you worked with your writing center before submitting a paper;
* making our conferences and journals into writing clinics, where peers don't just review, but collaborate on the writing

I feel guilty when writing these reviews, because it's almost certain that the authors speak English better than I speak their first language. Or it feels unfair because the authors may have done really great research work and just not written it up very well, and whether this paper gets published is the indirect way of evaluating their research work.

But papers *are* a communication of the work, not (just) rewards for having completed the work.

It's not uncommon for me to review a computer science paper where the gist of my review is:
this work *might* be really interesting and valuable to the field, but the writing is poor enough that I can't understand whether it is and I don't think most readers will get the full value from it.

if you've been getting subsidized health insurance premiums, but then unexpectedly make less income than expected this year (say, related to massive global economic instability), and so end up with less than the federal poverty level -- technically you're required to pay the government back the entire year's subsidies, because you're too low-income to receive a low-income health insurance subsidy
#kafka

I posit that it's a new take on steampunk, and I think it's appealing in a similar way. The older technology appears less sleek and unknowably complex, and it's at once both wondrous and sensible that it should be possible to accomplish so much more (than is historically contemporary) while maintaining the aesthetic of tools that seem more comprehensible because they're simpler, older or less advanced.

I am appreciating the recent aesthetic trend of retro sci-fi TV, where technology uses 70s-80s external apparatus (chunky keyboards, beige panels, rainbow stripes, dials, lights, switches) but futuristic capabilities (robots, AI, mind interfaces, antigravity).

Examples so far (I personally only require two items for a trend):
* Maniac (Netflix), retro Japanese/Apple ][ aesthetic, set in dystopian New York City
* Tales from the Loop (Amazon), 70s research lab aesthetic, set in small town Ohio

I didn't expect this Memex presentation to focus on a quantified self personal history database -- I think of the memex as being about the trails that the user explicitly creates connecting relevant resources. But it definitely triggers a similar interest at being able to query everything that you have read/consumed electronically.
#babycastles #wordhack #memex #vannevarbush

"I thought about the garden tended by a monk living in mindfulness. His flowers are always fresh and green, nourished by the peace and joy which flow from his mindfulness.

We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginning of every meeting or discussion."
📖 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness