Abandoned on my birthday

I was nuts about J…as was my roommate. I think we’d worked out a reasonable accommodation. 😉 They and another friend organized a “surprise” birthday party for my 19th birthday. I got home from my awful, awful job to what was supposed to be a fun evening, with cake. But J never showed up. Never.

And I never heard what happened; neither did my roommate. J was never heard from again.

That turned out to be the start of a really. complicated. year.

(There is, of course, a lot more detail than that, but most of it isn’t suitable for the intertubes.)

links for 2009-03-20

  • "In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations." This article actually kinda makes me physically ill. And scared.
  • "Almost the entire Obama family, including the president, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said laughing." a vegetable garden about the size of my house. nice.

Dreams from My Father

Dreams from My Father

author: Barack Obama
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2009/03/18
date added: 2009/03/20
shelves: autobiography, non-fiction, psychology, sociology
review:
Picked up a copy at the Austin airport and read it on the way home. Fascinating, especially since it was written in 1994. Chock full of that Obama nuance, and a striking amount of angst. Plus, wow, that’s a crazy childhood!

links for 2009-03-19

therapy 2.0

multiple stressors online, and then technology & mental health.

analogy to rsi. interesting.

wiki with resources.

very quiet when asking the audience why they’re here.

technology ebbing away ability to have solitude.

ok, today was probably not the day for me to try to participate.

“i can quit twitter anytime”

so validated when there’s a new message, but also being overwhelmed by too many.

“will you just put that down” not actually talking at a meetup.

removing from the present moment vs. wanting the support network

a new type of suffering, or just something that looks different?

integrating into social systems.

bigger risk: data mining, esp in re health insurance.

how do we define mental health?

social media offering the sense of understanding, broader context. invokation of megan [???] & myspace story.

mental stability & facebook.

maintaining effective boundaries. richness of media allows continuation of conversations. holding the context of the topic. “that work for the person in question” becomes more acute as the boundaries become more visible.

responsibility we feel for things that are marketed as play, adding more pressure. “ignorance is bliss”?

control over the information pushed towards. someone not on twitter: “i can’t handle one more thing”

“not the end of the world if we don’t” do whatever.

tech allowing him to jump over roadblocks (re: ADD).

exercise!

mental health: if it bothers you, it’s a problem.

“clinically significant distress”

starting consultancy: how to handle roadblocks, getting “wobbly” with bipolar. “consultancy-generated depression.” “is that an official name?” motivational, attentional, procrastinaton.

mental health defined/measured by productivity.

only woman in an office of 50 guys…”we don’t see you as a girl” — dealing with mixed expectations. influencing sense of well-being.

exhausted by mode-switching, sensory overload. you CAN’T keep up with everything. spend time doing stuff that’s NOT work stuff.

“just want to be me for 24 hours” (that’s why I’m here, partially. not gonna write abt it here, but I’m having some personal identity anxiety issues.)

“quien es mas macho” problem. (culture of overwork) how to set boundaries? focusing on the productivity goals rather than the methodology. “while I have you…” difference in personal IM vs business IM. office hours (in academia) creating understandable boundaries, talk to those people about the boundaries you need to set.

recorded affirmations, kindle, music streams. seeing distant family. “so much hating” getting comments and feedback as a writer. realizing that most people are kind.

support groups, task managers, meetups. introverts! exercise reminders.

hyperfocus, being able to handle interruptions on own time scale, and then being able to adopt a caring persona.

any new techniques for new technology?

links for 2009-03-17

memescape

I missed the name of the irc node.

awesome cartoon.

benkler, layers of communication: content, code, physical.

dude’s got sniffles.

the daily meme. vs stuff that happens over time.

oh, numa numa. I missed that one entirely until I saw the Canada on Strike episode of South Park. vs Rick Astley, rickrolling “barfing into the real world”

oh heck, dylan just spilled coffee on his netbook. 🙁

hamster dance -> LOLcats. adds community. icanhascheeseburger. ceiling cat vs basement cat, a universe emerging. LOLcat bible. can write executables in lolspeak? LOLbama. “yes we can has”

underlying patterns: daily meme, real world emergence, genres

with the internet 24/7, and more important than it used to be. growth of facebook among 25-54. 11% of people on twitter or similar. tools & communities for building memes.

the future?

flaw in layers model: people!

great news: we’re all trashed. (economy) how does recession become boom for internet culture? both supply and demand. lots of bored unemployed people with nothing to do. (hrm.) youtube traffic peaks right after lunch on the workday.

media companies turn to the internet because it’s cheap? books based on internet memes, because they’re cheap.

(I know he’s really excited about all this, but I’m finding it a little freaky/depressing.)

etsy, source of cheap stuff.

evidence?

comparison of graphs: correlation of DJIA & growth of twitter, vimeo, etsy pageviews. (I wanna see those graphs again more slowly.)

can you hack internet culture? (zombie ninja badgers!) retweeting between similar clusters. “rudimentary language for twitterbots”?! class where you get graded based on how famous you become on the internet. (I find that immensely depressing somehow.) “fame olympics”? gah.

social net neutrality. EPA for the web? (has he connected with zittrain at all?)

q: what about “forwards I get from my grandma?” universe of internet culture that belongs to people above 50. (actually, I’ve gotten a few of those happy love chain letters from folks my age. I think it’s an actual cultural difference, rather than an age difference.)

q (dylan): 3rd model of recursive memes? meme relative reliance on old media. the 4chan paradox: as it gets simpler, culture gets richer. q: age bracket, stuff from the usenet coming back to facebook (25 things), wtf is up with that? internet groundhog day syndrome. (as I think I mentioned, some of that stuff dates back to pen & paper for me.) “before the lol” cats with funny captions from back in the 70s & 80s! web caches everything. rick astley’s on tour again! roflcon is all on archive.org.

q: did you catch sterling? I heard he was angry. boomers & internet culture? internet culture comes from people who have too much time on their hands. so what happens when huge group retires? clusters of internet that are entirely their own cultures.

q: companies trying to create artificial memes, how does that affect organic meme growth? haven’t been able to achieve “that special sauce” — 4chan saying “do it for the lulz” “never going to find a community around [didn’t hear]” (maybe not: seem to remember stuff in Buying In.)

q: would rather be rickrolled rather than what it replaced! (nsfw) she accidentally created a meme, is there a pattern of what works and what doesn’t? hard question, part of what they’re trying to research.

q: trends in how memes spread (facebook vs twitter vs whatever)? back to the 4chan paradox. slimmer tools. simple memes: single-serving sites. (isthesunstillburning.com)

q: missed a bunch of stuff, people misinterpreted “meme” as “Me-Me”

q: are the internet-famous persuing it deliberately, or hitting it accidentally. “aggregate things that used to happen on the edges of the society and bring them into the center” in-jokes exploding back into the larger culture.

q: metrics & tools for studying internet memes? project at berkman called media cloud. generate associations between terms.

youth culture in nigeria not so much about drugs or whatever, but 419 scams.

links for 2009-03-16

wasp annual mtg

just catching the tail end. swan talking abt internationalization. “web standards cafe” (although: arg! grammar error on slide!) educate ourselves on what actual issues are in other countries!

featherstone being excited. (ran into him at bikehugger bbq in full on bike gear)

I see molly getting rowdy over in the corner.

back to the specific focused things that wasp did back in the day.

ie8 compatibility mode question, oy subtle differences.

ranty mcrant rant from dylan & molly re: netbook preloaded with ie6. gah. blah blah blah. I’m sorry, but this arguement bores me to pieces. like the sterling rant, I’m not entirely sure why I have that reaction.

kim blessing, whole industry around supporting ie6, us in this room can’t do a whole hell of a lot. (reminds me of tom yesterday talking about the “jerry mcguire moment”)

molly: the fact that ie6 exists means we have to continue to support. one friggin’ web.