💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~epiii2 › log › 2022-07-29 captured on 2023-06-16 at 17:32:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Hello!

Here I'm a citizen of rawtext.club. Out there I'm a citizen of Philadelphia, PA, USA. I work in medical research, mainly in data analysis, and on the side I read and learn anything and everything I can manage. I tinker with electronics and software for hobby projects every now and again.

I hope to log some thoughts here from now on, and host a few other non-chronological things. I also made a gemini capsule dedicated to Philadelphia over at hoagie.space, though right now it's just a couple of gemini proxies of local news sources. I hope to add more in time. (At the very least, some locally-themed gemlogs. I know we have at least a couple of us on rawtext.club and probably more of us out there in gemini and gopher space.)

Why This? Why Gemini? Why Anonymously?

Growing up I was very active, but very cautious, on the internet of the late 90's/early 00's. I was anonymous in the extreme. I didn't give any demographic or location information whatsoever. But I had some really interesting conversations online... religion, science, anything and everything. People were interesting, and interested.

Then I grew up some more, shrugged off the anonymity, signed up for Facebook when it expanded to some more .edu's early on. Things started getting weird online, though. Hard to put your finger on, but, strange. I deleted Facebook a couple years in, avoided most of the other services, and let my online presence eventually turn into just... a sort of resume. Things got weirder online, and the weirdness and negativity leaked into the real world too. I turtled more, became a hermit online. Didn't want to get pulled into all that.

But it's become unavoidable. Tweets are a central topic of entire news articles now. Social media shitstorms engulf local organizations and destroy them. Our crises in recent years should be opportunities for fresh thinking, but instead there's a strange self-reinforcing pall over everything. I thought if I scaled down my sense of the world and focused on local, city-level topics more, I could find more of an emphasis on actionable news and constructive ideas. But it's here too. It's everywhere. What "it" is is hard to describe but you know it when you see it. A zero-sum mentality, an obsession over false choices, a petty small-mindedness. If you've noticed it, well, you know.

I've been encouraged more recently, though. I'm seeing interesting things more often again in these small spaces, and people taking a calmer, longer, more thoughtful approach here and there. I've also started to recognize how tools shape the subjects they're applied to, and that includes communication and thought. As somebody or other around here put it, the signal to noise ratio is pretty awful on the web... but it's impressive on Gemini space. The choice of one technology over another might not be the most decisive factor in what information is communicated and how, but it does shape it and guide it, and I'm seeing that more clearly with time. Gemini is simple and rugged and to-the-point. It's built to transmit linked text content primarily, but also whatever else you might like to provide, with a minimum of fuss. The content is the focus. I like that.

So I'd like to put some thoughts out there now and then, via Gemini, and back in my old anonymous way. I hope we can have some interesting conversations.

OK, what, then?

Things I'd like to write about, and talk about:

Actionable news and ideas. What's information we might want to have because it could enable us to do things, rather than just make us feel bad?
Ideas for good citizenship and collaboration between people and groups. (Ditto to the above.)
The occasional "check out this weird thing I discovered" topic, with a deep dive into it. The world's a big, confusing, magical place and I should remember that sometimes.
Different ways of thinking. Ideas to help us try to break out of those false choices we get hung up on.
Tools for dignity and responsible self-determination. This might be software, physical devices, techniques and ways of thinking, anything.
Books touching on all or any of the above.
The occasional more technical topic. Software-defined radio, DIY-friendly gadgets, that sort of thing. Hopefully, if I do it right, that dovetails with the other topics rather than just being me wonking out.

Things I'll try to minimize if I can:

Rants. They're like junk food: they feel good in the moment but make you feel bad in the long run.
Philosophical rambling, especially about software, and especially Gemini. I don't want to fall into the trap of going on amateur radio to just talk about amateur radio, so to speak.
And especially, philosophical rants about software.

Please let me know if I slip up on those. I'll make posts here every so often, and If anybody has feedback or comments, send me an email at epiii2@rawtext.club. If you like I can amend a post to include your comment below it, letter to the editor style.

gemini://rawtext.club/~epiii2