💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~oldernow › 2023-12-02-06-18-14.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:39:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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And *I'm* the one that you're counting on to solve this? I'm an antisocial, autistic, downwardly-mobile, middle-aged salaryman who barely has enough energy at the end of the day to do any serious activism. Even my kids won't listen to me. I can't even run for city council because I have no social skills. I dropped out of graduate school largely because of inability to schmooze my way into research projects.
I so loved "Even my kids won't listen to me" in the middle of that! :-)
And most of the times what pisses me most is, when people don't tolerate others' views and their freedom of speech. I don't mind if a certain person is a nazi or an anarchist, if they are a person, then they should have the freedom of speech. You can ignore them if you want, but you have no right to silence them.
And Bingo was his name, oh!
I know no one reads it this far anyway.
I'm a real geminaut
reading where
I guess should not
writing all my nowhere plots
for nobody
?
Independent thought or speech is ashamed, moderation is seen as a vice, and all that matters is to align oneself with the trending newspeak of the day. Long ago, I came to a point where I avoid activists of any kind or persuasion, for I'm, honest-to-God, afraid of them, even if they happen to agree with me in this or that. Yeah, I can be contradictory. But then I've lost all hope in to ever again discuss politics, in any meaningful ways, several times.
I sometimes call activists 'fundamentalists'. :-)
NB: I might not be able to put myself to a reply to any reply. Been there, done that, turned awfully almost every time.
Yeah, it can definitely get dicey: you're going along enjoying doing your thing, and sudden, BOOM! Someone's losing their shit, and it's your fault! Yikes!
But black beats all of the others hands down.
Is 'gumcist' a word yet? ;-)
I am a person in my neighborhood
A happier reason I’m online a bit less is that I’m doing more things locally and in-person. Playing tabletop games with strangers and acquaintances, mostly, but “doing stuff with strangers” is really the best way to make friends. Especially when you move to a new place. It’s nice that people play at the game shop in my own neighborhood, a short bike ride from home.
That sounds fantastic.
I an honestly see reverting back to pre-internet times, including buying only with cash, only locally, and paying bills only via paper through the mail. And this isn't just a philosophic point. I'm truly tired of what's become the online/paperless lie. Maintaining logins/passwords, and repeatedly enduring various two-factor dances is seemingly like way more work than I'm recalling paper billing being.
Smolnet figures into that as well. Internet via a phone hotspot has become plenty sufficient for my online needs now that my main online fun is mostly words. Why am I paying for that, *and* some home service via a router, when the latter is mostly to watch video, but finding video I want without having to "pay extra" has become a massive chore. Fuck that. I'm successfully tuning my networking needs down to what I enjoy most anyway: text.
More generally speaking, there's an increasing effort/pain overhead to "being connected" that's increasingly loathsome to endure *for what it's worth*. The benefits/effort ratio is sagging big time.