Sometimes it's hard to remember that I loved the lives I lived before

[sovay]

Who knew that one of the reasons to appreciate DW not being the algorithmically slammed febrile chamber of FB would be that I can actually spend time on this platform without constantly having in my face the same photos of a man in need of a damnatio memoriae stat throwing an enthusiastically received Hitlergruß. I think of myself as possessing a reasonable tolerance for hateful language and gestures, since it is fairly impossible to survive in the world as currently constituted without one, but I could be doing several very different things with my life if I wanted to look at wall-to-wall Nazi salutes. I know that it happened. I have seen the responses and the responses to the responses and I have some responses of my own. Please get the outrage bait out of my eyeballs; it's got to take a number and stand in simultaneous line with all the rest of the corrosive Gish gallop, which actually if I hear one more person refer to the destruction of human rights as a distraction, get in that same line and load yourself into the sun.

Nonetheless, as people with whom it was my only regular medium of contact bleed off FB, I get to feel left behind once again. I am as unlikely to have an account on Bluesky as on original flavor Twitter for the same reason that its structure is terrible for my brain. I appear to have been wired by nature for exactly one form of internet communication and resent that I am supposed to accommodate to ones that make me feel like someone is treating my concentration as a pincushion. Discord is not congenial to me, either. Meanwhile I continue to hate the expectation that it is universally easier to extract information from videos or podcasts rather than written articles.

The original concept of the Etruscan saeculum is a valuable one, because it measures in historical memory: it ends with the death of the last person who was alive at the time of a crucial event, such as the founding of a city. Obviously I am trying not to feel that we are at the fraying end of one of these cycles, especially since Strauss–Howe generational theory appears to have run off a pseudoscientific and rather millenarian cliff with the notion.

To conclude on a not completely unhelpful note, Mamaleh's has had for some time a feature at their register where you can round up to the nearest dollar on an order, donating the difference in change to a charity of the restaurant's choosing. This month they went with the MIRA Coalition—Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy. The good news is that you can donate to them on your own time with or without a bagel or a milkshake or a 50/50, although I am obviously in support of the latter, too.

Comments

[redbird]

MIRA do good work. In the Before Times, I volunteered for a few of their new-citizen voter registration efforts. They resumed those efforts a couple of years ago, but I no longer feel up to volunteering.

I agree completely about wanting printed text, not video or podcasts, with few exceptions, mostly for how-to videos where being able to see what the instructor is doing, or look at the results. For example, I may benefit from seeing what someone means by a "low simmer," but I know what a bowl of soup or an ice cream cone looks like, and I need things like oven temperatures in text.

That said, I do somewhat better than you with some bits of Discord and Bluesky, though it occurs to me that I haven't looked at the latter in a couple of months.

[ethelmay]

Video seems potentially useful in some instances, but in practice it always seems as if all the bits I want slow are too fast and vice versa.

[sovay]

Video seems potentially useful in some instances, but in practice it always seems as if all the bits I want slow are too fast and vice versa.

I can read so much faster than I can watch a video. One of the reasons I was sort of reflexively uninterested in movies for years was the books I could finish in the time it would take me to watch one. I had to learn to appreciate them as their own art form, but it is actively so much more difficult for me to get the same information from a podcast than from an article, I don't see my feelings altering on that front.

[sovay]

[Excuse the initial wrongly threaded comment.]

MIRA do good work. In the Before Times, I volunteered for a few of their new-citizen voter registration efforts. They resumed those efforts a couple of years ago, but I no longer feel up to volunteering.

I am still glad to hear your endorsement.

I agree completely about wanting printed text, not video or podcasts, with few exceptions, mostly for how-to videos where being able to see what the instructor is doing, or look at the results. For example, I may benefit from seeing what someone means by a "low simmer," but I know what a bowl of soup or an ice cream cone looks like, and I need things like oven temperatures in text.

Understood. I don't think I have ever used a video to figure out how to cook or build something. I just do better with detailed descriptions and sometimes diagrams.

That said, I do somewhat better than you with some bits of Discord and Bluesky, though it occurs to me that I haven't looked at the latter in a couple of months.

Both of my husbands are much more oriented toward other platforms than I am. I don't mind that other people can use them. It's just the shifting default in expectations that I protest.

[imagine_that]

My 10-yr-old is a fiber arts person. While she initially learned to knit and crochet by watching videos, she gets so mad when there are *only* videos for a pattern or kit. She needed for the basics, then after that the written pattern is what she wants. We have had to give that as feedback to so many cute kits. The Wooble kits are good like that because they have both (although the written pattern is only online, so if you want it to be a portable craft, you need to print it out).

[sovay]

The Wooble kits are good like that because they have both (although the written pattern is only online, so if you want it to be a portable craft, you need to print it out).

Even with that extra step, I'm glad there's someone who remembers that it's useful!