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

[sovay]

I feel very much the same. Especially for social and political analysis.

Yes! When I attended lectures, I took notes as close to transcription as I could manage (I do not and have never written quickly by hand). It seems unreasonable to have to do that for information on the internet.

[redbird]

When I attended lectures, I was OK if not great at figuring out in real time which bits I should write down for later. But I'm also someone who benefitted from the process of taking notes, even if I didn't look at them later as part of studying. I occasionally lent my lecture notes to classmates who had missed a session, or borrowed someone else's for the same reason, but I warned the person who asked for my notes that they might not be comprehensible. I was, like you, trying to write down a lot quickly, so there were bits of informal shorthand: arrows, and negation and conjunction symbols from mathematical logic, Spanish ni...ni... because it takes less time to write than English neither...nor, a couple of bits of Greek. (I have forgotten almost all my Greek, and much of my Spanish, in the many years since I actually studied them.)

[sovay]

But I'm also someone who benefitted from the process of taking notes, even if I didn't look at them later as part of studying.

The process of note-taking was part of what engraved the information onto my brain, but at least in college and grad school it only worked by hand. By the point in time where I could try taking notes on a laptop, it perceptibly did not work as well as a memory aid. I'm still not sure it does and considering how much more difficult it is for me to write by hand than to type, I don't know why.

I was, like you, trying to write down a lot quickly, so there were bits of informal shorthand: arrows, and negation and conjunction symbols from mathematical logic, Spanish ni...ni... because it takes less time to write than English neither...nor, a couple of bits of Greek.

That's wonderful.