all these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends

8:16PM - Note on a side project:

http://propagandander.blogspot.com/

I started this because I wanted to react to the amount of misleading and perhaps dangerous propaganda I come across daily on Facebook. I don't know how long I will be maintaining it, but if I want to critique overly simplified information passed around the internet, something tells me I won't fall short.

10:54AM - Framing, technology and relationships

You can read this and comment on this if you want, but I am more writing it out to take mental notes for myself.

One of the main concepts in Heidegger is that technology is the process of "framing" things. You have a thing or a place that can be described or experienced a number of ways, but by putting a frame around it, you turn it into a resource, a technology. So if you have a field of grain, you put a frame around it and it is now "500 bushels of wheat". If you have a forest, you put a frame around it, and it is now "5000 board feet of lumber", or whatever. We constantly put frames around things, to quantify them, to give them places. And this isn't done for greed as much as it is a cognitive habit.

In our world today, much economic activity is centered around relationships and human development. But those relationships can be framed, turned into technology, in the same way that a mountain full of copper can. Medical care and education are two of the biggest, and fastest growing fields in the country. I am theoretically employed in one of them. And in those fields, people are "framed" into students and patients.

But I don't think it is economic gain that causes this. It seems to be natural human instinct to frame people into relationships, even back in preschool, kids did it. "I'll be your best friend!"

And the internet certainly helps this, because now all our little interactions and encounters can be framed. "He is my Facebook friend", "She is my Livejournal friend", "we are tagged in this picture together".

and...I might have had more to say about that, but I am tired now.

12:00AM - Project done!

It involves 33 people, eleven countries, six continents, two ex-girlfriends, and two pairs of married couples, but my project is now done.

8:58PM - And to prove that all I do isn't to dwell on the past...

All of these entries where I talk about the last decade of my life and how badly I messed it up, I might give the impression that I am just a big ball of introspection.

Not so!

I have been busy/tired through May, but today I took my bicycle on a 15 mile trip up Sleeping Child Road, up to about the 5000 foot mark. It was a cold day in town today, and in the mountains it was just a few degrees above freezing...and a few hundred feet above me, it was snowing. At the end of the road, there was a trail, and I walked along it. Not for long, because it was cold and wet, but long enough that I now want to come back to it.

10:49PM - When I stopped listening to music

This is another part of "Closing Time":

I stopped listening to music sometime in the past few years.
Of course I didn't totally stop listening to music. I don't dislike or despise music. I sometimes still get into really listening to music. Especially when less-than-sober.

But at some point between...oh, 29 and now, music lost its role as kind of my emotional pacekeeper. And as my source of identity.

Remember back to your early teen years, when that amorphous stuff that came out of the radio started to communicate nuances of identity and social placement that became so important? I do. I remember memorizing the all-so-important answers to the question "What type of music are you into", which at the time, the best answer was Alternative Rock and some of the better Classic Rock bands. If you really wanted to be tony, you would mention also liking classical or jazz. But "No Rap and No Country" was also needed, although we would all pick up hip-hop in a few years, at a quicker or slower pace.

And from the age I was 14 to the age I was 28, music would be the thing. It would be what I went to when I was happy or sad, or more importantly, when I wanted to be happy or sad. Music was the perfect tool for manipulating my emotions. And why would I want my emotions manipulated?

...that is another question entirely.

At some point, this stopped being something I needed to do every day. For most of 2011, I would still listen to music: I listened to a 16 disc set of John Coltrane, one disc a month, for about a year. This year, I have stopped even doing that. Whatever is going on in my head, it can't be captured by music. And when I look at my progress forward in life (such as it is)... it just isn't about finding a new band or a new genre.

See, I am getting old!

11:03AM - The weather in Montana is wonderfully malleable.

The weather in Montana is wonderfully malleable.

The thing about Montana isn't that the winter lasts into June or something: at least in my part of Montana, its usually passably warm by the middle of March, most days. A week or so ago, the temperature here was I believe somewhere in the 80s.

No, the thing is that the seasons follow the progression that I am used to in Portland, and then blindside me. A week ago it was in the 80s. Right now, at 11 AM, the temperature here is in the 40s. And that is the part that always throws me.

I was thinking that today I was going to go and do something outside, because as mentioned earlier, I haven't done that much in May. But with the weather, and with me still being tired, I am thinking that today is another inside day.

12:47AM - LIVEJOURNAL RELEASE 92: NEW SITE UPDATES AND MORE

May 23, 2012 - The official LiveJournal Release 92 has been deployed. Here’s what you’ll find in this latest site update:

NEW

• Particularly long comment threads now collapse with the alert “...and [#] more comments.” Just click on that alert to see the rest of the comments. Here’s what this looks like:


• Notification emails now hide any content that was already placed inside an lj-cut instead of displaying the entire entry.


• Social Capital is now displayed for all communities on the profile page.


• You can now embed the Spotify player into your journal or community style.


• Personal userheads are now available for purchase. A personal userhead is of your own design and is unique to you, unavailable to anyone else. Purchase as many personal userheads as you like; each costs 5,000 LJ FunBux™, and is good for five years. Learn more.

BUGS, FIXED

• Scheduled entries should no longer return errors or double-post.


• Domain mapping should no longer force redirection to the LiveJournal login page.


• The format=light URL modifier works on entry pages again.


• Comment notification emails will send even if the entry has a poll.


• The "Music" section on the edit entries page will let you delete the entire text field.


• The help link next to “Do not add to friends pages and RSS” on the update page now links to the correct FAQ.


• The list of journals and communities added by default for new users has changed to news and lj_releases for non-Cyrillic users.


• Missing navigation items in the Classic journal style have re-appeared.


• Notifications about expiring add-ons will now have correct subject lines.


• The bold/italic/strikethrough buttons in the site default commenting scheme should no longer cause cursor positioning problems in Chrome.


• The Calendar feature will now update properly when you edit an entry and change its date.

PLANNED PARENTHOOD: HELP WITH A VGIFT!
Join us in standing up for reproductive health and education. Through the end of the month, you can send a specially designed Planned Parenthood vgift to your LiveJournal friends to help support this cause. (And if you need someone to send it to frank is always happy to receive gifts!). There are three variations for you to choose from ($1, $5 and $10), but they’d all look good on your profile. Thank you for your support! Learn more.

- The LiveJournal Team

11:10PM - Since April...

If you all remember back a few weeks ago, in April I was writing all sorts of stuff here and having epiphanies left and right and we were all getting our introspection going.

For the past few weeks, I've been less active on here.

If you are curious what happened, let me explain with one word: work.

Even though I don't work too much, its kind of reset my life and what it is about. It just kind of gives me something to structure my week around. Even though I know there is a much bigger world than working nine hours a week gardening in Hamilton, Montana...I kind of like focusing on my job and focusing on the steps I must take to get it done.

So if I am not happy, I am at least passably content.

9:38AM - ALL-NEW SCRAPBOOK TO LAUNCH THIS WEEK; UPDATED FAQ

May 21, 2012: Three weeks ago we officially announced the plan to overhaul Scrapbook, LiveJournal’s exclusive photo-hosting feature for Plus, Paid and Perm accounts. Today we’re letting you know that the new Scrapbook will release this week; in anticipation, we want to give you a bit more information on some additional changes that have been made. The newest additions to the FAQ are under the cut; the original FAQ about the new Scrapbook is in the previous news post.

( Read more... )

10:32PM

I get Lonely way too easily. :/