Flutterby™! From 2017-01-02 to 2017-01-31

Nixon deliberately sabotaged peace talks in 1968, leading to the deaths of 30k US service members (and 500k others) http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016.../164330/Nixons-Vietnam-Treachery

[ related topics: iPhone ]

The quantity of dishes generated by a meal and that the dishwasher will hold are both prime

[ related topics: Food ]

Coralproject: The Real Name Fallacy. Some good musings on identity and names and things we can do to build systems that are smarter.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Dear Obama, From Infosec:

We are more than willing to believe Russia was responsible for the hacked emails/records that influenced our election. We believe Russian hackers were involved. Even if these hackers weren't under the direct command of Putin, we know he could put a stop to such hacking if he chose. It's like harassment of journalists and diplomats. Putin encourages a culture of thuggery that attacks opposition, without his personal direction, but with his tacit approval.

Your lame attempts to convince us of what we already agree with has irretrievably damaged your message.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture ]

Next time you're feeling old: The hour record for a cyclist over 100 is 16.7 miles. Get off it and ride. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38510439

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python ]

Geez, Emacs, if you can't handle a 83 megabyte file I might have to find an editor that can.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Dementia rates 'higher near busy roads'

Living near major roads and the incidence of dementia, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis: a population-based cohort study

[ related topics: Health Current Events Monty Python ]

Drop your computer off at Geek Squad and they're itching to find anything on it that'll let them get a $500 reward from the FBI. Best Buy Geek Squad Informant Use Has FBI on Defense in Child-Porn Case:

Setting aside the issue of whether the search of Rettenmaier's computer constituted an illegal search by private individuals acting as government agents, the FBI undertook a series of dishonest measures in hopes of building a case, according to James D. Riddet, Rettenmaier's San Clemente-based defense attorney. Riddet says agents conducted two additional searches of the computer without obtaining necessary warrants, lied to trick a federal magistrate judge into authorizing a search warrant, then tried to cover up their misdeeds by initially hiding records.

Worse, this could be in something forced into your browser cache without your knowledge, or, hell, even put there by a Geek Squad employee.

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture moron Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement ]

If you like a capella raunchy songs, the Misbehavin' Maidens are kickstartering their second album: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...dens-nerdier-and-dirtier-second/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

WSJ: Rhodes Scholar’s Mother Helped Him With Autism Breakthrough: Jory Fleming is headed to Oxford, thanks to home schooling that tapped into his sense of curiosity. Same guy, different story: Meet an Amazing American Rhodes Scholar with Autism:

"My goal was not to change him, it was really to bring out the best in him," said Kelly Fleming. "I can't change his brain and the way he's thinking but I can change how it's used."

Increased reaction to stress linked to gastrointestinal issues in children with autism. The study is paywalled, it's Associations between Cytokines, Endocrine Stress Response, and Gastrointestinal Symptoms in Autism Spectrum Disorder in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, the journal of the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society, but the article suggests that the researchers are claiming the stress causes the gastrointestinal issues:

Cortisol is a hormone released by the body in times of stress, and one of its functions is to prevent the release of substances in the body that cause inflammation. These inflammatory substances — known as cytokines — have been associated with autism, gastrointestinal issues and stress. The researchers studied 120 individuals with autism who were treated at MU and Vanderbilt University. The individuals’ parents completed a questionnaire to assess their children’s gastrointestinal symptoms, resulting in 51 patients with symptoms and 69 without gastrointestinal symptoms.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Education ]

Think I am going to have to go see this movie: ‘Hidden Figures’ and the power of pragmatism.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Blown away by the customer service at @ClipperCreek. If you need an electric vehicle charger, I highly recommend them!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I'll save you the Google-ing time. Yes, this really is Paul Ryan's logo at speaker.gov

[ related topics: Photography ]

Dinner involved 7 distinct dishes including home-made Kim Chee and lotus root. Twitter ad suggests blending Velveeta and canned tomatoes.

[ related topics: Food ]

Bwahahahaha. Thanks, Shadow! RT Katie Tiedrich ‏@katietiedrich:

we just met, slow down

[ related topics: Photography ]

I am confused. #visionzero #zerovision

[ related topics: Photography ]

Rogue One: should have gone to see Hidden Figures instead. Does nobody believe in script writers any more?

[ related topics: Writing ]

If the Director of National Intelligence wanted to legitimize the Trump presidency, what would that look like? https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

If you need a good laugh at some folks trying to untangle a bicycle from a live electric fence, may I suggest Fat Bike caught on an Electric Fence! (YouTube).

Via Shadow and via MeFi.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Theater & Plays Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Yay! Turned in the Jetta Sportwagen TDI back to VW. Gonna miss that car, but not so keen on helping the Germans gas our neighbors...

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

I don't want to kink shame, but when being blackmailed by the Russians w/golden showers, don't promise inauguration with "soft sensuality"?

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Parallel Thinking: Can painted boundaries tighten up the inefficiencies inherent to parallel parking?

Some simulations and thoughts on parallel parking.

NPR: Scientists crack a 50 year old mystery about the measles vaccine: why, when the measles vaccine was introduced, did childhood deaths from all infection plummet dramatically?

This idea of "immune amnesia" is still just a hypothesis and needs more testing, says epidemiologist William Moss, who has studied the measles vaccine for more than a decade at Johns Hopkins University.

But the new study, he says, provides "compelling evidence" that measles affects the immune system for two to three years. That's much longer than previously thought

The study is Long-term measles-induced immunomodulation increases overall childhood infectious disease mortality in the journal Science.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Education ]

Current status: Amazon EC2 instance keeps crashing and going non-responsive on me. How's your day going?

[ related topics: Books ]

Finally broke down and ordered "The High Cost of Free Parking". Expect religious level tirades on parking minimums from me shortly.

[ related topics: Religion ]

You can experiment with self-driving cars by training OpenAI to drive around in GTA V:

This release includes a baseline agent, trained via imitation learning on 21 hours (about 600,000 images) on the game's AI driving. (The built-in game AI is a good initial target: it performs better than a typical human since it can access internal game state, though it still makes mistakes such as making U-turns on the freeway.) The baseline agent can drive in a variety of different weather conditions, react to traffic, and keep to its lane. This agent is a start, which we invite the community to improve upon!

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Community Education Artificial Intelligence Gambling ]

C-Span Online Broadcast Interrupted by Russian TV Feed:

An online C-Span broadcast from the House floor was interrupted on Thursday by a broadcast from RT, an English-language network controlled by the Russian government.

CSPAN statement as an image embedded in a tweet:

This afternoon the online feed for C-SPAN was briefly interrupted by RT programming. We are currently investigating and troubleshooting this occurrence. As RT is one of the networks we regularly monitor, we are operating under the assumption that it was an internal routing issue. If that changes we will certainly let you know.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture broadband Robotics Software Engineering moron Journalism and Media Television Embedded Devices Real Estate ]

Edit: Open Whisper Systems: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'.

WhatsApp vulnerability allows snooping on encrypted messages.

WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption relies on the generation of unique security keys, using the acclaimed Signal protocol, developed by Open Whisper Systems, that are traded and verified between users to guarantee communications are secure and cannot be intercepted by a middleman.

However, WhatsApp has the ability to force the generation of new encryption keys for offline users, unbeknown to the sender and recipient of the messages, and to make the sender re-encrypt messages with new keys and send them again for any messages that have not been marked as delivered.

Do not trust Facebook or closed-source with your communications.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Cryptography ]

Dear Perl module authors: When dealing with types that are often "big data", maybe not make "cache everything in RAM" the default?

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

For those of us who put Post-It notes over our laptop cameras

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/25/ speaker_microphone_malware_hack/

[ related topics: Photography ]

"Americans need bulshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves..." Michael Moorcock

Things you don't want to see on an ATM display...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Donald Trump revokes the Washington Post's Whitehouse press credentials. I became a subscriber. https://www.washingtonpost.com...tory.html?utm_term=.87365c0c9d9a

Double update, this one deleted.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Bay Area Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Net Culture ]

Kink.com is moving porn production out of The Armory: Historic SF site says goodbye to its porn movies.

Over the last three years, as porn has migrated to free sites, membership groups like Kink.com have struggled to make up revenue, Acworth said. Kink.com’s membership has dropped from 50,000 to 30,000, and its revenues have dropped by 50 percent. The company laid off half its workforce a year ago and is focused on providing an Internet platform for BDSM entertainment, rather than creating content.

“Porn is not nearly as profitable as it was,” he said. “We have had to change our business model.”

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Bay Area Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Net Culture ]

Washington Post: Democrats can't win until they recognize how bad Obama's financial policies were

Obama didn’t cause the financial panic, and he is only partially responsible for the bailouts, as most of them were passed before he was elected. But financial collapses, while bad for the country, are opportunities for elected leaders to reorganize our culture. Franklin Roosevelt took a frozen banking system and created the New Deal. Ronald Reagan used the sharp recession of the early 1980s to seriously damage unions. In January 2009, Obama had overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress, $350 billion of no-strings-attached bailout money and enormous legal latitude. What did he do to reshape a country on its back?

[ related topics: Politics Books Invention and Design Sociology Law California Culture Currency Douglas Adams ]

Shambling corpse of 3D TV finally falls down dead. LG and Sony have dropped 3d from their new lineup, Samsung dropped it last year, Vizio in 2013.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Nature and environment Invention and Design Current Events Graphics Television ]

RT Brian Carnell ‏@brian_carnell:

Eurythmics Four Factor Authentication

Something that wants to use you

Something that wants to be used by you

Something that wants to abuse you

Something that wants to be abused

RT Bertie_Waster ‏@Bertie_Waster:

@brian_carnell Was that by Annie Linux?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Ferrett Steinmetz: Dear FetLife and other kinky people: You don't have the luxury of being apolitical anymore

And that may not be just FetLife. It may also apply to those happy local kink clubs you’ve watched grow over the last decade or so. People wanna shut them down, and unfortunately, those people are in power. Read @Zetsu’s discussion on how Trump’s Attorney General’s #1 priority is stamping out porn. Read @NCD’s post on what happened to porn providers during the Reagan years. This isn’t just in America – England’s pondering new laws, Germany is, all around the world the tide is turning.

Remember that studies show that access to porn is linked to a decrease in sexual violence. It's gonna get worse over the next few years.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Invention and Design Law Community Government ]

Tonight's exploration: understanding an old accordion

[ related topics: Photography ]

The wax has gotten brittle and is no longer holding the reeds in

[ related topics: Photography ]

I don't know how much warping the leather valves can take and still work...

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Further exploring the innards

[ related topics: Photography ]

The bellows looks in good shape, but we've been told it'd be cost prohibitive to repair

[ related topics: Photography ]

Dear Twitter: no. #bigdatafail

Dear Twitter: no. #bigdatafail

[ related topics: Photography ]

So when you're President, does the CIA give you the cocaine directly, or do they have to move it through an East LA distributor first?

[ related topics: Drugs ]

Just typed :wq when I meant to type C-x C-s C-x C-c. I blame the new administration.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

QOTD: "Punch is such an ugly word. I prefer to think of it as an alt-rebuttal." Behemoth on MeFi http://www.metafilter.com/1646...azi-Ask-your-grandfather#6886017

[ related topics: Quotes ]

Needed a key and mail organizer by the front door. White oak and brass.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Race Model Building ]

Holy shit! Ohio State University: Autism symptoms improve after fecal transplant, small study finds. Study appeared in Microbiome.

Very small study, definitely needs to be replicated at larger scale, but holy crap we're learning things about the digestive tract.

[ related topics: Current Events Education ]

Cervical cancer is killing women at a higher rate than previously thought (Warning: Auto-play video)

Researchers found that black women in the United States are dying from cervical cancer at a rate 77% higher than previously thought and white women are dying at a rate 47% higher, according to the study published in the journal Cancer on Monday.

HPV causes a lot of cervical cancer, and a whole lot of men have HPV. It ain't the world, but transmission of it is something to think about.

[ related topics: Current Events Race Video ]

Sean Spicer earns Four Pinocchios for false claims on inauguration crowd size.

• Floor coverings to protect the grass were first used in 2013.
• At most 4.6M people watched online, not “tens of million of people”

And more.

[ related topics: Movies Current Events ]

Soundtrack for today is Mouth Moods - A Mashup Album By Neil Cicierega. Often mash-ups end up leaving me flat or feeling repetitive, and this one does take a little bit to get going, but some of it is mindblowing. Just... Let the bodies hit the popcorn while dear Prudence walks the dinosaur... And smooth barenaked criminal ladies.

Thread which includes some track info

Eye of the Tony the Tiger vintage ad.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Washington Post: Fact Checker: Trump camp’s repeated use of dubious sources on voter fraud. Trump keeps citing a study on voter fraud that doesn't say what he thinks it says.

Meanwhile, Stephen Bannon was registered to vote in two states — despite his efforts to take himself off the rolls in Florida, and so is Tiffany Trump, which is what the studies actually said, and the 20 state agreement to share voter registration information has dramatically cut down on this sort of stale registration since the study was done.

Edit: Trump cabinet nominee Steven Mnuchin is also registered to vote in two states.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

Expected, to many of us who've hung out with smokers, and hopefully this'll be integrated into tobacco addiction management programs: Nicotine normalizes brain activity deficits that are key to schizophrenia.

"Our study provides compelling biological evidence that a specific genetic variant contributes to risk for schizophrenia, defines the mechanism responsible for the effect and validates that nicotine improves that deficit," said Jerry Stitzel, a researcher at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG) and one of four CU Boulder researchers on the study.

Led by Uwe Maskos -- a researcher at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France -- the study found that when mice with schizophrenic characteristics were given nicotine daily, their sluggish brain activity increased within two days. Within one week it had normalized.

"Basically the nicotine is compensating for a genetically determined impairment," says Stitzel. "No one has ever shown that before."

Same press release from the University of Colorado Boulder: Nicotine normalizes brain deficits key to schizophrenia.

Nature Medicine: Letter: Nicotine reverses hypofrontality in animal models of addiction and schizophrenia

[ related topics: Nature and environment Education ]

https://twitter.com/Trump_Regrets - tweets from people expressing regret for voting for Donald Trump.

https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/lists/nps-accounts - list of National Park Service twitter accounts

https://twitter.com/StollmeyerEU/lists/twistance/members - rogue accounts related to U.S. agencies with a science bent

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

When people go on goes on about ISIS/ISIL and Muslims, I've started pointing out that we're less than a century away from Christians committing female genital mutilation in this country, and atrocities in the name of religion continue. Yes, I know it's fringe elements of Christianity, but it's also fringe elements of Islam. In this case: Father and son accused of rape want ‘only law book that truly matters’ at their trial: The Bible

[ related topics: Religion Books moron Law Current Events ]

RT @extrafabulous :

[ related topics: Photography ]

Some notes from last night's talk on stormwater runoff:

• Creek Signs - Guide to Developing a Local Watershed and Creek Signage Program
• Slow it. Spread it. Sink it. Store it! A Homeowner's and Landowner's Guide to Beneficial Stormwater Management

[ related topics: Nature and environment Software Engineering Douglas Adams ]

Wow, some good conversation on addiction in Life on the Swingset #275: The Myths of Sex & Porn Addiction with Dr. David Ley.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

RT David Burge ‏@iowahawkblog:

Breaking: Union of Concerned Guitarists puts Doomsday Marshall all the way to 11



The thing about Trump using a Galaxy S3 with Android 4.4 is that the US can easily hack it to find out how the Russians are instructing him.

Aid-in-Dying Laws Don’t Guarantee That Patients Can Choose To Die:

Shavelson, director of a Berkeley, Calif. consulting clinic, said he has heard from more than 200 patients, including dozens who were stunned to learn that local health care providers refused to participate in the state’s End of Life Options Act.

“Those are the ones who could find me,” said Shavelson, who heads Bay Area End of Life Options and is a longtime advocate of assisted suicide. “Lack of access is much more profound than anyone is talking about.”

[ related topics: Health Bay Area Current Events California Culture Government ]

Wonderfully transformative weekend has left me floating and unwilling to engage with the misery porn of social media current events.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Boats ]

Last week the square dance floor pulled me through, and made my weak calling fun. Tonight, I felt on. And wow does that feel good.

Dear auto-correct: I don't know how you got "vaginal" from my attempt to type "casual", but I have mixed feelings.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Edit and addendum: Please read the post above this one first. If you came here from the Facebook post, you probably already did.

Yesterday I whined about all of the negativity on social media, so this morning have a big dose of good news:

Ali Khoshbakhti Vayeghan, Petitioner, v. Kelly, et al., Respondents (PDF):

On January 28, 2017, Petitioner Vayeghan filed a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus and Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, an Order to Show Cause re Preliminary Injunction, and an Ex Parte Application for Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) staying his removal from the United States, and ordering his release from the custody of the Department of Homeland Security. [Doc. ##1, 2.] Before the Court could rule on the TRO, he was placed on a flight to Dubai to be removed to Iran. On January 29, 2017, he filed an Amended Ex Parte Application for Temporary Restraining Order (“Amended TRO”), which is currently before the Court. [Doc. # 4.]

Or, as Tom Lowenthal summarized on Twitter:

“You illegally deported that man in violation of my order so you are going to go over there and GET HIM BACK.”

—LA federal judge

American becomes Iranian traveler's hero as he enters U.S. during ban. When the opportunity presents itself, may we all be brave enough to stand up as Barbara Berger did. And, yes, may we all continue to support the ACLU so that they're there to back us up when we're needing to defend the Constitution.

Speaking of the Constitution, similarly, may we find heroes in government willing to stand up for it and the separation of powers the way Acting Attorney General Sally Yates did: Trump fires acting AG after she declines to defend travel ban

And kudos to 538: Tracking Congress In The Age Of Trump: An updating tally of how often every member of the House and the Senate votes with or against the president. Note that they rank not just by voting in-line with Trump's position, but sub-rank based on how far the person's expected position is from Trump's position. Our very own Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, leads the pack.

Finally, bookmark https://phonecongress.com/

[ related topics: Politics Aviation moron Law Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Civil Liberties California Culture Chocolate Real Estate hubris ]

This was transcribed from me talking while driving, so has a different flow and style than my usual writing. Deal with it.

I've been "blogging" since before there was a term for it. The first entries in my blog's archives don't have timestamps on them are dated from sometime in February of 1998, so long about 19 years. I have, for years, read the essays by social scientists describing how social media provides us with little bursts of oxytocin, provides us with a thin veneer of interacting with people, and as someone with along history of participation in social media I kind of accepted that that was true, but online communication has, since the early to mid 1980s, has been a very strong part of my social scene.

So I thought "yeah, that's fine, but we carry on".

This last weekend I did a workshop that, among other things, had lots of hugs, lots of close eye gazing, lots of respectful physical contact, and everyone of those, too, sparks a little burst of oxytocin, a little burst of wonderful brain feeling.

And the workshop is designed to have a narrative arc which brings us through some experiences which can be scary, or exciting, into a place where we hopefully come out feeling amazing, and having learned some things. My own narrative arc was amplified by some long-standing social anxieties. Despite being a square dance caller, or perhaps that's why I'm a square dance caller, I don't enjoy free form dance much, I don't get much out of it. And so on Saturday night when the "how late do you want to stay up" activity was free form dancing, I was kind of feeling dejected, and and a little bit out of the space, and felt apart, as I often do in social experiences.

Sunday morning, an absolutely wonderful person, whether by design or accident, amplified my narrative arc. Came and gave me a huge burst of validation and absolutely wonderful connection. And so I'm also coming off the weekend with a tremendous limerence that feels amazing (The nice thing about being 48 rather than 18 is that I have some of the communication skills to work through this with the other parties involved, and some of the introspection skills to work through it within myself).

When I got home, the tools and skills that I learned in this workshop helped me to better re-connect with Charlene, too. So I had this absolutely amazing weekend, got to sleep very late, and on Monday morning, as is my habit, after Charlene left the house, I went down to my computers to start the day, opened up a tab on Facebook and Twitter, and was faced with pages and pages of wallowing in the horrors of current politics.

All of a sudden I was tremendously conscious of how I had been turning to Twitter and Facebook increasingly for these little bursts of validation, of interaction with other people, and how as social media has evolved to be passing around the same overly amplified horrible news stories, we've lost a lot of the personal connection that led to the friendships and amazing relationships that I have with people I've met online, from the BBS days, to Usenet, to early bloggers back in the late ྖs. Friendships and relationships that continue today. My favorite social media these days is email and private slack channels and other side channels that involve those same people.

I've never had a defined mission statement for my blog. The best I ever came up with was "sex, drugs & technology". It has always been "things that interested me", and was never really published for other people, at least not at first: The first time I looked at my logs and saw that I had 45 or so regular readers I was absolutely ecstatic. Later that ran up to probably about 1500, and it's probably down to 10 or so now. But it has served as an additional brain and memory for me, as well as a social connection. So I certainly post my share of political news, of things that I know that I will want to go back to: I often end up having conversations later where I wish I could cite exactly where that thought, feeling, factor number came from, and my blog lets me do that.

But as I gazed through Twitter and Facebook on Monday morning, what I saw was the same story repeated hundreds of time, the same people linking to different version of the stories, each of which was designed to create more and more anxiety in the reader, more and more clicks, more and more "oh my god, I have to read more".

So I'm searching in new directions. I want to find more personal connections. More places where the interactions aren't with repeated material, but are with the minutiae of people's everyday lives: The things that allow us to connect, and be human. And I suspect that much of this is actually going to be more in real life than online. Although there may be ways to build tools to get back to doing this online.

(Aside: There was talk about "real world", and going back to it, and why is "what we're used to" the "real world", and not the space we were in in the weekend?)

I have long complained that "news" is rarely something I can do something about. It's not like the latest events in Washington are things that my life can directly influence. That's why I elect legislators. That's why I participate in a society that has a tripartite system of government. So I would appreciated it if, as people post news of horrors and horrific statements by appointed officials that they think about what particular actions can be taken in the context of that news. Instead of the handwringing and the misery porn, concentrate on the positive direct actions we can do.

We know that the attitudes and opinions of those "in power" value certain power dynamics or economics over human decency. We know that modern government is heavily based in fear, and reactionary politics, and hate. We don't need a constant stream of reminders of these things, what we need is examples of ways to do things better, and reminders of how to effect that change within our world. And then we need the personal connections, the things which inspire us to be better in the world, which guide us to a better world. A world with more human connection, with more smiles, with more soulful longing, and the tools to gratify that longing and explore those spaces of social and psychological need.

So this is my call to you to think twice before forwarding that latest report of the horrors of some Washington DC official or political pundit. If you have specific issues you'd like me to contact my legislators on, I am all ears. If you have uplifting stories and examples of people who are striving to counter the horrors of more than half of our current government, I'm all ears. If you have photos of your kids and your kittens and your lunch, the things that are meaningful to you, especially if they're of your own kids, your own kittens, your own captions on on your pictures, I eagerly await your posts.

I want your updates of your joys and sadnesses, of your laughter and crying, and yes, of your concerns, but of the concerns that concern you, not the concerns that are generated externally.

But if social media continues to be full of these hits of hopelessness and despair, these clips of movies that cannot possibly have happy endings, I need to change the channel. I need to turn the television off and go outside.

So if I disappear from Facebook or Twitter, that's where I've gone. You can always catch me on my own blogs, although that may get a rework. On email, or the various other ways that I stay in touch with people. Ask for an invite to one of the various online communities that I also participate in, or come square dancing with me, or find hugs in one of the other physical communities in which I engage. But I need my communities to be uplifting and empowering. To be inspiring. I want people around me to be people I connect with, people I can be joyful with, people I can say "hey, you know, I'm crushing really hard on you right now", and we can talk that out and find safe boundaries in which to explore that relationship for all of us.

Places to make *human* connections. Because that's the way that can be inspired to save our world. To lift up our communities. To become more together than we can individually.

If you desire my political opinions and notes of the day, they're over at this blog entry: https://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/23901.html

[ related topics: Religion Drugs Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Technology and Culture Health Movies Invention and Design Bay Area moron Space & Astronomy Writing Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Television Net Culture Graphic Design Community Douglas Adams Economics Archival Real Estate Woodworking ]

Removed: Double post.

OH: "Heard recently from a young person: "Zip cars are sorta like Uber, but you have to drive it.""