I have returned from Alaska; and therefore have finished the 50. Almost nothing I booked in advance went as planned, thanks to a forest fire in Fairbanks, followed by another in Denali, then drenching rain for a week in Kenai, and finally a tweaked knee in Wrangell-St Elias that finally prompted an return a few days early. But I still had an excellent time, and it so happened that my early return meant I dodged the great Crowdstrike outage. My original flights would have left me stranded in Seattle for days.
It did mean I didn’t do half the hiking miles I wanted to. On returning, I have so far controlled my impulses to run off to Tuckerman’s Ravine or Mt Katahdin to make up for it, but it’s only a matter of time.
METABLOG
This WordPress install actually got hacked. Someone was careless with some passwords, or was running an outdated plugin or four or something on my tiny server, so all of a suddenly my humble little 3-hits-daily blog was spewing spam and CAPTCHA attempts out, and generally being a bad citizen. So I spent a lot of time cleaning that up and deepening my defenses. But now I feel more invested in it, I suppose.
TABROOM
I have a couple of weeks of things to do before I can then take a deep breath and freeze the introduction of any new features into Perl/Mason legacy code, and start working exclusively in JS frameworks. It hardly feels real, and it doesn’t help that most of the tasks I do have between then and now are rather tedious and annoying cleanups of very old code. It’s a hard thing to do in July and August, when New England can just stun us with clear light stabbing everywhere through an ocean breeze. I am making progress, but it’s requiring a few pulls of the chain to get the old motor running again.
These remaining tasks are mostly Nationals specific nitpicks of no use or concern to anyone outside the NSDA, but I am hoping to get the notification system working better in a Tabroom native way (which means fewer adblocker issues) and running on iPads and iPhones better.
NEXT MONTH IN WHERE THE HELL ARE YOu
I’ll be spending a week in Mendocino because I can. This time I might actually have company there. I’ve never been able to show the place off to anyone else, despite a lot of trying. Then I’ll cap that trip with a meeting with the Mock Trial folks in LA. Otherwise I’m sticking to the northeast for the rest of the summer.
NON TABROOM TYPING
I’ve been writing a lot but the chances I post whatever it is I’m tinkering with right now are really low, to be honest. However it’s been interesting enough that I’ve found a couple nights I look up feeling ‘a bit tired’ and realize it’s 2AM and perhaps I should sleep instead. I started working on my tablet with a keyboard attached to it, instead of the open distraction festival that is my laptop. It’s worked tremendously.
I have written two of the required six posts about travel that I’ve set as my threshold for doing more travel blogging, though, so there’s at least some hope there.
READING
I’ve finished the 3rd Strong Towns book, and remain a fan of the organization and its goals. I found them via the podcast, but as they’ve grown that’s become a much smaller part of their media footprint of late. I re-read Piketty’s Capital because I felt like being a nerd, and Faulkner’s Light in August because I felt like being a different type of nerd.
I also read two books of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, but then I looked up how many there were left, and it turns out he’s produced 4 of a planned ten volumes. I decided to put the series into park. I found the series to be engaging enough but plodding in terms of major plot points. I think authors in that genre have to put a lot of work into building a World, but then they become enamored of the world, or exhausted by the amount of work it took to create. So instead of telling their story with a full start and ending, they end up just living there. Their outlined story inflates with filler, and the spaces between actual events grow and grow. Sooner or later you’re reading an account of the main character shopping for dinner ingredients. Or, you know things that the characters don’t, and grow tired of waiting for them to catch up.
So I’m putting that down and going to reach for the classics pile again, especially now that driving around thousands of miles of Alaska is no longer on the agenda and a 45 hour audio book isn’t so appealing. I have a copy of some Cather, who I’ve read only once and enjoyed.
KILLING SOCIAL MEDIA
It struck me a little recently how much life is different in 2024 for me than any other year because I no longer have a serious social media outlet. I was one of the first 1,000 users on Facebook, back when it was only open to those with a @harvard.edu address. Once I finally axed the Facebook account in 2017 I went through brief phases of being active in various corners of Reddit, and then more on Twitter, especially during early Covid when it was the best route directly to some of the under-reported actual experts on respiratory viruses and current research. But then Twitter became Xitter (pronounced Shitter) and along the way fired my sister, so I killed my account and do not touch the site anymore.
Folks keep sending me links to Xitter. I never click on any of them, but they keep coming.
I do post stuff to Instagram from time to time, mostly as a heartbeat to people I don’t keep in regular contact with. And I tinkered around with Bluesky and Mastodon for a while. But I’ve come to realize that they were like the raw sugar candy of communication: empty calories that concealed the nutrient deficits they were creating for me. It felt like I’d interacted with people in mass, but truly I had read eighty-seven quick bad hot takes.
They took a silent toll. I’ve never been notably anxious; my mental curses tend to run more towards slowness and lethargy, not spinning around rapidly. But online social discourse is drenched in terror right now. Are there things to fear in the present political moment? Yes. Are they so omnipotent and unavoidable that we should ban optimism altogether? No. But engagement sells, and fear drives engagement, and now that’s all you find. And even I found it was damaging my calm more than the underlying reality does.
So, I started muting the most conspicuously doomerish on Bluesky and Mastodon. After a while I found both of them were growing rather silent. And after a time I stopped checking either altogether. And now, neither lives on my phone. And almost by magic I find myself more productively writing things that matter, not little zings about the latest political event that will affect nothing at all and persuade no one of anything.
I think a lot of debate people probably end up with a parasocial relationship to politics: the actual agents do not know or care we exist, but we imagine that if we have the 2024 equivalent of Josh Lyman’s four TVs going at all times that our finger is on the pulse. It becomes a part of folks’ personality to know what’s going on instantly. People felt the need to text me immediately after the shooting attempt at the Pennsylvania rally for the orange creep, or when Biden dropped out of the race, as if it matters that I know these things within the hour, or even the week. As it happens Alaska is a big wild land with a lot of gaps in cell phone coverage, and I learned about neither piece of news quickly. And it did not affect either my life, or how either story unfolded.
And that speed makes people vulnerable to their own narratives. Without time to deliberate the specifics of an event before the next one comes, you’re at the mercy of your cognitive biases and shortcuts, who are so often false friends. It’s important to be hostile to your own beliefs. Before allowing a concept into your mind, first subject it to deep scrutiny, to make sure it’s worthy. And then go back and re-open old ones too, and make sure they’re still current. I’ve turned pretty radically from one conclusion to another over the years on a number of fronts, but I think it’s part of how I remain myself.
And so it was with the shooting; it infected even Instagram, which I keep because it’s supposedly limited to pretty pictures. Suddenly there were walls of text assuming this event had sealed the doom of all civilization; presumably because the jerk would win the election as a result, or something? The mechanism of the doom is never clear, just the feeling. Just who would change their vote because someone took a shot at the guy and missed? How was this landslide going to start rolling?
And in the event, a week later Biden dropped out of the race, and the world changed again. Nobody remembers the event that doomed the world. There’s a lot of events that “mean we’re all screwed!” that nobody remembers anymore. Like a lot of politics, it was mostly ephemera. And while I can name a lot of books that changed me, I can name zero tweets that have done the same.