values are overrated

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Botgesian spatialities: exploring the latent space of desirable wholesome books.

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Some of us

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Entryways

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asdf arst ahoy

Making sure I can post stuff here. I feel a need for an outlet, I’d like to rave and rage and rant, put my thoughts into words and push them out there.  I’d like to engage with people at some point. I remember Tumblr having a very nice crowd, haven’t been here in years though.

I find some unresolved tensions here. I had a notion that it would be cool to post stuff regularly somewhere as I’m progressing with *computational art* and my various projects. I’d like to build towards a public portfolio. I have a bunch of processes going on, and I often feel lost and stuck. I notice that putting things *out there* for other people to interact with helps a lot, it feels like closing a feedback loop. I can move on to the next idea, without feeling live I’ve abandoned the previous one, even if it didn’t make a splash. 

So let’s go with it.

Here’s a shader animation made with GLSL in KodeLife and turned into a gif

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Solving the spaghetti problem

If you've ever tried to snap dried pasta in half, you know that it's hard to get just two even pieces; what you usually get instea

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This place is for me to have fun

Which means, in particular,

Not silencing myself when I have a random observation to shout into the ether;

Not being awkward to the point of never ever posting anything,

Allowing myself to actually engage with people I admire from the distance,

Not being paranoid about online privacy or who might see me saying what where.

Being goofy with the language,

Posting bad snapshots of work-in-progress-probably-never-to-be-finished,

Mismatching punctuation,

Vaguewhining about issues I’m living through but don’t care to explain

Whatever I feel like it might mean at the moment.

[theunitofcaring]

dan-was-on-fire-once said:

So now asking for pronouns is offensive too? You people are crazy

Hey, so, I think you’re not really understanding the purpose of conversations like this one, or why people want to have them. People go to bars and go to parties and run discussion groups and moderate book clubs and volunteer at youth shelters, and they care about how to address one another in a way that lets people make their needs known while not putting them on the spot or forcing them into conversations they aren’t ready for.

And this is hard. In some cases, it’s literally impossible - some people need the exact thing which will hurt other people, and any conceivable policy is going to feel like a punch in the gut for someone. In other cases, it’s possible only with a ton of hard work, and with other tradeoffs, like having more complicated verbal discussion prompts, which can be hard on people with language processing challenges. 

But it’s still worth knowing what the tradeoffs are, and brainstorming about ways to thread the needle and offer more to people. Because we can. Because even if we can’t find anything that works for everyone, we can find something that works for more people, and that’s worth it all by itself.

If you’re interpreting social justice as ‘a bunch of people deciding which things are offensive’, then of course ‘every possible set of norms is going to harm some people’ is ridiculous - what’s the point in declaring everything offensive? 

But if you’re doing social justice because you want to give people more options and learn more about what they need and learn, from them, more about what you yourself need -

- then, well, you’d better be able to work in a complicated world where there isn’t a single perfect course of action that hurts no one, and where often you try to do something and then realize that it’s created a new problem or made an existing one worse or run up against another limitation.

I recognize that there are people who harass others in the name of social justice, and that’s meant that for a lot of people it feels really urgent to figure out what the Approved opinion is, and what course of action definitely won’t get them harassed and called a horrible person. But - 

- well, firstly, there isn’t such a course of action. Some people will be dicks to you no matter what you’re doing. Even if there were one True Social Justice that harmed no one and required no further analysis and learning, people wouldn’t agree on it, and in the real world people have access to completely different experiences and needs and of course they don’t agree.

- and secondly, if your engagement with social justice is around trying to identify opinions people won’t hate you for so you can hold those and not be a terrible person, then I think you actually should stop engaging in social justice for the time being. It’s really important to come to activism from a place of ‘I want to build a better world’ rather than ‘I want to not be evil and hated’. It’s really important to feel able to independently evaluate ideas and go “yes, this seems true” or “no, I think this is missing something”. It’s really important to be filling in more pieces of your understanding of the world rather than replacing your own understanding with the one being yelled the loudest. It’s better to take a step back than to blunder through looking for the wrong thing and learning to ignore yourself whenever you disagree with it. 

[livingwithinreason]

So what do you do if you just want people not to hate you?

[theunitofcaring]

I’m not saying this isn’t a totally reasonable thing to want, but -

it doesn’t work. People are really varied, and value really varied things, and there are a lot of them, and they’re all going through their own stuff, and some of them are deliberately awful to others and some of them are doing their best but are kind of awful anyway. There are people who will hate you for being a woman and people who will hate you for being a man and people who will hate you for being anything that isn’t a woman or a man. There are people who will hate you for thinking Israel should exist and people who will hate you for thinking it shouldn’t and people who will hate you for not having an opinion about Israel.

There is no shape you can contort yourself into so no one hates you.  So what you have to do is go - okay. I am valuable; I matter; my suffering is bad and my happiness is good.  I have access to truth - that doesn’t mean I’m always right, or always have the answers, it means the opposite of that, it means that I have the capacity to learn, and the capacity to reject things as false or identify things as true, it means that when I go out into the world and try to learn things I can do more than answer ‘who hates me’ or ‘who yells the loudest’. I have access to truth that other people don’t have - I know what it’s like to be me, and I know when I feel strengthened and empowered and able-to-truth-seek and when I feel dismissed and unwanted and obliged-to-conform. And I’m going to start building my world off of that, because I am the only one who can.

And then you block people on the internet who hate you and maybe get a pet who adores you and you seriously consider moving somewhere where you won’t be surrounded by people who hate you and you keep track of the answer to the question “is this friend/meetup/ideology/blog making me more able to uncontort myself, or just giving me new things to contort around?” and you pursue the places and the people where you don’t feel hated, and don’t feel like you have to confine yourself into someone who isn’t hateable. And people will still hate you but they won’t control you, and people hating you matters a lot less when they can’t control you anymore.