I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space.
▰ Afternoon trio for dishwasher, microwave, and neighbor’s construction
▰ Thanks to the patient assistance of my longtime social media spirit ally, the wise C. Reider, I’ve boarded the Mastodon. (Note: I no longer use the account I listed in the original tweet. It’s a long story. This thread provides some sense of the series of events, and my confusion, which has since been dealt with, had nothing to do with C. Reider’s help, which was great.)
▰ Doorbell rings. Peep head out door. Look left. See two seemingly pre-drinking-age individuals headed away. Look right. See neighbor’s head peeping out door.
▰ OK, music theory nerds, hit me with your mnemonics for modes, ’cause my head hurts trying to keep ’em straight.
▰ “Marc, you signed up for Mastodon, so why aren’t you posting?”
“I posted yesterday, and the stuff disappeared, as did all my profile information and images.”
“You should sign up for a less popular server.”
“I tried to. I had to apply and haven’t heard back.”
“You should just refill your profile material.”
“I did. Twice. And it’s all gone.”
“Oh.”
“So, I’m gonna wait for the popularity to chill, and then see if the thing is working.”
“Cool.”
▰ Mastodon, ’cause it’s old and slow but potentially powerful. In any case, now I’m at @[email protected] (Not loving the vibe around the word “lurk” but so be it. Friends say it’s an OK hang.)
▰ OK, I deleted my mastodon.social account. Who knew mastodon.social is different from mstdn.social? (Fun fact, my first online instance — not counting BBS — was ~mrcwdnbm on some ancient 1993/1994 FTP site.) Anyhow, now I know. I’ve deleted the one with he vowels.
▰ Er, with “the vowels.” I managed to delete a consonant while trying to talk about deleting vowels. This is what Mastodon’s complexities have done to my brain.
▰ Mostly been using my own photos for the Disquiet Junto projects lately, but I used a public domain one for tomorrow’s. Looks pretty nifty, I think.
▰ OK, in the interest of simplicity, I’m just at @[email protected] for Mastodon activities. I’ve deleted both mastodon.social and my mstdn.social accounts (have no idea how I ended up with both, except that this whole process has been very confusing).
▰ A piece of the puzzle:
▰ Been (back) on Mastodon 48 hours and every time I see the word “federated” I think 🖖.
▰ “This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out” (nytimes.com). I’ll just assume some variant on this is the next Sayaka Murata novel until there is a next Sayaka Murata novel
▰ The summary statement of the Mastodon “community” (I’m still learning lingo) I’ve currently settled on: “Welcome to post.lurk.org, an instance for discussions around cultural freedom, experimental, new media art, net and computational culture, and things like that.”
▰ 7:34am: I somehow have three different Mastodon accounts. Nothing works.
12:38pm: I’m down to one account. This interface is more opaque than it needs to be but I’m OK with it.
3:32pm: It’s still a bit confusing but I haven’t been confused online in a while so let’s go with it.
▰ Reflecting on how I found Mastodon very confusing for two days, and how now I don’t. You’ve truly passed through a window when you can’t quite recall the reasoning for why something had been, quite recently, not just confusing but downright irritating.
▰ Joining bookwyrm.social requires your “favorite book.” I don’t have one. I’m bad at lists, worse at favorites. I put John Stilgoe’s Shallow Water Dictionary, among the books I’ve most often given as gifts. Maybe Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.? Maybe Paul Auster’s City of Glass? Hard.
▰ Twelfth novel I finished reading this year: a hunk of lightness in the form of John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. Read the author’s note first. It sets the right expectations for a book about bio-nuclear shenanigans, quick camaraderie, executive greed, and being the least educated person in the room.
▰ Me at the start of the week: Mastodon is excruciatingly complicated and whatever my head hurts.
Me at the end of the week: writes a 2,000-word email to friends helping them understand it by tracing my own walk through the conceptual window.
