@mibwright@mastodon.social
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

mibwright

@mibwright@mastodon.social

#Writer (mostly drama, but poetry and short fiction too). Member of the Dramatists Guild. Likes: #SFF; TTRPGing; perennial philosophy; kindness; meditation; #Dreams; #Veganism; #Linux; #FOSS.

ALT/Avatar: Grayscale portrait of ASCII characters — man half smiling.

ALT/Banner: A row of red plush seats in an empty theater.

*Note: I don't accept follow requests from people with empty profiles and no OPs.

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JustChapman, to random
@JustChapman@mastodon.social avatar

As a musician, I beg of you - PLEASE do not use Spotify. The ONLY people that make money on Spotify is Spotify. Support artists, not capitalists.

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

Egads. I haven't used Spotify in a quite a while. I signed up for it circa 2012 for a year, but bailed when I began to understand what a bad deal it was/is for many (read: most) musicians.

I don't currently subscribe to any big music streaming platform. I buy music.

It's disheartening to me when I talk to people about how/why Spotify is bad for musicians and they just sort of… shrug. Because they don't feel like there's an alternative.

"Chokepoint Capitalism" explains it well.

Strandjunker, to random
@Strandjunker@mstdn.social avatar

Serious question: Why are white people so afraid of becoming a minority? Does America treat minorities badly or something?

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

Globally, white people are a minority, and always have been.

White America's fear of minority status never made sense to me because I don't associate anything the US has done well, or done poorly, with external morphology.

I don't think whites had, or have, any extra-special insights or destiny.

White racists (or apologists for racists) are afraid because they intuitively understand their past dominance was based on the same kind of bullshit that their ancestors immigrated away from.

pleaseclap, to random
@pleaseclap@urbanists.social avatar

Let me tell you what's not going to persuade me to vote for an enthusiastically genocidal candidate:

Telling me that it's my problem. Telling me to get on board with the team.

Y'all want to recruit people - you're not going to get there by telling them their moral compass is the problem. You need to change if you don't want to lose to Trump, not me

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@pleaseclap

I suddenly remembered this morning that a US soldier set himself on fire (killing himself) as a protest against US involvement in Israel's war on Gaza.

It's striking, and unaccountably sad, how little his death has resonated nationwide.

It seems a sign of how much tragedy we see daily, but also a sign of how timidly accepting most are of our military's actions.

Among other things, this is the result of war becoming the province of executive authority (not representatives).

mibwright, to linux
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

Getting myself going with a phone. Technically, on a used Pixel 7.

I reflashed the phone today, degoogling it and installing Graphene. The web interface made it super simple. I have the Google Play Store app on the phone, but per GrapheneOS it's been sandboxed (i.e., isn't spying on me). I don't think the app store will work until I have cell service (?)

Now I just have to set it up with my carrier.

mibwright, to random
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

Funny how you have to worry a lot less about if you:

(1) think carefully about the difference between journalism and opinion (big hint: the former has cited sources);

(2) read laterally;

(3) use RSS and don't (or rarely) click on shared news posts on social media.

Obviously, it's still possible to end up in a bubble following these steps, and still possible to put your eyes on propaganda. The most foolproof step is (2), along with not stopping at one lateral source.

mibwright, to random
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

I lost sleep last night to by @pluralistic, a book about the ruination of prisons by private equity.

My brother went to jail in 2023. For dinner, two slices of bread, a slice of ham. My parents were paying $600/mo for video calls to his "free" tablet. I couldn't mail him a book, but had to have it sent by Amazon. Worse, the GED program was in practice non-existent.

I'm teary-eyed and grateful that Doctorow wrote a (great) story about the sleaze of these management companies.

mibwright, to random
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

The obvious truth that almost no one is saying in debates about media: Meta/X/TikTok are not public forums.

If you feel as if they've become public forums, you're delusional, or are simply ignoring many of their obvious features.

We should not take seriously any debate about them that proceeds from the premise that they're "public forums."

The companies want to us to perceive them as such, when it suits them, but it's not reality. It's Stockholm Syndrome.

mibwright, to random
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

Wind
buffets
the elder
trees on my street;
scraps of leaf chitter across the asphalt.

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

every time US right wingers radicalize into convoys etc they get practice organizing.

we focus on how dumb or maybe scary their conspiracy driven gatherings are but the reality is that they are getting more and more vital practice with assembling, forming relationships and alliances, and connecting with needed resources — really helpful stuff for building power

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@seachanger

Kind of joking/not joking, but it's worth pointing out that some of their organizing is done by Russian trolls.

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@alaskan.social

Yeah, I was mostly just joking.

Arguably, the political right is better at organizing because it places more value on group identity and loyalty (in settings inside and outside of politics).

The political left, in being anti-authoritarian, and generally secular, is more suspicious of groups.

It seems as if the left spends a lot more time in building solidarity and consensus among various groups while the right is able to build it through shorthands like Christianity.

mibwright, to random
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

My wife couldn't sleep last night because she's a middle school librarian and our state legislature is pushing through book ban bills that are, frankly, authoritarian.

The new laws will allow: a member of the state legislature to unilaterally pull books off the shelves in their area; a book to be banned statewide if only three school (out of ~40) districts ban it; the fining and/or jailing of teachers for having "objectively sensitive" materials.

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

In the interest of "small government," my state legislature only meets for 45 days per year. But practically speaking that means that almost no one knows what's being passed in the lightning fast process. They pass ~500 bills every year and many of them without debate.

To even approach 50% control, non-GOPers would have to pick up 30 seats in the House.

Occasionally, there's bipartisanism, but it's usually on no-brainer issues.

Opposition politics in is like shouting into the wind.

pleaseclap, to random
@pleaseclap@urbanists.social avatar

Honestly the main thing that makes me doubt the CIA killed Kennedy is that they haven't taken shots at Trump; the same security argument applies

But it's probably just because it's just different people at the CIA these days and the new guys are chaos artists who welcome the coming constitutional crisis

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@pleaseclap

I have to admit: I'm very curious what would happen if the US empire fractured.

I don't want to say it would be "interesting," but what would the schismogenesis between the seceded states and the remaining union look like?

The obvious difference in the new Southern (and probably some Western) countries would be semi-theocracy. But one wonders how far they'd take privatization. It's not hard to imagine that they'd revert to pre-20th century, aristocratic-like republicanism.

ceoln, to ai
@ceoln@qoto.org avatar

Having finished a rereading of Stross's Accelerando, I was thinking that the whole "superhuman intelligence arises from autonomous financial instruments" thing was kind of silly; then it occurred to me that in real life one of the software systems into which the most effort is being poured, started out as a website for college students to evaluate each other's hotness..

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@ceoln

Ha! So imagine if the Meta corporation is still around in 500 years — used for asteroid-mining robots and interstellar communications and what not — and the corporate story is: "It all began as a website for college students to evaluate each other's hotness…"

pleaseclap, to random
@pleaseclap@urbanists.social avatar

Remember the "fully mature extra large galaxies discovered way too early in the universe's lifetime" problem, last year?

They fixed it by just doubling the universe's estimated age

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@pleaseclap

This made me laugh. We have enough people not taking science seriously and now they’re, “Oh, by the way, the universe is twice as old as we thought”?

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@pleaseclap

I guess, in the big scheme of things, it would be remarkable if humans in 20th century correctly determined the age of the universe.

The age is bound to be re-estimated as we know more.

Just funny because it's been more or less one number (~12-13 billion) for my entire life.

But… Reality check: even though humans have believed in other planets beyond our solar system for millennia, probably, we didn't have actual, third-person evidence until the '90s. So…

mibwright, to fantasy
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

"Yes…fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

pleaseclap, to random
@pleaseclap@urbanists.social avatar

I mean literally copyright is theft from the public domain

"Copyright infringement" is an orwellian reverse uno - copyright law is the infringing force

Information in its natural state is free and public; copyright imposes artificial and preferential exclusivity

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@pleaseclap

Insofar as information is power, it's better for information to circulate.

Where power concentrates, we get corruption.

This is obviously true in the case of informational power: when officials can stop information from circulating, they can (much more easily) commit crimes — even world-changing atrocities.

The Pentagon Papers was largely just information about the Vietnam War that was withheld.

seanpatrickphd, to random
@seanpatrickphd@mastodon.social avatar

1/11: Dream sequences, how do you feel about them?

I love dream sequences. Which is odd, because most of my dreams are kaleidoscopic nonsense. But it seems that some people really ascribe meaning to their dreams, and I simply love the weird other-worlds that dreams bring us to. I'm a fan of Jungian psychology, archetypes and that sort of thing, and I often try to approach dream sequences in my writing as encounters with the collective unconscious.

mibwright, (edited )
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@seanpatrickphd

In my experience, going through cycles of engaging with my dreams and sometimes not paying attention to them at all, dreams start to "talk back" at some point in your engagement with them.

I think you can sort dreams into one of a few categories. The simplest category is dreams in which you're obviously processing recent experiences or current concerns. Beyond that are dreams with more metaphorical content, wordplay, and the grappling with longer-term emotional issues.

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@seanpatrickphd

And then, of course, there's a wild category: dreams of the future; healing dreams; lucid dreams (where the content is partly consciously determined); and, for sure, encounters with archetypal figures.

A favorite healing/lucid dream of mine was confronting my own double, who was attacking me. I absorbed him, and felt great, and woke up feeling great and less disposed to criticize myself. For a while, at least. ;)

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@seanpatrickphd

I wouldn't say most of my dreams are lucid, but I often have semi-lucid episodes — especially when I'm in distress in bad dreams or nightmares. I'll be able to change an aspect of the dream and continue without conscious direction. For instance, I once turned around and faced a cop who was chasing me and asked him what he represented. He said, "I'm the part of you that hates yourself." Then I woke up. But it's usually like making myself fit through impossibly small spaces.

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@seanpatrickphd

Like a lot of people, I got into dreams in college, and tried the lucid dreaming trick of looking at my hands in a dream.

You just tell yourself, when you're going to sleep, that you're going to look at your hands, and eventually you do, and you realize you're dreaming, and that can trigger a deeper lucidity and vividity.

Some of my deeper experiences have come out of experiments. For example, once you know you're dreaming, ask what you need to see and open a door.

pleaseclap, to random
@pleaseclap@urbanists.social avatar

AI isn't replacing jobs: employers are firing people.

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

Earlier today I was thinking about how people could make money with relatively cheap machines doing what corporations charge a lot for.

For instance, printing 100 pages double-sided at FedEx costs around $46. ($10 at my local library.)

People either eat the cost of FedEx, or buy their own printer (cheaper in the long run).

But people could, in their homes, offer to print documents for other people, charge less, and still make money.

pleaseclap, to random
@pleaseclap@urbanists.social avatar

I know it's popular to hate on Marvel Disney and it's justified but

have y'all ever seen any of the DC movies from this era? They are significantly more fashy

mibwright,
@mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

@pleaseclap

I was the odd man out among my friends when “The Dark Knight” came out. My friends loved that s***t and I was like… “Wait, this movie ends with Batman using warrantless mass surveillance.”

Also, “The Dark Knight Rises” arguably has a chaotic evil criminal analogue for the Occupy movement.

But I also in disagreement over MCU’s “Civil War,” which metaphorically argues against the UN and in favor of American exceptionalism.

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    mibwright,
    @mibwright@mastodon.social avatar

    @seachanger

    Yeah. Figures.

    Try this search engine:
    https://metager.org/

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