@TrueBloodNet I love this! It's a solid platform, but the twits are out in force right now.

Phew, I've been on a blocking spree on Threads.

There is neither shame nor pride in blocking folks -- I'm just saying this as a public reminder to myself to curate my attention.

All communication requires some push and some pull.

When communication fails, receivers tend to blame senders, and senders tend to blame receivers.

This is naïve and futile.

Depending on the relationship, sometimes this is a thing which needs to be stated explicitly: "I need you to put more work into communication."

Either:
Work at being comprehensible.

Or:
Work to comprehend.

Work represents value.

@Kaysymmetry I'm looking at the accumulation outside of my window, and wondering what the combined forces of quickly-melting snow and continuing rain have in store for us.

Injustice and antagonism are entrenched with self-serving platitudes.

Seeking to point out injustice does not inherently mean seeking retribution, but it is a politically expedient thing to assume and suggest.

These are strategies of entrenchment of status quo, so the system can keep serving who it serves, ignoring who it ignores, and oppressing who it oppresses.

Some people's imagination for justice ends at retribution.

This is true for many with power and privilege, who can only imagine retribution is the goal of every justice-seeking initiative from the margins.

While we need to define terms carefully, and justice is often vague, injustice is generally clear and obvious.

I'm grateful for the interventions that are available for disabled/neurodivergent people in Canada, like tax breaks, and gov't assistance.

But I gotta tell you: these programs are complicated, confusing and clumsy! They are often associated with so much admin that many are effectively inaccessible for disabled/neurodivergent folks.

There is definitely room to simplify all of this stuff -- make it *simpler* than other things, not *more* complicated. There is also a huge need for navigators!

@danialexis People close to me have experiences like this, too.

It does helps to clarify one's priorities.

Also? I want to give people permission: if something isn't actually a desire (any longer?), that's totally fine, but then please steward your imaginative energy.

There can't be anything much sadder than people pining over stuff they don't *actually* want.

A lot of people have a core dream they've cherished for their whole life, but they don't take the minimal planning it would take to make their dream come true.

This is profoundly weird and vaguely sad to me.

I have to accept that people simply want to live in their dreams more than their their reality.

I've lost patience for that. You get one life. Live it!

A system infected with dominance -- even if it isn't the core -- when it values ideology over reality can push in any direction without any limitation/recourse.

It speaks with self-granted impunity about anything or anyone who it decides is other.

This is why our leaders need to have deep philosophical roots. Without the love of wisdom, there is no hope for us to use the power available to us well. There is boundless potential to see the problems we need to solve as small instead of huge.

We have only scratched the surface of how deeply dominance/colonisation has affected the trajectory of human history.

Perhaps the greatest threat to our collective survival is humanity's might-makes-right mentality: Someone who's strong deserves to express their strength in any way they see fit. They make the rules, and they oversee their enforcement -- or lack thereof.

Democracy and law are inventions to restrict this kind of power, yet don't perfectly solve this (majority privilege).

@feloneouscat So apparently they don't like politically partisan flags, but somehow found a way to exclude the confederate flag from that ridiculously-broad and vague category?

Ain't that cute?

Also, what does "neutral" mean here? Forbidding flags of acceptance and inclusion doesn't fit any reasonable definition of "neutral."

"Many of the dangers we face indeed arise from science and technology—but, more fundamentally, because we have become powerful without becoming commensurately wise. The world-altering powers that technology has delivered into our hands now require a degree of consideration and foresight that has never before been asked of us."

-- Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot

@CherNohio I love this!

@Qbae 'Cause maybe
You're going to be the one that saves me!

@Lucky188 @feloneouscat @Pat_Walrond Oh, yeah, my uncle had an old Atari with a tape drive. That was painful!

So many times I'd pull a tape out, cue it up, and wait for the game to load and realise that I'd accidentally loaded one I had no intention of playing. I'd play it anyway because I'd invested so much time in loading it, and didn't want my whole day to be spent just loading games.

@Pat_Walrond @Lucky188 @feloneouscat @TheAbbotTrithemius So true! Those constraints sparked such creativity!

BTW I just confirmed -- it was 64 kilobytes!

I never had a C64, but several of my friends did, so I was pretty familiar with it.

@YogaSteve It's an important question, and not just limited to those two realms. You can add in a whole gamut of social structures and religious organisations as well.

How did our culture come to so highly esteem masculine fragility?

@Pat_Walrond @Lucky188 @feloneouscat @TheAbbotTrithemius I had a Hercules monitor to start, too! It was pretty high resolution for its time, but its ability to render motion graphics was less than rudimentary.

My Dad's setup (a shiny, new 386) could go all the way to 1024x768 in four whole colours. That blew my young mind...but it was all but useless on a 15" CRT.

@Lucky188 @Pat_Walrond @feloneouscat Now I can't remember if my first hard drive was 20MB or 40MB. Whatever it was, not having to change floppy disks all the time changed my whole life!

My parents gave me that and a monochrome VGA monitor (with a graphics card) for Christmas one year. It was quite the gift!

A while back I was reflecting on the difference in physical size between the typical 20MB hard-drive of the early 90s and a 128GB micro-SD card.