this was two years ago. this year i just couldn't get up for the trip to Austin. seeing Steve Collins stateside that year was nice. Steve introduced me to Immediatism via his website a long time ago.

To be "too busy" for the Immediatist project is to miss the very essence of Immediatism. To struggle to come together every Monday night (or whatever), in the teeth of the gale of busyness, or family, or invitations to stupid parties--that struggle is already Immediatism itself. Succeed in actually physically meeting face-to-face with a group which is not your spouse-&-kids, or the "guys from my job," or your 12-Step Program--& you have already achieved virtually everything Immediatism yearns for.

(from Immediatism vs. Capitalism.) today is a repeat of about a week ago for some nonspecific reason. listening to Sun Kill Moon and being sad.

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I'm hopefully going to a loaned office today to work on a complete re-write of SWIM that instantly formed in my head as I tried to lay down for a quick nap late yesterday. I'm going to try to use this non-SXSW time to get a large chunk of that done.

Update: a nice brisk ride down to the west end + database design + building the models out in Rails* + finding babysitter for tonight + getting paid has all made for a MUCH improving day!

*I am a little scared of learning a whole new language, but damn if I didn't get it today like I never was able to before. Time to cozy up with that Rails book I never sold! I'm going to do that and explore some of the popular PHP MVC frameworks concurrently.

Finally, all of these reservations, as strong and as heartfelt as they are, do not in the end even begin to address my single most important problem with social-networking systems, which is that social comfort and coherence require that by far the majority of actual feelings regarding the people in our lives not be made explicit. In my experience, any degree of smooth and compassionate human concourse absolutely requires plausible deniability, and a certain degree of dissembling regarding your actual, operative feelings for the people you’re engaged with, however much you love them. (Depending on context, that degree may even be greater the more you care about them.) By contrast, having to declare the degree of intimacy you're willing to grant each friend, whether in public and for all to see or simply so that they see it, is a state of affairs I've described, in comments elsewhere, as "frankly autistic." It’s no way to arrange things as absolutely central to life as friendship, of that I am sure.

Antisocial networking -- Adam Greenfield's Speedbird

It continues to frustrate me that as more people more eloquently communicate the shortcomings of social software, Dan Hughes built a social software 5-6 years ago that immediately addressed these problems to a greater degree than any other system out there, and that we were very close to getting the funding required to see that system to some level of actuality.

Meh.

It all started a while back when Lane Hartwell got frustrated. Friends spoke up on her behalf.

At some point she called a lawyer and enacted the DMCA on the offending party's asses. See Misunderstanding Copyright Law And Ruining Everyone's Fun and/or My statement regarding the Richter Scales "Here comes another bubble" video dispute.

So there was some mainstream media coverage, and of course the bloggers sang along like a gospel choir. Some offered "easy" solutions.

Finally, she just sent an invoice. And the video was remade without her photograph included.

Early on in all this, I bought thisphotobylanehartwell.com. I've been tracking and writing about the situation in a friends-only post, but in the end, less is more.

So go over to lanehartwell.com, er, I mean thisphotobylanehartwell.com. It is customizable so that whenever you need to provide attribution to someone you can do it in really big text.

Something is really bothering me this morning. It is something that bothers me frequently, to the point of being annoying. It doesn't have to be my problem. I don't know why I take such offense at it. I don't know why it turns my stomach and ruins my mood. I would rather not let it. The thing is hard to describe (and non-specific, in case you were wondering). I'm hoping that if I attempt to describe it, it will help me get over it. The thing is something like this:

When the hype around something exceeds its result.

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Uuuuuuugg...

See more progress on: Quit Smoking

Just wondering: how much and for how long can someone perform premeditated character assassination on me to such a degree? I understand the psychology of it, and will spare you dear reader (that's just part of it). But I do know that it has to be more tiring for the hater than for the receiver of said hate. And man, I'm tired of receiving it! So how do these people feel? Wouldn't they rather be happy?

And I guess there you have it. All I can do is choose to be happy. yay.

You thought you could keep me from loving
You thought you could feed on my soul
But while you were busy destroying my life
What was half in me has become whole

So this is how it feels
To breathe in the summer air
The feel the sand between my toes
And love inside my ear
All those things that you taught me to fear
I've got them in my garden now
And you're not welcome here

from a song i posted in an mp3 mix also a long time ago.

the record is so much better now. i can't wait to get it out so everyone can hear it