changes

I Made the World’s Blandest Facebook Profile, Just to See What Happens

by Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic

It seems like not many people are talking about this aspect of why Facebook is so horrible because it is also horrible in so many other ways. This is actually one of the main reasons I finally deleted my Facebook account, though.

I didn’t have a ton of “friends” (230ish, which I’m sure is below average for someone on Facebook for over a decade) and most of them didn’t share much that was real (or if they did, the algorithm didn’t see fit to share it with me), so my feed was filled with so much inanity and corporate stuff, and I still just scrolled through it compulsively, hoping something interesting would happen.

You can see this article had a different headline when I first encountered it in the Apple News app (another demonic time suck if you aren’t mindful and deliberate about finding quality content there - you have to dig to find things like articles from The Atlantic.)

After this I did find one more person talking about this, again via The Atlantic, but this time one of their new newsletter authors, Charlie Warzel in his Galaxy Brain:

What might the Facebook conversation look like if it more readily acknowledged Facebook for what it is: a vast algorithmic wasteland? Infinite channels, but nothing on.

Facebook’s Vast Wasteland

by Charlie Warzel

Standalone post link: Reading Link: Facebook Sent Me Down a Centrist Rabbit Hole

Your art is more important than your audience.

– so says my A.I. / algorithmically generated horoscope today, the notification popping up while I was mid-contemplating just how to curate collections and microthoughts such as these on this website, and whether to continue to do it just for myself or reconnect somehow with a social media network for the possible benefit or irritation of unknown others.

I still haven’t decided.

Standalone post link: Your art is more important than your audience

The things you don’t say accumulate.

The things you don’t buy don’t accumulate.

Standalone post link: Accumulation

I really did that.

Somehow it became super important for me to clear out over 20 months' worth of emails from my personal email account this weekend. I did it, though, by letting myself let go of some things (like all the poem-a-days that I had never read.) Weird trip back through the history of the pandemic as portrayed mainly through brand and organizational emails.

Standalone post link: Daily Picture- Nothing Inbox

THINGS I DIDN’T POST DURING THE PANDEMIC - 01

Back in the spring of 2020 Mesita was writing, recording, and releasing the music of the pandemic in realtime, but I didn’t post anything about it at the time because I wasn’t really posting things, and I feel bad about that.

Because after that he kind of went into a thing where he tried to get away from the Internet and from music, and he still is kind of into that thing, and I’m kind of into a thing like that, too, and so I wish him the best in whatever he decides to do, but a downside of that thing, besides the fact that maybe he’s not going to make music anymore, is that he deleted all his youtube videos of individual songs that I would have posted and that were easy to share. He did later gather all those springtime pandemic songs in this album Empty Island, though, and it is still around on Bandcamp and the streaming services- at least for now.

And it turns out that it is actually quite easy to share or embed stuff from Bandcamp in any number of ways, and youtube is actually kind of awful even though it is so easy and ubiquitous.

Album: Empty Island Artist: Mesita (Brooklyn, New York by way of Littleton, Colorado) Release Year: 2020 Label: Self-Released

Standalone post link: Listening: Mesita - Empty Island

I wrote and had published on Granite Media a review of The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. Might as well reshare it here for a record.

Full review text from https://www.granitemedia.org/2021/11/the-last-cuentista/ :

It’s literally the end of the world: a solar flare has knocked Haley’s Comet into a catastrophic collision course with Earth. But for almost-13-year-old Petra and her family there is an opportunity in the midst of this tragedy: they must leave their grandmother and their home in the New Mexico desert to secretly board an interstellar ship on a mission to colonize a new planet. Petra’s family is chosen as part of the mission because her parents are expert scientists with knowledge needed for exploring and terraforming the new planet. They will be put into stasis for the nearly 400 year space journey, and along the way Petra will receive a cognitive learning implant that will make her an expert in botany and geology when she arrives and is brought out of stasis. More than that, though, she also carries within her the Mexican folklore her grandmother shared with her, and the desire to be a storyteller, and preserve the stories of humanity. When she is brought out of stasis, not to her parents but to a future far different and more precarious than what was planned, her stories and Earth memories might be the only hope for saving what is left of humanity.

This book launches with a seemingly typical near-future sci-fi premise, but is unique as a middle-grade novel centering the story around a young person’s perspective. The author expertly interweaves Petra’s present predicament with flashbacks to her life on earth before the journey, as well as folklore and tales she learned from her Grandmother, which turn out to be absolutely prescient to her current situation light years from Earth. The book has positive echoes of middle-grade classics like The Giver and the Wrinkle in Time books, but with a contemporary flair, a fresh Mexican American perspective, and perhaps higher stakes for the characters. Beyond being a gripping science fiction adventure, it is filled with topics and situations for tween readers to discuss and think about, which would make it great for a book club or classroom study.

Reviewed by Joshua Whiting, Library Media Program, Granite Educational Technology Department Review shared in October 2021 Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5 stars) Interest Level: Grades 5 and Up

Author Website: dbhiguera.com

Title: The Last Cuentista Author: Donna Barba Higuera Publisher: Levine Querido Release Date: October 12, 2021 A review copy was not provided by the publisher.

Standalone post link: Book Review - The Last Cuentista

This file exists solely to respond to /search URL with the related search layout template.

No content shown here is rendered, all content is based in the template layouts/page/search.html

Setting a very low sitemap priority will tell search engines this is not important content.

This implementation uses Fusejs, jquery and mark.js

Initial setup

Search depends on additional output content type of JSON in config.toml ``` [outputs] home = [“HTML”, “JSON”] ```

Searching additional fields

To search additional fields defined in front matter, you must add it in 2 places.

Edit layouts/_default/index.JSON

This exposes the values in /index.json i.e. add category ``` … “contents”:{{ .Content | plainify | jsonify }} {{ if .Params.tags }}, “tags”:{{ .Params.tags | jsonify }}{{end}}, “categories” : {{ .Params.categories | jsonify }}, … ```

Edit fuse.js options to Search

static/js/search.js ``` keys: [ “title”, “contents”, “tags”, “categories” ] ```

Standalone post link: Search Results

Update on AASL, after day two: maybe I should start playing the edu/library twitter game again. Maybe I should try practicing a bit of the synchronous lifestyle again.

Standalone post link: ''AASL21updatday2maybe''

Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

• I’ll be attending the AASL21 conference here in Salt Lake City later this week. (AASL = American Association of School Librarians)

• I’m deleting my Facebook. Might be deleting Instagram and some other platforms, too, but I’m starting with just Facebook.

• I’m posting random notes on this site every day now, or nearly every day. (I think it’s kind of like nicorrette for social media.) The notes show some of the things I’m reading, listening to, taking pictures of, etc.

This page was last updated on October 18, 2021. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.

Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers. I had envisioned a page of this sort for my new website, but my concept was vague and I didn’t have a clear way forward until I happened upon someone with a ‘now’ page and followed the trail back to the source. I think you should make one too.

Standalone post link: Now (October 18, 2021)

This is how slimy they are.

I have to stay clean for 30 days to actually make this happen.

Standalone post link: ''slimyfacebook''