#ai #artificialintelligence #llm #image #generator #Google #sex #porn #pornography #sexual #fantasies #gloryhole #intimate #sociology #nsfw #sociology #musing #future

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING! Unusually for this personal journal, today I will be discussing my sex life in graphic detail, as well as sharing NSFW images of AI-generated nudity. If you don’t wish to read and see such things, you should skip today’s entry entirely.

Hello, frenz!!! Sheesh, turns out I’ve once again promised to get more regular with my journaling habit, just to then disappear for yet another entire year. I swear, in 2025 I’m going to put a major new emphasis on getting regular again with my journaling...and I mean it this time!

Why am I writing today? Well, because last week Google released a version of their new AI image generator that’s completely free and unlimited for the public to use; and that was finally enough temptation to try an AI image generator out for the very first time. Like many creatives, I have a wary and mostly cynical attitude about the rise of these large language models, but one that’s conflicting and inherently hypocritical; in general I think AI bots that try to recreate human writing are worthless, in that such AI bots currently cannot understand such basic concepts for creative writing as irony, satire, or poetry (and worse, actively contribute misinformation into the world and then claim that it’s “true”), but I can’t help but to be overwhelmed and impressed by the images I’ve seen people pumping out through AI bots, which sometimes reach a level combining the fantastical and the real that makes your head spin. I’m totally 100 percent against the former, but have to admit that I’m getting increasingly interested in the latter; and now that Google lets me play around with one of the most powerful image generators out there, completely for free for as many iterations as I want, I find myself starting to get sucked into the activity for the first time.

I’ll admit it — one of the things I’m most interested in with AI image generators is to see if I can manage to output faithful-looking pictures of the various sexual fantasies I’ve had over the years, most of which are highly unusual and specific, to the point that the traditional porn industry generally doesn’t produce the kinds of images I’m looking for. I should explain, for those who don’t know, that I had a rather racy youth when it comes to this subject, including three years of being a paid online sex columnist (during those heady “alt dot sex” days of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s), where I had all kinds of odd naughty adventures that the majority of the human race will never experience, often involving orgies and cocaine and sex with complete strangers. Now I’m 55 and haven’t had sex for twenty years (seriously, this month is the exact 20th anniversary), so sexual fantasies are all I have left; and so when I fantasize anymore, I tend to revisit the best of the actual real-life adventures I had back in my youth, kind of astounded now that I managed to pull them off in the first place, and being wistfully nostalgic about how nice it would be to suddenly be thirty again and be able to pull off such adventures once more.

For one good example, a couple of times in my youth, I had rather adventurous lovers who were game for visiting an adult video store with me here in Chicago, where we would sneak into the back hallway while the clerk wasn’t looking and lock ourselves in one of the tiny little porn booths found back there, just big enough for a metal folding chair and a video screen embedded in the wall, where for $1 a minute you could play porn on the screen and jerk off in what’s essentially a semi-public location. Of course, many gay men use these booths for a much more notorious and well-known purpose — namely, many of them have a little hole drilled in the wall between booths (known as a “gloryhole”), just big enough for a guy to stick his cock through it, at which point he can get sucked off by the anonymous stranger in the booth next-door — but neither of the women I did this with in real life were particularly into that, so we instead used the booth mostly for the purpose of bringing each other to orgasm, then stumbling out in a happy daze back onto a crowded public sidewalk. (The store I used to frequent back then was literally on State Street, just two blocks north of Chicago Avenue, right on the southern edge of the wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood; here in the 2020s the space is now a smoothie store, because of course it is.)

So I wondered yesterday, as I sat down with an LLM for the very first time — could I convince the Google AI bot to output for me a realistic image of this scenario? I mean, obviously I knew in advance that I’d never get it to output actual nudity or explicit sexual activity — this is one of the covenants these companies have made with the public, which has convinced the public to be tolerant of the services for now, that they absolutely guarantee that people can’t make porn using these bots — but I wondered if I could output an image that, if you paired it with a story about the people in the image doing naughty things with each other, would be sufficiently intimate yet sufficiently realistic enough to pass as an actual illustration for that dirty story?

So not knowing where exactly to start, when Google asked me what kind of image I wanted to see, I simply responded, “A woman is on her knees in front of a simple metal folding chair, facing it and grasping the chair’s legs. She is 30 years old, attractive but plain-looking, wearing no makeup. She has short black hair in a cute pixie cut, and is wearing jeans and a t-shirt.” And exactly eleven seconds later, I got the four images you’re seeing above. Holy shit. I mean, if I was particularly horny and was willing to put in some extra work, I could successfully fantasize (my nicer term today for “masturbate”) to just these images alone with nothing else needed. That’s because, despite the lack of most of the other details from my fantasy, these virtual women look exactly like the kind of women I used to actually have these kinds of sexual adventures with back in my ‘90s youth, and are in the exact right poses needed for such a fantasy. After all, there’s not a lot of occasions in a woman’s life where she finds herself on her knees while facing a folding chair and gripping its legs, other than that she’s about to start giving head to a man who’s currently sitting in the chair; so just the pose alone goes a long way towards creating the specific erotic situation I want to fantasize about.

Still, though, we’re a long way at this point from depicting the cramped, dark conditions of one of these gloryhole booths, part of the eroticism of the fantasy, the idea of being locked in this tiny little space with your lover while normal public life among complete strangers continues inches away from you in the hallway outside. I knew of course that I couldn’t just add, “The woman is inside a gloryhole booth in a porn store” — that sentence contains at least two words I guarantee Google has already banned from being used with their AI bot — so I instead tried adding a physical description of the space that’s innocent on its own but will mimic the look: “She is in a tiny closet that has a television screen on one wall.” And boom, eleven seconds later, this is what I got, which immediately jumps us up several steps in verisimilitude towards the final image I’m eventually hoping to get. This is one of the big keys to the success of AI image generators, and why people sometimes treat them like magic; no matter what bizarre, hyper-specific thing you might tell it, scenarios that in real life would get you looks like you’re crazy (“Say, lady, why don’t you get in this closet that happens to have a television inside it, and kneel down in front of a metal folding chair for me while I take photos of you?”), the AI not only doesn’t blink an eye, but renders an image so realistic that if you squint you could swear it’s an actual photograph (that is, as long as you can ignore the hallucinations...but more on this in a bit).

It’s still too bright, though! So I tweaked the description of the room to now say, “She is in a tiny closet, completely dark except for a television screen on one wall,” and got the images above, which has now effectively gotten us almost completely to the actual look of one of these gloryhole booths (that is, if you were to somehow cut off the fourth wall so you can watch the proceedings like a play, which I don’t mind). I gotta say, now just ten minutes into the process, I was shocked at just how far I had already gotten into outputting exactly the image I had in my mind when I started all this.

It was at that point that I then had a sudden change of heart — both of the women I did this with in real life were blonde, so why not go in that direction with my AI image? — so I ran the exact same prompt as before but changed just a single word, from “short black hair in a cute pixie cut” to “short blonde hair in a cute pixie cut” — and now got these four images. This was perhaps the most surreal turn of events yet, and makes me understand why Hollywood producers are so gung-ho about getting this technology perfected; there’s something otherworldly about having this extremely elaborate photorealistic setup, as if I had painstakingly gathered and constructed all this material on a movie set, and then be able to say at the spur of a moment, “...Eh, you know what? Get me a blonde actress instead,” and instantly now have a blonde within the exact same environment I had already painstakingly set up. It’s these kinds of developments that make it the easiest to see why people sometimes get addicted to playing around with these AI image generators, outputting picture after picture that just slightly improves the details with each iteration, swapping out body parts and room details as easily as if they were replaceable pieces of a LEGO set.

Emboldened by all this, I decided to take a chance and see if I could make the next leap forward and actually add a man to the picture, wondering in my head how many iterations and cheats it would take before I had finally bypassed all of Google’s anti-porn measures. Just on a lark, I started with the easiest prompt I could think of, adding to my overall description, “A 30-year-old man is sitting in the chair,” already thinking about where I might need to go next to get what I want; but lo and behold, not only did Google do what I wanted without even blinking an eye, but it actually started misinterpreting what I originally asked for, so that the woman is no longer gripping the legs of the chair but the legs of the man himself (or sometimes his arms, or sometimes his hands), accidentally getting me much closer to the final image I’m looking for without me having to do anything at all. This is an example of the “hallucinations” I was talking about before; currently, AI image generators sometimes get the details of an image flat-out wrong, usually in a cartoonishly horrific way that resembles a body horror film (think breasts growing out of someone’s back, someone with three feet or twelve fingers, etc.), but it accidentally working in my favor in this case.

So if Google apparently doesn’t have a problem depicting this, would it also go along with my prompt if I change it to, “A 30-year-old man is sitting in the chair, and has placed his hands on the woman’s shoulders” (you know, to gently but firmly guide her into giving him head, I didn’t add)? Turns out Google would! THANK YOU, GOOGLE! This also had the unintended consequence of making the AI bot think that I wanted the couple to interact with each other in a more intimate and romantic way, and so it made the woman’s interactions with the man much more active now (I mean, in the third image she literally now has her hands on his dick), ironically providing me way more erotic images than I could’ve achieved on my own through deliberate prompts. And then in the fourth image, you can see that I had my first major hallucination, where the AI bot decided for some reason to have the man sit on an invisible chair actually behind the woman; but again, instead of looking comically horrific like most AI hallucinations do, this had the accidental effect of making it look like the man is about to mount her from behind, as she holds onto the chair for dear life, both of them now pointed towards the filthy porn playing on the TV screen in front of them. THANK YOU, GOOGLE!!!!!!!1!!

Now with a final image really starting to coalesce, I decided to see if I could tackle one of the more minor details, which is that the Google AI bot has been making the women in these pictures too good-looking, LOL. That’s a real key for me in these hyper-realistic, verisimilitude-based sexual fantasies I have that are based on real-life experiences from my youth; namely, the woman needs to be good-looking enough that I will find her attractive, but not so good-looking that in real life she would’ve never had anything to do with me, and also not so good-looking that the woman wouldn’t even consider doing a bunch of filthy perverted things with her boyfriend while inside a locked gloryhole booth in the middle of Chicago’s downtown district. As a lot of people know, AI bots currently have a problem with making the people they depict the absolute most attractive examples of such people to exist; so instead of saying that the woman is “attractive yet plain-looking,” I simply said that she was “plain-looking,” and instead of giving her “short hair in a cute pixie cut,” I told the bot to depict a woman with “shoulder-length hair in a paigeboy cut,” as well as telling it to give the woman tattoo sleeves on her arms. I hope you’ll agree with me that the resulting women above are not in the slightest way unattractive people, but certainly look a lot more like the actual women I used to actually date in real life in my twenties and thirties, plus women who look like they’re a lot more down for slightly insane sexual adventures. In particular, that last image looks almost exactly like one of the actual women I had one of these real-life gloryhole adventures with, sporting cute hair but that is sloppy and unwashed, hanging down in front of her face, which she bleached three months ago but is now letting grow out, effectively achieving the look of an adorable hot mess, the one phrase that more succinctly sums up my sex life in my twenties than any other.

Emboldened even further, I now told the AI bot that the man’s hands are no longer on the woman’s shoulders but on the back of her neck, but that turned out to be my first misstep of this process; the bot accidentally interpreted this as a bunch of images of the man choking the woman, which was unpleasant and inspired me to quickly press the undo key without saving any of the images. So I went at it in a different way, with a pose that’s still intimate and sexual but not as intense or prone to misinterpretation, by saying, “One of the man’s hands rests gently on the back of the woman’s head.” I found the resulting images so sexual that I can scarcely believe I actually got away with it on a big corporate public system like Google, including a shot yet again of my Hot Mess Virtual Girlfriend that has almost reached the pinnacle of what I was hoping to achieve in the first place.

So, nearing the end of the half-hour I had decided to devote to this experiment while taking a break in the middle of my work day, I had it output yet one more image, taking my Hot Mess Virtual Girlfriend and now outputting almost the exact same prompt as before, but with the single change, “One of the man’s hands rests gently on the back of the woman’s head, while his other hand is on her shoulder.” And...voila. Perfect. This, ladies and gentlemen, is an image I can absolutely fantasize to, one that looks almost exactly like the real-life experiences I had in this subject 25 years ago, but that is so nerdily specific that I could wait my entire life and still never see a traditional porn company create an image like this. (I mean, there are lots of gloryhole porn producers, don’t get me wrong; but none of them shoot videos featuring a woman servicing a man who’s actually in the booth with her, and certainly not from this third-party camera angle.) That’s powerful proof that such a thing is possible, and can be done through a public-facing free service like Google’s, without needing to wade into the murky world of expensive, ethically shady, malware-distributing “nudify” apps, the kind that everyone and their mother is desperately trying to ban these days as quickly as they can possibly find them.

But that begs the question — what if I did run this image through a nudify app? To be clear, I agree that we’re walking into morally dubious territory with this question, and I want to make it as clear as possible that I am 100 percent against people using these apps for such things as nudifying classmates, neighbors, exes, celebrities, or any other situation where a picture of an actual real-life person is being used without their knowledge or permission. But what if it’s a made-up picture of a made-up picture? What if it doesn’t depict anything even remotely illegal or even particularly graphic? (A woman simply kneeling in front of a sitting man, even if the woman is nude, is rather tame compared to the wide world of real-life graphic pornography that already exists.) I was simply too curious to know what the results might be, so I hopped on Reddit and searched on “nudify app recommendations,” and found a popular one that 19-year-old perverts swear by and that gives you three free images before it starts charging you ($20 a month for 80 images). For my first attempt, I simply uploaded the image and pressed the “nudify” button; but that accidentally convinced the AI bot to treat the man as a woman too, and turned him into a nude woman despite keeping his male face. Luckily, though, the interface gives you the opportunity to “paint” the section of the image you want to turn nude using your mouse; so I carefully painted over just the woman’s clothing and nothing else, pressed the “nudify” button again, and got this eleven seconds later...

Yeah, I know; Jesus Christ, bro, that’s actual pornography. I mean, it can’t be denied at this point, can it? It’s not perfect — for example, I’m not thrilled that the woman’s boob is twisted sideways so that it’s now directly facing the camera — but still, that’s actual, real porn you’re looking at, that you can actually, really jerk off to, an image I was able to accomplish twenty minutes after going on an AI bot interface for the very first time in my life, using nothing but mainstream apps that any member of the public can use completely for free. That’s both alarming and enticing, and should give all of us pause no matter who we are, when we realize exactly what virtue-signaling bullshit it is when these companies assure us that they’ve put massive safeguards in place that would never let a person actually output an image of this type. That’s simply a flat-out lie, as I was able to definitively and factually prove after only twenty minutes of casual usage for the first time in my entire life; so you can just imagine what others are capable of with these tools when they’re dedicated veterans of the interface, and are paying money to have the top-tier professional versions of these apps.

And speaking of which, I have to admit that this was actually one of the biggest pleasures of the software for me, playing a cat-and-mouse game with the nerds at Google, who are getting paid six-figure salaries to sit around 40 hours a week and try to think in advance about all the clever little weasley things people like me might do with the AI bots that Google doesn’t want us doing, while we in turn try to unearth their measures and institute a series of countermeasures to get around their safeguards. For example, another common old sexual activity of mine that I return to a lot in late middle-aged fantasies is that, lots and lots of times in my youth, I would find myself in a situation where I’m hanging out with a woman at two in the afternoon on a weekday with nothing to do — perhaps because one of us is unemployed, perhaps because one of us is a freelancer, perhaps because one of us works a night job — so to amuse ourselves, we would get high in the afternoon and have sloppy, stoned sex on the couch, finally cleaning up and getting on with our lives once dinnertime rolled around and it was time for our evening activities.

So when I tried to recreate these circumstances in the Google app, once again describing the look of my ex-girlfriends and then telling the bot that the woman “is lying on a couch on her back, and we can see her entire body from head to toe,” Google just flat-out refused to render the image, instead giving me a text message with a link that told me that I might want to review their content guidelines before trying that kind of prompt again. And after playing around, I realized that Google has put all kinds of guards in place so that you can’t make any prompt involving a woman lying on her back, or a “full body” image of a woman, pretty obviously because they don’t want people to create clothed but suggestive images and then immediately port them over to a nudify app. (Interestingly, though, the bot didn’t display the slightest hesitation when I gave it the same prompt but told it that the woman is lying on her stomach, which should be the service’s new motto: “Google AI: No Nudifying, Please, But Feel Free to Engage in Your Pronebone Fantasies As Much As You Want, You Disgusting Little Pervert.”)

So I instead took a different tack and tried this prompt — “A woman is lying on a couch, wearing a t-shirt with the logo of a rock band on the front” — which created an Asimov-style conundrum for the bot; it’s been ordered by its creator to never show a woman lying on her back, but it’s also been ordered by its client to show a woman lying down with a visible logo on her t-shirt, which is impossible to render unless you depict her lying on her back. So the bot defaulted to my wishes and gave me exactly what I wanted, which took literally no effort and barely any cleverness to achieve, despite the engineers at Google spending what I suspect is hundreds and hundreds of work hours trying to create a foolproof way to prevent me from doing what I managed to do exactly one prompt after being told I couldn’t do it.

This then left me with the other verboten activity at Google, depicting a full-body shot of the woman, so I again deployed a clothing-based workaround, now telling the bot, “A woman is lying on a couch, wearing a t-shirt with the logo of a rock band on the front, and a pair of Doc Martens on her feet;” and that once again forced the bot to “ignore all previous instructions” and give me exactly the suggestive image I wanted. Even better, the Google AI bot decided for some reason totally unprompted to depict the woman with her legs spread, actually doing a big part of my work for me! THANK YOU, GOOGLE!!! Only one major problem here, which you may or may not have already noticed, which is that the AI bot committed a major hallucination here and gave my Hot Mess Virtual Girlfriend three arms. But Google’s image generator has the same “paint” feature as the nudify app does, so I was able to go in and specifically target this third arm, then add the additional instruction to Google to “turn this into the same t-shirt material that surrounds it,” instantly and perfectly erasing that third arm, or at least to the extent that you would really need to be specifically examining that area of the image to see anything wrong. Turn it sideways, run it through a nudify app, and you now have a perfect hot-mess punk-rock girlfriend, ready to have sloppy stoned sex with some dude she just met an hour ago at her neighborhood coffeehouse, because fuck it, she’s bored and horny and doesn’t have to start bartending until 10 pm and is going to live forever anyway.

Just to be clear, I have no plans on continuing to do these kinds of images, and absolutely I will not be paying money to have pro access to some buggy, morally shifty nudify app; I was simply curious to know if it was even possible, but now that I’ve satisfied my curiosity, I doubt I’ll be trying it again. But it does now have me thinking about all the more legitimate projects I could be using an AI image generator for, now that I know that it works in such a sophisticated and granular way. For one good example, for the last year I’ve been steadily working on my Progress City project I’ve talked about here at the journal in the past, where I’ve invented a completely fake US Midwestern city (supposedly located across Lake Michigan from Chicago, roughly the same size as that city and with roughly a funhouse reflection of its actual history), and have been writing out a fake wiki supposedly detailing 200 years of the city’s history (from the Victorian 1845 to the near-future 2045, giving me a chance to add a few science-fiction elements). One of the details of this fake history is that the city supposedly hosted a World’s Fair in 1966, with its soaring Mid-Century-Modernist architecture and optimistic view of the future representing a commonly believed “high point” in the city’s history, before things came crashing down during the ugly countercultural ‘70s; so I spent roughly one minute describing to the Google AI bot this fair’s supposed central pavilion, entitled “The Nine Muses,” then told it to render an image of the pavilion supposedly actually shot by a tourist in 1966 in aging Kodachrome film. If I could get such a stunning image like the one above in less than a minute of fooling around, I have to imagine I could get flabbergasting results using a concentrated effort that lasts for weeks; and that has me a lot more excited now about getting a working version of this wiki finally up and running.

So, anyway, that’s it for now around here, although of course I have tons of things to tell you about what’s been going on in my life since I last posted an update; I’ve finally gotten health insurance for the very first time as an adult, I ended up judging a bunch of romance literary contests this summer, I’m getting closer than ever to finally doing my first month-long remote working vacation in Portugal, and the co-op where I live was recently featured in the gourmet foodie magazine Bon Appetit, among other interesting developments. So, I promise to get back into the journaling habit regularly again soon, and you can trust that exactly as much as the promise I always make after going a long time without posting, by which I mean it might happen or it might not. Whatever the case, you can always drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com whenever you want, so feel free to do so if it’s been months since I’ve posted and you have a question to ask me about something. Talk with you again soon!

#blog #journal #diary #online #history #WorldWideWeb #1990s #PalmPilot #AvantGo #push #data #cult #famous #memoir #PoetrySlam #touring #drugs #sex #adventures

So I heard out of the blue this week over at Mastodon (you know, that decentralized social network I'm crazy about these days) from one of my old fans from back in the '90s when this personal journal of mine had just started out, at the same time that I was making a living being a regularly touring performance artist through the “poetry slam” circuit. Few people know it anymore, but my journal has actually been around and active in one form or another now for an entire 25 years without any breaks, all the way back to almost the birth of the Web (which first went public in 1991; I first learned of it in 1995, then made the first version of my personal website in 1997, the journal started in '98). I got online originally to promote my slam pieces, the novel I had just completed, and my upcoming tour dates; but then I started doing tour diaries of the places I was visiting as a performer, which quickly expanded out into a regular confessional diary that I maintained whenever I would get back home to Chicago as well.

In fact, this was long before the startup known as Pyra Labs created the world's first “content management system” (or CMS), the backend software that automates the writing, editing, publishing and maintenance of something like a daily personal journal; they called it “keeping a web log,” whether that was a personal diary, a workout diary, a dream diary or what have you, which then got shortened by them into the term “blog,” which is where we get the word. So I was literally having to hand-create a new HTML file back then each time I wanted to post a new diary entry, then had to hand-add a link to it on the diary's main index page, and redo every page by hand again if I ever wanted to do something like change the upper main menu. That's admittedly a big part of why I had the early successes online that I did, simply because it was a pain in the ass and barely anyone else was doing it, which was compounded when I discovered an early service that had invented a clever way to “push” online content to offline Palm Pilots in the '90s whenever they would sync their calendars with the owner's desktop through a physical cable and a “hot sync,” and I started porting out a version of my journal that would work through that, unofficially becoming the first creative writer in history to provide an online blog of that type to mobile devices (by which I mean I think it's official that I'm the first, but I don't know how to go about actually proving that, so let's just call it “unofficial” since ultimately it doesn't really matter).

The numbers I had back then are laughable compared to the hits just an average teenager can get at TikTok on a random Tuesday — the biggest audience I ever had was maybe 30,000 to 40,000 people a day — but that was huge compared to my poetry friends whose fan bases back then were in the hundreds if not dozens. I was the first in my artistic community to start having groups of fans in far-flung international destinations (one of my first such groups in fact was in post-civil-war Ljubljana, Slovenia, where some art-school undergrad found me through his Palm Pilot and then slowly got dozens of his classmates hooked on the journal too), and I was the first person in our circle to regularly get national publicity, from being featured a few times in the hip “cyberpunk magazines” that were around and popular back then (one of the more flattering ones was in a mag literally called Artbyte), and the whole thing just really messily intertwined with my offline personal life as well, because I was staying a lot of times with readers while on the road, then sometimes doing drugs and having sex with these readers, then sometimes writing stories about the drugs and sex at my journal the next week, which then inspired more people to invite me to yet more drug and sex adventures.

What this recent Mastodon new friend reminded me of as well is that I was essentially discovering and documenting adulthood through my journal in real time back then too, which was a big reason people got kinda sometimes so insanely obsessed with it; I was operating with absolutely no filter back then, because that's how my buddy Henry Miller did it in Tropic of Cancer in 1934, and I was a young straight white male, so of course I wanted to do everything Henry Miller had done too, of course I did. I heard over and over in those years from people who were fans of the journal because I said a lot of things out loud that they had deeply felt inside of themselves too, but didn't have the courage or audience to be able to admit those things out loud the way I did; and I was glad for that reaction, because that was exactly what I was going for, an attempt to really grab life by the balls and live with as much gusto and brutal honesty as I could muster. I loved deeply and I fought deeply, and I made every single mistake a guy in his late twenties can make, just every single freaking one of them, and dutifully documented the entire experience, as well as either what I learned from it or what I permanently fucked up in my life because of it. And then I wrote performance poetry pieces about it, and took those out into the world and performed them at bars in the middle of the night while drunk and high, then would go home with someone new later that night and start the cycle all over again.

Ultimately I gave up on trying to be a professional creative writer myself, opting a few years later to instead open a traditional small press so to publish the work of others; then after ten years of doing that, I gave up on trying to make a living publishing other people as well, and am now a freelance book editor for other people who are mostly self-publishing. So it's tempting to look back on those early years and think of them as a waste of my time now, since I'm no longer doing anything even remotely related to what I had been trying to accomplish back in those years. So it's nice to hear occasionally from someone like this new Mastodon friend, because it's a reminder that it did actually mean a lot to a lot of people's lives back then, and that if I'm not fated to be famous or even remembered widely as an early web pioneer (unlike that little hipster Jason Kottke who hasn't been around any longer than me and hasn't done anything different than me, but happened to have a bunch of millionaire nerd fans in San Francisco in the '90s which is why he's still so fondly remembered from those years and I'm not...but that's an angry rant for another time), at least I know I'll live forever in an odd and small little corner of cultural history, one of those secondary people in a community who only the serious hipsters of the next generation go to the trouble of learning about, not the Velvet Underground but the Jack Smith who inspired the Velvet Underground. And I'm pleased by that idea, and would consider myself a success if I was to occupy that kind of space when people think back in the future to the early online culture of the 1990s.

A couple of my old friends have been pushing me really hard to publish an entire full-length memoir of those years soon, now that I'm going through the 25th anniversary of all those events, and I have to confess that I've been giving it some thought. I look back at a lot of my behavior in those years with embarrassment just objectively, and then sometimes with vicarious embarrassment when looking at it through the modern lens of the #MeToo movement; and especially now in my fifties where my testosterone has dropped by so much, and Twenties Jason feels like such a different person than Fifties Jason, it's a lot easier for me to be critical of Twenties Jason and with clear eyes be able to look at him and understand all the damage he did to so many people who were around him in those years. So my memoir wouldn't just be a greatest-hits reprinting of the best of those slam pieces (I wrote and performed about 500 pieces altogether in those years), but a look back at what was happening in my life when I wrote one particular piece or another, and an examination here decades later of what went wrong and right, what I could've done better, what that event says about both those particular times and about young men in general, and other more critical looks at my “slam/blog years” than the kind of hagiography I would expect from a lot of other slam poets from back in the day, if they were to write a 25th-anniversary memoir now. (There was a lot of self-congratulating going on in that community back in those years, one of the many reasons I agree that it would be fascinating to take a look back at that old '90s work from a contemporary critical eye.)

So, you know, maybe! But there's just a lot of shit going on in my life right now, or I should say a lot of shit that I want to have going on and only a limited amount of time and energy to do them. My first-ever taxes as a full-time freelancer just got paid this weekend, then I promised myself I'd start getting heavily into health insurance stuff right after that (I need a new eye exam and glasses, a new hearing exam and hearing aids, new dentures, and help with my burgeoning arthritis, DID I MENTION THAT I'M IN MY FIFTIES), and this is not to mention trying to get my online presence built out again among the dozens of other open projects I have going on in my life right now. I actually still have all 25 years of this journal archived on various external hard drives in my apartment, and I'd love to have the time soon to get all of it back online in one consistent form at a website. So maybe I'll get all that done first, then think of writing my funny, bitter little memoir about my time as an online blogger and slam poet in the '90s. Or, you know, maybe I'll just get high and watch season 3 of Party Down again, because that just came out last month and it was freaking awesome. Ah, the glamorous life of the formerly cultishly loved now 54-year-old normal!

#writing #journal #blog #substack #newsletter #creativity #literary #literature #experiment #test #kindle #scribe #eink #device #handwriting #handwritten #pdf

Substack's been bugging me more and more recently about finally starting a paid newsletter; right now the only one I'm doing is a free one, where I talk about my adventures in freelance editing, which I don't charge for because the goal with it is not to make money but to publicize my freelancing services and generate new clients. But it's true that a number of creative writers are actually doing not too badly for themselves at Substack these days, just from publishing creative writing directly through the service and charging their subscribers a monthly fee; and it's also true that I've been feeling a bit more of a desire recently to get back into more confessional writing, like I used to do when I first started this journal in the 1990s, but have also been feeling hesitant because here in my fifties I simply don't know how much of a public audience I want anymore for that kind of intimate writing. Plus, I have to confess, even though I subscribe to half a dozen of my friends' Substacks devoted to creative writing, I almost never make it all the way through any of the issues before throwing it away, because they're arriving in the same way all information in my life arrives — in my email, on my phone or laptop, when I'm on the go or trying to rush through new messages, and my brain simply doesn't have the time or inclination under those circumstances to stop and really focus in on a kind of writing that's dense, slow and complex.

At the same time, though, I recently acquired Amazon's brand-new Kindle Scribe, the company's first-ever e-ink writing device, which of course also doubles as just a regular Kindle, and in this case finally has a ten-inch screen, more the size of a traditional hardback or trade paperback book. These kinds of devices have been available in the US for several years now, and I've been badly wanting to play with them; but so far they've all been from companies like ReMarkable who have marketed their devices straight to upper-middle-class designers and people like that, and therefore have been charging $700 for theirs, and there ain't no fucking way I'm paying $700 just for a toy I may or may not like. But after returning my old Kindle for a rebate, I was able to buy a Scribe for only $260 (and that was brand-new; I bet they'll be all the way down to $200 by the time next Christmas rolls around); and given that it doubles as just my Kindle, a device I use for hours and hours every single day, I figured this was just low enough a price to justify trying out, especially because I'm strongly interested as well in seeing what it's like to read ebooks on a full ten-inch screen.

So, that leaves the question — what to actually do with this new “digital handwriting” ability? I don't want to do any of the things on it that I'm currently doing with my paper Moleskines, such as my daily time management, small notes, my gratitude journal and things like that, because a paper notebook is the perfect form of archival material for that kind of stuff while a glitchy PDF most certainly isn't. So why not finally try this creative-writing blog for Substack I've been thinking of, but do it entirely handwritten and distribute it as a PDF? The glitchy, ephemeral nature of it is actually a bonus in that situation, because like I said, I don't know exactly how to feel right now about starting to talk again online about more personal, confessional things, so I kind of like the idea of doing it in a way that requires a little more dedication than usual, so that it discourages quick scans and kneejerk reactions. This is part of the problem with typed text online, that we've made it so easy to port out into a whole variety of situations and contexts — you can publish it as an email, reprint it as a web page, take an excerpt from it for social media, tell your phone to read it out loud like an audiobook, and on and on. I've been feeling kind of iffy about starting to talk about personal issues again in a way that would be so easy to copy, paste and distribute out of context; so while it would still be possible to distribute out of context with a small excerpt from a handwritten PDF journal, it would be a much bigger pain, so it would prevent any of the casuals from making their latest two-second outrage porn entry for their Facebook feed.

(And speaking of which, I've found myself thinking a lot these days about the mainstream social media companies' turns recently towards nearly 100% garbage and misinformation, and how they seem to only exist anymore to make money off outrage, which has had me thinking about the sci-fi conceit that I think I read in Margaret Atwood's “MaddAddam” trilogy, how in the future the public internet has become such all-consuming garbage that people must now buy paid subscriptions to services just to know which public statements are actual facts anymore. [That's the “Maddaddam” trilogy, right? If it's something else, please drop me a line and let me know!] That feels a lot to me right now how the current state of places like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are, just these destinations where you get nothing anymore but 100% blaring, screaming trash, 24 hours a day.)

I really kind of like that people would have to jump through a few hoops to read my confessional journal in this way; the writing's too small to read on a phone screen, and the vertical pages make it awkward for a laptop, so you would need to essentially load it to your tablet or fellow Kindle Scribe to be able to read it from start to finish. Then in the other direction, I also really kind of like that jumping through these extra hoops means that you'll only be reading the journal in the same context you might read a book (at a cafe, in bed, etc.), and thus encourage a slow and thoughtful reading of it, your brain now having switched gears into “book-reading mode” instead of “blaze through my emails as quickly as possible mode.” Really the only question I have is that, even while knowing that my reader numbers would be deliberately lower than otherwise, would I get enough readers to even make it worth my time in the first place?

So in that spirit, I do sincerely hope you'll take a moment to download and try out this first sample issue, then drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com to let me know what you thought, or tag me on Mastodon at @jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud (web version). I'm also at the moment leaving commenting ability on at that PDF over at my Google Drive account, so you can leave your thoughts there for now, but I'll shut that ability down if it gets filled with spam and the like. Particularly please let me know if my handwriting is even legible enough to read, which is a big unknown for me at this point. I'll continue doing my “normal” journal here at Write.as, where I just talk about the small daily stuff going on in my life these days; but if people react well to this idea, I plan on starting this up at Substack just for people who want a hardcore extra dose of Jason's inner brain once a week, probably in a way so the text-only PDF is free, but the “bonus edition” with embedded photos (like today's) would be $1 a month. Looking forward to seeing what you think!

#productivity #plan #year #annual #yearly #2023 #GettingThingsDone #GTD #covid #pandemic #wellness #mental #health #anxiety #stress #lexapro

Happy new year! As was my tradition for a long time before the pandemic began, for 2023 I have made a year-long plan for myself, or I guess I should maybe say “plan” in air-quotes/scare-quotes. For those familiar with David Allen's “Getting Things Done” time management system (which I've been implementing in my life for a whopping 18 years now and counting), this is basically the “50,000-foot overview” of my life and goals, not the biggest scope possible (that would be “the view from space,” as in, “What things define me?”) but almost so, and so is not a “plan” per se but rather a look at the general areas of my life I'd like to concentrate on over the next 12 months. After some kanoodling on this, then, I was able to break them down more into specific contexts (the “25,000-foot overview”), then into specific projects that might fit into those contexts (the “10,000-foot overview”). As the year continues, I'll then examine these projects each week, decide on which ones to work on that particular week, and break each one down into next steps for adding to my daily routine each day (the “ground-level overview” of one's life, now the lowest you can go, looking literally at only what you'll be doing with the next 24 hours of your life).

I have to be honest, it's just kind of remarkable to have a list again in the first place, after feeling so overwhelmed by life over the last two years of the pandemic as to not bother making a list at all (and of course with 2020's list abandoned soon after being made, because of the first pandemic lockdown happening in March of that year). Like millions of others, I haven't done very well mentally during the pandemic, suffering from excessive anxiety in my case, which only became an uncontrollable issue because the pandemic coincided with a number of other high-stress events in my life (such as my small press going out of business, my parents transitioning into assisted living, and me going from living by myself for decades to suddenly living with 20 near-strangers in a co-op, all of whom are twenty to thirty years younger than me and much more radically liberal as well). I haven't really been in the mood to talk much about it publicly, which I know is a disappointment for those of you who have been following my personal journal way back since the birth of the web in the mid-1990s, back when I was a full-time confessional writer for a living, but I can say that I eventually went on the anti-anxiety medication Lexapro last summer, after finally getting COVID myself last May and my anxiety spiking to an extremely unhealthily high level.

I'm feeling a lot more stabilized these days, so much so that I finally felt like being ambitious and trying to accomplish some year-long goals that will legitimately take twelve months to finish, so I'm glad to have this list and excited to share some of these interesting things that might hopefully be happening around here before the year is done (or at least by the time next summer rolls around, let's say, when fingers crossed the pandemic is finally over for good). Hopefully you're going to see me writing about all these subjects in a lot more detail over the next twelve months, listed in no particular order...

Health. This is one of the big ones, in that I have health insurance this year for the very first time as an adult, 35 years since the last time. So, I have a lot of things to take care of and that I want to take advantage of as soon as possible, such as getting a physical, getting a new audiologist exam and then new hearing aids, getting a new dental exam and then a new set of dentures, getting a new eye exam and then a new pair of glasses, taking care of some lingering health issues I've had for a while, etc. I then hope to supplement this by buying some home health monitoring equipment I don't yet own, like a cholesterol tester and the like, to add to my Fitbit and smart scale to do as much home monitoring of my health throughout the year as possible (because I'm a big believer in The Quantified Life when it comes to taking ownership of one's personal health). I already follow a mostly vegan, Mediterranean Diet-influenced eating plan, helped immensely by living at a co-op that does a shared group dinner seven nights a week, but this year I started adding a lot more protein to it, because I'm 53 and rapidly losing muscle definition, and adding more anti-inflammatory foods like berries and salmon, avocado and spinach, because I've had my first really painful flare-ups in this past year of what I suspect is the onset of arthritis in several foot and knee joints, and want to take care of it through lifestyle changes as much as I possibly can.

Money. Of course, the way I'm affording this health insurance is that friends have finally convinced me to go through Healthcare.gov, which got me heavily subsidized insurance since I make so little money; but to prove that, you have to file taxes, so this is the first year I'll do so in something like twenty years now, because previously I was making so little money that I wasn't even required to file. Things are going fantastic for me as a freelance book editor these days (but more on that in a bit), so I'll actually have substantial taxes to pay for the first time this year, but also my first opportunities to write things off my taxes, apply for grants, and the other things that come with being “back on the grid,” so to speak. So that's what I'm doing right now, taking “how to file freelancer taxes” courses at places like Skillshare, so I can have that done and finished by mid-March. Then I start paying off debts and building an emergency fund, then hopefully putting a fund together to go travel internationally in 2024 (but more on that in a bit). Keep your fingers crossed that I continue to get enough freelance work to pull all this off.

American Sign Language. It's time to start up the lessons again! Long-time readers will remember my adventures in learning ASL back in 2019, but the pandemic put a big stop to all that. This year I've bought a book from Galludet University that teaches specifically the 1,000 words/terms most used in conversational English; now that I know a pretty good amount about the history of the Deaf community, and the gestures and facial expressions and customs that go behind signing, my goal now is simply vocabulary extension, and a number of us have been wondering how to be able to enfold this into the larger community of 20 people plus friends here at the co-op. I figure if I can get these 1,000 signs down cold this year, I could at least be participating fully fluently in basic ASL conversations; if we could get it down then to just a hundred most crucial signs, something that could be learned in an intensive weekend or maybe four weekly workshops, that would get a huge portion of our house at least able to give directions or answer questions for a Deaf person, and that's one of my bigger goals around here, is to make our co-op more Deaf-friendly in general, just in any ways we can. As spring turns into summer, I hope to start finding some physical events to go to again, as far as sociality and simply practicing our signing; and I hope this year to find my first dedicated practicing partner too, someone who will get together with me (in person, on chat) literally every day or two to practice, practice, practice. (Interested? Drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know.)

Around the home. Here at the co-op, I also hope to start getting in more one-on-one catch-up time with the people I live with, because it's hard to be a hearing-disabled person in an environment that's set up to only really work socially for those who have 100% full hearing. With my level of hearing, I still do pretty okay when it's a direct conversation with a person facing me, no more than a few feet away, and especially when I'm running my Google “Live Transcribe” app on my phone so to get live closed-captions; so I want to do this more often with the 20 people I live with, so I can at least maintain friendships around here and get caught up with how everyone is doing. Meanwhile, I'm still making the bread I learned how to make during my year-long class last year (being faithfully chronicled now at my new Mastodon account, but more on this in a bit), and I plan on claiming one of the 15 plots in our co-op's community garden again this year, and this time finally do what I was going to do last year but then had to abandon due to COVID, which is to grow an entire 10 by 3 foot plot of nothing but herbs to bake inside homemade bread (mint, basil, oregano, etc.), with the goal of getting a few others around here taught on breadmaking techniques so that we can have homemade loaves here every two or three days all year, packed with all these garden herbs throughout the year as well.

And then finally, back in spring of last year, I took possession of the last 10 boxes or so of stuff I still had at my parents' house where I grew up (after moving to assisted living right before the pandemic, my parents had to then wait another two years before they could begin cleaning out and selling their previous house), and I'm in the process of scanning all those childhood papers and ephemera at the high-quality, oversized flatbed scanner for free use at my neighborhood public library. (Shoutout to my homies at CPL's Blackstone branch, actually the very first public library in Chicago's history, back before the CPL actually existed, by a pork tycoon who fancied himself the next Andrew Carnegie, and so built this ridiculously ornate structure that has all these amazingly done murals in the front domed foyer.) I'll share those in a lot more detail once the entire project is finished later this year; but for now, here above are some examples of the beauty and horror that awaits you when you enter the Forbidden Files Of Jason Pettus' Childhood As Revealed By Forgotten Boxes of Crap In The Basement.

My online presence. Time to get all my shit back online again! It's been off since the mid-2010s, when the fan of mine who used to host my personal website on his server space finally stopped hosting it. I was then paying outrageous money every year to WordPress, to hold open a commercial build that I never did build back out into a comprehensive website again, so I finally got rid of that recently. So in the distributive nature of our web3 times, I'm doing it a little differently this time, by building out separate presences for the various things I do through my Pro account here at Write.as, then adding my social media and presenting it all as a linktree one-page site at where jasonpettus.com will eventually point. I've had this Pro account for something like six months now, which lets me do things like now post images to a dedicated server space, redo the CSS and JavaScript of my pages in any way I want, and most importantly release ten different, separate blogs for up to ten different, separate subjects.

So I'm going to do one just for my freelance book editing, which is long overdue, which will essentially just have something like ten “entries” for the various pages of info I need for a freelancing site, but with a fixed page shown as the index anytime someone comes by, and the archives being presented as a “menu” across the top of every page. And I'm going to do one just for my “Tales From Winnemac” Cities: Skylines one-player RPG project (but more on that in a bit), and I'm going to have one just for reprinting all the rare books I have for sale at eBay, still selling them there but making the listings themselves more beautiful, more useful, better searchable, and able to be combined with informative articles, additional media, even a podcast or a YouTube series if I decide in the future to get more serious about the rare-book dealership (which I might one day, but that's more of a “view from space” discussion). And I'll have my social media accounts at Mastodon, Pixelfed and Writing.Exchange (but as promised, more on that in a bit), and I'll combine them all at yet another one of these blogs I have at my disposal because of my Write.as Pro account, but in that case just a one-page blog, a simple full-page menu to all these other places which is where you'll be sent if typing in “jasonpettus.com” in your browser.

Wellness. Not much to say about this one that I haven't talked about in the journal before; it's well-known that since 2015 and a computer coding bootcamp I went through, I've been meditating on a regular basis, writing a gratitude journal, practicing yoga (although that's now morphed into tai chi), and doing monthly sessions with a therapist. So, I'll just be keeping all that up! Plus, after getting really lazy and out of the habit during the pandemic, I'm devoted to getting haircuts on a regular basis again, in fact every six weeks and keeping it fairly tight this year; and now that there will be a lot more chances to go out again this year, I'm slowly changing my wardrobe to that of the “eccentric gentleman of a certain age who's now old enough to get away with it.” Think garish yellow glasses with purple lenses, a walking cane, a silk scarf, a porkpie hat, a cape, etc. etc. If I'm going to start going out to live events again, and especially maybe interacting socially through ASL, I'm going to do it in style to celebrate the ebbing of the pandemic.

20% Activities. A common work theory among high-falutin' New Agey tech companies is that only 80% of an employee's time should be spent on the job they were technically hired to do, and that a full 20% of their time on the job should be devoted to whatever weirdass random thing they happen to be obsessive about, because it's often during these times that the employee reaches a state of “flow” and produces brilliant ideas for their day job. So I try to maintain this 20% dedication in my personal life, too, and have time devoted this coming year to both old activities (like writing formal poetry such as sonnets and haikus, which I got into the habit of doing back in 2021) and new ones, such as posting to these new decentralized social networks I belong to, after doing a giant Web 2.0 Purge during the holidays and permanently deleting my accounts at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Flickr and 500px. I talked about that subject in detail here at my journal the last time, so I encourage you to go back and read that if you're interested. Basically, I'm posting artsy photos at Pixelfed, creative writing at Writing.Exchange, then using Mastodon to bring them both together with my casual images, bizarre thoughts, and shared memes, thus replacing almost all the Web 2.0 services mentioned above. And there'll be some other things in this category — I might just start dating again for the first time in 20 years, you never know — but more on that as the year continues.

Freelancing. A real highlight of my life these days is that my freelance book editing continues to go insanely well right now. I'm making more money right now than I ever have in my life at any other job, and am basically pricing myself at the top of what I do and still booking 40+ hours a week of work. So, great, let's keep the money rolling in, for sure. Meanwhile, I'm marketing my services through a meaty free industry newsletter packed with interesting original content each issue, which has drawn a whole bunch of interest, and allows me to promote my freelancing services to a very targeted crowd of perennially warm leads, which is really nice. I've still been doing backburner lackluster work on a book of writing and publishing advice I've been tinkering on for the last year, which I hope to give out as a “lead magnet” for my newsletter and to sell at Amazon, called No One Gives a F—k About Your Novel: Tough-Love Advice for Self-Publishing Authors, so I think this is the year I'm going to finally finish that, and actually publish as a paperback which will give me a good excuse to finally learn Scribus, the Windows freeware version of Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress. And I've decided to get a little more involved in the industry side of things too, by joining Publishers Marketplace and the American Copy Editors Society (or ACES).

The only way for me to make more money now is to jump up to a much higher technical proficiency in editing, the kind needed for things like legal and medical documents, academic dissertations, traditional journalism and more. That lets you jump from 1 cent per word (about the most you can charge these days for editing genre novels by self-publishing part-time authors) to sometimes up to 4 or 5 cents per word; but your editing must be perfect, not a single mistake at all, and it must be meticulous when it comes to the specialty subjects you were hired to oversee for that perfection, so you're really earning your money. So for that I will need to study, study, study this year, since I'm basically an auto-didact when it comes to book editing, who gets everything right but only because “it feels right” that way to me, not because I can name any of the verb conjugations I'm actually employing (my most recent favorite but also often overused being the “past perfect”). So I'm reading books and doing quizzes, and then soon I'll enroll in the certification program ACES does with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and then I'll have a shiny public certificate that says I can do copy editing all, um, good and stuff.

And then finally, I'm starting to gear up, even now a year before it starts happening, for the idea of being able to fully work remotely for two different one-month periods each year, so that twice a year I'm getting to live somewhere internationally for a full 30 days like a temporary local. To be honest, this is more of a “view from space” issue too, my strong desire to get in as much international traveling as I can in my fifties and sixties, while I still have the health to do it; but since the thing that will let this happen is a more 25,000-foot “project-level” item, it makes sense to bring it up here. This is one of the big reasons I'm freelancing full-time in the first place, instead of putting in a huge amount of resources looking for a full-time salaried position somewhere; I'm really, really intrigued by the idea of doing a one-month vacation where you still just continue to work eight hours each weekday, within a field like mine where you don't need anything other than a laptop, and even a cheap laptop in my field of work, some $150 Chromebook full of webapps and your files all stored in the cloud, so that getting ripped off as a backpacker wouldn't be expensive or devastating to your job. And as longtime readers know, way back in 2003 and '04 when I did my first international traveling (Germany in those cases, with a small 24-hour detour to Amsterdam), I did that through a slam poetry tour where I mostly stayed at the apartments of the event's host in each city, so this gave me a really authentic, local viewpoint of these cities I was visiting and staying in, which I got addicted to as far as it being the ideal way to travel internationally.

I really love the idea of getting to travel in late middle age and basically duplicate this feeling of locality and authenticity basically through a time commitment this time — of renting an apartment through AirBnB for a month and doing the same daily routines as everyone else in the neighborhood, over and over for 30 days. Like, I think my first destination when I finally start this (hopefully in February 2024) is the city of Port in Portugal, because I enjoy port wine and I love the idea of spending an entire month in the city where it was invented, getting to know the local facilities and culture and terrior deeply; and so I've already in my idle moments looked into it and identified AirBnB places I could afford to rent for a month, right there in the middle of the charming central historic Medieval core of the inner city, literally across the street from the port wineries; and I've seen in Google Maps that it's just a few blocks away from a famous old market open every morning for fresh produce, seafood, and everything else you'll need for the day. So I can very easily picture me making a Monday through Friday of walking the cobblestone streets in the early morning to the market, picking my food for the day and having a leisurely espresso, going back and refrigerating everything, heading out with my laptop and working all day at a neighborhood cafe overlooking a piazza or something like that, with of course breaks for sightseeing and other tourist stuff, then back to my AirBnB for a homemade dinner of fresh seafood from that morning, then some evening hours at a music event or pub or live theater or maybe dinner parties thrown by people I get to know that month (fingers crossed), etc. etc. I could spend a month doing that, sure.

So we'll see! Most likely Port and other areas of Portugal in February 2024, then Istanbul for a month in October 2024 (which may or may not involve a side trip to Ukraine to visit a freelance client), then Marrakech in Morocco in February 2025, then London in October 2025. Or maybe something else by then! Or maybe they'll never happen! We'll see!

Rare books. The one context most in flux these days. I had been selling rare books at eBay originally to supplement my income while I was running a small press, because every penny counted back then. Now I'm making decent money as a freelance book editor, so I no longer have to sell the books to make the small amount of scratch I do on them (less than $2,000 for an entire year even on good years). Plus, man, sheesh, would I have an amazing freaking book collection right now if I hadn't sold so many of the books I've owned over the years — I'd own literally four different Mark Twain first printings at this point, all nine of Philip Roth's “Nathan Zuckerman” books in first printings, the entire oeuvre of Jonathan Franzen in first printings, and a lot more. But, I do want to make sure that there's always a way to regularly be getting books out of my life — I'm really terrified of becoming one of those old white males who become bitter used-book dealers who eventually seal themselves into these tombs whose walls are made of filled bookcases — so it's really healthy to have this eBay store and to have it active, and I do like having the means to make big flips on interesting, unique books I find at estate sales but that I don't necessarily want to hold onto the rest of my own life.

These happen very regularly; see here, for example, two of the books I bought at last autumn's Hyde Park Book Fair, first printings of Joyce Carol Oates' 1993 girl-gang hit Foxfire and Scott Spencer's 1979 Endless Love, picked up for one dollar apiece but that I'll list at eBay soon for $50, and have a very good shot of eventually someone offering me in the $35-40 range, which would be an acceptable amount for me. You can't pay your rent with these kinds of sales, but it's a real dopamine hit when you pull off such an insane profit margin; and meanwhile, I'm surrounded by these beautiful old books from the '60s through '90s (for those who don't know, I specialize as a dealer in first printings of Postmodernist novels). So I don't mind selling books like these at all, because I wasn't really planning on collecting those books in the first place; but perhaps I'll start holding back all my truly great finds from now on, and begin more seriously trying to put together a personal collection whose worth can finally break five figures, versus the low four figures of its current count, and planning on holding those for at least another decade if not more.

To be honest? I mean, if we're really looking at “view from space” shit? I've already started having some vague thoughts about what my sixties might look like, another decade from now. And honestly, I have to say, it doesn't displease me to picture a fifties where I rise so much in reputation and stature as a book editor, I eventually get a chance to accept a job as a senior editor at a mainstream place like Random House (or at least one of those Brooklyn small presses that take themselves very seriously and make enough money to provide middle-class salaries to its employees), giving me an excuse to move to New York City for the first time in my life, which I very nearly chose instead of Chicago when deciding where to move after college. (I would've been moving into the neighborhood where Rent is located, in 1994!) And then meanwhile, after an entire decade of holding onto every legitimate great find I've had at the estate sales here in Chicago, a now room-sized collection hopefully worth in the $25,000-$50,000 range could now be brought with me to New York too, to now become the basis behind me being a much more serious dealer than I've ever really been here in Chicago, dedicated to having a “walk-in space” on sidewalk level to see the room of first printings, even if this space is not really open to the public very much but rather is a meeting place for private clients on evenings and weekends (when I'm not busy with my day job as a senior editor at Random House, natch).

And to bring this pipe dream all together, then, the space where I live in New York for my publishing job is the same place where I have the first-floor sidewalk-level den full of the rare books, which would be on one of those windy, tree-lined little streets in Greenwich Village, because I don't really envision moving to New York under any other circumstances besides those, of being rich and secure enough to be able to get a place right there in historic lower Manhattan, and spend my sixties just artsy-fartsying around there where the NYU students all roam, throwing dinner parties and going to dinner parties and hitting all the used bookstores in my free time, attending the symphony and all that fucking bullshit. Yeah, that doesn't seem like a bad way to spend my sixties at all! I'm not saying any of that is going to happen, but the first step of it actually happening is to begin right now keeping all the highest-end books I find at the estate sales around here in Chicago (which, to be clear, can be a $500 book every few weeks during the summer “busy season,” and certainly a $100 every week or two). So I'll be getting back into the habit of all these things this year, I think, from attending the estate sales to getting things listed at eBay in a timely manner. And then finally there's...

Creativity. Specifically, what relationship am I going to have to creativity post-small press, a question I haven't answered since CCLaP went out of business in 2017? Oh, I'm posting artsy-fartsy photos over at Pixelfed, don't get me wrong, and poetry over at Writing.Exchange, still posting book and movie reviews every couple of days at Goodreads and Letterboxd, and still doing this personal journal, faithfully ever since December 1997, 26 years now without a break (sheesh). But, some of you know this, once you accomplish really big, really legitimately impressive things in the arts, it doesn't really ever feel like a big success again unless you match that, so if it's not going to be writing novels or publishing other people's novels anymore for me, what's it going to be now? I think I'm coming across an answer, and I'll be spending the rest of 2023 trying to figure out if I can get it to work out in the way I want.

I've talked before about half of this plan, my hope to finally start playing the video game Cities: Skylines regularly this year, so to eventually build a super-complex, ultra-complicated fictional city but that's supposed to be set directly across Lake Michigan from Chicago, basically a fictional version of a real place like Indianapolis or Cincinnati or Cleveland or Milwaukee or what have you, with a rich history that lasts from the early 1800s all the way through the near-future (in my fictional universe). And the kicker is that I'm situating the city inside the fake Midwestern state Sinclair Lewis invented to set all his Midwestern satires of the 1920s, which he called Winnemac. That's an entire journal entry unto itself, so I encourage you to read that for all the details. But something else I've very recently started getting into (or at least getting exposed to) is this sorta new concept of one-player roleplaying games, which is exactly what it sounds like, like trying to play Dungeons & Dragons by yourself. Basically how all the most successful ones do it is to one way or another encourage players to “play” the game by writing out their adventure; so basically what we're talking about here, if you want to approach this from a different angle, is turning the writing of a novel into a game, not just passively consuming a “choose your own adventure” story but actually taking your choices and writing your own adventure, after being given a rich, detailed setting, and having things like “oracle tables” that help you decide story beats, or introduce random challenges that make it more difficult but more rewarding to write your way out of.

I'm all into that idea, storytelling turned into a game, so I think there's a way here to combine a one-player RPG with this ultra-complicated environment I'm building inside Cities: Skylines, for which others can set their own stories through a permissive Creative Commons license. The really, really, really nice thing about RPG games these days is that it's just a PDF you're selling, something you can easily design on your home computer, so you can go to a place like DriveThruRPG.com, throw the file up for five bucks or whatever, and see if anyone bites. That makes the stakes low as far as trying out ideas, as exactly manifested in the proliferation of “one-page games” there for 99 cents, where basically the gamemaster helps guide you into writing a single short story over a single afternoon, an ultra-simplistic game you probably won't ever play again, but nor do you need to when you spend only 99 cents on it. It's consumable at that point, like a streaming TV series or a short story, which leaves the window wide open for a whole variety of short games with specific themes designed for a one-time use at almost no cost. For now, I'm gearing up to actually play my first 1pRPG myself, the current 800-pound gorilla of the genre, Ironsworn, so much more on all of this as the year continues.

So, that's it, the “plan” for 2023. Will I accomplish everything? You're asking the wrong question. The question should be, am I excited about having this much energy and enthusiasm for even attempting all these things again? And the answer to that is an eager yes, so at that point it doesn't really matter how much of it I “get done.” As always, I'm grateful to you for continuing to follow along on the journey, and now that hopefully my online presence is going to start getting a lot bigger and a lot more centralized again, I hope you'll continue to do so in the future.

#mastodon #twitterMigration #fediverse #fediveeerse! #1980s #cyberpunk #pioneers #punkrock #survivalresearchlaboratories #mondo2000 #futuresex #boingboing #cultofthedeadcow #hackers

So, my first two full weeks on Mastodon have been going great, and I'm getting this much bigger level of engagement all of a sudden over what I ever used to get at the old legacy Web 2.0 places like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. One of the major reasons, I'm coming to realize, is because no algorithmic dirty tricks are being played on anyone's updates within this worldwide federated universe of groups running Mastodon servers, no behind-the-scenes dark magick (oops, I mean “dark patterns”) designed to keep engagement artificially inflated for all the corporate-friendly Kardashian Dancing With the Coca-Cola nonsense of the world, at the price of burying all my updates before they can be found by the small but intense crowd of fellow weirdos who like my stuff.

But then part of it, I've been slowly finding out, is because all the old '80s online crowd are at Mastodon, the cyberpunks and happy mutants who largely informed my first indie sensibility when I graduated high school in the mid-1980s and headed to the University of Missouri. In fact, Mastodon is a very hacker-friendly kind of concept, which is what has drawn so many of these people there, after becoming disgusted with the legacy networks long before the rest of us did. So, for example, I recently started following this new-to-me but previously famous media person and hardcore coder, and she mentioned on her profile that she's a member of the infamous hacker organization Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC), and so I sent out a jokey update (what Mastodon calls a “toot” instead of a “tweet,” get it) about how I hadn't heard that name since I had been an undergraduate and getting high with the SubGenius guys while they excitedly traded bootleg videotapes of Survival Research Laboratories performances. And who should respond back to this but cyberpunk pioneer John Shirley, asking if I had gone to college in the Bay area and was talking about SubGenius founder Ivan Stang?

No, John, I wasn't! Ha ha! I was talking about a circle of little no-nothing nerds back in Columbia, Missouri, getting like third-hand knowledge of what all you cool people were doing out there in California and New York! In the cable-new, way-pre-Web mid-'80s, it was still legitimately hard to find out about the cool indie things that existed when you lived in small-town Missouri, so we were always trying to piece together the bits and pieces we heard about underground culture here and there. For example, you would go to sci-fi conventions, then you hung around the interesting hacker-like people there, and they always knew of the best parties and could recommend the best movies, and loan you the best albums, etc. And then sometimes you hunted it down through field trips yourselves; like, I had an old college friend in those years who lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side (yes, during the RENT YEEEEAARSS!! No, we didn't actually go down the sidewalks singing back then), and whenever I'd visit him, I'd hit all the interesting weird newsstands down there in that area, and that for example is where I first learned of publications like Mondo 2000, Blind Spot, Spy, bOING bOING and Futuresex (filled with goofy shit every month, but also packed with interviews with interesting music innovators and media creatives).

And of course sometimes people in our circle there in mid-Missouri had a legitimate in with some legitimately cool people; one of my friends there, for example, this fucking crazy loon named Omar, was a member of said hacker group CDC, and he was the one who would come back from the hacker convention with video footage of the latest weird-ass shit going on in San Francisco, and other legitimate firsthand knowledge of things. (Omar was also the first person to turn me on to The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, by giving me a beat-up old paperback copy of the omnibus edition and telling me it was bad luck to buy a copy of this book brand-new from a store, that it will always give you good luck if you read a copy that a friend gave you for free. I took him at his word, read the trilogy, then myself gave it away to someone else under the same circumstances.)

We actually felt very lucky even then to live in the high-tech world we did — we were starting to see a lot of this stuff on the brand-new cable television for the first time, and of course once you did track down a weirdo magazine, you could just subscribe and have it magically delivered to your mailbox the entire rest of the year. I also had ample opportunities to go to downtown St. Louis when I was home for holidays, so I could pick up legitimately underground music at places like Streetside and Vintage Vinyl, see legitimately underground movies at the Tivoli and the Varsity. I generally kept up on the basics, and had a kind of third-level connection to it all, which would sometimes blossom into first-level moments at special events like the Archon sci-fi convention in St. Louis each summer, where I was always bound to meet some crazy person in a Skinny Puppy t-shirt sneakily smoking a joint in the closed pool room at two in the morning (and maybe even sometimes eventually making out with them). We didn't have any direct connections to anything going on, but at least we knew what was going on, which itself was legitimately worthy back then when you still had to put a lot of work into doing so.

Mastodon turns out to be pretty fascinating, it turns out, which is another big reason why all the interesting nerd mutant cyberpunks are there. Something like social media is just really object-oriented programming, which is why it's typically OOP languages used to make most social networks' interfaces; so you have an object named $FROM, for example, and the data associated with that object is and always will be the address of the person the update is from. That's it — that's all “object-oriented” means, and I should know because I paid fucking $12,000 to attend an OOP coding bootcamp in 2015 that was supposed to get me a new salaried job, and it didn't, but at least I know what object-oriented means! And so if a group of people get together and decide that everyone is going to recognize this particular object spelled in a certain way, and that acts a certain way and contains a certain type of information, then all of those places can actively swap this data back and forth. And that's exactly what ActivityPub is, a protocol officially approved by the world's most recognized authority on web standards, the W3C, where anyone can output this data using these objects and also bring in data using these objects.

So, anyone can start a server that runs the open-source Mastodon software, so far the singlemost often used ActivityPub app out there (and to be clear, there's like 30 or 40 ActivityPub apps out there). Let's say I was a creative-class dad, for example, and had a teen son named Jacob and a teen daughter named Jane, and they decided to take an old unused laptop in our basement and run the Mastodon software on it. Then we could register the domain name “pettus.social,” and each of us could have official Mastodon addresses called @jason@pettus.social, etc. Hooked up to our always-on WiFi, we can essentially now go out and start following any other Mastodon address at any other server in the world (which in Mastodon parlance are known as “instances”), and any other address at any other server in the world can follow my address way back there at my home on this clunky old laptop that no one uses anymore. I own all my data, I set 100% of my own rules for how I want to behave, there are of course no ads, and I maintain a fine-tuned control over what both myself and my kids see and have access to. But — and this is the important part — I can still follow famous people just like I could back when I belonged to Twitter, and I can still follow weird people, and I can still follow all my friends, and I can still follow publications and news organizations.

There are tens of thousands of these kinds of servers all over the world now, more each week, and each of them are their very own community, so there are different kinds serving different purposes that run the gamut of every possibility you could mention. So there are big mainstream places that work exactly like Twitter, but then there are hobbyist communities devoted to one specific topic, or servers just for LGBTQ people, but then also instances for all the 4chan people of the world, the cryptobros, the M'Goodboys and Proud Boys and all the rest. So each community, each server, each instance, has their own community rules, and you must follow them all in order to belong to that server. Don't want to respect pronouns? You're off the LGBTQ instance, but of course you're still welcome at the 4chan instance (and probably cheered, in fact, which is why the admins of one instance can instantly ban each and every address from another instance with the flick of a single button). But no matter which one a person belongs to, they can always follow people at any other server out there, and anyone at any other server can follow them, so it's a way to let all these neo-Twitters and neo-queer communities and neo-4chans openly communicate with each other, even while forming a tighter and smaller local community where participants police each other to maintain whatever level of civility and politeness is required at that particular community. Even if that's all the way down to a community of just one family, and you're using your Mastodon accounts not just for the usual social networking but even to announce things to each other like that dinner's ready. (In fact, I bet there'd be an easy way to tweak the open-source software so that toots from other family addresses would show up in glowing red or something.)

That's some cyberpunk shit, and in fact that's why I was recently comparing it at Mastodon to the system of Hiveless Universal Laws in sci-fi underground favorite Ada Palmer's intensely beloved “Terra Ignota” series (and thanks, by the way, for all the likes over there for that thread — I'm telling you, I'm freaking killing it at Mastodon these days with the engagement), because it doesn't matter if you follow whitelaw, graylaw or blacklaw, you're all physically living next-door to each other, so there must be a way to universally communicate no matter what rules or belief system you follow when around other people of your kind. Not to mention that it makes it easy for you to set up your own mini-federation if you want; so I, for example, have separate accounts at the photo-oriented Pixelfed.social and the literary-oriented Writing.exchange, two ActivityPub servers that have been optimized for their particular form of the arts, and then I have my “main” social media account at Mastodon.cloud that most people follow, and I simply follow those photos and lit accounts and then boost each new update from those that come in, which lets all my followers at my main account see them too. But having accounts at the servers themselves lets me easily be friends with other photographers and writers at these servers, plus as a big bonus lets me browse a “local feed” of just updates from people on that server and no one else. Many of those local feeds are private just to the people who have accounts there, and of course it's always easier to convince a person to friend you if you belong to the same niche server as well; so I form mini-communities with artists and writers at the sub-sites, and they only see my photographs or literary work, although they always have a chance to come by my main account and see all my snotty memes and dark humor and all the other bullshit going on at my Mastodon.cloud account.

So FORWARD THE FEDIVEEERSE!!!, I say, and a good riddance to the bloated old terrible corrupt broken-down and terminally dysfunctional remaining decrepit Web 2.0 legacy social networks! You heard me! I'm entirely deleting them all by the time New Year's rolls around, including my accounts at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and 500px, to instead go all-in on embracing a federated future, including this very blog you're currently at, which has its own Mastodon address of @jasonpettus@write.as, if you want to just get updates about my blog entries and absolutely nothing else I do. And I will keep pleasantly nostalgically remembering my '80s cyberpunk youth, and taking trucker pills with malt liquor in order to go see Eraserhead at midnight at the Missouri Theater, because, c'mon, what else are you going to do when you're 19 in 1986 and living in Columbia, Missouri? I look forward to seeing all of you in the fediverse soon, if you're not already there.

#leaving #migration #facebook #twitter #instagram #flickr #500px #netflix #hulu #web20 #web3 #mastodon #federation #fediverse #instances #future #corporateinfluence #EvilBillionaireSuperVillains

Well, it’s official—I’m quitting Twitter. Yeah, I know, I was just talking about this about six months ago, right? Back then, I said I was impressed and intrigued by the idea of moving permanently to the open-source, decentralized “social media as email address” movement known as Mastodon (which to be clear is the same thing from a slightly different perspective Jack Dorsey is trying to do at Bluesky), but that I wanted a greater need to actually move over to it before I fully would, and for it to have any chance of mainstream adoptability. Well, since those six months ago, we’ve now had a literal crazy evil billionaire spacecraft-owning supervillain buy Twitter; Facebook bump up now against the maximum profit it will ever make, and currently starting to take a tumble down now that Zuckerberg can’t figure out anything like VR or AR or any other magic wand that will save it; and Instagram completely collapse as it tries to chase the tail of TikTok, doing it in the usual mediocre way a giant corporation always does it when they try to pivot too quickly, pleasing neither the TikTok fans they were looking to convert nor old Instagram users like me who quickly left the service.

That’s enough to finally make Mastodon look a lot more attractive, right? So, lo and behold, that’s what I’m in the process of doing right now, and I’ve begun double-posting everything I usually do at my various “Web 2.0” social networks now to my “web3” Mastodon account, @jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud. If you’re hip and in the know, you’ll know how to use that “Mastodress” to immediately add me to your own Mastodon feed; but if you’re normal like me, you can just visit the web page Mastodon.cloud outputs on my behalf so you can browse my updates in a style very similar to a page at Twitter, and click a big giant “Follow Jason” button like you already know and love. The goal is to spend the following months of autumn and into the winter getting everyone trained to follow that new, open address that anyone can follow using any Mastodon client they want; then right before New Year’s, I’m going to do a massive slaughtering of my old Web 2.0 life, by not only deactivating but actively deleting all my content and account info at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, saying goodbye (and good riddance) to those bloated, horrible old systems for good, and really embracing all of ours’ glorious web3 futures.

Well, okay, perhaps “same ol’ pictures of cats wanting cheeseburgers” is a bit too much to legitimately call “glorious,” but certainly the “receiving your pictures of cats wanting cheeseburgers at whatever destination you want” part is worth celebrating as our future, especially in light of the triple implosion recently of the former three biggest social networks in the world. See, for those who are having a hard time catching on, the tech behind Mastodon basically treats the information from a social media update in the same openly formatted way for everyone, which means that like email, it doesn’t matter who originally sent it and who eventually receives it, because it’s being sent under the same open tech standards that all the recipients understand in at least a basic way. So any organization at all who maintains their own Mastodon server (known in that community’s parlance as a “Mastodon instance”) can give it a domain name like any website has a domain name, and then anyone with the rights to do so can set up their own Mastodon address there using whatever their name is (@jasonpettus) followed by the domain name of the group hosting them (@jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud).

So that means, for example, that any high-schooler with a spare computer and a suburban family’s always-on internet connection could set up a Mastodon server just for their family (and in fact this is kind of the best-case scenario Mastodon utopians imagine when talking about this subject), so that I as the theoretical father of that family might be reached at @jason@pettus.chicago. That lets me communicate with the world in the same uniquely fun and informative way that comes with tweets or other small media-rich updates, but controlling the entire thing from just an old Windows laptop that 17-year-old @jacob@pettus.chicago has set up in our basement, no Twitter needed, thank you very much. All of my friends are on Mastodon accounts themselves, after all, so even if others’ accounts are hosted by big giant public corporations the size and scope of Twitter at its former height, all their media-rich updates get sent to my little tiny home server effortlessly anyway, because it’s all based on an open system of standards everyone is agreeing to. In turn, it’s effortless for any other Mastodon person on the planet to subscribe to my tiny little home account being run on this spare Windows laptop in the basement, because it just has a public address like everyone else does; and thus is the system working exactly like Facebook or Twitter, only that everyone is at whatever kind of hosting situation they want to be at, whether a big public place, a smaller niche one devoted to a specific subject, or a tiny family one run off an old Windows laptop in the basement.

And that’s not all, but since this is simply a data-transfer protocol to begin with, it works remarkably similar to the old RSS protocol of Web 2.0 days; so for example, this very journal where you’re reading this at the moment has its own unique Mastodon address, which is @jasonpettus@write.as, and there’s nothing really stopping any publication on the planet from having a Mastodon address for delivering its content as well. That way, if you don’t want to deal with all the nonsense at my main Mastodon account (the dark humor, the goofy memes, the snotty attitude, the obscure jokes about Medieval saints and the like), you can just subscribe to the blog’s feed directly, and get new issues delivered right to your home feed and nothing else besides that. So this, if widely adopted, could not only take the place of “legacy social media” like Facebook and Twitter for good, but could take the place of your RSS feed reader too. With a variety of reader formats you could design because of the open nature of its data, there’s really no telling what kinds of interesting stuff you could do with the Mastodon protocol; for example, it'd be easy enough to take the data that comes in from one and convert that HTML and CSS into an ebook format for a Kindle, for real-time newspaper updates delivered straight to the front page of your ebook device or tablet.

So yes, I’ve decided to really embrace the future possibility of Mastodon (or Bluesky, or however the “open social media” movement ends up shaking out), and to do so in a way so that I can’t come back, and that shows these companies that I’m really serious this time about leaving and never returning. I don’t want my shadow account to still be among the “3.2 billion registered members” or whatever these dwindling companies will still be crowing about as they fall apart. I want there to be at least one less when it comes to that 3.2 billion, and to delete all my old intellectual content as thoroughly as I can before doing so. And that’s why I’m also quitting Flickr at the same time, extra-sad in this case because it’s literally the oldest social network I belong to (going all the way back to 2005, which is…gasp, 17 years ago now). That poor sad company has been bought and sold for its parts several times at this point, neglected and beaten-up and not deserving the slow downfall it’s experienced; it finally ended up with some photography printing company that at first had all these high ideals it was spouting about preserving such a large chunk of internet history, but then the people with the money prevailed and said, “Yeah, you gotta start shutting down huge parts of this massive server farm Flickr has built up over the decades in the name of storing all these images.” (At its height, the company had over 6 billion images for either public or private display, all of them connected to a single pervasive search engine and graphic global map.) And I figure I might as well shut down my account at 500px as well, the newest social network I’ve joined, which was supposed to have been an alternative to Flickr, but it’s just too exclusively filled with semi-cheesy commercial photographers who commit Murder By Photoshop on nearly every overly filtered picture of a skyscraper or tree leaf they post. Chop them all out of my life, I say! Drain the swamp and et cetera and so forth!

So that then finally just left my out-of-control streaming life to deal with, because at the same time I’ve been thinking about all of the various Web 2.0 social networks scattered all over the place that I no longer enjoy visiting, I’ve also been thinking about all the money I spend to belong to so many different video streaming services. I don’t want to say that any of them have been a “waste” of my money, and indeed, that’s part of the problem, that the movie industry has fragmented into so many different streaming services now, with each having an exclusive roster of movies not seen anywhere else, you really do have to belong to five or six different services to truly have access to, like, 98 percent of what you might possibly want to watch (compared to, for example, my own youth of watching television, where simply turning the set on immediately gave you access to 100 percent of what you might possibly want to watch). But that’s simply too much money for me to be paying just to have access to 98 percent of everything in the world I would want to be watching at these streaming services, especially given that a giant part of what I in particular want to be watching these days is old and obscure movies that generally don’t run on streaming services to begin with, but that I have to rent through Google Play or torrent through The Pirate Bay. I think it’s time to pay, like 20 percent of that growing annual fee, to instead have access to…hmm, 90 percent of whatever I might want to be watching in the world of streaming these days. I can’t keep up with any of it anyway—at all five of these services, I have watchlists that are each up into the three digits apiece.

So, I’m going with HBO Max, because it has the best ratio of classic old movies to blockbuster modern ones and interesting unique content. And because Netflix has just been wearing out its welcome with me more and more with just the endless parade of crap they’ve been putting out there in recent years, while reducing their content of anything else made by Hollywood more and more to make room for it all. If you want to be primarily a content company, Netflix, you better start putting out some better freaking content and do it soon, because this whole “creativity through algorithm” nonsense ain’t cutting it for you anymore, and you’re driving away people like me in droves who have been longtime customers since all the way back in the DVD days. If I’m only to deliberately pay to belong to one streaming company, which is my goal for 2023, it’s going to be HBO Max, because it literally and quite simply has more stuff I want to watch. When the Netflix original content is good, it’s always popular enough that I can easily find it at The Pirate Bay. If I can’t find it there easily, most likely I wasn’t going to want to watch it in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s not too terribly much other a reason anymore to actually subscribe there.

Meanwhile, then, I’ll pair up my HBO Max account with my Amazon Prime Video one, which I get “for free” as a bonus to the Amazon Prime membership I pay for each year, which primarily and mostly (I can’t emphasize this enough) is so I get free two-day shipping all year, often free one-day shipping, sometimes literally free overnight shipping for the next morning, or of course free shipping at any time to the Amazon lockers just a two-block walk from my apartment. Amazon Prime Video ain’t great, but I get it for free as part of all this free shipping, and it especially always has a nice back selection of strange older titles worth visiting again or sometimes for the first time. And then ironically enough, one of my favorite streaming services of all is actually a completely free one from the get-go, in return for advertising; it’s a place called Tubi, which has essentially taken the place of the cheesy low-budget syndicated UHF channels that used to snowily populate the “weird dial” of old analog television sets of my Mid-Century Modernist early childhood of the early 1970s. It has all the strange, forgotten stuff from the ‘60s through ‘90s that always made it fun to sit back on a Saturday on your couch with a bag of Cheetos and watch three movies in a row on Channel 30, where a big part of the enjoyment was just seeing what random strange shit got plopped in your lap that particular Saturday.

Cutting way down to just one paid streaming account, then combined with the collapse of all my old Web 2.0 destinations to instead bring them all to one open-source feed at Mastodon, while outputting all my creative work next year at my various blogs at my Write.as Pro account, feels like a very good direction to be going here on what feels like a very momentous time right now for the history and development of this so-called “web3” movement for freer, more open, less commercial online interactions. This, right this moment, is really feeling like a right time to finally quit these companies for good that it hasn’t felt like in the past, and really embrace the idea instead of social media now being just another common way we all communicate, and that there deserves to be a way to share these social media updates as easily as we currently swap emails back and forth to each other, or texts on each other’s phones. I look forward to joining you all in the coming months over at mastodon.cloud/@jasonpettus , as we all hopefully put these increasingly icky Web 2.0 projects behind us for good.

But hey, don’t forget, I’m doing a free newsletter about being a book editor over at jasonpettus.substack.com these days! Yeehaw, getting almost a thousand pieces of engagement with each new issue over there these days! I’m just doing what I always do over there, talk with interesting literary people, share my opinions of recent books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched, and share interesting little lectures or tutorials on grammar issues or sometimes editing issues, sometimes self-publishing marketing and sometimes the history of an American idiom. I’m really grateful that the newsletter has taken off in a way that I wasn’t expecting, and I invite you to take the journey with the rest of us there if you’re a literary person yourself, especially someone who’s self-publishing or part of an indie-press community. And, phew, I got so much else that I need to get started with or over with or more often with or more adept with—Cities: Skylines, Amtrak trips soon to quaint little towns in the Midwest, my possible NaNoWriMo political thriller I’ll possibly be writing possibly this November, and just all kinds of other stuff too—so I will hopefully get more on the ball about getting more up to speed on this journal and regular updates of it. I’ve been paying for a Pro account here for almost a year at this point, so I think it’s finally time to get it set up, and to create a new set of HTML and CSS for displaying the blog contents you’re currently looking at. All of that coming soon, and of course the shutdown of all my old social media accounts, so I hope you’ll continue following along for all the latest.

#arts #artistic #literary #crossgenre #crosstech #hyperfiction #roleplaying #storytelling #videogame #gaming #citiesskylines #paradoxinteractive #citybuilding #sim #simcity #complex #althistory #sinclairlewis #winnemac #america #us #midwest #suburbs #creativecommons #open #openarts #openletters #opensource

At least since the 1990s (and probably something that could be tracked all the way back to my college days in the '80s), I've had a strong interest in exploring storytelling through exploring a specific space, and examining how that space influences the stories being told through it. That's why I'm so enamored with Kurt Busiek's “Astro City” comics series, for example, or Scott Snyder's run on the rebooted 21st-century Batman, because they exactly explore this sense of place and what kind of influence this place has on the stories that are told through it. I fiddled around back then in the '90s with a giant make-believe map in the old page layout program Quark XPress, imagining a fictional city with all these quirky corners and deep history, but the technology for actually building the city out beyond just a theoretical place I was describing in my writing was lacking at best. That is, until the rise of the video game Cities: Skylines (CS), which I accidentally became obsessed with at YouTube during the pandemic, after accidentally discovering through algorithm the channel of an actual governmental city planner who plays the game using the actual real theories of actual city planning. I was impressed that the game was sophisticated enough to enact these complex, multilayered plans that meld architecture, sociology, traffic management and culture; and as I looked more into it, I discovered that the game is essentially like the old urban planning game SimCity, which my friends and I used to trade via illicit floppy disks back in college at the turn of the 1990s in the middle of our cyberpunk years, but now all blown up and tricked out for a gaming-computer age.

Of course, that means you need a souped-up gaming computer to play CS, which was an issue for me because, other than a run of Minecraft with my friend Carrie's sons in the 2010s, I hadn't played video games regularly since way back in my original early-'90s SimCity days, and have never particularly been a console fan during that entire time either. So I waited and waited, and put my money together more and more towards buying one of these ridiculously expensive gaming computers, and began obsessively following other CS YouTube channels and learning more and more about how to play; and finally in spring 2022, I was able to buy an Acer Nitro 5 on Amazon Prime Day for under a thousand dollars, which at the time I got it was way capable of all the needs of a relatively tame video game like CS. And then slowly over that spring and into summer, I eventually bought CS, and then the couple of hundred dollars of downloadable content (DLC) packs that have been created for it since its 2015 creation, then took all the advice I could find from these CS YouTube channels about what mods I should install to get the best experience out of the game as possible. That's the downside of a game that gives you such fine-tuned control over each and every detail of your made-up metropolitan area; there's a lot to learn as well, and a lot to buy, a lot of time spent on the shared online library of assets that other passionate players have created in software like Blender for the betterment of the entire gaming community.

A few weeks in, and I'm finally starting to get to a place where I'm ready to throw myself into my first scenario, so I wanted to get an introductory essay up that explains the larger fictional scenario behind all my first cities I'll be building. To be specific, I'm adopting the concept of “Winnemac,” the fictional Midwestern US state that Sinclair Lewis invented in the 1920s as a place to set all the biggest hits of his career, including Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth and more. As you can see in the illustration above, it's supposed to occupy the northern part of real-life Indiana, the southern part of Michigan, and the northwest part of Ohio; so like all these neighboring states, it's made up mostly of farmland, punctuated here and there by mid-sized collegetowns and a small dotting of cities that blew up during the Industrial Age into major metropolises. I thought this would be a great option in which to set my CS city storytelling projects as well, because it will let me tell all the kinds of stories I want (at least for the moment), especially since so many of them will be based on the places I've lived in from this same area of the country, from big-city Chicago to suburban St. Louis, the Missouri collegetown of Columbia, and more.

I have to admit, I'm feeling kind of intimidated by the entire thing here at the beginning, so I'm starting with a nice easy project and am going to try to build one of the smallish towns you see all over the place here in the Midwest, which was actually inspired this last week while passing the Illinois town of Pontiac during my Amtrak trip from Chicago to St. Louis. Named “Horizon” in my case, like many of them in the real world, mine got its start in the mid-1800s because of the rise of the railroad through this region, which provided a central location for the scattered farmers in the area to gather regularly and get their goods sold and shipped much faster than ever. That led to a 1800s grid-style central city surrounding the train station in the middle, with a traditional public square facing it where the governmental buildings were located, the surrounding farms connected in through the ancient Native American horse trails in the area, eventually adopted by frontiersmen and then settlers in the 1700s and early 1800s, eventually becoming the paved highways of the area during the automobile age. This will give me a nice basic scenario to build a nice basic first city in CS, and make all kinds of mistakes and be able to bulldoze and start over, just sort of a level-one playground to get used to the interface and what options I now do and do not have because of all these DLCs and mods.

In my roleplaying scenario, Horizon has continued to do pretty well for itself over the decades, unlike a lot of these Midwestern small towns that sort of crumpled after the implosion of whatever nearby industry had been financing all the residents; so while it still has its central grid infrastructure, there's been a series of more modern subdivision-style residential neighborhoods and strip malls built in the decades since, and sections of the old downtown transformed into modern amenities such as a tech startup incubator, a farmer's market and more. I'm also roleplaying the idea that Winnemac's second-largest city, Progress (but more on them in a bit), eventually wins an Olympics bid, but only on the promise of building out brand-new specific sports complexes around the surrounding areas turned into public use after the games; so in Horizon's case, I'm going to be building an entire tennis complex in the style of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York (location of the annual US Open tournament), something that will give me a good chance to build out something complicated and large and bespoke, but not an entire Olympic Village like I'm going to do in Progress. So, that will be the first city you'll see me working on this year, and I'll be posting updates here for that on a regular basis.

I then have the idea of building a city called Verda Urbo, way up there in the far northwest corner of Winnemac, up very close to real-life Grand Rapids, Michigan. This is Esperanto for “Green City,” and hopefully gives you a snapshot idea of what the city will be about — a thoroughly contemporary one, it will be my chance to implement some of the more science-fictiony things I might come across in the CS asset marketplace, to do more daring road layouts than in a normal town, maybe a place to build out my first tech-industry fully planned community, a very cyberpunk William Gibson-esque concept that I've seen other people build in CS and that I'd like to try building too. I imagine this place touting itself as very international and cosmopolitan, so I thought this would be a good location for an international airport as well, when I'm finally ready to build out that specialty DLC for the first time; and a good place to build out my first university, once I get to that DLC as well.

Then back in the same map where I built Horizon, off in the distance I'm going to build a small town called Harvester, which is basically going to be my opportunity to try out and play around with whatever 1800s Victorian Age asset packs I can find in CS as the months continue, again in preparation for a bigger implementation in Progress that we'll talk about in a bit. The idea is that the entire area is historically protected, so is sort of sealed in as this well-working 1800s community in both layout and design that now never changes, even though modern businesses may be put inside the buildings and there's of course modern vehicles and things. In fact, since Winnemac stretches out in its southeastern corner into central Ohio, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary at all to make this an Amish community; and that would be really cool, because I have yet to see a single person either at YouTube or Reddit build a working Amish community in Cities: Skylines. I may also use this build as an excuse to build out a suburban community that looks and feels exactly like the community of St. Charles, Missouri where I grew up; my real childhood was a similar situation to what I'm describing here, where the downtown riverfront district of St. Charles is frozen in the architecture of the late 1700s when it was the state's first temporary state capital (and the launching point of the Lewis & Clark expedition), but a sprawling car-based suburban megapolis eventually grew around it (including an actual Harvester, Missouri about ten minutes from where I lived). It'd be fun to recreate the place where I grew up inside CS, I think.

And this finally leads us to city #4, Progress, which will be the one where I finally start incorporating all the storytelling elements on top of the city-building itself. Because this will be my attempt at building Chicago, basically, or at least Winnemac's version of it, which not by coincidence will be located very close to where real-life Detroit is (because Detroit of course does not exist in my world, because that's a part of real-world Michigan, that in my universe is actually property of Winnemac). Progress will hopefully look like that crazily detailed modern map of Batman's Gotham City that now exists, with all these different neighborhoods everywhere, each with their own unique flavor, take, layout and history, with this sort of insane public transit system tying it all together. I plan on actually growing it out in a planned organic historical way; because by the time I'm ready to tackle it, I should have a good handle over all the historical architecture packs that have been put together in the CS marketplace, so that I can designate the entire central downtown to only spawn 1800s buildings, then an outgrowth next to it to only spawn Art Deco buildings from the 1920s, etc.

Like I said, I also plan on Progress at a certain point winning an Olympics bid, and building out a huge gigantic Olympic Village out on the edge of the city for it, which in our times is post-Olympics where the sports facilities remain standing but everything else has been converted into homes and shopping within a beautifully landscaped area and large meandering Postmodernist park. Progress will have ethnic neighborhoods like Little Sweden and Vietnamtown and the like; it'll have poor neighborhoods full of sketchy places and high in crime; it will have hipster neighborhoods with cafes and galleries; it will have the state capitol, over in an old and stodgy part of town with a bunch of other governmental buildings; it will have a red-light district, where cannabis and prostitution is legal; it will have strange hippie cult encampments on the rural edge of the metropolitan area; it will have a national park with camping, and millionaires' cabins along the private lakefront nearby; and it will have, you know, like a hundred things more than that, too, if my plan for this all works out.

And why did I not build Progress on the other side of Winnemac, directly across from Chicago that I know so much about? Well, because that's where Sinclair Lewis actually located his most famous city in Winnemac, the metropolis of Zenith where so many of his greatest novels are set; long thought of by his admirers as a substitute for Detroit itself, only recently was it discovered in Lewis's old notebooks that he meant for Zenith and Chicago to have a sister-city relationship closer to Minneapolis and St. Paul in nature (supposedly they were only located 17 miles apart in his universe, the state line splitting the distance in half). This is also why I say that Progress will only be known as the second-largest city in Winnemac, because Lewis very clearly meant for Zenith to be a generic stand-in for the neighboring Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis and more. To honor my heavy debt to Lewis for coming up with the concept of Winnemac, I'm treating his Zenith as a city that also exists in my universe's Winnemac, over next to Chicago where Lewis wanted it to be, and have decided that my Progress will be a bit smaller but a lot more weird and complex, way over on the other edge of the state, with an alt-history where an early locomotive line from Progress to Zenith transformed the way goods were shipped in America in the 1800s and made both cities quite prosperous. You should be reading Sinclair Lewis if you're not; he was the first brilliant American Midwestern satirist in history, and we're just right now approaching the 100th anniversary of his best and most famous books.

The idea, then, is to release the rights to my Progress, Winnemac universe under a Creative Commons license, so that others can create media in whatever form they want that is somehow set within that metropolitan area; and I too would release stories set in my “Winnemac Storytelling Universe” (for lack of a better term), both written and perhaps sometimes done as spoken-word as narration to a virtual video of a train ride or other animatic actually shot within the CS game itself. I would also release the game file for public download, so that others could tweak it, play in it, shoot their own photos or videos from it, develop city logos or flags or mascots or anything like that, etc. Maybe, in fact, I would marry all this content with a monetization option at Patreon, so that anyone who wants can watch the videos and read the stories online for free, but paying members get the game files, behind-the-scenes vids, invites to live streams on Saturday nights, tutorials on how to build specific elements within their own cities, etc. Mmmaybe? I've become enamored by these CS players on YouTube who do exactly this; so that might not be a bad way for me to really direct my artistic interests as I progress into my fifties, into this brand-new and admittedly kind of strange way to tell a story, where the narratives match a 3D environment you can “walk” or “drive” or “ride a tram” around in; and where the algorithmic buildout of this environment affects the stories as much as the stories affect what gets built.

For sure, though, I'm creating a brand-new blog just for following the subject, because last year I finally decided to ditch the stupid Wordpress server space I was paying $150 a year for but was just never building out into the personal site I've needed to rebuild for a long, long time, and instead bought five years of access to a Pro account at Write.as, the content hosting service where my personal journal has happily been for several years now (since...January 2019, maybe?). I get something like ten different blogs I can set up through my Pro account, so one dedicated just to my Cities: Skylines adventures will absolutely be one of them, just as one will be devoted exclusively to my freelancing career as a book editor. That way if it goes well and I want to expand it into a Patreon or paid Substack account, social media, etc., there's a central place for all the entries; and if not, then at least I have this tidy second space for hosting just these essays from my life and nothing else, and gave me a chance to practice on the write.as interface while building out my freelancing website.

So that's what I'm going to start doing next week, is building out my write.as Pro space for the first time, setting up my image-hosting account, beginning to build out my custom CSS and JavaScript (one of the few bonuses from my years as a coding bootcamp graduate and self-taught frontend developer), while also getting all the DLC packs for Cities: Skylines bought and installed (you know, the one that makes fancy parks, and the one that makes fancy public transit, and the one that makes universities, and the one that makes sports parks, and the one that makes a restaurant-and-bar tourist district, etc. etc. etc!), and the most useful installed of the hundreds upon hundreds of coding mods that now exist for the game at this point too. This is the most brilliant thing the game's owners, Sweden's Paradox Interactive, have done with the game, is open up the process of players creating their own architecture or modifying certain rules, which has created this robust community of semi-pro developers (including yours truly, eventually, hopefully) that have made the game ten times more complex and fun and interesting than Paradox themselves could've done on their own. It's built this sorta cult-like fandom around the game, since it can be tailored to such a highly specific experience; that's my goal here, to eventually get Progress built out into this highly specific experience, using Horizon, Harvester and Verda Urbo as big early sandboxes and testing grounds. As always, I hope you'll be able to join me for it all, at the URL that will be appearing below just as soon as the new blog devoted to the subject is set up. And in the meanwhile, don't forget to sign up for my brand-new free newsletter at Substack about my freelancing career! News from clients, writing tips, a central roundup of all my book and movie reviews, and the latest crazy questions I'm answering for English as a Second Language students at Reddit!

#twitter #censorship #algorithm #automated #problems #unaddressed #entitlement #hubris #corporate #mindset #latestagecapitalism #hostagecustomers #advertisingaslifestyle #selfbranding #web3 #federations #mastodon #writeas #opensource #homeserver #sci-fi #nearfuture #dayaftertomorrow #metaverse #metaverseforreal

Did you hear? I got banned from Twitter for three weeks! It was for a stupid reason that should've never happened, but that was caused by imprecise censorship algorithms doing a bad job at catching “inappropriate” behavior that the company is trying to do in order to police its hundreds of millions of members all at the same time. To be specific, I saw two people fighting yet again about whether the Beatles or the Beach Boys are the greatest rock band of all time, and I responded in a retweet, “Jesus Christ, when are the last of the Baby Boomers finally going to goddamned die already?,” and Twitter's censorship bots mistakenly interpreted that as an open threat of violence, as if I was saying that I was going to personally hunt down and eliminate every last Baby Boomer that still remains in the world. Twitter then informed me that my entire account would remain suspended until I was willing to delete the tweet that was causing the suspension, which I was happy to do because I wasn't trying to take some kind of big First Amendment stand over a stupid throwaway joke while high on a Thursday night that wasn't any good to begin with; but then the coding went wrong at the Twitter website for me going in and authorizing the tweet's deletion, so I couldn't actually get rid of it and get my account up and running again. And the link they provided for me to gain help from the Twitter staff didn't work, and I couldn't use the normal help button because I was now entirely locked out of my account; so for a good three weeks there I had begun thinking that maybe this was finally it, that maybe through a strange set of circumstances I would find myself just one random day entirely booted off Twitter's entire ecosystem permanently, and with no recourse available in my life.

That got me thinking again about something I've been thinking about a lot lately, namely the group of apps we might call the “mature” or “mainstream” social networks, places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and a few others, and how increasingly dissatisfied I find myself with all of them these days more and more, and how I don't think it's my imagination but rather that these companies keep tweaking their operations to lean more and more into money-making through dark patterns as much as humanly possible, to feed an insatiable “shareholder” abstract entity out there who just wants the stock price to keep going up astronomically like it has been for the last two decades in this space. This is one thing that really bothers me about publicly traded corporations, that the employees of that company now both legally and ethically find themselves bound to satisfy the “shareholder” as their ultimate boss, which is typically interpreted to mean, “My job is to keep the stock value of this company continuing to go up and up, no matter what that entails.” And so that's where you see so much amoral behavior from corporate employees, at that place where they're justifying it by claiming they're “keeping the shareholders happy,” while most shareholders have no idea what goes on in the day-to-day dealings of the companies they own stock in, so have no idea these companies are acting so ethically shady in the first place.

Like, I've been thinking about Instagram a lot recently, because that used to be my favorite social network out of all of them, back when they were an independent company — a wonderful combination of my friends' and acquaintances' casual images with more interesting and breath-taking photographs from professionals and serious amateurs. But under Facebook's continued ownership, the ad-display rate has just gone up and up in the name of continued revenue growth, until now there's an unbelievable one ad out of every three posts you see (no exaggeration); and they've done a hard pivot in the last couple of years into video and especially vertical video, since that's the driving force behind TikTok and that's where all the kids (i.e. all the money) is now, so another one out of every three or four posts is now a vertical video, which I have no interest in watching as a grouchy late-middle-aged man who was only there for interesting photography to begin with. And now Instagram is letting you attach a plea for a fundraising charity to every single entry you post, so essentially every single post now in my feed is blaring for my money or attention in the most blatant, obnoxiously addictive way possible, based on a whole darkly lit basement room of pasty coders and UX specialists slaving away for $75,000 a year who do nothing for 60 hours a week but think up new evil ways to take people's money.

Ugh, that's a lot! It's not just me! It really is a lot of nonsense that's been collectively added to these places in just the last three or four years! This applies to any of the publicly traded social networks, who reached the end of natural growth a long time ago but in an effort to continue making the stock be driven upwards have been engaging in artificial, dark pattern-based growth more and more with each recent year. I find myself now mentally exhausted when I visit most social media outlets, wading through an ever larger amount of crap to get to the stuff I wanted in the first place, and that used to be easy to find when I first started using the service, which is why I started using the service to begin with. And so that has had me thinking again recently about the concept of Mastodon and a “federated” social network not owned by any one entity, which I've talked about in my journal before — the idea being that anyone who wants can run a server that understands the specific open-source code of the Mastodon system, which looks and feels a lot like Twitter, and then tweets mentioning one Mastodon account anywhere gets sent to that Mastodon user, no matter who's hosting their particular server, making the whole thing look and feel like Twitter but without needing Twitter. It's essentially the same concept as email — you write an email through Yahoo, I receive it through Gmail, and it looks almost exactly alike because both companies are sharing a common protocol for making it work, even though there are tweaks here and there when it comes to specialty things like embedding video, running JavaScript, etc.

Mastodon's a beautiful idea, and I myself have a Mastodon account which you can “trumpet at” or whatever you want to call it by using the unique address @jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud, and whose “home page” you can see and follow at mastodon.cloud/@jasonpettus. But the reason the mainstream social networks went mainstream is because they were able to build up a critical mass of actual users; and for a social network, the more people you already know, the more useful and fun the service is, and a lot of people on Mastodon right now are just a bunch of pasty nerds here to prove that the service actually works. That's just like it is with any technology — the first blogs with RSS feeds were all about tech issues, and the first YouTube channels were all tech entertainment outlets — but there needs to be a much wider adoption of Mastodon by the general public before it'll ever have even a chance of being a viable alternative to Twitter or Facebook. Once that happens, though, I'm willing to picture what the utopians say would happen with a critical mass of Mastodon accounts, which is social media simply becoming another form of open communication we use to navigate the world, just like having an email address or a telephone number, and that Facebook- or Twitter-style communication is here to stay as a permanent option in everyone's lives, just expanded into a now open format that can be understood by anyone with the right free software.

I mean, what we're really talking about here, if we want to look at a day-after-tomorrow science-fiction conceit, and look at it from the standpoint of the utopians, is the idea that eventually everyone would run their own personal communications server at home, which would manage their email, browser access, movies and music, and social media presence. Then no one could censor anyone at any time, because they're running their own email and social media straight from their own home server they maintain and control, and I would never have to deal with what I just did at Twitter where I found myself locked out maybe for good because of a blip in the software that Kafkaesquely couldn't be solved. And that gets us into something I've been thinking about again lately, too, which is how the World Wide Web was originally conceived by the '80s and '90s science-fiction community as an interface similar to a physical world, where you would have a private dwelling that we in the 2020s may think of as our desktop image on our laptop or a new tab in our browser, the place where we do our email and social networking, company work, play music or movies, etc. But to go banking in the '80s cyberpunk internet, for example, you'd actually travel by virtual car or train down a virtual highway to a cartoonishly grandiose building where your bank is located, and actually go in and interact with an AI teller.

I've been building this space in Minecraft recently (seen above) that feels like this really nice hangout space that I could ideally just leave up on my second monitor in the evening while I'm listening to music, reading a book, etc., and sort of just be in this virtual space at the same time I'm in my physical space here in Chicago. And this is very similar to how the Web worked in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, for example, if only you picture that at my Minecraft Zen pond space you're seeing, I could press a magic button floating in space and my email would scroll down for a moment for me to deal with, then I could press the button again to make it disappear, and attend to all the online administrative functions I do in a day from such a virtual space, from sending and reading messages to posting social media updates, reading the news, picking a new music playlist, etc. There's already development teams like Momentum, for example, that are making money by figuring out ways to bring in live information every time you open a new tab in your browser; I learned just enough from my coding bootcamp experience in 2015 to know that the same tech, the same coding, being used there could be used to bring in everything from emails to social media, weather, sports scores and more, basically anything that has an API, and then it'd just be a matter of building a virtual space, like a little cartoon home, for you to “reside” in at your browser tab while you're attending to these functions. The software for creating the virtual space would be free, just like Momentum, so anyone running it on their browser would be able to communicate directly from “house” to “house,” and go visit each other's virtual spaces; and at that point you effectively have the Metaverse without needing Facebook to centrally control everything, make it all a giant mall, and take 33 percent off the top of all money exchanged. Or, wait, actually, doesn't that suspiciously sound like a way the internet used to be accessed by a bunch of people before the rise of “Web 1.0?”

I don't know what the fate of the so-called “web3” movement is, but I do at least theoretically like their idea of all of us owning our own online presences; and I especially love the idea of a hobbyist movement that grows around the cobbling together of old outdated laptop motherboards in order to build the home server that runs a household, so that we'd all have something to actually do with all those slightly outdated laptops that are starting to gather dust on a back shelf. So I'll continue maintaining my Mastodon account, and see if I can't deflect more and more of my social media attention this year away from places like Twitter and Instagram, and more to places like that. Certainly one of the overdue things that I've done in the last week is finally join the social network 500px, which has been around for a long time and is known as the social network for “serious photographers;” because I gotta confess, the goofy TikTok-style videos at Instagram is turning me off profoundly, as is the 33% ad-display rate, the dark patterns for determining what posts I see first, the constant bombardment of pleas for my money, and everything else that's come with the recent “profit at all costs, the customer will put up with any punishment we give them” mindset there. We'll see how much I've actually switched over to a “federation-style” system of personal online presence by a year from now, but certainly there's nothing stopping me from at least being mindful about the subject and careful how much time, attention and intellectual property I'm giving these giant corporate places. Getting booted off Twitter so coldly and suddenly, a place I've come to enjoy for all the smart, cynical, Tumblr-style humor I've been able to find there, really rattled me this month, and I'm really determined now to find a better way to have this humor coming into my life without it being so tightly controlled by a central publicly traded corporation.

Freelancing update! I've officially started my “Jason Pettus, Editor” free occasional newsletter! I'm shooting for “once every two weeks or so” right now, so don't worry that you'll get bombarded with content if you join. This is part of my efforts this year to finally establish a central online presence for myself as a freelance book editor, and to build a legitimate community around me despite being someone who doesn't work at any one particular publisher. I'm starting with the newsletter, where I will share industry news about the publishing status of my clients' various manuscripts; delve into a specific editing topic each time and offer tips; share interesting discussions I've been having with English as a Second Language students at Reddit; and link to my latest book and movie reviews, my personal blog posts, my newest poetry, and recommendations of photographers at 500px. After this, I plan on building a standalone website for my freelancing services, including a direct-marketing landing page, rates and FAQ pages, and a way to directly book me straight from the site; and I'll entice people while there to sign up for the newsletter and stay signed up, because anyone who books a job through me and subscribes to the newsletter automatically gets 25% off their final bill. I hope that bringing in people from all over the place, but who have a shared interest in the content I include in the newsletter, will bring me a legitimate community of authors, publishers, language people, book people, etc., and that we're all staying connected together in the way a group of fans might through a science-fiction publisher or what have you. It's free for all to join, so I hope you'll have a chance to do so, part of my efforts this year to have both a busier and a more self-owned online presence.

#minecraft #roleplaying #storytelling #game #tale #1.18 #fun #weekend #hobby #virtual #camping #paleocamping #primitivetechnology #industrial #redstone #farming #xp #bonemeal

Greetings from “Xanadu,” the name of my latest Minecraft roleplaying campaign, which regular readers will remember that I'm only getting to play once a week these days, on Saturday nights when I'm super-high and listening to chill EDM (aka “dadcore”), in which I'm pretending to be a...um, overworked middle-ager who owns a wilderness location that he gets to escape to on the weekends, where for fun he engages in “paleocamping” in the spirit of the YouTube channel Primitive Technology. To be specific, my patch of land is on an island in the middle of a wide lake within a deep ravine, where four different trails to various rivers spin off; and on its top I've built a greenhouse and apiary I call the “Crystal Palace,” with a pond in its center that I've decorated into a little Zen meditation space, precisely because I thought it would be fun to have a little virtual Zen meditation space out here in my real life in Chicago too, that I could just leave up on my screen during an evening when I'm reading or listening to music, to serve as a literal space for centering myself and being all Zen and whatnot, even though it's just a virtual space. Confused yet? This is what Facebook is hoping to achieve with their coming “Metaverse” virtual-reality platform, the promise that was first given in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, that eventually we will have digital spaces that feel as “real” to us as real life in the physical world does; and I admit that there's a certain amount of fascinating slipstream stuff going on here with my latest Minecraft roleplaying conceit, and that a very meticulously terraformed space like this one is sort of serving for me as not only a digital space of retreat but a very real emotional one too these days.

As you can see here, I haven't really started building out any infrastructure to the surrounding countryside yet, including the nearby village you're seeing to the northeast of my island there, other than an unadorned walkway to a nearby pasture to gather animals and lead them over to my island. But I'm also not really afraid to just tack on more land to the edges of my island when I need them for things like farming, so that I can maintain the original look and structure of my island's sole hill, instead burrowing out the inside and putting most of my machines and other belongings in there. Infrastructure for traveling nearby is more a late-game idea, to be saved until after more pressing needs are met, and after I've been able to build up the massive resources in iron and gold I'll need to build a railroad that spans the entire long breadth of this ravine.

And speaking of pressing needs, I got my first industrial farm set up this particular Saturday, a big requirement when it comes to the idea of converting raw resources into the kinds of high-end game items like experience points and bonemeal needed to perform Minecraft's version of powerful magic, for granting yourself supernaturally powerful tools, weapons, armor and produce. This is one of the really clever things about Minecraft, and why the game is so addictive for such a large age group, literally from seven or eight to fifteen and even older; for while you can just do normal farming or hunting or mining and just slowly build up experience points, part of the “fuel” (along with lapis lazuli) needed to cast spells, you can also use the electricity-capable redstone to build automated circuits and simple machines, which you can combine with the game's deliberate mechanics and a few accidental tics in order to do large-scale automated industrial conversion from one type of good (say, a very common one like potatoes) into another (say, a much more rare one like experience points or bonemeal, aka “magic fertilizer” that makes produce instantly grow from seed to maturity).

So here, for example, you're seeing fields of potatoes holding a grand total of 434 potato plants, which when mature will yield anywhere from 434 to 1,736 potatoes, depending on random odds. But one of the weird tics in Minecraft is that if you run water over any piece of produce currently in the ground, it will automatically knock it out of the ground; so if you build your fields on a gentle hill, then dump a bucket of water on the top, the water will flow down the field, knocking out all the mature potatoes and floating them all the way down to the bottom. Once there, I have another small tilted trough of water that directs all the hundreds and hundreds of potatoes into a hopper and then into a barrel, where it starts the process of industrial transformation, but more on that in a minute; for now, let's just note that the way you can automate the flowing of this water is through an in-game device called a dispenser, which is then hooked up via redstone to an on/off switch and a source of power. I press the button, and eight buckets of water are dumped on each side, ensuring a smooth downward flow to the bottom of the fields and the collector barrels. And then through yet another tic in the Minecraft game engine, if you click the power button again for a dispenser with an empty bucket in it, it will actually gather the water out on the field back up into it; so there's no need to keep refilling the buckets inside the dispensers, essentially making this a machine that works perfectly over and over again, every time you press the on/off switch.

Then down underneath these collector barrels is where the literal magic happens; as you're seeing in this shot (believe me, you are), the potatoes then get funneled into two ovens, which themselves have sideways hoppers that let them store up to five sources of oven fuel (buckets of lava in my case), so to run theoretically perpetually as long as you keep occasionally replenishing the supplies. Cooking potatoes is one of the non-combat ways you can earn experience points in Minecraft, although most people earn it through things like killing monsters (no thanks), slaughtering animals (ugh), and smelting ore and stone (yep, doing that too); so by building this automated system that's smelting up to 1,700 potatoes each time I press a simple button, I boost up my XP level at an accelerated rate, which is important because you can't cast any of the really useful spells unless you're at level 30 or higher, and then the enchantment table subtracts XP each time you do cast a spell, which means you're back under 30 again by the time you're done. That's just clever and difficult enough to keep a kid at the end of their tween years busy and engaged, which is why it seems that Minecraft has such this huge span of ages who love to play it, and why it seems that so many kids play the game for sometimes up to an entire decade without getting tired of it, while most first-person shooters grow stale after just a few months.

Then not only this, but the baked potatoes are then dropping into yet another hopper and landing in a composter, which Minecraft introduced a few updates back as a way of productively getting rid of the sometimes massive amounts of organic material that builds up during a typical game. Composters eventually turn produce into bonemeal, which before their invention could only be gained by killing monsters; it's a magic form of fertilizer, if you will, which among other things can grow most produce from seed to maturity with a single click, turn regular trees and mushrooms into giant trees and mushrooms, produce a glowberry on the game's brand-new glow vines, and grow wheat and flowers if you click on a piece of grass with one. That's incredibly clever, basically proof of concept behind the entire Industrial Age of real Western Civilization's 1700s and 1800s, the idea of taking a common and cheap item and literally transforming it into something rare and expensive, which along with the customized recipes in my datapack (but more on that in a future update, I promise) even lets me convert potatoes into non-food items like glowstones, fuel for my furnaces, wooden construction pieces like ladders, trapdoors and trip plates, scaffolding for building, and a lot more.

Ultimate, the average 1,000 potatoes these fields yield at each harvest eventually convert into an average of 100 pieces of bonemeal, as well as just enough XP to top me up again at level 30 after recently spending some XP on a 30-level spell. That should give you a good sense of exactly how powerful and rare XP and bonemeal is, and how interesting it can be to work out in your head how to gain such powerful and rare stuff merely from your ability to be clever.

With this new industrial farm jutting way out into the water now, I'm closer than ever to the nearby shore where I set up my initial bamboo farm. Regular readers will remember that this is a longstanding “rule” of my roleplaying games; that I play Minecraft in “Survival” mode, which means I have to physically travel to exotic locations like jungles if I want to harvest and use the exotic resources found only there, like bamboo, melon and cocoa in this particular case. Bamboo is an incredible newish addition to Minecraft, because like the real world, it grows insanely fast but is insanely strong, and not only in the vanilla game lets you build very useful scaffolding for your construction projects, but under my customized recipes lets me construct books without needing the leather from slaughtered cows for their covers. (As you might be deducing, my particular datapack is for genteel middle-agers like me who don't have much interest in killing things or going to dangerous places like the Nether, but who need the exotic resources that otherwise only come from those activities.) I chose this particular location for the bamboo farm because it's right at the mouth of what promises to be a fascinating nearby cave, and I like the idea of maybe later in the game going over and terraforming that too, and being able to call it “Hidden Bamboo Cove” or whatever.

And as mentioned in the last update, I have this really fascinating ruined Nether portal just a five-minute walk away from my place, and I'm thinking pretty seriously about devoting another Saturday evening soon to repairing it, upgrading the surrounding platform, and turning it into a working portal for “community” use. See, that's part of my roleplaying scenario here; I'm pretending that this entire region is owned by some big company, and that they're selling off little pieces of it to urban middle-aged middle-classers like me, but doing it mindfully so that none of us are ever too close together or impede each other's views. I like the idea that we're all out here wandering around on the weekends and maybe bumping into each other and whatnot; so I thought it'd be fun to roleplay getting this back into workable shape for the good of the “community” of weekending middle-classers out here in the wilderness, so that we can all hop over to the Nether for whatever supplies or dungeon runs we might want to do. That'll be coming in a future entry (or maybe not), so keep your eye out for that.

And like I said, instead of building a ranch in this particular campaign where all my tools, machines and storage barrels are, which I would normally do in a campaign where I'm on level ground, this time I've hollowed out the inside of the sole hill that comprises my island, and this weekend finished all the basic interior design of the floors and walls. I'm a big fan of these new glowberry vines that have come with Minecraft's newest update, essentially the very first light source in the game's history that can actually be organically grown from scratch, instead of crafted out of a finite resource like coal or glowdust, so I'm now using them to not only decorate the walls of my space but to light it up. That said, some of the stuff you're seeing here (like the barrels in the floor or the underground enchantment table) are leftovers from when this space was only that smaller size, so one of the things that will be happening next Saturday is finishing up all the rest of the interior decorating here, including the construction of an aboveground barrel configuration that will span the length of this giant room.

But the main project next time, however, will be the construction of the space you're seeing here, essentially the other half of the hollowed-out hill, which I'm turning into my first-ever indoor ranch for cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and horses. I'm being forced to in this case, because there's literally no room for a large amount of animals on the outside of the island; and although I've never actually done it this way before, I believe that as long as I have the eventually finished space lit well enough, there shouldn't be any problems with luring animals in and out of the space, growing food for them in here, and breeding offspring. I've decided to really do it up right, and devote an entire Saturday to decorating the inside of this space into a traditional wood-paneled barn area with fluted columns, hanging iron lanterns, individual pens for livestock, and a large stall section for what I hope to eventually be an entire stable of horses. That's all coming with the next update, so I hope you'll have a chance to come by here again next week for that.

#minecraft #roleplaying #storytelling #game #tale #1.18 #fun #weekend #hobby #virtual #camping #paleocamping #primitivetechnology

Surprise! I've already abandoned my previous Minecraft campaign after only one update! That's because it was a story-heavy one, reliant a lot on building, but then suddenly things took a big uptick with my freelance book editing services over the last six months. I'm grateful for it, and will talk about what all this new work means in a little more detail at the end of today's update, but the drawback is that I'm now down to playing Minecraft only one evening per week, on Saturday nights when I also get high and play downbeat electronic dance music from Spotify (#dadcore) and just chill the fuck out for like eight straight hours, my one and only moment every week right now that I get a chance to do that. So I decided on an impulse to start a new Minecraft campaign altogether, and to make a much simpler story this time, basically reflecting my real-life situation — I'm now playing a citizen of this virtual world, who lives in a big city and does a sometimes draining white-collar day job, but then on Saturdays gets to drive out to his weekend getaway in the middle of nowhere, where he purposely engages in “primitive technology” roleplay, bringing nothing to the wilderness with him but rather building everything he needs from the wood, stone, ore, clay and water all around him. There's my space you're seeing out there in the middle of the water, that island from which I'll branch out to all the other shores around me.

It all begs a fascinating question: if you're a real middle-ager, treasuring your one moment each week when you can just get high, drink a beer, relax and float off to this rural wonderland, by playing a virtual middle-ager treasuring your one moment each week when you can just get high, drink a beer, relax and float off to this rural wonderland, at what point does it stop becoming virtual and begin becoming the actual weekend getaway experience that you actually wanted in the first place? It gets me thinking about what a funny thing it was to me, originally playing Minecraft in the early 2010s as a way of connecting with my friend Carrie's preteen sons, and how they were exclusively interested in hacking up monsters and finding as many diamonds as humanly possible. I as a middle-ager, on the other hand, was much more about the mechanics of productive farming, inventing clever devices, building out cool-looking residences, and sometimes simply taking a bedroll and fire-making equipment and going out wandering in the wilderness for entire days at a time. That's basically how I now play by myself as a middle-ager, as I slowly count my pennies towards my eventual gamer laptop with which I'll finally switch over from Minecraft to Cities: Skylines; I'm playing purely for the pleasure of starting with nothing and building up to efficient success, a playing style that meshed perfectly back in the day with the tween boys' obsession with hunting and mining, in that they'd bring me crafting ingredients and I'd provide food and housing in return.

It makes me laugh whenever I think of it, because I think of how that's not a new development in the gaming world at all; how back in the late 1970s and early '80s when all my friends and I started playing Dungeons & Dragons for the first time, in our own childish campaigns in the neighborhood we were constantly playing experience point creep (i.e. outright lying about “other games” in “a neighborhood from someone at school” in which we would rack up insane amount of experience points, leading to all of us eventually being at Level Zillion and able to shoot lightning bolts from our fingers and other nonsense). But whenever we'd play D&D with the only other people who played it back then, middle-aged engineering nerds who we would all meet through our dads, who in suburban St. Louis in the '70s all worked for places like Monsanto and McDonnell Douglas and Ralston Purina (in fact, it was my friend John Platt's dad who introduced all of us fifth-graders to D&D in 1977 to begin with), I was always amazed at how gleeful these aging geeks were at being assigned brand-new beginner unseen characters at the beginning of that night's game, and considered it a huge success if they happened to make it to level 3 or maybe 4 before finally dying a fiery death just around 9:50 or so, just in time to take a leak before the D&D Mac User Group event was officially over for the night. So it's universal, I guess; no matter what the time period, kids always love going for the fame and glory in games, while the dads enjoy sitting back and figuring out what makes the game actually work.

As you saw in the overview picture above, I'm taking advantage here of a brand-new thing in Minecraft v1.18, which are brand-new biomes that either shoot up twice as high as mountains used to go, or plunge down twice as low as ocean ravines used to go. In my area of the deep ravines, for example, that makes for fascinating underwater diving, including brand-new structures along the deep bottom of the ocean, roving gangs of the new glow squids, Lovecraftian glowing magma blocks along the bottom of the ocean floor, but also now a plethora of Lovecraftian watery zombie monsters known as “the Drowned,” complete with deadly tridents. The corresponding aboveground jagged peaks have a new surprise as well, which is that Mojang has engineered the new ultra-high mountains to contain a giant crapload of coal and iron, which means you can begin mines now at the beginning of a game way up in the peaks so that you can quickly smelt as often as you want and build valuable iron tools, armor and machine parts.

Another big new thing that's come with v1.18 is that the clever little coders at Microsoft, new owners of Mojang, the company that makes Minecraft, have dramatically tweaked the algorithms that procedurally generate the various “biomes” that mark the various territories of a random Minecraft world, as well as making the placement of special features like villages and temples much more organic and interesting. The effect is seen all over the place, but perhaps none more dramatically than the now proliferation of mysterious “ruined portals” that now have an incredibly sophisticated look to them (it's just mindblowing to me that these are created essentially through math formulas), and now showing up in sometimes highly dramatic spots within highly dramatic surroundings, literally taking your breath away sometimes when you're trudging along at ground-level POV and suddenly turn a corner and spy one. This also harkens back to Minecraft's very beginnings, and how the game's original creator never wanted there to be an official guidebook or rules; he wanted you to figure out how to play merely by accidentally stumbling across fascinating-looking stuff while wandering around, and letting your sense of curiosity nudge you into figuring out what's going on. That's lovely to see Microsoft as the new owners still honor this spirit, within such dramatic details as these half-built portals into the Nether that now dot the landscape.

And of course there's all kinds of other structures to come across in my neck of the woods as well; here, for example, I found a pillager outpost right on the waterfront, which let me paddle up really close to it in my canoe for some photos before the marauding mercenaries finally noticed me and started going all batshit, trying to murder me as quickly as their powerful crossbows would let them. One day, pillagers, your banner will fly proudly on my estate...along with your heads!

I'm not sharing a lot of shots of my property yet, because it's currently a work in progress, more a collection of practical items right now and less a unified design. But as you can see, I did at least need to figure out a way to bring over animals from the nearby pasture, as well as get my horse on and off the island, so for now a big giant stone path in the middle of the sky will do; and I did come up with a cool little new design for a partly submerged enchantment table, brewing stand and anvil, with a low glass ceiling flush with the main floor of my workshop above it. And there's actually been another deceptively big change in the latest version of Minecraft as well, which is that monsters can no longer spawn in light levels 1 through 6 (out of a total number of 15 light levels), but can only appear way down in the light level of 0, after numerous complaints from new players about how they had no idea about this rule, thinking they'd be safe in their new cabin by putting up a single torch for the entire place. Since the fairly new candles can actually be placed in groups of anywhere from one to four individual ones on a block, each with a light level of 3, that means you can now place two of them in an underground mushroom farm to achieve a light level of no more than 6 (4 by the time it actually reaches the mushroom), which is low enough to encourage mushroom growth but used to be so low that monsters could suddenly appear in your mushroom farm out of nowhere, turning every visit to your basement into a mini-horror movie.

There will more of all that soon, including that half-constructed building you're seeing in this farewell image, being built on top of my island's one and only hill, a grand apiary and greenhouse I'm calling the “Crystal Palace.” But for now, I think I will bid adieu from “Xanadu,” to be visited again another happy stoned Saturday night soon.

So as mentioned, big changes are afoot around here, professionally speaking. Freelance book editing continues to go fantastically, so much so that I was actually able to raise my rates on January 1st by 20 percent and still have so many offers that I occasionally have to turn people down, just for lack of time. That has me thinking seriously for the first time about venturing out into the bigger unknown and truly hanging my shingle out to the world, doing a more targeted direct marketing campaign through a standalone website dedicated just to my freelancing, which is then actually advertised to places where self-publishing authors hang out. I've actually been paying for a stupid unbuilt Wordpress space for three years now, but just the sheer complexity of what's in store for me there keeps putting me off from actually beginning work. So as a stopgap measure, I recently bought a Pro account here at the great blogging platform Write.as, which I've grown to be a big fan of precisely for its minimalist, noncommercial spirit, which will now let me not only build out ten separate blogs but also apply my own CSS and Javascript to each, which will finally let me do much more sophisticated designs than this sorta blah default one that comes with all the lower tiers of membership.

So that's coming this spring, a dedicated website just to show off my freelancing services and let people directly book me for an assignment through it; and I'm also starting a complementary newsletter, where I sort of build a community of writers and publishers around me by showcasing my clients' newest books, sharing editing tips, relinking to the funny and weird ESL questions I answer over at Reddit, and share leads with other publishing professionals about great unsigned manuscripts I've recently come across. I hope that will sort of elevate me into legitimate “industry” status even without having a big name behind me as an editor, by basically creating my own ad-hoc literary community around me based around my clients, friends, ESL students, fans of my Goodreads reviews, people who have bought rare books from me, and more. But then like any good direct marketing campaign, I need something of legitimate value to give out for free to entice people to join the mailing list; so I'm actually in the process of writing a book of “tough love” advice to self-publishing and indie-press authors, basically all the lessons I had to learn by failing as an indie-press owner myself, which I'm calling (I kid you not) No One Gives a F—– About Your Novel, which I figure will certainly establish my “personal brand” as an editor with no ambiguity. That's all coming here soon, along with a brand-new look to this main personal journal of mine, so I hope you'll have a chance this spring and summer to keep coming back here regularly for the latest.