#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.

#writeas #blogging #cms #framework #decision #opensource #free #anonymous #journal #journaling #mastodon #federation #socialnetwork #fediverse #FEDIVERSE!!! #markdown #GratuitousGenerationXReference #52weekphotographychallenge #2019photographychallenge #52week #photography #challenge #week1 #dramatic #shadow

Ha ho, my gents and laddies! Greetings from the newest member of THE FEDIVERSE!!! The newest thing on the internet to predict itself to be the next big hot thing on the internet! Will it convert? Well...

This all started because I got motivated to finally get off my ass this year and move my personal journal off Medium.com, where it's been since 2015, after Medium moved to a paid-access business model and suddenly tons of people wouldn't have access to my blog unless paying money. Over New Year's, the online publication Tedium published an article challenging its readers to move off social media and into owning their own intellectual property by running their own blog or publication-style newsletter/podcast, and recommended the minimalist publishing platform Write.as as a great destination; and that finally got me up and going as far as moving my personal journal off of Medium and onto https://write.as/jasonpettus. Or, not off Medium, but no longer exclusively on it; one of the nice things about Write.as is that it taps into Medium's public API and will repost your blog entries there if you ask it to.

Where I'm composing my essays, though, is now over at Write.as, and it's merely sending a copy over to Medium. No third party is dictating who can and can't see it at Write.as, and it has a public RSS feed too. I actually kind of like composing essays there in Markdown a little more than the WYSIWIG dashboard at Medium — it's faster and cleaner for someone like me, who isn't a great coder but a good enough one that Markdown comes easily. But one of the biggest new benefits, I'm coming to discover, is that Write.as is broadcasting my feed in a way so that a Mastodon-built server, any of them, can add me as either a “friend” in a social network or a “feed to follow” in a news reader. In other words, it's not one central social network like Twitter or Facebook, but a bunch of social networks that all run off the same shared free public API, so that any member at any of them can follow or friend any other member at any other of them, just like being able to directly dial any other phone on the planet just by knowing its number. It's a federation of different, competing social networks, just with one communications protocol to Rule Them All. It's a... FEEEDIIVEEERSSSE! [echo] [echo]

And I'm like, okay, sure, I believe in supporting your hippie vision, I do. But I also lived through the birth and death of THE BLOGOSPHERE!!! twenty years ago. I was on Geocities and then I was on LiveJournal, then was on TypePad and then MovableType, then Blogger and then Blogspot, then was on a gay porn server space being provided to me for free by one of my fans, and eventually all of them failed me in one way or another, so forgive me if I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool believer just quite yet. Still, it's an admirable system, and really the next generation of how the social web online is going to work. Ironically, the technology for it's been around for awhile, but it's just now with the big major social networks having ethical meltdowns that it's suddenly become a hot thing that a bunch of people are interested in at once. It'd be a beautiful way of opening up Twitter-like benefits (the immediacy, the rapid scope) but without anyone ever again having to worry about the random whims and badly enforced censorship of any one large corporation like Twitter; you simply all share a core code base for exchanging information with each other, just how like how 100 percent of email clients now share a core protocol for communicating.

So we'll see whether it catches on or not; but for now, you can add this blog to any account at any Mastodon server anywhere with @jasonpettus@write.as . And, sigh, yes, I suppose I will sign up for an account myself at some Mastodon server somewhere just to see if the hype is earned. Now fetch me my Mondo 2000 and a cyberpunk movie on videotape, my Nine-Inch-Nails-listening Generation-X Blogosphere Comrade!

Here's the image I chose as the best at the end of week #1 of my new 52 Week Photography Challenge of 2019, the theme this week being “dramatic shadows.” Four other finalists from a nighttime shoot are below. As always, check out more at my Instagram or Flickr accounts. They were all taken in the Buena Park neighborhood of Chicago where I live. Next week, some thoughts on joining Spotify last week for the first time ever, and the windowless room full of nerd slaves they must undoubtedly have somewhere in order to make their recommendation algorithms work so well. Talk with you then again.

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