baggage – Secret Special

Picturesque

I sometimes take for granted the experiences I have been graced with in my thirty years on this planet. In a fit of insomnia, one pair of experiences popped into my head.

Lately while working on a new puzzle game called Interst8, I’ve been delving into road geek forums and getting into all things highway. These topics reminded me of my own experience on one of the westernmost roads in the country, the Pacific Coast Highway. Traveling on the PCH is a goal of mine, but so farm I only had a taste of it; while in Los Angeles filming Superhuman, I used some free time to visit Santa Monica and crossed over the highway on a pedestrian walkway. Nothing but a means to get to the beach.

Fast forward a few months later and I’m back at my day job. Bugs are found. Our QA lead calls me to her desk. She opens Chrome, clicks the bookmark for our corporate email, and comments on the splash screen. Default Outlook splash screen with generic stock photos.

Then it hits me.

The bridge. The sandy coastline. The buildings in the background. It’s the pedestrian walkway I visited. Phones were taken out of pockets. Photos from Dropbox were loaded and compared with Google Street View and the Outlook splash screen. It was all a match, and it was all beautiful.

I know the novelty will fade as my insomnia wanes and I’ll finally be able to sleep, but for the moment I’m basking in the awe and satisfaction of having been somewhere so beautiful that its photo was used as a cheesy login screen background. There’s something special and amazing about it.

Banned

How do I feel about the new weekly taco at Velvet Taco? What are my feelings on a friend’s new relationship? What is my response to a question that I was just tagged in? Am I coming to the open mic tonight?

The answers to these questions and many more… were stuck in my head for 24 hours recently thanks to a ban from Facebook affecting my ability to comment, post, react, and message in their ecosystem.

The charge? Sarcastically saying “men are pigs” in a display of empathy toward a female friend. What I, a biological male who identifies as a man, thought was a joke was instead taken as damning evidence that I was out of compliance with Facebook’s “community code”.

The punishment? A twenty four hour ban. This ban included both Facebook and Messenger, the later of which is the meat of my gripe. No phone number to call or text friends? Shit outta luck. Not even the vague dismissive positivity of the thumbs up button will afford me any pity during my twenty four hours of lonely hell.

To nonaddicts it sounds like an inconsequential timeout. But to a generation raised on the belief that Facebook is the next email/telephone/telegram/mail, a ban of even as short as twenty four hours is a devastating shunning.

To those who think the above is hyperbole, think about how Facebook is posturing as a replacement ecosystem on Android devices and trying to usurp SMS and the various Google chat offerings. It feels reckless as hell trusting such a fickle master with this kind of pivotal role in my life. With the proximity of the net neutrality repeals and having learned from the misdeeds of AOL in this matter, I think more alarm bells need to be going off in regards to censorship.

Let me say “men are pigs”! Let me die on that cross, and let people block me if angry react face is not strong enough. Foster an environment where the average user has the strength to choose what to take on board instead of watering down every message for the masses.

Collaboration

As an artist, I’ve found myself wanting to collaborate with others. Last year I went to a sticker art show in Houston and met a lot of really cool, down-to-earth folks. A few of us had ‘real training’ and could wield Inkscape or Illustrator like champs, but the rest were average folks scribbling on copies of USPS label 228: the American vandal’s first choice in street art.

Continue reading Collaboration

Nostalgia

Tim Carmody recently asked Kottke.org readers to give him their takes on the best of the web, and then curated the responses in something that feels like a cross between those awkward Top 5 list YouTube channels and a flip through my pocket notebooks from the best years of my life. My puzzle blog, The Griddle, and my response about Ed Pegg’s MathPuzzle made the cut, as well as some of my responses that echoed general public consensus. (RIP Geocities. Thanks, Wayback Machine. Etc.)

Aside from wanting to gush about how much I love the online puzzle community, I think this survey and article series spoke to me because I kind of haphazardly grew up on the Internet. Between lunch hunched over the desk in the newspaper classroom in middle school, frequent trips to the public library’s computer lab, and eventually getting a hand-me-down IBM box and firing up AOL, I constantly dug for content and people that spoke to me. Back then, finding content was more of a scavenger hunt than it is now. Searching and curated lists were the name of the game; today there’s a lot of subscribing and refreshing feeds hoping for a morsel of awesome between ads and whining.

So, at the risk of being pretentious or jumping on a bandwagon, I wanted to put together a list of some sites that have that vintage web feel and formed a vital part of my growing up on the web.

Continue reading Nostalgia

Inventory

Lately I’ve felt as though I’m spread quite thin. My default response to anything negative is to burden myself with an additional project, so a new blog seemed like an obvious choice. On further thought, having a single point of outward communication felt like a good way to condense and unify my ideas, and the feedback from friends, kind strangers, random hecklers, and so on.

I think a good first step in this newest endeavor is to take inventory of all of my projects and lay them all out for overview. This is most easily done by copying and pasting my list of domains from HostGator:

Continue reading Inventory