Month: October 2022

A World Turned Upside Down

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the more sensitive issues in society today is LGBTQ rights. It’s so sensitive that it’s difficult to even address it without either people yelling at each other or someone getting “canceled” before it’s all over with.

And, yet, it’s definitely something that is tearing the country apart in its own way because the Blues have a very strict orthodoxy about the subject that really alienates people who might otherwise join forces with them to keep our fragile democracy alive.

The issue of LGBTQ rights — and the topsy-turvy world of center-Left expectations about gender — is something that Reds love, love, love to wallow in because it helps push people who might otherwise support democracy into their arms and, but extension, the arms of fascism.

It’s gotten to the point where my center-Right relatives have the notion that the “woke cancel culture mob” wants to “turn everyone gay” at the VERY forefront of their mind. That’s all they want to talk about. It’s their go-to talking point, especially when they might be losing an argument about something else. And Traditionalist conservatives are so all-in with the anti-gay orthodoxy of Reds that they’ve completely bought into the notion that the “woke cancel culture mob” is “grooming” little kids whenever it’s not engaging in infanticide.

The whole thing is loopy and corrosive to the point that it’s like nations of the mind that Blues and Reds live in are totally different. And, soon enough, it could be that they live in two different political nations as well. Only time will tell. We may implode into a MAGA Republican fascist state instead, who knows at the moment.

The issue of gay rights is one of a number of hot button topics — abortion, global climate change and gun control to name a few others — that are now so totally loaded that’s its impossible to have any type of conversation about them with someone you disagree with. The two sides have very strict orthodoxies and that’s that. Neither side will compromise, neither side will budge or even listen to what the other has to say.

And it’s things like that which makes me think we’re careening towards a very dark future — one of autocracy, civil war or military junta. Something’s gotta give. We can’t keep this up. The two sides are too far apart and our politics no longer function.

Either we become all Red (autocracy) or Blues tell Reds to fuck off and leave the Union on the state level. What the U.S. Military will do is very much up in the air and there is at least a chance that we may endup with a military junta for a while instead of the other two choices.

Anyway, get out of the country if you can. Things are dark and getting darker by the moment.

Just About At The Midpoint Of The Latest Attempt At a First Draft

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have gotten this far — the midpoint — of my first novel a number of times, only for either everything to fall apart or I simply lost faith in the whole thing and I had to start all over again.

But I’m definitely running out of time. I’m in put up or shut time when it comes to this novel. I just have to hurry up and get something, anything done. If I’m not careful, I’m going to wake up and it’s 10 years from now and I will be pretty exactly where I am now in this project.

But at the moment, I feel pretty confident. I pretty confident that I wrap up this first draft by around Christmas and finish the second draft by sometime in spring 2025. Then I plow myself into the beta process — probably by being other people’s beta readers in exchange for their reading my beta draft.

That’s how it’s suppose to go, at least.

I’m going to need things to break my way a few times, of course. If I can somehow, someway get the funds for an editor to take a look at this novel before I query it, then all the better. And, of course, one big issue is length. This novel, I fear, is going to be way too long on the word count front.

I keep asking people how to manage word count and I keep not getting any coherent answer. Hopefully, the story, unto itself will be compelling enough that even if it does endup being a little long that won’t preclude — by definition — me being able to find a literary agent.

My Proposed Twitter Replacement Fixes An Existential Problem With Existing Social Media Platforms

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The key flaw in social media is it’s very “flat” in the sense that the different sides of your life are mashed together into one circle. There have been efforts to manage this in the past — most notably Google’s failed G+ with it’s “Circles” concept, but I’ve come up with a far more simple concept that fixes this problem once and for all.

The solution is what I call Groups. As part of the onboarding process for this proposed service, you create as amy public or personal groups as you like. Using a drag-and-drop feature, you put your Friends within different groups, depending on how you know them. Within these Groups, you would have Posts that were threaded, just like the good old days of Usenet.

Meanwhile, people you didn’t know could join different Public groups that you had created — this would be ideal if you were some sort of public content creator like a journalist or celebrity. You would be given the ability to restrict who could post in the group as necessary.

I guess what I’m trying to say is — I’ve come up with fixes for the existential flaws in the Usenet UX that caused it die in the first place. But all of this is a big lulz. No one cares and I’m wasting my time. I would be far better served to shut up and continue to throw all my energy in finishing my first novel.

Imagining The Very American Autocracy of MTG’s ‘Velvet Fist’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have long mulled the idea that someone like Ivanka or Lara Trump might somehow find themselves as POTUS, only to be a figure head for their deranged, autocratic veep like Mike Pompeo or Josh Hawley. This would be par for the course for an autocracy because it would give the autocrat the ability to consolidate power and serve, in real terms, a minimum of around 16 years before they had to either become Speaker or change the Constitution to serve longer.

So I sat up and took notice when I learned that everyone’s deranged, power hungry MAGA idiot, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is growing in esteem in Trump’s eyes to the point that he’s even thinking of naming her his veep. This, of course, would put her in the driver’s seat to become POTUS.

I honestly don’t know enough about MTG to know if she would be nothing more of a figure head as she would be in the Velvet Fist scenario or if she has the wearwithal actually be an autocrat unto herself. It’s very curious. In one way, MTG is very Trump-like and would probably not be centered enough to consolidate power like a true autocrat, but at the same time, from what I can tell, she wants to be a power player and so she might be able to pull it off.

The idea of MTG being America’s first Very American Autocrat is loony, but I guess in it’s own way it’s better than having an autocrat named JOSH of all things. But there remains the issue of how politically blood thirsty the fight to be Trump’s autocratic successor is going to be when that moment comes. I just don’t know if MTG is up to that type of fight.

The ‘Feed’ of My Imagined Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Again, I only write about this pointless mental exercise because there is, in fact, a window of opportunity for a tech startup to swoop in and replace Twitter if Elon Musk manages to force his new acquisition’s implosion. I have six novels to work on and I should throw myself into that instead of daydreaming about shit like this. It’s finally really gotten into my thick skull that no one is going to listen to me about this idea if I can’t code or have the resources to pay someone to make this a reality.

But my hope is that someone, somewhere might read this and run with the idea. I’d prefer to simply get some credit for having thought up the idea, but other than than that, lulz. I know how the real world works.

Anyway, let’s talk about how the “Feed” of this Twitter replacement would work, given that instead of Tweets you would have full page, graphic rich Webpages you would interact with instead. This would take even the Facebook concept of the status up date to the next level.

Here’s my solution to this situation — you would “subscribe” to individual Threads within Groups that you’ve subscribed to and whenever there was a new Post that Thread you would see in it in your timeline, like you might otherwise see a new tweet. But you wouldn’t see the whole post, but rather just its subject and the first 100 words or whatever. Something manageable.

When you click on the subject of the Post, you see the whole thing in the context of the overall Thread and Group that it’s in. This solves one issue with the Group feature that is a hold over from Usenet newsgroups — newsgroups were notoriously parochial and unwieldy. That’s why back in the day, any popular Usenet newsgroup had to have a FAQ to stop people from asking the same questions over and over again when they joined the group for the first time.

One tricky problem is how to solve the “Hello” issue. Inevitably, new people to any service will want to say “hello” just to make sure someone can see what they’re tweeting. This was a real problem with Usenet newsgroups — especially during after AOL gave the broader public access to Usenet in I think 1993. It got so bad that there was a specific group devoted to people simply saying “Hello” — alt.hello.

I think the solution would be to address this issue through a combination of the onboarding process and maybe giving people a productive way to say hello in a Group set to Personal that only their friends would see. Or something.

I’m well aware that all of this a lot more complicated than the average Twitter user might be accustomed to AND if this proposed service grew popular enough that Facebook would either want to buy it or crush it because it would be easy, through mission creep, to turn this proposed service into something more akin to Facebook than Twitter.

Anyway, absolutely no one listens to me. But it feels good to get this off my chest.

The Power of The ‘Group’ Feature of My Imagined Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Even though I’m very tired of thinking about this idea because it’s just never going to happen for various reasons, I feel like letting off a little steam and writing about it some again. The key element of my proposed Twitter replacement is the Group feature.

This would be a lot easier to understand than G+’s “Circles” because it’s implementation would be pretty much just a more modern, more flexible incarnation of a Usenet newsgroup from 25-odd years ago. The key interesting part of the Group feature would be everyone could create a one for any reason for any subject.

So, imagine there’s a big breaking news story. With Twitter, you generally have to be following the right people — journalists, etc — to know what’s going on moment by moment. And, even then, what you get is a flood of information that is difficult to process because there’s no rhyme or reason to it all.

But with my imagined service, you would have two options in the breaking news use case. One would be, you could follow the user and the other would be you could follow just their Groups you were interested in. As such, you would get notifications whenever a user you followed created a new Group and you could opt-in to joining a group you found interesting. Meanwhile, you could also use a discovery feature to find Groups with a subject of interest to you as well.

And, remember, because of the redundancy involved with the service, it’s a lot less likely that a Group will grow so huge as to be unwieldly. And, if you really wanted to manage the size of any particular Group, you might even give the owner of the Group some basic administrative abilities like controlling who can post.

This brings up one potential flaw in the Group idea — management of groups might grow overwhelming and cumbersome. Most people don’t have the time, interest or energy to use granular administrative tools for a Group if they have dozens of Groups to oversee.

There are two solutions to this.

One would be your more popular accounts would probably already have a social media management team that could handle all of that. The other solution is you could have some sort of universal application feature that would set the permissions of all your groups and you could change it for an individual group as necessary.

Remember, the only reason why I even mention any of this is Twitter is in trouble and, as such, there is a window of opportunity for someone, anyone to swoop in and fill that technological and social space with something new and better.

But, in general, it’s a very limited window and you would have to have a lot of spunk and vision to pull it off because, lulz, all the momentum is in Web3 and AI.

Ok, You Have Me Figured Out, Tik-Tok…But How?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to be amazed by Tik-Tok’s ability to figure me out to a very, very specific degree. I’ve written about this phenomena repeatedly — even going so far as to suggest Tik-Tok can read my mind in some way — but let’s talk about the latest version of this, which I think might be explainable without any strange, kooky ideas.

Jane Birkin

A long time ago, I had brief, intense celebrity crush on fashion It Girl, Alexa Chung. Now, what’s so weird about this is for some time I’ve been pushed videos of Jane Birkin (who Ms. Chung looks up to a lot) as well as her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg.

I find all of this kind of weird. I find it weird because I started getting pushed videos about Birkin and Gainsbourg pretty much out of the blue. But I will admit that once I was pushed the videos that I lingered on them and liked them, which could explain why I also got videos of Chung pushed my way as well. Maybe? Anything to explain what’s going on rather than to suggest digital telepathy. What about what I was looking and liking on Tik-Tok could possibly have narrowed down what the service knows about me down to my interest in Chung and, by extension, Birkin and Gainsbourg?

It’s all very strange. Spooky even.

I don’t think Tik-Tok can read our minds — even though it definitely seems like it at times, but….the mystery of algorithms remains very eerie.

The Vision Thing: My Personal Pitch For A Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only bring this up because it definitely seems as though Twitter is going to crash and burn pretty soon, now that we have learned that Elon Musk wants to cut 75% of its staff.

I’ll try to be as brief as possible, I’ve wasted too much energy on this fantasm already.

The point of this Twitter replacement would be to bring back, to modernize the best bits of the old Usenet newsgroups. Now, I’m WELL AWARE that Reddit serves the function of Usenet in the modern age. Ok, I get it. But the idea that I have would be to be a far more feature rich and nuanced interpretation of Usenet.

What makes Twitter so engaging? That’s the key issue when thinking about how you might build a better version of it. One element of its success is how simple it is — there’s no onboarding to the service and you can really just jump right in without having to read any additional documentation like a FAQ. The service’s simplicity combined with having zero learning curve is what has given it whatever success it’s found to date.

The idea I have is a far more simplistic version of the “circles” concept that G+ had back in the day. Instead of a Circle, you would have a Group. And these Groups would be setup in such a way that the concept would be a lot easier to understand than G+’s Circles. They would be setup a lot more like Usenet Newsgroups with discussions and threads. You would have Threads inside of a Group made up of full pages posts.

This concept is exactly what we had back in the day with Usenet newsgroups and very similar — but not exactly — like Reddit. I haven’t used Reddit in a long time, but it’s my impression that you have one post and then threaded discussions below that central post — but it’s more of a comment section instead of a full page Post like we had back in the day with Usenet.

Anyway, the point is, as part of the onboarding process, you would have to setup your own Groups — with whatever names you liked — and you would have the option of joining other people’s Groups as well. And, remember, you could create as many Groups as you like about whatever subject you liked, no matter how specific or personal.

This redundancy would allow the service to scale in ways that neither Usenet nor Reddit can. This redundancy would would, in essence, give you a sense of a “super Twitter account” in the sense that you could have ad hoc Groups by different reporters and writers devoted to the same news event — breaking or otherwise.

I could go on and on — and I have on my Instagram account (SheltonBumgarner.) You can see me, over the course of way, way too many Instagram videos flesh out this concept pretty well. I’m embarrassed by how many videos I did on this subject over the years.

No one is ever going to take me up on this idea, of course. That’s just not how things work. But I really love the concept.

Jesus Christ, Is America In Fucking Political Denial

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The Traditionalist conservatives I know love Trump because he’s a fighter. They feel “oppressed” because the “woke cancel culture mob” wants to “groom” little kids and otherwise turn everyone gay.

They feel they risk having their life ruined — or “canceled” if they should happen to do or say something that doesn’t follow the “woke” media agenda. They think all their favorite stars are having their lives ruined by the “woke mob.”

They are aghast at the potency of the transgender movement — especially when children are involved — and the feel the “what are your pronouns” issue to be as alarming as it is ridiculous.

Throw in a heaping helping of negative polarization and you have a recipe for disaster in the guise of the United States turning into an autocratic white Christian ethostate pretty much the next time Republicans have it in their power to do so.

In short, the United States is fucked.

The center-Left is too divided, too wrapped up in quibbling about how many genders can dance on the head of a pin, to do anything preemptively about the dangers we face. And, really, at the moment, I just don’t see there being a National Divorce.

Blues will ultimately bend a knee to fascism and those who have the means will vote with their feet by leaving the country. That, at the moment, seems to be our immutable fate. The only reason why I don’t absolutely believe this is I can’t predict the future and, as such, we might either have a civil war or some sort of military junta.

And, yet, the fix is in for Something Bad to happen. We’re past the event horizon for “the Fourth Turning” if you want to invoke that astrology for dudes brand.

In the end, I think we’re just going to shrug and give up our American democratic birthright because we don’t realize the true implications of becoming a MAGA-themed autocracy. Good luck.

To This Yank, It Seems The Solution To The Liz Truss Problem Is Obvious: Have King Charlies Fire Her

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I know just enough about the Benny Hill skit that is current British politics to make a fool out of myself, but here goes. As I understand it, the issue of the day for the Brits is they have a horrible, incompetent PM in the guise of Liz Truss who simply can not, will not, take the hint that it’s time to go.

This is all complicated by two things — nobody wants her predecessor Boris Johnson to come back, even though he’s got populist appeal, and the Tory backbenchers don’t want to call a snap election because they fear that they’ll lose their jobs.

And, as such, the United Kingdom finds itself in something of a sticky wicket. A crisis that grows more severe by the moment.

It seems logical to this outsider that King Charles should, for the sake of the nation, use his royal prerogative and fire Truss. But this is extremely problematic because him doing so would upend the careful apolitical nature of the British monarchy and God only knows where things might endup.

I constantly think about how the UK is now (essentially) Europe’s sole major multi-state nation and, in a sense, its continued existence doesn’t make much sense. It definitely seems, in a sense, that if the UK just peacefully split into its component parts through self-determination that a lot of unlocked potential would be unleashed.

And, yet, if THAT happened to the UK, good Lord what might happen to the United States in a few years, since the two countries on a macro political level tend to bounce back and forth following each other.

So, I am more than happy to keep the UK intact. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate outcome of this crisis is, however.