There’s a meme going around where someone gives you 7 topics to write about. I’ve been neglecting the ones Jess gave me a while back, so I suppose I should actually write something on them.

“Social media” is a vague term. I guess it generally refers to the collection of websites where users make the content and provide information (Twitter, Facebook status updates, forums, reddit, etc), so that’s how I’ll deal with it here.

Social media is one of those things that bothers me more than it should. Most people reading this are probably aware that I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts last September after being disturbed by the things I was reading about Facebook online.
And that’s probably the first thing that bothers me about it: it concentrates information in the hands of a few big companies, and you are at their mercy as to what happens with that information. There’s a reason I maintain my own journal, hosted on a website by a webhost I pay. There’s a reason I dump my photos to my own website. I am uncomfortable with the idea that some corporate entity somehow holds this information and that it could disappear at any time. (Yes, I have backups. Yes, I know anything public on the internet can be mined and extracted and archived anyway. But it still feels different.)

After deleting my accounts, it occurred to me that my interactions with people, while being less frequent, were more meaningful. It’s not interesting to read 140-character updates from someone 50 times a day, or to read status updates about mundane things. And it seems more and more that these superficial means of interaction are replacing long-form writing (journal posts, letters, meaningful email conversations).

Maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly old guy, but I really miss back when people wrote long, meaningful entries in personal blogs (or used LJ or even Xanga). I don’t really need to know when a particular person is eating or where they are eating or what they’re eating. But a well-written post afterward about the restaurant, the food, the service… that’s something interesting.

So I guess, as a whole, social media is making it easier to share *everything*, and I’m not convinced that’s a good thing.

Still, there’s something I do miss from when I participated in these websites, but they’re more a result of people moving toward them than the sites themselves: It is now nearly impossible for me to reach certain people. Emails seem to be rarely read nowadays, resulting in responses a month or so after the email, rather than near-instantaneous with things like Facebook. IM is used far less often (or not at all by many people). Phone conversations also seem to be dying out (and texting isn’t always a feasible alternative). As a direct result, planning events (or getting invited to events) has become far more difficult; it’s now nearly impossible for me to try and meet up with some people when I fly back to California or Arizona, because I simply can’t get in touch with them in a timely manner.

I suppose there’s also a weird effect on news reporting that I’ve been noticing more since I’ve been with The Tartan (a topic for another update). People not only can’t tell the difference between news and opinion anymore, they also can’t seem to recognize bias (or, really, even care about bias) in articles.
In my opinion, this is a result of the way information is shared nowadays (which relates back to social media)… when it is so easy for people to share information, people will share everything, resulting in a huge amount of information to wade through to get anything relevant out. When information is shared in tiny snippets instead of longer, meaningful articles, people get less information out of them. When articles are read through social sharing rather than by sitting down and getting the news from a reputable site (or a collection of known RSS feeds), it leads to a tendency to treat everything as fact (or, at least, equate articles written by the New York Times with articles posted to Queerty).
Additionally, when news propogates down a social graph, each node introduces its own level of bias. Imagine discovering an article on the NYT on your own, versus being linked to it with a note “OMG can you believe they’re doing this?!” Imagine seeing multiple comments below the shared link in agreement. You’re biased against the article even before you have seen it, and resharing only serves to exacerbate this effect. (There’s an excellent example of this in a Tartan article a couple weeks back where it was primarily shared on Facebook, resulting in an overblown and wholly underdeserved backlash as the article was interpreted as an officially-sanctioned attack rather than a general opinion piece. But I have already ranted about that separately.)
So social media helps spread more news faster, but it likewise leads to lots of misinformation.

I suppose this is turning into a bit of a rant, so I will leave off here.

It’s still the secret bonus day, so I guess I should make a post.

Almost 5 years is enough time for people to lose interest, right?

It occurs to me that I angst and whine and complain way too much on the internet about things, especially about things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I used to angst about grades way too much. Now I tend to angst about feeling stressed/incompetent at work. Silly me.
Semi-relatedly, I’m generally glad I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Social media may be useful for connecting people, but it also tends to promote a lot of short-form superficial interaction over long-form meaningful communication. And it also means I don’t have control over my data.

I had a Glee-related dream last night, which is strange given I haven’t watched the show since the “New York” season finale that was everything wrong with the series combined into a horrific hour. (And I hear it’s gotten even worse since then.)

The dream involved something like Mercedes’ dad getting a job in Chicago and moving there, and Sam following her in a car. We get shots of Mercedes staring forlornly out the window of a moving truck before the truck whips a quick 360 and drives back toward its origin. Camera then switches to Sam who is driving, craning his neck backward to see the truck drive off (but not turning around himself and also not hitting any other cars). He gets a job in a strip mall somewhere between Lima and Chicago, and we then shift the story to his adventures and dealings as a paranormal investigator there.

Yay bizarre dreams. Pretty much all of my dreams are in third person, but this is one of the few I remember where I’m not actually present.

For those I have not yet poked: I will be in San Francisco next week from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon. Tentative plans include all-you-can-eat pizza on Sunday, dinnar things on Monday, and dinner in Mountain View on Tuesday. Let me know if you are interested in joining for some of these.

life has been updated… both life itself and the stats page. Actually, they were updated late last week, I just fail at posting.

Software engineering is such a weird field. It’s probably one of the only areas where you can make shittons of money with little to no startup cost (just some computers, which you probably have anyway). Most other fields involve selling (in some manner) physical objects, each of which costs real money to make, or selling services, which is a finite resource. Software just gets duplicated infinitely, perfectly.
Also, it’s much more acceptable to sell software that is buggy or incomplete than it would be to sell, say, a microwave that exploded whenever you turned it on. (“That’s just a hardware bug; we’ll fix it in microwave version 1.0a. Sorry, we’re not liable for your severed limbs. You agreed to our EULA and absolved us of any responsibility when you opened the box.”)

Also, it’s amusing that there are areas of software dedicated to dealing with vulnerabilities in other software. Antivirus is a bit like a company selling reinforced steel cases for your exploding microwave, to limit the damage when something goes wrong. Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know.
(Yeah, I know, Software is hard™. But other things are too, and other things don’t tend to get a free pass when it comes to vulnerabilities or deficiencies.)

Pineapple jalapeño pizza is one of the best things ever. I may have to obtain one tomorrow for delicious consumption.

I want Belgian waffles. Eggo waffles are a poor substitute.

I really should work more on my card games. They are sad and neglected.

Kingdom of Loathing is fun. The new IotM is horribly overpowered. Fistcore’s combat skills are also horribly overpowered. (150+ damage for 0 MP, as often as you like? Day 1 sewer leveling just became trivial.) The combination means lots of new daycount records are being set. In a challenge path. Something is not right there. But it’s still fun. I had my first 5-day run the other day, which is my fastest run yet, and it was 100% Baby Sandworm.
I really wish I had purchased a Suspicious Stocking when they were the IotM. They seem just generally fun to use (never mind their optimality, as I am far from optimal).

4 years, 5 months, and 4 days. Making this post on Thursday would have been more fun. Oh well.

Tartan people are awesome. Moar Tartan games on weekends! Moar!

I am getting really bad at ITG, both stamina-wise, accuracy-wise, and difficulty-wise. That’s actually three things. But I’m not sure I care enough to get back into 11s.

Poopity poopity poop.

I got a promotion, progress is being made on card games, and my dad is (finally) getting out of the hospital.

Things are looking up.