Luke O. @loppear@social.coop

Super excited to be in the home stretch on these builtin bookcases, we have had our books in boxes for two years and they're getting a nice reading nook to go with!

Is jitsi the OSS video conference answer, esp if I want mobile clients? Do I need/want to run my own something server if i don't want to have qualms about asking my friends to use [zoom, skype, etc] but want to regularly hold 10 person private chats?

Wild #fungus loop in our yard.

The swamp is the river for the week. Longer than we've enjoyed this incursion before as they hold open the dam a few miles upstream. Sit and watch the river roll by from our porch, rather than a half mile hike. Figure the river is 3+ miles wide when this happens.

#Reading Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss It When It's Gone, Astra Taylor. Just getting started on this one, musings on democracy's tensions (esp with elite?) and what it would mean in more parts of life (work, community, justice). We'll see how much she wants to discuss #anarchism but non-hierarchical self-rule seems centered, and the ideal of democracy as a process of refining/demanding not a static thing.

#Reading The Romance of American Communism, by V Gornick. 70s interview vignettes of former CPUSA members presenting a broad varied view of how they came to CP (family, community, union, politics or workers struggle), what passion or focus held them in through contradiction and constant organizing, and how they reacted and recovered from dissolution of this sense of total purpose (some remain activists or organizers, most pursued some other American life, some angry still some nostalgic).

The three-d cobwebs in this outbuilding, captivating.

Cold enough again this week for regular fires, conveniently I have a short stack of wood from 3 years ago that needs to be burned this season, and newly downed trees to share between the bugs and the earth and new stacks of split wood.

Oh gee the PinePhone really looks like what I've been missing. Back in 09 I had an N900 as my "superphone" running Maemo (following the previous nerdy N series tablets), but then Nokia gave up and android phones caught up and... here we are, reasonable looking hardware in an open source connected phone again. Will watch for stock / next version, I'm on the fence of going back to a flip phone in 2020 already.

When the river floods
Our swamp rises
Morning fog meets
A subtle current
#smallpoems

#Reading Waste by Kate O'Neill: 20% of all landfill trash is food waste / only 3% of food waste from farm to plate is composted [what a tragically simple climate crime]

Actual USA Today headline:

"This simple trick stops Google, Amazon, Facebook from listening to you all the time"

Actual trick in article: turn off the surveillance devices/microphones when not using them...

"We can try to wipe the glass clean, but we are still looking through the window of our experience." - Kate O'Neill

#Reading Jenny Odell's #HowToDoNothing call to reclaim attention from advertising social networks to retain more will and more connection->sensitivity->attentiveness to place and region. Discusses #mastodon briefly towards the end as well as #ssb, I quite like the idea of a home-based pub/instance for when folks visit, in our case almost a Guestbook (and echoes early bbs and web guestbooks). It is a beautiful book of non-traditonal art criticism and contextualism as well.

"I concluded from my reading of classical economics that the creation of poverty is as fully intentional as the creation of wealth"

Reading Woolf's #ARoomOfOnesOwn and thinking about why poverty and inferiority are useful to the powerful. Thinking back to Kendi's #StampedFromTheBeginning and how the U.S. is a racist nation, no diversion required from our historic role to subjugate. Thinking about our southern border. Reading Vollmann's #HarpersMagazine essay on that, ends by quoting #ForWhomTheBellTolls, "There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes."