Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

The calculus for posting stuff online hasn’t changed much since the 90s. If you don’t want to be on the record doing things that are illegal, for the love of all things good, do not post it to Masto.

I guess I’m wondering how nightly news orgs are going to explain how machine learning and inference models work, because so many folks still consider this to be magic.

While things are kind of bonkers right now, this is an interesting observation about how state actors influence US elections (past and present): https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/02/25/on-august-2-2016-paul-manafort-gave-konstantin-kilimnik-75-pages-of-recent-detailed-polling-data/

One of the questions I’ve had is how polling data made it into the orbit of microtargeting/psyops companies and their state-sponsored counterparts, since that would be needed to go from how people behave (on social media) to how people vote (with high confidence).

He... gave it to them in paper.

To this day, I still have to stop myself to remember the difference between VLC and VCL in any given conversation.

Much-too-confident, socially awkward lizard-betwixt-author-proxy goes to college, generating too much scandal, in candid, unreliable narrator slices of life. All while somehow remaining endearing and being much too relatable about how bizarre and alien social dilemma often feel in real time.

Novelty blogs of that nature thrived on LJ, and I miss those in a way the more general literary and webcomic fandoms don’t quite cover?

An oddly-specific thing I miss from the LJ days is rambling about just how good Sythyry’s Journal (and its addenda) are to people.

I guess I’m still trying to find those ways. I don’t quite have an answer, and my reclusiveness now is so I can do the work of figuring that out.

Because it’d be really cool to belong, for some value of “cool” and some value of “belong”. Even if I haven’t figured out what either of those are shaped like yet.

I had a brief window in which I was able to overcome those fears (posting art to Twitter, organizing small groups with locals ~4ish years ago). In that time, I socially burned out, my reclusive tendencies reasserted themselves, and then... I was accused of a bunch of stuff I didn’t do.

Which did break me, for awhile (sorry). And at the bottom of that, it returned me to the reticence that I’d felt before, even though I know there are ways this can work.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on that, especially in light of how folks’ perceptions of reality can dominate the truth. And I guess this is why I always expect things to go poorly for me in any group setting, reinforcing my predisposition to hide from people already.

Because if folks think my resulting reclusive behavior is an indicator I must be a bad person, I... really don’t have the bandwidth to challenge that notion nor change the behavior.

I guess that also leads people to fill in the gaps for this behavior. Common things I hear, in paraphrase:

* “Oh, them, they never respond, they’re probably an asshole.”
* “They’re really quiet except for specific subjects. Then they give way too much information.”
* “I think they’re plotting something.”

And I guess I understand the impulse to think that, but usually it’s because I’m paralyzed not knowing what my identity even is.

I think this is part of why I have so much trouble relating to people or figuring out how relationships — even casual friendships — are supposed to work. All of the hardware is there, all of the software is installed correctly, except I didn’t come with any configuration files whatsoever.

Which I guess I recognize as not broken, nor exactly. But it leaves people uncomfortable that I’m faking it. Which I guess I am.