blogging

Blink.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Philip K. Dick

There’s been so much going on in the world that is disturbing that I disconnected for a while – not out of disdain, but out of the acknowledgement that there’s not much I can do about things I wish I could do something about.

The Internet can be like that scene from Clockwork Orange, where eyelids seem taped open to get us to react to some things in more ‘approved of’ ways1.

I closed myself off from the world for a while, and I’m the better for it. I hung out with some new friends and completely forgot about things that others have not had the luxury to forget about in war zones. The reality is that most of us are not in war zones. The reality is that most of us have that luxury, and we waste it getting upset over things we cannot directly impact.

I wish we could.

Sometimes, we need to blink.

In this last languorous blink, I made a few decisions.

I’ll be planning one post a week on RealityFragments.com – which means I get to think about it over the week while I work on the book. I plan on that to be on Sundays – so subscribers, I expect it will be more worthwhile to read one solid post rather than trying to keep up frenetically with a world…

A world where we should blink more.

  1. Of course, that movie was an exploration of a different sort of punishment for violent crime that somehow managed to humanize someone who had dehumanized others. However, that particular scene, was a pivot point and is reminiscent of how many of us consume media. ↩︎

Opinion: AI Art in Blogs.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Years ago, I saw ‘This Space Intentionally Left Blank’ in a technical document in a company, and I laughed, because the sentence destroyed the ‘blankness’ of the page.

I don’t know where it came from, but I dutifully used it in that company when I wrote technical documentation, adding, “, with the exception of this sentence.” I do hope those documents still have it. The documentation was dry reading despite my best efforts.

I bring this up because some artists on Mastodon have been very vocally negative about the use of AI art in blog posts. I do not disagree with them, but I use AI art on my blog posts here and on KnowProSE.com and I also do want to support artists, as I would like artists to support writers. Writers are artists with words, after all, and with so much AI generated content, it’s a mess for anyone with an iota of creativity involved.

Having your work sucked into the intake manifold of a generative AI to be vomited out so that another company makes money from what they effectively stole is… dehumanizing to creative people. Effectively, those that do this and don’t compensate the people who created stuff in the first place are just taking their stuff and acting like they don’t matter.

There has been some criticism of using AI generated imagery in blog posts, and I think that’s appropriate – despite me using it. The reason I got into digital photography decades ago was so that I could have my own images. Over the years, I talked with some really great digital artists and gotten permission here and there to use their images – and sometimes I have, and sometimes by the time I got the permission the moment had passed.

When you have an idea in the moment, at the speed of blog, waiting for permission can be tiresome.

These days, a used image will still likely get stuck in the intake manifold of some generative AI anyway. There are things you can do to keep AI bots that follow ‘rules’ at bay, but that only works if the corporations respect boundaries and if you follow the history of AI with copyright lawsuits, you’ll find that the corporations involved are not very good at respecting boundaries. It’s not as simple as putting up a ‘Do Not Scrape’ sign on a website.

So, what to do? I side with the artists, but images help hold attention spans, and I am not an artist. If I use someone’s work without permission, I’m a thief – and I put their works at risk of getting sucked into the intake manifold of an AI.

I could go without using images completely, but people with short attention spans – the average time now is 47 seconds – should be encouraged to read longer if the topic is interesting enough – but “TL;DR” is a thing now.

So yes, I use AI generated images because at the least they can be topical and at worst they are terrible, get sucked into a generative AI intake manifold and make generative AI worse for it, which works to the advantage of digital artists who can do amazing things.

Some people will be angry about this. I can’t help that. I don’t use generative AI for writing other than for research and even then carefully so. I fully support people’s works not getting vomited out of a generative AI, but that involves a much larger discussion regarding the history of humanity and the works that we build upon.

Almost A Month of Mastodon: Thumbs Up!

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

On April 1st I joined Mastodon, eschewing centralized social media networks because I felt like an experiment rather than a participant.

My experience so far has been great. I have some followers, not a lot, and I follow about twice as many as I follow (a good metric, I think). I interact with smart people, some who know more than me, some who know less, but everyone’s pretty polite.

It’s a sharp contrast to the other social networks I’ve been on – it actually reminds me of the good old days of the BBS systems, almost as if a few of us would form a party and go play D&D.

Sure, you have some annoying people now and then, but that’s life.

Centralized Social Networks: Blech.

Being away from the centralized social networks has given me perspective. In hindsight, this is what I saw:

Algorithms seemed to have washed the nutrients from my news feeds, instead pushing polarizing posts and spammy sales messages into my eyeballs. It was like a roundabout of billboards that I couldn’t get off – and what I did add to the networks was either not seen or interacted with.

On Facebook, with 1,250 connections, all of them felt distant, removed – not the flesh and blood people that I met, or the intellectually interesting that I had found. My newsfeed was repulsive.

“Hate Israel! Hate Hamas! Hate Russia! Hate Ukraine! Hate Republicans! Hate Democrats! Hate this one! Hate that one! Buy this! Buy that! Buy THIS AND THAT!”

Man, that’s tiresome. Hate takes a lot of energy and usually requires the suspension of the intellect in and an over-exuberance of negative emotion. I’m just not over-exuberant. To me it all looked like a litter box – and made me come to the understanding that walled gardens become litterbox prisons.

LinkedIn is pretty much a human caterpillar of professional brown-nosing. Everyone’s so worried about what a potential employer might think that they won’t rock the boat. They just want to be seen in a positive light, and so that network has become a beacon of bullshit as everyone’s interviewing and it’s a competition to be the most politically correct while maintaining some facade of professionalism all the time. It’s like being at an interview that never ends. It’s terrible, and oh- by the way – people always want to sell you stuff there too. Nobody cares what you can do, really, and the headhunters are more just about collecting skulls to make their bones. And Microsoft (LinkedIn) is constantly asking you to upgrade your subscription so that it can find you a job you’ll likely be unhappy with – otherwise they wouldn’t make money when you go back on bended knee.

At least in psychiatric wards, they give you drugs so you don’t have to experience the other inmates, and in that regard that’s what I believe social media networks largely do.

Twitter? Never really cared about it because I foresaw the trusted sources issue a year before the company even formed. People got into it for various reasons with no exit strategy, as most of us did with social media networks. TikTok I never got into, I don’t even have an account – it’s bad enough I was handing my likes and habits to Big Tech in the U.S., which because of FISA is a grey area of government – why on Earth would I want to hand more information to another government?

Meanwhile, On Mastodon…

I started off by following hashtags I’m interested in, and interacting with other people. 99% of it has been really good, thoughtful, and sometimes challenging in good ways – new perspectives to explore, new trains of thought to consider, new… well, new! Yet that was just the first week, and like a car, you really don’t know how well things are working until you lose the new car smell.

There’s an intellectual freedom I found there that was lost on other social media networks – the Fediverse has it’s own wonkiness, and there are criticisms of Mastodon by longer time users that I don’t understand yet. That’s fine. Most of the issues I see with people on Mastodon is that they want the same confirmation biases fed that they had fed on centralized social networks.

One person wrote today of the centralized networks, “where friends are frictionless and things are predictable.” That sounds a lot like an echo chamber to me, an algorithmic ant mill. I don’t like watching NASCAR because it’s a boring track, I never would have wanted to drive in NASCAR because it’s a boring track, so doing the intellectual and emotional equivalent seems less than ideal for me.

I interact as I wish – politely, even with people I disagree with, and I have yet to block anyone for being douchebags. All in all, it feels a lot like I want a social network to be.

A few people are worried about ‘reach’ – one person posted that they wanted Dan Gillmore to have as many followers on Twitter, which when I looked was 10,000 or more than he has on Mastodon, and he’s talked about ‘reach’ – but it’s really engagement that’s the way to measure things in social media, and even with that engagement, it’s about the quality of engagement.

Also of interest – I’ve found more quality blogs to follow on WordPress.com on the Fediverse than I have on WordPress.com in unit time.

All in all, I feel that I’ve spent my time better on the Fediverse through Mastodon than any other social network. You’re not swimming against algorithmic flotsam and jetsam.

I’ll be on Mastodon. Links are on both of my sites at the top. If you pop in, say hi, and enjoy the interesting people with the understanding that you don’t have to agree with people – just like in real life – but you can have conversations, sometimes hard ones, respectfully – rather than dodging them in the echo chambers.

Categories Schmategories.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

When I read “Genres as Crushers of Creativity” by Jude Berman, I was happy.

I hate categories, and to read someone else talking about how categories in the publishing industries crushes creativity, I was tempted to find a parking lot to dance naked in until I realized people might not appreciate that sight as much as I might enjoy doing it.

So judgemental, humans.

Maybe it’s because of my own identity not fitting neatly into someone else’s category, maybe it’s because I connect things differently than most people seem to. Maybe it’s just not enjoying the prejudices that come with categories.

“Oh, you’re a software engineer, will you fix my computer?”
“It can’t reproduce, it’s already fixed. Unless… well, we won’t discuss that.”

When it comes to blogging, as an example, I have been around 2 decades and I’m heading toward 3. I’ve written about a lot of things, some popular, some not. Douglas Adams once wrote that a nerd is someone who uses a phone to talk to other people about phones, and by that measure the Internet itself is nerdy. We use the Internet to… talk about the Internet.

Yet there’s much more to us. When the ‘blogging tips’ started coming out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I rolled my eyes and just wrote about whatever I wanted to write about, writing in a niche be damned. We have tags for that stuff. I can write about topics that touch each other sensually or violently that way, and go about my business.

Did I make lots of money doing that? Nope. Not yet anyway. I suppose I would need a business plan of some sort, and that’s not in the cards right now as I keep writing unpublished books, waiting for this AI business to settle down. People find my stuff, they read it, they like it or not, and maybe their world is a little bit better for it. Someone liking or commenting on something that I wrote makes me smile, even if they disagree because it means it provoked thought. Negative emotions are running rampant around the planet, and those conversations are best to be avoided.

When we write – those of us that do beyond short missives to the ether of microblogging – we write to an audience. When I think of the writing that connected with me over the years, the scratching of pens on paper, the tapping of old typewriters, it was as if the author was opening worlds for me beyond time, beyond space, and even beyond death. To flatten the perspectives into simple categories seems silly to me.

Take for example the connection between Toni Morrison and Information Science I wrote about recently – she connected two things and made a very human point. That, to me, is what people who write do – they connect things in human ways, and in a period of technology we forget that. Technology is useless to us unless it empowers us and our ability to connect with other humans – nevermind the AI girlfriends, a disturbing trend if every I saw one.

We get to define the walls that contain who we are. Don’t write for categories. Write for yourself, be it a blog or a book. Or stay in a lane someone else defined for you and eventually wonder why you can’t break out.

How I use social media.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How do you use social media?
View all responses

It’s not often that I respond to WordPress.com writing prompts. “How do you use social media?” popped up, and using the WordPress.com reader I started looking through the responses.

That’s the key thing for me when it comes to social media – looking for things of worth, people with good ideas to discuss, etc. It’s about finding pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t have a picture on the box to refer to.

Scrolling through the responses, there are the few that mention making money, like the old advertisements in the back of 80s magazines with the get rich schemes. The way to make money off social media is telling people how to make money off social media. The way to make money off a product or service is to have a good product or service and not shoot one’s self in the foot when marketing it.

I don’t use social media to make money. I don’t use social media to be popular. What I do use social media to do is explore other perspectives, but in an age where everyone and their mother is training artificial intelligence, I am leery of social media sites. Even WordPress.com has been compromised in that regard, though you can take action and not be a part of it.

Unknowingly, many people are painting the fence of generative AI, giving the large companies building and training generative artificial intelligences the very paint and brushes that they need to sell back to them. It confounds me how many people on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are going out of their way to train artificial intelligences.

This is why I have gone to Mastodon. The Fediverse offers me some protection in privacy. I post links to social media accounts to stuff I write, but I only really interact on the Fediverse, where I feel more secure and am less likely to paint generative AI’s fences.

Kill The Social Networks.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

There was a time when blogs were a big deal. We had our own network of blogs, we had a website called Technorati that ranked them and where we could see who was writing about stuff we were interested in.

The early blogs I found really great. We had people discussing all manner of things, with ‘pingbacks’ between blogs allowing for the crosslinking so even though you didn’t comment on their website, there was a link to the author referred to. WordPress.com does that, and to an extent it still happens in open source blogs, though a few things happened that changed the way things worked.

For example, at the same time, to make their sites more popular, crosslinking was done, and sometimes it was done to such an extent by people who had more marketing than thought that the search engines smacked it down in their search engine results. Search Engine results were important, so that was done more carefully. It was all very cliquish, and in some ways very elitist. Though I knew and even worked with some of the more famous bloggers, they weren’t interested in the content created. They were interested in their own audience, as well they should have been.

For all of the flaws, it wasn’t a bad system. It was decentralized, and the only real limit on content you could find was your ability to find it. Search engines cashed in a bit more because search engines were used a lot more. Nowadays, people are fed pulped fictions with some interesting stuff every now and then.

Social networks showed up and threw everything out the window. When you have centralized networks, you have the centralized ability to shadow ban people on the network, and once it hits critical mass, it becomes arbitrary, with the owner of the network enforcing their own version of what is right or wrong without even a conversation. Facebook does it, Twitter does it, Instagram does it… so the only path to not being shadow banned for something real or imagined is to simply leave the network.

But it doesn’t really end there. Now everyone is training an AI on user data, and no one has control over what user data they train on and how it is used. Chandra Steele writes a bit about how it feels like it’s the end of the shared Internet:

“…This is why the Tumblr and WordPress news [about selling information to AI companies] seems like a heavy blow to a shared internet. It’s taken away the possibility to return to the purer place we came from. PCMag Security Analyst Kim Key reached out to Automattic, which owns both platforms, and the company did not confirm or deny the rumors, though it did direct her to a statement that seems to indicate that if the deal goes through, users will be able to opt out from having their work included in AI training…”

“WordPress Wants to Turn My Old Blog Into an AI Zombie, and It Breaks My Heart“, Chandra Steele, PCMag.com, February 29th, 2024

It’s not the end of the shared Internet at all. Some of us don’t write on PCMag.com, and there are plenty of other options that exist. WordPress.com was just a later website built with open source technology, but before that we had GreyMatter, etc. She mentions 2009 for her blog – I was blogging since 1999. A lot happened in those 10 years.

These technologies still exist. If we want control of our content, we should move off of platforms where we cannot. I’m considering this myself in the context of WordPress.com. I only got here because I was tired of the trouble of maintaining my own sites, but during the time I have used WordPress.com, website hosting has improved to include managed open source content management systems, the open source content management systems themselves have become more easy to maintain and more powerful…

If you feel boxed in, get out of the box. I’m considering options myself since I feel my own trust was betrayed by WordPress.com, and they haven’t really discussed with us what is going on since that bombshell was dropped.

What we need to remember is that we always have options. The only way to effect change is to actually change ourselves. Don’t like a network? Get off it. No one will die.

If you write good content, they’ll find you.

WordPress.com, Tumblr to Sell Information For AI Training: What You can do.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

While I was figuring out how to be human in 2024, I missed that Tumblr and WordPress posts will reportedly be used for OpenAI and Midjourney training.

This could be a big deal for people who take the trouble to write their own content rather than filling the web with Generative AI text to just spam out posts.

If you’re involved with WordPress.org, it doesn’t apply to you.

WordPress.com has an option to use Tumblr as well, so when you post to WordPress.com it automagically posts to Tumblr. Therefore you might have to visit both of the posts below and adjust your settings if you don’t want your content to be used in training models.

This doesn’t mean that they haven’t already sent information to Midjourney and OpenAI yet. We don’t really know, but from the moment you change your settings…

  • WordPress.com: How to opt out of the AI training is available here.

    It boils down to this part in your blog settings on WordPress.com:


  • With Tumblr.com, you should check out this post. Tumblr is more tricky, and the link text is pretty small around the images – what you need to remember is after you select your blog on the left sidebar, you need to use the ‘Blog Settings’ link on the right sidebar.

Hot Take.

When I was looking into all of this, it ends up that Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com and Tumblr.com is doing the sale.

If you look at your settings, if you haven’t changed them yet, you’ll see that the default was set to allowing the use of content for training models. The average person who uses these sites to post their content are likely unaware, and in my opinion if they wanted to do this the right way the default setting would be to have these settings opt out.

It’s unclear whether they already sent posts. I’m sure that there’s an army of lawyers who will point out that they did post it in places and that the onus was on users to stay informed. It’s rare for me to use the word ‘shitty’ on KnowProSE.com, but I think it’s probably the best way to describe how this happened.

It was shitty of them to set it up like this. See? It works.

Now some people may not care. They may not be paying users, or they just don’t care, and that’s fine. Personal data? Well, let’s hope that got scrubbed.

Some of us do. I don’t know how many, so I can’t say a lot or a few. Yet if Automattic, the parent company of both Tumblr and WordPress.com, will post that they care about user choices, it hardly seems appropriate that the default choice was not to opt out.

As a paying user of WordPress.com, I think it’s shitty to think I would allow the use of what I write, using my own brain, to be used for a training model that the company gets paid for. I don’t see any of that money. To add injury to that insult of my intelligence, Midjourney and ChatGPT also have subscription to offer the trained AI which I also pay for (ChatGPT).

To make matters worse, we sort of have to take the training models on the word of those that use them. They don’t tell us what’s in them or where the content came from.

This is my opinion. It may not suit your needs, and if you don’t have a pleasant day. But if you agree with this, go ahead, make sure your blog is not allowing third party data sharing.

Personally, I’m unsurprised at how poorly this has been handled. Just follow some of the links early on in the post and revel in dismay.

92 Day ‘Streak’ Introspection.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

For those of us on WordPress.com, where this blog presently resides, we get these updates whenever we write at least a post a day. WordPress.com calls them ‘streaks’.

People who do laundry are familiar with streaks, too, so I’m not sure that’s a good thing. WordPress.com also doesn’t give prizes for this other than another one the next day.

Not very inspiring. I’m not sure if that helps anyone, actually.

What I am sure of is that I’m back in the rhythm of writing, though I will admit that I’m not working on the book(s) as much and I do need to focus a bit more on that.

Some of the things I’ve learned over the last 90 days is how so many people will like a blog post but how little cross-linking there is to riff with other people. There are good ideas out there worth cross-planting with. Then there are the people who just like things so that you look at their stuff – which works maybe a few times if their stuff isn’t all that grand.

Hiding underneath all of that are the actual likes, which aren’t as representative of traffic. Strangely, RealityFragments.com has a lot more content – almost double at present that of KnowProSE.com, largely because that’s a more serious blog – yet KnowProSE.com has more SEO penetration, perhaps because… it’s a more serious blog. Strange how that works.

At the same time, and perhaps related, I have been seeing a psychologist regularly to check on whether or not I’m completely bonkers. As it happens, I’m not, so there is that, but it’s been interesting unraveling myself with her as I unravel other things elsewhere. It’s helped a bit with the introspection.

In normal introspection, we’re there, we’re thinking about things, and we hopefully come out better for the experience. Yet some things are tied to observations of other people, and people can be so ludicrous that I wonder at times if I’m not the crazy one.

When you look at things like The Fumigator and note how everyone else just ignores the strange behavior, there is a part of me that wonders at times if I’m not the one who is a little bit… off. I see this more often than not, these behaviors that others gloss over. I’m not going to say in any way that I’m some standard of normal – I am not – but I do wonder if when we ignore some strange behaviors if we’re not ourselves being a little crazy ourselves. In the case of the fumigator, I was a silent observer trying to figure out what was going on, but everyone else just… went about their business as if nothing crazy was happening.

This could explain governments around the world.

It disturbs me a little that we have gotten to this level of complacency about so many things. I suppose, in a way, that’s what my writing is about – not being complacent, not just doing what you’re told because you are told, and being aware of things and working towards making the world better.

Social Media: Immediacy vs. Patience.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

In a time where immediacy is demanded when it comes to social media, we undervalue waiting. Twice this week there were stories that demanded the wait, but we wouldn’t wait. Time lost that we can’t get back.

There was a period in the world where news was much more slow. It could take months, sometimes years, to get news and when that news was had, it was aged and even out of date. That doesn’t do well either.

News stories need time. I am not a journalist, at times in my life I was maybe a citizen-journalist of sorts, but I never thought of myself as a journalist and I don’t aspire to be one. This is not to say I don’t respect those who have chosen this path – I do, when they can balance waiting with immediacy. When a story isn’t ready, it is simply not ready, and when it’s late, it’s too damned late.

But Media is society’s mirror. Most people don’t realize it.

An example? The Titan. Early on, the US Navy had heard a possible implosion on their network (which isn’t really that secret) at around the time the Titan went missing, in the same area, and reported it to the relevant Coast Guard people involved in the search. This was not in the news.

Meanwhile, for some time, the media gets to inundate us with stuff we want to know about – which in a peculiar way seems to have not been as much about the fact that the submersible should have surfaced within 24 hours. That too was left out for a while. The information, like the Navy report, was there – but people get to look really busy, and the politics of it plays well.

We want to believe that they would look for us, don’t we? That even if there was the faintest chance, that someone would come looking. It’s a Hollywood story. As it ends up, it’s a Hollywood Story with half of a James Cameron ending. Everybody died, there wasn’t a woman who would become an old lady to tell a story to someone about the guy who couldn’t get next to her.

Immediacy with respect to the Titan would not have worked for the media or politicians, because most people wouldn’t watch a news story about recovering wreckage to study. It’s sad, and unfortunately it’s true. It is, however, what’s really happening at this point: figuring out why it failed. The side benefit is that someone will get blamed and everyone will get to feel good about wagging their fingers, while the majority of humans inhabiting the planet are on to the next story.

It’s like the whole Russian issue yesterday. A 24 hour uprising lead by the head of the Wagner group. I normally keep up to date with Ukraine, but I had some noise pollution that kept me up later than usual so by the time I found out it was well underway – but it wasn’t adding up. I didn’t write about it. I polled my source stuff. It still wasn’t adding up, and there was no clear direction. I told people to listen to the Benny Hill track while watching any news they got.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxoUmh2FCX4&t=671s

It’s really a good soundtrack when you’re getting ‘live updates’ on anything because what’s happening is that in the want to be first, stuff gets reported that may not be worth reporting. Much of it was.

Even the brokering of a truce by Belarus’s Lukashenko seems weird to me. Neither party involved really has listened much to Lukashenko, so I don’t see why they would now – now there is a story, something worth researching and investigating, but that’s where the story really is. Because without that solid piece to lock it all in, it’s all a bunch of floating pieces clinging together for dear life.

Sometimes it’s best to wait. Sometimes not.

When I write something, particularly on KnowProSE.com, it has to feel worth writing about. The Titan I wrote about a bit because we didn’t seem to be getting the whole story – and we weren’t. We probably still aren’t. That US Navy network is really good at what it does, as old as it is, and anyone who has read, “The Hunt for Red October” knows how awesome Jonesy the Sonar Tech was on a submarine. The movie lacked that depth.

That search was a ‘Hail Mary’ for the media. Everyone in the know knew with a high degree of certainty that if that submersible didn’t surface within 24 hours, that Navy sonar network was probably 99.9% correct. That was the story. It still is the story, now it’s about finding scapegoats while advancing knowledge on why that deep sea submersible (It had one job!) was not a deep sea submersible.

And the Russian ‘coup’? It was never a coup. It was a threatened coup. A well televised threatened coup. A too televised threatened coup. It bordered on theatrical, if it didn’t jump solidly on that part of the line occasionally. As someone who has gotten well educated on that part of the world through friends made since, I definitely want Ukraine’s victory. My spirits lifted a bit for Ukraine, that this would make the reclamation of territory extremely easy, but to me it also did not smell right.

And so, I didn’t write about it and was rewarded with not looking like a complete idiot after the fact. It still doesn’t make sense, that whole 24 hour thing.

The point is that when we write, we have to recognize the responsibility we have. Journalists are supposed to understand this. Social media stars generally don’t with a few exceptions.

Writing good stuff is a responsibility. Writing good true stuff on such occasions is also a responsibility, and making sure the stuff is true is not an easy task. Rewriting someone else’s facts is borderline, but sometimes good if you can make it more readable or otherwise add value.

But simply writing what everyone else is writing about during a real world event when you don’t do those things is just littering, really. We shouldn’t litter.

Sometimes we should wait. And sometimes we shouldn’t.

Friends and Readers.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

I’m connected to a lot of people on the Internet of different cultures, religions, political ideologies and lengths of nose hair. I do not have empirical evidence of the latter, so let’s call that a theory. I digress.

When I publish something – anything – on the Internet, I find my connections may like something I write but not share it. That implies they don’t think it’s worth sharing. It’s sort of like having a hot dog stand where people you know walk by and say, “that’s nice” and wander off in search of hamburgers, rotis, and sauteed goat testicles.

It doesn’t really matter to them. They don’t like hot dogs, or the algorithms that decide what they see think they don’t like hot dogs enough.

Fortunately, I’m not selling hot dogs.

I could go off and write stuff that would engage my eclectic arrangement of acquaintances I’ve collected over the course of a lifetime, some in real life through real world experiences and some through online experiences. Some may just think that you’re already awesome and that you don’t want your content shared. Some may find you the guilty pleasure that they don’t share with their own audiences.

Friends are not necessarily readers. Readers are not necessarily friends. We’re lucky when people are both.

I’ve recently been writing more frequently online again, and I am not one to write in a niche about a particular topic. I like to mix topics, swirl them around with the abandon of a naked abstract artist spinning around to fling paint on the canvases of the world, decorating a piece of time. It can be disheartening at times when people who you know are posting things others have written about the same things. Maybe they’re ignoring you, maybe not.

It doesn’t really matter when you write as an outlet rather than writing for an audience. That’s the key difference.

So, I have noted I have gained more readers, and I’d like to thank you for your time and interest. I wander around when you have websites and look at your stuff too, leaving comments and even riffing with some of your stuff.

I’m having fun. I hope you are too. Don’t be afraid to comment!