Stairs erase up and down whereas ropes and slides insist on them. Too many ropes and slides in public software today. Don’t try to decide beforehand where users want to be; make it possible for users to get to where they want to get to in plainly reliable ways, then invite them for a climb or a plunge.
And no, I’m not ‘anti-elevator’…ach…this metaphor is deteriorating rapidly in earths' atmosphere…
Do these stairs go up or down?
To get at why stories seem to me fundamental building blocks of reality I have to backpedal and talk about pictures for a bit. ❡ Building blocks of reality? Dude, smoke another bowl… ❡ Pictures. We know what those are. Kind of freeze frames of the light available at some particular moment. Pictures of things, pictures of words. We consume and conceptualize them now as pixel collections, sometimes printed, mostly on screen.
As I was saying, telling a better story is important for me. I feel somewhat compelled to do it, if only in my head, but preferably also to create artifacts for future data waves. And what do I mean by better? More coherently truth congruent with repeatedly identifiable phenomena; the propositions therein match up with consensus reality; the shit rhymes. ‘But why stories?’, I pretend you ask. Because I’m convinced that in strange ways it is actually ‘stories’❡ that are the building blocks of our reality.
I want to emphasize in this post what I mentioned last time: not censoring myself out of economic, or other, anxieties. Anecdotally, in what were always described to me as “professional settings”, but turned out to just be “people in a room”, when I thought they were serious when they said “we want to hear what you think”, and I start with a phrase like “…well, your software kinda sucks…” I found myself plunged into a situation I thought I left in junior high school.
The reason I felt it important to just finish out the photo series mentioned above …or below, if you’re into the whole reverse-chronological thing, which is cool… is because I want to become accustomed to simply saying the things that occur to me to say, rather than just thinking about them. Take work, for example. I’ve self censored my public utterances most of my adult life when even the possibility existed that an employer, past, present, or especially future, might fortune upon it and, digesting it, judge me unworthy.
Exploding Cigars? Yeah, it was funny, y’know? Light your cigar, then — bang — it explodes! Funny right?
Hey, news editors writing headlines that tell the entire story—be praised! The ordered presentation of facts and not the grooming of responses is what citizens want. And despite likely higher click-through rates, the rest of you can fuck off with the coy questions, implied mystery, fortune telling, and all the other horseshit. Oh btw, "facts" are all the things you can know without opening up anybody else's head. Inside the head stuff is called "
Yes, again it is the promise of apocalyptic judgement that is the core of their manipulative powers.
I needn’t repeat the only apocalypse any of us face is personal and inevitable and natural.
Trump Supporters Think They’re in a Fight to the Death - The Atlantic
...because maybe somebody does read this, because maybe ON the OFF chance that somebody does read this, and perhaps thinks if I’m criticizing software in some sort of abstract way it must actually be about the platform I am posting my criticisms on, so perhaps Twitter, or where I secretly really hang out, on micro.blog. Well, it is not. I like twitter for what it is, mostly, and micro.blog is groovy, does just what it does without fuss.