Austin “Hocus” Pocus

Anyway, hi, I’m Austin and I am indeed a real human being with meat organs and everything definitely not a robot wait shit where’s the backspa

Another flashback to when I joined Facebook again after a long time away, and she was the first person I added. So naturally I posted “hi I’m Austin and I’m real” and for some reason people were really suspicious

Flashback to me wife telling me she thought I was made up. She looked at my Instagram and was like “no way is that his real name”.

I’m a little late to the spooky name party but my name was *made* for spooky season

It’s available to stream! You have to go into special features on Disney+ for the original Star Wars: A New Hope and it’s listed with the director’s commentary and whatnot.

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

time for web directories and web rings to make a comeback

This isn’t even an AI post as much as it is another anecdote in how social relations in America have been put through a blender of extreme market extraction at the same time that govt/charitable support for 3rd spaces, extracurriculars, social clubs, etc have fallen to their lowest point in decades.

We had a landline phone that was wired to the wall when I was younger, later it was cordless. No cell phone until I was 15 and that was a flip phone with 160-character texts, and we were charged per message or had limited texts per month. No internet on the phone.

We couldn’t look things up as easily. If you were lucky enough to have a computer, it was a desktop PC and internet was slow. Many pages were dubious, and no Wikipedia. If you didn’t have a PC, you could go to a library or ask someone you knew but a lot of questions would just go unanswered.

I could be out and about all day as a 12 year old and my parents didn’t know where I was for sure and couldn’t get ahold of me (no cell phones).

Going to Blockbuster and renting a VHS. “Be kind, rewind.”

Calling your friend’s house phone and the dread of talking to their parents to ask for them.

The em dash is HIGH LITERATURE. I am aghast at them coming for the em dash as an AI giveaway. Pry it from poets & fiction writers who write sentence-long paragraphs' dead hands!

David Lynch in Twin Peaks, saying “fix your hearts or die!”

How much you wanna bet they ran data through AI to classify people as citizens or not? The article doesn’t say, but it does say there are inconsistencies in the data which combined with AI would make for false positives/negatives.

Do you really want this government to have databases on us?

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

Exactly! And there's so much depth to it, you can get absolutely *lost* in the various subgenres of metal.

Lately, anger is a big factor in at least one of my stories. Even when I'm writing something less angry, I am often fueled by things that piss me off, things about the world that I want to imagine differently. I often enjoy writing because I get to transmute those emotions into art.

#LateNightWrite

Hi there, #LateNightWrite! I'm Austin, coder by day, writer by night. I'm just getting started on a couple WIPs: a revenge story in a high-tech hellscape, and a utopian daydream about psychic revolutionaries.

I love metal! 🤘 I like punk, hip-hop, and funk, too. But metal is how I got into music.

This part. The creative process is the whole point. Why would I outsource something I love doing to a machine?

It would be like hiring a robot to do my eating for me. It defeats the purpose of doing the thing in the first place. It just doesn’t compute.

All this is to say, if I had an open platform where I could write freely, share with friends, cross promote each other’s work, and know there’s open channels to promote to a wider audience without being beholden to Big Tech, I’d be one happy camper. I bet other writers would be too. Thoughts?

With this, anyone could aggregate their favorite reads without being boxed in by one company. The fediverse is one potential answer to this — I haven’t read the AT Protocol specs thoroughly enough to know for sure but I understand fedi has similar goals in terms of openness and not siloing creators.

I don’t know if RSS alone will solve the problem entirely but what I’d really love to see is a resurgence of “blog rolls” where authors list their favorite blogs to read, combined with some automated (open) means of reading them with a web crawler.

This whole thread is worth reading, but I quoted this because it raises a question that’s been on my mind for a while as a writer who codes: how do we as creators / authors / bloggers leverage open protocols like RSS or ATProto to create our own network effects minus the walled garden?

But does the website containing all other websites contain itself

"Bill Gates said: wait till you see what your computer can become. But it's You, who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do."

-- Kurt Vonnegut, "A Man Without a Country"

Being disabled is not a personal failing. It’s not caused by lack of effort.

The human body is frail. Statistically speaking most people will end up disabled at some point in their lives.

It’s a minority group you can join at any time.

We need allies, inclusion & accommodation. Not judgement.

torn between "how am I supposed to make art in the midst of all this cultural destruction" and "jfc I need to make art because of all this cultural destruction"

Do we think that we'll see more Spirit Halloween stores now with all the federal office closures? Or do we think the deep horror of reality is enough that we won't need any store-bought?