I am, generally, very bad at getting to the point. One of the things I was trying to accomplish in writing these essays was practice cutting off a small portion of an idea and trying to wrap it up in a few hundred words. They still don't usually seem to have a thesis statement anywhere.
So today I'm practicing summaries! If you haven't wanted to read my ramblings thus far, here's a little treat for you: the point of every essay I've written here so far, each in 100 words or less.
Philosophy of This Personal Website
Websites are a public-facing art form that assume some sort of audience. I'm still surprised anyone might care what I have to say, but I'm making a website anyways. It seems my motivations are the same as all art--to practice, to think, and to try desparately to be understood.
An Autobiographical List of Other Folks' Writings on How to Organize Thoughts
As you learn things, the categories of knowledge or relationships between ideas become more important and also harder. Your internal cognitive structure determines what you will remember and what ideas you'll link together, and your understanding of how other people understand those ideas affects your ability to search for them. Many of the people writing about how to do this well seem pretty divorced from the actual usage of information and pedagogy, except maybe librarians.
More Useful Ways to Talk About AI
The people who say AI isn't very intelligent have a point, but doing a find-and-replace of the word "AI" with large language model or another specific implementation is not advancing the conversation. Most of the problems with AI are really bigger and faster versions of existing social problems, especially labor injustices, so I'd like to see a move towards a variety of more specific and problem-focused phrases like "large-scale algorithmic decision-making", "black box surveillance", or "worker dehumanization" (just to coin a few).
In Defense of Jargon
Technical terms with specific definitions in a given domain, also known as jargon, are very handy shortcuts that are a necessary part of thinking and communicating about very complex topics. Jargon only becomes elitist if the culture already believes that not knowing things is a moral failing, or if you insist on using it with people who aren't "in the know".
The Overblown Importance of Sexual Attraction
The online queer community's current focus on sexual attraction as a unifying factor is an understandable intellectual response to the bigoted rhetoric of recent decades, but it's also so abstract that it's pretty divorced from the reality of oppression queer people face and often divides groups (say, allosexual and asexual lesbians) whose needs aren't that different. I wish we focused more on the accommodations queer people need from an equitable society and not acceptance of a private inner inclination.
VR Makes Me Feel My Most Cyberpunk
Silicon Valley types have a habit of ignoring or intentionally obscuring the physical reality we live in so they can promise whole new infinite worlds for capitalism to continue overtaking. Many disabilities make the physical world much harder to ignore. VR will never actually eliminate the need for a physical space to walk around in, if it's aiming for high immersion and high realism, and increasing physical requirements makes virtual worlds less accessible in the same way the real world can be. We could just choose to make digital spaces with lower barriers to entry.
Online Fashion VS My Sartorial Stubbornness
I love making and styling clothing, but I'm tired of how fast fashion moves and the way everyone gets swept up in the same trends as one block. I wish that the variation in the fashion landscape was larger between people and smaller over time, but that's obviously not what large corporate interests want. I want to pay more considered and active attention to the fashion inspiration that does spark joy, rather than craving more clothing content forever. I want more niche and thoughtful fashion community, not more massive #ootd photo aggregation.
"Mo <meta>, Mo Problems"
Making something "machine readable" generally involves classifying it into binary categories--a website is in English or it isn't. A photo is of a dog or it isn't. But there will always be edge cases, and we can't think of every useful category ahead of time. On the other extreme are the hyperlinkers, OG digital gardeners, and Zettelkasten folks who think we should only ever specify relationships between individual nodes instead of classifying them. I want out of this dichotomy, too.
Advice for Egg-Spotters
It's shitty to presume you know your friend is trans before they do, but I do understand the impulse. Many of us wish we could have started being who we want to be sooner, but trying to give that to the "next" folks the thing is assuming transness is an essential static characteristic and not actually addressing the transphobia that stood in the way of many of our transitions. All we can do is leave the door wide open.
Autistic (Non)Compliance
You'll never understand autism if you look only at the external behaviors exhibited by different people with autism at different times. I think the story often becomes simpler if you focus on the internal experience of people with autism. For example, a wide variety of willful or accidental rulebreaking and strict adherance to rules that have been previously enforced can be collectively understood as individual, personality- and context-dependent responses to a shared difficulty intuiting fuzzy unspoken rules and the trauma of being punished for transgressing them.
One of the frustrations I already have is that many of these sound much more certain and definitive than I actually feel about some of these ideas. I think I'll always want to get the messy link-nests of ideas and metaphors and questions vaguely related to a core topic out first. But, overall, I think this was helpful. I might revisit these later, either trying this again with the same posts once I've forgotten or trying to distill these down even further. After all, as I said in a previous summary of my very first blog post, "Some thoughts or pieces of information are meant to be forgotten and that's what summarizing is."