Explaining Myself.
The Console Culture
12/22/2024
The latest Microsoft commercial hints that the company (finally?) gets it.
I like Microsoft's latest commercial because it nods to the power of the personal computer in an era when I suspected that even Microsoft itself had forgetten about it.
The spot recognizes that somewhere somehow certain people -- and enough of them to prove the thriving future of -- are going to "require a computer" to produce their output. Whether artistic or otherwise.
Smartphones as a primary digital interface are here to stay but only for the most prosaic, which is likely most people. Even the creatives and the producers with their continued preferential reliance and use of PC devices will of course still have and use them.
The point though is that there still exists and hopefully will always exist the console class. And it may become accidentally elitist as they continue to maintain a culture and communication of one between them.
I hodge-podged together something I call the New York City People Fusion platform for communication among such people. Under the proverbial hood it's not fancy. It's just basic PHP and MySQL written quickly with a direction to reach than a market to sell to or a scale to meet, same as anything I do. But it's a philosophy I'm pushing that desktop computing is still a thing and the people that engage in it are both legacy and the enriched future.
That Microsoft seems to have finally stood back and come to realize that its own place in the market today connects to its PC foundations, validates something I've only been able to reflect as a suspicion until now.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Brian Thompson Should Not Have Been the Target
12/06/2024
The shooting death of Brian Thompson has provided a framework for the open condemnation of our predominantly for-profit health care system. But I feel this condemnation is misappropriated if not obviously cruel.
Brian Thompson wasn't denying anyone getting healthy or healed. In fact he probably cherished the health and well being of anyone as very much you and I do.
The real outrage isn't that United Healthcare is a thing that denies coverage in a contract with policyholders. From their perspective that's just business as usual wherein drawing a line in coverage is always controversial. You can pretty much say that about the inconvenient parameters of any business contract.
Health insurance companies don't deny anyone procedures once the lines and thresholds are hit. You want anesthesia? Fine, have it. All Anthem Blue Cross is saying is *you* pay for it.
That is, if you have thousands of dollars laying around -- of course.
What's actually mortifying is that you likely can't pay for it.
In colossal effect what the composite reality of all health care insurers are actually telling you to do when denying coverage, is to get rich.
Get rich.
Think about that.
Consider that this isn't the expectation underlying the morality of just United Healthcare or Anthem Blue Crosss' decisions to deny, deflect, and defend. And also consider that when the insinuated assertion to "get rich" doesn't mean just get fiscally well situated or to just rely on fair wages for a fair time's work.
The message, literally and unambiguously, is to get filthy stinking rich, period.
And there you have it.
This is what our society has evolved to. In all areas, not just health care. Whether it be to live securely free of destabilizing crime and drama, to weather the foils of unemployment or employment, to eat healthy, to exhibit as an artist, to trill in song to massive audiences, to pontificate, to raise your children and to protect them, and even to defend your reputation or to establish one in the first place - everything - is now subject to the expectation that you "get rich" to do it.
I know we can point to bulks of people who do afford healthcare, do art, do sing, and do raise great and secure families. But only at the behest of misery on a larger scale and only by playing to the gamemasters. Some people become or embrace sociopaths - they join the United Healthcares of the world or at least admire and emulate them well enough to self-insulate. Some decay over time at the stress of, dying internally. Some rot into criminality at more basil levels. In ignorance, negative in, negative out, after all.
Whatever the cope and whatever the resilience, pound for pound, we as a people have terrible yield.
It could be a lot lot better with just a little more wisdom. Be outraged we don't evolve better, not that because we haven't, that lo and behold, we have United Healthcare, not to mention people credibly doing their jobs like Brian Thompson. A very real soul probably being reminded of that as you read these very words.
By laws of both scarcity and sheer probability everyone can't "get rich". If three bullets need to go into something, it's the universal expectation that everyone can and should, to live free secure and prosperous lives. Rich is a rotten threshold for basic living.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Not Just Any Mister
11/28/2024
I'm not just Mr. David Pinero in Toronto - I am *MR.* David Pinero.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Thanksgiving and the Boost Economy
11/28/2024
Waiting for my bus to Toronto just now, one seemingly homeless guy complains to another just after a police sweep that he can't go anywhere because it's Thanksgiving. He adds that he can't even "boost" because all the stores are closed - and he knows this because he Googled around looking for one. No place to go, nothing to steal. But at least he's Google-savvy.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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These Scenes Are Always Cute
11/24/2024
On rare impulse I fire up a random "Videos for Cats" video on YouTube and frustrate my cat kids with the mystery of disassociated animals that hop and flutter before their feline little eyes. They remain occupied for a time but eventually surrender to the futility of actually catching anything. Aside from relieving their boredom for a time, I am also hoping to wake them up to the concept of "TV watching" so that they better understand why I'm laid out on the couch like I am for hours at a time. Not sure I am making a dent there though.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Wildlife Traffic Control
11/22/2024
Sort of just a fun fact here. My job facility is located in the center of a thriving wildlife community which consists of critter-level creatures like gophers and groundhogs, birds of all kinds, deer, and even wild turkeys. The reflective dots pictured are affixed to the large glass windows around the facility in hopes of (and presumed actual effectiveness) letting them all know that hey!, this here part of the universe is made of glass. No charging, flying, or trotting on through.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Social Media More Dependable Than CNN
11/06/2024
Nothing solidifies the disconnect between reality and the profit media than Trump's reelection. There's simply nothing to explain the picture media houses like CNN painted that the election was going to be close in the lead up to last night, other than just about every charge levied against them. Social media, people talking to each other directly, was far more accurate and dependable than CNN.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Branding the Non-Commercial Web
08/16/2024
I posted the following in reply to a Threads post last week and kind of like it.
So here it is again at my blog with maybe more context.
What is needed is to brand a non-commercial web and then get people to participate in that brand. Right now everyone has their own idea of it so there is no organized movement that everyone can relate to, to foster one. My website (in profile) is no-commercial and very much what you mean. But for it to be a thing, it needs to interlink with another website like it, and so on, and so on, and so on.
As noted this blab is in response to someone who misses the old somewhat ad-free internet and web of the early days, and is my thought on at least a partial solution. The closest thing we have right now is the IndieWeb movement.
The IndieWeb gets everything right insofar as a rationale goes, but doesn't seem to touch on people's desire for reach, which is a thing that social media and commercial platforms do so well with. Also, I suspiciously note that the movement does not preclude monetizing anywhere that I can see; it just focuses on publishing logistics and data liberty. If there's no loud stand against monetization, who's to say that a web of independent publishers don't wind up enshitifying?
People need to collectively agree on what the non-commercial web is, why it makes sense for a body of information sharing, and then participate in propagating examples of it. Once that happens, reach will be restored.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Is it Suddenly Wrong to Post Like This?
08/07/2024
Here is one example of the decay of the WWW's open spirit.
In this post I am recounting a trip I made recently to Wilkes-Barre, PA - my birthplace and the city I ultimately went to high school in - even though I did not grow up there. While recounting, I am throwing up a simple picture of my remaining blood family on my mother's side. Myself, Mike, and Chris (who is officially known as Herbert).
The thing is - it feels bad, almost illegal, to post someone's picture on your blog suddenly.
There might be good reasons to not do something as simple as this today, but I'm racking my head trying to figure out when doing so actually became bad.
Myself, Chris (Herbert), and Mike -- fine, I won't post any last names!
At some point it became bad etiquette at the very least, to outright hostile at worst, to volunteer images of others on an open forum like the web -- though there is much less stigma and understanding for doing so on say, Facebook.
It's not like I can't imagine why it morphed into recklessly rude practice. The web and internet made people cautious over time. People acquired a sense of purposeful privacy and there are in essence understandable objections to having an unvolunteered picture of yourself wind up in a Google image search (hiding from that abusive ex for example).
But, when that we just wouldn't post pictures of others at our personal blogs anymore as a security solution have its day in court as the opt security practice exactly? It bothers me that there is this uncontested ever creeping set of rules that doesn't even actually just stop with posting pictures but really extends to any degree of personal sharing online.
It's a tough feeling to explain. I get it, but at the same time I'd feel somehow better if someone just decreed that we wouldn't share our stories on the open web and made it a national law or something, rather than everyone just sort of quietly and collectively not doing it, until I, up and like an idiot, do it to possibly everyone's aghast.
Whatever, I hope there is a kindred spirit out there who gets what I'm saying here.
As for this nostalgic trip and family reunion, it was my first time back in Wilkes-Barre in what I take to be at least five years at this point -- probably a little more.
It was technically a belated birthday party for my "Uncle Mike" but the keystone event of this was a minor league baseball game between the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders (a Yankee team affiliate) and the Louisville Bats.
While there I found time to tour around Wilkes-Barre's Public Square and harken back to places I worked and even went to school at.
In this picture, off to my right shoulder, is the old Wilkes-Barre Times Leader building where I illustrated for about two years and briefly wrote as a stringer. Some time ago they moved their operations to another address in the city (not far).
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Let Me Explain
07/08/2024
In June of 2024 I reengineered my entire WWW presence to reflect the reality that all my online expressions were taking place first and foremost on commercial social media platforms. To make online interaction worthwhile I conceded that I needed an active audience in order to fuel the spirit, and that the blog platform -- even one based on a CMS engine that I myself had developed -- wasn't providing me enough of the lulz.
The "blog it first" syndication model as it is sometimes known as became futile, inefficient, and redundant; whereas commercial social media platforms afforded everything I need to emote fast. Try as I might to resist reacting on Threads, Facebook, Reddit, and so on, before blogging, I could not. And when I failed to do so the energy of a reaction that I swore I would carry over to a longer more meaningful blog post later, evaporated before I could.
As a result my blog languished. And that felt somehow corrosive to my writing and production spirit. Not to mention that it fanned a betrayal of my passionate advocacy that people live more on the open web.
I still understand the criticality of one's own WWW place. But given the reality of my behavioral preferences, which is not unlike the untold millions of others, I see that my advocacy for an independent digital presence needs to process a different formulation.
And so, here we are. Everything I do online wherever I'm doing it is first, and this "blog", if we can still call it one (we can't, more on that in a moment), is now something like a second.
My WWW space is now a repository platform. Somewhere to place and reference things I have produced with focus and with exceptional significance that needs to live somewhere I control. Under this model I don't expect repeat visitors or a perpetual audience. I expect it more to be a showcase that I can link back to from social media as needed.
I think this is a better balance for me and a better use of the independent streak. Not just here at my personal blog repository but my other sites as well. I will export this philosophy making it part and parcel of my other blogs like BuffScan.
Blogging will still happen but only under exceptional circumstances. No more trying to beat a story or point out of a thin conviction. I don't know how frequently under this model my personal writing will ever appear here, but know now that when it does, it is over something borne of conviction and feeling.
Why, take this very entry as an example.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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