Oh heavens, part deux. And the Twitter.

Much of my online activity as of late has migrated towards Twitter and Blip. In case you don’t know them they are micro-blogging services. The micro implies both the length of the messages you can publish, and also the length of my attention span – which seems to have shrunk to measures traditionally used for 100m dash.

Like right now, while writing this, I blipped two songs and emailed Petter about it and updated my Twitter feed (even though it auto-updates every five minutes).

At the same time as the immediacy of connection is being realised, there’s an almost constant feeling of “wait, where were I?” Some of us have become so fully immersed in our computers and their proffered connections that we’ve become very active nodes. We’re spending so much time computing and parsing data that to an online observer we might as well be highly specialised and slightly retarded computers. Or maybe it’s just me; Having so much info passing through eyes and ears and out my fingertips, and retaining nothing but the constant buzzing noise, the trunk noise of a phone held to the ear.

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The upside of all this – Olle tells me that optimistic posts are better than “the self-loathing and whiny stuff” I occasionally write – is that I’m getting stuff done. Granted, it’s not like I’m actually using all my waking hours being creative or something, but there is a feeling of “getting shit done” in the air which is uplifting.

There’s that thing with my brother and that thing with Petter, and some stuff Ana and I have been talking about as well as the whole Skup Palet that Anna, Jan + a bunch of us are learing at. With that, I know it’s easy to talk about stuff that you might do or are interested in doing or perhaps would consider doing if the conditions are favourable and you are sober enough, but there’s something in the air. Like, pollution, only good pollution.

Thanks to global warming the winter has been mild here and we’ve been spared the sleet and piss that a Gothenburg winter is commonly associated with. Knock on wood. It all adds up.

I can’t believe I’m actually looking forwards to spring. Let’s recap the past year: I quit smoking after 7 years, started running, got a drivers license and had an interesting job both in spring and fall. And I got a moustache.

And now I’m looking forwards to spring, lying on my bed looking up at the clouds passing by. It’s just like that science guy from Independence Day when he played another science guy in The Fly and he slowly turns into a fly and peels his eyes off. Only I’ve peeled my eyes off and discover I’m now a twinkly hippie person. Before you know it I’ll be tie-dying shit and doing astral journeys in public.

Step by step, oh baby! (Fascism)

Excerpt from They thought they were free about the gradual changes in Germany that culminated in atrocities. Comparisons between anything current and 1930 Nazis falls under Godwin’s law, but it’s a shining example of what a slippery slope looks like.

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it.

As with so many other articles I link to, this one showed up in a reference over at Metafilter.

Also, my brother and his woman visited Gothenburg this weekend.