// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

Arve Bersvendsen, a virtually unknown blog blog journal ger hipster (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m one myself), made a point of blog blog journal ging blog journal -keeping about why he’s giving up Reddit – instead of just posting his dissatisfaction on a “self” link on Reddit itself. That’s kind of odd, both because it assumes his blog journal readers are familiar with Reddit and that it’ll reach significant notoriety on Reddit.

But wait — his post slug, the post-name-in-the-URL, gives him away. It actually says “Social web is dead”. He changed his mind after starting to write the post and saving a draft version. Whoa, dude — not that I’m willing to defend the strong (yet not as strong as that one) that the “social web”, which I’ll be forced to define, is alive and kicking. But that is a strong proposition.

The thing is, his post doesn’t say anything about Reddit or the “social web”, however you define it. It’s just a list of topics that come up often on said social website (his “last hope”) that don’t interest him at all. That’s no evidence that the “social web” however you define it is dead, just that you happen not to belong in the particular speck of land in the internet landscape that is Reddit.

But that’s okay. You actually renamed your article. It’s a lot more adequate as a “giving up Reddit” post than a “social web can’t work” one. So, um, Reddit is not working for you — that’s because it’s a “social website” that has ceased to reflect your “social group”. See, the whole point of the Internet is enabling you to reach a wider group of people that reflect enough your interests, way of thinking and “intellectual self” — be it by reading static blotches of content or by actively participating in interactive websites.

Don’t.

Seriously. It’s my own “agenda” to defend, my own mountain Everest to climb, my own life pursuit. It’s also a nondescript umbrella term whose meaning I’ve been and probably will be shaping implicitly in my writing.

Sure, you could hypothetically try to infer a cloudy idea from what I’ve been saying and try to follow it. But hey, trying to shape oneself into a dayvan cowboy is not something a dayvan cowboy would do. It’s not just the chutzpah, the deleuze-ish ultraphenomenology of crashing down the plane of imannence, or even the zen idea implied by the very idea of “don’t try, just do” implied in this paragraph.

It’s not like there’s a crowd to worship the idea either. But I worry about myself, about being blinded by the idea that I have some big secret to share. Something like Being alive: a primer needs to be fueled by a sense of self-assurance that is both positive in that a dayvan cowboy should just dive into things as if they’re liquid — they always are — and negative in that begins to convey a sense of closure. As if I had it solved, or at least knew I was heading into the solution.

I registered this domain like, what, 2 months ago? and my PageRank with Google implies an exposure I don’t see reflected in my viewer stats. So I started comparing it along blog blog journal s. As a measure of comparison, Wikipedia and the New York Times are a 9. The scale maxes out at 10. Jason Kottke and Nick Carr are a 7, Waiter Rant is a 6 and The Last Psychiatrist is a 5; I’m a 4 and annoyingly, Violent Acres is below me at 3. PageRank is bunk, dude. V. from Violent Acres has been at it for years, consistently kicks ass and is guaranteed to have controversy in her comments. She’s in a way someone I admire, as she’s been living out her life pursuit in her very own way — she’s far, far from being a dayvan cowgirl — and what’s more, consistently avoided letting herself indulge in her own identity. This is the girl who went (voluntarily and with a plan) homeless to pay off debt.

Há algum tempo que a visitação ao meu blog journal tem sido movida em boa medida por buscas muito dirigidas por informação no Google, o que não chega a ser curioso (dado que eu uso muitas frases estatisticamente improváveis) mas é desafortunado, porque eu não dou realmente nenhuma informação útil. Mas como alguns temas têm se repetido consistentemente nos termos de busca (segundo as estatísticas do Wordpress) ao longo dos últimos meses, decidi tirar uma meia hora para um pingue-pongue com toda essa gente anônima que não pode nem deixar comentários.

“torval efeitos colaterais” Torval é um equivalente genérico da versão de liberação prolongada do Depakote. Eu já tomei Torval 1500, e como estava partindo as minhas pílulas recebi uma receita para o Depakote brand-name, que sairia mais barato porque a pílula partida perde o efeito de liberação prolongada. E, enfim, muito mais gente tomou o Depakote e sabe como isso pode dar efeitos colaterais horríveis. Mas olha, eu tomei doses bem baixas — primeiro 1500, e depois 750, para o meu peso que na época era de uns 70 quilos — complementando o regime básico de lamotrigina (Lamitor, Neural, Lamictal, etc.). Eu não tive o famoso Efeito Velhice de perder cabelo, ficar cansado com os ossos doendo, etc. etc. Pra mim o Torval foi um ansiolítico extremamente intenso, ao ponto que eu passei um mês inteiro fora do planeta, feito um monge budista, em despersonalização completa (o que provavelmene se deve às minhas questões neurológicas esquisitinhas também).

Mas, respondendo à questão dos efeitos colaterais negativos, uma coisa muito marcante da época do Torval é a perda de memória.Eu não lembro de quase nada daquele mês, e com freqüência eu não lembrava de conversas tidas horas antes, ou de tarefas cumpridas na semana anterior. Recentemente eu tive que conferir alguns cálculos feitos aquela época para o trabalho, e fui ver os logs do Stata: eu refiz os mesmos cálculos várias vezes — cheguei ao número errado várias vezes, lembrava de que havia algo de errado com aquele número embora não conseguisse recordar o que, refazia o cálculo com outra metodologia de ponderação e encontrava o número que eu queria, o número que existia como uma imagem fuzzy na minha cabeça — sem nem mesmo pensar que tudo existia no log.

I use last.fm, which means in effect I’m giving up large ammounts of privacy — the kind of music I listen to — for the sake of social networking (which in the end I don’t use at all) and fun stats. And that’s okay; at least the terms of service assure me that

We won’t pass your email address on to anyone, not even Lars Ulrich at gunpoint.

Sure, it also claims that

We reserve the right to sell or license pseudonymous listening data for commercial use, however we will never sell your personal data that can be traced back to a specific user. We may, for example, license our weekly charts for commercial use. This would not compromise any personal information.

But then today I started getting ads in hebrew characters in my Gmail. I don’t ever receive or send emails with hebrew characters, or in Hebrew, or related to Israel in any kind or form.

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As you can see, my Gmail is set to portuguese language, and except for automated newsletters most every email I receive or send is in portuguese. I’ve been intrigued for most of the day. Then, just fifteen minutes ago, a friend was complaining about an annoying message she had been sent on last.fm. I went there to check and saw this:

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As you can see clearly on the right it says “Link patrocinado”, which means “Sponsored link”. It’s not a feed I subscribe to.

Of course, just this morning I dusted off a CD I had received as a gift when I was a teenager and ripped it to iTunes. The title on the cover says “Hava Nagila and other Jewish Melodies”, but the CDDB-derived title was written in hebrew characters.

And then the two things clicked. What kind of sinister coincidence is this?