Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

This is a long article -and I had already posted it in a couple of other places, but I feel it is an important discussion for those of us who live part of our lives in these spaces:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

I've been a bit worried on how much we depend on Zuck's apps for a while. Alas, the two branchs of my family (in Italy and in Venezuela), most of my friends and pretty much all of my pupils communicate with me using either FB, Whatsapp or, to a lesser extent, Instagram and Messenger. Even the neighbours of the building where I live communicate via a WA group. Yes, well, I have accounts on Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc -but they don't and inertia keeps things as they are. And then we get yesterday's outage. And, interestingly, the congressional testimony. I wasn't gloating (as many were on twitter) for losing access to these apps. But I will be pushing a little harder for alternatives, futile as that endeavour may seem.

A rather technical explanation of what happens, here:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/

FWIW as I don't know absolutely anybody in there -and it is one more in a long list of things that want to send me notifications, that you have to keep an eye on just in case, etc. Nonetheless, I seem to be in Mastodon:

https://mastodon.social/@fflavio

One of these days one of those things might catch on and slowly replace Twitter or FB. Not holding my breath, mind -how many of those have there been, already?

More people leaving LJ for DW. And some probably will leave LJ and never quite make it to DW, not needing this livejournal thing of an app that is halfway between blogging and social networking. I hope enough of the people in my f-list do that the conversation may continue in a place different to Facebook, which had still happened in LJ in spite of the FB steamroller and the failure of all the FB alternatives from Diaspora to Ello.

This, btw, is crossposted to LJ from Dreamwidth.

On a Met line train, making my way out of London for my teaching day in Watofordo. Running very late, won't be able to move stuff around (which will prevent me from using my printer, locked in a filing cabinet in my old teaching room which I cannot use because of a broken window mechanism that the school hasn't had time to fix, it's only been nine months since I reported it for the first time). This is probably going to be an interesting teaching day. As per the old supposedly Chinese curse.

The BT/Openreach engineer came yesterday, fixed the line, confirmed that 'somebody' had disconnected me to connect somebody else. This makes me wonder how long I will have telephone and internet before it happens again if it happened twice within 36 hours.

Elbow seems to be healing well but now I'm getting pain in my wrist (and more creaking when I turn it -not liking this much) and have noticed bruises on my knee and my leg that I hadn't noticed before, maybe because of the elbow. I should be able to play the guitar by the end of the week. I hope so; it is so much more long-winded to explain things in words than to demonstrate guitar in hand, even if you have the right words

Wondering about some friendships of mine (ok, one) that seem to be one way only, as in 'I try to be a friend, the other person tolerates my friendship'. That is not a satisfactory situation and I think I'll just get out of their hair. Anyone who reads this and knows my recent history will probably know who I'm talking about. Not their fault, we all are how we are.

Need to push the house-concert microgig idea more and get myself a few recitals for the summer. I'm so rubbish at 'selling the product', though. Need an agent, clearly... but that's another minefield.

Well, that's the current state of the flavio, I think. That, and strange dreams of loss and recovery and strange but familiar distant cities.

Well, the last few days have been rather strange and testing. In minor ways, nothing very dramatic but all the little things together do accumulate.

The most dramatic bit (or perhaps the most ridiculous one) must be my getting run over by a bicycle while coming back from feeding a travelling friend's cat. This resulted in a fractured radius, which impacts rather a lot of what I do: I cannot drive, lift weights... more importantly, I cannot play the guitar, which makes teaching it rather more complicated -half a bar of music demonstrated to a pupil can be worth hundreds of words. Literally. I also cannot properly wash or shower or do anything that requires two functional arms. Stretching or bending my left arm results in horrific shooting pain. Moving it at certain angles produces an intense pain that is very much like a cramp. Luckily (?) the bone didn't break, just fractured lengthwise and didn't change its position. Also feeling, curiously, like I let my friend down, somehow. One good thing is that the Royal Free Hospital people reassure me it won't take six weeks for me to be playing the guitar. Now, they do require me to do exercises stretching, flexing and rotating the arm. In other words, all the things that currently make me scream in agony...

The internet situation is even more strange. I had reported that my telephone line and broadband were dead. An engineer came on Monday and sorted it out, telling me that somebody ('a contractor, surely') had just disconnected me in order to connect somebody else. He reconnected me and I had internet and telephone... for less than 36 hours. Yesterday evening the line was dead again. I need the internet for a lot of stuff, partly for my teaching (I do a couple of online lessons) and communication with my pupils in several ways, apart from everything else I use it for. If that engineer was right I might be getting a sort of war of attrition, if BT/Openreach are going to be coming to fix that line for it to be pulled by ... whoever is doing it. This is unsustainable. We'll have to wait and see.

One little thing that compounds the internet situation is that I have very poor mobile reception in my flat. With luck I get enough to make phone calls (which often become warbly or get cut off). This hasn't always been the case and started about a year and a half ago. It means that in order to get some very patchy, very very slow internet I must put my mobile phone out the window and then tether the computer to it. Absurd, in these days. There's been a couple of other irritants these last few days but that's probably enough to mention. Nothing fatal, nothing big enough to warrant a good fit of sobbing screaming, but...

I've been taking a trial month of Netflix and then of Amazon Prime. The choice in Netflix seems to be rather limited but not being tied to a yearly plan but rolling month by month is a little more attractive to me than paying yearly lump sums. We'll see what I decide in the end, if anything. I've been told that there are hacks to gain access to the US Netflix which apparently has much more choice but haven't looked into that yet.

Science-fiction choices seem to be particularly scarce and a little disappointing. On Netflix -little and old. I've watched Iron Sky (finally; a lot of fun), Tron Legacy (but I never saw the original.. and they don't seem to have it either), the two Hobbit movies (ok, that's not SF), a couple of other things. I'm not really interested in sit-coms or rom-coms or Scandinavian detective dramas at this point and that would seem to be the bulk of the choice. Most of what I've done so far in Netflix has been to run nature and space documentaries (but there aren't that many of the latter) while I practise my scales on the guitar. I also watched 'Prometheus' and a couple of other things on Prime, including the first few episodes of 'Vikings' a series about which I knew nothing but quite liked thus far, with some reservations.

Last night, watching 'Event Horizon' on Netflix . Beginning to get confused between this and Prometheus! Those pesky aliens.. coming here to this planet to take our jobs and our movies. And I was kind of expecting the rather younger Morpheus to start offering blue and red pills to his personnel.

I'm still not entirely convinced about either, slightly in favour of Prime currently....

Woke up to find I cannot gain access to my livejournal pages; I get an 'Access Denied' page. This happens across multiple browsers and two computers but I can get (as I'm doing now) from my phone nad iPad if I switch wi-fi off (as I'm evidently doing now). This would seem to indicate that my IP is banned from the site. Irritating and perplexing, this. Have mailed their web support, will see what happens. Not enormously happy about this.

The more I look at Ello the more I wonder. Livejournal can do all that Ello can and a whole lot more. So can Dreamwidth, the LJ clone. So probably can a number of the pretenders to the Facebook Killer crown that have appeared and quietly fallen by the wayside over the years. I hope they do get it right and I would be willing to pay (a small amount) for something that worked ok and had the right policies as well as the right set of features. But my friends and family would have to be in it -and therein may lie the rub.

I would seem to be in Ello (thank you, antid0te!) -maybe because I don't have enough social net sites to keep track of? er, wait... in any case, if you would like to add me, I'm https://ello.co/fflavio over there