bear

I've been busy the last little while! November update first.

( New York: meandering through Manhattan on a perfect fall day, foliage, serendipitous Brompton test ride, C Pam Zhang reading, finally went up the Empire State Building after 27 years?! )

( Boston: bagel delivery service, proper trains, finally getting to ride the Community Path Extension, never enough time with friends )

( Stravinsky tech week )

( Monterey: Hyoun runs, I find all the good food and the last remaining bookstore in Carmel, you all are shocked )

And amid all this sleep-deprived timezone confused chaos, I may have gotten into overenthusiastic bikesplaining mode with a friend of a friend on Facebook re bike infrastructure, and only realized after the fact that said person was somebody I'd gone out on a couple of dates with back in the day (🔒). ROFLMAO. Hyoun cracked up listening to me come to this realization in realtime. Me: "What, you'd been reading my LJ for three years by the time we got together and you knew me for years before that, you knew what you were getting into!" H, smiling fondly: "Sure did." Some things have changed, but clearly some things remain the same. :D

I *thought* this was going to cover November, but we're already past the 1500 word mark and I'm only up to November 13; Thanksgiving next time, I guess!

Imagine the setting. There are about 170 choristers onstage at the Paramount Theatre, along with the Oakland Symphony. We’re at final dress rehearsal for today’s holiday concert. It’s Oakland Symphony Chorus, Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, along with choirs from Cal State Hayward and like four area high schools.

The orchestra conductor has his baton up for the downbeat of What’s Love Got To Do With It, when several dozen cell phones START PLAYING THE bereal CHIME.

Oh my god the youth energy, 🤣, I love it. Happy holiday concerts to everyone else performing today! (Original post.)

Least flattering, most heartwarming photos of precious time with my Boston best beloveds Saturday night. Catching up since the last time (six months or four years) amid pizza devouring, cookie baking, genial mockery, and all of the laughter. We love and miss you all. 😘 (Original post has more pictures.)

If you ever get a chance to hear Sam Beam (Iron and Wine) perform Flightless Bird, American Mouth a cappella in person, DO IT. One of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

Also, he’s a decent vocal percussionist, too 😁 (Original post.)

Still have a longer entry coming up about both Death Cab/Postal Service shows, but I totally cracked up tonight at Sam hyping up The Postal Service: "You guys ready for some hot licks and electronic love?" Which I promptly texted to Hyoun, telling him, "Yeah, this is what some married guy said to me tonight. Okay, and 18,000 others, he was the guy with the mic at that point." ggl

14 years married as of today! Still the best choice I made, to love you, to continue loving you through all the twists and turns of our lives. You’re the bestest. (Original post.)

Boston is well-known for its large student population. I think the latest numbers have 350,000 students living in the metro Boston area, with something like 150,000 students living in the city of Boston proper (which only has a population of about 650,000 people total). Boston University alone has 35,000 students, many of whom live in the Allston neighborhood of Boston.

Moving Day is September 1, when A. Lot. of these apartments turn over their leases. It's a great time to go get Free Stuff, Especially Furniture, if you're one of the lucky ones sticking around for another year; this is how it got the name Allston Christmas. I took advantage of it during my early-twenty-something years living nearby in the Fenway, hauling coffee tables and end tables and folding bookcases home on the T and then up to my third-floor walkup. (Never upholstered stuff, though, no matter what!)

Discovering that SOMEBODY IS MAKING A ROMCOM MOVIE ABOUT ALLSTON CHRISTMAS?! Utterly, utterly delights me. :D (And the Allston Christmas Story IndieGoGo is still open for another couple of days.)

"“An Allston Christmas Story” is a love letter to our city, written with the trappings of a campy Hallmark movie and traces of the supernatural. Three intertwined stories follow our Bostonians as they navigate the mean streets of Allston and their own relationships. Join us on this journey about love, heartbreak, loss, friendship, cursed furniture, and making it to the basement show on time!"

Facebook memories, both mine and my friends', smacking me in the face this morning reminding us that it has been THIRTY YEARS TODAY since The X-Files debuted on network television. A show that Julie and Elaina had to persuade me to watch because I was definitely a child of shiny optimistic future sci-fi shows at that point (*cough* Star Trek: TNG), unsure about the creepier-looking horror-type elements in the preview.

The three of us sitting in the common room, chowing down on Ben and Jerry's, feeling the tension rise as Mulder checked Scully's back for unexplainable puncture wounds, then relax as they proved to be mosquito bites. Relief that Mr. Stockdale didn't walk into the common room until after that scene, because otherwise he probably would've made us turn it off, seeing a woman onscreen in mostly just her underwear with zero context. (Little would any of us know how paltry an amount of emotional/romantic/sexual payoff the show would provide us over its run - at the very least until we were all well over the age of majority! - certainly nothing Mr. Stockdale had to worry about impressionable teenagers consuming, ahahaha!) Me, afterwards, still unsure of the scarier bits but intrigued by the characters, now with a new Friday night routine: grocery shopping, then running from the bus to claim the common room for our show.

That a TV show would lead to me meeting so many people through what we were then referring to in vaguely-near-futuristic terms such as "the world wide web," still in the realm of fantasy for all but the earliest of adopters - beyond my ability to conceive at that point. But I would go off to college a few years down the road. Lose track of XF for the fall of my freshman year in the excitement of making new friends, being in my first romantic relationship ever. My roommate Shay would bring a TV back from the winter holiday break, and we would be flipping through the channels with Ingrid one night, sitting on Shay's bed, and discover that Friday had become Sunday. That Mulder and Scully were still out there, that the monster of the week ate cancer, and was going after Scully at the climax of the episode, and BOOM I was sucked back in.

Later that night, I would go on Yahoo! Search, and my search queries would lead me to a weekly post-episode chat and mailing list where people were discussing not only the plot twists, but the character relationships. The above-mentioned romantic relationship I was in would fall apart the same week (blessing barely in disguise); the people I met through that chat became friends for life, providing perspectives of life outside the college bubble when it all became too much for me.

I would go to my first in-person meetup with them later that summer in Vancouver, run around X-Files filming sites, squealing in delight; it felt like summer camp for XF fans. Make it an annual gathering for a few years, whether in Vancouver again or DC or NYC (the weekend I graduated!) or Vegas. Watch friends fall in love because of this chat channel, even from across countries and oceans, move to be with each other. Their experiences eventually giving me the chutzpah to start dating somebody I'd basically met online myself (well, set up by a friend, "secretly but blatantly,"), years before most of my in-person friends did, and every time I would go visit him in DC and we'd take the Metro somewhere, I'd laugh, thinking of how me and my XF friends had belted out David Duchovny, Why Won't You Love Me? on the Orange Line from Metro Center all the way out to Ballston, and how I had met all of them partly because of this technology that barely existed when I was growing up, but also the motivation of connecting over what we loved.

Layers of nostalgia building on each other across a lifetime, connecting everything and everyone and making me smile, even if the results of ever trying to explain end up with "... that was not remotely what I was expecting to hear, and I love that a weirdo like you is in my life." That my Sunday night routine became running back to my dorm room with ladysisyphus after rehearsal so that we could watch XF together on the little 12" TV I'd hauled back to my dorm room on the bus from the mall, but I'd always hop onto chat afterwards. That eventually chat became LiveJournal, then Facebook, but the friendship ties remained.

And now, even after all these years, still keeping up with each others' lives. Still having them over for dinner on our front porch. Still planning to get together the next time we're in each others' cities. (Still convinced we should've taken over XF and detangled everyone from the ridiculous, no-payoff "mytharc," even though that longer, not-limited-to-one-episode storytelling arc would become more prevalent over the following decades, and be done much, much better with other series.)

Still out there.

Yeah, so earlier this summer, I got a bug up my butt about "given how the wider internet is going to hell, how about I centralize my archives in one place?"

So I'm looking at Twitter and trying to figure out how to actually get my tweet archive into Dreamwidth, and what I want that to look like, and what tools actually exist to help with that right now. I think, ideally:

* I have something like 22,000 tweets. I would *really* like to not create 22,000 Dreamwidth entries, even if I can automate this import somehow. I will absolutely not be manually creating 22,000 DW entries!

* It would be lovely if these imported tweet posts could be posted private, or access-only.

* Ideally, the import tool would make one post per day, including multiple tweets in a post if they exist.

* Uber-ideally, the import tool knows how to handle uploading images to Dreamwidth :) and in the 5 <1% (I just looked at the media folder in my tweet archive; out of 1120 media files, 29 are .mp4s and 59 are .pngs; everything else is a .jpg) of cases where the media is an .mp4, figure out a way to fail kindly until I can get the movie files uploaded somewhere at least linkable, if not necessarily embeddable.

Have any of you done this before? Or know of any tools that do? ... or is the real answer going to be "guess what, Bear, you get to figure out how you want to translate the tweets.js format into a Dreamwidth-importable format!"? LOL. (And, um, what does that latter bit look like?) Though it looks like currently, the importer only works directly with other LJ-based sites, so I can't fling an appropriately-formatted file at it from my desktop.

I've been thinking about danah boyd's recent post on the current state of Twitter alternatives, along with the context of being a relative Internet Old.

( my early internet participant context: .plans and fingering and retroactively understanding it as a social network )

What struck me most in boyd's analysis is the idea that the slow internal growth of networks was also one of the most significant stabilizing factors. It's paralleled my overall internet experience; many of my LJ friends simply never made the transition over to Dreamwidth, for example, despite whatever logical and emotional reasons to move were provided, illustrated in stories. At the time, we wrote off most of this to "network lock-in;" hanging out on the internet where the largest pure number of "my people" were as a way to optimize ROI on staying in touch with as many people as possible. Which illustrates how the majority of us ended up on Facebook, and slowly, the rich sharing we enjoyed on earlier networks atrophied, bowdlerized into pablum for audiences that now included people with even less of an understanding of the norms of the Internet and its communities that came before. >_>

And then of course, how you found your friends on social media in the 2010s was by uploading your contact lists. Trying to find my friends on 2023 social media like Bluesky and Mastodon has involved third parties that, to the average person, feel like their functionality and respect for data privacy is just as opaque as the more convenient if dangerous method of uploading a contact list.

Among my friends that remain active here on Dreamwidth, it seems like it's been primarily the geeks and the fen, both communities with at least a baseline commonality of norms not true of the broader Internet, long-accustomed to needing to move internet homes every so often, whether seeking novelty or security, and bringing their people along with, most of whom were used to coping with some level of inconvenience and inaccessibility.

But on a more personal level, it makes my recent archival project of centralizing and preserving my own broader internet archives on Dreamwidth feel like the ultimate "context collapse." For the me of 20 years ago, I posted on Planworld to keep in touch with primarily college friends, and I posted to LiveJournal to keep in touch with my online friends, most of whom at that time I'd met through X-Files fandom, or through volunteering for LiveJournal Support. Noting the differences in how I talked about my life; who knew what of me at the time. As the years passed, I built up my post-grad friends circles both in Boston and online, some of whom overlapped in fandom or geekdom, but many of whom didn't. But LiveJournal (and fandom) had gotten mainstream ~enough~, and my circles melded enough, that I grew into feeling comfortable writing for this blended audience, all of whom I counted as friends.

But for newer friends whom I might want to share older posts with, the context feels odd. Like, to give a recent example, trying to explain to the newer Planworld members currently in their early 20s that I was among the first of my college friends to date somebody I'd met on the Internet, even kind of? That almost nobody was on Match.com, that Tinder et al didn't exist? While at the same time, many of my online friends had been in relationships that started on the internet years prior to geebee_x dragging me and a law school friend of hers into an AIM chatroom one night in October 2001 to “secretly yet blatantly” set us up (🔒). But also, that most of the people with whom I was sharing these musings back then were people I had ongoing pre-existing relationships with, whether that was years in the same classrooms and clubs or years in the same chatrooms and mailing lists; that even in bringing new friends into the fold, my networks were mostly growing pretty slowly with specific contexts intact?

I feel a similar awkward butterfly-shedding-its-chrysalis around opening up here again, too - I've been away for so long, and I know I haven't kept up with many of you even elsewhere in recent years. But it still feels like part of how I want to be on the internet; be the change you want to see, be a person talking with other people in an otherwise transactional, influencer-capitalist society.

And I'm only up to summer 2003*! I wonder how I'm going to feel once I really start pulling in tweet threads and Facebook updates and Instagram pictures that stopped getting automatically backed up on Flickr and here.

• Granted, summer 2003 and the people I met because of it were far more pivotal to my life than I could recognize at the time I was living it!

It took a lot longer to return to Boston for another visit than planned.

When we last hugged everyone "until next time," it was a chilly, slushy late December week in 2019; we stayed with bitty and arfur and baked up a storm, prepping for Jewmas on our last night in town. Made it to Burdicks and Harvard Books; managed to grab bellinis and tapas with Ingrid the night we flew in and the night before she flew out; admired danamae's adorable and fast-growing kids; checked out the fancy new French joint with mrieser. Bemused the BC crowd walking into chez noghri and Cris with a bewildering amount of home-baked cookies (chocolate toffee classics, (passionfruit) meringue swirls, (fivespice) chocolate hazelnut baklava, (raspberry) chocolate chip cookies, and Baby Yodas based on BA's black-and-white-and-green cookies), safely maintaining my reputation of being ~juuust~ a bit extra. Hugged Bitty and Arthur goodbye Christmas morning as it began to snow, blithely declaring that of course we'd be back soon and could paint our hands on their closet then. Missed jpallan and crschmidt due to illness, but weren't too concerned; we'd catch them next time, right?

( my heart, my heart; you don't have to go home in a straight line )