Month: January 2019

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Sex and drugs, two pathways to altering consciousness. Making aspects of them illegal to support an institutional agenda of subjugation is in effect a war on consciousness from the State. The State sees these as threats to its institutions and programs of control. 

Activist Conner Habib:

“Once you start to self-actualise by investigating your own consciousness you become a threat.”

I stumbled upon Mary Jane, a cannabis lifestyle blog edited by Mira Gonzales and owned by Snoop Dogg. Just one of those random things that happen at 5:30 in the morning. It showed up in my twitter feed (actually the podcast link showed up in my feed and in the spirit of discovery I pressed play and kept on listening to the end.)

It was interesting conversation between Mira, the host, and her guests activist Conner Habib and feminist professor Dr Heather Berg. Some of the perspective they shared on sex work, porn, and drug work I found intriguing, like this idea of exploring consciousness through sex and drugs as being a threat to the establishment’s money-making agenda. Sex sells is the common notion. But actually, it’s not sex that sells it’s the transference of the arousal brought on by looking at a sexy model standing next to an exploded image of beer that sells the beer.  Basically, the ad is beaming thoughts to your subconsciousness mind that you’re never gonna get the girl in the ad, but the feelings you’re feeling can be satisfied by drinking the beer. Or something like that.

Anyway, check out the episode. You can watch it here or listen to it on iTunes.

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Getting meta on you for a second.

One of the things I’ve been working on of the past couple of weeks is my blogging workflow. Admittedly I’ve been focusing on the Newsletter (which, by the way, if you haven’t signed up for it, you should. I’ve renamed it Eclectically Curios to reflect where I’m going with the whole “learn something new everyday” motif). I’m 23 issues in and feel relative happy with the direction it’s taking.

Now to integrate the newsletter and the blog…

Because, despite all of the rhetoric about blogging being dead, I believe the blog is alive and well – for some. And yeah, while the good old days of personal blogging, where everyone pretty much just bled their hearts out onto the screen (they do that on social media now), may be gone, blogging is not dead, it has just evolved.

And I believe it’s about to evolve again as more and more articles and blogposts are throwing the question out there, is social media dying? Plus a number of high profile bloggers back in the day, who jumped ship for social media, are now hinting at returning back to personal blogging in attempt to recapture the blogosphere of the late 90’s early 2000’s.

Of course there is talk that people are turning to closed networks on platforms like WhatsApp, which last year broke the 1.5 billion active monthly users mark. And there are others like Messenger and Telegram, and for the more techie, security caution types, there’s Wire. Of course, being the geek I am, I have a presence on all of them.

I like the questions and conclusions that long-time blogger, Jason Kottke lays out:

Maybe we need to ask ourselves, what was it that we wanted from the blogosphere in the first place? Was it a career? Was it just a place to write and be read by somebody, anybody? Was it a community? Maybe it began as one thing and turned into another. That’s OK! But I don’t think we can treat the blogosphere as a settled thing, when it was in fact never settled at all. Just as social media remains unsettled. Its fate has not been written yet. We’re the ones who’ll have to write it.

Ok, so back to the blogging newsletter things. Knowing that I have limited time (don’t we all), I have to sort out how the blog and the personal newsletter play nicely together without either taking up too much time and the other dying of neglect.

My thinking at the moment is to have the personal newsletter take the lead role and the blog, the supporting role. I haven’t quite worked it out completely, but my initial thoughts are the newsletter is a more personal link from me to you, while the blog is my Internet interface, where, like Rome, all of my connections lead to.

Anyway, that’s the state of affairs for whatever this is that I’m doing.

By the way, I’m writing this in MarsEdit 4.0, a web editing app that allows my to create my posts on or offline. I’m trying it out as a part of nailing down my workflow. The two main features that I like is the ability to compose blogposts in something other than the browser or copying and pasting from Word. The other neat feature is the Safari extension that lets you create a post from an article i’m reading, like what I do with the Revue powered newsletter. That should save me a load of time in my seek, sense, and share mode.

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Chad Dickerson’s words bare repeating:

Maybe if we all gave each other the space to be complex people — not reduced to public perception, our professional bios, our LinkedIn profiles, others’ narratives of who we are — we might understand each other better and give ourselves the room to be messy but wondrous human beings

This is the first thing I read this morning and it has set the tone for the day. The things is, I spend a lot of time fighting with myself inside. On one side of the divide, I’m trying to limit myself online, to niche as as they say, because the logic goes: you’ll attract a larger audience, the narrower you go.

On the other side of the line is me, the renaissance man, the jack of all trades, the curious George into everything.

I hate the idea of putting myself in a narrowly defined boxed.

I like things to be messy.

I feel as human beings we have the capacity to be many things all at the same time and that we don’t need to be small, we can be big and expansive into anything and everything, exploring our curiosity.

We don’t have to be like insects and be specialists. We should indeed celebrate our infinite capacity to be many things.