On Texts
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
In all of my coffee rabble about our digital state, I failed to mention my success in implementing DataTables within this Minimal-Mistakes theme, something I last referenced a month ago on July 18. While I initially thought I might have to include another source of jQuery—which, looking back, makes no sense, but, LIFE, has never been advanced by the Monday morning's armchair QB. Ultimately, my calling forth the script is where everything fell apart. I couldn't call it via a script tag inside the markdown (and for what its worth, I've found markdown tables to be unsortable), so, I have included it in the <head>. Not the most elegant solution as its on every page, but, if I ever wanted to call a table using the same ID on a different page...booya!
And NOW, I have a sortable and searchable table of My Reading List Since May! I even went back and added a Goodreads URL for each title. And while hand-coding the HTML for this sort of thing might come off as daunting, all I had to do was use the columns I already had set up in Libre Calc, add another for the URL, and stitch it all together beautifully via CONCAT and copy it all down for the 116 entries. And for you who are playing at home:
=CONCAT("<tr><td>",A2,"</td><td>",B2,"</td><td><a href=",CHAR(34),G2,CHAR(34),">",C2,"</a></td><td>",TEXT(D2,"yyyy-mm-dd"),"</td><td>",E2,"</td></tr>")
I'd like to add some sort of favorite authors feature, but, I don't know what that would look like. I would be wholly against any sort of ranking feature of titles as I think that is impossible to do—well, not in terms of a number or a star, any more than I find it amusing that we use a quantitative system to access qualitative success.
Regarding that system, honestly, even a PASS / FALL system is hard to justify unless there's some sort of baseline rubric like...a class on swimming: if the student drowns, that would garner a failing mark. But, as to the rest, if the student comes away from the experience gaining a new insight, did they fail? If Michael Phelps jumped in the pool to join the class, wouldn't it be exponentially harder for him to pass the class within the rigid confines of a rubric, for what could he learn? (beyond observational studies of the flailing failure of humanity) And if a student does not learn in a class, he has failed...which is ridiculous as Michael Phelps was the most dominant swimmer of all-time.
And whether it was high school, undergraduate or graduate studies, I've never valued GPA anymore than something that could get me from point A to point B in as few as many steps required. GPA in of itself has no intrinsic worth.
I realized that tests were not for learning (growth) assessment. They were just cute games of trivia where an instructor attempts to trick students into answering incorrectly. Papers and essays were fundamentally a participation grade, which assess no one, for writing is a craft that takes practice, practice, practice (via consumption) and essentially is a vehicle that cannot be improved in a one-shot, 5-page paper. And yet, this is exactly how growth is assessed! Such a paper's merit is graded on its variance from the topic within the scope of its approximation of the MLA format. FORMAT! The thing is, that's an easy thing for an instructor to assess; ideas, however, are notoriously difficult to grade. You can have a technically great paper that argues for a really dumb idea.
The De-Spotification Exultation
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
I did it. I left Spotify FOR GOOD. Yeah, I know, I just signed up again on Sunday evening, but, hear me out: it never quite sat well with me. There was never the "I love it when a plan comes together" moment for me. Sure, I was back in the driver seat with those well-worn controls with my go-to playlists honed from hours of my craftmanship. Yet, I felt...regret. It did not bring me joy, unlike when I left the platform in the rear view mirror.
And while I struggle with its scope and the articulation thereof, I know that my attitude towards Spotify is part of a larger narrative about our virtual society and our place within it. And perhaps this is the fate of us whom are a bridge between two worlds, those of us whom possess a high level of tech fluency, but, are not naturalized.
I was 17 when I first came online in 1995, and I can remember richly the world that was before the widescale adoption of the Internet, a realm where cell phones were literally telephones enhanced by their mobility, an environment where we were NOT tracked as our individual habits and demographics uploaded to databases, and we didn't have crowdsourced (Google) answers to everything at our fingertips.
There are qualitative and quantitative differences between those whom remember how things were, versus those whom grew up alongside the Internet. For them, it is because it always has been: it's OK (to them) that our every movement is tracked online, and by extension, our real world identities, because that's the way it has always been.
Maybe this is why there is not more of an uproar leading to a pullback from industry. In general, it all comes off like a tech giant standing in our bathroom during our morning shower, posts a "It's all cool, bruh" PR release, and continues to stand in our window at night.
Big Tech just never asks those why questions—sure, you can drive and take Street View images everywhere you go and scan local WiFi networks while you're at it, but, should you? If a corporation is an individual, then an individual who does that is a bit of a stalker, or at the very least, a creep.
But, it's more than that...it's a LOT more. What we watch, what we listen to, what we purchase, where we go, who are friends are, what we do to have fun, where we work, crescendoing into greater power by future rollouts of ubiquitous IoT tech—ALL that data on everyone is a LOT of power; J. Edgar Hoover's famed dossiers immediately come to my mind. And while that kind of control/manipulation on an individual level is frightening, I'd argue that wielding such great power to shape the macro is more disturbing.
The Midnight & Timecop1983 - Arcade Dreams - RMX
Monday, August 17, 2020
Listening to the remix of The Midnight's Arcade Dreams brought me back to Spotify. OK, so it was a LOT more, or more accurately, the potential of a LOT more.
I love music, I do. I appreciate High Fidelity's autobiographical organization of a record collection. I love the tactile element of its ritual for preparation. It feels real, as if I'm holding my soul in one hand and a time machine in the other. I felt that today as I held my vinyl of Simon & Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme—so many memories of the faces in the mists.
The problem is, I no longer own the albums I once did.
And while I like them in a vacuum, as part of the whole picture, even if they were dumped by the truckload for FREE, it would clash with my desire for simplicity—invoking minimalism almost comes off as a cliché these days, and honestly, that's a hard position to define. While I value complexity, it is simplicity that we seek, even if the simple is complex and the complex is simple.
Yesterday, I found myself more consumed with music than when I had Spotify—not a great trend—as I considered strategies of building a small collection. I even put a few dollars toward that objective, which ran counter to my initial intent of cost savings.
Would I continue to spend time & treasure on music?
As far as the last post on the inundation of data, I'll be exploring ways to serve up a greater experience at this buffet. Today, I enjoyed jazz CDs that were $1 thrift store finds. It was a special delight of discovery.
But, do I want to resurrect a collection? No, of course not! I weighed the benefits of buying a vinyl of The Midnight's Nocturnal, but, if I bought that, then I would want to buy something else, followed by another purchase and loop that one right up into Ecclesiastes.
Perhaps the takeaway from this whole experience is my recognizing Spotify as a tool to diminish materialism's icy grip. It also highlights to me how many good, old albums are out there that I miss. I know, I know, it almost comes off like Cinderella's Don't Know What You've Got ( Till It's Gone).