2018.06.15 - Day 93

Yes, the ‘Big Red Book’, as students called it, is pretty heavy Storm  I also have a pile of notebooks I used on the course. I remember sitting in Sainsburys café writing little descriptions of people around me to sharpen my observational skills. A bit like Steve doing his sketches. There is a creative writing MOOC starting September, in case you might be interested, but mostly on writing fiction. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/start-writing-fiction

I checked out a book I heard a recommendation for, ‘This is your Brain on Music,’ about the neuroscience of our brains concerning music and again found I already had the book. I better finish Tart’s book and start these other books.

I have been working with Eckhart Tolle's suggestion of putting attention into your hands as a way of practicing presence. At first there didn't seem to be much to it, but it got more interesting once I realized that there is an important distinction between actually putting my attention into my hands versus just thinking about my hands. It's like feeling my hands from the inside. It takes a deliberate effort. When I do it, there is a definite sense of a shift in my center of awareness. It's also interesting to observe how quick and strong the impulse is for my attention to flip from my hands back into thinking (which includes thinking about what just happened when I placed my attention in my hands).

In place of Tart's morning exercise, I've now decided to do a Focusing session with myself in the morning, whenever I can. For those not familiar with Focusing, here is a link to a description of one approach to it: https://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2234.html

I've also been putting more attention into daytime lucid dream practice for the last week or so. I've had brief lucid dreams for 3 nights in a row now. I still can't stay in the dream long enough to do anything interesting.

I'm going to end my active participation in this 99-day exercise after day 99. This has been very valuable, but I feel like I need to take a break for a while. If a new 99 days is started at some time in the future, I will definitely be interested. Looking forward to continuing the dream sessions and hopefully other PaB activities too. edited 18:52, 15 Jun 2018

Thank you Zen! I'll give that a go. The same organization also does a shorter one for poetry that I can do straightaway. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/how-to-make-a-poem . It hadn't occurred to me to look for these courses. Thank you again for that. :))

LONG POST ALERT: Please skip if you're not interested in Mastodon!

Assuming that you want to give Mastodon a go, how do you join? You join a particular instance. That will give you a particular local community and through that community links to other communities. But which one should you join? It's really nice to find a place that feels like home. On the other hand, if you get it wrong, don't worry because you can join another instance and migrate over there.

The things to consider are:
Niche or general
Number of users
Code of conduct etc
Sample timeline
Links to other instances
Volume of toots
How are they financed
Open or closed

Niche or general: There are general interest instances (e.g. mastodon.social), instances for artists (e.g. mastodon.ART), writers (wandering.shop and writing.exchange), academics and teachers (scholar.social), left-wing politics (todon.nl), Unix enthusiasts and other techies (mastodon.technology, mastodon.sdf.org and many more), LGBTQI+ (lgbt.io, queer.party and many more), and many other niches. There are helpers to help find a good instance for you. https://joinmastodon.org/#getting-started is one most people have seen, though it often has a fairly short list. Another is https://instances.social/ which will give you long lists of over 2000 instances that you can easily sort. (I've heard about more than 4000, but many are just personal and family ones.)

Number of users: How many users are on an instance? Do you like being anonymous in a huge crowd (the Japanese general instance pawoo.net has nearly 400,000 users!) or in a smaller more sociable place with a hundred or so users. Many of the niche instances have 1000 users plus or minus, which seems a good balance of size to me.

Code of conduct etc: On their About pages, instances have links to their code of conduct (How stringent/relaxed are they? Do they provide a safe space? Do they screen out the bad guys? What posts do they allow and disallow?). And they may say why they exist, whether there's advertising, how they're supported etc. - all things that will give you a feel about the place.

Sample timeline: On the About page you'll often see a scrolling series of toots that users are making on that instance. Are they in a language you can read? Are they interesting people? About interesting subjects? Click on a user to get their time line. Click on the people they're following. If you see a user ID like this @xxxxx it means they're part of the instance you're looking at. If it says @xxxxx@yyyyy.zzz then they're part of another instance, and maybe you want to put yyyyy.zzz in your browser to investigate that one.

Links to other instances: You can follow your friends on other instances, if this instance is connected to them. But some instances have exclusions because of conflicts between Codes of Conduct, or strong conflicts of interest (think politics and religion here). This can sometimes be hard to find out.

Volume of toots:
Toots are like tweets in birdland, though over there tweet is a verb and a noun, whereas on Mastodon users toot (verb) their status (noun). Is the place quiet or busy? (Statuses divided by users gives a rough idea. The time between toots on the timeline gives another.)

How are they financed: Nearly all are free to use, but the admin still has bills to pay. I've never seen an instance that allows advertising. Most accept donations or have a Patreon page. Some are cooperatives. Allegedly some have tried sign-on fees - see Nolan Lawson's blog for that.

Open or closed:
Some instances let you (or anyone) sign up from their About page. They're open. Others are closed. Why? Perhaps they're purging bots, maintaining the server, updating the server software, or perhaps they feel they are reaching their upper limit of users. Some instances may need you to be sponsored or recommended by a known good user. Others you simply email the admin at their published address. A closed instance can sometimes be better if a little inconvenient at first.

An example of the open/closed thing. My wife (SL: Jobe) was enthused by my encounters with Mastodon and wanted to join. As she's a professional artist (and works at home as an artist as well), I suggested she joined the instance called mastodon.ART. It has 6500 users but it is currently closed. We looked through some of the users via one of my accounts, found a young British artist who had an Etsy account, really liked her stuff, bought a couple of artworks and asked her for a mastodon.ART invite (which all users on an instance can usually give out). The invitation came (the British artist hadn't known the instance was currently closed), Jobe registered, signed on, built a profile, sent out an introductory toot, and made some quick friends and settled in at home. :)) edited 01:42, 16 Jun 2018

Alma you have a very clear way of describing these practices, and the why. Thank you.

Strange day with odd rhythms and an upset stomach that has come and gone, off and on. Feeling restless, not in a bad way, just that there is energy building. So the challenge becomes to take note and not attach this to that unnecessarily. Let be. :)

Watched a bit of the World Cup. Considered my, to some, strange ways of being involved with some things. I'm rarely a fan of whole teams, but within each game certain players or dynamics emerge. Similarly, if I think about 'favorite' things, such as films or songs, there is almost no whole that is my favorite, rather scenes, or expressions, or unusual lines that mosaic.

It has taken me a long time not to apologize too much for not giving the answers people expect when they ask these kinds of trivial questions, but I’ve not yet come to a place of not apologizing for not doing/seeing some other, more ‘important’ things the way many others seem to. I've realized over these weeks tracking relationships, especially family relationships, that it is just very hard to say "this is different for me" without seeming to be ungrateful. My tendency is to to qualify and contextualize, but it is really okay not to be understood.

Just like these rambles I guess. :)


added: posted and then see a nice long post from Storm that I'll come back to read with fresh eyes. :) edited 02:00, 16 Jun 2018

Thanks for this detail, Storm. I'm going to try Mastodon, but not quite yet, so am saving this page. Glad that Jobe found a community there. :)

Last night's dreaming worked with some of my ramblings from my earlier post here, bringing me a little further understanding. That things come forward differently for me is not what some have a hard time understanding with me. It is more that when the other things recede, they recede so far back that it takes a bit long for me to pull them forward again. I'll almost forget entirely. This is a weird comment but actually helps me a lot to see, and hopefully to be more patient. :) edited 12:56, 16 Jun 2018