riga @riga@refactorcamp.org

#introduction

~ Hi Everyone ~

I'm glad this space exists and looking forward to spending some time here. Some things about me:

- web developer for money
- slow burning music projects on the side
- politics/philosophy/psychology buff
- ribbonfarm afficionado

in the spirit of further #introduction, some random things that preoccupy me:

- maintaining a generous sphere of personal freedom while being embedded in society in a fulfilling way
- dreams of next-gen composition tools for virtual modular synthesizers
- thinking about how to make North American cities beautiful and functional in spite of decades of car culture
- recognizing and grappling with spooky psychological antipatterns: mine and others'

Read receipts are an invasion of privacy. If you ever have a choice to implement them or not, don’t do it.

Burlesque shows basically get this idea right — sex is totally absurd!!

@riga To me, sex is the most ridiculous thing ppl do on a regular basis. So I find it hard to imagine taking it seriously enough to care that ppl do it in a particular configuration.

It’s very weird how who other ppl wanna boink is of the greatest concern to many ppl.

I think I found the right phrase to describe my dayjob writing line of business apps: “bureaucratic plumbing”

Reflecting on the breakdown of my last relationship. Combining someone whose greatest fear is engulfment with someone whose greatest fear is rejection... what could go wrong?

also strategically, it’s a wedge conservatives can take advantage of: “look at these urban elites who now want to use our taxes to fund college for their kids.” and on that count, i think they might be right.

@riga free college only makes sense as a progressive position if you take for granted that the only way you can escape precarity is by joining the academically credentialed administrative elite. besides being a dying strategy on its own terms (desk workers now got that precarity too), it concedes too soon that we can’t make a truly egalitarian economy.

Cold take: free college tuition is not actually that progressive, since college isn’t for everyone. Instead, we should be enhancing the social safety net so nobody feels like they have to go to college in order to avoid precarity.

mmmmm... it’s worth getting the more expensive pesto

Fun fact for my lefties: The Guardian opposed the creation of the British National Health Service on the grounds that it would weaken the gene pool. IMO they’re the best English speaking ‘left’ news outlet with global reach, but you gotta take the ‘left’ with a grain of salt.

idea: version control with first class support for embedding comments on specific lines of code in the commit, rather than in the source itself. would ideally solve the problem of comments getting out of sync with the code being commented. does this already exist?

Imagine being able to challenge any common practice of modern industrial society and picking routine vaccination.

I think it's gonna have to be my next big trip abroad.

Watching RA's Japan city guides. It looks like Japan is very good at aesthetics.