Candide: Origins
Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2022 3:38 pm
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Previously on Candide (or The Pessimist).
viewtopic.php?t=12355
And now, back to our show . .
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How I got to these forums. The short answer is I got sick of Reddit, and noticed that I was linking again and again to the ERE blog, so I decided to look at the forum.
The short answer is usually less interesting than the longer one, however. . .
I had rejoined Reddit with a new screen name because I was looking ahead and trying to build a kind of hobby I could get in and out of when I enter the zombieland of sleepless nights when the baby comes [1]. (I don’t think Reddit will be able to serve as that hobby, but that is neither here nor there – that’s what I was thinking at the time).
[1] Yes, I am very concerned about that time period. I do particularly badly on a lack of sleep. But I am use to taking huge quality of life hits for defined periods of time to try to get something more meaningful in the future. I remember someone’s journal positing that this is probably a sign of high-functioning depression. Good call, I think.
Before that I had purged my life of social media. My first attempt at a replacement was as small email group where I wrote an essay on Saturdays. I called it “Candide’s Garden” in reference to the last bit of Voltaire’s Candide, which basically says to not worry about the machinations of the powerful, but rather to tend your garden.
I greatly enjoyed writing the pieces on Saturday. It was a great way to fill a day that I made sure to make a real Sabbath and do nothing productive for work or home, but my group wasn’t the best this project. Mostly there was apathy. Two of them read what I wrote poorly – twisting my words around to try to start an argument. Only one of them was part of a good back-and-forth, and so I just became his pen pal.
After I closed up Candide’s Garden, I got into the alternate internet protocols of Gopher and Gemini. Here’s an article on this with a guy who at least believes he is coming at it from a Solar Punk perspective [2]:
https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gophe ... ternet?s=r
[2] The originator of Gemini is also a self-identified solar punk. Other than that, I kept waiting in vain for the rest of the solar punks to show up en masse.
I was NetCandide on Gemini and Candide on Gopher respectively. This time period was also a lot of fun. I joined (with money) a public Unix called SDF, and that helped me to learn all sorts of shell commands rapidly as there were immediate purposes to what I was doing. I then switched over to Linux on my home laptop, and for a while I got my life down to terminal minimalism: Lynx as my browser, Nano to write, either piping music from streams (down to a the minimal bash command of ./d.sh) or playing a music collection I had saved as a local backup. There is a slogan that circulates somewhat in among Gopher and SDF – “plain text is beautiful.” And so it was. And so it is.
But as often happens when I have stripped everything down, I eventually felt an emptiness. I didn’t find enough action in those spaces to hold my interest – they were nice places to visit (and take lessons from) but I wouldn’t want to live there. In particular Gemini suffers from the problem of people just wanting to use Gemini to talk about Gemini. This is the way with people who work in technology. They start becoming the proverbial men with hammers, and hammers only, so they start to see every problem as a nail [3].
[3] This space, on the other hand, seems to attract a lot of people who look for other tools as well. It’s been heartening and fascinating to see as I keep reading on.
Eventually, I drifted to opening a more conventional web browser to listen to podcasts while I did chores, and then one thing led to another, and then eventually, a short while after my wife told me she was pregnant, I was back on Reddit.
. . . Man, Reddit sucks. Any sub-Reddit that has the prospect of being interesting to me suffers from either a) people asking dumb questions (ie let me google that for you) or b) people just wanting to challenge the very premise of the sub. For example, if you go to r/ValueInvesting and it is overloaded with either total laziness or people pushing index funds. And these are the posts that get sky-rocket to the top with the most likes.
In response to a particularly bad thread, I set up my own sub and wrote the following white paper:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nicheWorld/com ... che_world/
No one joined. But then, I did virtually no promotion, and may gotten on that, but luckily, I found this forum. . . See, I kept answering queries on r/leanFire (ha) and r/Frugal (haha) with links to the ERE blog. After doing this several times, I decided to decided to look into these here forums. . .
. . . And that’s the long version of the story.
Previously on Candide (or The Pessimist).
viewtopic.php?t=12355
And now, back to our show . .
=======
How I got to these forums. The short answer is I got sick of Reddit, and noticed that I was linking again and again to the ERE blog, so I decided to look at the forum.
The short answer is usually less interesting than the longer one, however. . .
I had rejoined Reddit with a new screen name because I was looking ahead and trying to build a kind of hobby I could get in and out of when I enter the zombieland of sleepless nights when the baby comes [1]. (I don’t think Reddit will be able to serve as that hobby, but that is neither here nor there – that’s what I was thinking at the time).
[1] Yes, I am very concerned about that time period. I do particularly badly on a lack of sleep. But I am use to taking huge quality of life hits for defined periods of time to try to get something more meaningful in the future. I remember someone’s journal positing that this is probably a sign of high-functioning depression. Good call, I think.
Before that I had purged my life of social media. My first attempt at a replacement was as small email group where I wrote an essay on Saturdays. I called it “Candide’s Garden” in reference to the last bit of Voltaire’s Candide, which basically says to not worry about the machinations of the powerful, but rather to tend your garden.
I greatly enjoyed writing the pieces on Saturday. It was a great way to fill a day that I made sure to make a real Sabbath and do nothing productive for work or home, but my group wasn’t the best this project. Mostly there was apathy. Two of them read what I wrote poorly – twisting my words around to try to start an argument. Only one of them was part of a good back-and-forth, and so I just became his pen pal.
After I closed up Candide’s Garden, I got into the alternate internet protocols of Gopher and Gemini. Here’s an article on this with a guy who at least believes he is coming at it from a Solar Punk perspective [2]:
https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gophe ... ternet?s=r
[2] The originator of Gemini is also a self-identified solar punk. Other than that, I kept waiting in vain for the rest of the solar punks to show up en masse.
I was NetCandide on Gemini and Candide on Gopher respectively. This time period was also a lot of fun. I joined (with money) a public Unix called SDF, and that helped me to learn all sorts of shell commands rapidly as there were immediate purposes to what I was doing. I then switched over to Linux on my home laptop, and for a while I got my life down to terminal minimalism: Lynx as my browser, Nano to write, either piping music from streams (down to a the minimal bash command of ./d.sh) or playing a music collection I had saved as a local backup. There is a slogan that circulates somewhat in among Gopher and SDF – “plain text is beautiful.” And so it was. And so it is.
But as often happens when I have stripped everything down, I eventually felt an emptiness. I didn’t find enough action in those spaces to hold my interest – they were nice places to visit (and take lessons from) but I wouldn’t want to live there. In particular Gemini suffers from the problem of people just wanting to use Gemini to talk about Gemini. This is the way with people who work in technology. They start becoming the proverbial men with hammers, and hammers only, so they start to see every problem as a nail [3].
[3] This space, on the other hand, seems to attract a lot of people who look for other tools as well. It’s been heartening and fascinating to see as I keep reading on.
Eventually, I drifted to opening a more conventional web browser to listen to podcasts while I did chores, and then one thing led to another, and then eventually, a short while after my wife told me she was pregnant, I was back on Reddit.
. . . Man, Reddit sucks. Any sub-Reddit that has the prospect of being interesting to me suffers from either a) people asking dumb questions (ie let me google that for you) or b) people just wanting to challenge the very premise of the sub. For example, if you go to r/ValueInvesting and it is overloaded with either total laziness or people pushing index funds. And these are the posts that get sky-rocket to the top with the most likes.
In response to a particularly bad thread, I set up my own sub and wrote the following white paper:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nicheWorld/com ... che_world/
No one joined. But then, I did virtually no promotion, and may gotten on that, but luckily, I found this forum. . . See, I kept answering queries on r/leanFire (ha) and r/Frugal (haha) with links to the ERE blog. After doing this several times, I decided to decided to look into these here forums. . .
. . . And that’s the long version of the story.