this is not about the Roman Empire - March 20, 2024

Driving to work this morning, Michael Smerconish was taking calls from listeners about immigration and the border crisis. I was half listening - I stayed up until midnight last night catching up on homework I didn't realize was due (because who assigns homework over Spring Break?) - and a woman called in and started talking about some list Smerconish had of problems in the U.S. (maybe that was it, I can't be arsed to find it on his website), and all of them coming down to critical thinking skills.

And, yeah? A lot of problems probably are the result of critical thinking skills. Go on....

But then.... THEN she started going on about how Tucker Carlson said that the Roman Empire fell because there were too many immigrants and they all joined the army and then mutinied from within and that was why the Roman Empire fell.

Immigrants were not the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Actual Causes:

• Corrupt politicians(emperors) more interested in power than actual governance

• A whole host of economic issues including a slow down of expansion (Rome relied heavily on taxation from all of it's conquered territories), inflation and the debasement of currency, agricultural decline, trade decline, increased taxation, and increased government spending on military campaigns, public works and a lot on nonsense.

• The size of the Empire - it was just too big and too hard to defend.

• Germanic invasions - which is where the "Immigrants" come in. Germanic tribes entered the empire looking for land and resources and were rejected - so they attacked towns and took what they needed to survive.

The sound byte of "immigrants caused the fall of the Roman Empire" sounds sensational - and any sensational sounds byte really needs to be followed up with research because it's entirely too easy to boil down a complex topic to an entirely oversimplified and inaccurate tidbit. Tucker Carlson in particular is notorious for this - and that garbage being repeated by someone lauding the importance of critical thinking skills is especially enraging for me.

Also, please don't come at me for also boiling down causes to a few sentences - I'm not a historian and I'm very tired.

National Something Day

In other news, there’s not really any news.

I’m organizing thoughts in a constructive way around the importance of choice when hiring for specific jobs, all inspired by the plethora of True Crime content I consume entirely too much of.

I’ve decided I’m not really a big fan of my own art style - and to remedy this I’m doing daily studies of art I do like (the Pre-Raphealites, Arthur Rackham and Harry Clarke), as well as practicing drawing men’s faces (currently Donald Sutherland) until I’m happier with it.

And I just celebrated my birthday, quietly with my husband.

Intentionality

I’m old enough to remember the infancy of social media, when it was all supplemental to everyone having their own websites - myspace and opendiary were supplemental to your geocities or blogspot or custom domain. You’d spend time. week to week checking in various sites to see if that lady who bought the 6ft tall metal rooster had written a new post, or if the geeky lady had a new review of some etsy shop. It was all a little more time intensive, but also very intentional. And it feels like the internet may soon be making an about face back in that direction.

Meta and IG are scraping all of your images for their datasets - apparently in using the platform you’ve given permission for them to do whatever they want with your images unless you can prove it’s directly harming you. I remember seeing this in the IG terms of use back when I first created an account, but it also seemed very choiceless at the time. Scrolling through a feed is so much easier for an audience than going through your list of links to see who is going to entertain you for 5 seconds - and at the time I was a lot more concerned with being seen than I am now a decade+ later. I’m curious to see if we all go back to individual web preseences, or if artists will attempt to use tech like Nightshade to protect themselves from what is essentially theft. I’m not 100% sure it matters - I don’t know if Meta is able to remove the millions of ai images from the dataset effectively and I have been watching for that moment when that snake starts eating it own tail.

I remember my moment last year(or was it two years ago?) when I had a glint of optimism about what ai was going to do and what people were going to do with it. I’d forgotten that people are human and humans do what humans do - and it’s frequently the least amount of work for the most amount of gain regardless of who it hurts in the process.

In short, I’m going to be purging and deleting my IGs, which is going to take forever to delete each individual image - not that it matters for past content, what’s been scraped had been scraped already. But this venue give me infinitely more control of what is mine, and more reason to use a blog space.

I’d like more intentionality in my life - which includes who views what I make. I’d rather you were here on purpose than a glance in a sea of content.

What are we doing? Where are we going? Why are we here?

I love the concept of self improvement. I love the process of learning, acquiring new skills, and challenging myself. I love following my whims hither and yon, exploring the subjects tickling my brain today and finding unexpected connections between outwardly unconnected things.

One of the creators I follow on tiktok (Trejayne) has been talking about skill trees for a while now, and the concept of utilizing a skill tree for real life is brilliant. And to be clear - none of this is about saving money. There are projects I want to make, not because it’s cheaper to make them than to commission someone else to, but because I want to make them, and understand how they were made.

I have so many projects I’m working on, waiting to start: hacking a furby, a quilt, a temperature quilt, the dollhouse, an entry for the Federal Duck Stamp competition, and someday far in the future - a replica of the Baseball Diamond from the Great Muppet Caper - it’s well past time to drag myself out of the RimWorld hole I dug for myself and spend more time working on all of this.

And then it was December... also I got married.

It’s been over six months since I last posted anything here (so much for goals). A lot has happened, and also very little has happened - as is the way things feel sometimes.

To start, a chain of events:

• Last year I completed a Data Analytics Bootcamp hosted through KU. It was great, it was overwhelming. I learned a lot, and “graduated” with 103%, despite coming out of it without a final project I could show anyone. But it was so much in so short a time, I felt like I needed to do more to flesh out and reinforce what I learned.

• I started 100 Days of Python, while I considered what to do next. This was also great, and was reinforcing a lot of key fundamentals in my programming knowledge that had been glossed over a bit during the bootcamp.

• A quarter of the way into my pythoning, EdX - the company that runs the bootcamps - contacted me about being a TA for the program. This sounded like an excellent way to do some of that reinforcement I’d been wanting to get around to. I applied, I was hired.

• It was not the reinforcement I’d been looking for. Mostly I spent my time helping students install things on their computers.

• Talking with my partner about my experiences with the bootcamps, he brought up his own trepidation about working with anyone who’d learned in one for the same reason I hadn’t applied to any jobs yet - too much too fast with no reinforcement. I took a beat, and started looking at local college programs with Analytics degree programs. I found one at a community college that looked good, applied, registered, and I’m just completing my first semester this week.

• A month ago I finally declared my “major” - Computer Science and chasing another Data Analytics Certificate. I will quite likely not finish the former, but I really only declared a major so I could sign up for classes three days earlier than I would be able to do otherwise.

• Also I got married two weeks ago. 

TLDR: Did school. Did more school. Did more more school. Got married. 

School has got me to finally update this site though, as it’s a requirement of the Data Analytics program to have an online portfolio (how convenient for me that one already existed). I still need to finish my Bigfoot project, which might get a complete overhaul for very important reasons. I also find myself wanting to do an exploration of Kansas City crime over the last 10 years because True Crime, and also convincing my mom that Seattle would actually be a safe place to live.

Art has been more of a private affair. AI and advancements and AI internet drama is provoking thoughts about the commodification of our attention that I can’t quite put into words yet. The next (insert number here) months/years are going to be interesting to say the least. I have mostly been working on my dollhouse, learning basic electrical to light it up, and lots of faux-everything techniques. Wanting to share it, that will probably be here in this blog. It doesn’t fit in with anything else and it’s not something I want to market, just share. Though truthfully I’m feeling very over marketing myself. I don’t want to be a commodity, and to keep people’s attention everything about you has to be a commodity.

I much prefer the quiet.