Daily Create: Book Band

Vampire Weekend At Bernies - 1

I didn’t follow the rules, which is par for the course, for the DS106 Daily Create, which prompted us to combine the name of a band with the name of a book and design the book cover. I could not resist Vampire Weekend At Bernie’s, even though Bernie’s is a movie and not a book.

Peace (and prompt),
Kevin

Remembering Murph

I found out last night that my close, childhood friend, John “Murph” Murphy, passed away in June. We had been out of touch for a long time, for no reason that I can think of, but as kids, we were as close as thieves. Murph and I not only grew up in the same apartment complex, but we were musicians together – he, on the drums, and me, on the saxophone. My dad was his drum teacher.

We played baseball and football together in our neighborhood, and rode our bikes all over town. There were stretches of time when the two of us were inseparable.

From elementary school up through high school, and then into college, we also played music together in a variety of bands (he invited me to the sixth member of a band called The Fried Five), and he was my first “producer” when he borrowed a Tascam Four Track, and suggested we use his Casio keyboard and my guitar to record a song. I pulled out some poems and we got to work, recording a song called It’s A New Day.

That same summer, 1985, we did a bunch of experiments on the four track, laying tracks and sounds, and just having a blast for hours at time. It was one of the most fun periods of my life, as I began to realize I could write songs and record them, and Murph was a genius at thinking about sound and music. Plus, he was an amazing drummer. That same summer, he played drums and we recruited our friend, Eric Autumn (Herbst), to sing lead on a song called Mark On Time. At this point, we were in Eric’s real recording studio, with Murph running the show.

After college graduation, we went different ways and connected now and then. He opened his own recording studio for a stretch, which I thought was cool (he was very talented). But it had been some time since we had connected and I am saddened by the loss.

Sorry I missed your passing, Murph. From reading the obit, it sounds like you had a full life. I wish you were still here, making music with me.

Peace (in remembering),
Kevin

In Protest

No Kings Protest

Yesterday’s No Kings rally in my small city drew thousands of people, clogging the streets of downtown, and I know that was the case all over the country. It was the sixth or seventh rally that my wife and I have attended, and each time, we come away a little more empowered, and feeling like we are part of a movement, and not just a pair of isolated angry Americans.

As a military veteran, I am appalled at the way this president is using our troops — for the streets and for a birthday parade. This cannot stand.

Peace (and protest),
Kevin

Toeholds: On The State Of (Dis)Connections

Connected/Disconnected

Reading Alan Levine’s post this morning about the decisions we make in this social media landscape, which is always in shift mode to some degree, on where we are and where we might go, has me pondering my own presence in various spaces, and so I am using this post to take stock of decisions or in-decisions I have made, or not made. It’s as much reflection as justification.

I suppose I am apt to stay in a place a little too long when things change on me, until it reaches the point of time to leave. I know I am not alone in that feeling. So, I am now finally long gone from Twitter — deletion event — but I lingered a bit longer than I should have. I never dipped much into Zuck-world, at least, because I have always had privacy concerns about his business model (and I think his site designs and interfaces completely suck). You don’t need to quit a space you never entered when the owner goes off the rails. There’s that.

Here, then are some thoughts on my current toeholds in the social world, for good or for bad:

  • Mastodon — I have had an account there for about 8 years (!!), and after the Musk takeover of Twitter, I mostly shifted my presence there, and I have found it interesting — the mix of people is very different than my past socials, as educators are minimal but poets, photographers and tech-centered folks (with mostly left-leaning, progressive tendencies) populate my feed. It’s my morning space for Daily Creates and haiku prompts. Yet — I know I can jump to another federated space instead of the main Social one (heck, there is an even a DS106-affiliated home) , and I have not yet done so. Why not? Not sure. Thought about it, often. It would make sense to find a new home for my federated self, but here I am, still dancing in the main Social stream of things. I do support Mastodon through regular donations, trying to do my part to support the underlying notion of federated spaces, outside the reach of corporations and billionaires.
  • Blue Sky — I get Alan and others’ critique of Blue Sky, and while I also get the feel of what Twitter once was as a sort of comfort food, I am mostly there because that’s where my educators friends are congregating and I like being in that mix. I am trying to resist the urge to just recreate Twitter there. However, I am significantly more disengaged in those conversations than years ago, and I have yet to take part in a single chat there, even though I have enjoyed chats in other spaces. I do worry about what the site might become, and whether monetization (which does not happen on the Fed) is coming, and how that will impact the tone of the site.  I am ready to bail if that time comes. (This is a difference, too — the emotional connection to any social space has diminished to a mostly transaction nature)
  • My Meandering Mind — When I first started my blog, I used Edublogs on recommendation from teaching friends who were blogging, and here I remain. Every so often, when I read something from Alan or Jim Groom or others via Reclaim Hosting, I think: time to pull up and move this home. And then, I don’t. Part of it is that Edublogs has been just fine for me. No problems. No hassles. Just a writing place under an educational umbrella. But then when I think, this is not a space I own myself – I am renting my blog here, and why not find my own place? At some point, I will probably make that shift. For now, though, here I am. My posting has changed over the last few years — focused more on my creative ventures and experimental inquiries, and less on my daily classroom teaching experiences. I am not even sure who reads this nowadays, other than my CLMOOC friends. If you do, thank you.
  • Write.As – – I use my Write.As space for poetry writing, and I am happy to be over there. So happy, in fact, that I keep trying to find the place where I can kick in some donations to keep the platform running (and worried about what could happen to all my poems if it all disappears on me). I appreciate the simplicity of that writing space. This reminds me to find the instructions for making a PDF archive of my poems. (note to self on that one …)
  • Flickr — Like Edublogs, Flickr has long been a staple of my connected world, a constant space for hosting and sharing photos, and connecting with other people, too. I’ve been concerned over the years when it has run into financial troubles and gone through ownership crisis, and felt relief that the site mostly runs the way it has always run.
  • YouTube — Gosh, I wish I had been able to justify the cost of Vimeo when I was using it regularly but I could not. I know there is a federated video hosting space, too, and I think I even set up account at some point and then .. did very little with it. I stuck for now in the clutches of Google, due to familiarity and ease of use. (Is that really still an excuse?)

I think, in general, it is good to be both across different kinds of platforms and still have a home, anchored, as a space to write and share and think. This blog is that.

And one final musing: RSS feeds are still the bomb. When all is said and done, the invention of RSS remains the most important invention in social technologies (in my opinion). Finding Alan’s post sitting there in my RSS reader is what started me here. So thank you to those early visionaries (at Netscape?). Which is why I featured the quote above, from Alan. To me, that’s RSS, even though I know he is more expansive, referring to federated spaces, too.

Peace (through the lines),
Kevin