March 12, 2020
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Spent a lot of time today reflecting on the COVID-19 outbreak. The absolutely uninspiring response by the government
here in the US does not give me much hope for the next month or so. Schools in my metropolitan area are 
already extending their spring breaks, and my county has declared a state of emergency. I have plenty of food and toiletries,
and am underemployed but stable enough to where I can stay home for a month or two if need be. I am worried, though,
for the elderly and immunocompromised in my community. I met with my parents and my girlfriend's mom today, and I couldn't
help but be nervous for them in the near future. They aren't elderly enough to be physically feeble, but I wouldn't
want to see any of them catch this bug.

I suppose the closest thing to a silver lining here is the possibility that this whole clusterfuck of a situation
will help folks see the glaring flaws in our current way of doing things.

The best things I read today were spring's writings on the Small Internet, which I've linked to on my main page. I hope
that the platforms that will find the most success in the near future will be the ones that help foster more meaningful,
intimate connections between people. Things built to emulate the more problematic platforms (GNUSocial, Mastodon, PixelFed,
etc.) will doubtless enjoy a large audience, but I would love to see people migrating to gopherspace, tilde servers, and
the like. I think, too, that simple tools could be built to bring access to those who are less technologically literate.
My hopeful vision is of people like my older parents and their friends collaborating on a tilde server via a friendly,
lightweight interface instead of exposing themselves to the stream of horseshit on facebook. Tangentially, I'm unsure
I could convince some of my friends to learn the *nix command line to play on a tilde, but I would certainly want them
there--perhaps a good future project would be to make a scrub-friendly remote server interface or something. Or possibly
an all-new server type? Bah.

I'm losing the thread of this a bit, and I think it would honestly be better just to convince/teach my friends to be
more *nix-literate.

Feeling a bit braindead earlier than normal, which is good. Hopefully my sleep cycle can adjust to something more sensible.

~slothbear

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