In said archives, I found this post:

When FIFA announced the host of the 2030 World Cup as a split between Morocco, Portugal and Spain, they also pulled a fast one at that Extraordinary FIFA Congress where they also announced the 2036 host as… Saudi Arabia!

Missed it by that much!

If I’m talking about something in a post on whatever social network, I like to use “A.I.” with the proper periods within that abbreviation of “artificial intelligence”. It leaves you with little misunderstanding about what is meant by “A.I.”

But everything time I see “AI”, I just think you’re talking about “AL”.

I’m glad he sees it, too.

I thought it was a pretty good show. The folks I snuck into this shot to be my models did, too.

While everything seems to be in meltdown mode on Twitter, a lot of users are jumping ship to Mastodon.

Mastodon is not new. It’s actually been around for a handful of years but operating in smaller, dedicated circles as an alternative to “major” social networks like Twitter or Facebook.

I had been thinking about exploring more about Mastodon a few years back but never found the time to dig into it. Of course, now that I’ve made my jump on board, I’m somewhat regretting that I haven’t explored it sooner.

I understood that it’s a “federated” social network but never really grasped what that meant until I got into it. Hearing someone say it is a lot different than actually getting hands on so that your brain can fully comprehend what that means.

And it’s awesome. Yes, it’s a little difficult to understand at first, and there is a lot of terminology and functionality that is mostly the same but different from those mainstream social networks that you might already be familiar with.

The one thing I really like about Mastodon is how decentralized it is. There are pluses and minuses to that concept, but this is what could make Mastodon a really great, evolutionary step in all things internet.

Because “federated” is something everyone is more familiar with than they know. The roads you drive on are federated. The phone you talk or text on are federated. Email is federated. There is an established method for how all of these things work that is managed on various levels but generally provide the same standards.

When you drive across the country, at least in the US and Canada, you subconsciously expect that there will be at least a two lane highway that is wide enough for two cars traveling in opposite directions. Every state or province has their own methods for how those roads are constructed and maintained, but they are all built to a standard that every driver tends to understand. From signage, road markings, and speed limits, there are established protocols that remain fairly the same from location to location.

That’s what is meant when it is said that Mastodon is federated.

There is an established method that allows islands of servers to exchange data in a predefined, open source protocol, which is pretty much the exact same way email already works.

And just like email, anyone can setup a server or find an existing service to sign up on to start interacting with the world. But once you control a server, you can decide who can have an account on it, what other servers can interact with your server, and so on.

That is where the power lies in Mastodon for me. It might not be perfect and need some work to make these protocols efficient as more and more people jump on board, but the idea of having control over your social network is a massive concept to a more free and open internet.

This is what they shared on Twitter the other day:

Well, the bills are rolling in for the medical care I’ve had to pursue after this accident and that “covered by insurance” amount is… lower than I thought

And this is supposed to be “good” insurance.

Lol the per-month payment that’s suggested by my medical portal is well above a car payment amount for my wrist surgery.
And we haven’t even fixed my knee yet.

AMERICA, THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, UNTIL YOU NEED MEDICAL CARE, THEN FUCK YOU

This is probably also a great time to mention that with all this I haven’t been able to work the last two months

<looks toward GoFundMe, America’s actual funding of medical fees>
I might just have to do it.

– twitter thread

This is hard.

I’ve been a Canadian citizen for one year now. I just passed that milestone shortly preceded by getting my gallbladder removed after dealing with increasing issues with it for just over a year prior, maybe longer in hindsight.

It took a while for it to all culminate in getting the surgery, and my situation didn’t make it an urgent thing to get taken care of. I shifted my diet to basically eliminate fatty and fried foods, stopped drinking alcohol, worked out when it allowed me to, and started doing more yoga than I ever had before. Also discovered the bliss of a good heat pad as a consolation bonus to it being necessary for the pain that the stones and polyps caused inside this angry organ on increasing occasions.

Prior to surgery, I also had a colonoscopy just so I could have some personal assurance that it was just a gallbladder that we had to deal with. Once everything checked out there, it was still another couple months until my surgery date.

Each time I went to a medical facility for an appointment, I presented my B.C. Services Card each time, saw who I was supposed to see, and walked right out the door when done. Ultrasound, blood tests, surgeon consultations, and the hospital where I left a piece of me behind at.

So many Americans don’t know what this feels like. What it is like to pay taxes for something that benefits you so directly that is so completely not obvious to so many people in the fifty states. What it feels like to walk straight passed the front desk and not worry about any additional charges needing to be dealt with.

That’s it. Without getting into the how and why, this is more about that this should be a reality.

Because I think about this every time someone I work with loses their job, which happens a lot in broadcasting. It’s a brutal profession with an even more brutal reality where being good at your job does not equal job security.

And I also think about this when someone I know leaves their job or career. Quitting your job in B.C. means you can do so without the enormous fear of not having that job meaning you lose all of your medical coverage. Even if you get a part-time job somewhere, you’re still covered if you break a toe or get cancer.

This is how taxes should work. Health is the one thing that everyone has in common. In a civilized society, we shouldn’t be bound to a job just because the benefits are too good compared to the dream job we’d rather be doing.

It’s not a perfect system here in B.C., and there is much more to that statement, especially today. The system that we have is something to be cherished and improved upon each and every day.

But in America, this story of so many having to ask others for monetary help is so uncomfortably common, especially for someone who was gainfully employed prior to this accident, now has a broken ankle, busted up knee, and a family to take care of that I’ve watched grow from the day they got engaged.

I don’t know how a dream like this becomes a reality, but it really should be better than this for a nation that is so great, prosperous, and wealthy.

Today marks one year since I swore my allegiance to Queen Elizabeth and that I will fulfill my duties as a Canadian citizen.

Do I feel any different? Not really, but there is more of a greater love that I feel for nearly every part of what makes Canada the country that it is. To list all of them would take too much time, but I hope that I can be better about sharing these things going forward.

Like butter tarts. I failed to take a picture of them at the small celebration we had to mark the year and a half long process came to an end. It just feels good to be Canadian with the Canadian I moved to B.C. to be with.

Even my B.C. sister-in-law was impressed with the dawn and dusk skies of the Midwest. It’s a different beauty to appreciate.

One of the most prolific venture capitalists in the history of capitalism has done what a wealthy capitalist does, which is to buy something simply because they can. That’s how I look at this in a nonfictional context.

But where does that leave us, the consumers of Twitter?

I joined the site when it was nothing more than a website in 2007. Smartphones were still in the single-stroke engine phase of their technological evolution, and initially, the only mobile engagement you got was a one-way interaction via text message, meaning you could post a tweet through SMS but not really get any engagement back because all of that effectively happened at the terminal level.

It brought on a whole new level of engagement that we all declared to be called “microblogging”.

And the truth is that Twitter was the beginning of the end for the culture that blogging had become around that time. One technology overtaking another technology is a tale as old as time, so in hindsight, this should not be surprising.

Over the next few years, many blogs, mine included, went pretty quiet because tweeting was a quick, rapid fire method of dissemination that cost basically nothing and was simple to grasp the concept of. Blogs, like this site, took a little more to understand how the method of publishing content with pictures and links works and how to do it well.

Ease of use and instantaneously reaching the entire world at the click of a button was a huge jump in information sharing in human history, and anyone, not just those who could afford it, could suddenly do it with Twitter.

Because if you look back in time, the evolutionary track of how we share information is filled with the commonalities of how a handful of powerful players influenced, steered, and profited on technologies like the printing press, telegraph, the electrical grid, wireless, radio, television, to the internet. There were even other forms of microblogging sites that tried to be “the next” or “an alternative to” Twitter, but they came and went with varying forms of success and failure.

Twitter happened to be one of the first and got lucky to have investors that helped forge it into what it became.

So now that Elon has bought it and cleared out the core of those who were at the top of the company’s operations, I would say that there is something going on that can certainly destabilize Twitter as a business.

Tech companies have come and gone by the thousands, and no business is ever too big to fail. There is an absolute possibility that Twitter could cease to exist, which was true before Musk even thought about buying it. But being that he has forcefully removed those at the top of the company’s ecosystem, we’re going to see the beginning of a brain drain with employees walking out from the lower ranks.

That’s the real foundation of any operation where without those people knowing the daily ins and outs to how things work will cause a noticeable shift. It’s impossible to guess as to how much and to what degree, but this is true of any job, especially if you lose lynchpins that take multiple people to do the same things that a single person did.

That’s really my first thought. How long before the first fail whale resurfaces? What about sabotage? Because this is the type of event where there will be no two-week notices. Folks will quit by just standing up and walking out as their personal thresholds will be tested against that benefits package and steady income that is just too good to leave your job for.

“Oh. Steve used to take care of that. I guess we forgot to put someone in charge of that… three months ago.”

The last few days has seen a sharp rise in derogatory language on Twitter, making people publicly ask if this is the free speech that Elon is professing his reasoning for this takeover.

This is where we have to wait and see how this will play out. Because even if someone is wealthy enough to do powerful things, that does not mean they are the best, the brightest, or the most successful. It just means that they are rich.

Up and until now, Musk has been good with his capitalist ventures because he has invested in developing products. How will he be able to handle something service based? How do you keep users, not customers, content?

If someone has a problem with a Tesla, you can give them a new Tesla. If someone has an issue with a rocket, you build them a better rocket.

If the Twitter experience is ruined for someone, that’s it. There is nothing shiny or new that can be given. With users, you have to apologize and promise to be better, and then the final decision is in the hands of the user to stay or go.

And if you start introducing new things, then you risk users not liking new Twitter and fading away while left desiring Twitter classic.

Because Twitter doesn’t have to exist. It could have gone into the ground years ago under poor leadership and misguided direction, but depending on how you look at it, we’re lucky it didn’t in a weird, sometimes sad, human experiment sort of way.

Accepting that, I’ll continue to use Twitter because I remember the time when we didn’t have it as well as those times where it really showed the power of how the internet could bring people together and get out from behind our terminals. Long live cat photos and viral sensations. Down with anger and hate.

Edit: Here’s a great take on The Verge, “Welcome to hell, Elon”

I came across this song a few years ago now when the YouTube app on the Apple TV automatically played the next video but completely forget what it was that I watched originally that was “related” to this track. Once the sample hit and rhythm kicked in, I was instantly hooked. The bass lines through the whole song are just so excellent.

Let’s come back to that idea later.

There is something to be said about the subject of sport because I certainly have my interests and am not relatively shy to admit it.

Futbol (soccer), hockey, and baseball are among the top of the list, but I also appreciate rugby, Australian football, a good tennis match, nearly any sport featured in the Olympics, and the occasional gridiron football game but get more engagement from the Canadian version than the American flavor these days.

But I literally grew up in the hills off in the distance that you see in the background of the baseball field that Kevin Costner’s character built in Field of Dreams, so you can bet I grew up playing baseball.

We played on sandlots, empty lots, parking lots, and even the carved out kickball court on the local Catholic school playground, which shattered a fair share of car windows in the church parking lot out in right field as well as the Zimmerman’s kitchen window that sat in foul play territory on the third base side, consistently setting time records for how fast kids could evacuate an area every time it happened.

The main thing is that we had a lot of fun, and I can recall that’s all I ever cared about. Winning seemed like a fleeting moment and only meant bragging rights, which kids can be brutal about. I hated when it was done to me but am sure that I’ve done my share.

This is where my mind drifts back to when searching for the origin of appreciating the concept of competition and the drama of my team against your team.

It’s about the beauty of a moment. The one time at the park where the team of kids from another side of the neighborhood beat the snot out of our team, but you had a couple of great hits and drove in some runs to help cut the lead. Even though you lost, no one could take away that feeling of connecting your bat to the ball, hearing the ting of the aluminum bat, and running to second to drive in a few runs.

I am an absolute sucker for that drama. That feeling of a moment that drags you to the front of your seat because maybe something amazing is going to happen. It might be good, it also might be bad, but it’s still a moment.

And those moments become history, and that history is shared through story. Where you were when it happened and how it made you feel. Remembering those good times with the bad. Wins. Losses. Times that could’ve or should’ve been.

It’s torture, really, but I think that’s a good thing.

Because I believe that as a human race, of all of the civilizations that we have created for ourselves, much of everything we have done has been born out of conflict and, more precisely, warfare.

The concept of us versus them runs very close here because sport inevitably, and by design, creates division.

This makes sport a healthy substitute for our evolutionary past enjoyment of successful warfare, whether through outright victory or peaceful resolution meant you literally survived to see another day. Your culture was allowed to continue in its existence and grow into greater societies that might become empires and countries.

You could go on and on comparing these notions, but the fact is that sport can help hold us back from the brink of taking these things that can feel so similar down a notch when passions become too much.

This is where I hold myself back and say that I have that love for sport but hesitate to say of sport.

It’s as simple as people taking things too far.

Because when I played football for that one season in the tenth grade, our coaches always talked about sacrificing our bodies and that playing our games was like going to war.

Hold on. No it’s not. This is just a game.

Our school mascot was the “black panthers”, an animal indigenous to nowhere near the state of Iowa. Our games preceded the varsity football game and got way less local press coverage. Sure, we were being prepped for when we eventually moved up a grade and played in the prime time slot on Friday nights, but even then, I watched guys on my team get ruptured spleens, dislocate shoulders, and break various bones.

I even developed a problem in my hip socket that one season and did my best to play through it as much as I could because many of my own teammates teased me for faking it, making it feel more like we had teams inside the team rather than what the term actually stands for.

That’s where passions can run too deep for me, and I can pinpoint the moment when I realized that I’m a bad competitor.

One Friday night football game that season, we were about to win the game until the visiting team got a last second touchdown to take it away from us in the dying seconds. The play was a beautiful pass with a diving catch in the end zone, our defenders getting just barely outstretched after forcing that pass as the clock hit zeros after the play started.

Honestly, it was an awesome feat on their part, and I, being a small guy and still fighting my hip, watched from the sideline.

I remember turning around with a little bit of a smile and mouth drop with an oh-my-god-did-that-just-happen look on my face when I connected with one of my teammate’s horrible, full on cry-face, sitting on the bench and completely weeping. I turn around and see another guy walking off the field with tears streaming out his eyes.

This was like the fifth or sixth game of the season, and the other team wasn’t even one of our neighboring rivals. We weren’t even pushing for the playoffs, if we even had a playoff system for tenth grade football.

I can’t even remember if we had a winning season, and ended my involvement in high school sports after that season with no regrets.

It taught me to appreciate the spectacle though. The fun that comes with the act of playing a sport and not letting it be everything because I once knew a guy around the same time that got so angry after losing a football game on a Friday night that his girlfriend knew that she wouldn’t be seeing him all weekend. He kept brooding over it straight into Saturday and would shake it off by the end of practice the following Monday.

So this is where I get confounded when a spectator goes through the same emotional intensity as someone actually playing a sport does.

And there are a lot of them. There are whole industries built around feeding on it, and I’ve been in the thick of it as a broadcast engineer for a sports talk radio station for over a decade.

But it’s also entertainment. No different from how someone enjoys a good book or lives to cook a greater meal, the release of dopamine is all the same. It hits everyone in the brain’s pleasure center all them same. We can’t ignore that fact when talking about that sports enthusiast who can drop stats and always knows what should be happening if they were in charge.

That is where I draw my line though.

Stats and tactics talk until the cows come home. Who needs to be traded. What kind of player should be acquired. I’m just not the person to be that good to talk that talk.

I’m not that kind of a consumer of sport.

I love those oh-my-god-did-you-see-that moments. Absolutely those are fun, and who doesn’t?

Because I’m hardly what you could consider a fan of curling but can get into a good match between powerhouse countries. All you need to know is that it’s about the team with the rocks closer to the center dot. Don’t worry about the scoring that you don’t understand, which is fine. I don’t either! I’m not even sure if it’s called a “match” and will resign myself to not looking that up until after writing this and eventually publishing this post.

It is a game. It is entertainment.

If you choose to follow along, embrace that your team can be awful, and some will be more awful than others, usually because of money, even in amateur high school athletics. Accept that misery in losing gives you connection to a conscious, torturous, continuous sense of hope that keeps you coming back for more whenever the next time is.

At the end of the game, set, match, round, or whatever, it’s over. It happened. Enjoy that it did, and it’s not the end of the world for what did not.

I was fascinated.

Dan was wanting to make videos about what life is like where he lives in Russia while using the English that he had taught himself and wanted to improve upon so he could one day travel the world.

Eventually, his wife joined in on the videos, and they simply showed what life was like in their neighborhood, countryside, and just everyday life. Shopping at the mall, getting groceries, building his own house, and even starting a family.

Did you know that gas lines run above ground in Russia? Because I do now.

Dan’s stories and insights hit that spot in my heart that drives me to see more and more of the world that is as basic to the notion of driving to the end of a road just to see what’s there.

And then the invasion of Ukraine happened.

Dan’s content was a little hard to take at the beginning of the war from my perspective. It wavered along some perceived indifference to the conflict but still offered some valid insight on how their cost of living was being effected while steering clear of any viewpoints that could get them into trouble.

But one thing that is for certain is that his heart has no room for anyone or anything that goes against the notion of love and peace. On that, we could find some common ground.

And since this war has started, I’ve found other creators who offer similar insights from their various perspectives. Many of them have made their way out of Russia, some before and some after mobilization.

But I keep checking back on Dan and his family as new content appears, especially since his daughter turned one around the same time that Ukraine was invaded.

His recent content has been getting more downtrodden, and the latest (embedded at the bottom of this post) has a real sense of despair that has come over him.

He will be leaving Russia with his family. They will soon buy tickets and see where they can go, if they are not stopped at the airport. He doesn’t know. No one knows. All they can do is try.

At the end of the video, he said something that I wanted to transcribe because it’s something that I hold in my heart as well. It’s something we all need to believe.

The bright side will win.

The dark side is more easier to live in the dark side. In dark side, people can be very rich, very powerful because they have contract with major general and their life can be easier.

But in bright side, you can keep you soul. You can save your soul. And your heart.

The most expensive thing in this world is your soul.

Don’t trade your soul.

What most people in elected offices do is play the political game of using issues like drugs and immigration as consistent cannon fodder for their own interests. It’s a constant tactic used to maintain their position in government, stoking their constituents into believing that their simple raising of the issue amounts to some sort of solution to the problem.

But it doesn’t. And it won’t.

Elected leaders tend to say things that sound like a solution. They talk about a plan, which may or may not exist in greater detail. And if it does exist, it’s loaded with legalese that makes it difficult for the average person to fully comprehend the doublespeak that always exists as an exit strategy to that leader’s responsibility.

More often than none, it starts and ends with that single entity. At least in America, we tend for forge ahead on a single front.

It’s never really worked on these issues, and that might be by design. Like a never ending war that always demands your support for the cause that defends your freedoms, they attack Goliath with a peashooter and never aim above the knees.

Because if that mighty, threatening giant stays out there on the horizon, just far enough that you can’t see but can be convinced that it’s there, that leader can keep you holding on to the idea that it is.

It’s coming. Believe them that it’s coming.

And that any other idea or solution outside of their own might help or work on said problem is a preposterous notion.

How dare you think that anything else could be done that is outside the concept that has already been laid out before you, especially by anyone not on the same team. “They” are the ones who are wrong and will never get it right. “They” should never be trusted.

All of this happens inside their own borders, within the frameworks of elected leaderships. Silos within silos of ideology hellbent on maintaining their position of king of the hill. You just need to trust them on this, and if you need proof, they’ll give you the proof you need while telling you that anything contradictory is not to be believed.

But like many of their constituents, they’ll never go beyond the rhetoric they tell themselves and reach out to others for guidance or, heaven forbid, better ideas.

That’s just more of what is going on here. Senator Grassley is lobbing out some refrigerator magnet headlines so he can say, “Look what I did!”

He’s also up for re-election in a little over a week, hoping you see this tweet from a 90 year old man that has been a senator in the U.S. government since 1980.

40 years, and the southern border is still a problem for drug trafficking. In the 80’s, it was cocaine. The 90’s, methamphetamine. 2000’s, heroine.

Why do we need more hearings to hear how bad things are when we already know how bad it has been for the last four decades?

In Chuck Grassley’s Iowa, meth production and consumption has been some of the highest in the United States for the last half of his entire time in government and continues to destroy lives to this day, something I’ve barred witness to after reconnecting with former high school classmates via social media, some unrecognizable from their former selves due to the toll the drugs took on their bodies.

The U.S. solution from within has not and will not work. More political efforts will be made to try and probably even succeed for an amount of time for everyone to feel good enough to forget and move on until it becomes a problem again, usually getting the most air time on the problem around the time of the next election cycle. Meanwhile, the cartels adapt, react, and innovate like a hawkish venture capitalist always looking for that next opportunity to grow their portfolio.

The solution to this sick cycle can only be found when looked at from a collaborative, continental perspective. Whatever has been tried before has to be only thought about in reference to what can be achieved to lift up the lowest so that we can all prosper on a greater plain.

Going it alone with ideas like these where we throw more peashooters at Goliath will never cut to the root of the problem as much as it serves to keep the issue coming back around for timely political gains of the few that it truly benefits.