I need to get on with my day instead of googling what Andrew WK is up to nowadays. In a bit 🫡

That is one thing we talked about in January. There was an idea that nostr would somehow be able to accommodate smaller groups that would be somewhat separated from the big pool of nostr general. I remember #[4] being involved in discussions and having some ideas about this. I'm hoping to see him back on nostr as his dev skills and experience are valuable. I recall thoughts that maybe clients based on certain interests or even relays based on certain interests would start to pop up. There were, to be fair, quite a few who predicted that as nostr grew it would just end up like other social media and they were pessimistic about it's ability to maintain the values that have made it so engaging. As time goes on I do see it as the responsibility of individuals to contribute to what we want to see happening and I don't see the inevitability of a large nostr as being a detriment if we are able to perhaps establish smaller groups built on the nostr protocol.

Loving it now is one thing

Do you have any thoughts about the incentives existent on nostr at present. To be honest I'm often thinking about what the outcome of "public zapping" has been. I daily still tip people anonymously for posts I appreciate and only in the last month or so gave in to also publically zapping. I will be accused of not understanding value for value but I'm not sure if that is entirely what is going on. Would value any other thoughts on that as it seems, like others in this thread, I'm also a non social media character. I bailed on most that happened online in the late 1990s, so having never used facebook, twitter, insta etc it's hard for me to get a sense of what users, who have lived in those platforms, are bringing into nostr.

I find this 'conundrum' and/or rumination resonant, as I too have largely abstained from social media for the better part of the last decade and more.... -- I've peripherally observed the decline of exchange and in the quality of thought and content. It feels, that the stage has been so unfortunately and set, and our populace primed to blindly accept things that ..... staggeringly, and obviously absurd and/or wrong. -- I had early on adopted a personal policy of a sort of 'Damnatio memoriae' with respect to those ideas and the individuals who perpetuate them - which is to say, to not share in the public hue and cry...and the ...creation of occasion and argument for engagement...and the sowing of fertile soil for broad and damaging 'troll-ery.' --- In this time and general context, and with the global consequence of macro happenstance and advancement...I think...it has become imperative to engage in dialogue -- the experiment of drowning out the obvious idiots with silence bears no fruit when so many would suffer fools .... Which is to say, I feel that Nostr provides potentially the tools and context to engage in fruitful and productive engagement, and gradually foster and favor signal over noise. -- Or so, I hope.

LOL.

I recently read the first Harry Potter book to my kids. It was weird to finally consume the product after years of observing the culture war surrounding it from the sidelines. Given how invested so many fringe progressives are in the HP world, I was staggered at how unapologetically English the whole thing was. From the ancient boarding school cutlure to the oh-so-twee names and salivating over toffees and Shepherd's Pies, and the fact that the poncy wizards all live in some sort of neo-Dickensian time-warp, it seems like a trad larper's wet dream. What on earth were they getting out of it?

MK Ultra is always my first guess 🧐

Here's an interesting titbit buried in the footnotes of Wedny Painting's "Abberation In The Heartland Of The Real": one of the psychs attending to McVeigh while he was in prison was Dr Jolly West, a notorious MKUKTRA figure who also treated Jack Ruby while he was in prison for killing Lee Oswald. West also achieved notoriety for killing an elephant with LSD.