The contenders from last year that I’ll be trying again this year are Mastodon (federated Twitter-like), Diaspora (federated Livejournal/Dreamwidth-like), NextDoor (neighborhood-restricted Facebook-like), and SubStack (Medium-like).

Last year’s contenders that I don’t currently plan to try again are MeWe and Lemmy.

I’m also using a few single-community sites on platforms like Mighty. If Mighty had a centralized news feed and client it would be a serious contender, but they don’t seem to be headed in that direction.

What else should I be trying this year? I’ve heard some folks mentioning Urbit which is relatively new, and Ello and Minds which I tried years ago, but none of them have jumped out at me as worth the effort now/again.

As I am winding down my time in Hawaii I want to put my intentions for the next year out into the world. Writing them down to share might help keep me on track, or inspire collaboration or advice, or …

Hawaii - July and August 2021

Barring some unlikely last resort options bearing fruit soon, my efforts to buy property in Hawaii are winding down. Over the next two months I’ll be trying to sell most of the extra stuff I brought or bought down here (solar panels, tractor, van, car, furniture, etc) and packing to ship a much smaller load back to the mainland. I expect to hand off the lease of the house in Kona to one of a few friends who have visited and are coming back and want to stay here long term. If that goes well, I’ll have a place to crash here should I visit again in the future, alone or with friends.

Los Angeles - Late August 2021

I recently purchased a large tour bus / coach near Los Angeles. When I return from Hawaii to California I’ll need to quickly deal with the initial logistics of that purchase and the future plans for it. I expect to fly into LA, spend a couple of days doing a rough sparse conversion on the bus (remove most seats, install kitchenette and bed), then register the vehicle as a housecar / motorhome and upgrade my license from a noncommercial C to a noncommercial B with 45ft housecar endorsement. What I really want is a commercial A, so I can carry passengers for money, but that has a mandatory 14 day waiting period and some other logistical requirements that I can’t squeeze into this step of the plan so it can wait a bit longer. With that taken care of, I’ll probably pick up a few friends who want to carpool north and set out for the bay area.

Bay Area - September to December 2021

Work wants me to be in Mountain View three days a week (Tue/Wed/Thu) starting September 1. I also want this, because remote onboarding hasn’t been going well, and I’d like to rack up some face time with my colleagues. Separately, I want to experience and take advantage of all the perks of tech-y office life while I have the chance.

I will be living in my bus somewhere near Mountain View during the week so I have a short walk or bike to the office, and spending weekends elsewhere, mostly in the bay area, with remote work in the daytime on Monday and Friday. In the new bus I’ll be a lot more graffiti-avoidant than in my previous buses, so overnight parking options will be more constrained, but I still plan to spend most weekends somewhere more interesting than the peninsula.

This will also be the time in which I pursue doing a “fancy” conversion on the new bus. All of my previous conversions were more function than form, with a lot of exposed plywood and 2x4s, square corners, and standard household or garage furniture bolted into place. This time I am aiming for something more like a commercial RV or party bus, the sort of result you’d expect if you hired professionals to do a mid-five-figures conversion job. Rounded corners, custom built and fit benches and cabinets, visually appealing upholstery and decoration, etc. A comet from the east coast has expressed interest in collaborating on the interior design. A well informed friend has recommended Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale as a good makerspace that I might use for my fabrication projects. I’ll be doing a lot of metal work, welding, carpentry, woodwork, upholstering, electrical wiring and electronic gadgets, etc.

Festivals/etc - September to December 2021

While I have a normal day job mid-week, remote work for long weekends, and a bus to live and play in taking shape, I plan to get back into the habit of going to big events regularly. This conveniently mostly coincides with a lot of big events returning from year-or-longer hiatus periods. I’ll also be trying to get out for smaller scale activities, but that requires less planning months in advance. I’ll be filling in my calendar as I learn about more events, more events announce their schedules, and I coordinate with friends, but here’s a tentative list of stuff I’m 50%+ likely to attend:

September 3-6 not-Burning-Man in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno (not in the bus!)

October 10-18 http://everywhenproject.org/ in the Mojave desert north of Los Angeles

Nov 12-15 http://darkodyssey.com/surrender/ (NSFW) in San Francisco

2022

Right now, things get fuzzier past the end of the year. However, by the start of the new year I hope to have a pretty good idea of how I plan to finish it.

Work has committed to making it possible for us to work from different offices, and my department has a presence in Atlanta and Boston, so I have some vague ideas of finishing the round-the-country road trip that I put on indefinite hold when I landed in San Francisco. Along the way I’d be spending some months or longer in one of those places, where I’ve lived before and have contacts and community to reconnect with.

There’s also the possibility of transitioning to full time remote work and going on the road for a while, in a new town or park every few days or weeks like I did back in 2015.

Either way, I plan to be taking what I’ve recently learned about shopping for real estate and coordinating people and money, then turning that into something big. I have an idea to pick the CoDwell name and concept back up, or to do something more commercial and profitable (like a b&b or campground or retreat center) and top-down with more specific goals and plans (rather than leaving it up to the participants to plan around their passions).

Beyond that… who knows?

I experienced a blowout while driving from Hilo to Kona a while back and the ensuing adventure was a bit longer than expected. Let me regale you with the story of my flat tire…

Round One

A blowout is no fun, but this one was remarkably comfortable thanks to the run-flat tires on my 2006 Honda Odyssey. While that might sound like good news, it’s not, but we’ll get to that later. I pulled over and it only took about ten minutes to get the spare installed. At which point I discovered the spare is also flat, but since it has a thicker tire I couldn’t tell just by handling it. Although I didn’t have a 12V air compressor, a failure to be resolved at another time, I did have my bike pump and plenty of time, so I got to work. After a few minutes of pumping I’d made no progress and investigated to discover a leak around the valve stem on the spare.

At this point it was 5PM on the day before Easter. Most businesses on this island are closed on the weekend. Most businesses on this island are closed on holidays. Most businesses on this island are closed after 5PM. And, the kicker, most businesses on this island don’t answer their phone. All that added up to us spending about an hour trying to find a mobile mechanic or towing company, leading to finally finding someone who was closed but knew a guy who knew a guy who did after hours towing. We called that guy and he asked for $400 for the tow. In hindsight, I should have taken it, but it seemed like unnecessarily much at the time.

We called a few friends in search of a ride home and found someone willing to cross the island just for the company. While we waited for the ride I prepped our gear to fit as much as we could in his car and leave as little as possible behind. That included taking both wheels off both bikes we had with us, and getting all the electronics and paperwork out of the van. We got lucky that he was in a station wagon and it all just barely fit! A few hours after the blowout, I was back home with a blown tire on the rim sitting in my garage, and so ends round one of Sparr vs Flat Tire.

Round Two

Sunday was a lost cause, so my next efforts were on Monday. I finished up work shortly after noon thanks to the time difference with my office, then set about my quest to get a new tire, get it mounted, and get it back to the van. I had taken the jack out of the van so I tossed that in my medium-size hiking backpack along with some snacks and water and other supplies. Then I strapped the tire to the pack, took a selfie, and started walking. I picked three tire shops, including Costco, as likely targets, the closest being about five miles away. I walked about a quarter mile down a 10% grade to a main road then stuck my thumb out. Standing still with the tire didn’t earn me any sympathy, but as soon as I put the pack back on and started walking I got picked up. My first ride got me halfway there, and my second within a block of the first shop. First shop told me they have never seen the numbering scheme on the tire (235/710R460) and can’t deal with it. Second shop was Costco and they were able to tell me it’s a specialty tire (PAX) that they can’t order. I spent over an hour waiting for them to get me a quote on new rims and tires, which they failed to accomplish. While waiting I also called a few other tire shops. I left voicemails with the ones that didn’t answer and spoke to the few that did, all of whom told me they didn’t have the tire and couldn’t mount it if they did. A few said they could order the tire and would get a quote for me. I asked for the same on all the voicemails. One of them told me to try the Honda dealership, but they were already closed at that point. I also did some googling and learned that Honda had actually been sued and settled over how hard it is to find a mechanic that can work on these wheels and tires. I bought a folding cart at Costco so that round three would be a bit less back-breaking, and got a ride home from a friend.

Round Three

On Tuesday I had not heard back from any of the shops with quotes to order the tire, so I went online and ordered a pair myself. $500 for the pair, plus $40 shipping from the mainland which is astounding considering that FedEx’s consumer portal quotes $840 for the same shipment. I watched a few YouTube videos and convinced myself I could mount them if I had to. It’s not a trivial process, but it’s not THAT much harder than mounting a regular tire without power tools would be.

The tires arrived on Thursday morning. I called the local Honda dealership and they said they could mount them, so I loaded up the cart and started walking from home again, this time with one rim and two tires (blown and new), along with the other supplies like the jack. A helpful guy in a pickup truck picked me up pretty quickly once I was walking on the main road with my thumb out, and he took me right to the Honda shop. Where, of course, I was told after a short wait that they can’t mount the tires, and the only shop that can is on the other side of the island. At that point I took out my phone and called the same shop I was standing in, asked the person on the phone very specifically if they could mount my tire (by type and brand) and was once again told yes. I asked person B to go educate person A and I started packing up to walk again.

I walked about a mile without finding a ride. Fortunately along the way to my next destination was a cool place to get food and drink, which meant my packed snacks could stay packed for later. I sated myself and arranged for a ride across the island with the same friend who was there for the blowout. For timing reasons, I took a Lyft to get closer to them, once again barely fitting the load into a vehicle.

Along the drive with my friend we passed the van and it was right where we left it. We made it to the mystical lone tire shop with ten minutes to spare, after having called ahead a few times to make sure they could fit us in. They said we were risking having to leave the tire overnight, but we were committed at that point. Fortunately between the two of us we convinced the shop to do the work in their post-closing-to-customers pre-done-working hour, possibly aided by the fact that it was an educational opportunity for some folks there who hadn’t seen this kind of tire before and definitely by my willingness to take back and dispose of my own blown out tire.

It took them about an hour to get the tire changed, and then we started the drive back to the van. Unfortunately, we discovered that someone had broken a window on the curb side. Two of them, actually, since the first one they broke wasn’t big enough to reach through. Fortunately they didn’t bother climbing in, presumably because the inside already looked ransacked from where I’d had to unpack the spare and then removed all the valuables. This one is a tiny bit my own mistake; I shouldn’t have locked the doors after already removing the valuables. I’m surprised they didn’t steal the battery or other low hanging fruit. I’m more surprised they left the extra jack they were probably going to use to steal my wheels. This is my second bit of evidence that the more remote parts of the island aren’t as crime-free as the populated areas seem to be.

Aftermath

I drove the van back home with no issues other than cold wind and buffeting from the missing window. The next time I crossed the island in the van I took the second new tire with me to get it mounted, so I wouldn’t be on mismatched-wear tires. On my last trip to San Francisco before shipping the container full of my stuff I picked up the glass and put it in the container, to save $300+ in shipping. The Honda dealership was able to install the big one, and I had to install the small one myself which went mostly well. That was a month ago at this point, and the only remaining step is to wind up the insurance claim for the broken window and see if their shop of choice can source the one rubber gasket I wasn’t able to replace during the install. At this point I’m calling the flat tire saga complete. I learned a lot, about Hawaii, my van, my friends, and my minimal ability to hike with a 60+ pound pack. Onwards and upwards!

Today’s insight into my analysis of interpersonal risk and reward involves being a houseguest, a differently intimate sort of interaction than I usually focus on. I am hopeful that this different context for what is really the same issue will help someone understand it who previously hasn’t.

Sam and I took a flight together. Upon landing, Sam invited me to crash at Pat’s place. I trust Sam, so even though I’ve only met Pat once before and they weren’t there to welcome me, I accepted, and went to sleep in one of Pat’s guest rooms. Come morning, Sam was gone and incommunicado, but might have been back later. Pat was around, and we greeted each other. I asked if I could stick around for a few hours to do my day job. So far this is a perfectly normal experience in terms of friends and +1s crashing at each other’s homes, one I’ve been on both sides of multiple times in the past, and I think most of my friends will recognize.

Pat’s response was “I need to get [the guest part of the house] reset for an airbnb guest and then I have to leave soon”, and then they turned away from me and back to making their coffee. That was where everything went off the rails, both in terms of common expected responses, and in terms of my personal [perception of] risk in proceeding. It’s that risk that I want to walk you through next.

I predicted a 20% chance that Pat wanted me to leave and an 80% chance that they’d have been fine with me working in a different part of the house while they were gone and I was waiting for Sam to come back. Further, in the case where they wanted me to leave I predict a 50% chance they would give me a straight answer if I asked and a 50% chance they would take my followup as creating enough social pressure or obligation for them to let me stay even though they wanted me to go. And in that worst 10% case, there’s a decent chance that they would tell someone, and a small chance that person either repeats it badly or are themselves the sort of person to take misleading irresponsible leaps in paraphrasing communication, and a bunch of other factors and weightings that I can elaborate on if necessary… All of which leads to my probabilistic prediction that this choice would lead to about five people being told for the first time, and perhaps hundred more not for the first time, that [TRIGGER WARNING, this is about to take an unexpectedly intense turn] I am a rapist. And since that is an outcome I would prefer to avoid, I packed up and left the house.

Now Sam thinks I’m weird and awkward and ignorant of social norms and unable to read interpersonal signals, or at least a bit more of those things than they already thought, and is less likely to invite me to their friends’ homes. I knew that outcome would happen, and nothing about it surprises me. If I had a dollar for every time someone accused me of missing signals that I didn’t miss… I wouldn’t need to borrow nearly so much to buy a house.

What I need from you is either to convince me that I’m wrong in my predictions, or in my weighting of the harm/benefit of the various outcomes, or to stop being and/or associating with the people who do the game-of-telephone thing and mis-judging of these and other sorts of situations and all the other cognitive failures that have led to this state of affairs.

Who lives in The South? Is Pittsburgh on the East Coast? These are the questions I occasionally find myself asking, any time I see or hear someone name a region but with a clearly different definition in mind than the last person who referred to it. More so whenever I encountered people actively arguing about whose definition was “right” or “true”. Eventually, despite my complete lack of qualifications as a professional statistician or survey-writer, I decided to gather some data. I took the map drawing code used by Bostonography for their 2013 neighborhood survey and adapted it for my needs, then asked a bunch of people to fill it out. That was eight years ago, and rather than let the project sit forgotten I figure it’s time to actually write up some of the results.

Unless I’ve explicitly told you that I don’t trust you or that you’re a bad or evil person, if I know you then I want to at least occasionally see you face to face, and I’m willing to help facilitate travel to make that happen if necessary. I drafted part of a much wordier version of this post, but scrapped it for this.

Unless I’ve explicitly said otherwise, when I invite you to visit I am offering you a guest room to stay in, a place to work remotely, use of some of my tools and toys for going on adventures, and food while you’re here. If you’re going to be here for weeks to months there’s a good chance I’ll ask you to contribute to the costs of the house/community, but that won’t ever be an unstated expectation.

I am hopeful of and predict that while you’re here we will do adventurous and/or tourist-y things together. Since I’m writing this in Hawaii those things might include hiking, bushwhacking, swimming, snorkeling, biking, and shopping. When I was in SF it would have leaned more toward museums and art, with hikes more distant.

For some of you, I’m also hopeful that you’ll choose to share my bed and/or engage in some kinky adventurousness while you’re here. The degree of that hope and certainty in my predictions of it coming to pass might be double what they would be in less coordinated interactions we’ve had in the past, if putting a number to it helps you make sense of things as it does for me.

Neither of the hopes above are obligations. The only obligations you have if you accept my invitation are those of a responsible adult human, to communicate when necessary, be honest, and fulfill the commitments you’ve made.

I hope to see you some day, soon or otherwise!

Why did you post that thing? Why do you keep posting stuff like that? What do you expect to get out of this post? What are your goals in this discussion? … I get these questions a lot. Not as often as I’d like, but still often enough that answering them gets a little repetitive from my point of view. Here’s an attempt to do this once and for all, so I can link back to it the next hundred times I’m asked. I’m sure there are at least a few reasons I’ve thought of before but are not coming to mind right now, or motivations I have that I’m not yet aware of. I’ll attempt to update this post in the future, but for now I think this is a pretty thorough answer to the question.

I post about controversial topics in an attempt to ...

A friend approached me about co-buying some property in Hawaii with them and a few other folks, with a goal of building some residences and functional spaces from local materials, growing our own fruit, maybe hosting travelers. We're all meeting up to see properties the last week of February, but I decided I wanted to take more time for this. I'm flying down this Sunday without a specific return date set. I'll have about two weeks on my own to scout out land we might be interested in, do some covid-safe tourist-y stuff, see some nature I haven't seen before, and generally seek adventure and/or relaxation. My plan is to buy a vehicle when I get there, live in it for the duration, then sell or gift it if/when I leave.

If anyone out there wants to join for the real estate shopping, the co-buy project, or just come along for the adventure, get in touch.
 

A lot of things are changing in the world and my life right now. I’m making a lot of contingent plans based on a lot of predictions, and I figured I might share some of them with you. Maybe you’ll find them amusing, or they will inspire you to make plans, or they will inform your plans related to me. I’ll also be able to look back in a year and see what I got right or wrong. Here’s how I see the rest of my 2021 shaking out. Each category is in order of decreasing preference unless otherwise noted.

• Residence

  • 30% CoDwell (my 100-200 person coliving project plan)

    • 25% Laurelwood, Oregon, boarding school property

    • 5% Somewhere else

  • 40% Hawaii

    • 30% Land co-buy with some friends and friends of friends

    • 10% Solo purchase of land, maybe house

  • 20% Loophole (my previous ~10 person coliving project in SF)

  • 10% ??

• Employment

  • 60% Google

  • 10% ??

  • 10% Self-employed

  • 10% Cruise

  • 10% Unemployed

• Relationships (intimate+romantic)

  • 70% Still involved with Victoria

  • 10% A comet upgrades to local/full-time

  • 20% Get re-involved with someone from the past

  • 10% Get involved with someone new

• Recreation / Hobby

  • 50% Have regular convenient access to wood and metal shops

    • 10% Start a kinky equipment/furniture business

  • 20% Find or start a regular recurring board game group

  • 20% Become active in open source game development again

  • 10% Pick up something entirely new (paramotor, scuba, ...)

• Health (sorted by worry, most to least)

  • 1% COVID+

  • 5% Problems develop with the scar on my cornea

  • 5% Another surgery on my right shoulder

• Legal (sorted by expected gain/loss, worst to best)

  • 10% I get sued over someone’s recreational injury

  • 10% I file a civil suit for five figures worth of property damage from 2018

  • 20% I file a small claims suit for four figures of bad mechanic work from 2020

  • 80% My text message spam class action suit significantly progresses

Reddit originated as a news sharing and discussion site like Digg, but has expanded to include many more social components, including personal posts, friends you can follow, etc. It is my favorite platform for organized deep discourse, owing to its large userbase, wide variety of topical groups, and fully nested reply model. A little known feature that makes it much more social-network-like is https://reddit.com/r/friends which functions like the "news feed" on other sites, showing posts by your friends no matter which subreddit they post in.

https://www.reddit.com/user/sparr/ | sparr | /u/sparr

Mastodon is an open source federated clone of Twitter. Federated means no single company controls the network, and you get to pick the server where your data lives while still being able to interact with other people on other servers, sorta like picking an email service (you use gmail.com and your email lives on google servers, but you can send and receive email from people using yahoo or microsoft, etc). It uses ActivityPub to interact with other services in the Fediverse, so you can use a Mastodon account to follow not only people on other Mastodon servers, but also on Pixelfed or Friendica or other services I'm not trying this year but will eventually.

https://mastodon.social/@sparr | @sparr@mastodon.social

Diaspora is an open source federated social network with functionality similar to early Facebook or LiveJournal.

https://joindiaspora.com/people/98ece344da783437 | sparr@joindiaspora.com

We took a three hour tour last weekend. Here it is in 8 minutes for you: youtu.be/ozAXkzW2NN8

If you want to be part of turning this property into a coliving meta-community, as a resident or community organizer or investor, let's talk!

I'm trying to get people and money together to buy a large rural mixed use property, particularly a boarding school, to turn into a group of intentional communities all with their own focus but sharing the common spaces. The focus recently shifted from Vermont to Oregon based on some real estate shenaningans.

The current target property is an ex-boarding-school ex-Ananda-retreat with 100 dorm rooms, wood welding and auto shops, dozens of classrooms and labs, large and small auditoriums, and 200 acres of land.

Details on the project at http://CoDwell.org and the just-launched crowd investing campaign is at http://wefunder.com/codwell

Get in touch if you're interested in helping organize or otherwise make this happen, joining as a member or resident when we launch, or investing through the crowd investing campaign or otherwise.

0. She / her / hers (cisgender woman)
1. She / her / hers (transgender woman)
2. They / them / their
3. E / em / eir (and other popularized sets)
4. Unique invented pronoun set
5. Ella / la / suya (and other foreign sets)
6. She / her / hers / "call me a man"
7. She / him / their
8. You / you / your
9. 9. I / me / my

1. What is the highest number you have seen in the wild?
2. What is the highest number you have successfully trained yourself to honor for someone, and who?
3. What is the highest number you would socially punish someone for not trying to honor?
4. What is the highest number you would socially punish someone for failing to honor?