JH AfterParty 1.3

How about a wall of text with no headings this week?

Hey everyone and welcome to another JH AfterParty, I am of course your sartorially exquisite and finely honed host John Henry, let’s take a look at what’s up inside my world this week!

The ongoing high-octane energy period continues. I have to admit this is kind of shaky ground for me, because this definitely isn’t an artifact of my mental illness (which it often is when I’m “up” like this – it’s called “manic depression” for a reason). I’ve been steady and strong for weeks now, and there’s no end in sight. My mind is sharper, my productivity is through the roof, and I’m literally hitting personal, internal goals that I’ve been picking at for twenty years or more.

The implementation of ProjeQtOr project management software on a subdomain of JHUS is a great example of this. I’ve literally been playing with project management software trying to find something that would work for me and the way I do things AND not cost an arm and a leg or require an MCS for thirty years.

Like Microsoft Project is pretty perfect – would be a better solution than this in fact – but it costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain and unlike Adobe Creative Cloud (which also costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain) it doesn’t produce an easily tangible result for the “customer,” which in my case is you in spite of my long-standing loathing for the idea that I am a “product” or the things I do are “commodities” or “services” to be “consumed.”

Regardless of my own self-serving philosophizing, in the end people are giving me money because I do certain things, and that amounts to a customer service relationship. This isn’t a new idea to me, it’s just one I’ve always been loathe to speak out loud because it feels like I’m turning myself into a new gadget from Ron Popeil. I don’t like thinking and talking in corporate-speak and MBA terminology. I know the language, in fact I’m pretty fluent in it beyond not keeping up with the lastest stupid buzzwords for someone’s half-assed attempt at actually doing the things some of us have been doing and telling everyone else you should be for centuries.

Watch the whole progression of the “Six Sigma” thing for an example. It doesn’t really mean anything at all other than “I’ve got a decent enough handle on how to do things that I can pass a little test and get a certificate that will make all the HR drones think I’m smart.” It’s just a big fancy bunch of marketable nonsense that comes down to “maximize production efficiency whenever possible.”

Much like “common core math,” in the end it represents an attempt by someone who doesn’t “get it” to communicate “it” to other people who “don’t get it,” while entirely locking out everyone who does “get it” from the conversation because the person who appears to “get it” gets paid so we’re back to the manifest individual tumors of the cancers of competition and capitalism.

Common core math is an attempt to teach neurotypical people how geniuses math, predicated on the notion that if you do it like a genius, you’ll get genius results. It, and nearly every such endeavor, overlooks the part about you have to be a genius to understand how it works, and most of us aren’t geniuses.

Six Sigma and pretty much every other trendy corporate buzzword is the same thing; it’s how someone figured out a way to package a good idea so people who are consistently averse to good ideas will accept it. Problem is in order to do that, half the time you have to compromise the idea until it’s no longer good.

This circles back to my problem with project management and self management and software. I’ve seen it in plenty of other places, too, it’s not just me – you can get so caught up in the metastructure of what you’re doing that you forget to actually do the thing you set out to do.

For instance about twenty-five years ago when I first started building websites, I started putting together a little section of my Geocities page for gaming…and then ended up in the weeds creating all the structure for the content until I got bored with it and never created the content. Now here I am a quarter-century later finally following through on it.

I’m not talking about things that just don’t pan out like the Musk For A Minute project – that was a good solid swing and an unfortunate miss and that happens in life, it’s not even a “failure,” just didn’t go where I hoped it would. I’m talking about things where you start off thinking you’re going to arrange your music collection and end up building a database where you can keep notes, track lists, ID3 or other metainfo, and write an article for every single one of your 60K+ MP3s…and then when the database is done you do about twelve entries and find something else that attracts your attention and your energy and suddenly a good idea is abandoned and three years later you go “ohshit, I was gonna….rawr.”

Meanwhile you’ve forgotten all about actually organizing your music collection.

That is the kind of bad habit I’m breaking in myself right now, and for some reason it’s important to me to express how it really is the same problem as the compromise problem above (and the other one below). You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the truth palatable to people who are violently opposed to hearing it (or in some extreme cases straight out incapable of processing it), you forget that the job is “tell the truth,” not “make it comfortable,” and pretty soon you’re not telling the truth at all anymore. You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the process more efficient that you forget it has to actually be a working process and at some point you need to engage in it.

See e.g. the entire “critical race theory” argument, whereby cowardly bigots insist that because the truth of how horrible white people in the US have been to people of color historically is not comfortable to white people, that truth should not be spoken at all.

All three of those examples of broken thinking are rooted around the same fundamental (and dysfunctional) thought pattern, and you can probably tell by my rambling I’m having a little trouble nailing down precise verbiage for it. I know it’s not just a me thing, because there are those examples above. I just can’t find a common, readily understood phrase to describe it that does the concept proper service. I think the closest I ever came was something I said once that got memed and I’ve long since lost track of: People will happily pay $10 for a sideshow just to prove they didn’t get taken in by the $5 circus.

Point is I’m in a really amazing place in my life right now, things are happening like crazy and moving ahead in big ways. All that stuff I was “gonna” over the years, I’m finally doing, and it feels really wonderful. (Okay, not all…but a lot more than I ever have at once before.)

I wouldn’t be here without all of your help, and I wouldn’t be able to contemplate moving forward without knowing you all are here, and I appreciate you far more individually and constantly than you probably think…especially because interpersonal communication and followups like sending “thank you” notes when someone chucks me fifty bucks on PayPal tend to be first and foremost among those things that get lost in the dust when I’ve got other stuff happening.

That’s part of the whole reason I’m doing this newsletter; to find SOME way to show folks that I’m thinking of you and that I never forget “who I’m working for,” without stepping over a big bright line I have where I think it’s pretty gross to lock information that everybody really needs behind a paywall so only people who can afford it, get it. That’s kind of one of the big problems I’m trying to solve, right – the whole inequity of access to critical needs, systems, and information. I can hardly be a credible agent of change in that regard if I refuse to risk letting go of the tactic myself because I’m afraid I won’t be able to eat or pay rent. Someone’s got to take that risk, and I happen to be pretty well geared to minimize the impact of it in a lot of ways that most people aren’t, so here I am.

Anyway…I was going to say “I digress” but this entire newsletter is supposed to be a digression of sorts so I won’t. I will say that I’ve got a lot of great new content up at the site, much more coming, some really fantastic things happening in terms of my mental health and overall state of being, and I’m now in my groove and doing what I came here to do.

See y’all next week, please don’t forget those engagements! Some of y’all have been hearing me talk about “when I get to this point, it’s gonna be time to get serious about all of this for folks in the liking and sharing and commenting and subscribing and telling others department” for a decade or more.

Well, now I’m at this point. It’s time. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Talk soon and don’t forget to subscribe to the Substack! (There’s a form in the sidebar if you’re reading this at JohnHenry.US. It’s below the content on vertical screens.) That’s the one way you know for sure you’re aware of everything I publish and create, and that’s the best way to know what you like and prefer to share and engage with 🙂

OH! I almost forgot I’m doing an irregular-but-daily-ish new thing called “The Morning Me,” you should check that out (I’ll get a node page up for it soon) and also know ahead of time that there’s probably going to be something similar about the rest of the world coming along Real Soon Now™. And yes, rich media is on the horizon.