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This blog is a table of contents for my Twitter threads, starting in 2012, and working through toward the present. I include links to the threads, as well as quick descriptions of the threads.
From time to time, I like to do a blog post reflecting on the time frame of the threads I've most recently posted to this blog.
The blog posts directly below are my final blogs of 2016.
As you can see from many of the posts, they signify a lot of the volunteer work I'd been doing over the course of that year -- political volunteering during the 2016 election cycle, political participation after the elections, volunteering with a literature festival, and volunteering within Denver's art gallery scene.
As I've mentioned before, in 2016, I was experimenting a lot with Instagram. And for a while in mid-2016, I moved almost exclusively to Instagram from Twitter for my social media posts.
In September I came back to Twitter to posts about a lot of things -- most especially political work and reviews of movies and books.
I still mostly kept my reviews of art gallery and art museum visits on Instagram, as I felt like a lot of people I referenced in those reviews -- visual arts folks -- were on Instagram and could be made aware of my reviews.
However, for reasons I can't quite ascertain from my notebooks, between mid-December and mid-January, I moved entirely over to Instagram again.
I'm guessing the reason for this had something to do with the Denver art gallery I was volunteering at. By the end of 2016, the folks who had gotten involved with the gallery and aimed (I feel, though I could be wrong) to get me kicked out had almost totally succeeded. I was trying to make efforts to keep some sort of foothold in the gallery, though I knew it likely wouldn't happen. And I think I pushed really hard on Instagram in December to try and keep my presence.
But things were just not very good, and my presence within the Denver art gallery scene diminished and diminished, until May of 2017, when I essentially removed myself from the gallery I'd been helping and from Denver's art gallery scene altogether.
This was also a strange time for me politically. I'd done a ton of political volunteering in Colorado in 2016. And while the Democrats had had a lot of victories in Colorado, we were still left with a lot of losses, including some losses that were very meaningful for me personally.
So in November and December I reflected on a lot of the stuff that had happened for the Democrats during the 2016 election cycle. I formed my opinions based on personal experience and what the leaders around me were saying. But, somehow, I still ended up saying some stuff publicly via Twitter that I don't think was very popular among my Democrat friends.
Honestly, it was pretty evident almost from the time the 2016 elections ended that, despite some pretty obvious weirdness that definitely affected our elections, nobody was really going to address that weirdness -- which was largely internal, and which largely came from national leaders. Instead, it was pretty obvious, people were going to shift the blame for the internal weirdness onto foreign actors and use the shifted blame both to create nationalistic sentiment against foreign nations and a justification for increasing restrictions on internet freedoms within the US.
So, as you'll see, understanding this, I began to write more and more "op-ed" style Twitter threads regarding this stuff -- trying my best to express why I felt we Democrats were heading in the wrong direction post-elections. We were -- and are -- absolutely controlled by our hatred of one person, driven with animosity toward a nation we insist is composed entirely of bad foreign actors, and convinced that if we restrict internet freedoms for kids, all the adults will magically make only good political choices from now on. It's all absurd and, to this day, makes me a little bit ashamed to be a Democrat.
This was also a transitional period for me in my professional life. From 2012 to 2015 I'd worked very hard to help a company get sold for a lot of money. My efforts had little to no return for me. Instead I got fired from that company as soon as the change in management would allow it. Two days after I lost that job, I started work with another company. But that job slowly crashed and burned.
But in early 2016, I'd started doing some side consultancy work. In mid-2016 my steady job collapsed entirely and I was let go. Throughout the remainder of 2016, I was working entirely via my consultancy jobs. The work was uneven -- I'd have a number of projects all at once, then have only one project. I worked myself a little too hard, probably. But it was probably also worth it, as I think my hard work left me with a somewhat good reputation.
By December of 2016, I'd gotten started on a project that kept me in good shape (combined with other projects) and lasted through October of 2017. I've been doing consultancy work ever since. It's been turbulent at times. But, overall, it's worked out okay.
But I think by December of 2016, I'd also worn myself pretty ragged. And, in a lot of ways, I feel like I was ready for a big emotional and mental collapse, which I guess did happen. As you'll see, there are a couple times in 2017 when I disappear from Twitter for quite a while.
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