Category Archives: Life

Farewell, Twitter

Posted on March 4, 2023 | Leave a comment
A screenshot of my first tweet on Twitter from my @kilbo account dated April 3, 2009. The text is, "Becoming a twit."

I’m done with Twitter and tweeted my last tweet in January 2023. Though I mourn the voices I’ve left behind, I celebrate the experience. While quitting Twitter cold-turkey has been rough, the time I used to spend on it has shifted to other activities, like reading, and I’m less anxious about world events–both positive outcomes.

With its global reach and endless ways to slice, fork, and forward conversations, Twitter always reminded me of USENET. It also shared a similar community dynamic of direct, unfiltered conversations with world- and lesser-famous experts in their fields while bad actors and idiots derailed things through malice and ignorance.

Twitter at its best kept me connected to friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, delivered nuanced and broad viewpoints on any topic that caught my eye, alerted me to important breaking news, educated me, and provided virtual communities to discuss the topics I was most interested in. At its worst, it was a catalyst to amplify the horrible behavior and voices of fascists, racists, bigots, misogynists, transphobes, and other dregs of humanity.

The good parts enabled me to curate lists of astronomers, astrophysicists, ichthyologists, writers, geologists, and local journalists, all discussing happenings in their fields along with a corresponding steady stream of amazing pictures. Automated Twitter bots delivered me pictures from the edge of the universe, the outer and inner solar system, the tops of mountains and the bottoms of oceans, and forests and deserts. Other bots sent me earthquake alerts and reports, first responder information, weather forecasts and warnings, gentle reminders to take care of myself, and my favorite bots, the just for fun ones like icon aquariums and meadows, hourly photos of lizards, and esoteric art.

The worst parts had me block hundreds of accounts and keywords in order to filter out hate and emotionally insulate myself from seeing endless, echoing reports of singular, tragic events. There were also people who were just fine with insulting or threatening me for daring to share or hold an opinion that was at variance with theirs.

Using filters and lists curated through the wonderful third-party app I used, Tweetbot, I had hammered Twitter into a community and information conduit that was mostly pleasant to interact with and minimized the negative bits. I was never a prolific tweeter, clocking in at over seventeen thousand tweets over almost fourteen years.

But then a billionaire asshole bought Twitter at the end of 2022. That sale prompted me to delete most of my tweets before the deal closed. I set up an auto-delete bot to purge tweets older than a month and I ramped down my tweeting. My intent was to add a minor speedbump to access my account data on the platform by putting the bulk of it into offline backups.

On January 12, 2023, third-party Twitter apps were disabled, which was the only way I interacted with Twitter. I haven’t tweeted since. That the asshole owner continues to exhibit behavior and espouse and amplify opinions from the worst side of Twitter makes them anathema to me and reinforces my decision. I can’t in good conscience provide my content or passive participation for them to monetize. It’s the “no assholes” rule in action.

I’ve looked at Mastodon as a replacement and I’m not convinced it’s a step forward instead of a step sideways and back so I’m holding off for now. Its architecture is similar to USENET with its distributed servers, each with separate content policies and admins. I was uneasy with the situation back then and it wasn’t until I set up my own server with my own domain and policies that I felt more secure in my participation. Mastodon falls into the same bucket for me and I have no desire to be a server admin again.

I remain hopeful Twitter crashes financially and is sold in a fire sale to better owners who will restore third-party API access with a subscription fee. I’d pay for that. I’m not holding my breath.

Farewell, my Tweeps, farewell.

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Farewell Pierre Ketteridge, Prophet of the Great God Glub

Posted on February 9, 2023 | 2 comments

Pierre was what any generation would call a Character and a world-class raconteur. He was what my grandfather’s generation would have called a pen pal and mine calls an Internet friend–someone I knew semi-intimately through their writing first on USENET and then later, on a private mailing list. I knew him for close to thirty years but only met him one time on a group video call.

The first adventure of his I recall reading about was his participation in a North African car rally. My faulty memory wants to believe it was the Dakar Rally and that he was engaged as a photographer, which was another one of his creative outlets. His dispatches then and until the end of his life had a Hunter S. Thompson-esque flavor and I recall his hilarious narration of mechanical breakdowns and the trials and tribulations of journeying in a desert where you don’t speak the language.

At one point he included a selfie shot of him and the driver in the desert. His thin frame looked dusty and dirty. His curly hair was an unruly windswept nest atop his head. Underneath his bushy moustache was the smile of a person who looked like they were having the time of their life. I’m certain he was.

Pierre lived in the UK and was a keen observer of regional and cultural dialects and class distinctions as he travelled across the country for work. He had a knack for meeting or observing interesting people and I always envied his characterizations and ability to transcribe their patois. His missives through the years were a delight to read. A more memorable story of his from a 1994 trip to Brighton recounted witnessing some London businessmen out to dinner with sex workers:

They were loud, and brash, and drunk, and they were loaded – and wanted everyone to know it. … Sleazebag was trying very hard to look like John Travolta in his cream linen suit and dark open-necked shirt. His gleaming pate and greased-back remains of dandruff-encrusted hair spoilt the effect a bit, though. Both were dripping with ugly, chunky jewelry. … My main course, and a carafe of wine, arrived, and I got stuck in. I could still hear them though, singing and shouting and giving the restaurant staff hell. “Oy, Angelo! Gessanuvva bottla wine! An’ none of that fuckin’ Shyanti crap like before. Gessa bottla Valpollywotsit, pronto!”

The story unfolds in a way that would make Guy Ritchie blush and concludes with his vicious hangover the next morning.

Many of his stories orbited around alcohol-fueled behavior, either his own or others’. His last home was in a live-aboard in a marina surrounded by a cast of other characters who lived there and in the local pub. He recounted plumbing problems, bodies alive or otherwise in the water, motorcycle crashes, dating adventures, mentally ill neighbors, and the drama that would spill from the pub and end up on his boat and vice versa.

There’s no sugarcoating that his final years were rough, physically and mentally. It was distressing to watch from afar. He lost his high-tech career and worked a variety of odd jobs. He suffered from a number of physical ailments that caused him great pain at times and limited his mobility. The UK’s medical system has been trending towards the US’s for over a decade, and he was chronically under-treated.

His stories, which used to be torrents with hundreds or thousands of words, shrunk to a few sentences of tantalizing vignettes or cryptic hints of more to come that never came. When he was finally diagnosed with cancer and ended up in hospital, that trickle of words turned to drops until his tap ran dry.

One happy constant in his restless and unpredictable life was his love for his boys. He was very proud of the men they had become and it came through whenever he wrote about them. I send my heartfelt condolences to them.

Pierre’s is a peculiar grief to me. I have lost a favorite author and I grieve not only the loss of his life but the loss of his words. As much as watching him from afar could be maddening when he made sub-optimal decisions, I will miss the unbridled joy and piercing insight about people he shared through his stories, like when he was hired to photograph Grace Jones at a club and described her and her entourage in devastating detail or detailed the eccentricities and travails of local village inhabitants.

Farewell, Prophet, you mad motherfucker. Send a letter from the beyond, willya?

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RIP Chris Wicklund

Posted on February 11, 2020 | 3 comments

Chris was one of those people for whom sitting still and keeping quiet was hard. Very hard. A mutual friend’s father who needed a bit of prodding to remember who he was famously said of him, “Oh, the mouthy one.”

In his defense, Chris was not unkind, cruel, or particularly foul-mouthed more than other people – he was just loud.

Sound, more than anything, defined his life. We were housemates in college in the late 80s, and again later in the late 1990s when he was between relationships and housing. He almost always had loud music playing, or was talking loudly, or was laughing loudly.

He laughed a lot. At full volume, his laugh was a barking snicker that would erupt out of him. In quieter moments it’d be a more gentle, “Heh.” Chris was a comedian, with an almost endless patter of one-liners, snark, wry observations, and pantomime, which often made other people laugh, too. Trained in and a student of the dramatic arts, he would put his whole body into it, with arms waving and torso thrusting; anything for a laugh or reaction.

Chris was also a musician, and when I met him he was playing bass and backup singing in a band called The Look. They played cover tunes at frat parties, schools, and the odd event, and I worked crew for the band for a spell. He played a black Steinberger, (for those not familiar, it’s a very blocky looking instrument, with the tuning keys at the base of the saddle,) and its New Wave look stood out for a rock and roll band.

Chris’ setup was always pretty easy. It was a microphone and stand, plus a monitor speaker. The crew, of course, always tormented the talent, so his microphone stand would almost always be set up for sound check just a little bit too low or a little bit too high. He’d bitch at us while adjusting the height and then tell the person running the soundboard to turn the bass up in the mix. Being good crew, the sound person had already been forewarned, so knobs would be twiddled that didn’t adjust the bass volume at all until he was satisfied with the mix. Sometimes we’d catch him at the board later and have to turn it back down.

The Look went on to record a CD in 1991, Big Fruity Wet Bongos, to showcase the talents and range of the band and hook a record contract. I was fortunate enough to attend and observe a few recording sessions, and it was inspiring to see Chris pursing his artistic dreams. But 1991 was the year of the grunge explosion, and The Look’s pop-rock with metal-inspired guitar didn’t stand a chance and The Look eventually disbanded.

But throughout his life, Chris was almost always in a band or getting a band together, and I remain impressed he was a gigging musician throughout his life. He moved from bass to lead singer, and years later he was forced to hang up the guitar for good after a semi-trailer rear-ended him and damaged his playing arm. He expressed his sadness and frustration after that at not being able to play anymore, but he also talked about how much he loved singing.

When he lived in my basement, I got to know the quieter side of Chris over a chessboard. It was one of the few activities where I would see him sit still and be quiet. We’d talk about everything and nothing, and it was a respite for both of us.

Chris moved around later in life and we drifted apart. But a few years back he texted me about chess, and we had some back and forth there and over the phone. We tried to make plans to get together but they never gelled. The last time I talked to him was in January this year while visiting mutual friends in Moses Lake. I hand’t heard from him in a while, so it was a pleasure to hear his voice and laugh.

It hurts to know that voice and laugh is now gone. I miss my friend.

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The Fadings

Posted on November 13, 2017 | 1 comment

Mary Jo Egan Kilbourn

November 13, 1939 – April 5, 2017

     Our elders are the past who understood the world we were born into because they lived through it. By the time we understand the world, our elders understand it less, and usually by the time they die, it is as unrecognizable and confusing to them as the world was to us when we were born. And when they die, the past does not die with them. It fades.
     It fades in the slow, chemical decomposition of pigments in photographs. It fades in worn-out things requiring replacement. It fades in the uncountable moments we forgot of eating breakfast with them, shopping with them in grocery stores, phone messages from them we erased, papers from them we threw away and recycled, and the forgotten moments of normal conversations about making plans or just talking together about unremarkable things, because if they were remarkable we’d remember them.
     What remains is the curated distillation of them, but it isn’t really them. It’s the remaining distillations of those that came before them, which you curate further or catalog and file as museum archives, kicking the can down the generations, plus whatever you’ve saved of them because it reminded you of happiness, or comfort, or of the bond you now share with a ghost.
     You can talk to that ghost, but the ghost doesn’t really talk back. It does, but it’s what you think the ghost would say, not the ghost’s words. They’re you’re words. They’re words you tell yourself when you’re sad, or happy, or enraged, or melancholy, or joyous, or angry, or at peace, or terrified, or any of the other feelings that pass through a day like weather systems.
     Some of those words are like sunshine, warm and reassuring. Others fall like branches on your head during a windstorm, leaving you concussed because the sky is falling. Then the words fade, because they always do, and all that’s left are the emotions.
     Fear, anger, sadness, wistfulness, and million other emotions that vibrate in chords with a diminuendoing basso of grief that began as a siren’s ear-splitting wail. It fades sub-sonic and will punch you in the gut when it resonates in harmonic frequencies, boosting a resonant tone to where it bursts out of you in racking laughter or sobs, before fading into the background dirge echoing amongst the works and follies of all ghosts in chorus, indistinct.
     It’s music you chase through deserted cities, canyons, forests, beaches, mountains, fields of sunflowers, at the dentist’s, or anywhere else you find yourself suddenly alone. With the sound seeming to be always around the next corner or bend. But you never locate the source of it because the closer you come to it, the more it fades away until you stop searching for it. Then it blindsides you in the grocery, in the car, in the shower, under the covers, on the couch, while you’re out of for a run, sitting on the toilet, or preparing dinner, making you tremble as it catches you in its net and drags you under before fading and you can struggle up for air.
     Even faded, that past has weight. Each moment a grain of sand, which compresses into a slab of sandstone you carry until it, too, fades by weathering away back into sand and then dust. We carve our lives into these tablets, hoping to avoid fading, hoping some future soul will pick it up and dust it off, hoping we’ll be able to finish our lines in time.
     Over time, the shape of the land changes and what was once an ocean floor becomes a mountain and the mountain becomes the ocean floor, lifted by fire and then run down by water. And the animals and the vegetables and the minerals change and require twenty questions to identify, and one day we may join them in that game, if we’re lucky.
     But that’s okay. Uncountable stars, planets, galaxies, black holes, quasars, and other stuff we don’t know about yet have been born and then been fading away across the universe for billions of years and we don’t even know for certain if there are other creatures out there that have faded or will fade on those rocks or in those oceans. It’s just the nature of things. I have my suspicions though. Until and beyond when we know or never know, our fadings will ring the celestial spheres until none are left to hear.

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Goodbye IMDb, hello…

Posted on October 17, 2016 | 1 comment

kilbo-logo…independent consulting practice & stealth startup!

I’m incredibly excited to announce that I am now a freelance consultant specializing in customer & user experience analysis, and information & content architecture for mobile applications and the web.

For the past eleven years, I’ve had the privilege of working at two of the top 25 Fortune 500 companies in the world, Amazon (IMDb) and Microsoft. Combined, the products I’ve worked on have over 100MM downloads for Android and iOS, and over 300MM website visitors a month. It’s been exhilarating and humbling to work on properties at that scale with some wicked smart people.

But for a few years now I’ve been wanting to get back to working for myself and have the flexibility to be around more for my kids. After a year working with my IMDb colleagues to set a new information architecture, apply a new Material design, and get the wheels turning on development, (launching soon-ish!) it’s now time to strike out on my own.

So, if you know anyone that needs help tuning up or launching an app or website, I’d really appreciate a referral! The best way to contact me is through my LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kilbo.

And, because I also miss my startup roots, I’m also incubating a new company. Over the winter I’ll be working on the business plan and expect to be ready to scale and launch the new idea in the first quarter of 2017.

Stay tuned!

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Posted in Customer Experience, IMDb, information architecture, Life, Microsoft, startups, user experience, Website Design

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