black roses

I came upon a rose garden. The rose garden had black roses, which I know fascinated my mom as she has mentioned them multiple times for some reason - I think she saw them once 45+ years ago.

I was going to go bring her to see to see the black roses when a friend arrived at the garden to tend to the roses. She told me they looked black because they were burned roses. She showed me the bit where the ends of the petals were still red, as that was the newly grown bit.

I didn't at the time question how burned petals could continue to grow and how the new growth was red, but I did think to myself that it would be very disappointing to explain to my mom that black roses are simply burnt roses.

And that's when I woke up.

Coincidentally, I completely forgot about this until I saw a video today, a tongue in cheek one about people who can't see colour in their imagination, which prompted me to describe my dream in the comments. I found the coincidence (that I would dream of black roses on the same day I'd come across a video of people with black and white imaginations) uncanny... or was it confirmation bias?

Either way, time to tell mom about my dream about black roses... or not.

the un-optimized life

A comment on a youtube video about watching everything at 3x speed (to keep your mind sharp and optimize the rate of flow of information) reminded me of something I've never blogged - a bit about my past, that very strongly shaped how I lived ever since. 

I'm not feeling like rewording my comment, so here it is, copied from the video:

Interesting thing about speed listening. I'm guessing there haven't been long term studies about this though. I have anecdotal evidence about speed reading as an analogy. I started speeding up my reading from when I was about 6, hitting my maximum at about 9 and sustaining that for many years - I never counted words per minute but it was 4.5 pages per minute of paperback novels. At that speed, I was reading between 2 and 3 books a day, literally running out of stuff to read. I kept that speed going till I was about 19. At that point, I think I got saturated with information (I had literally ready my entire school library, although my uni library was much larger and I didn't bother even trying to cover it). I can speed-read even now (I'm 42) but I find it very exhausting and not worth the effort. I have stopped optimizing the flow of information into my head and now focus on enjoying the journey, even if it's information for information's sake. It seems like youtube/podcasts in general are inefficient sources of information, so a person may not hit saturation point as quickly (or at all?) but given speed-listening to youtube has been with some people since childhood, I wonder if they may eventually reach the same predicament as I have with reading.

Just to add: while the first aspect of my life to be consciously de-optimized was my information diet, it's now spread to pretty much everything else. As recently as 10 years ago, I used to believe in packing every moment of free time I had with "things worth doing".

That's completely changed now. Well before Chronic Fatigue Syndrome took over my life, I had very much stopped optimizing my time. Everything has become about being "in the moment" even if the moment was something mundane. Kinda like climbing the same hill twice a week for 3 years - something I could never even imagine 10 years ago!

I still seek new experiences, and still enjoy change, but I have stopped feeling that pressure now. 

To put it differently, life doesn't feel "too short", life now feels "long enough" - a crazy thing to say when I can literally see weeks and months go by in a blink, just staying afloat - eat, work (not always - CFS has really impacted my ability to get things done!), sleep repeat. And no, I've not run out of things to do. I've simply stopped maintaining a ToDo list. I now do things as I feel like, when I feel like. I don't sweat the missed opportunities, the things I could do. Or even the things I could do better.

I don't know if this will ever change, but I can see this is simply what I learned in my late teens with regards to information and learning, spreading over to the rest of my life.

Anyway, it's 10:45pm. I'm off to bed!

social (and not commercial) media

It's been over 10 years in the making, but I have gone from guessing to being absolutely sure that the time has come for a new social media that is truly social and not commercial. It's an idea that's been brewing in my mind for a while. It needs to mimic human relationships: humans only speak one-one or in small groups, and sharing something involves repeating it, typically not verbatim. Human communication is typically verbal, and pictorial sharing is pretty limited.  Our time and social batery is not allocated by "engagement" or other clickbaity metrics, but by the meaning we derive out of the interaction.

It should be easier to create and maintain than the vast behemoths that pretend to be social media these days. I will get around to creating it soon.

alternatives

sometime in 2020 (or was it early 2021?), I decided I needed to streamline my social media footprint. until that time, it was a combination of Instagram for photos/videos, Facebook for links and general posts, and twitter for banter. if I had to pick one of the three, Facebook was the obvious winner, simply because it was the jack-of-all-trades, doing everything reasonably well. 

things have changed since then: Facebook has made it significantly more difficult to organise photos/videos, become so ad-littered that I struggle to find stuff to have meaningful conversations over, and my friends probably can't find most of my non-photo posts either. 

Instagram is worse: there isn't (and never was) any sense of organisation, engagement (other than people liking stuff) is ridiculously low, the ad ratio is close if not the same - it is Facebook after all.

Twitter was never a contender as far as being my primary social media platform is concerned, simply because there are too few friends on it. something like 5% of my Facebook friends! no organisation either, and tweets are simply lost in the ether once they are off the timeline. thankfully no ads though.

so, the solution is "none of the above". and in fact, it's now a matter of "build or use?"

as far as using existing platforms is concerned, this blog is one option. it cross-posts to Facebook, can cross-post to twitter, maybe even WhatsApp(!) and telegram, lets me organise stuff as I please, but is extremely limited as far as interaction is concerned. 

the thing with interaction though is, it already seems to be quite one-sided: friends interact with stuff I post more than I interact with stuff they post. as a result, most of my time spent interacting on any social platform seems one-sided and not very rewarding. so maybe it's time to just forget about it.

when it comes to building something new, my options recently reduced thanks to heroku announcing end of their free tier. so I'm going to have to find some new way to post. anything I build will obviously work with zapier, and hence be able to do everything my blog can - but can it do better? so far I don't have any ideas. but that's also because I hardly use my blog. 

so, it's time to move everything to my blog. everything is going to be public again(!).

there is also going to be a significant effort involved in building the structure I want to use. for example, my blog has no categories for any of the stuff I post on Facebook!

I just hope I don't give up halfway and decide it isn't worth it (because that would probably be the end of 20 years of my online presence!). 

hiatus

i only realized 5 minutes ago that my last post (before the one I posted 5 minutes ago) was 3 months ago! in fact, I had so completely forgotten about this blog that I'm now surprised I even remembered to type the last post - there has literally been a mental pathway that I seem to have stopped using! for example my birthday went by a couple of months ago and for the first time since the inception of this blog, I completely forgot to write about it! and it wasn't even for lack of content. in fact, I have more than the usual stuff to write about, and I also have more than the usual stuff to write about that I haven't been posting elsewhere (ie facebook/twitter)!

why then have I stopped blogging?

the answer is literally right in front of me as soon as I consciously started thinking about it: the internet  (specifically social media, or more accurately, Web 2.0) has rewired me.

I have always been big on social media - to the extent that I have probably been called a social media butterfly at one point (at least a few years ago to be fair). the biggest difference though is that while the amount of time I spend producing content has reduced, the time I spend consuming content has increased.

And most of the content I consume isn't particularly high on the cost/benefit scale I'm used to measuring my energy-weighted time and effort by.

Has facebook's algorithm's become inexplicably more addictive? I don't think I'm objective enough to be able to say. But something I'm more convinced of is that I've been trying to apply the same "dopamine feedback" loop that instant-gratification forms of social media promote, to other forms (like this blog).

this blog doesn't provide instant (or possibly any palpable) gratification. nobody comments. there is no like button (it does get cross-posted to facebook and there is a like button there, but I'm not sure if that counts), there are no notifications other than emails that get buried under hundreds of more important ones. heck, i recently exported my email subscribers (yes, google just killed feedburner, they want you on that dopamine feedback loop too!) and it was all of TWO. two subscribers over 15 years.

I know I'm actually writing this (and pretty much everything) for myself, but I can't help feeling that repeated reinforcement that nobody cares has caused me to stop caring too.

except that I do care. I care as long as I type. I stop caring once I click publish. But isn't that what it's supposed to be?

I feel that dopamine hit coming along as I hover over the bright orange button, ready to click - and feel the need to fight it. because too much of this good thing is most definitely bad.

either way, i'm back.

retribution or support?

I happened to comment on a post about "mansplaining", asking if there's anything a man could comment there without being dismissed as an instance of mansplaining.

The amount of negativity a man earns by just virtue of being a man is... overwhelming.

I wonder, would it be easier to make the world a better place for women if every conversation about issues that primarily affect women would not be so overwhelmingly targetted against men (as opposed to the problematic behaviour itself, even if that behaviour is exhibited by the majority of men)? In other words, if a man chooses to try to make a difference (which every man should!), would it be more productive to offer retribution for the rest of his ilk and his/their past behaviour, or support?

And if it's not clear if a man actually exhibits the behaviour being discussed, would it be more productive to give the man the benefit of the doubt before coming to that conclusion? Or does the generalization make things easier to discuss, and making a few men feel bad for no fault of their own acceptable collateral damage?

The responses to the comment led me to conclude a few things:

• Mainsplaining is so common that many women do not feel the need to quallify their statement about men
• Mansplaining is so common that some (many?) women do not even realize it - they simply assume men know more
• Most men and women fundamentally disagree when it comes to "can we talk about a problem without trying to solve it?"
• The women involved consider "shut up if it doesn't refer to yourself" as a valid approach to take. It appears the men involved (myself included) do not. Is that because we're muddying the waters? Is that because the majority of men who'd comment on such a post are the ones who are either not guilty or blind to their faults?
• When men do the gender-neurtal equivalent of mansplaining to other men, they are simply branded condescending (or, as one man would say to another: a dick). And it happens a lot, and men either ignore it or call it out and move on.
• I need to stop taking claims about "men" personally, as I would be as guilty of inflicting collateral damage on women who have been at the receiving end of this sort of behaviour far too often for far too long.

I have not concluded whether retribution or support is the most productive line to take though. It's unlikely I will be able to make that decision.

anti-social media

the less you use Facebook, the more dysfunctional it seems to get. is their algorithm bad or is there a subtle plot to encourage people to be regular users? same experience with Instagram too, until I finally uninstalled it 🤦‍♂️ 

stepping away from twitter for a few years and then getting back made me realize it was always a super-high signal to noise ratio that wasn't useful unless I spent hours on it.

is social media dead? has social media always been dead? 

phone free

I'm preparing to go phone-free. I'm already down to using my phone for about 10 minutes daily, and my phone's battery life is down to about 20 minutes on a full charge.

I could theoretically purchase a new phone, but why? I don't even use my phone much any more. Yes, I know, it's because I'm working from home, and basically at home 99% of the time, and I might change my mind and buy a phone once we're back to moving around again. Who knows?

I'll still have my mobile phone number for calls and texts (unfortunately, my landline is only used by cold-calling scammers), but I am planning to not use my phone for anything else that can't be done without it.

So:

No more Whatsapp (oh yeah!)

No more Instagram (yeah, why not?)

No more Signal (sorry, all of you who just switched. Telegram is better because it doesn't exclusively run on a phone)

Possibly no more Google maps (we did fine without it for decades, no?)

No more photos of my food (let's be honest, how many of you cared?)

I'll probably blog more. Probably.

days go by

it's been a little over two weeks since we've voluntarily confined ourselves indoors, except for weekly grocery shopping, and twice so far, walks.

i've never worked from home for so many days in a row in my life.

the last time i've spent so much time indoors was 26 years ago, when i was terribly sick.

i guess the biggest difference between then and now is that i didn't have any way of being in touch with friends (I could wave out to them playing cricket from my home, but i was so weak i probably didn't).

so this is different. an able mind in a somewhat able body. just cooped up indoors.

for one, i've stopped seeing the boundary between work and life. since both are in front of the same screen, on the same couch, i just multitask between the two.

my screen time is off the charts. i don't think i have looked at a screen for as long since maybe 2003.

and i'm pretty sure i haven't spent as much time on facebook in... forever.

it's a strange conflict i face now - my time online is well past the point of diminishing returns, but all the platforms i'm using are designed for exactly that - an epidemic of free time with not much to do. if i reduce my online time significantly, i will definitely have more free time for other things, but i won't be moving back up the curve of diminishing returns - it's going to be flat, because everyone else, including the people i want to be in touch with. is oversharing mindless stuff as much as i am.

one thing is for sure though - progress on my pet projects (the one i blogged about, and another one) have slowed down. focusing might help... because trying to find collaborators online has come to naught.

it's funny how society breaks down so easily, and the wave of boredom and listlessness can consume everyone to the point where few people seem to be getting anything of real use done.

these weeks have provided me a learning experience i would never have imagined. slowing down of time without having any physical/mental impediment has let me view the world in much more detail than i ever could.

i wonder if this is what growing old feels like.

connect

So, in this time of social isolation and forced/voluntary quarantine and whatnot, I have an idea. I have started work on it myself, but since this is my first ever app, I'm clearly out of my depth. Calling on mobile app devs who are willing to brainstorm and collaborate. I don't think anyone has implemented my idea yet, so I hope we can build something that makes a positive impact to peoples' lives. Hit me up!

the problem with trying to solve people problems

i've always felt the urge to solve human problems. mine as well as those that are not directly mine, but indirectly affect me (every problem affects everyone!)

my own problems are usually simple: the solution is usually about doing something that seems obvious but not very appealing. and the solution is usually incremental - i got here through many tiny steps in the wrong direction, and i just have to retrace/go the opposite way and i'm sorted. the big bang problems are generally not obviously visible to me until someone calls me out on it, and in that case as well, the solution is usually tiny steps in the opposite direction.

when it comes to problems that are indirectly mine though, it's interesting. as an outsider, tiny incremental steps by others in the right direction seem inconsequential, and i tend to focus my thoughts on chunkier things. the reasons for this are many:

• for every person seeming to do the right thing, there are others doing the exact opposite. unless there's an overwhelming majority moving in the positive direction, it's easy to get lost in the perception bias and conclude there is no net effect
• solving problems incrementally depends on consistency, and it's hard to perceive consistency in other people.
• it's hard to tell if tiny incremental steps are due to an over-arching strategy or just correlation. if it's the latter then nothing is being solved since the above 2 points are dominant.
• the obvious possibility that i'm wrong - if it's tiny steps, how do i correlate cause and effect on a macro level?

i could probably go on all day. but in short, that's why small steps do not lend themselves well to observation and solutions of people problems. and so, i'm unavoidably attracted to big picture problems/solutions. but again, trying to solve big problems, leads to a strange progression of thought: every problem leads to an underlying, even bigger problem. sometimes it leads to multiple problems. and eventually it leads to such a big problem that the solution seems to be... annihilation of the human race. that is a definite, conclusive solution to all people problems, isn't it?

but if that's the solution, isn't that where we're headed after all? why speed up a process when my now nihilistic perception of our race already predicts that as the inevitable destination?

and if that's the solution for our race, why should I attempt to go the other way?

nihilism quickly leads to hedonism - if we're doomed, we might as well enjoy the journey, and damn the consequences, right?

but then, i'm no longer part of the solution: i'm now part of the problem! and that's obviously something I don't want to be, because if that's what everyone else was, we'd be brought to a pretty swift end.

in short: since we have arrived at a contradiction, my premise must be incorrect: there's no point in solving big problems that affect other members of society before they affect me.

so, i must solve my own problems. fine.

but as part of solving my own problems, if i do not try to let others reuse my solutions if they desire, am i not wasting my solution?

so, i must solve my own problems incrementally, while helping others solve theirs by speaking about mine.

but again, i need to know what problems i'm solving for others, so that i'm not just pouring out an overwhelming stream-of-consciousness thatg dilutes my solutions to the point of them being lost, right? and for that i need to know what problems i want to solve for them!

there sees to be no correct approach to this, so i'm probably going to pick a few thing I feel are important, and focus on them consciously.

watch this space.

my problem with everything

1. too much opinion, too little fact. way too much opinion passed off as fact.
2. nobody talks about their intentions. everybody can see what, nobody knows why.
3. judging everyone who is too different for us to ignore.
4. "patching" of problems instead of moving towards real solutions.
5. the world has been rewired to keep us on a stimulant cycle.
6. there is no common goal, or even the motivation to find one.
7. i have fallen into all of the above traps and am currently refusing to get out.

forgotten blogs

i opened my rss reader today after years. i'm guessing those guys who run it assumed i'm never coming back, because when i signed in, everything was unread. i read post after post. some interesting, but mostly mindless. all of them said they were posted today... until i clicked through to the actual site and it showed the real date: 2 years ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago.

i wondered to myself, what happened to these blogs? what happened to these bloggers?

did life happen? (that's a joke. life always happens - but people still blogged 10 years ago, while life was happening)

did they find better things to do?

are they numb and bored, sharing facebook post after post, retweeting to hundreds or thousands of bots and a few humans who follow them, adding a word or an emoticon as their only contribution?

are they snapchatting with weird animal eyes and mouths and freaky lights?

are they too busy binge watching their favourite show that just has a new season coming out?

are they keeping up with hundreds of messages that flood their whatsapp and facebook groups, some from friends but mostly strangers, or people who might as well be?

either way, they seem to have found better things to do than good old writing. putting stuff up for posterity, for the world to see.

or maybe, it's because the world isn't interested any more. who but the most deranged of the bunch have the time to scroll through screen after screen of tiny, monospaced text, often in strange colours?

i was going to close my reader and let those guys forget i existed once again.

but then i happened to click through one of the posts.

a dark poem that hit home.

it was written today.

i sent a comment. said hello to the fellow. thanked him for writing something real.

he hasn't forgotten his blog.

success

of late, i've been getting sucked into quora, especially questions about human interactions - both because i find them fascinating, and because i've found that it's something i can contribute to and impact others' lives in a concrete, positive manner. sometimes, though, more than helping others, the questions make me think and crystallize my thoughts to myself. like this question, today:

What is something that others see as success but you don't? Why?

funnily enough, the existing answers seemed (to me) to be quite one dimensional, and coloured by the respondent's perspective - more like they were venting their pet peeve about someone or something widely regarded as successful. and that prompted my answer:

When I saw this question, my mind spun off into multiple directions, trying to think of all the things that “others” see as success, that I don’t. When I tried to summarize them all, it came down to this: 

“Success is internal to you. You succeed when you feel like you have, and nothing else.” 

Nobody else’s definition of success applies to you (if you ignore the paradox this creates with my statement above). If you want to appear successful to others, sure, go ahead and find their definition and try to conform to it. But you’re truly successful only when you feel it - even if nobody else can tell! 

As for why, I can put it down to experience: there have been plenty of times I have felt successful, when others did not see or even realize it, and there have been a comparable number of times when others have expressed delight in their own success, but where I failed to see it. In fact, I have reached a point where I do not think about whether or not someone else has been successful, but instead, I watch out for cues that suggest they feel successful, and compliment them or encourage them to achieve further success without suggesting terms for their future success.

open source ideas

it's interesting how, when hanging out with a similarly inclined person, ideas abound. execution may or may not follow, but seemingly valuable ideas are generated at a far higher than "average" rate. more like a spike, from what i've seen.

and it rarely happens in online (textual/one way video) contexts.

can humanity be bettered by getting similarly inclined persons to hang out, and open source their conversations? like live transcribe it, separate it into context blocks, and then let the participants filter the irrelevant bits (or personal stuff, etc), and upload it?

i'm throwing this idea out to the world. let's hope something comes of this :)

sold out

so, i've finally "sold out" and started a FB page of my own. and blindly invited the first 100 or so friends FB suggested. i still hate pages and will probably not even look at my page unless facebook forces me to. it's just there so that as long as the free app i'm using to cross-post my blog posts works, it can fight it out with all the other trash on facebook these days.

please don't feel obliged to like/share/comment/whatever. i couldn't care less if you do, lol.

seeya!

that's what she said

before we begin, the first sentence of my twitter bio says "#TWSS bot."

i never bothered finding out how this genre of jokes came about, but i love innuendo and wordplay enough to (some may say, excessively :D) indulge in it anyway.

"that's what she said" jokes are simple enough: reply to any innocent-sounding statement, which, taken out of context, could be interpreted as innuendo (wordplay, slang and all other such things are allowed while reinterpreting), with "that's what she said" or "that's what he said". or, if you're on twitter, #TWSS or #TWHS for brevity.

so far, so good.

the confusion arises when you need to decide between "he" and "she". and that's where i need to make a point.

the gender of the person who made the original (innocent) statement doesn't matter at all. nor does the gender of the joker. the gender *has* to be picked so that the hypothetical innuendo is as funny as possible, taking into account pop culture, slang, gender biases, and whatever else may work to make one side funnier than the other.

eg:

@TheSoothsayer_ said to @hinnaz: "they look so awesome!" (both people involved are women)
me: that's what he said.

yes, that's a he. why?

simple. ever heard a girl telling a guy (assuming both people involved are straight, to avoid confusion) that "they look so awesome!" (they, referring to *ahem* body parts here)?

me neither.

guys say that to girls all the time though.

and so, it's a *he*.

on the other hand:

@Sakshikumar: "Phew. All good now. Couldn't breathe there for a moment."
me: that's what she said.

no points for guessing why that's a she. (fine, sakshi is a she too, but that's irrelevant)

okay, enough lecturing for today.

TL;DR: picture a guy saying x in a sexual situation. picture a girl saying x in a sexual situation. which one is funnier? bingo!

the middle-aged blog

blogs have personalities. blogs change. blogs age.

sometimes, sadly, blogs are stillborn. but the ones who make it through, will probably flourish in some sense.

a newborn personal blog is quite rough at the edges. experimenting around with features, widgets, layouts, colour schemes that change by the week. in one word, unpredictable. they're full of pent-up energy, stories, ideas. and everything seems like a good idea. the overflow of ideas can make it directionless. and in all these senses, the blog is childish. but nobody really cares too much about the personality of a young blog, because the author is probably the only reader and definitely the biggest fan.

and then there's blog youth. when the blog finds its rhythm, is lively, fun. finds its direction. explores its spaces, occasionally goes beyond, subtly altering its direction in the process. the best part of a blog's life.

but at some point, the blog becomes a victim of its own maturity. the expected standard of posts becomes exceedingly higher, and hence the quantity of posts becomes increasingly lower. barely any self-proclaimed junk can make it past the publish button. it is so set in its direction, that quirks become rare. posts get re-read, proofread, edited for style. the layout and theme is so set, it can't be changed easily. everything just works. and hence, nothing can really change.

that's where i think this blog is at, now. i don't want to reinvent it, because i'm happy with the way it is, but i realize something's missing. my posts these days are nothing i'll be embarrassed about 5 years later (i hope!). i don't think i can go back to posting jokes, crying about missing an ex, sharing my favourite songs' lyrics. because feel my blog has grown past that. my last decision to make it more lively with photos, fell flat when i didn't post a single photo after the announcement.

and now, i'm wondering where it's all headed to. more middle age? senility? death? or some misplaced attempts at acting youthful again?

maybe i should go back to stop caring about who reads what, and write for myself. make it personal again. throw away this act of political and grammatical correctness. make it more like the real life, uncut, uncensored "me".

i wonder.

tapering off

4 posts in as many months. I wonder where this blog is headed. but wherever that may be, I'd have to be blind to miss the obvious: I have almost stopped posting.

A bit of introspection made me realize that my life has shifted from being public to being private. gone are the days when I'd pour my heart out on my blog, twitter, or even Facebook.

These days, most of my communication with the people around me is done in private.

I'm still trying to figure why.

This blog is in a state of neglect because of a variety of reasons: starting with laziness. The other thing is this feeling that my posts should be "quality or nothing"

twitter is still good, I still feel the connect there. I guess it's just laziness. but I do feel that now that I don't hang out much in real life with my twitter friends, I don't have that nudge to be there and read their every tweet. The friendships I've forged on twitter are strong enough to survive without much online interaction. and I don't really have the energy to make any more friends online.

Facebook, for me, seems to have disintegrated into a place to share random stuff from around me, but nothing *about* me. and when I look around, it seems like that's the case with most of my friends as well.

so what's left is: whatsapp, my phone, and meeting up.

and these 3 (not so much my phone, actually) have taken over my life.

I have probably typed more in  whatsapp+gtalk messages in a year than I have typed tweets, blog posts, and Facebook posts in 5 years.

my life is back to being private again.

google reader, you're messing it up!

I started reading blogs when I started using google reader.

in fact, I started blogging shortly after (and to a fair extent, because of) google reader.

it had the usual characteristics of a google product: clean, easy to use, functional, constantly getting features added, mobile-friendly, and eventually (inevitably?) popularity.

google reader was good for me for almost 5 years.

until early last month.

I now hate reader.

maybe google is trying to get more content on to google+ with this, or maybe getting people to use that "social network" a bit more, but whatever it is, they're doing it wrong.

I do NOT want the stuff I like to go someplace else.

I do NOT want the stuff I share to be on a closed social network.

I WANT to be able to read stuff my  friends share in the same place as I read my subscriptions.

I WANT my mobile experience to be as similar to my web experience (why on earth would they *remove* the like and share features from google reader mobile?)

I WANT to be able to search the stuff I've shared over the years (it's there somewhere, just that google isn't letting me get at it)

I WANT to be on a platform which I can trust will remain interoperable with open standards (mainly the ability to export my shares as a rss feed)

I could go on and on, but these are the biggest things google reader used to be, and isn't anymore.

my feed-reading experience is so crippled right now, that I don't even know how many other people have outraged over the new crippled reader, just because google+ is such a crappy platform that I can't bring myself to use it to read others' shares.

the final straw was 20 minutes ago, when in a moment of insomnia, I opened the android reader app, read one post, and then couldn't find an option to like/share it (other than the android native "share" option). seriously, what?

despite being the google loyalist that I am, I think the time has come to take my feeds elsewhere. I just hope google notices.

this is not being evil, this is simply being dumb.