Home For Fiction - Blog - Page 6 of 149

Simple Analytics that Respect Privacy: a How-To Guide

July 29, 2024

creativity, home for fiction, marketing, programming, society

A programming post for today, but with a little twist. We’re not making a story planning program or an interactive fiction “game”. In a way, we’re not even making anything concrete – though I will share with you some code samples. Instead, we’ll take a more theoretical look at what I term simple analytics, with respect for privacy in the foreground.

As you perhaps recall, I recently revamped both the main Home for Fiction site and the blog itself. Doing so, one of the things I wanted to do was to completely eradicate all forms of privacy-invasive analytics. So I threw out Google Analytics as well as Jetpack analytics for WordPress.

Let’s take a look why and, mostly, what could one do if they’d like some simple form of stats/info that respects users’ privacy. I’ll also throw in a story about grandpas’ underwear for good measure – trust me, there is a connection hidden in there!

simple analytics; image of chair on Greek island — Simple analytics, Greek style!

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Review of I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava

July 22, 2024

Book Review, Criticism

book, literature, review, writing

I picked I Fear My Pain Interests You, by Stephanie LaCava, looking for a literary-fiction story with strong psychological undertones. What I got instead was “the next Great American Novel“, but let me be upfront: I mean this in the worst possible manner, using it entirely ironically.

Indeed, my motivation behind writing a review for this novel was very simple: I absolutely loathed it. This is the kind of pointless drivel you’d expect from 15-year-old edgelords thinking they’re writing avant-garde literature. I know, I used to be one.

Another fun fact: I almost gave up on the novel at the 90% mark, which would’ve been an amazing thing to do, but I sadly had to finish it since I’d decided to write this review.

Of course, that I hated I Fear My Pain Interests You is not very… interesting to you. But why I hated it might be, because it reveals a lot about how and why literature is written nowadays – in the US (see earlier note) and places copying the US.

i fear my pain interests you; image of woman screaming

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“Am I the Asshole?”: The Art of Self-Assessment

July 15, 2024

Experiencing, Society

art, experiencing, ignorance, society, writing

There is an often quoted claim suggesting that if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole. This isn’t always true – there are never black-and-white answers – for reasons we will examine, but it implicitly focuses on an important issue: How do we determine whether we’re right or wrong? How do we determine, “am I the asshole”?

There’s even a Reddit thread where people share incidents with strangers and expect them to answer, “Am I the asshole”? Of course Reddit, like the internet at large, relies on consensus. If 10,000 people insists you’re wrong, they must be right… Right? At least that’s what the bandwagon fallacy would like us to think. Obviously enough, this takes us back to the “assholes all day” problem.

But again, there are never easy answers.

So in this post, let’s try to unpack all this. Let’s see why we can’t rely on public consensus to figure out whether we’re right or not, and what we can do about it.

Am I the Asshole? blurry image of people — Humans are social animals. We want others’ approval. But what if others are wrong?

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