Blaine

@blaine.bsky.social

7549 Followers 622 Following

Sociotechnologist, activist. First employee @ Twitter, built that and pioneered social decentralization, created OAuth. Shy cloud-observer, mostly. Building Roundabout for local communities at @newpublic.org.

A photo of Anthony Hopkins as Thor
A sign-in page for roundabout, with an email field at the top, a sign in button below that, a tos/privacy policy agreement in the middle, a logo below that, and small text that says "don't have an account? register here"
a cartoon of a man with "sickos" written on his shirt, looking from the outside through a window to an unpictured interior, with a speech bubble that says "yes ... ha ha ha ... YES!"
VOD JAM in the style of the SPACE JAM poster
An ASCII Owl (I think)
A certificate the says NOT A TECH BRO in bright green text. Lots of small, largely illegible writing, but a meter showing 0% tech bro alignment.
A crocheted butterfly, blue with a white outline.
An image of a uniquely Canadian drink, the Caesar. A clamato-based drink with celery, a savory garnish (olive, tomato, pickles, bacon) and a salt rim.
Outdoor meme image showing an elderly woman with short white hair using a silver walker on a garden path, while a younger woman with curly dark hair, jeans, and a bright blue shirt walks beside her with one hand on the older woman’s shoulder. The background is sunny and leafy, with flowers, trees, and a house partially visible. Large white caption text with a black outline adds a joke about internet generations: the older woman says, “In my day, people were mean online. The internet was basically a hellscape of hatred and abuse,” and the younger woman replies, “OK, millennial, let’s get you to bed.”
A Sony Ericsson T68i "candy bar" cell phone.
A comic, titled "fault-tolerance" in three panes. Each pane has two middle-aged businessmen with moustaches, one in a grey suit with a grey tie, standing and one in a blue suit with a red tie, sitting. The dialogue reads: Pane 1: Grey: "So, how do I query the database?" / Blue: "It's not a database, it's a key-value store!" Pane 2: Grey: "Oh, it's not a database. How do I query it?" / Blue: "You write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang!" Pane three: Grey: "Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?" / Blue: "I believe I did, Bob."
This is a slender, cylindrical pen made of frosted, semi-transparent plastic with a matching rectangular clip on the cap. The dark ink reservoir is visible through the barrel, which ends in a fine, needle-like metal tip.
Sensual ALF
An image of an industrial robot arm with a squeegee, in a white room, surrounded by a red liquid that appears to be flowing away from the robot. The robot is squeegeeing the liquid towards itself in an apparent sisyphean task.
A worldcoin orb in ominous purple
Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets, sitting in their ornate theatre box
A screenshot of the titles scene from Serial Experiments: Lain of Lain, with eyes closed, wearing a hat with a cute bear face on it.
A screenshot of the following text: JENNIFER GRENZ: How is it that simultaneously, I want your help and want you to leave me alone, that I recognize I cannot do all the work of healing the land with our communities by myself, but don't want you to do it either, that I can respect and praise your skills and knowledge, but do not seek them out of suspicion of your motivations and intentions. I find myself so often, in the same moment, happy to build bridges of understanding between our cultures, yet wanting to burn that same bridge, proudly taking up the space you helped make for me, but not wanting that space.
An ai-generated image of a bartender standing at a beautiful bar. Behind her is a wall of cans of "twitter light"
A Sony Discman D-50, from the past.
Mickey Mouse, as the sorcerer's apprentice, wearing the sorcerer's hat, using a magically animated broom to help him carry buckets of water.
A large Douglas Fir tree down across a rural dirt driveway
A gold-foil detail from the back of Lori Emerson's book "Other Networks" depicting a linked network graph below the horizon of a circle, and a line-drawing sunrise above.
An image of Lori Emerson's book "Other Networks: A radical technology sourcebook" with a stylized line-drawing of a dandelion on the cover.
A bright green moss growing out of fire-affected soil.
An illustration of a man with a beard and short hair
A table with the words "dog", "cat", "car", and "road" in the left "Word" column, a "Latentese Vector Approx." column with a series of vectorized embedding equivalents for each word, and an "Explanation" column reading "A friendly, four-legged companion." for the "dog" row, "Another pet, similar but distinct from dog" for "cat", "A vehicle. Quite different from animals!" for "car" and "Usually 'close' to car but not an animal" for "road".