Autumn - On the Hudson River by Jasper Francis Cropsey

New Blog Hard Launch

Hello everyone! Welcome to the new blog. This time I have the structure a little different. Both the technical and written structure are a little tightened up here. The next few paragraphs were going to go over a bunch of blog-stuff. But man, that stuff was BOOOORRRING. So instead I have summarized it into three bullets:

  1. The jazz age was the era right before the New Deal. I have no problem with jazz, the music, just rampant corruption that was common before the New Deal.
  2. I will be posting an update once a month. Sometimes I will pull out snippets of monthly updates into their own pages to link easier.
  3. The site is hosted on new infrastructure that will hopefully make it easy for me to set-and-forget while also being really fast.

There we go, saved you from 300 words of self-indulgence. Well, it’s a blog, it’s all self-indulgence. So maybe I should have kept it.

Who Am I?

It is fitting, I think, to put in a ‘Who Am I?’ section to this launch post. I have a long meandering answer to this I wrote, but I actually decided I want something more snappy and short for now.

I am an organizer, software developer, writer, and UI/UX designer, in that order. This blog will, for the most part, be about my organizing and writing work. I am of two minds about the developer + UI/UX stuff. One of the shames of having a political blog split off from your name so you don’t get fired is that…you can’t put it on your resume. Figures. At the same time, I do not really feel like spinning up an exclusively technical blog, and I want to write about technology + politics together, so I will probably put that work here.

I have a simple organizing philosophy: I wanna win really bad please please please. Which sucks. Because it is really hard. Also, I have learned many people who call themselves organizers are pretty shit at the whole thing here. I have been told it is something specific to my city. Also, at this point in my organizing journey, my role model is Jane McAlevey. I have some friends who do a lot of work based off of Ganz, and I am excited to explore that too.

A quick rundown of my organizing journey:

  1. I was radicalized in 2020 but was a minor and did not have transportation to make it to the protests. Before this I was a weird like Democrat but libertarian individualist idek. I was pretty apolotical. I did like economics though.
  2. I joined Students for a Democratic Society and YDSA in my freshman year of college in September 2021. This would start a long bad trend of playing it fast and loose with how many orgs I was in.
  3. SDS and YDSA kind of cratered in 2022ish due to…petty drama? I mean it wasn’t going too hot to begin with. There was limited mentorship from our faculty advisors, no real experience because pre-covid organizers were gone, and for some reason the YDSA chapter had 0 communication with national.
  4. I joined Sunrise, which I campaigned with solidly for about two years.
  5. I graduated during the Palestine encampments, and I was exhausted, so I took a break.
  6. I recently joined the local DSA! And I like everyone but also don’t like the actions? I am very conflicted. I will write about it! Do not fret. God I love vague anonimity.

Okay, thanks for reading. More to come from me. JAH out.