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New Project

As many of my readers know I love playing around with new blogging systems. It’s a hobby.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a project to really work on during retirement – trying to come up with an idea. I have built a lot of skateboarding sites over the years. Right now, run bloftin2.blog as my skateboarding blog. I enjoy running it. I post anything I want about skateboarding there. Videos, opinions, pictures of boards, whatever.

For the last week I’ve been fiddling around with a blog hosting service called scribbles.page. I really like the user interface. I like the styling of everything. The developer has been improving it a lot lately. So I began playing with this site, Radio Lefty. It is a skateboarding site, but rather than just being “anything” about skateboarding, it’s intended to be about my life experience in skateboarding. A bit more emotional depth. What it means to me, especially as I age.

Will anyone read it? Maybe a few. You don’t create real blogs to get thousands of page views. You do it for yourself, and maybe someone else enjoys it too.  That’s my opinion anyway.

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Interview Answers

If someone interviewed me about blogging, and asked about my “work flow”, I would tell them I don’t really have work flow. I just start typing, on whatever device I’m on, in whatever application or sited I want to or is available.

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Rush

Well, we saw Rush. Twice.

When I found out that Geddy Lee had laryngitis and bronchitis on the date of our original show I was not optimistic that we’d be seeing them play on the rescheduled date of July 11. Ten days didn’t seem like enough time to heal. When asked, I told people “I’m cautiously unoptimistic.”

Well, I was wrong.

Due to the cancellations there were seats available, so we got seats for July 13 as well.

Both shows were great. Apparently being a millionaire rock star has advantages, among which is access to great doctors who will “use the nuclear option” on laryngitis and bronchitis. Geddy sounded great. The whole band was incredible.

The first night we were pretty far back in seats from which we could see the whole production. Fantastic! The next night we were about 4 rows up, stage right, about 50 feet from Alex Lifeson, with a great view of Anika on drums and we could really see the band interacting with each other.

A week later we are still talking about it. We are still in such a great mood.

 

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Human Creativity Is Not Artificial

I found this article a few months ago via the 32-bit Cafe Discourse forum. One of the participants wrote it…

The Colonization of Confidence

It’s great. READ IT.

A little background on it. The author is, in fact, a professional writer and is blind. Not sure that matters at all, but maybe it does? Is an intelligent blind writer harder to sweep up in the Generative AI Hype Train? I have no idea.

Anyway, I enjoyed this short story a lot. Apparently it is a true story. Frankly, and I mean no insult to the author, there are parts that seem fictionalized. Nothing huge. A little bit of the dialog. Makes no difference if it is. It works.

In short, the story deals with an author in a writing group. One member of the group, a tech bro, has a boner for AI. Also, he’s a fucking douche. The rest of the group falls under his spell even as he destroys a good man’s confidence in his own writing.

Just read it. It’s about a 15-minute read, and worth it. Because here’s the thing.

WRITING is only done by humans. Not machines.

Writing, like all art, is a fundamentally human endeavor. Creating art involved human cognition. Remove human cognition and what you have left – is – just – shit.

I am doing writing at this exact moment. Sorry, if a machine put these exact words together, it’s not writing. ART is done by humans. I’ll go so far as to say that anyone who uses AI to write, or to even brainstorm, or to help arrange their thoughts on “paper” is not writing. Sorry. They just aren’t. If that’s you, then you are not writing.

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Website Details, Blogging, and Ethics

First. Yes, I’m posting a lot today.

A couple of years ago when I “discovered” the notion of the IndieWeb I also spent a lot of time exploring blogs. By blogs, I mean REAL blogs. The kind written by real human people, about their lives and opinions and ideas, on which they are not trying to sell things. I don’t like that the interwebs have become, in the mind of the Great Unwashed Masses, just a marketplace. I don’t like “app culture”. So I looked for other bloggers doing good work and started following them via RSS (in my case, using the Reeder app — yes — I know – a fucking APP!!! — but in this case it’s doing the lord’s work).

If you still don’t know what RSS is and why it can make your life better, read this thing I wrote.

So, getting to the point…

I found the blog Minutes to Midnight, by a person who would become an internet/blogging friend, Simone Silvestroni. Looking over his blogroll I found other good writers. I also discovered the word “colophon”, which I will be adding to this site, but more importantly on his colophon I found some really interesting information that I actually care about. In particular, notions of website accessibility and how green a site is. Lots of good links and info on that page! For example – links. Look people. Links need to be easy to find. The text needs to be a different color, have enough contrast to the rest of the page, and be-fucking-underlined. Likewise, I learned about green websites — sites that use less energy to serve up a page. And page design that uses less energy. I think Minutes to Midnight is where I learned to stop being obsessed with analytics and to not spy on my readers (or help Google spy on them).

I was surprised to find that the host of this site, dreamhost.com, seems to use a green amount of energy. I’ve tested the pages here. I was very surprised to see that my micro.blog sites aren’t as green as my dreamhost sites. I am not stressing about it, because honestly my sites over there get so little traffic. I’m working on getting all my sites nice and accessible. The biggest issue on micro.blog is that I tend to change themes on some of them a lot, and it takes to put the link underlines back in. This site could be greener. It runs on WordPress. Honestly, I’d rather it be static pages, but at this point I’m not going to convert over 1000 posts and pages. In the future, however, who knows?

One thing I’ve become more aware of is the effect of images and video on my pages. I’m trying to be more aware of not using images or video unless they are really the point of a post. If words will get the job done I just type the words.

October 6 will be the 20-year anniversary of this blog.