Author: Lord Bob

Lord Bob
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Punk Ethos and Blogging +

Note: I originally drafted this post months ago. I went in this morning, did some edits, and hit publish.

On  my micro.blog site I posted this while back.

I’ve been having this conversation with @grubz today, in a comment thread on this post he made a while back, in which he said that having your own blog feels so punk rock.

I agree. Fediverse/Indieweb is indeed the punkest thing happening on the internet now. I realize now that is why I’m so drawn to it.

The quote I was thinking about from Ian MacKaye was from a talk he did a the Library of Congress. From my notes from a library conference presentation proposal I never finished…

On the Definition of Punk – Ian MacKaye, at Library of Congress…

People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?’ Here’s how I define punk: It’s a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It’s just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn’t being dictated by a profit motive.

Ian goes on to discuss this a bit more. Here is the full video. It is worth your time to watch or listen to.

As we move into a possibly (probably) dark time in our country’s history, and as libraries are under attack by the Forces of the Stupid, I feel compelled to explore this line of thought again. The Public Library as an Intellectual Free Space.

Recent events happening in the ongoing enshittification of social media (and nearly everything else) have brought this interview with Ian to the top of my mind. I’ve been doing this blog since 2006. I actually had a blog before that as well. I’ve been creating websites about my personal interests since 1994. But not until now have I really considered just how punk rock the “small web” is. It is part of that free space that Ian describes.

Note: the rest of this post is what I added this morning. 

My friend The Czarbar and I have been talking about this stuff almost constantly for the last year, as we  attempted to move a 200-person skateboarding group away from Facebook. The effort, as I edit this post now months after I originally drafted it, has largely failed. The core group and a few others have joined us on Discord. Facebook (predictably) fucked us over by reopening the group after The Czarbar shut it down. This complete disregard on the part of Meta for the wishes of the original creators of the FB group is clear evidence 1)that we did the right thing by leaving FB, 2)that when you put shit on a Meta site it becomes THEIRS. Not yours. and 3) Meta and other big social media and “content” companies are scum and along with the purveyors of AI should be eradicated like the digital (and actual) vermin they are (I added this one because I wanted three reasons, and because it felt good).

Not surprisingly, the reopening of the group did not demonstrate to the folks who jumped right back on that FB is shit. They just breathed a sigh of relief and continued posting shit.

Back to the top of this post….

I will, however, amend my statement above about the punkest thing on the internet right now. It isn’t Fediverse. Fediverse is useful, and it’s much better than the social media silos, but

The punkest thing (and for those who don’t care about being punk, the BEST thing) on the Internet has always been and always will be personal websites and blogs, written by individuals, to express themselves for zero payback beyond the experience of blogging. 

Personal sites and blogs, connected to you via RSS feeds, with relatively secure commenting features, and without connections to big social media, are the answer.

Own your online presence. Get a domain name. Own your data. Make it portable.

That is all.

Lord Bob
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Oddities

A few months ago we ventured down to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas to check out the Oddities & Curiosities Expo.

I’ll start by saying this is not really my “tribe.” I knew that going in. I prefer the nerd stuff. Happening simultaneously, and unknown to us,  was Fan Expo Dallas in another of the huge areas at the convention center, which is closer but still not really a direct hit on my nerd/fandom target.

When we got down to the convention center is was early in the day and already the place was getting packed. No biggie. I just chilled and found us some parking.

As we walked over the the venue the variety of humans was impressive. For the Oddities Expo you had the weirdoes with all the piercings, lots of tats, black clothing, etc. I say “weirdos” only in the positive sense. I appreciate a harmless weirdo enjoying their thing. Side by side with what I can only call pseudo-goth-horror-weirdos were the cosplayers there for the Fan Expo. Looking for a dude with a beard dressed up as Little Bo Peep or whatever the current anime trend is? We got you covered.

Cosplay is fine by me. People create amazing things.

I support it when people get together to share their interests. I had a good time. I was kinda hoping the Oddities and Curiosities might be a bit more varied.  It is mostly stuff like taxidermy (seriously), horror-inspired gruesome art and knick-knacks, etc. Again, just not my thing. It’s like the New Jim Rose Circus blew up in there. Body horror, mutilation, whatever. I feel like a lot of the vendors were just selling shit they ordered from a Chinese factory. However, a lot were in fact selling stuff they had made themselves, and that’s cool. We found on vendor who was selling her own art, which featured some very beautiful colors and really stood out in the sea of disturbing stuff. We bought a small print which is, in fact, quite beautiful.

But again, people should 100% follow their instincts on this stuff, because I’d rather have a neighbor with a house full of stuffed raccoons and a bone through their nose than a conservative republican who hates everyone that has a personality or any joy in their lives.

Lord Bob
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The Hard Way

I saw some new Adobe Podcasting AI tools in a video today.

I began using computers and the internet during grad school in 1994. I had barely touched a computer before that.

I’m glad I got in on almost the ground floor of the web (compared to most people), because I learned how things work and how to build things by hand.

As tools like thew new stuff from Adobe allow people to “optimize” their audio without having a clue what’s really being done to it, and more tools allow people to create without knowing the process at all, I find myself returning (willingly) to doing things the hard way or simply not adopting new technologies because I want to understand things.