Author: Lord Bob

Well, after coming home from Christmas in the Houston area I got sicker. I went to the urgent care place and was tested, and I have the flu. That would explain the 101.6 temperature. They started me on Tamiflu. Today, 2 days later, I am feeling somewhat better but still shitty. I think I did have a sinus infection, and probably still do, and it opened the door to the flu. That can happen, right?

I’ve had all sorts of ideas of long blog posts to write, about different things that few but me care about, but have not had the energy to really organize my thoughts. I am taking notes.

The following disorganized rant was composed while hacking up mucus.

Been talking to my friend Tony Gale, freestyle skateboarder supreme, about various issues of the freestyle skateboarding scene and how it is presented and organized online. He and a few (meaning me) other enlightened humanoids wish to take it AWAY from social media, and re-center it on actual websites that are not owned by corporate scumbags. I support this. I think this will be difficult to pull off, but excising the social media cancer from freestyle is a surgery that must happen.

I have been as active as most on social media since it started gaining a foothold. I had no special enlightenment. It just seemed like a fun way to share skateboarding. But over the last 15 years we have simply fed the beast too much, and now it is out of control. From deciding what you see on your timeline, to tracking what you do, to sending your info to third parties you don’t even know, it is all 100% bullshit.

Edit: Conforming to corporate overlords and bending over like submissive humps for them is EXACTLY what skateboarders are not supposed to do. Everyone needs to get the corporate dicks out of their mouths.

I feel like we need a set of webpages for freestyle skateboarders (or skateboarders in general) to clearly explain the options.

This is not really complicated. Here is where we might start.

• RSS feeds — allow you to subscribe to any fucking site that has an RSS feed. You can get the feed on a reader on any device you have. It strips out all the fucking advertising and bullshit code too! This blog, for example, has an RSS feed. With modern RSS readers you don’t even have to know the feed address. Just type in the URL and reader will find it for you. If you are too dumb to read a short article about RSS, just look it up on YouTube and have some hipster explain it to you. I’m not providing all the links here because I can’t spoon feed y’all everything!
• If a site has no RSS feed (like IG, FB, TT, or whatever) then it is beneath your  notice. Fuck them.
• iCal — you can subscribe to calendars and have them show up on YOUR calendar. You do know what a calendar is, right? There is approximately a 100% chance you have one on the phone in your pocket.
• Fediverse – look it up. I’ll do a post about it soon-ish. I have the flu right now and I really can’t muster the energy to solve all the problems.

Folks, the hard truth is that we handed our valuable identities and cool shit over to the big silos in exchange for convenience. I too am guilty. GUILTY. But now they have made us their bitches, and it is time to not be the bitches anymore.

There are only a few reasons I can think of for continuing to give them your life…

1. You haven’t thought this through – start thinking
2. You are dumb – I have no solution for this
3. You don’t care  – start caring
4. You enjoy the narcissism and dopamine hits – you are an addict and need to stop
5. You are running a business and use, for instance, Instagram, to market your stuff. This is valid. You can start helping by transitioning to other ways of doing things – websites, RSS, Fediverse. Here’s an example. If you have a company and an IG page, when you post something to IG, post that video to your website too! Not connected to IG. Put it in the blog section of your site so we can subscribe to it. If you post a clip on IG, then post a really nice long clip ONLY on your website. Seriously, no one is buying your shit from IG. You have to get them to your site.

More later…

Lord Bob

OK, yeah, I’ve been reading a lot lately. I’ve been sick with the flu, and I have a new iPad Mini I got specifically for reading blogs and RPG rulebooks.

This is a pretty good article.

https://neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/

Worth spending a few minutes to read, especially this stuff about the tracking that happens on most corporate websites.

Well, I got a new iPad Mini for Christmas.

Part of me, for years, has considered acquisition of an iPad to be a huge waste of money. I only really want it for reading blogs and reading RPG rulebooks and supplements.

Then a few days ago I decided that as a now 60-year old man with sufficient income, who is a law abiding citizen, public servant, and all-around nice guy, I should have a fucking iPad if I want one.

So I went over to Best Buy, bought a 256 gig iPad Mini and one of those little covers for it, splurged on AppleCare, and handed it to my wife, who’d been scratching her head as to what to get me for Christmas.

Then we crammed our car full of stuff to the point you couldn’t get another toothpick into the trunk, heading to Houston, where I promptly got sick with a sinus infection.

Side note: As we drove into Houston around 8pm, we passed untold car dealerships with untold acres of cars on the lots, with untold measuring units of electricity keeping those lots lit like the surface of the sun on a cloudless day. So is my ownership of the iPad wasteful? I don’t even care. When they shut down those lights call me back on this.

This is the first time since the start of the pandemic that I’ve been sick. Right at the start of the pandemic I had a sinus infection, and I have not been sick since then. Until now. So that’s a pretty good run.

I spent Christmas Eve day and evening in bed, with a 101.6 fever. Finally took some meds around 8pm and got the fever down. Felt better today (Christmas Day), but still have had a bit of fever off and on. Going to the NextCare Urgent Care in the morning to get checked out and see if I can get some antibiotics. Sinus infections and me have a long history. I know the drill.

Being sick away from home sucks. Being sick as a guest in a house where the extra beds all feel like concrete slabs does not, in fact, make it better. It is hard to sleep, even after taking Benadryl, when you wake up because the bed is killing you. Oh well, another day and I’ll be home to our super-luxurious bed with actual springs in it.

Between sleeping, laying around being semi-miserable, and reading today, I’ve been setting up the iPad.

NO ONE does a smoother job of welcoming you back into their ecosystem than Apple. I am typing this on my MacBook Pro. I have an iPhone SE and an old 16gig iPad Air I inherited from my mom that is basically useless. I turned on the new iPad Mini, held my phone up to it, and the damned things talked to each other. A meaningful conversation in which the phone gave the iPad all the information it needed to set itself up. No fuss. No cursing. So, so good. I swear if I had to use a PC and/or Android I’d just quit technology completely. Actually I’d go Linux.

The new iPad Mini has ZERO social media installed on it. NONE. It is for specific purpose, and spying on me for FB is not one of them. I understand that Apple will spy on me. That’s not the hill I’m going to die on. I also told Apple Intelligence to FUCK OFF during the setup process. AI is bullshit. Outside a few very controlled uses it is probably the worst thing to happen to tech since social media. Now, if they can use it to cure cancer, that’s cool. I’m talking about people using AI to “create blog content” or to “come up with better ways to write a sentence or convey and idea.” Sorry folks – there are SUPPOSED to be good writers and shitty writers. If you are a shitty writer, you get better by learning to write better, not by farming out the work to AI. That is the hill I’ll die on, or at least lay down uncomfortably for an extended time.

Overall, even with the sinus infection and torture-bed, it has been a good Christmas. We are with our family for the first time in several years and it all went well. Our dog Riley is with us, and he’s been a good boy. Everyone falls in love with him. Lefty (our cat) is at home and I can’t wait to see him again. Best of all, other than me, everyone is healthy. There was a time a few years ago that wasn’t the case.