Category: whatever

So now we are a country that is streaming an execution. If you voted for him you own a piece of the barbarity.

Sitting at work with the the headphones on, listening to the entire Black Sabbath Paranoid album. The greatness cannot be overstated. Do not misunderestimate it.

The last couple of months I’ve adjusted my participation in the blogosphere and made a few changes to my site here. I felt like I was getting a bit too immersed in the drama of this or that happening in the world of blogging, obsessing over stuff that makes little difference and over which I have no influence, and overall being more judgmental (publicly) than I prefer to be. I have enough to worry about in my life without seeking out drama and devoting brain power to it.

Whether AI is scraping my poor little blog here or not, I think the best thing I can do to promote and support the so-called Open Web is to simply post stuff here to my blog, be it skateboarding videos, writing, or pictures of my cat or dog. Just blog about that interests me or what I’m having for breakfast, and not worry about what blogging platform I’m using so much.

As of yesterday I have been blogging here for 20 years. This will be the 1159th post.

I’ve covered my practice of Aikido since I started it in December of 2006. I’ve talked skateboarding, books, technology, writing, librarianship, and at times simply ranted.

This blog has been through the deaths of both my parents, my mother-in-law, and numerous cats. It’s been through my wife’s breast cancer, the pandemic. I’ve written about monster movies, science fiction, reading, and random stuff.

20 – freaking – years. Where did the time go? I was 42 when I started it. I’m now 62 and at a very different place in life, but life is good. Yes, as you age the losses do stack up, but the good things do too.

I guess I’ll just keep blogging.

• Robert Breen on Why Blogs Matter
• Unattributed talks about what real blogs are and why content marketing (and content marketers) suck.
• Robert Breen again on The End of Private Libraries (what happens to your books when you cross the Rainbow Bridge to be with your dead pets again — which will be a great reward for putting up with all the bullshit in this life).

On the way to work this morning I was thinking (again) about my use of technology. Appropriate use of tech. That kind of thing.

The fact that I was thinking about it (again) is indicative of a problem.

For most of my life, up until probably 10 or 15 years ago, when you bought a product or service  you just looked at it and decided if you needed or wanted it. Mac or PC? Which one do you like. Churches Fried Chicken or Kentucky Fried? What mood are you in and what chicken seems like the right one to eat?

We didn’t have the internet to let us know if the CEO of Churches was a scumbag. We didn’t know if the head of the computer company had frequented Epstein’s Island. We didn’t even know that island existed, much less what depravities and crimes the world’s elite were committing there. Walmart, of course, had completed much of its project of destroying Small Town America, but Amazon had not yet crawled from the primordial ooze of tech-bro-genesis to kill off brick-and-mortar stores.

I find that now I spend a lot of time thinking about my use of technology and my choices about commerce in general, evaluating them against an ever-shifting rubric of acceptability. What does it say about me, in my own mind, if I buy a new MacBook vs. a PC? What if I use Bluesky vs Twitter?(that one’s actually easy). Am I a bad person if I each Chik-fil-A every so often, given their politics?

And here’s my problem. I don’t want to be a person who just doesn’t care. At the same time I realize that maybe my poor human organic brain and the psyche it generates are not equipped to be on constant alert for this stuff. In short — it is exhausting.

After deleting all social media from my phone over a month ago, I find that I’m not really missing it at all. I’m especially not missing the constant invitation to drama and outrage. I don’t miss Instagram at all. I don’t miss Mastodon at all. I look at the Bluesky account for my gaming podcast once a day, and have no compulsion to check it more often.  I’m barely using Facebook at all. This leads me to believe that a massive part of the cognitive overload problem is the damned cellphones. This is not a surprise.

I love this grumpy old cat.

Just a quick thanks to people who leave comments on this blog. Since I don’t collect analytics that’s really the only way know anyone has read anything.

YouTube is now full of older GenX and young Boomer who have reached retirement age, or been retired against their will, who suddenly realize they’ve been  lied to by Capitalism for their whole lives and that materialism is not a great thing to base your life on.

Amazing.

I’ve run this blog through a number of accessibility checkers and it fails miserably.

I’ve done a few things to make it more accessible for people with vision issues. Simple things. Making sure links are underlined and are a different color. I’ve been using HTML headings properly, putting alt text in, etc. But it fails really badly for anything that would help a non-sighted person.

Gonna look into this. I need to do more reading and research about this. The WordPress them I use is really old, and I find that most WordPress themes both confusing, horrible looking, and probably not accessible.

Going forward I’m not going to comment on other people’s blogs if I think they somehow don’t meet my “standards” (whatever that means). I think all the bloggers I follow are of good intentions. Sometimes execution of an idea does not go the way you might want it to go. People are imperfect. I know this firsthand.  I’ve seen good people in the web get absolutely harassed because they didn’t articulate something to someone else’s liking.

I rarely delete a post, but a recent one — I just deleted it. Nothing horrible. I just felt after some conversation and consideration one of the links was not true to what it said it was. Basically, talking about punk rock and then selling punk rock tshirts = a serious contradiction of the message. It becomes content marketing at that point, which is not blogging. It’s just shit.

See, I can admit when I’m wrong!

Just sitting here at my desk at work, with nothing going wrong (besides the entire country), I took a few seconds to breath and get centered, and suddenly realized how much tension I am carrying just sitting here. I’m thinking as hard as i can about — well – everything. No wonder I’m exhausted all the time.

Private Hudson guards my new science fiction shelf. The Ultimate Badass. Fuck’n’ A man…

This interview has nearly brought me to tears. These two men – their friendship. The work. The art. The kindness.

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson Go Deep on Rush’s Return | Rolling Stone Canada