Category: whatever

• 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

Assuming no nuclear wars or whatever, here are my weekend plans…

Teach Aikido
Go to skateboarding event, lunch, and Half Price Books with my wife
Relax
Read
Work on D&D

Take the dog for an excellent walk with my wife
Play D&D
Relax
Read
Work on Traveller

I’m in Shreveport, Louisiana, tonight. Drove over because some cousins were flying in to see family. It’s only about 3.5 hours from Dallas.

I have a lot of family here. Our ancestral spawning ground is about 20 miles south in Mansfield.

Shreveport is the city where Frank Sutton, the actor who played Sergeant Carter on Gomer Pyle, died. I’ve been coming here since I was a child. The city seems like it struggles and apparently has a declining population. In recent years there has been a lot of violent crime. Still, I have a lot of good memories of Shreveport. I love my family here. Having lived in Dallas for most of my life it would be hard to live here in such a smaller city. I’m used to having all that Dallas has to offer at my disposal. I mean – we went to see Rush twice in the last week.

I wish my family all lived in the same place. I hate how geographically dispersed families are now. It seems like life was better when families were close and could really support each other. Simultaneously I am glad my parents left Louisiana and moved to Texas in 1969, when I was 5. Growing up in a more cosmopolitan and diverse place was a gift. I really appreciate it now.

Driving around Shreveport that are streets and buildings I remember for my childhood. I remember riding bikes with my cousin Stewart from his house to a hobby shop and other places. When I was over here with Stewart I had a freedom I didn’t have at home, mostly because he just went wherever he wanted. Like so many cities, those old familiar places have changed. A lot of them replaced by the same boring chain stores and restaurants as everywhere else in Commodified America.

Our hotel is is in Downtown Shreveport, near the river. There are a lot of cool old buildings. So many small cities in the United State have these great old downtowns that have fallen into disrepair and non-use. There’s great old architecture, cool bridges…here in Shreveport there were once streetcars. My mom and her family used to ride the bus from their town up here to Shreveport and they would take the streetcars around shopping.

Not sure where I’m going with all this. Just getting it on “paper.”

These small cities could be so much more, and they are all over the country. We could do so much better.

I am curious. Do you read this blog? I actually have no idea how many people might read it.

If you read it, please just say hello in a comment on this post. I don’t collect any analytics at all. Just wondering who is out there.