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Yesterday’s session – another video

I made this video from yesterday’s clips. I told Chadwick, from Super 8 Skateboards, that next time I rode one of his boards I’d shoot some footage, knowing that 60 year old slightly overweight freestylers are highly influential on the social medias. Seriously, everyone looks to see what we’re doing and models their behavior after us, but they can’t keep up at all. Pitiful.

Anyway, here is the clip. I generally hate “portrait orientation” videos, but again, as this was for potential social media use in case he was insane enough to use it, I had my friends shoot it this way.

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Ditch Session in Fort Worth

Today I went out to Fort Worth my friend Mark (white shirt) to meet up with our friend Carter (yellow shirt) at a killer ditch to skate.

I am the old guy in the black shirt.

It was hot. Mark and I skated hard for about 1.5 hours before we gave out. Carter just kept hammering at a trick he wanted to get, and he got it.

I haven’t been skating much lately and it felt really great to get my legs back under me. Severely out of practice, but the legs feel good again and I feel the desire to skate, which is great.

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AI Content Theft

When Midjourney came out a few years ago I used the 5 free “prompts” or whatever to create some weird looking aliens for my Traveller RPG game.

Then I found out it was scraping real artists sites without permission, stealing their art, and using that to “create” art.

I never used it again.

I’m not patting myself on the back. Just saying – it wasn’t a complex ethical decision.

LLMs scraping websites without permission is just stealing. Not complicated. It is just theft.

It’s no different than if I stole a truck from the guy down the street and my excuse was “I needed it.”

Everyone involved in this should be prosecuted, convicted, fined, and incarcerated.

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Blog More

A blogger I followed shared this post, Your words are wasted, this morning. It’s a 13-year old blog post about why you should own your own content, mostly likely on your own blog, with your own domain name and all that. Basically all the IndieWeb principles.

I know I go on about this topic a lot. I’m sure my friends are tired of hearing me talk about it, but this is my blog and so, well, here I go again.

Edit: I wrote a bunch of boring paragraphs under this line, which I just deleted, because good God they were just not needed.

OK, now that my edit is out of the way, here is what I have to say.

If you want a web presence, have a blog. If you don’t know how to do that, ask me. It’s really that simple. If you must use social media, use it sparingly. If you must use social media, consider using Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse stuff and bringing your friends along. As soon as advertising, MAGAs or other kooks, or AI bots show up on a social media silo, stop participating.

That is all.