For less than $5 a month you can have space on a web server. For a few bucks a year you can have your own domain name. With a computer at the public library and a plain text editor you can then publish a website that can be seen more or less all over the world. THAT IS POWER. It just requires a tiny bit of knowledge and effort to do your own thing. You should do it.
I can imaging myself going down the audiophile rabbit hole very easily. I have thus far refrained, but a few weeks ago I ordered a new Ortofon 2M Red cartridge for our turntable. To simply installation I got the one that is pre-mounted.
Installation re-balancing the tone arm were both easy.
Sitting here right now listening to XTC’s Skylarking. Honestly, this album sounds amazing anyway. It is one of the best produced albums we have, but the new cartridge really does it justice. It sounds fantastic.
I’m really glad I made this purchase. Records, CDs, and this stereo are my only real indulgence besides coffee.
Obsession with productivity and optimization is the antithesis of a life well-lived.
You will never be productive enough the leaders of the Cult of Productivity. “Productivity” as it is measured is higher than ever in history, and yet we still all slave away. The idea of Productivity is bullshit as are the methods of measuring it.
The so-called Protestant Work Ethic is simply a means of getting people to slave away for their whole lives. It’s a lie.
No matter how optimized you are, you will still eventually die. No matter how rich you are you will die just like everyone else. Beyond not smoking, killing your liver with booze, you have no control over anything. Fit people get cancer and die every – single – day.
As the months roll by it is actually kind of amazing to see the evolution of clearly bot/AI generated “content” on social media platforms. Fake “fan” groups and pages, etc etc. I hope some genius is out there writing a PhD dissertation on this particular disaster.
I’ve been reading some blogs this morning. A lot of posts about the effects of social media. A couple of ideas keep coming up, which I will list and comment on below.
We are retreating into our own information bubbles that tend to isolate and radicalize us.
Gonna have to disagree with this. At least for me. Curating your intake of information is not retreating. It is the Enterprise raising the shields. There are way too many graduates of YouTube/FaceBook/Twitter University out there, many of them not even actual humans, blabbering 24/7 to propagate lies about vaccines, support Trump, and tell you raw milk is good for you. No one needs that shit, but there it is. Shields – fucking – UP Mr. Sulu!
People are losing critical thinking skills
I’m not sure most people ever had them, but this is more of a comment than anything else. Every single one of the Trumpbots, Q-nuts, and other wackos believe their own ability to think critically is unmatched. So when I hear someone complain about the “critical thinking skills” of others I immediately question that person’s own intellect.
We found out about this great new record store in downtown Garland, Dead Wax.
Fantastic selection of LPs and CDs if you like punk, post punk, rock, new wave, etc. I picked up two XTC albums and this killer BBC sessions The Jam record.
This is me a couple of years ago. I’m not this fat now. This was before I went back to Aikido, after at least two years of pandemic life. I wonder what damage that period of time actually did to me. Being out of shape like that for a couple of years plus all the stress of the pandemic and cancer in the family must have some lasting effect.
Anyway, this simple trick is one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes I’ll do a 180 shove-it out. It’s simple but you can flow into and out of it nicely. This is the kind of thing I like to do now.
Some people would not even call this a “trick.” I would say they are wrong.
The World Freestyle Skateboarding Championships were in Germany over the weekend. A lot of my friends from all over were there. Do I have anything left that is worth sharing? I need to think about this.
I’ve been playing with DuckDuckGo for a few months now.
Today I did a comparison search.
My friend Jeff and I run the world’s only talk podcast about the Traveller RPG. The only one. There are no other talk podcasts in the world dedicated to Traveller. It is called SAFCOcast (SAFCO stands for Super Adventure Friends Co.)
I searched DuckDuckGo for “Traveller RPG talk podcast”.
Our podcast was the first thing to show up. As it should be. It is the single best answer to the fucking query.
DuckDuckGo, doing what a fucking search engine should do.
Then I searched Google. Our podcast was not even above the fold. The first thing that came up were videos on the Google-owned YouTube and links to threads from Reddit, who Google has a “deal” with.
Google’s shitty crooked search results. They are shit.
It’s not really a surprise that Google now sucks. I’m a reference librarian. I have known this for a long time. The thing is, it is getting worse and worse.
My new project for the remainder of the year, which I’ve been meaning to do and not gotten around to, is to gradually remove myself from using any Google-owned products, at least in my personal life. For the time being we still use Chrome at work. I deleted all my videos from YouTube earlier this year.
OK, maybe I don’t work in a sweat shop, but my 3-day weekend is drawing to a close.
Amazingly, after having 2 days off and having some fun and relaxation with no stress from rushing around, I had the energy today to clean our bedroom really well. I mean — like – really well. Going to really enjoy sleeping in there tonight on clean sheets, with a clean floor, the bathroom super clean, and all my clothing washed and folded/hung.
I’m not necessarily looking at a 4-day work week though. I have a library outreach event to do on Saturday, and some other stuff that will keep me busy a bit late one night this week. In the morning I’ll look at everything and see if I can work out a work-free Friday. That would be nice.
Today we got up, bought some coffee and took the pup for a walk at the nature preserve, came home and relaxed with more coffee. Then we drove out to Forever Young record store in Grand Prairie and did some record shopping, my wife procuring two excellent albums and I bought 1978’s All Mod Cons, by the Jam, one of my favorite bands. I need to delve into Paul Weller’s other material. Note to self. Genius is genius.
The more I look into it, the more I realize how much of my favorite music was created before 1980. I feel kind of dumb to have not realized this before, but that post-punk era was just so good!
It is, as I type these exact words right now, 6:29pm. With the lovely three-day weekend I have been able to relax, have fun, enjoy my family, and not feel rushed at all. I worked from home on Friday, so the Tyranny of Laundry is not currently oppressing me.
As the fateful hour of 8pm approaches, the usual feeling of Sunday night depression is not seeping into my psyche. As we walked our dog about 20 minutes ago I was thinking about this and coming to the realization of how much middle-class misery is caused by feeling like one must rush from one thing to another. Constant time pressure cooker. To some extent we do this to ourselves, but only to feel like we actually have a life outside of work. I am lucky I actually love what I do and have a great employer, something 99.999999999% of people can’t say, but still I’d like to work less.
Aside from buying these records today, my holiday consumerism included ordering a higher-quality cartridge for our turntable, the red Ortofon 2M. My friend Dale tells me this will make a noticeable difference from the stock cartridge that came on our turntable. Looking forward to checking out the new records with the new needle.
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.
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.
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.
