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Moving a FB Group

As I’ve written about extensively here, I’m moving all my creative output and a lot of my communications off of social media platforms.

Here are some issues that have come up with moving one of the two Facebooks skateboarding groups I am involved with off Facebook…

Over the last few weeks we’ve been moving Neverwas Skateboarding off of Facebook and onto its own blog with links to associated accounts and services. For example, we are no longer going to host our yearly videos on YouTube. We have a PeerTube set up. This is the direction we’re moving.

The biggest reason for this change is the acceleration of changes for the worse on the various Meta platforms. My own personal feed is now full of actual propaganda clickbait. I mean FULL of it. I understand the need to generate adverting revenue, and I can accept seeing ads on the page. What I can’t tolerate are images, posts, and reels about Elon Musk, Zuckerberg and his new buddy Dana White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and other people I detest. Reels about “how to get women”, “why the bible is wrong (inserting some super wacky shit)” are common. But the overall tone of what I am shown has changed dramatically to the “let’s get him mad so he’ll click this” manipulation.

But beyond that fact this all this bothers me, it is pernicious and harmful to society.

So yeah, it has been bad for a long time. It’s worse now.

As a group, the admins of Neverwas decided we could  not ethically keep the group on the platform. Yes, some of us as individuals have not completely extricated ourselves from Meta. But we can move the group.

Beyond our newfound contempt for Meta and the big social media silos in general (I shouldn’t speak for everyone, so let’s call it MY contempt), the main admin and I know there is a better way forward. A way that is more true to the way skateboarders used to do things. Flexible, non-corporate, grassroots, decentralized systems. No, we can’t have our own actual internet infrastructure that transmits data, but we can run our own installations of Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. We can host the blog on an ethically run small company’s system. If that company goes belly-up or sells out, we can easily transfer our pages to a new host.

This is all part of the IndieWeb philosophy – which harkens back to the early web, the pre-social media web. The web on which I ran Bob’s Trick Tips years ago. It’s just a better way to do things.

In moving the group to the blog, we spelled out very clearly our stances on a few things like homophobia and transphobia (and hate), MAGA extremism, and pervaders of conspiracy theories. Those ideas are not welcome in the group. We’ll not platform someone just in order to appear tolerant. Private groups do not owe anyone a venue to espouse their beliefs. It was felt best that the group, moving forward, be clear about the overall inclinations of the members. We all have different religious beliefs, various political persuasions, etc., but we all draw the line on these topics.

This has upset a few people in the group, who have left. They felt targeted. I’m not happy about that. The various ethical stances we have taken on the blog’s “Ethos” page are a direct reflection of the reasons we are leaving Facebook and Meta, not a targeting of individuals.

As I write this, today on January 20, 2025, there is a good chance an executive order will be signed by the new President that dehumanizes trans people in the eyes of the federal government. Make no mistake. Under the guise of some sort of  logic, such things are intended to dehumanize one group and please those who don’t want them to exist. So yes – we have stated our position as the admins of the group. If you disagree with that position(s), you may not be a good fit for this group.

All that being said, we don’t even have a “space” dedicated to the discussion of politics and social issues. And we never will.

Personally, there are a few people who may not wish to stay associated with Neverwas because they don’t like the way we are doing things, but who I still like quite a lot. People with good hearts who view the internet as a place for not just discussion but debate. To them I say — I still love you – but NW is not going to be a place for debate. There is nothing unethical about a group stating its ethics, be it a skateboarding group, club, or religious organization.

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All-Around Skateboarding

I’ve been having a conversation with some of the guys on NeverWas Skateboarding about freestyle skateboarding and how back in the mid-late 70s and even early 80s skaters were more prone to being all-around skaters. By all around, I don’t mean “I skate transition AND street”.  I mean skater who did vert, banks freestyle, slalom, downhill, as well as just skating in the street.

You’d have guys like Doug “Pineapple” Saladino show up at a pro pool event and place in it, then the next weekend he’d win the Oceanside pro freestyle contest. My friend Paul was on the local Wizard Skatepark team. I used to see them practicing. They all practiced everything. The legendary Jeff Phillips was on the team, and I remember vividly being at the park on a Friday night and the team was all in the freestyle area doing their routines one after the other, and I saw Jeff doing his.

In 1978-79 Skateboarder Magazine published a series of “Quivers” articles, showing the board setups of a number of current pros like Stacy Peralta, Gregg Ayres, Mike Weed, etc. They all had a range of boards for different purposes, including freestyle.

That’s how it was. I suppose as each form of skating became more difficult and more advanced specialization came more to the forefront.

The all-around era was really the formative era for me. As I could only go to the skatepark for 2 hours a week, freestyle and bank skating (at local spots near my house) were most accessible for me. It was easy to practice freestyle at the nearby school parking lot. The banked driveways in our alleys were my bank skating training ground. Occasionally one of us neighborhood skaters would build some shitty little ramp. But all-around skating was always my goal.

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Banning the TikToks…

This article from starbreaker.org came across my radar today. It expresses what I think about the TikTok ban pretty completely. Now it looks like Trumpistan may try turn it into some form of state media. How fitting.

I’ve never used TikTok. As soon as someone showed it to me and I saw videos of teenagers dancing I formed a negative opinion of it, because I can be a dick that way.

The  ability to create your own website is what democratizes the internet. The ability to run your own email list, using your own software democratizes it, just like owning your own data and creative output that you can move around and shield from AI thieves (as best you can) democratizes the web.

What would REALLY democratize it would be the ability to fully and completely OWN your own domain name, rather than renting it. But that’s how it works.

I’ve read opinions that having your own site should be easier. I don’t really believe this. It is already just so easy. It’s easier than it’s ever been. What is missing is the awareness in the general population that it’s possible. Awareness and desire. Not everyone wants to have a website. They just want to share stuff. The Fediverse answers that need quite well, but it requires a tiny amount of effort to understand. Tiny. Frankly the ability to text a group of friends and include an image or short video pretty much covers the sharing part as well.

But there is nothing like having your own domain name and website. Or even just a page. Hosted on space that YOU rent or own. Nice and portable. Make yours site such that if one host closes are begins to suck you can just move it. Easy.

Problem solved. You’re welcome, America.

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The Beauty of the Hyperlink

As I delve further into the movement back to personal webpages and blogs as the basis for the real internet, one thing that has become very clear is that you must use hyperlinks whenever you can!

The beauty of the web, and really its original intention, was the linking of one document to others, creating – GASP – a web of information and links!

It honestly feels absurd to be explaining this, even if hardly anyone is reading. This is such basic knowledge, but I’m sure that if you ask almost anyone who wasn’t in tech back at the beginning, a serious computer hobbyist, or a librarian, they won’t know why it’s called the World Wide Web.

Social media at best barely permits good linking habits, and at worst makes it impossible, since the owners of the silos don’t want you to leave. To them it is critically important that you stay on their site. This fact has gone a long way toward ruining the internet, but not quite! The old internet is still there, the old ways are easier than ever to learn and do.

Anyway, on this blog, when not simply composing some irrational screed, I try to hyperlink to relevant pages. I tend to link to Wikipedia a lot. When I heard that Musk apparently said bad things or some other shit about Wikipedia the other day I donated for the first time. Hey, I’m a reference librarian approaching my 30th year in the profession so I understand the limitations and problems of Wikipedia, but it’s pretty useful if you are just needing info on the first Godzilla movie you ever saw or something.

Here’s the thing. It isn’t a web if there are no connections. Linking to other interesting sites, pages, or whatever is what makes the World Wide Web a web. So LINK!!!!!!

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Manifesto?

OK, I know it seems like I’m going off the deep end, and I may be, but I updated my “About” page. It’s not quite a manifesto – YET. I’m working on it.

I added my static skate clips site, which I generate with Jekyll, to the navigation menu up top. I don’t now if I’ll stick with Jekyll, but so far it is working. There are a few issues I want to work out, but I do love the art gallery look of it.

Honestly, if I can get the issues worked out with Jekyll, or find another static site generator that solves those few problems, I may work on moving this entire blog to a similar setup. WordPress has been good for many years, but it is becoming bloated. I feel like the complexity of the mySQL/PHP stuff makes it vulnerable to hacking. I mean, I know this is the case. Worst, the themes in WordPress are becoming very hard to customize, absurdly complex, and almost all of them suck. The complexity issue means it is really not a great use of my time to create my own.

I do love using micro.blog for my other skateboarding blog. It is based on Hugo, another static site generator. Micro.blog is really a pretty amazing blogging platform. Still, I’m increasingly drawn to building everything I need myself. The transition will take time though. I have lots of other things I’m working on. I think ActivityPub is very cool, but really, I’m getting to the point I’d rather just have people follow the site by RSS and email me if they have something to say. I’m feeling less need to share it everywhere.

I’d hand-code everything and use SSIs IF I could easily create an RSS feed for it. I’m just not there.

 

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The Revenge of Frankenstein

Tonight I watched the 2nd of the Hammer Frankenstein movies, The Revenge of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing of course as the kindly doctor.

I love that there’s a continuity so far with these movies. Keeping Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein and actually following his life through six movies is pretty cool. Other than the classic universal monster movies I’ve really never been much of a horror movie fan. Much more into science fiction. I’m aware that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel is really considered to be the first work of science fiction and literature, but let’s face it. The movies really are about horror. That being said these films aren’t exactly scary or even that shocking by today’s standards. But there is something disturbing about them. And they’re tremendously fun.

I’ve actually had to watch these films on three different streaming services. Tonight I watched on Apple TV. Not sure where I’m going to pick up the next one.

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Walking the Dog

Not the skateboard trick. This post is actually about walking the dog.

Our dog is about 2 years and 3 or 4 months old. I have always loved him, even when he was 9 weeks old with needle teeth and peeing in the house. I loved him, but I didn’t really love being a dog owner at that point. I’d never had a dog before. Neither had my wife. We were new at it. Luckily my wife is super smart and she did a fantastic job training him, and getting professional training for him as well.

Today I worked from home. She’s out of town so it was just me and him and the cat. I had to go into work for about 3 hours this morning. He was in his crate, and of course he was great.

Anyway, I took him out for about twice as long a walk as he gets on a normal afternoon because he’s been so good. It was a really nice day here, so we walked down to the neighborhood park so he could watch the kids play, which he likes. It was nice to have the freedom to do that. I hate that I can’t do that with him every day. Soon, little guy, soon we will all go for great walks all the time. We’ll go to the nature preserves a few times a week. It’s going to be good, little buddy.

beautiful sheltie dog
Riley, at the park, on a beautiful day. What a good boy he is!
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The Curse of Frankenstein

After watching Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell last week, I decided last night to watch the first of the Frankenstein films by Hammer, The Curse of Frankenstein.

The film was made in 1957, and stars a relatively young Peter Cushing. I say relatively young, because I’m not sure he ever actually was young. It’s hard to imagine, and I’m refraining from a simple web search for “young Peter Cushing” because really I don’t want to know. He really elevates this part, like he seems to have done in everything he was in. I found his performance in this film fairly complex. Threatening, weirdly naive about the way others might perceive what he’s doing, arrogant. He conveys a lot of qualities. One quality he does not convey is “I’m a nice guy.” Which is just fine.

The film follows a typical but altered Frankenstein story. No real surprises. While the makeup for the monster isn’t great, it is also less comical than the classic Boris Karloff style makeup. The Hammer films, if my viewings thus far are any indication (and I think they probably are) enjoy hitting the viewer with more gross-out moments than the classic Universal monster films did. Eyeballs being taken out of a jar. The hands of a great sculptor brought back to the Frankenstein estate, all pale and dead looking. Sawing through a skull to get at that precious precious brain. Hammer digs that, and so do I.

So, no spoilers here. I mean, I don’t want to slip up and tell my readers than Baron Frankenstein creates humanoid monster from the bodies of the dead. Not gonna ruin that for anyone.

Hammer made six Frankenstein movies, all with Cushing. I’m not including 1970’s Horror of Frankenstein, which was a parody and did not star Cushing. Pretending it doesn’t exist. So with two down, I only have four more to watch and I’ll have earned my PhD in Hammer Frankenteinology. My Uncle John, who loves this stuff, will be so proud!

Tonight I’ll watch the second of the films, The Revenge of Frankenstein. Looking forward to it!

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Small Goodness

In all of my hobbies, skateboarding, blogging and web development, tabletop role-playing games, nothing that’s actually interesting is coming from a huge companies. All of the cool stuff is coming from very very small companies or just simply individual enthusiasts.

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The Internet is Amazing

I’ve been reading a lot recently about how shitty social media has made the internet. I agree. What started out as promising has really turned to crap. At the same time, I’ve been very immersed lately in learning about the IndieWeb, the “small web”, and such.

For a “normal person” — someone who wasn’t in the tech or academic realm until 1994 — I feel like I was a pretty early adopter of the internet and web. I detail my introduction to the internet and the World Wide Web in this post on my other blog, Me and the Internet, Part 1. (Yes, my blogging has been kind of divided for the last year or two. Been blogging over at micro.blog because I like the platform a lot and it is very interesting.)

I’ll get around to writing part 2 soon enough, detailing the years from 1999 to 2010 when I ran the first skateboard trick archive with video. A site called Bob’s Trick Tips, which got 40,000 page views a day and nearly blew up my credit card with pre-cheap bandwidth/pre-YouTube bandwidth charges.

My point, I suppose, is that since 1994 there has never been a time when I didn’t have at least one personal website. Until I discovered Moveable Type and then WordPress they were for the most part hand-coded (except for running phpBB message forums and trying out a few content management systems).

Further, my point is that I’ve been creating websites and using the web for so long I think that until tonight I had really forgotten how amazing it is and how amazing it can be. When I started on the internet, the browser that came on the floppy the university gave me was Mosaic. There were hardly any sites compared to today. I used Gopher and Telnet to connect to servers all over the country and the globe. It felt fucking incredible. I mean – INCREDIBLE. From our crappy apartment off the drag by UT Austin, with our 28.8 modem and our new Macintosh Performa computer we’d taken out a loan to buy, we could connect with people a world away. It was quite literally William Gibson shit (I’d just read the Sprawl Trilogy).

For the full story, read that post I linked to earlier on the other blog.

Tonight I got an email from Matthew, who runs the starbreaker.org blog and site. We’ve been corresponding a bit. He mentioned that he loves building static sites, just him and a text editor and pushing that stuff up to a server pointed at the internet. That is power. And man, he struck a chord with me. I’ve been thinking so much about how fucking punk rock blogging and/or personal sites are. In fact, I wrote this thing about it recently. But Matthew’s words were simple and powerful. Yes – with a computer, a simple text editor, an FTP client (or maybe just some browser-based upload setup), and some storage space on a server, YOU can publish stuff that can be seen all over of the world. THE WORLD. That is a damned low barrier to entry, because truth is you could go to the public library, use their computers and internet connection, and their books to learn HTML and if you are feeling industrious CSS, and BOOM. You can have your own manifesto on the internet for all the world to see and fear.

So yes, I am unhappy that social media has made its inevitable transformation into mountains of fecal matter. Yes, I’m unhappy that for so many the internet is just a place to 1)buy things (though god damn I do love buying some things)and 2)plugging in to the 24-7 outrage machine, BUT I feel reminded and more aware than I’ve been in years that the old internet is still there and it is still absolutely fucking amazing.

I understand that not everyone has this crazy compulsion to post their thoughts, the records they buy, the shows they see, and pictures of their cat to the internet, but I really want to encourage friends who are so inclined to do it. I mean, you can have your own domain name so cheap every year, and web hosting even cheaper.

Tonight I created this simple page, by hand, in a text editor. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I can write basic HTML and build sites from memory. I need a little refresher and some references to do CSS. And of course, I embedded a video from my Vimeo account just to see how it looks. The only hard part was finding the meta tag that made it look good on a phone (without the right tag the text was super tiny). Yes, it’s a shitty page, but not really. It loads fast. Regardless what device you see it on it works. Turns out that plain old HTML is nice and responsive. I’m going to work on it as a site. Get the style sheet the way I want it, see if I can find a good way to generate an RSS feed without automating the whole site with a static site generator. But Matthew was right. Writing it on a text editor and pushing it up to my server with an FTP client is wizardly and grand, which I had forgotten.

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Snow Days

It has been snowing here in the Dallas area for a couple of days. Not a huge amount, but enough to make the streets icy.

I generally hate cold weather and snow, but there is one thing I love about snow. When it snows or we have ice, it is super quiet outside. Hardly anyone is driving. The drone of air conditioners disappears. Even the sounds from the freeway about two miles away is lessened significantly.

Snow days are the quietest days in Dallas.

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Skate Clips Gallery

I have taken my experimental static website and moved it to a subdomain of this blog.

https://skateclips.concretelunch.info

I think it looks like an art gallery.

This new gallery is not technologically connected to this main blog. There is are no comment fields there. I want it to be a more oldschool organic thing. If someone wants to comment, the email address is right there. It can be easily followed using the RSS feed, which is shown on almost every page.

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Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

I’m composing this using voice dictation, so I’m sure there will be some mistakes. Tonight I watched the old Hammer horror film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. Slight spoiler. The monster isn’t actually from Hell.

The movie stars Peter Cushing, so you know it’s going to be pretty good just because he’s in it. While not particularly terrifying, the movie does take place in an insane asylum. So the depiction of seriously mentally ill people in this old horror film was pretty interesting.

This is the kind of film I would’ve watched on a Sunday afternoon when I was a kid. I’m surprised I’d never seen it. It would’ve seriously disappointed me. However tonight I was not disappointed, but delighted

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Setting Up Board

I’m looking forward to setting up this new Cockfight Skateboards Matt Money deck. It’s 9″ x 33″ with a 15″ wheelbase. Should be really good for parking lot style, ditches, and parks. I’m going to put Indy 169s and some 54mm 99a Bones STF on it. I’ve got a bunch of bank tricks I want to work on. Of course, we’re about to have an “arctic blast” hit the DFW area, so it’s going to get really cold. I always pick the best times to set up a new board. I also got some new New Balance skate shoes that I’m currently breaking in, before my current one fall apart.

Cockfight skateboard deck
click for full size

Cockfight skateboard deck
click for full size