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Negative

Well, I tested negative for Covid this morning. Still have a lot of snot, but I went to work for the first time in over a week. I did OK. About 2pm I was feeling pretty tired, but not as bad as the day before.

One more day of work this week and then the weekend. I’m going to lay off exercise for at least a month. That sucks because I have an aikido seminar I’m going to miss and I want to do some skateboarding, but I also don’t want to over-tax my body and end up with long Covid.

By the way, a message to whoever brought this fucking virus into our world. Go fuck yourself. Whether you are a lazy researcher who spilled a bottle of virus somewhere or some monkey-eating asshole buying bushmeat in a dirty market, please please please go fuck yourself.

Seriously. I have stuff to do, and now we’ve gotta live the rest of our lives dealing with this bullshit.

Dear Unknown Reader – you may have noticed a lot of cursing on this blog lately. I’m just annoyed and grumpy.

I have about 15 months until I retire. That’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. Once I retire I am going to seriously reduce my contact with the germ-carrying unwashed masses.

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Aikido, Covid, Cons, Etc

As a follow-up to the Covid post, I am supposed to participate in an Aikido seminar in 3 weekends. I question whether I will really be up to it. In Aikido, once you are of the “dan” ranks (black belts) you are expected to attend two seminars per year. This is a big thing in the art. You go somewhere, usually another dojo, and a high-ranking teacher from somewhere else leads class for a weekend. Usually it is a full day of practice on Saturday and then Sunday morning. It is exhausting but fun. It is important to expose yourself to other ideas in the art, as well as create and maintain relationships as part of the greater Aikido community.

The last few years there have been very few seminars, due mostly to dojo closings resulting from the pandemic.

Anyway, I honestly don’t know if I will have enough fuel in the tank to do this. It seems like a lot of time, but it will be here before I know it. Right now I am about 55% well. I did not have any of the drastic respiratory problems that can come with Covid, but the fatigue is real. I’d say the same if I was recovering from the flu.

I had been feeling almost…normal…about going to events. For example, gaming conventions. Cons are well known as great places to get sick. I have a badge for the next North Texas RPG Con. Now I am rethinking whether I even want to go. I will have lost a week of health and fun activity do this particular illness. I don’t know that I really want to roll the dice a gaming con. Or, if I go to this Aikido seminar, what am I likely to pick up there? Flu? Some other Covid variant? Who knows.

Now, I can’t live my life in fear of getting sick. I understand that. But it is something to consider.

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Covid

Well, after all this time we finally ended up with Covid.

I was going to write a lost about it, but honestly I just don’t really care right now. I just want to get well, and for my wife to get well, and move forward. Fuck this shit.

 

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Punk Ethos and Blogging +

Note: I originally drafted this post months ago. I went in this morning, did some edits, and hit publish.

On  my micro.blog site I posted this while back.

I’ve been having this conversation with @grubz today, in a comment thread on this post he made a while back, in which he said that having your own blog feels so punk rock.

I agree. Fediverse/Indieweb is indeed the punkest thing happening on the internet now. I realize now that is why I’m so drawn to it.

The quote I was thinking about from Ian MacKaye was from a talk he did a the Library of Congress. From my notes from a library conference presentation proposal I never finished…

On the Definition of Punk – Ian MacKaye, at Library of Congress…

People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?’ Here’s how I define punk: It’s a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It’s just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn’t being dictated by a profit motive.

Ian goes on to discuss this a bit more. Here is the full video. It is worth your time to watch or listen to.

As we move into a possibly (probably) dark time in our country’s history, and as libraries are under attack by the Forces of the Stupid, I feel compelled to explore this line of thought again. The Public Library as an Intellectual Free Space.

Recent events happening in the ongoing enshittification of social media (and nearly everything else) have brought this interview with Ian to the top of my mind. I’ve been doing this blog since 2006. I actually had a blog before that as well. I’ve been creating websites about my personal interests since 1994. But not until now have I really considered just how punk rock the “small web” is. It is part of that free space that Ian describes.

Note: the rest of this post is what I added this morning. 

My friend The Czarbar and I have been talking about this stuff almost constantly for the last year, as we  attempted to move a 200-person skateboarding group away from Facebook. The effort, as I edit this post now months after I originally drafted it, has largely failed. The core group and a few others have joined us on Discord. Facebook (predictably) fucked us over by reopening the group after The Czarbar shut it down. This complete disregard on the part of Meta for the wishes of the original creators of the FB group is clear evidence 1)that we did the right thing by leaving FB, 2)that when you put shit on a Meta site it becomes THEIRS. Not yours. and 3) Meta and other big social media and “content” companies are scum and along with the purveyors of AI should be eradicated like the digital (and actual) vermin they are (I added this one because I wanted three reasons, and because it felt good).

Not surprisingly, the reopening of the group did not demonstrate to the folks who jumped right back on that FB is shit. They just breathed a sigh of relief and continued posting shit.

Back to the top of this post….

I will, however, amend my statement above about the punkest thing on the internet right now. It isn’t Fediverse. Fediverse is useful, and it’s much better than the social media silos, but

The punkest thing (and for those who don’t care about being punk, the BEST thing) on the Internet has always been and always will be personal websites and blogs, written by individuals, to express themselves for zero payback beyond the experience of blogging. 

Personal sites and blogs, connected to you via RSS feeds, with relatively secure commenting features, and without connections to big social media, are the answer.

Own your online presence. Get a domain name. Own your data. Make it portable.

That is all.

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Oddities

A few months ago we ventured down to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas to check out the Oddities & Curiosities Expo.

I’ll start by saying this is not really my “tribe.” I knew that going in. I prefer the nerd stuff. Happening simultaneously, and unknown to us,  was Fan Expo Dallas in another of the huge areas at the convention center, which is closer but still not really a direct hit on my nerd/fandom target.

When we got down to the convention center is was early in the day and already the place was getting packed. No biggie. I just chilled and found us some parking.

As we walked over the the venue the variety of humans was impressive. For the Oddities Expo you had the weirdoes with all the piercings, lots of tats, black clothing, etc. I say “weirdos” only in the positive sense. I appreciate a harmless weirdo enjoying their thing. Side by side with what I can only call pseudo-goth-horror-weirdos were the cosplayers there for the Fan Expo. Looking for a dude with a beard dressed up as Little Bo Peep or whatever the current anime trend is? We got you covered.

Cosplay is fine by me. People create amazing things.

I support it when people get together to share their interests. I had a good time. I was kinda hoping the Oddities and Curiosities might be a bit more varied.  It is mostly stuff like taxidermy (seriously), horror-inspired gruesome art and knick-knacks, etc. Again, just not my thing. It’s like the New Jim Rose Circus blew up in there. Body horror, mutilation, whatever. I feel like a lot of the vendors were just selling shit they ordered from a Chinese factory. However, a lot were in fact selling stuff they had made themselves, and that’s cool. We found on vendor who was selling her own art, which featured some very beautiful colors and really stood out in the sea of disturbing stuff. We bought a small print which is, in fact, quite beautiful.

But again, people should 100% follow their instincts on this stuff, because I’d rather have a neighbor with a house full of stuffed raccoons and a bone through their nose than a conservative republican who hates everyone that has a personality or any joy in their lives.

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The Hard Way

I saw some new Adobe Podcasting AI tools in a video today.

I began using computers and the internet during grad school in 1994. I had barely touched a computer before that.

I’m glad I got in on almost the ground floor of the web (compared to most people), because I learned how things work and how to build things by hand.

As tools like thew new stuff from Adobe allow people to “optimize” their audio without having a clue what’s really being done to it, and more tools allow people to create without knowing the process at all, I find myself returning (willingly) to doing things the hard way or simply not adopting new technologies because I want to understand things.

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In Praise of Horsegirl

Last Friday we went down to the Sons of Hermann Hall in Deep Ellum to see this band, Horsegirl.

The venue is cool. Read about it with the link. It’s on the very outskirts of Deep Ellum, so you can get in and out without having to deal with too many of the idiots, scumbags, or idiot-scumbags down there. I like that. I love going to see music, but honestly when you go to “entertainment districts” you always see, and sadly sometimes encounter, some fucking dirtbags. I’m just way too old and grumpy to deal with what bullshit very well.

So before I rain praise down upon the main act, I have to say that the Unnamed Opening Act was, in short, dreadful. I mean, really really really really really really bad. I lay most of the blame on the singer. Generally when young people are out doing their thing, performing on stage, chasing their dream, or whatever, I usually support that. I think it’s good. Go for it, I say. Fuck the Man. Fuck your parents who told you not to do it — to go look at a computer screen all day while you contemplate suicide. But occasionally you encounter a young person whose parents told him he was a super special do-no-wrong angel one too many times, and that may have been the case here. My wife said she didn’t like his sorta “menacing” stage persona. As usual, she got it right.

And now to the praise…

Horsegirl was awesome. They were recommended to us by a friend in Virgina who saw them a while back. Three young woman playing some really good stuff – guitar/bass/drums, with a little keyboard here and there. A bit of Sonic Youth, a bit Silversun Pickups, and maybe some others we haven’t quite figured out yet. Really great. It was super good, and very much the sonic antidote to the ear-poisoning we’d gotten from the openers. We went from a 100% bullshit act to a 100% ZERO BULLSHIT BAND.

My wife (you can say that like Borat if you want to, and if you are too young — or old — to know who Borat is then probably stop reading my blog) picked up one of their LPs. We listened to it the next morning. Excellent. Sounded great on the Big Stereo, and she ordered another from them.

the band horse girl performing in Dallas Texas in August 2025

 

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New CD Set

A few weeks ago we went to Dead Wax, a record store in downtown Garland. Great store. Very crafted to appeal to people JUST LIKE ME, which is why it is great. We bought a few albums. While we were there they were playing Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004–2024 (a boxed CD set) in the store. It was really good, but they didn’t have it for sale, so like the good American (consumer) that I am, I ordered it from Amazon.

Been listening to it one disc at a time for a couple of weeks now. It is quite to my liking.

Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004–2024

 

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Ozzy

Well, Ozzy is dead.

No one will ask “Which Ozzy?” There’s only one Ozzy that matters, and we all know who he was.

I’ll say right off the bat — I don’t own any of his music at this exact point in time as I write this. There’s a good chance that by tomorrow I will own everything, as my wife may very well rectify the situation. She is a music listener and buyer, so this possible course of events would not surprise me.

I’m pretty sure my intro to Ozzy, via Black Sabbath,  was on KZEW or Q102, local album rock stations here in Dallas during my teen years. I’d guess I probably heard Paranoid or Iron Man first. Can’t imagine it being otherwise.

I think, upon reflecting on it right now this very instant, that Paranoid is one of the best rock songs ever written. Just so good.

That is all.

Rock on.

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You Owe Nothing – by starbreaker

starbreaker is my favorite blogger.

This is his more recent exploration of why personal blog/site/pages are PERSONAL.

It would be thermodynamically impossible (or some shit like that) for me to agree with him more. I don’t lay down the law here quite to the extent he does, but that’s not what I’m about. But the point is, I could if I wanted to.

Honestly, this is why the small web = best web.

Now go build your own site and tell the social medias to fuck off.