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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.

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Blog changes and stuff

This morning I indulges in some obsessive blog theme adjustments. I changed the color of all the links. I felt like the previous maroon shades were kind of harsh. I didn’t like them. My goal is that this blog be easy to read. It is, in the end, about the words. I think the various blue shades retain plenty of contrast, and the mouse-over pink let you know you are on that link.

I’ve been fiddling around with other blogging platforms a lot, but I’ve had this blog running on WordPress for almost 20 years. I just can’t see changing it until the day comes that this theme is no longer working with the system and there are no good themes available. Now, that might seem crazy, but I have looked and for the most part all the themes are horrible corporate bullshit looking things.

However, this theme looks good on computer, phone, or tablet. It works. So I’m sticking with it.

While I do maintain some blogs over on micro.blog, I am not crazy about the notion of having my main blog housed on a “service.” Micro.blog is fantastic, but the owner is one guy. He’s a genius, but he’s one guy. Same with Bearblog. Hosting on Dreamhost.com — having my own WordPress installation or whatever static site I might decide to build, seems a bit more solid.