Hey there. How are you doing? I’m doing alright today. Apparently it’s been 477 days (or 1 year, 3 months, 20 days) since my last post.
Yeah, I’m not proud of that.
The short answer is I’m a bit intimidated by blogging. It feels like writing a note on receipt paper and once I’m done it’s ripped off and handed to somebody else. I never seem to have enough to update with or there’s too much going on to know where to start. It doesn’t help that I have a habit of making mega-posts that require lots of research and links.
It’s no surprise the guy with ADHD has trouble making and sticking to a schedule. Consider the New Years resolution to get in shape and how many fail to follow through because magically on the 1st they’re supposed to be an entirely different person. We can’t just tell ourselves “I need to get in shape.” We need to block out the time, say no to the rest of the world for a while, and physically start moving. Most of us, if we miss days, we feel like we’re never going to crawl out from under the disappointment. I learned with webcomics not to see updates as pages that have to be accounted for eventually, otherwise the backlog will brew resentment.
Another issue probably linked to my neurodivergence is perfectionism. I keep giving myself unrealistic expectations and then get frustrated when I don’t meet my own arbitrary standards. Didn’t make a post on Monday? Obviously I’ve failed for the week. Got an idea to write about? Must be branched out into a multi-part series. Gotta maximize effectiveness! Can’t let one slip by without burdening it with the Ghost of Blog Posts Yet to Come.
Catching Up
The biggest news I have to report is Solange and I got married! ❤️ :3
She always told everybody she’d elope but we decided to have a small ceremony here with her immediate family. The plan was to keep it quiet online, get my family to join us for a stateside celebration in Vegas months later on April 1st, then announce on April Fools Day and see who couldn’t tell if we were serious or not. (Never let it be said my wife can’t commit to a bit) She kept her maiden name, though she’s still angling for us to both change to the amalgam Thomp’olson. I love that woman :V
*Gestures Broadly*
I’ve come to recognize the value in a personal website lately as, well, it seems like the rest of the internet is on fire these days. Some time ago I wrote of the various places I was considering to post stuff. These sites and services have regular daily users so sharing content on them should be a no-brainer, right? Except all these aggregators have their own agendas and responsibilities. To some extent we’ve all accepted giving up some level of privacy for the sake of using these sites. We don’t like it but we shrug it off, like clicking Agree to the new Terms of Service when software needs updating. We try not to think about it too much until it directly impacts us. I’m not going to call people lazy or enabling because I do it, too. We all just want to get through our day without having to deal with making sure the stuff around us functions properly. Problem is, the desire for that ease of use results in forgiving and overlooking pretty egregious behavior. For example: Meta artificially limits your reach unless you pay to boost content.
This is compacted by advertising. These monolithic corporations couldn’t care less about what individual users need. Their guiding light is what advertisers want. Never mind that online advertising revenue is perpetually in decline. Running an ad-blocker isn’t simply about being selfish. Ads are not only annoying and intrusive, they can also leave you open to malware. If you’ve never gone to a page and tried to figure out which download button is real you’ve never really experienced internet advertising. (Also, don’t use AdBlock Plus: they sell ads) And before anybody gets a feeling of self-importance, saying we need to band together and solve this through competition, here’s a video from Folding Ideas discussing VidMe:
Alt-tech has existed for a while but it’s usually been for exiles of the mainstream platforms. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter I mean X. Now people are jumping off to alternatives at a rate I haven’t seen since back in the aughts when popular forums imploded. And just as I started actually using Reddit they decided to kill 3rd party apps. Will any of them be the next Twitter? Honestly, I don’t want another one. You have to track down your friends, see where they all landed, then the site either dies because nobody uses it or everybody uses it and suddenly another monolith becomes Too Big to Fail. I simply don’t have the time or the energy to invest in the game of Which Billionaire Comes Out On Top. I’ll make profiles to follow, I guess, but I’m going to refocus my attention. I’d like to rekindle some of what we lost with the death of Flash. Check out this video by Lord Ravenscraft about Homestar Runner: