General

Jetpack? More like nopack! (Yeah, it needs work)

Today, I deactivated (and will later remove) the Jetpack plugin from my site. This is a plugin that does all kinds of things–it dances, it sings, it pushes SEO hard and wants you to sign up to a lot of bonus services for a low, low monthly price, so you can become rich off your blog content-rich site. It’s made by the company that owns WordPress, Automattic (the two t’s are intentional) and let’s just say they have been making the news recently for all the wrong reasons.

And it’s all because of our good friend, AI (we really need a better term, because there’s no real intelligence behind all this LLM1Large Language Model, another abbreviation I learned in the past year junk out there. Maybe we should call it Al, instead, like the person’s name. Blame everything on Al!) There are a lot of sources I could cite, so let’s choose 404 Media for now (and apologies, they require an email address/account to view their stories to prevent–oh so appropriately–AI firms from slurping up all their content):

A WordPress ‘Firehose’ Allows AI Companies to Buy Access to a Million Posts a Day

Now, the story above has been updated to include a statement from Automattic, but like almost all statements from the company over the past week, it sounds kind of weaselly:

Automattic edited its original “protecting user choice” statement this week to say it will exclude Jetpack from its deals with “select AI companies.”

From the 404 Media story

This could mean Jetpack is not affected, or it could mean that Jetpack is only being excluded for some, but not all companies. I would not be surprised if Automattic crafted the phrasing to be deliberately ambiguous.

Remember when the web was all animated GIFs and cheesy midi files? I’m not saying I’m hankering again for that experience precisely, but I do miss the days before the web was all about control, commerce and “engagement.” Sometimes it feels like the best thing to do would be to take my blog and all of its 4,933 (!) posts offline and just keep it in a journal I could revisit on my own, in private. I don’t mean a paper journal, of course. I’m not crazy. But something fully offline, where I don’t have to think about security patches or a host changing the rules on me, or escalating costs, or why is it such a chore to post images in a gallery, anyway?

Hmm. Hmm, I say.

March 2024: The Possibilities

March is a fun month, but also weird and sometimes horrible. Behold my list (with semi-random bold highlights):

  • We switch back to Daylight Saving Time, aka Proper Time, and gain back an extra hour of light in the evening (as of March 10). This is good for birding and just not being in the dark as much.
  • Spring officially begins (on March 19). I saw buds on trees back in January, so spring is really already underway, despite a few attempts at snow since then (Mother Nature is acting more like Mother from the terrible Police song of the same name right now).
  • Even without DST, daylight is stretching out longer into the evening.
  • Temperatures start getting milder. T-shirt weather soon! (More seriously, t-shirts become feasible outdoors as soon as next month, barring climate change hijinks that could genuinely push this into March).
  • A downside: Starting with February, the amount of precipitation goes down every month until September, when it starts going back up–except for March. March is an anomaly, where it is wetter than February. The downward trend resumes in April.
  • Speaking of, it is 3°C and raining as I type this, with a high of 7 forecast (two degrees off the average). Winter is reminding us it’s still official for 17 more days.
  • But also speaking of, March is where the last chance for real snow that sticks to the ground and needs to be shovelled, comes to an end. Looking at the 10-day forecast, it seems we are safe from any more snow accumulations for Winter 2023-24, though a few flakes may fall over the next few days here and there, just to annoy everyone.

Here’s the historic average for rainfall. It’s for New Westminster, but I checked, and it’s accurate for the whole Lower Mainland1Or Metro Vancouver, if you prefer to be all official about it.

March: We heard you like rain.

And with all that said, here is my haiku for March.

Haiku for March

Warmer and brighter
But still the rain won't let up
Take what you can get

New Year Resolutions 2024: Second month check-in

Here we go again.

First, the resolutions:

  1. Get to 150 pounds. But for real this time. Gotta go with the classics.
  2. Finish my prototype game. Title to be revealed soon™.
  3. Complete my blog redesign. Another classic. It could happen!
  4. Revive my newsletter. I am actually working on this now, and have moved from Substack to Buttondown for the hosting.
  5. Complete one of my unfinished novels. Likely either The Mean Mind or Road Closed. I’ve been itching to get back into writing again, and either of these stories will be fun to noodle around on.
  6. Start a new blog or something. I kind of have something in mind, we’ll see what happens.
  7. Focus on:
    • Being happy
    • Staying healthy
    • Bringing good into the world
    • Getting decent sleep, which will help with all of the above

And the results, after two months, by which time the average person has completely mind-wiped resolutions from their brains.

  1. I ended February down 3.5 pounds. A major breakthrough. Definite PROGRESS.
  2. The game has been on hold while dealing with condo stuff, which has somehow evolved into almost a full-time job.is in progress. PAUSED, but should resume in March.
  3. I have continued to tweak the blog a bit, but haven’t done much actual blogging. Still, I maintain this as IN PROGRESS.
  4. Nothing changed from what I wrote last month: I did not get out the first issue for January as promised, and I am rethinking the whole thing. STATUS TBD.
  5. I have chosen the novel to be completed (Road Closed, possibly with a new title). IN PROGRESS, though not much yet.
  6. Still mulling another month later. I am mulling both the site itself and the platform, so the mulling has become more in-depth. IN PROGRESS.
  7. I am not especially happy right now, but I am taking steps to hopefully address that. I didn’t run as much this month as I’d have liked, but am still running. I cut snacking enough to drop 3.5 pounds, so there’s that! I don’t think I’m bringing BAD into the world, so at the very least I’m kind of a carbon-neutral human. Sleep has been mostly decent, with “stress” interfering now and again. Let’s stick with this nebulous category as being IN PROGRESS.

Overall, February saw mostly minor steps forward, but with little regression. That works for me!

UFOs, UAPs and me

The prompt: A UFO silently gliding through the night sky above a dark, wooded area.

I have never seen a UFO, at least not to my knowledge. I’ve seen things in the night sky I couldn’t immediately identify, but were very likely planes, satellites, meteors or kids up to shenanigans.

These days, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are often called UAPs because the term is more encompassing: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It doesn’t assume conventional flight (or flight at all), or that the phenomena is an actual, physical object, but it still admits you can’t identify it.

Even though they sound more scientific, I have also never seen a UAP.

But lots of people have. In recent years, there have been so many UAP reports that they are now almost commonplace. They are discussed in the bodies of the U.S. government by credible and serious people who are not dismissed as lunatics. There are more photos and video you can shake a UFS (Unidentified Flying Stick) at. Even Mick West1Look him up. He’s an anti-conspiracy theorist, former video game designer and skeptic, but he’s also smart and fair. He has a website and, of course, a YouTube channel. probably can’t debunk all of them. Probably. (And let’s not even touch on how much of this stuff going forward is going to be a slurry of “AI”-generated nonsense. “It’s a real UAP, I swear. I don’t know why there’s a DALL-E watermark!”)

Some theorize that all this activity is to get the masses used to the idea of UAPs and all that may come with them, in preparation for…something. Probably not a giant spacecraft landing on the White House lawn, though it would honestly be hilarious if some other intelligence actually played into the trope. It’d be a great way to break the intergalactic ice, assuming they weren’t here to enslave and/or eat us.

It’s more likely that if these beings–whatever they might be, and assuming they are, in fact, real, would be preparing us for some sort of reveal that would make their presence among us undeniable. I’m not sure how this could be done in a subtle, yet convincing way. I actually read a book about this years ago, A.D. After Disclosure (links to my review way back in the olden times of 2012) and the various scenarios depicted in that book are, I think, accurate: We, as humans, would not react well. Right now, there is intelligent life in the universe, and it is us (insert joke about intelligence here). And if we never find any other intelligence, it means we are all alone–but also on top! No one is better than us, technology-wise, or society-wise, or evolution-wise. We’re #1. But as soon as another intelligence is confirmed, that changes abruptly and permanently. We would adapt, of course, but there would be a period of social chaos that would probably be unlike anything we’ve seen in human history as we re-orient ourselves as a species next to…whatever is sharing the universe with us.

All of this is to say that I am curious to see how all this UAP jazz plays out. On the one hand, definitive proof of other intelligent life would be very cool and spiffy. On the other hand, social chaos and all the mess afterwards would be…less so.

If anything zany happens, I’ll update this post, assuming the worlds isn’t cast into permanent upheaval, and I’m not living in a cave in the mountains or something. I would probably not have good Wi-Fi there.

How can 2019 already be five years ago?

Time is weird. With a cat.

I mean, really. Time is weird, and it just gets weirder.

I still remember when I was really young, and my family was at an event (I want to say a car race or something involving vehicles) and I asked my mom how much longer it would be (because I was apparently not being sufficiently entertained) and she said about ten minutes. And I had no idea how long ten minutes was. I inferred from her tone that it wasn’t very long, so that’s how I started to learn how to tell time–tone of voice.

The time for this post to come to an end is now.

Something that really was better in the olden times

Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as:

A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.

This definition is kind of depressing! But it captures the main things I’m interested in when it comes to nostalgia:

  • yearning
  • sentimentality
  • wistfulness

When I get nostalgic, it’s usually because I’m thinking about something pleasant from my past, and not recent past, but a time long enough ago that it feels good and gone now. An irrecoverable condition, one might say.

However, if I start chipping away at a particular bit of nostalgia, the imperfections of the past reveal themselves. I see the things that were less than ideal, the stuff we’d think of as archaic or even unacceptable today.

But are there things that really were better back in my youth, which was primarily in the 1970s and 1980s? When I came up with the premise of this post, I didn’t have an answer, I wanted to start writing and see if something obvious came to mind.

Nothing has so far. I remember the overall feel of my childhood, which was relatively safe, pleasant and uneventful. I have oodles of good memories, and the bad ones–and there are bad ones–have been blunted by time, and most of them were not that bad to begin with. Fights (verbal, never physical) with friends over stupid things. Having a crush and being thus crushed. Sometimes they were more tactile: finding out what happens when you ride a bike with no feet and hands (you crash).

But what about something specific, something where I can say, “This [thing] in 1975 was way better than today, in 2024”? Also, good lord, that’s almost 50 years. I feel a little better knowing I still hadn’t hit puberty in 1975, at least.

The more I think about it, the more I come to realize it wasn’t something that existed back in the 70s or 80s that was better than today, it’s the opposite–the absence of something. And the most obvious one that comes to mind is social media.

I appreciate the irony of writing that on a blog.

There are lots of great aspects to social media, but its ills form a long and well-known list. For the moment, leave aside the potentially addictive nature, the negative effects on culture and specific peoples, the things we all know are bad about social media.

When I cast my mind back to 10-year-old me in 1975, what did I do during my free time after school or on the weekends? I’d hang out with friends, playing board games, or the very first video games (yes, including Pong), riding bikes, play-acting (usually based on some current TV series or movie). I’d draw comics or write stories, or listen to music. Sometimes I’d just read a book or magazine. And it’s when I think of that last category–reading–that makes me appreciate the difference between the world back then and now. News came in slower. I learned about contemporary issues and ideas through magazines. There was TV, too, but even that was restricted to a handful of channels.

And books! I would spend hours just quietly reading, lost in imaginary worlds, or being enthralled by breathless “non-fiction” covering the nonsense I loved as a kid–monsters, ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot1I’ll grant that not everyone will see these things as nonsense. Heck, even I’m still not sure what’s up with UFOs.. And the thing about reading was the sense of quiet. The world moved, but the pace felt deliberate (also allowing for the difference in how time is perceived when you’re a kid).

That quiet simply doesn’t exist in 2024, unless you make a concerted effort to isolate yourself or head to a place where you can be reasonably confident you will be left alone, just you, your thoughts and a smartphone that can’t get reception.

So that sense of quiet, that’s something that was better in the olden times. I’m not sure how well I’ve explained it. I may revisit this post later. I’ll make a note2Seriously, I’m adding it to my reminders app. In olden times, this would have gone on a slip of paper that I would inevitably lose..

This blog hatched 19 years ago today (February 2, 2005)

woman using smartphone and laptop
It’s a blog, see? Photo by Plann on Pexels.com

Yes, I have been rambling on, making lists and dissing Apple on this blog for 19 years. My blog can now legally drink in BC.

Here’s the original post in image form:

You can see the actual post here: Bloggity blog blog

As a first post, it’s not exactly riveting. I’m still using WordPress, though.

Some fun facts from 2005:

  • Twitter did not exist (just like today)
  • Facebook did not exist1Actually, it did, it launched in 2004, but it didn’t open up to the general public until 2006
  • Instagram did not exist
  • Spotify did not exist
  • Social media did exist, but it was stuff like Friendster and Myspace
  • YouTube launched
  • Steve Jobs still existed, but we were still two years away from the iPhone
  • Donald Trump being president was still just a joke on The Simpsons, a cruel, cruel joke
  • People were using Windows XP because it was actually current
  • The most popular song of 2005 was Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”, which I have no recollection of
  • The top movie was Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
  • An actual comedy was in the top 10. Like, a movie you see in theatres (Wedding Crashers, at #6)

For the 20th anniversary, I will get my blog a cake and then eat all of it.

I tried Spotify again

It’s the free version, since I’m still paying for Apple Music. And this is the first thing I saw:

First, I was terrified. Then I wondered if maybe McDonald’s had some kind of playlist (the song “Grease” immediately comes to mind), then I realized it’s just an ad, because you get ads in the free version.

I don’t like ads, I no longer like McRibs (I did when I was 14, proof that teens think they know everything while knowing very little), but I am curious to try out alternatives to Big Daddy Apple these days, so I’ll see how it goes.

EDIT: Mobile Syrup’s newsletter the following day had this:

New Year Resolutions 2024: First month check-in

As noted in New Year resolutions for 2024 I said I would check in every month to see how I was faring. It’s time for Check-in #1!

To recap, my resolutions were (I’ve numbered them this time to make it easier to check progress, but they are not in any particular order):

  1. Get to 150 pounds. But for real this time. Gotta go with the classics.
  2. Finish my prototype game. Title to be revealed soon™.
  3. Complete my blog redesign. Another classic. It could happen!
  4. Revive my newsletter. I am actually working on this now, and have moved from Substack to Buttondown for the hosting.
  5. Complete one of my unfinished novels. Likely either The Mean Mind or Road Closed. I’ve been itching to get back into writing again, and either of these stories will be fun to noodle around on.
  6. Start a new blog or something. I kind of have something in mind, we’ll see what happens.
  7. Focus on:
    • Being happy
    • Staying healthy
    • Bringing good into the world
    • Getting decent sleep, which will help with all of the above
  1. I ended January up 2.6 pounds. Whoops. FAIL (so far).
  2. The game is in progress. I did not expect to have it done by the end of January. IN PROGRESS.
  3. I have actually been working on my blog! IN PROGRESS.
  4. I did not get out the first issue for January as promised, and I am rethinking the whole thing. STATUS TBD.
  5. I have chosen the novel to be completed. IN PROGRESS.
  6. I have not done anything on this yet, but am still mulling. IN PROGRESS.
  7. I am trying to find things that bring me joy. I am trying to reduce snacking (as always). Bringing good into the world? I am making some moves there. The sleep part is going well overall, with stress interfering here and there, but not regularly. Overall, a lot of this is IN PROGRESS but could be better.

So far…not bad, not great, mostly just starting to roll forward. We’ll see if it’s down Sleek Highway of the Future or hurtling toward a cliff. Check back in another month!

More things to look at (a small site update)

I have finally added back the ability to view some of my photo galleries in the right sidebar (currently a few birding galleries, one of planes, and a trio from hiking in the days of yore). I am going to redo this shortly because the current design will quickly become unwieldy, but worry not, the new design will be both more compact and expansive. I will defy the laws of physics!

I also added back the Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards comic. The bonus material page has been tweaked a bit with some better shots. Check it out for your early 2000s web comic/game mashup needs.

A twist on the ol’ ‘getting chased by things’ dreams of my youth

When I was a wee lad, I semi-regularly had two types of bad dreams:

  • Ferry disasters (possibly because I didn’t swim well and any rocking on a ferry kind of terrified me. Because I grew up on Vancouver Island, almost all of our holiday trips required taking the ferry.)
  • Getting chased down by various things and entities, including but not restricted to:
    • Vehicles of all types. They typically were missing the front bumper, because this made them more terrifying to me.
    • Vampires
    • Robots
    • Mummies
    • Assorted monsters

The chase dreams would usually end just as the thing was catching up to me, or in the case of a vehicle, just as I was about to be run down. I’d wake up, all frazzled, then eventually fall back asleep. Good times all around.

As an adult I very rarely have bad dreams and when I do, I typically wake up, think, “That was weird” and promptly doze off again.

Last night I dreamed I was either at the UBC campus or one that was subbing for it. It was vast and sprawling, and I must have been attending classes there, because I remember marvelling over how I was enjoying the science classes more than the arts, which was the opposite of my dream self (my awake self is the same, but not as strongly as the dream version of me). As I made my way across campus, it became time for me to leave. I was walking along one of those quiet campus roads that you see an occasional service vehicle trundling down, and as I approached the edge of the campus this road widened out into the start of a (I believe four-lane) highway. This was almost certainly my subconscious drawing in the Southwest Marine Drive entrance to UBC, which is indeed very highway-like.

Because this was where the highway started (or ended), it was very quiet. I needed to cross, and rather than going back to the quiet campus road, I opted to cross the highway.

You can see where this is heading.

I began to cross and almost at the same moment noticed a car approaching from the campus side, heading toward me. It was a low, dusty gold colour. It made me think of a 70s Dodge Charger. I looked it up and if this isn’t the car I saw in the dream, it is extremely close to it:

In the dream, I did a quick mental calculation and realized that the speed of the car meant I wouldn’t have time to get out of the way. Would the driver swerve around me? Plow into me? Was there even a driver at all? (The childhood versions of these dreams almost always featured driverless vehicles).

With no other options left, I did the only thing I could think of: I jumped straight into the air as the car approached. And it zipped harmlessly under me.

I woke up shortly after that.

Maybe the takeaway is that as an adult I have more control over things that frighten me, or make me uneasy. Or maybe my subconscious finally realized that three dimensions exist in dreams, too.