Month: December 2024

The Culling: The Verge

Yep, it happened.

Yesterday I went to the Verge homepage, but never clicked on anything. I appear to have not looked at any articles in the last few days, judging from my browser history. This makes sense, because I’ve de-prioritized the site since it added an “optional” subscription.

Today I clicked on the lead article and got this:

Yes, a paywall on the feature article, which was–hold onto your hats–about rearranging your home screen app icons. I did not get a Verge subscription, nor did I try any trickery to allow me to read the article. Instead, I closed the tab, removed the Verge from my new tab page list of bookmarks and will rarely check the site in the future.

I don’t begrudge the Verge wanting to extract money from its readers–you gotta cover expenses! But the way they are doing it sucks, and I’m not going to reward them (apart from the volume of clickbait junk opinion pieces is still too high, as well) with my money.

A partial/ambiguous paywall is bad design. It just is. I’ve barely looked at the site in the past week, so I don’t know if I’m getting hit by the paywall at random, if I reached my limit of “free” articles, or the feature article is paywalled by design. The pop-up doesn’t say, and I’m not going to dig around on my own to find out.

Asking people to fork over money and still serving them ads is also bad design. And tacky.

I don’t care about the newsletters. It’s not an enticement.

In a time when subscription fatigue is a real thing, the Verge has taken probably the second-worst approach to adding one (the worst would just be a complete paywall. I wonder if they’d still have ads then? Maybe!)

I don’t know how their two markets compare, but the way Ars Technica does subscriptions feels right to me:

  • If you don’t subscribe, the site is plastered with ads. Gotta pay the bills!
  • If you subscribe, you get some perks:
    • Article PDFs to download
    • A better layout for articles and the site in general
    • Customization options for text size, width and additional themes
    • No ads

Notice the last one? You get an ad-free experience and, knowing it is ad-free, subscribers get a layout that flows nicely without having to accommodate ads.

No content is locked behind a paywall. The sub is reasonable–as low as $25 per year. I like supporting the site this way and I get a nicer experience (to be clear, I do subscribe to Ars Technica).

Anyway, I suspect the Verge will do fine, since subs or not, they are still running ads. I’ll miss some of their content (but not their awful comments system). Having culled the site, I now have a tiny bit more time to devote to cat pics, so in a way, it’s win-win for me.

A few shots from the shortest day of the year (Dec. 21)

Like the title says, shot on my iPhone 12.

I’ve shot this hydrant before, maybe not from quite this angle.
Brunette River, which I’ve rarely shot an sunset.
Train, trail, pipe, river. Too bad the sky is kind of blown out. I should add a giraffe.
The gate at the west end of the river trail. The yellow seems to be overwhelming the phone camera.
Casual bald guy biking topless in the third week of December, as one does. Also no helmet and not holding onto the handlebars because his inate coolness protects him.

Experimenting with Ghost. Spooky!

UPDATE, December 22, 2024: Corrected a few things based on a reply from the person who hosts Magic.Pages!

MagicPages.co is a Ghost hosting site, and they offer both reasonable pricing, plus a 14-day free trial. Today, I signed up for the trial and created a mock version of this very blog. I tweaked the default theme a bit, made a post, then duplicated an existing post from here to see how easy it was or wasn’t, and how it looked vs. WP.

Here are my initial takes.

Pro:

  • Clean, simple interface. WP has a ton of cruft and junk I never use, and the thing I do most often–post–is not made particularly easy or accessible. Ghost streamlines everything down to a minimalist UI that makes it simple to write posts.
  • More options are always close by. It’s only a click away to do more complex formatting or access other features. Again, the UI feels honed, and focused.
  • It has a nice selection of themes, and you can create your own (though it’s not that simple).
  • No plugins needed! It has image-handling options that are much nicer than WP’s, and they’re just there.
  • If you want to have members/subscriptions, it’s easy to set up.
  • ActivityPub integration is being worked on, meaning I could blog and share easily to Mastodon, the one social media site I haven’t completely abandoned (yet).
  • I can use all emojis, to excess. Always to excess.

Con:

  • Most themes are locked behind a higher-priced tier, as are custom themes. Wrong! The head of Magic.Pages, Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, wrote to me to let me know all of Ghost’s official themes are supported in the Starter plan. The Pro plan is required for custom themes.
  • The number of fonts is limited. I’m not sure how easy it is to add more (edit: It looks like it requires haxing the backend to a degree).
  • While the UI is great, the overall level of customization seems lower overall. I love tweaking, but maybe too much, so this isn’t necessarily a con.
  • How do I turn off the copious subscribe buttons? One is enough.
  • No easy way to import my WP site, which begs the question, what would I do with the old site? I am not going to manually copy over 5,400+ posts. Probably. (Note: Ghost.org does offer importing, but only with their even-more-expensive tiers.) UPDATE: Yearly plans do get support for importing, so I was basically wrong here, too.
  • The two cards it supports are for the worst social media platforms: Facebook and X.

Overall, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but I am fussy and unsure. I have about two weeks to make up my mind about this specific host, though.

11 days

It turns out it takes 11 days for me to overcome my fear of getting a blood test after the last test did…not go well1Think human pincushion (tracking from when my doctor gave me the sheet listing the blood work to me actually going into the lab to get the blood taken).

The good news is this time (today) was perfectly normal as far as that sort of thing goes. Here’s hoping the results aren’t completely horrible, though the way the year has gone, I am…keeping my guard up.

Also, the happiest blood I could find:

If you wish to have your own happy blood, I got the image here: https://vectorstock.com/13564473

Birding, December 18, 2024: An eagle bum is better than nothing

Where: Centennial Beach (Delta), Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby)
Weather: Mostly sunny, some clouds, 9°C

The Outing

Centennial Beach

The tide was in, making Mud Bay look more bay, less mud.

In our last outing of 2024, the weather was actually pretty decent–and milder than normal, to boot.

I am still working my way around using Nic’s (borrowed) old camera, but managed to get some decent in-flight shots of geese today, so progress. My hand/eye coordination has finally learned the shutter/back button combo for taking photos, too. My brain is growing!

Centennial Beach had a decent mix of songbirds, plus a passel of yellowlegs and even some surf scoters, though they were way out on the bay (as usual). The tide was also way up, so no traipsing across the mud flats today. I saw a (for me) rare common goldeneye in the li’l pond near the picnic area, but my shots were only so-so. I fared better with others, including a few decent shots of robins, to prove I could still do it. I would be more upset if I regularly took blurry photos of, say, birds of paradise.

And yes, I shot eagle bums. But also eagle fronts, too. They were a bit high up, but that’s eagles for you.

In all, Centennial Beach turned out to be perfectly cromulent.

Piper Spit

This is actually one of the brighter shots I took of Burnaby Lake.

It felt colder here, mostly due to the wind, and clouds started blotting out the sun, making for darker, if moody, shots. The land mass remains intact and is still being claimed mostly by gulls and crows. We didn’t see as many songbirds, though there were chickadees darting about, and a few song sparrows.

Off the pier, most of the winter migrants were present, including a lone bufflehead, looking small and adorable, as is their way. Duck drama was a lot more toned down than on other recent visits. Maybe everyone has established their turf, or something.

We even saw two coots being…affectionate?

In all, a good visit, even if the light could have been a bit better. Here’s to brighter days of birding in 2025.

The Shots

Soon™

The Birds (and other critters). Rare, rarely-seen or recently returned birds highlighted in bold.

Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:

  • Anna’s hummingbird (heard)
  • Bewick’s wren
  • Black-capped chickadee
  • Dark-eyed junco
  • Fox sparrow
  • Golden-crowned kinglet
  • Golden-crowned sparrow
  • House finch
  • Northern flicker
  • Red-winged blackbird
  • Song sparrow
  • Spotted towhee
  • Surf scoter
  • White-crowned sparrow

Waterfowl and shorebirds:

  • American coot
  • American wigeon
  • Bufflehead
  • Canada goose
  • Common goldeneye
  • Great blue heron
  • Greater yellowlegs
  • Green-winged teal
  • Long-billed dowitcher
  • Mallard
  • Northern pintail
  • Ring-necked duck
  • Sandhill crane
  • Scaup
  • Wood duck

Common:

  • American crow
  • Assorted gulls

Raptors:

  • Bald eagle

Non-birds:

  • None?

Checking in on my New Year resolutions for 2024

Here’s what I wrote on December 27, 2023.

Resolutions 2024

  • Get to 150 pounds. But for real this time. Gotta go with the classics.
  • Finish my prototype game. Title to be revealed soon™.
  • Complete my blog redesign. Another classic. It could happen!
  • Revive my newsletter. I am actually working on this now, and have moved from Substack to Buttondown for the hosting.
  • 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.
  • Start a new blog or something. I kind of have something in mind, we’ll see what happens.
  • Focus on:
    • Being happy
    • Staying healthy
    • Bringing good into the world
    • Getting decent sleep, which will help with all of the above

New for 2024: I will check in at the end of each month to see how well I am doing on these things and use a letter, star, number or some other system to mark my progress or lack thereof. It’ll be fun!

Let’s see how I fared!

Resolutions 2024: The Verdict

  • Get to 150 pounds. lol no. Unless I binge donuts for the next two weeks, I will be down for the year, but nowhere near my 150 pound goal. The good news is I am probably more on track to achieve this now than at any other time in the past year, all thanks to an infection. Woo.
  • Finish my prototype game. lol no. Work came to a complete stop, for reasons.
  • Complete my blog redesign. lol yes! I actually did redesign my blog, making it much simpler and cleaner. It’s fine. I am looking to move off of WordPress thanks to the manbaby tantrums of the owner of WP that make the platform a lot less appealing, so further refinements are unlikely.
  • Revive my newsletter. lol no. I just didn’t have it in me. If I ever revive this (again) I will create something like six months of material before relaunching, to take the pressure off (for at least six months).
  • Complete one of my unfinished novels. lol no. I did painstakingly copy over Road closed into Scrivener (in Linux!), where I would work on a local copy. I’ve re-read it and have thoughts. Will they translate to actions? We’ll see!
  • Start a new blog or something. lol no. I experimented with a few blogging platforms, but never committed to one.
  • Focus on:
    • Being happy. Eh…
    • Staying healthy. I got a cold in June and an infection in December. Not great, but could have been worse? I also got that Baker’s cyst on my right knee again, but keep running pretty regularly through the year, even notching some of my best times in the past two years.
    • Bringing good into the world. I mean, I didn’t give birth to New Hitler or anything.
    • Getting decent sleep, which will help with all of the above. My sleep was overall pretty good!

New for 2024: I will check in at the end of each month to see how well I am doing on these things and use a letter, star, number or some other system to mark my progress or lack thereof. It’ll be fun! I did this once, I think. I should have set a reminder.

And now…

Resolutions 2025

None! That’s right, I am making no resolutions at all. I will still have some goals (in my head) and I still want to hit 150 pounds, but I’m making nothing official. The Culling™ now includes New Year resolutions. Onto 2025 and whatever the hell it brings!

I changed my logo and realized why it looked familiar…

The new logo uses the same font but adds an underline and changes the colour from all-orange to green and yellow. Green and yellow work well together, but there was something a little too familiar. Then I realized it.

I had created the Subway logo.

So now I have to change it again.

My Subway-ish logo:

Fake edit: I’m going with this for now. At least it doesn’t make me crave a six-inch chicken sub.

Not a fake edit: Now I’m trying a yellow and gray version. I’ll probably keep changing it, but won’t update this post every time, so the true level of my madness will not be fully revealed.