General

Stop the world

Eurythmics, 1999:

Stop the world
Call it a day
Leave it all behind
Leave it that way

I tried to pick the least depressing verse from the song (“Peace is Just a Word”). Yeah.

I don’t have anything to add. Yet.

The world without Dolly Parton

It’s a diminished place.

Here are two things I saw and wanted to share here about the death of Dolly Parton today, at age 80:

And an editorial cartoon:

Celebrity deaths don’t usually affect me, but Dolly Parton radiated such tremendous goodness, intelligence, compassion, and generosity. She was also funny as all get-out.

She will be missed.

Dreams of late, in brief

In brief because I can only remember slightly less than an elevator’s pitch worth of description for each.

  1. I’m fighting crazy cult women. I think it more a game of wits than a physical battle. I cannot recall why I was fighting them or how I fared.
  2. Running along a scenic mountain trail. If I remember correctly, this started with me walking with a friend then transitioned, as dreams do, to me jogging alone along a trail that ran through bare trees that suggested winter or fall. As I kept running, my speed increased, first to an impressive sprint, then to something absurd and impossible, where I had to deliberately apply the brakes when jogging around a corner to prevent the momentum from flinging myself off the mountain. I wish I could move like that. Or maybe I don’t. It seems dangerous.
  3. The last dream was in some kind of meeting room. I was sitting at a conference table. Across from me was Elon Musk. He was jacking up his office chair super high while sitting on it, laughing, and saying how he could do things like that. I said I could do the same thing and didn’t need a billion dollars to do it. I then threw a pink eraser at him. I have no idea what happened next. Hopefully I left.

Am I doing Blaugust right?

I feel like people checking recent posts here are going to leave, thinking, “This guy is really into birding and running and not much else”. But there’s more to me than that. I have other hobbies! I have opinions! I write lists!

But I have been going through some interesting times that have pushed me away from writing about other stuff here on the blog and I’m hoping to add more of that back so it’s not all 5K runs and here’s a Black-capped Chickadee. (Though I feel part of it is the desire to share and mull things over in a public space has withered away a little, though I can’t articulate exactly why this might have happened.)

In the meantime, here are some semi-random posts of mine you may find interesting. I have a certain, specific sense of humour and if it doesn’t match yours, some of these links may not do anything for you, but if you’re a nostalgia nerd, some probably will.

I will put an update at the top of this post if I add more links later.

Retro/nostalgia:

To all the phones I’ve loved, er, owned before

My computer and video game history, an abridged edition

Things I miss from the 1970s

The Obsolete List: 1964 Edition

Technology:

Apple September 2023 “Wonderlust” event: My medium-warm takes (I used to blog about Apple events, this one is probably my favourite)

Fiction:

Most of the fiction comes from writing prompts and these are essentially first drafts, so they may be a bit unpolished or even unfinished (I note the unfinished ones).

The Reunion (creepy text messaging story)

Writing Prompt: The text of a letter, email, or diary (Short story called “Reflections”)

Writing exercise: A Walk in the Snow (Part 4) (unfinished, sort of?)

CLAWS ~or~ How an 11 year old tries to write a blockbuster novel

Prompt 1 of 5,000 (The arrival of a letter, email, or package)

Writing prompt: The Burn (Part 1) (unfinished)

Writing prompt 9: Labyrinth (unfinished)

Writing prompt 6: The world ends with you?

Writing prompt 3: Technically on vacation

Writing prompt 1: Inevitable time travel (my riff on “Someone tries to stop Hitler”)

Movie reviews:

Movie review: Prometheus (a LOT of spoilers and I fairly savage the film)

Review: 2012 or Science is Hard

Movie review: Deep Impact

Miscellaneous:

In which I interview myself, Part 5 of 2 (links to 1–4 provided, best if read in chronological order. Part 6 coming soon™.)

Writing:

What writers secretly want: Typewriters

Addressing concerns of my blog being scraped by AI (probably not what you think)

The Ultimate Guide to Writing More

The future of AI and blog topics (written in 2016 and again probably not what you think)

10 light blog post topics (yes, I used ChatGPT for the prompts and would not do so now, but it amused me at the time)

Cold weather writing prompts

Writing prompt: Ten questionable opening sentences

Tonight I edited a 17 year old post

Why? Because I was looking at my tags (all 100 million of them) and Nic noticed one that was so long it wasn’t wrapping properly in a column. I said it was probably for a review of the movie 2012, which I remembered correctly. Then we reread the review and Nic pointed out I had said the fissure in the Sistine Chapel appears between God’s finger and David, when it is, in fact, Adam. So I fixed it. The post was written on November 14, 2009.

Is this hardcore blogging or am I just a weirdo?

Yes.

Empire (1990) aged like milk

Like a lot of people, in 1990 I bought Queensryche’s fourth album, Empire, because the song “Silent Lucidity” was such an effective clone of that big, spacey Pink Floyd sound. I’ve said before that if you dropped the song onto either of the post-Waters Pink Floyd albums, no one would have batted an eye.

But Empire is more than just “Silent Lucidity”. It also features the title track, which is about the usual decline of urban America, its descent into violence and guns, guns, guns (“Got an AK-47 for his best friend/Business the American way1“).

But there’s a spoken word section that recites the following:

In fiscal year of 1986 to 1987, local, state and federal governments spent a combined total of 60.6 million on law enforcement. Federal law expenditures ranked last in absolute dollars and accounted for only a sixth percent of federal spending. By way of comparison, the federal government spent 24 million more on space exploration and 43 -times- more on national defense and international relations than law enforcement.

This seems like a pretty clear statement of “more funding for police = better!”, which was naive in 1990 and in 2026, with police in most American cities being very well-funded, and ICE terrorizing citizens, the reality is that well-funded law enforcement has created a de facto police state in America. And solved none of the issues that the song “Empire” speaks to. Whoops.

But “Silent Lucidity” is still a very nice Pink Floyd homage.

  1. If the lyrics had been more openly sarcastic, they would have worked better, but that might be just me. ↩︎

A thing that shouldn’t annoy me, but does (pods)

Lately I’ve noticed people shortening the word podcast to just pod. I understand the reasoning–a podcast originally referred to an audio program meant to be played on an iPod (kids, ask your parents) but with the iPod dead and buried, if not forgotten (I still have two) I can see why people might want to use a different term now. And this is before you get into what even counts as a podcast now, since a lot of them are now also on platforms like YouTube, where they are…videos.

Still, “pod” bugs me because it still retains the “pod” part of “iPod”, which seems to me to be the part you’d want to replace. But mainly it just sounds just too twee (yes, I have a kind of twee meter in my head that tells me when something crosses the “too twee” line) and doesn’t really make sense because peas are in pods, not people talking to each other. Also:

Podcast > Pod

Broadcast > Broad

If the latter becomes accepted usage, I will embrace pod.

My first Blaugust 2026 post

My first official™ post for Blaugust 2026 comes with me at a crossroads when it comes to blogging.

A few years back I began exploring options to move away from WordPress, which started as a blogging platform but has evolved into something that does way more than what is needed for a simple blog with words and images.

Also, the head of WP started making…interesting public statements and committing actions that left me uncertain about the platform’s future.

I explored many different sites and platforms, and several came close, but always lacked something. I admit I am a fussy person, and it may be impossible to fully satisfy me. WordPress works, not because it’s exactly what I want, but it gives me flexibility to bend it to my vision, such as it is.

But it’s also complicated, and much of its UI and way of accomplishing tasks are things I’ve simply grown used to and tolerated, never enjoyed.

And now, with seemingly everything tech-related going up in my price, my Dreamhost unlimited plan is seeing a significant price increase, no doubt to move me over to one of the limited plans (the unlimited plan is already no longer an option for new customers). This huge price increase has rekindled my interest in thinking how and where I blog.

More thoughts on this soon–my billing renews on August 15th, so I’ll have to commit to some course of action by then, even if it’s just paying the increased cost of sticking with the Dreamhost unlimited plan.

(I will quickly add that I very recently saw a reference to Pure Blog on Mastodon [somewhat hilariously, I initially misread it as Purple Blog and was a bit disappointed that’s not the actual name] and it’s intrigued me. It looks like it’s Static Site Generator software, but tailored more specifically for blogging. I also feel like I’m more willing to get “to the metal” again with CSS and the like now than I was in the past. Anyway, what I’m saying is I’m actively looking for new options and this is one of them!)

Meanwhile, I remain as cool and collected as typing cat.

#blaugust