General

Yay, spring! (2024 edition)

Spring is starting out strong this year, as it is coinciding with the last bit of the unusually warm weather we’ve had over the last few days. It’ll be back to seasonal or seasonal-ish after that.

For now, though, it is pleasant and sunny and things are getting greener (in a good way).

And now, a spring bunny:

Hooray for more daylight

Photo by Pixabay

It’s my annual post celebrating the arrival of Daylight Saving Time, which should totally be permanent but isn’t because politicians are dum-dums.

I will cherish that extra hour of light this evening by going out and revelling in the lightness of it all. Unless it’s raining, in which case I’ll be inside and hiding.

Posting preposterous proposed precipitation-free prognostication

This is from the 10-day weather forecast. As I post this, it is March 9, 2024.

The normal high on these days, the last of which is the final day of Winter 2023/24, is 11C. As you can see, they are predicting a high up to 20C, which is almost double that and is legitimate t-shirt weather.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/401/347/312.jpg

Even better: Only the first two days would establish new records, as we hit 20C on March 18 five years ago, in 2019.

Anyway, it will make for nice running weather if it happens. Unnerving, weird and unsettling, but nice.

Moving off of WordPress, Part 2

In Part 2, I offer some takes on platforms I skipped, summarize my experiences with ones I’ve tested, and offer some alternatives to blogging altogether.

Not for me, but still good

Here are a few sites I skipped because they focus on text over images, though some do support images.

  • Scribbles. This one is still in early access, but the editor is very nice. There are no real themes to speak of, but the whole thing is well-designed and fast. If you just want text, this is a very good choice.
  • Bear (not to be confused with the note-taking app). Comes with some themes, supports markdown and images (as a paid option), but is extremely minimalist. It’s free for basic features and $5 per month/$48 per year for paid (paid covers things that are server-intensive).
  • omg.lol. This is a weird grab bag of stuff for a mere $20 per year. They now include a blog option which is currently in beta, uses markdown, and is the most “to the metal” of the three listed here.

Sites I’ve tried so far

  • Scribbles: If the image support was a little more refined, I might stick with it. I don’t knock it for this, though, it’s not their focus.
  • Bear: Fast and light, but again, image support is not quite there for my needs.
  • Pika: This was on my short list from Part 1 and…it’s so close. Images are constrained to the theme, so you have to right-click and “open image in new tab” to see them full-size. I can understand why it’s set up this way, but it’s just not right for me.

Alternate solutions to blogging platforms

Some of these may seem pretty obvious, I include them, anyway.

  • A journaling or diary app.
    • Pros: Completely offline, entries could be entire books if you are very silly and wordy
    • Cons: It’s for you and you alone, unless you publish your collected writings at a later date. This is also a pro to some people.
  • A paper journal. The pros and cons are the same as the electronic version, with the bonus of never needing electricity or battery power to write, just enough natural light and your favourite pen/pencil/crayon.
  • A note-taking app like Obsidian, Bear or one of the other billion options.
    • Pros: Lightweight, local, fast.
    • Cons: That sharing thing again. But wait! See the next bullet item…
  • A writing app that also lets you publish to the web. Some of these include Ulysses, Mars Edit and iA Writer (the Mac in particular has a lot of options).
    • Pros: An excellent writing environment, and they allow you to share your posts relatively easily.
    • Cons: You still need a site to share to. Also, while the writing experience is often quite nice, once you move beyond that with photos and heavier formatting, the process tends to start breaking down a bit.
  • Dictating into a voice-recording app or voice recorder device.
    • Pro: It’s as easy as just opening your mouth and talking.
    • Cons: Cleaning up the dictation later could prove clunky or messy. You have to decide where to put the transcripts, unless you just want an audio version of your life (which might be interesting!)

For Part 3, I will be doing more research and narrowing down my choices a bit more.

Here is another cat GIF. The cat is industriously working away on its blog, All the Mews Fit to Print.

Words that rhyme with “snow”

Photo by Pixabay

I can think of one:

NO!

We got snow last night, and it had the temerity to start sticking. There’s still some left this morning. Who decided it would be funny to flip January and March around? Why is Mother Nature being such a jerk?

The 10-day forecast claims that it will be 14C on March 13th. WE’LL SEE.

In the meantime, I’ll be here, huddled next to the heater.

Moving off of WordPress, Part 1

Back in January I wrote that I was contemplating moving off of WordPress for various reasons.

Back then, I posted four possible options:

  • Keep using WordPress and just shut up about it. It works, right?
  • Actually switch to a WordPress alternative.
  • Stop blogging altogether.
  • Post my cat pictures on Facebook for free (after getting a cat).

I have narrowed down these options to one (and a half):

  • Actually switch to a WordPress alternative.
    • Move some of my bloggy stuff to an offline journal (probably the running/exercise posts)

The next question is: Which WordPress alternative? Because it turns out there are a lot of options. Like, a lot. Oodles. Too many.

But since my needs are specific and known, I can winnow down the list. If your needs are like mine, this might be useful for you, too. If not, there is an animated GIF of a cat at the end of this post.

What I want

My needs (also in the linked post above, but paraphrased here):

  • Blog posts, both long and short.
  • Photos, along with galleries to keep them organized.
  • A general means of blog organization, like categories or tags.
  • An easy-to-use editor that makes me feel warm and fuzzy and want to share with the world.

Pretty basic stuff, really. If I eliminated photos (I will not do this, but let’s pretend), my choices would be nigh-infinite. I could go for one of many super-minimalist blogging sites. But having no photos would also mean no drawings, which are like photos I put together with my hands and brain instead of a camera. This is a dealbreaker. I don’t want to revive my old Flickr account.

That clears out the wide array of minimalist, text-only sites. What’s left? Still oodles!

What I’ve found

Important note: I am omitting blogs that lean into more technical, nerdy skills to set up or maintain, so there's nothing here that installs from a command line or runs from a folder or requires scripting, etc. These follow the flow of:

Write a post  Click a button  Your thoughts are on the internet

Here’s an incomplete list:

And a quick summary of them, with some emphasis on what I’m looking for:

Ghost

This is probably the most WordPress-like, and it takes the most direct aim at WordPress and its features, claiming to be better/faster and, in some cases, cheaper.

The biggest con is that it’s $9 U.S. per month minimum1All prices listed here are in U.S. dollars. This is a lot of money to record my inane thoughts that could just as easily be typed into Notepad for free. You can also self-host Ghost, which is cheaper, but not exactly a simple process.

Ghost does have another notable pro, though–it can import from WordPress, so the nearly 4,000 inane posts I’ve made here could be carried over.

Micro.blog

This is reasonably priced at $5 a month, but has an emphasis on community (not a bad thing if you’re looking for that) and while longer pieces are possible, the focus is more on short, quick posts.

write.as

There’s a free plan, with some reasonable limits, so you can try before you buy (note: as of this post, the free plan is listed as “Closed for now”), and it’s $6 per month after if you pay annually. It supports not just photos, but albums. It has a blog community and supports newsletters, which suggests it has started moving away from its personal blog roots.

Pika

Pika has a free plan that is essentially a trial–you can make 50 posts, and then you’re done. So if you only ever have 50 things to say, you don’t have to pay! It’s otherwise $6 a month. It emphasizes a great writing experience, has some simple themes, and supports images. It’s also really new, as it just launched at the end of January 2024.

Blogtastic

With a name like Blogtastic, you would expect this to be a good blogging platform. It has multiple plans, including Starter for $20 and Expert for $50. Prices are going up on April 1st, though (no foolin’), with new names like Hobby for $50 and Startup for $100. I don’t think the old $20 and new $50 plans match up, though their chart doesn’t make it especially clear.

Anyway, this platform seems to offer everything and has been running for about three years, so it’s still relatively new. It feels like a Ghost competitor and, indeed, they compare themselves directly to Ghost, stating that they are more focused on writing and less on “secondary” things. They claim their gallery management is “robust”!

Posthaven

There’s a $5 per month Founder Plan (good for 10 blogs) and–that’s it! No other options. It keeps things simple. Posthaven bills itself, somewhat weirdly, as “the blogging platform designed to outlive us.” I mean, OK, but I’m not sure if I care much about my blog a hundred years after I’ve departed the Earth for parts unknown.

A major caveat for me is image sizes seem to be limited due to their theming. They mention 800 pixels max, which is tiny and probably a dealbreaker.

Having gone through these, the ones I feel can be eliminated are:

  • Ghost (too expensive)
  • Micro.blog (cheap, but a different emphasis than what I’m looking for)
  • Posthaven (great, until you get to the tiny images)

This leaves Pika, write.as and Blogtastic. Currently, only one offers a free trial of sorts, so I’ll give Pika a test-run and do more research on write.as and Blogtastic.

Coming up in Part 2:

  • Some alternatives I rejected, but are still pretty good
  • Alternate solutions through non-blogging software
  • Probably another cat GIF

Here is the promised cat GIF for this post:

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.