General

Blogging and thinking about blogging (includes blogging)

I saw a link on Mastodon1aka the one social media platform I still use that led me to write.as, which is one of the blogging solutions I pondered when I was thinking a lot about moving away from WordPress. Then some things happened:

  • I got distracted (this happens a lot)
  • The easier route of just tolerating WordPress and doing nothing settled in and took root
  • Not to mention, I know WordPress quite well after using it for almost 20 (!) years, so there’s muscle memory and all that encouraging me to stay put

But as someone who hopefully isn’t just an AI scraping my blog for weirds and probably untrue things to add to the AI Slurry of Knowledge (SOK), you may have noticed I’ve also been engaged in something I call The Culling for the last few years. I can’t recall if I’ve ever fully explained what it is, but it’s pretty simple.

The Culling, explained

  1. Big corporations are generally bad
  2. Big tech corporations seem to be extra bad, in that, “You think YOU’RE bad? Hold my beer. Hold all of my beers” way.
  3. Growing increasingly disenchanted, while also experience things like subscription fatigue, I have begun The Culling. The Culling is meant to move me away from services and software offered by Big Tech™ and to use either free (possibly even FOSS) or paid options from smaller companies that still see their customers as humans and want to treat them fairly, a radical notion on the current interweb.

WordPress has made some dumb (IMO) moves regarding AI and are generally heading in a direction I don’t like. Also, the platform is bloated, creaking and there’s way more here than I need to just write inane things and post pictures on a daily basis to an audience of one to five people, of whom I count myself. Thus began the search for a replacement, which would also be part of The Culling.

And then lazy, too easy to do nothing, etc.

But now I’m looking again. I feel I’ve somehow managed to tap into one of those moments where I am invigorated for [x] period of time, and I am seizing it to move forward in several areas, one of which is this here blogging thing.

I will report back soon or soon-like.

August Rain

The song Guns ‘N Roses didn’t write.

We’re apparently in for a few days of showers–specifically, five of the next six days, starting today, but not including tomorrow, which is strangely listed as “mostly sunny”. I’m okay with that, though I’m never really sure how to dress for summer rain. The high today will be 24C. That is totes t-shirt and shorts weather. But you’ll be getting wet, so wear a rain jacket. But any rain jacket is going to feel too warm when it’s 24C. So just embrace the rain.

The mystery of the powder on the scale

Yesterday morning I got up and, as I always do, stepped on the Garmin scale in the bathroom to weigh myself. Except before stepping onto the scale, I stopped, because there was some kind of coarse powder sprayed on it. Alas, I did not take a photograph, which will become more relevant in a moment. I did, however, put together this simulation of the scene in Affinity Designer:

Because I had just woken up, and my brain was operating at like 15% capacity, my priority was to clean this stuff off the scale, weigh myself, then get on with the day. I figured Jeff would have an explanation for the powder.

He did not, as it turns out, and this is where I wish I’d taken a photo, because while my depiction above is pretty close to what I saw, a photo, examined all zoomed-in, might better reveal what exactly this stuff was.

With neither myself nor Jeff laying claim to having caused the powder to land on the scale (I wiped the floor around the scale, but it did not seem like much of this stuff landed there), the obvious questions arose:

  • How did this powder end up on the scale?
  • What exactly was it?

The answer to both questions: I don’t know!

There is no apparent source for the powder. There is nothing like it in the bathroom, or anywhere else in the condo. It did not fall from the ceiling or come off the walls. It was not tracked in. It seemingly just appeared during the night and was there when I went into the bathroom early yesterday morning.

It did not return this morning, which is good, but does not lessen the general freakiness of its appearance.

If it’s an omen, I have no idea what it would mean. Clean more often? I mean, that’s always good advice.

I will update this post if more mysterious powder appears.

Every month it’s the same

For a long while I averaged two posts per day, which seemed like a good thing, somehow. It kept my mind agile or some other buzzword. But since November 2023 I have not been able to muster the will to post much more than once per day. Why is that?

I do not know. I have theories. Stress is probably a big one. Falling out of the habit may be another. Maybe I’m just lazy or going through a protracted creative funk, or PCF as scientists call it.

Since there’s only one day left in the month and this is post #37 for July, it seems rather unlikely that I will crank out 25 posts between today and tomorrow to hit the two-per-day average. I mean, it’s theoretically possible, and I am mildly curious what sort of spammy nonsense I’d write about to generate so many posts in so little time.

But I probably won’t.

But maybe I will!

But probably not.

Here is a squirrel on a stump at Burnaby Lake:

It’s the Olympics! Somewhere! Right now, I guess!

That means everyone in Discord is sharing YouTube clips that look like this to me:

It’s okay, though, the Olympics (in Paris right now as I type this) are yet another major cultural thing I just don’t have interest in any longer. It’s weird, because I don’t know why this changed. I used to watch and even get excited in anticipation of the Oscar broadcast. Now I often struggle to remember the last film to win Best Picture (I do remember this time–it was Oppenheimer, which, like most movies, I haven’t seen. The last movie I watched in a theatre was Pixar’s perfectly fine Onward, in March 2020). In fact, the full list of things that once engaged me that no longer does is both extensive and maybe a little unnerving, because I really don’t know what has changed.

The drop-off in reading has actually kind of disappointed me. It turns out a long commute was really important to enforcing a good reading habit.

On the plus side, I have spent more time doing other things that are engaging or even healthy, like running and drawing. I guess it all balances out.

This concludes my Monday Semi-deep Thought™.

Run 873: This time I beat the tree root

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run.

Whoops, it’s 11 days later and I’m finally running again. This was not my plan.

But a toothache and other things got in the way. On the plus side, this meant I avoided running in what will likely have been the hottest stretch of summer.

My goal today was to do a 5K, whatever the pace, and emerge intact. Success! Though there was a moment where the intact part came into question.

I had planned to run counter-clockwise, but when I got to the lake I realized I’d done that the last few times, so it was time to mix things up and be crazy by running clockwise. I started off near the dam and though my first km was a slow 5:55/km, I was pleased when the second km came in at exactly the same pace. That didn’t last, though, and by the fourth km I’d slipped all the way to 6:15/km. I picked up the pace a little and shaved an impressive 10 seconds off the last lap, bringing my overall average to 6:05/km. I really can’t expect better with so little running and so much time between runs.

On the plus side, I felt fine. I knew UI was slow, but it wasn’t an agonizing, “When will this end?!” slow, it was just a moderate pace. It was warm, but a breeze helped, so conditions were also fine. Fine all around!

But…at around the 1.8 km mark, I was running along a shaded section of trail when my right toe hit something very firm. I can’t absolutely say it was a tree root, but I’m pretty sure it was a tree root (I will confirm later). As my foot got snagged, momentum began carrying the rest of my body forward. Fortunately, the root must have been small, because almost as quickly, my toe popped over it and I was able to pull myself upright and keep running, instead of splatting, like I did in August 2016.

Knowing what happened eight years ago, I felt an especially appreciative moment in not falling. The mind is a strange thing, though, and I continued on the rest of the run unconcerned about any other tree roots.

Hopefully the next run will be on a more regular schedule and not just whenever. Also, hopefully no more tree roots. Or rocks. Or ninjas. Or anything that will snag my feet.

Still Creek, post-run.

Stats:

Run 873
Average pace: 6:05/km
Training status: Maintaining
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Start: 11:12 a.m.
Distance: 5.03 km
Time: 30:37
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 20-21°C
Humidity: 59-58%
Wind: light
BPM: 156
Weight: 167.1
Total distance to date: 6,225 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 6 (10/26/36)

Save, don’t update

In WordPress, if you publish a post and later make changes to it, the Publish button changes to Update, to let you know that you’re, well, updating the post.

But in version 6.6, just released, that Update button now says Save, which is more old school, but actually makes less sense in terms of publishing something (as opposed to saving a file like a word processing document). I don’t hate the change, but it seems a bit weird and doesn’t really improve anything.

However, they haven’t made anything else objectively worse with this update (that I’ve found), so kudos for that!

Also, yes, I’ve kind of stopped looking for other alternatives to WordPress since finally committing to my site redesign. I still might resume that search, but it’s on the back burner again for now. Apologies to anyone waiting for me to render a verdict!

Sometimes when I think

Sometimes I get a jolt of self-awareness, except it’s not really a jolt, it’s more something that gently pops to the fore of my thinking and I ponder it for a moment.

For example, yesterday after finishing my shortened run, I was walking along the top of the Cariboo Dam, which has railings on both sides and is fairly narrow, except for an expanded middle section where one can stand and look for herons. As I began walking across, I noticed a jogger coming down the path from the entrance to the park. The jogger might go straight and head counter-clockwise down the lake trail, or they might hook left, cross the dam and go clockwise instead. I wasn’t sure, but I figured I’d play it safe and paused in the enlarged area midway across the dam, so the runner could easily pass.

The runner did indeed ascend the stairs and ran across the top of the dam. Once she passed, I resumed my walk out of the park.

A simple thing, but it required me to observe what was happening and then change what I was doing for a few moments, to make things a little easier for someone else, in this case a person I did not know and would likely never see again. Am I patting myself metaphorically on the back for being a nice person?

Yes.

Am I doing it to puff up my own ego? No.

I point it out because this thought process occurs automatically to me. Did I inherit it from my parents? To a degree, I’d say yes. They were both kind and thoughtful people who helped others, so I am, in a way, carrying that forward.

But I also think this is how I’m wired. While there are people out there who might clear the way for the jogger, I wonder how many would see the jogger and calculate the possible results and, in a way, pre-accommodate her by moving out of the way before it was known if it would even be needed? Kind of like being pre-nice. Not many is my hunch, but it is just a hunch.

I wish more people could look at situations like this and react the same way I did. I’m an imperfect mess, but I try to pay attention and I always try to be kind to others. And as the last few days have underscored to me, there are people out there that calculatedly do the opposite, who seem to enjoy architecting misery in others in order to preserve what they’ve got. It makes me sad. It makes me a little angry, too, but mostly just sad.

Try to be thoughtful, try to be kind.