General

I’m kind of tired of WordPress

photo of man using laptop
Pretend it’s me blogging on WordPress. I would be wearing socks, though. God, I love stock photos. Photo by Canva Studio on Pexels.com

EDIT: Shortly after posting this, I came across a list of blogging platforms in a post on Mastodon. Coincidence or serendipity? Or both? Coincendipity?

This isn’t a complaint about WordPress! WordPress is a rich, diverse tool that can sing, dance and probably rub its belly at the same time. I’ve been using it for this blog since 2005–around 19 years! Obviously, it’s been doing a decent job of letting me get my inane thoughts online, or I would have switched to something else by now1Or become a crazed hermit living in the mountains, eschewing all technology, perhaps.

So why am I tired of it?

It’s big, bulky, and jammed full of features, many of which I don’t use. Its company, Automattic, is increasingly pushing even standalone blogs like this one toward monetization, with plugins like Jetpack having more and more paid features under the premise that if you are using WordPress, you are intending to make money from it, otherwise why aren’t you just posting your cat pictures to Facebook for the price of free2Not counting the price of YOUR ETERNAL SOUL?

What I yearn for is something that is light, clean and simple to use, yet still allows me to do the bloggy things I like:

  • Write down my inane thoughts
  • Write lists, like this one
  • Post photos and drawings
  • Present these things in some kind of organized manner

I feel that WordPress has moved away from the simplicity of humble, handcrafted artisanal blogging. I want to get back there again. I want to touch (virtual) paper.

Where to go next

(I didn’t really need a subheading here, but you see them a lot on important blog think pieces, and I’m always keen to look fancy and smart.)

My choices are roughly as follows:

  • 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 free3I would also need to get a cat.

I’m actually unsure which option to pursue. The last few years I’ve been, in some ways, reconstructing many aspects of my life, and I don’t always know where these things will lead. I suppose this makes it exciting. Whee!

I have perfected the non-post

This, of course, doesn’t look anything like me, and the hands are the usual nightmare stuff that screams “AI-generated”, but I still kind of like the composition.

These days I am restricting most of my social media stuff to Mastodon, and lately I’ve started doing non-posts. They go like this:

  1. See an interesting post from someone I follow, or someone whose post has been boosted by someone I follow.
  2. Start writing a reply to the post.
  3. Question whether the reply adds anything of value.
  4. Exit out of the reply, opting not to post it.
  5. Repeat Steps 1-4.

Why do I do this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s related to this latent fear of saying the wrong thing, somehow, of offending or coming across as weird or odd. I am a fairly shy person in face-to-face interactions, and I think this might be the online equivalent to that. I just prefer to watch others talk. Or type, in this case.

Proving this, I was originally going to make this a post on Mastodon, then changed my mind and posted it here instead.

Christmas in January!

OK, Nic pointed out that the “12 Days of Christmas” apparently begin on Christmas Day, which means the last one of these 12 days is today.

Still, I feel this does not explain the preponderance of so many Christmas decorations that are still up. Some yards are still chock-full of inflated Santas, and festooned with sparkly lights. The lobby of our building still has the Christmas tree up. It’s just weird. It’s all going to clash with Valentine’s Day marketing soon. Not that people decorate their yards for Valentine’s Day. At least not yet.

Anyway, ho ho ho from New Westminster!

A snowman very happy to still be around on January 5th

I have no emojis and I must :(

WordPress supports emojis. Behold: 🙂

However, there are two types of emojis:

  1. Emojis that are converted from emoticon text such as :) turning into a happy face
  2. Emojis that are entered using an emoji picker, such as the one in Windows 11:

The former work fine on this blog, but because the database goes all the way back to the ancient internet time of 2005, it uses an old type of character encoding that can’t handle emojis and turns them into question marks instead, like so: ??

This means creolened.com can never show the full and resplendent range of emojis.

🙁

I could convert the database over to accommodate this, but that risks mucking things up on a sitewide scale. And as much as I’d <31WordPress support suggest this should auto-convert to a heart emoji, but alas it does not appear to do so. to have a full array of emojis to draw from, as I am a silly person, I am also at least a little practical.

😳

2024 is a year

We’re already seven years past Billy Joel’s projected dystopia of “Miami 2017”, 2010 (the year we make contact) is now 14 years in the rearview mirror, and Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles of 2019 was supposed to happen five years ago.

By these cultural yardsticks, we are doing:

  • Better than Miami 2017
  • Better than Los Angeles 2019
  • Well, about 2010…

The movie 2010 came out in 1984 and imagined a world where Russians and Americans worked together in space (but were on the verge of starting WW3 on Earth). Despite Russia descending into an autocracy ruled by a brutal, invasion-loving dictator since then (meet the new boss, etc.), that cooperation still happens today (albeit with more tension) with the International Space Station. But humans have never ventured past the moon (nor even been there in the last 50 years), let alone voyaged out to Jupiter. We’ve left most of our exploration to unmanned probes and the movies1Unmanned probes are actually a very effective way to explore the reaches of our solar system.

So we are doing better than the dystopian versions of the future, but kind of standing still or regressing on the space exploration part. And any alien life that may be out there has not seen fit to help us with our various crises of climate, politics and all that. Maybe they look at us like the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas. We amuse them.

But here’s to 2024, and to things getting better, hopefully, even as we continue to deal with the ills, problems and plagues of 2023 that don’t pause because we flip the calendar over to a new year2As I write this, there are reports of a 7.5 major earthquake in Japan. Another reminder that the world doesn’t pause for a new year.

2023 was a year

Yes, 2023 was a year.

Allow me to quote Selma Diamond from Night Court: “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.”

I really don’t have more to add than that. I am not an overly reflective type, except when I randomly want to be, and that time is not now.

I reserve the right to edit this post later, though.

Rediscovering old music

I wished my living room had looked like this when I was 30. (Image generated through NightCafe)

I don’t mean old-timey music like ragtime or something, rather I’m talking about eschewing a streaming service like Apple Music and going back to my old music collection, which consists mostly of CDs I’ve purchased and ripped over the past 30+ years. All of the files are local, tucked into a folder on my PC. The app to play them, Windows 11’s Media Player, provides album art and metadata, and that’s it. It doesn’t curate, recommend, provide radio stations, “for you” or anything else. It just lets you listen to your music library.

And it’s kind of refreshing. I can listen for hours and know I’m not burning bandwidth (I know I have the bandwidth, it’s more a principle thing). There’s a tangibility that’s missing with streaming. And everything is something I’ve already picked out, bought and listened to many times already. There is a welcome familiarity, but also a chance to revisit albums (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is) I haven’t listened to in years. Certain music invokes memories of other times and places. It’s weird and, usually, kind of wonderful.

Unlike my phone, which has a truncated version of my music library, the PC has everything, so when I hit shuffle, I never quite know what will come up. I like that.

Now I’m off to listen to Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe, which sounds more like a law firm than a majority of the members of Yes.

New Year resolutions for 2024

Firefly has been extensively trained on chicken scratch.

I couldn’t remember if I had made resolutions for 2023, which may give you an idea of how well I did at keeping them. Let’s find out and have a good cry together!

The 2023 resolutions were:

  • Get to 150 pounds by the end of February.
    • Verdict: Massive fail. As of today, I am 171.8 pounds, which is exactly seven pounds higher than a year ago and more than 20 pounds above my intended goal. I dreamed of being a hummingbird and ended up being a blimp.
  • Keep running.
    • Verdict: Success! Despite knee issues, I kept running regularly throughout the year.
  • Finish my Gum Gum game.
    • Verdict: Neither success nor failure, as I put the GGP game on pause to develop a different game first as a prototype.
  • Do more bird art.
    • Verdict: Success! I am working on more bird art right now.
  • Keep birding.
    • Verdict: Success! But this was a gimme.
  • Finally finish my blog redesign.
    • Verdict: Failure-ish. I did tweak the design a bit, but the big redesign still awaits.
  • Finally start doing some stretching.
    • Verdict: Success! After the issues with my knees and a couple of visits to a physiotherapist, I now stretch before I run.

Weird bonus resolution:

  • Record an original song in Garage Band.
    • Verdict: Failure. I think I opened Garage Band once. Fortunately, this was a silly resolution.

Overall: Eight resolutions, four successes. This is actually better than I expected. Onward to 2024!

My Fancy Resolutions for 2024

NOTE: For 2024 I am skipping the "easy" stuff that I would probably be doing anyway, like running and birding.
  • 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!

It Get’s Better!

…unless you are talking about grammar, then your Boxing Day email flyer may suffer a little under the load. I remember working Boxing Day in retail1It is the abyssal hell you imagine, so I’ll cut the proprietor here some slack and not call them out by name.

I remember way back (we’re talking about the 1990s here at the latest) when Boxing Day sales were items featured on local news, mainly because people would line up at A&B Sound at some absurdly early hour to get great deals on stereo and related AV equipment. Remember when people would line up for the new iPhone? It was like that, except it happened every year, for decades.

Now it’s mostly just a ton of e-flyers in my inbox and people placing orders online. And Boxing Day starts on Christmas Day…or earlier.

And I’m okay with that, really. I do not want to stand in a line.

(Also, I would be remiss to not point out the somewhat odd choice of using “It Gets Better!” as a shopping slogan, since it is best known for the It Gets Better Project to help out LGBTQ+ youth.)

I am the laser tag champion (in my dream)

I remember at least part of a dream I had last night. It went like this (insert dreamy music and transition effects):

I was in a large house, possibly a mansion, and had a sniper rifle. But wait, it’s not what it sounds like! It was a pew-pew laser rifle, like you use in laser tag. In the dream I apparently had a reputation of being a good shot (this is definitely not taken from any actual skills at video games and/or real life) and so even though we were in some kind of timed game that was ostensibly a free-for-all, it was really Everyone vs. Me.

I would emerge from a room and take a shot. I didn’t have time to use the scope, so I’d just quickly eyeball using the sight, and down an opponent would go. After a while, when they probably started thinking about how I was never not going to use my laser rifle, I switched it up and began using a grenade launcher. No, I don’t know how you could possibly simulate a grenade launcher in a game of laser tag, but in my dream, it not only worked, it worked very well.

I woke up just as the timer was running down, and I was declared victor, going undefeated. Basically, in this dream, I was a complete badass. Why I had this dream, I can’t say. Maybe my subconscious felt I needed a little ego boost for the end of the year, and delivered it in a way I could understand. I’m pretty sure the grenade launcher was due to recently rewatching Aliens. I had better luck than they did.

creolened.com Post #4,823

I’m doing this because I am easily amused.

Reference here: https://birchtree.me/blog/make-good-shit/

4,823 translates to about 253 posts per year, or 21 posts per month. That’s not bad when you consider how seldomly I posted in the early years of this blog (especially 2005-2015 or so). I’m not saying the quality has improved at the same rate, but there’s some decent stuff here, and in the near future, I will try to make it easier to find, so that others can better question my sense of humour, priorities, and fashion sense.

Also, here is a birch tree, as depicted by AI: