This is another test post written in iA Writer (which just had a big, though non-publishing on other platforms, update), and then magically sent to my WordPress blog, where you are reading it right now, if this worked.
Also, here is a photo of some freaky, somewhat face-shaped fungus at Burnaby Lake:
Fake edit: Publishing from iA Writer is clunky and requires clean-up after. iA Writer’s documentation on this is incomplete. I won’t be doing it again, but without experiments, how would we ever blow things up learn?
Her name was Ms Anderson, and she was the first teacher I had who went by Ms. She was very modern. I took Foods and Nutrition (a fancy name for Cooking) with her for Grade 8. Back then–the late 1970s–cooking was still widely perceived as a “girl/woman” thing1I made history at my junior high by being the first male recipient of the year-end cooking award in the groovy year of 1978. This was reflected by my class only having four guys in it (I was one of the four).
Looking back, the three things I remember most were:
A mystery recipe she put on the board, tasking each unit (four people) to figure out the recipe and then make it. There was no internet to cheat with back then. Our group correctly guessed baking powder biscuits. Another unit incorrectly guessed cookies and the results were more akin to lethal projectiles than anything edible. And were treated as such.
The other two were things Ms Anderson said:
Most breakfast cereals are basically candy. It was true then, and I think, is even more accurate now, as a lot of “adult” cereals are very high in sugar content, even though they present themselves as “nutritious.” I still feel a bit guilty when I have a bowl of Reese’s Puffs because of what she said (I only buy them on sale, I swear).
Clean as you go. This is one of those little nuggets of kitchen wisdom that is transformative when you first hear it. I still clean as I go over 40 years after taking her class, and nothing beats finishing a meal with minimal dishes to clean up afterwards.
So a thanks to Ms Anderson. She was young, so might only be in her 70s now, probably retired. I’d love to hear the kinds of stories she’d tell.
They’re also laying off 17% of their workforce (over 1,500 people)
On the second item, I do wonder why they needed so many people. Like many tech companies, they got silly with hiring during the pandemic, so some cuts were inevitable.
But the layoffs, Uruguay demanding fair payment and Spotify essentially saying, “We can’t pay artists fairly and also survive” made me wonder if we’ll eventually reach a point where music streaming transforms from what it is now–a frankly shockingly inexpensive way to have what is essentially endless music–to something else. Some possibilities:
All music streaming services start raising prices…a lot. Let’s call it The Netflix Effect because if anyone knows anything about regular price hikes, it’s Netflix. I think most people would grumble and keep paying as monthly prices climbed from $10-11 to $15. They’d get cranky at $17-18, but would still keep paying. $20 (or, let’s be realistic, what the companies would bill as $19.99) crosses a psychological barrier. We’re now twice as expensive as what people were used to. But still, I think few would bail. In fact, I feel they could raise prices to at least $30 before you’d start seeing people go without, and even those numbers would be small enough to be more than offset by the price hikes. I figure you’d need to hit around $50 a month to really get people to stop. And then we’d probably be looking at Napster: The Next Generation happening.
Streamers that aren’t currently owned by big tech (like Spotify) would be gobbled up by big tech. People idly speculate about Microsoft buying Spotify, for example. Why would this happen? Because the music streaming business is so marginal (Spotify has over 200 million paid subscribers and still manages to lose money) that it’s only appealing to big tech companies that can subsidize the service, keeping it as a way to get or keep people in their ecosystem (people using Apple Music will buy iPhones to listen, etc.1Yes, Apple has an Apple Music app for Android phones, but I suspect it’s a tiny market vs. iPhone)
A less likely scenario is companies giving up on streaming services altogether, and we go back to music as it was 15 years ago, when you listened to the radio (“Mommy, what’s a radio?”), bought albums on iTunes (iTunes, shudder) or went to a physical store to buy an actual spinning disc. I mean, most people would do the latter through Amazon, but you get the point. This would have a couple of interesting effects: I think people would buy far less music and, by that same token, listen to a lot less new music. People would get picky again, and more conservative, sticking more to known bands and performers. It’s even possible the album format could see a revival of sorts if it was no longer ridiculously easy to flip through dozens of songs with a few clicks or taps. Maybe those cheesy CD music compilations would become a thing again. But I think the odds of streaming music going away entirely is very unlikely, so this is really just playing out “What if?” scenarios for fun (but not profit).
Of the above scenarios, I think the first–price increases–is the likeliest. And we’ve already had some recently. I’m sure more are on the way.
For some time I’ve had an informal rule on this blog to write a post per day or what works out to be a post per day by the end of the month (30 days = 30 posts), then I started going a bit overboard and making it two per day.
At the end of last month, I was 16 posts short of that two per day goal, but I took it upon myself as a challenge and cranked out 16 posts on the last day of the month. It was a little nutty, and kind of fun.
I have been even more derelict in posting this month, meaning I would need to add 24 new posts this month to come up to the magic number of 60.
And I am not doing that.
23 more posts to go!
But I will provide another amusing cat image for having read this far:
I wanted a faintly absurd stock photo for this post. Done! Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com
At least going by the promotions sluicing into my email inbox this month. At least I didn’t see eggnog on the grocery store shelf before Halloween. Or I didn’t notice it.
Anyway, happy shopping holiday thing to everyone! I will accept any and all gifts you may wish to send that aren’t alive, harmful or versions of Windows prior to 95.
A little while back, I gave myself permission to post whatever I liked to this blog, with no filters:
Complaints? Sure! Though I try to minimize them.
Lists? I love lists.
Writing prompts? The sillier, the better. My inspiration.
Running updates? These are very skippable if you’re not me, though I started adding photos in the last year so at least there are pretty pictures as you scroll past.
Drawings and doodlings? When I have stuff to show, sure.
Self-referential posts about the blog like this one? Oh yes.
Recipes? No. Or not yet, anyway.
Things I like? Sometimes!
Reviews? I review every book I read, though my book reading cratered with the pandemic. I also review movies, but watch far fewer now, also a change since the pandemic. And sometimes I do not choose wisely, like when I thought watching Moonfall might be a good use of my time.
Other random stuff? I like random stuff.
All of this is a way of saying that I am again having a hard time coming up with stuff to write about, though there should be lots for me to ramble on about. I think I am afraid that anything I write might come out as a complaint because the world is, in many ways, kind of awful (See? I’m kind of doing it right now!) and it feels hard to avoid. I don’t want to just slap on a happy face and pretend everything is groovy, either.
Usually this is where I end with a random cat, but for a change of pace, here is a random sign I photographed a few weeks back1It’s found on the bins in parks for disposing of dog poop. It looks somewhat cooler when seen in isolation :
“Prime Time” is the first song and a single from The Alan Parsons Project’s 7th album, Ammonia Avenue. As songs go, it’s catchy and poppy. I had somehow missed the video, which dates back to the album’s release in 1984, and it’s like “What if that mannequin episode of The Twilight Zone, but as a music video?”
It’s also, in its own way, very 1980s (the thumbnail always makes me think a Village People video is about to start).
Behold the story of mannequins come to life, then try to reconcile it to the song lyrics1:
You can kind of match the video to the lyrics, with a little (lot?) of poetic license: “And it’s a prime time/Maybe the stars were right/I’ve got a premonition/It’s gonna be my turn tonight” ↩︎
When I look at my current blog design (captured in screenshot form below for posterity, and for when it inevitably changes) it occurs to me that it is quite retro and I hadn’t consciously realized it. Today, I happened to look at someone else’s blog and it was very typical of what you see on most sites–clean white expanses, black text, little in the way of links or other clutter. Just the posts and that’s about it.
Conversely, my site currently:
Slaps you in the face with not one, but two bright colours, one that surrounds that traditional black text on white “standard” look.
Has a Categories list. Seriously, this is a standard part of WordPress, but I seldom ever come across it elsewhere.
An Archives dropdown. Also pretty rare and another built-in part of WordPress. This one is mostly for me, though. Also, easily seeing how many posts I’ve made per month is oddly satisfying.
The design isn’t cluttered, exactly, but it isn’t overly spacious, either. I feel most sites have a lot more white space. Mine is…cozier? Maybe it’s just more cramped.
And I’ve actually stripped away a lot of the stuff I used to have. The menus at the top are gone, the logo is now just text.
Maybe one day I’ll finish that redesign. For now, I’ll probably just continue to add bits back, content to have a blog that looks very 2005.
We had a windstorm blow through the area (as windstorms do) on the night of November 10th, a few days ago as I write this.
I went birding the next day and captured a few shots of the destruction while walking down the Brunette River trail.
First, the pretty. The wind yoinked a bunch of leaves off the trees, making the trail resplendent in fall colours:
A jogger in red heads down the yellow leaf road
And the destruction. This was the largest piece of debris on the river trail I saw, and definitely not something you would want clobbering you on the head at 70-90 km/h:
This was right near the entrance off North Road, so I saw the worst right up front
This rare non-run day shot from the top of the Cariboo Dam shows that the morning after the storm was actually pretty decent:
All quiet now, save for the mad dashing of squirrels gathering food for winter
