I’m actually doing some of the things featured in this generic blog image for “resolutions”! Photo by Polina Kovaleva on Pexels.com
Here are a few more things I thought of:
Drink more water and conversely, drink less soda. I only drink non-sugary soda, but it’s still bad and I should feel bad. And I do, somewhat.
Reorganize the cabling for my computer and tidy up the desk. Somehow it’s become a complete mess again. Whoops. I also need to replace my beloved cat DJ in space mouse pad, it’s starting to curl up.
Renew my “draw something every day” vow because I kind of dropped that. I think the messy desk is a minor contributing factor.
I am cautiously optimistic that 2023 will be better than 2022, but then at the end of 2019 I never expected a global pandemic, either, so you never know what’s going to happen, then it happens.
That said, I maintain the cautious optimism. And now, a rabbit:
Remember when social media was just seeing what your friends were up to? That was about a hundred years ago!
Here’s how I use social media in 2022, which roughly mirrors how I’ll probably use it in 2023, too.
Instagram: I use this solely to post my photography and drawings, and to look at birb photos Nic posts. I follow a few people who don’t post much, so most times I’m on and off in a few minutes. Recent changes to IG make it really wonky on the iPad, which still lacks a native app because who’s ever heard of the iPad, am I right?
Facebook: My IG posts automagically go to FB, so I will see if anyone liked or commented on them there. Friends and family post more on FB, but most of the posts are memes and travel photos of places I’ll never get to, and I’m totally not jealous. FB is also stuffed full of annoying ads.
Twitter: I rarely used Twitter and started logging in more when Elon Musk bought it, and every decision he made regarding Twitter was terrible. But I don’t check anymore and deactivated my account. I don’t have a good analogy, but imagine driving a regular route and seeing this spectacular flaming car wreck one day. Then imagine you see it every day, forever. Eventually, you’re just done with flaming car wrecks.
Tumblr: I have never purposely used Tumblr.
Mastodon: A decentralized Twitter-ish service run by non-profits. A little clunky, but I made an account and pop in to check the few people I follow there. I have only made a few posts, and will probably not make many more.
Post: Another post (ho ho)-Twitter refugee camp. I made an account, will probably never post.
TikTok: I have never used the app nor been to the site. I’ve probably seen more TikTok videos on IG than IG videos.
I think that covers most of them. If I have accounts on anything else, I’ve forgotten about them.
Basically, I don’t use social media much, and I am good with that. I spend more time creating than consuming, which scratches the itches I have better. Although I do watch a fair number of YouTube videos. Do they count as social media? Probably.
Well, the world is still here and it’s not on fire, relatively speaking, so hooray.
But I still secretly hope that historians, researchers, archaeologists and all other appropriate specialists discover convincing evidence that Christ was actually born in June and Christmas moves to the start of summer, because the end of December is the worst time of year for the Northern Hemisphere to be travelling en masse. Or at all.
Speaking of weather, yesterday we had a deluge and today the copious amounts of snow have been greatly reduced. A few more days of persistent rain should get rid of most of the rest. This means I probably won’t be able to run on Monday (tomorrow), so boo. But Wednesday is a possibility (yay).
This also means we have an unofficial white Christmas (I think a “real” one is where it actually snows on Christmas, we just have so much snow that even a 24-hour monsoon could not wash away all of it).
Here’s my Christmas wish list for 2022. I am trying to not be too cynical or jaded. Trying!
Peace on Earth
Trump on trial before the end of 2023, and convicted. It could be for anything. A parking ticket. I don’t care. Just something.
Peace in my home (hopefully the PU move out in 2023, that would be the best present of all).
Merry Christmas to any humans reading these. Heck, Merry Christmas to any bots scraping the site, too!
Today is the Winter Solstice, also the shortest day of the year in terms of daylight. So it gets better from here. Summer, here we come!
But as I type this, there is a huge amount of snow on the ground, making a white Christmas a distinct possibility (rain is coming, but will probably be insufficient to wipe away this winter “wonder” land before then). It’s also -13C, which is a low temperature record. The high is going to be -7C. -7C!
So yes, it’s definitely winter. On the plus side, we’re only three months from spring, my second favorite season of the year. We hardly get any snow in spring!
It started snowing yesterday around 1 p.m. and is still snowing at 10 a.m. the next day as I type this (though it is sputtering out at the moment).
I’ll update with more photos in a bit, but for now, the area has seen 20-30 cm of snow fall overnight, on top of a lot of snow already on the ground. Roads are a mess, the transit system is at a standstill, ferry sailings cancelled, flights from YVR delayed.
And it’s still not technically winter!
So instead of complaining, we drink hot chocolate, stay warm and wait for it to warm up, rain and wash it away.
We have some little lights installed outside, shining toward our unit. They are still working, deep inside a snow bank (shot through a window, so you can see my monitors reflecting:
Like some snow beast laying in wait…
And a short video Jeff shot on the SkyTrain this morning, before he gave up getting to work because the buses were completely absent. The trains, meanwhile, were accumulating snow…on the inside:
All aboard! If you can pry the snow-encrusted doors apart.
And some shots of the Brunette River, doing the winter wonderland thing.
And yet here we are. Today we got another dump of snow and given the forecast (mostly clear/cloudy and very cold) it’s reasonably likely we will have some kind of White Christmas, which I was not dreaming of.
Right now, we’re in the “pretty to look at” stage.
Tomorrow it will be the “snow turns to ice after a night of sub-freezing temperatures” stage, and by the end of the week it will be “here comes the slush!” Then another week before it’s finally gone. Until the next big dump. WHICH BETTER NOT HAPPEN.
Forecast:
Christmas Eve is when the slushpocalypse begins. Ho ho ho.
A picture from outside my condo, looking toward the Fraser River, which you can’t really see, but it’s there! Taken about seven or eight hours after the snow started.
Tonight I deactivated my Twitter account. I have 30 days to change my mind, and then it goes away forever.
Good.
Casey Newton, in today’s edition of his Platformer newsletter, wrote the following:
…observing Elon Musk’s escalated attacks on a former employee and continued promotion of far-right ideas and personalities, over the weekend I found myself thinking: I just don’t want to be on Twitter anymore.
Any acquisition is bound to cause turmoil in the lives of its employees, but Musk seemed to revel in it: laying off employees so indiscriminately that he was forced to beg many to return a day after terminating them; forcing a mostly remote workforce back into the office on a day’s notice; imposing impossible deadlines on those that remained; requiring workers to sign a digital loyalty oath promising to be “extremely hardcore”; putting workers through regular “code reviews” that have often served as a pretext for firing them; purging workers who were found to have been critical of him in Slack or on Twitter; installing beds in the office to encourage workers to sleep there.
And:
More recently, he falsely stated that the company had “refused to take action on child exploitation for years” — an especially egregious statement given that he had just purged 80 percent of the company’s contract workforce, which included the majority of its content moderators. (We’ve reported that Twitter’s efforts here were indeed understaffed, but it’s not true that the company took no action.)
In recent days, Musk has increasingly advanced the narrative that Twitter was a den of corruption before he bought it. And over the weekend, he made his most disgusting smear to date.
Elon Musk posted tweets including an excerpt of Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation Saturday that suggested the former Twitter executive is an advocate for child sexualization — a baseless trope that leaves Roth susceptible to online abuse. […]
“Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” tweeted Musk, with an excerpt from the 300-page dissertation. “Gay Data,” the title of Roth’s 2016 dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, is about Grindr, the geosocial networking service popular with the LGBTQ+ community.
To be clear, the dissertation is about how to keep predators away from children. But in an interview with Kara Swisher, Roth had dared to criticize Musk after resigning. And so this was his punishment: a smear pushed out to 121 million people, which led immediately to Roth being overwhelmed with death threats.
As if all of that weren’t terrible enough, Musk followed up by tweeting “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” — a smooth-brained, Tucker Carlson-ass Mad Lib of a post that served to bolster the kind of anti-trans and anti-vaxx culture warriors that most people have absolutely no desire to hear from, ever. (Culture warriors who, I assume, made up a good number of the 60,000-plus accounts Musk recently returned to the platform after falsely saying he would first consult with a council of experts before doing so.)
There’s more, but you get the point (Platformer is great if you enjoy reading about how social media is affecting our world. It can feel a bit like doomscrolling at times, but Newton writes good stuff).
It’s reached the point where Twitter–which I rarely used before, anyway–has gone from being worth watching in a “flaming train wreck” kind of way to where having an active account starts to make you feel at least a bit complicit in what Musk is doing. I’ll still see and hear about Twitter news, of course. It’s nearly inescapable if you read any sites, blogs or newsletters that cover social media, but I’ll be doing it as someone on the outside, looking in, not as someone participating directly in the hellscape Musk is making.
As of today, I have logged into MyFitnessPal for 3,600 days:
That works out to 9.86 years. I’ve been logging in since I had hair.
When we were in Manning Park back in 2017 we had no cell reception. The place is, as they say, off the grid. But north of the campground we were staying at by Lightning Lake was a mountain called Blackwall Peak. We drove the long switchback-filled route to get to the top, and right at the apex was…a large Telus cell tower and building. I was able to get one bar on my cell phone and keep the MFP streak going.
I later found out that if you logged into the app during days you had no connectivity, they would comp you for them later through support. This was later still built-in to happen automagically once you had connectivity back. I think my streak was in the 800s back then.
The weird thing now is I don’t really care about the streak anymore. In fact, I’ve been on the lookout for a better tracking app but so far I’ve found none that are a worthy replacement, despite its flaws and niggles.
Anyway, just a random thing I noticed today.
Here’s a shot of me preparing to throw my mid-summer snowball, with the cell tower behind me.
Another recent culling decision was to move to a single reminder/to-do app, and the winner there ended up being Microsoft To Do. TickTick was a close second, and I could see myself possibly going back to it eventually.
The things I like about Microsoft To Do:
It’s free, with no limitations (free is good, no subscription was my real preference)
At first, the My Day feature bugged me, but I’ve come to embrace it. It’s basically a blank page for you to add things to and it’s easy to add daily stuff (which is also viewable elsewhere). It provides a way to focus, which I need.
The UI is unusually pleasant
Sync works fine, regardless of platform (PC, Mac, phone)
The thing I don’t like:
The name. Come on, they didn’t even try! And this replaced Wunderlist, which is an absolutely delightful name.
And here is a CGI cat writing a list in Stable Diffusion:
