So the tone of this blog post is going to be a little bit different. And the reason why is because I’m not actually typing this blog post. I’m speaking it. I’m sitting at my desk right now with my microphone in front of my face, and I’m talking and watching as the words appear inside of Emacs. It’s really freaking cool.

Now the question is, why have I set this up? Well, the answer is, is that I want to start scripting some of my videos. Not only for the Linux Cast, but for my history channel, and maybe another channel that I’m thinking about creating. I want to be able to actually script, and then read the scripts in front of a camera. When I tried this by writing out a script in traditional fashion with my keyboard, and then reading it out afterwards, it wasn’t a good experience. It never has been. I write really well. I have very good grammatical skills, for the most part, when I’m typing. But when I speak, I don’t speak like that. My grammar is not very good. I say words out of order a lot. I have filler words. And I say things that don’t make any sense. And I also repeat myself quite a bit. It’s just kind of my speech style. If you watch any of my videos on the Linux channel, you’ll know this about me, that I ramble a lot. And that’s my normal speech pattern. It’s not the way that I write.

If you’re reading this post, and found it through Mastodon, Matt did a thing. I’m working on making a python script that will auto-toot my posts automatically, then get the toot ID so that the comments show up. Doing it through a Docker container and a bit of CI magic on Gitlab.

If you read this and didn’t come here from Mastodon, follow me

If every sentence you write ends with an exclamation point, the mark loses all meaning! Please stop! This isn’t a good way to write! It is almost as bad as SHOUTING IN YOUR TEXT MESSAGES FOR NO REASON!!!!!

I have two big pet peeves when it comes to writing these days, whether it’s professional or just random people blogging on the internet: excessive use of exclamation points and the word chuckle. One is just burn out from over use, the other is because NOBODY KNOWS WHAT A FUCKING CHUCKLE IS!!!! Seriously, WTF is a chuckle? Oh, well, it’s a laugh, Matt, what else could it be? Well, that’s fine then, why didn’t you just say laugh then? Sorry, my bad. I thought chuckling was a specific kind of laugh. And if it is, I’d like to hear one, because I never have. And yet, every fucking author under the sun uses the word over and over and over again until my eyes bleed!

I haven’t done one of these in forever, so it’s time to get back on the wagon.

Blaugust 2026

Complete bust. I wrote 3 posts in 31 days. That’s actually more than I thought, but it wasn’t great. I haven’t done well blogging this year at all, so it’s not that much of a surprise. Maybe I can rectify that in the last half of the year. For those of you who participated in Blaugust 2026, hope you had a good time.

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile. How do you think of the Internet? Is it social for you? A source of information? A simple tool? A burden? A toxic place filled with assholes?

All of the above?

For me, I have a hard time narrowing down what the Internet even is. Oh, I know the technologies behind it, the hardware and software that are actually “The Internet”, but like many things that have spawned from the human condition, The Internet has taken on a much more transcendent place in our world. It is less abuot the technology, and how you experience the technology.

Last year, it was comments. This year it’s AI. Now, I think if you’re going to blog, you should do it yourself. Using AI for inspiration, I suppose, is okay, but the actual writing? Why bother having a blog if you’re not going to do the writing yourself? The entire point of blogging is to express yourself. That doesn’t happen if Chatty Jeeps does the work for you.

It’s not like coding where you might not have the knowledge to actually do the coding yourself. That is a usecase I understand and support. But,you have to have had the knowledge to set up the blog, and writing isn’t going to be any better with an AI doing it (trust me on that, AI can’t write worth a damn).

So, I’m taking part in Blaugust again. I’m not even going to try to do 30 this month. I’ll be happy with 5 or 10. But this is #1, so it’s a start.

The last time I wrote something, I talked about how I was considering going back to music subscription services simply because I missed their music discovery options. Self hosting was just not doing it for me in that regard. I really didn’t want to go back to paying for music, though. I have spent well over a year getting my own library up and running and properly tagged. It has been a long and tedious journey. But I have a great and huge library, so paying for music again just seemed silly.

So, awhile back, I decided to start self hosting my music collection. I’m sure I’ve at least mentioned it somewhere here on the blog. I re-downloaded my entire collection and more beyond that. Nearly 5TB of new music was stored on my various hard drives. It took months. And by the end, I was pretty damn proud of it.

I’ve been using that system now for months, and I’ve realized that I miss streaming services like Tidal and Spotify. It makes me feel a little dirty writing it, but it’s true. Why?

Last October I posted a review of 11/22/63. In that post I wrote:

This was 900 pages of wasted time. I enjoyed most of it. But the ending ruined every good feeling I had about this book. Why did I read it? Nothing changed at the end of the story. Nobody got a happy ending; not even a smidge of one. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like a sucker punch right to the face.