I like Discord. I also kinda hate Discord. The problem I have with it is that there are a lot of people there. The thing I like about it is that there are a lot of people there. It’s a mixed bag.
You will find a lot of great things on Discord, but I have also had my worst experiences on social media on Discord (which makes Twitter jealous). Something about the real time nature of the chat seems to remove the filter from some people’s mouth.
I’ve had some blog stats available on my About page for a while, but I wanted to see if I could make my script a little more robust. For one, I wanted more stats, but I also wanted graphs.
What I had before was a simple bash script that would post the total number of posts and the total word count. Every time I would publish a post, Hugo itself would run the script and output to a shortcode. It was janky and didn’t really count things accurately.
Back when Twitter was fun and Tumblr was new, the idea of posting small blogs, or “micro blogging”, caught the public’s eye. For those of us who found regular, long-form, blogging to be too overwhelming, posting a little thought here or their on our micro blog would allow us a foot in the door without the stress of WordPress. It also allowed for much easier community building when all the bloggers were on the same platform.
A few days ago I wrote about my inability to actually play games that I buy. In that post I made a… lukewarm mention of trying harder. You could tell I really didn’t believe it. Honestly, I still don’t believe it. But, I’m going to stick to my promise and try. I’m going to play (and try to beat) Skyrim, a game I’ve bought not once, but twice, and have played 59 minutes of (and let’s be clear, most of that was in the character maker).
The pushback against streaming media, despite many valid points, has some throwing the baby out with the bathwater vibes to it. Particularly around owning physical media; books, CDs, DVDs, vinyl records, BluRays, cassettes, floppy disks.
This also means that I own all of my music, play it from a server I control, using storage I control, via a client I’ve written and all of the data is stored on my own infrastructure. I author my own charts and can do as much or as little as I want with the data. I enjoy being able to view my own listening habits and run whatever granular queries I want. I’ve integrated concert tracking with artist pages, I’ve added support for tracking upcoming albums and exposed a calendar subscription.
As I get more into the analogue life with my field journal, I’m beginning to understand the appeal of moving away from a pure digital lifestyle. I like the balance that doing some things outside of the computer/smartphone brings my life. I want to add more of that.
But some people take this too far. Now, people can do what they want to do, just as I can judge them for it. My judgment really means nothing, so it should be easy for all of us to just move on. Some people are reverting to dumb phones. I get the idea here: less distraction from Android and iOS, and your life is better. Seems like a good idea, right?
Maybe it’s because I edit for a living, but I hate editing my own blog posts. I write them, why should I also have to edit them? 😢 But I do it. Maybe I don’t do it as well as I do it for my job, but I do it. I think mostly it’s shame that drives it. I don’t want to put something out there, even if its for free on my blog, that isn’t readable. I know that if I see a blog post from someone else that is littered with spelling errors and grammar issues, I judge them. A little bit. Maybe that’s because of my profession, but I can’t help it. And it seems a bit silly for me to judge others when I can’t put forth the effort to make sure I’m crossing all of my T’s and dotting all the I’s.
I pre-ordered the original Steamdeck right when it was announced. I cancelled that, but ended up pre-ordering it again. My biggest draw to this handheld gaming machine was that it is a gaming machine meant for the masses that runs Linux. I’m a Linux guy. I also figured I could make some content about the Steamdeck for my YouTube channel.
But, the thing is, I’ve not been a gamer in 20 years. I used to game quite a bit, but not so much anymore. And it’s not like I don’t want to game. I wrote ages ago about how I really wanted to add gaming to my life again. I still have that interest, but my attention span when it comes to games just isn’t there.