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.

31 days of blogging, in the bag. It was pretty easy for about the first 20 days. After that, I ran out of ideas. It’s why I’ve talked about blogging for the last four days. I had, at one point during that first 20 days thought: “Oh, I’m going to write every day until the end of the year!” Yeah, that’s not going to happen. I’ll write most days, but only when I truly have something to say or to share.

A few days ago, Forking Mad wrote this post about the location where they get their finest ideas. For them, it’s in the shower. The prompt for this post, I believe, was not supposed to be the location, but instead something along the lines of where do you get your inspiration? But I like the location thing better.

First off, my inspiration comes from many places. I steal liberally from other authors, developers, and YouTubers. I have no shame. If you have a good idea, and I have thoughts on that idea, I will take it. I’ll give credit, of course, but once you present the idea to the world, it’s open source in my opinion, and I’m forking that bitch. 🤣

I just finished 11/22/63 by Stephen King. I’ve written my review for it, and it will likely go somewhere on the net eventually. One spoiler for the review is that I really hated the end of the book. Like, with a passion.

I’ve talked before about how I tend to get into a reading funk after reading a really good book. But now that I think about it, I also have the same problem when I’ve finished a book that I didn’t like.

I’ve made some changes, and I’m pretty damn happy with them. First off, I have a new menu system. A new font, a new location and some tidier back end work. It’s still early days, though I have to get it looking and working better on smaller screens. But I love it.

I’ve also changes some accenting and font colors around the blog to go better with the gruvbox theme.

I didn’t come up with the idea of a /now page. As with most things when it comes to blogging, I stole the idea from @Joel. But I really like the idea, and I’m working on expanding the things I put on that page, along with the other slash pages I’ve created.

I think this is an important topic, because it reminds us that blogs are about more than just the posts. They are repositories for our lives in many ways. A lot of people, myself included have a page for what we’re reading, some have a page dedicated to the beers they drink, while others have dedicated pages to what they’ve been watching. These are just some of the ideas people have had. It expands the scope of your blog into a true portfolio of things you want to share with your audience. Or, things you simply just want a record of yourself.

One thing is for sure, having a blog has meant sharing more online. It isn’t a consequence that I forsaw when I started this here blog. But as I’ve gone through, and written 114 posts in 7 months, I find that I’m sharing more than I ever have before.

I’ve been on social media since before Facebook, and that was 2004. I was the sort of social media user who posted pictures of their lunch and alerted all of their 4 followers that they had arrived home from work. Fascinating stuff.