hello advertising, my old friend - Kottke
“Before I let you go, I need a tiny bit of your help with this. If you use ad blocking software when you read kottke.org, could you please whitelist kottke.org and/or Carbon Ads (carbonads.com)? It should be pretty easy…check your ad block software’s instructions if you’ve never done it before. I don’t want to get into an argument about the ethics or morality of advertising or ad blocking, but I will say that blocking ads on kottke.org means less revenue for the site. As previously discussed, advertising is an essential piece of the ongoing stability of kottke.org and whitelisting the site would help me out in that regard. Thank you.”
Of course I’ll whitelist advertising on kottke.org. I don’t block ads because I don’t want to see any ads. I block them because I don’t want my experience to turn to shit the minute I visit a site. I trust that Kottke and Carbon won’t let that happen.
The antidotes to populism: stoicism and civil society
“Something has certainly gone wrong in how we do democracy. We have forgotten what it is and how to do it. Specifically, we have gotten the idea that democracy consists in our right to command the government to give us what we want, when actually it is collective self-government. Democracy is not a reality TV-style contest in which the people are spectators and voters on who gets to win the prize of ultimate power. Rather, it is a relationship to ourselves and our fellow citizens that we develop and practise in our daily lives.”
…
“And that’s where we are now. A society of millions of strangers, all alone together in front of our televisions and twitter feeds, shivering with indignant rage.”
About that Ari Marcopoulos Camera Bag | The Machine Planet
“In fact, all camera bags now look like diaper bags”
Ha! It’s true. Also, I own the Ari bag and I love it. I use it either with two Hasselblad bodies and lenses or the Nikon F3 and either a Leica or X-Pro body. It works great, once you get the hang of that weird strap.
Moving on from Baty.net - or not
I’ve been maintaining a blog in some form since 1998. Everything before 2000 has been lost, but that still leaves many years of writing.
While I enjoy writing, I also enjoy tinkering with publishing tools. My blog has run on most major platforms and a few minor ones. One minute I’m using a static blogging tool like Hugo and the next I’ve converted everything to WordPress. And ’round it goes.
The problem with changing things all the time is that content inevitably breaks during the conversion. For example, I somehow lost the images on most posts from 2012. That shouldn’t happen.
Another thing that shouldn’t happen is broken links. Remember, Cool URIs Don’t Change. I’ve changed the permalink structure and the domain name a few times and didn’t always bother with the appropriate redirects. Not cool.
Is it more important to keep all my writing in one place forever or is it better to make sure things don’t break over time? Since I can’t seem to have both, I’ve decided upon the latter. To that end, the intention is to keep baty.net as-is and begin writing everything here at baty.blog. It’s admittedly an experiment. This could turn out to be just another of my weekend whims, but that’s ok.
Nothing is stopping me from continuing to write in both places. Baty.net using Hugo and baty.blog using WordPress. One static, one not. We’ll all survive; however it turns out.
UPDATE: Nope, we’re now using blot.im
G.A.S. Attack Outflanked - Bruce Robbins
So with considerable self-restraint, I decided not to buy the Autocord. £150 is too much to splash out on what would have become little more than an ornament.
I am seldom able to resist something I’ve spent considerable time looking into. For example, and unlike Mr. Robbins, I succumbed to the urge to buy an Autocord a few years ago. Here it is languishing on a shelf.
Autocord
I rarely regret buying unnecessary gear, but I would like to learn to avoid it more often.
After a couple of weeks, I’m finding that I prefer using Micro.blog to Mastodon. It’s the #IndieWeb bits that I’m interested in.
Josie today
Josie (2017)
Baty.blog
I’m moving my blogging to a new domain: baty.blog
I wanted to change the way I handle my blog but I didn’t want to burn down 17 years of baty.net history to do it.
I could have used a subdomain of baty.net, but I love blogs and the .blog TLD nicely promotes the idea that blogs are still a thing.
So baty.blog it is.
Posts here will be pretty much the same as always. I’m planning to include more microblog-type posts and send everything to micro.blog for distribution.
There is no grand design here, I was just getting bored lugging around 17 years of posts. I’m using WordPress, which makes everything easy. My infatuation with static blogging tools remains, but my patience with them hasn’t. I just want to type some words and click “Publish”.
baty.net remains as-is for now. It’s nothing but static HTML so it’ll just sit there nicely, forever I hope.
That’s my boyfriend! she tells us
“That’s my boyfriend!” she tells us
as the grey-haired man pushes himself
slowly backward. Using his feet.
The wheelchair moves more easily that way.
“I think the world of her,” he says
being careful not to move too quickly
lest he jar his neck brace. (She calls it a “halo.”)
Age amplifying his injuries
Her face, aged 91 years, beams as he says this
and suddenly looks exactly
as I imagine it did at age 18
Kind words will do that
Those kind in particular
Especially in this place