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Damned if I do; damned if I don’t

October 22, 2019 No Comments

Meriel Swain asked the question, “What will your epilogue say?” I paused for a second to reflect on her question, but all I could come up with this “His name was Clay. He played the game well enough to have more good days than bad days .” That’s all I could muster before being distracted by Mitt Romney’s secret Twitter account. 

My days are long!

05:00 start, so you can imagine by the time 23:00 rolls around, I’m pretty beat. It’s not so bad on my non-client facing days because I can take extended breaks through out the day and still squeeze in everything I want to do. On my client facing days, the story is a little different. I’m in full-on engagement mode with my client and so have very little time for reflection or writing during the day.  My intent is to doing it in the evening. The problem is, if I go to the gym after dinner, then that’s me done. I come back with good intentions, but having spent the last of my reserves pumping iron, there’s just nothing left in the tank. I try. Boy do i try. But mostly all I do is nod off at the keyboard until Ruth tells me to go to bed.

My only option is to skip the gym. I know…boo…hiss…boo. “You gotta go to the gym,” that’s what my good voice keeps saying. My bad voice, on the hand, be like “nah, forget the gym, you’ve got shit to do!” Both voices are right. But I don’t have the reserves to do both.

Like tonight I skipped the gym. Oh let me rephrase that; I took a rest day. And now it’s 8 minutes to 11 and I’m still up cranking away on stuff like writing this post. Plus I made this video which is a down and dirty overview of the open-sourced, social networking app called Riot.

I’m left with a dilemma. And like Bart said, “You’re damned if you do; and you’re damned if you don’t.”

The new PureGym opens in a couple of weeks. It’s one of those 24hr gyms. I’m thinking of changing up my tune and working out in the morning, and getting my ass under some weights before I do anything else (except having my morning cup of joe of course).

Anyway, here’s a link to the soulcruzer lounge, join me, even if it’s only to help me experiement with the platform.

via GIPHY

The real reason I’m a blogger

October 21, 2019 No Comments

I played PUBG with Jeremy last night. It’s been 142 days since I last played. 1) where does the time go? 2) Shows you how much of a gamer I am!???? I like games, but always feel guilty if i whittle away hours playing them. In my head, I keep thinking how many pages I could have read in those hours I spent playing? I know games are important too, but it’s hard to shake the notion that games, while pleasant to play, are time wasting activity.

Which brings me to Monday morning and thinking how can I be ridiculously productive today?

A couple of responses I got back from the crowd:


and

and

Over the weekend, I worked through the question of how to be as close to the open web as possible, and by that I mean how to extract myself from the walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, and use open sourced software and play in places whose business model isn’t driven by algorithms that exploit my personal data?

Micro.blog is one solution. I have a presence there. Also @TheEinarkist recommended Riot (which I’ve yet to sign up for) and PeerTube and Mastodon. I’ll explore all of these at some point. I have set up a micro.blog account if you want to check that out. The community there have been very welcoming so far.

All of this is closely related to my return to personal blogging versus blogging as a content marketing channel for business. The reason I started blogging in the first place was a channel for self-expression. Then the idea that you could make money from blogging kept oozing in through the seams as marketers began to dominate the social web bent on convincing people that even the Average Joe or Jane could quit their jobs and become full-time bloggers. I’ve always been more about readership than money (although a couple of pennies would be nice to pay for hosting and stuff, so click on those darn amazon affiliate links when I post them!). The hook that I always bit on the marketing line was “if you niche they will come.” Not fully realising until now that as a personal blogger, my niche is me!

Personal blogging is blogging about the things you care about and find interesting. And maybe along the way, you’ll bump into people who care about the same things. So that is where I’m at now with all this blogging stuff – writing about the stuff that interests me and connecting with other bloggers who are into the same thing.

Which brings me back to the open web. I’m on a hunt to find other bloggers and such who are outsiders like me. Drop me a link to your blog in the comments.

Panicked indifference

October 19, 2019 No Comments

My mother belongs to the fear I was needing, interlocking arms with white bags. Today has everything I need – wet clothes, pillowcases, liquor, eyelashes, and chemicals. Excuse the scars. Ducking, jumping, terrible things I was mid-air like a heavy meal. You save people too scared to fall from the sky. I need them to fall to feel better. I wept twice. My favourite emotion, a mix of happiness and sadness. No visible shame just a panicked indifference.

Lost in the woods

October 18, 2019 No Comments

Admiral McRaven has put into words what has been on mind and spirit for the past three and butt years. America has lost its way because the leaders of the country have lost their way and have lost sight of America’s values and what we stand for as a Nation. I spent 11 years in the service of something higher than myself. I was proud of the country I served.

When you serve something greater than yourself, you understand:

…the awesome responsibility that the nation had placed on their shoulders. They understood that they had an obligation to serve their soldiers and their soldiers’ families. They believed in the American values for which they had been fighting for the past three decades. They had faith that these values were worth sacrificing everything for — including, if necessary, their lives.

I believe Admiral McRaven is right:

It is easy to destroy an organization if you have no appreciation for what makes that organization great. We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.

And if our current government leaders can’t understand that, then as Admiral McRaven says, it’s time for them to step aside.

Jesse’s Endgame

October 17, 2019 No Comments

I finally watched El Camino last night, and seeing how Breaking Bad was one of my all time favourite TV series, I had high hopes for the movie. You can probably guess from my intro that it fell short of what I was expecting. Instead of a movie, we got an extended last episode to the series, one that we could arguably have done without.

I don’t want to get too much into the spoiler game, but basically, we catch up with the story at the end of the last episode of Season 5 with Jesse Pinkman speeding off into night in psycho Todd’s El Camino. The 2 hours that follow drift along at a slow pace as Jesse encounters some of his old crew, both in real time and flashbacks.  He does have a problem to solve before he can ride off into the sunset like the High Plains Drifter. I guess the movie brings closure to the show, if you need such things, but I think we would have been better off leaving Jesse’s endgame to our individual imaginations.

Switching gears…

Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus came yesterday. I was a little reluctant to pay £25 quid for a book sight unseen (there was no preview available on Amazon). I had to go on the strength of the reviews alone. I’m glad I went for it though because so far it has not disappointed me. And in fact, I cranked out my first tiny poem using one of the techniques from the book. Real quick, Jeff Noon is a really big language dude (he’s famous for writing in the cyberpunk genre with hits like Vurt, Pollen, and Automated Alice). He’s also into his music. He wanted to do what DJ’s do with music to literature, i.e. taking source texts and running it through a series of noise gates and filters to produce something totally different from the original text.

I used a couple of random tweets, exploded them

 

and then mixed it with this tweet:

to finally arrive at:

satan got the whole team reading dark material like your heart.

I did that over lunch. I’m looking forward to using the different filters and gates on some longer source texts.

So blogging turned 25 this week:

Last Monday was a significant anniversary in the evolution of the web. It was 25 years to the day since the first serious blog appeared. It was called Scripting News and the url was (and remains) at scripting.com. Its author is a software wizard named Dave Winer, who’s updated it every day since 1994. And despite its wide readership, it has never run ads.

I’m amazed that Dave Winer has managed to blog every single day since 1994! That’s lot of blogging. I like the writer’s suggestion that blogging is still important despite the infilitration of social media:

He’s also a reminder of the importance of blogging, a phenomenon that has been overshadowed as social media exploded and sucked much of the oxygen out of our information environment. When Winer started, blogging was an elite activity: you had to know how to set up a website and publish to it. But when Blogger and LiveJournal launched in 1999 followed by WordPress and TypePad in 2003, the barrier to entry became vanishingly low; in effect, if you could type and had an internet connection you could become a blogger. And so for a time blogging became the predominant form of user-generated content on the web.

And finally, I agree:

The blogosphere continues to be one of our greatest information resources. So why not log off social media, get yourself an RSS reader and wise up?

And here’s my RSS Feed so you can add me to your RSS reader.

Musical Interlude

I’ve been digging Cake this week. Particularly this version of I Will Survive:

One of these seconds

October 16, 2019 No Comments

I often wonder
about nothing;
Sometimes I wonder
about something, but
mostly i just wonder
about Hell

and my place in it
or on it if Hell is Earth
and other people

Worlds within worlds
within worlds. Worlds
come and go.

Four births happen
each second of every
day and nearly two
people die each second.

One of these seconds has
my name on it, I know,
we all know, but we carry
on doing what we do until
the second that has our
name on it comes.

Not the kind of thoughts
you want to be having
driving down the road
at speed with

one hand on the steering
wheel and the other hand
flipping through Spotify to
find just the right track to
suit my mood.

For some reason
I like to dance around
the edges of the abyss
comfort i guess,
keeps me loitering on edge.