A few friends know I’ve been keeping a blog just about my science fiction reading for the last year or so. I started it back in April 2023 (I think), when I began my 5% per day reading challenge. https://bloftin2sf.blog. I haven’t really promoted it much because it is really just a personal blog for my own tracking and reflections on reading. In other words — probably not that interesting to most people.

One feature I love on micro.blog is the built-in ability to track your reading. Could have something to do with the fact that the developer, Manton, is a reader. Might also have something with his wife, Tracy, having gone to library grad school and being a reader.

Here’s my 2023 year in books, as tracked via Epilogue and Micro.blog. https://bloftin2sf.blog/2024/02/28/year-in-books.html

At any rate, Manton has created a simple system for tracking and blogging about your reading. He has a companion app for micro.blog called Epilogue, which makes it simple to track your reading from your phone or tablet. He’s done all the work to draw the book information from legitimate bibliographic sources. This is available even on the base $5 per month micro.blog account.

I’m not planning at this point to move Concrete Lunch to micro.blog, as I have a few friends who enjoy commenting here. Micro.blog does not have a comment function, and thus there is no comment spam or harassment. You have to comment through the micro.blog interface, which is limited to users. They do a great job of keeping the system clean.

As part of the fediverse, micro.blog makes it easy to post there and syndicate your writing and other media to other parts of the fediverse, like Mastodon, BlueSky, etc.

The simplicity of being able to post from my computer or easily from my phone with micro.blog is great. The $10 per month premium account allows you to upload videos or podcasts of up to 45 megs, which is a short video or a mid-length podcast. All of this is unattached to Google, Youtube, Facebook, or any of the other commercial sites. Hell, you can run a podcast from micro.blog without having to have an account anywhere else. Amazing value.

Forgot to mention. They just changed the $10 per month account so that you can host up to 5 blogs for that one monthly charge. The service just keeps getting better.

Yes, I can create a post on the mobile version of WordPress, but frankly the interface it clunky and crowded. WP is still great for running a more full-featured site or portal, but it has really grown beyond the notion of “blogging” — a web log. Micro.blog is focused on blogging.

More and more I’m convinced the future of a quality internet is going revolve around pay services. Sure, there will be social media and massive sights like Youtube that are full of great stuff and lots of shit to wade through and put up with, who sell your data to every marketer in the world. And there will be a small fraction of the web that is curated, not free to every lunatic with a phone or computer, and of higher quality, that respects the privacy of its users.

If you are interested in the problems plaguing social media, I recommend you read the Part 6: Community in this book, Indie Microblogging, by Manton Reece.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a witty and hilarious (and possibly hate-filled) rant here on my blog. Please be advised that I’m aware of this, and actively reviewing worthy topics. Some possibilities include…

Editor’s note: My friend Jeremy read this, and asked why I “want my enemies to be free from suffering”? So please, anytime you see me wishing someone dead in this post, simply replace with “I hope [insert correct pronoun here] is suffering.”

1. The girl in second grade who criticized me for liking Halloween more than “the birthday of Jesus”. I hope she’s dead.
2. The junior high coach who wouldn’t put me in the track program in the 8th grade even though I was running every day after school as was about to hit my growth spurt and really become a good athlete. Screw him. I happen to know he’s still alive, sadly.
3. That guy who made me mad that time about that thing…yeah…you know who I’m talking about. Hope he’s dead too.
4. People who feel the need to convince a free adult American that his/her religious ideology is correct and their target’s in wrong. The hubris that allows one person to think they have the answers to life’s ultimate questions must be stamped out. Of this I am 100% certain, and if you disagree with me you are not only wrong but going to hell.
5. The single fecal dribble stain on the wall of one of the bathroom stalls at work. Apparently someone had explosive decompression, and this one dookie particle made its way to the wall, sliding down about 2 inches, leaving a mild brown track behind it. It’s been there for 3 weeks. Hey – its not my job to clean it! How does this happen?! I’m still trying to compute the impossible trajectory. Was this a one-cheek sneak that got way out of hand? Was this the magic bullet that would have made Lee Harvey Oswald green with envy? Perhaps we’ll never know.
6. People who back into parking places.

So there is my list of possible new posts. We’ll see how this all works out.