Concrete Lunch

OK, it was a pretty normal weekend. Walked the dog. We have been watching a lot of MST3K on Twitch since the Orange Shitbag took office. There’s only so much chaos we can take.

We had a fun D&D game on Sunday. We’ve been playing almost every Sunday afternoon, and it has been nice for everyone to escape into a world where you can actively seek out and kill evil.

Aikido for two hours on Saturday morning is really good but also very taxing. I’m in good shape now, but truth is I am 60 years old now and I just can’t run myself as hard as I did 10 or 15 years ago, but I still try, and it’s keeping me kind of depleted. Practicing on Monday and Wednesday nights until 8:30, then Saturday 10am-noon, plus full time work, plus maintaining the rest of life is a lot. And I haven’t been been skateboarding in weeks. And I’ve not been reading. So I need to find a new balance for some of these things. Reprioritizing things. I want to have more energy to do fun things with my wife, to help with some of the meal planning and cooking, etc.

I know that the winter is not helping. Gray, wet, cold days are a bummer, and they seep into the brain. It’s not good. I must also admit that as devoted as I am to the idea of not letting the activities of Orange Shitbag and his dirtbag henchmen ruin my/our life, the feeling of chaos in the country is hard to escape. It creates a background haze of anxiety even when you aren’t paying attention. When you do “tune in” for a few minutes a day to make sure everything hasn’t been destroyed yet (why? I don’t know, because there’s not a fucking thing I can do about what’s going on except carry on being a reasonably good person) the background anxiety leaps to the foreground. Also not good.

My wife asked me over the weekend how to use RSS feeds to follow blogs. She want to spend more time reading blogs and actual quality websites than using social media, which I think is a good idea. Thinking I might offer to do a quick n dirty webinar for friends  who want to see how it works. Might help people escape the shit silos.

That’s all for now.

Every cute pet pic posted on the internet diminishes the powers of evil.

While the country continued to slide into a Chaotic Era (thank you, Three-Body Problem), I continued to do my best to ignore it. While maintaining some understanding of what is getting fucked up, and what I need to watch out for (though there’s not much I can do about anything), I am also safeguarding my mental health, which I’ve worked very hard for several years to regain. I have people depending on me – important people – and I’m not going to let the current situation give me a stroke. I am needed, and I’m going to be here — fully here — for them.

We are all in this together. Now as always we have to be there for each other.

So – yesterday I had a nice 2-hour aikido practice. Felt good. Then I came home, had some lunch, took a nap, then we took our sweet little sheltie dog for a long-line walk up at the local university. People love to see him and he loves to meet new people. Then a relaxing night at home. I started working on a simple CSS stylesheet and page design to which I’d eventually like to move this blog. That will be a long project, and I’m not in a hurry. Not trying to do anything fancy. Much the opposite. I want a a very simple blog, written by hand, on a static site that can be easily relocated.

Today – another nice walk with the dog and coffee, then we played D&D for a few hours.

For me that’s a good weekend. Enjoying my friends, my wife, our dog and cat. That is more than enough.

Not going to look at the news for the rest of today, and not going to look at it tomorrow (Monday). Gotta manage my intake of lunacy.

Oh, I found this blog post over the weekend that I found very insightful, about the nature of the “real” internet (my words) and versus the corporate “net”.

As I’ve written about extensively here, I’m moving all my creative output and a lot of my communications off of social media platforms.

Here are some issues that have come up with moving one of the two Facebooks skateboarding groups I am involved with off Facebook…

Over the last few weeks we’ve been moving Neverwas Skateboarding off of Facebook and onto its own blog with links to associated accounts and services. For example, we are no longer going to host our yearly videos on YouTube. We have a PeerTube set up. This is the direction we’re moving.

The biggest reason for this change is the acceleration of changes for the worse on the various Meta platforms. My own personal feed is now full of actual propaganda clickbait. I mean FULL of it. I understand the need to generate adverting revenue, and I can accept seeing ads on the page. What I can’t tolerate are images, posts, and reels about Elon Musk, Zuckerberg and his new buddy Dana White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and other people I detest. Reels about “how to get women”, “why the bible is wrong (inserting some super wacky shit)” are common. But the overall tone of what I am shown has changed dramatically to the “let’s get him mad so he’ll click this” manipulation.

But beyond that fact this all this bothers me, it is pernicious and harmful to society.

So yeah, it has been bad for a long time. It’s worse now.

As a group, the admins of Neverwas decided we could  not ethically keep the group on the platform. Yes, some of us as individuals have not completely extricated ourselves from Meta. But we can move the group.

Beyond our newfound contempt for Meta and the big social media silos in general (I shouldn’t speak for everyone, so let’s call it MY contempt), the main admin and I know there is a better way forward. A way that is more true to the way skateboarders used to do things. Flexible, non-corporate, grassroots, decentralized systems. No, we can’t have our own actual internet infrastructure that transmits data, but we can run our own installations of Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. We can host the blog on an ethically run small company’s system. If that company goes belly-up or sells out, we can easily transfer our pages to a new host.

This is all part of the IndieWeb philosophy – which harkens back to the early web, the pre-social media web. The web on which I ran Bob’s Trick Tips years ago. It’s just a better way to do things.

In moving the group to the blog, we spelled out very clearly our stances on a few things like homophobia and transphobia (and hate), MAGA extremism, and pervaders of conspiracy theories. Those ideas are not welcome in the group. We’ll not platform someone just in order to appear tolerant. Private groups do not owe anyone a venue to espouse their beliefs. It was felt best that the group, moving forward, be clear about the overall inclinations of the members. We all have different religious beliefs, various political persuasions, etc., but we all draw the line on these topics.

This has upset a few people in the group, who have left. They felt targeted. I’m not happy about that. The various ethical stances we have taken on the blog’s “Ethos” page are a direct reflection of the reasons we are leaving Facebook and Meta, not a targeting of individuals.

As I write this, today on January 20, 2025, there is a good chance an executive order will be signed by the new President that dehumanizes trans people in the eyes of the federal government. Make no mistake. Under the guise of some sort of  logic, such things are intended to dehumanize one group and please those who don’t want them to exist. So yes – we have stated our position as the admins of the group. If you disagree with that position(s), you may not be a good fit for this group.

All that being said, we don’t even have a “space” dedicated to the discussion of politics and social issues. And we never will.

Personally, there are a few people who may not wish to stay associated with Neverwas because they don’t like the way we are doing things, but who I still like quite a lot. People with good hearts who view the internet as a place for not just discussion but debate. To them I say — I still love you – but NW is not going to be a place for debate. There is nothing unethical about a group stating its ethics, be it a skateboarding group, club, or religious organization.