Jack Baty

I'm sure there's a Petosky stone in there somewhere

I'm not supposed to be putting journal entries on this blog, but it's what I reached for without thinking this morning, so here we are. I enjoy using Pure Blog quite a lot.

I promised myself that I wouldn't post about any more social media dustups, but I broke my promise recently, and I wish I hadn't. It's just so hard to watch people on "my team" do things I wish they wouldn't, whether that's retreating to a platform that disgusts me, like X, or scolding someone for choosing for themselves to do that.

Dave says:

So here's the thing, our performative virtue signaling seems to be alienating the very people we need to persuade to come over to our side.

I remain convinced that Trump is president because "regular folk" were sick of being scolded and shamed for simply living their lives in the world they were born into, their only sin being that they were maybe a little behind the curve.

Anyway, my wife and I had a lovely weekend up north. Turns out that "the Outdoors" is pretty neat.

Sunset over Lake Michigan. Charlevoix, MI. (iPhone 15)

I knew I should have brought color film. All I had was a stupid iPhone.

Crowd: "That guy is pretty cool and is doing good work for the community. We should support him!"

Guy: Continues to do the exact same work, but decides it might actually be better for him to be posting on X.

Crowd: "That guy is a loser facist-supporting asshole with no moral compass or sense of decency. Boycott him!"

Personally, I hate X and Musk and the whole lot of them. I believe that using X is wrong, but I'm beginning to hate the lazy righteous finger pointing from the "good guys" just as much. How dare anyone only get a C on the purity test. What is this, 2020? I'm on vacation this weekend and seeing this shit happen 2 or 3 times in as many days is so disheartening.

My grandson, when he sees me pull into his driveway. 🥰

I'm looking forward to telling my grandkids about how we used to write regular expressions by hand. Much like the stories my grandparents told me about doing long division by hand.

Neo-Etiquette Basics: The New Rules of Being Human

We need a baseline that acknowledges a simple moral fact: that other people are actually real people. They have inner lives you can’t and don’t get to see; they have sentience, no matter how inconvenient that might be. You don’t get to treat them as disposable, you don’t get to process them into content, and you don’t get to claim their time, publish their flaws, or distribute their worst moments at will.

We might be better off we replaced the bible's ten commandments with Westenberg's rules. Or maybe just stop acting like you're the only important person there is.

Sure wish they still made Kodachrome. I miss it.

So what happened was...

I had a todo on my list for canceling my MagicPages subscription, so I went to do that. Seeing the Ghost version of this site running my custom theme gave me second thoughts. Remember how easy posting was with Ghost? Remember the comments, newsletters, and ActivityPub features? I caught myself before becoming too enamored with the idea, and canceled. If you use Ghost, MagicPages is a great service for hosting.

The draw of Ghost is the same as any "real" CMS... ease of posting. That reminded me that I was still running Pure Blog here at baty.blog. Hmmmm... :)

One thing about dynamically-generated CMSes is that one needs to keep them up to date, in case there have been any security or other issues. I logged into this blog, hit the update button, and I'm running the latest. While in here, I noticed there have been a ton of improvements since I last checked in. Kev has been doing a great job here.

"I'll only ever use an SSG for my blog!", I said, unconvincingly. Sometimes I don't want to. Sometimes Kev comes along and makes something like Pure Blog and I think, "Well, that's better!"

I can't have both. Or can I? It seems I have both right now. I dig Pure Blog, but if something has to give, it'll probably be that. I'm not ready to bail quite yet. It's too easy and simple and nice.

So, I'll continue blogging where and when my mood tells me to.

See!? Told you