december-ish

Posted on episode 367

when they go high (tech) we go low (tech)

December 1 of 31 December-ish posts.

Oh, how those billionaires-who-shall-not-be-named would factor into a good political-type post that I’m sure would attract all sorts of readers like wasps to a honeypot.

How would I… should I describe my 2022 in tech or tools?

As the year wraps up I’ve dabbled in what I’m (right now) calling the addict’s last puff on the drug known as corporate social media. I tried spinning up a Youtube channel over the summer. I posted with some frequency on Twitter and Reddit. Instagram was routinely at the top of my daily digital dosage. I even downloaded TikTok for a few weeks, though I couldn’t ever figure out why I would post there.

I grew up weaned on technology, but also I was part of that tech pioneer generation who co-opted the family phone line to connect to dial-up bulletin board systems over a 2400 baud modem hissing from beside my hulking CRT monitor.  We installed games from floppy diskettes and challenged copy protection with meticulously hand-copied versions of code sheets and game manuals.  My first website was coded by hand in a text editor and uploaded through an SSH command line to a server somewhere. I had multiple Geocities accounts and, for crying out loud, I had a paid subscription to Blogger.com before they got bought out by Google (and they actually mailed me a hoodie with both the Blogger and Google logos to thank me when that happened.)

This has never been a tech blog, but it is tech.

I use high tech to write and share about low tech.

I use bare metal and code to post about cast iron and food.

I had high hopes for social media’s role in the world. I was an early adopter of many of those platforms, bringing many people along and feeding them content on the near-daily for nearly a decade.

Is it unfair to say I feel a bit cheated by how things turned out? It is too much to feel that lots of low tech folks have used the high tech tools we helped build and refine for things that don’t jive with my worldview?

I’ve deleted many accounts and shuttered more. I’m reluctant to walk away completely if only because my usernames would get slurped up almost instantly and cause confusion to a few people I care about.

This site is not corporate. I’m just a guy who wants to write. I pay for my own hosting. I run my own technology stack and manage my own updates. I write. I post. I share. I do it all.  And I feel a nostalgia for that as I round out 2022 and consider the state of our online spaces and the chaos that is swirling inside them.  Perhaps stepping out of the “digital public square” will mean fewer people will read these words, but not caring as much about size of my audience versus writing for myself and few quality people, like you who has found this site in other ways, is where I am right now.

And as we creep into 2023 when I need to think less about the moral and ethical impact of my high technology use, I can spend more time thinking about and writing about my low tech fun, fire, food and cast iron cooking, right?

Posted on episode 336

December-ish (but still November-ish)

Every year I tend to get a bit sentimental and reflective when December rolls around.

As I close in on the end of my second full year of this blog, I’m hoping to channel some of that sentimentality into some productive creative motivation here (and also in other online and offline spaces I’ve been inhabiting lately.)

Following my strict-ish rule of trying to keep this blog as fuzzily attached to my real persona as possible, I won’t point you in the direction of those other creative pursuits, things like posting a daily watercolour painting, writing fiction every day in December, and taking one photo per day. But I can let you know that I’m opening up my creative floodgates here too, particularly so, and plan to relaunch my December-ish daily blogging effort once again and fill your December reading with some of that aforementioned sentimentality.

Each day I’ll try to write and post a little something on this site based on the same prompts that I wrote to on the same day of the month as last December.

And if you are clever, like I know you are, you can find when you click on an actual post (like this one and not just the front page or an archive list) on the side bar (or bottom if you read on a phone) there should be a little widget called “on this day” that points you at the post I wrote on the same date but in previous years. Handy right?

It’s cold outside right now. I walked a couple city blocks outside this morning and the wind was gusting and biting a raw cold that is hard to explain unless you’ve felt it. Walking in minus twenty five degrees Celsius is like touching a frying pan that has cooled enough not too burn yet is still far too hot to hold… that, but with cold. And with your face.

It’s a good kind of weather to sit inside and dream of warmer days and write.

So, stay tuned. Here comes December. Ish.

Posted on episode 284

Better

One word that sums up your theme for 2022

Better.

Just… better.

Better days.

Better minutes.

Better hopes.

Better self.

Better efforts.

Better me.

Better you.

Better world.

Better everything.

Better.

Happy New Year!

See you in 2022.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.

Posted on episode 283

Groundhog

One of my favourite films stars Bill Murray as a weatherman who, while visiting a small town to report on the festivities taking place to celebrate groundhog day finds himself trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of reliving the same day over and over and over again. He wakes up on the second of February countless times, makes his way through the day working out the various consequences of his small choices, and no matter how that version of the day ends he wakes up once more on the same day to restart exactly where he began.

Groundhog Day, the day, has long been a kind of pseudoscientific celebration where we turn to nature (in the form of a large rodent’s reaction to it’s shadow) as a prediction of the remaining duration of winter weather.

Thanks to the film, Groundhog Day has become shorthand for being stuck in a time loop and being forced to relive what is seemingly the same day over and over and over again as if the universe is testing one’s resolve to find a way to escape and that escape can only come at the cost of self-actualization and some kind of genuine epiphany of the soul.

One word that sums up your
theme for 2021.

grownd - hahg

A groundhog, also known around the world as a woodchuck, is a large rodent who obliviously predicts each year with stunning fifty-fifty accuracy the fate of spring at the hands of fading winter.

I don’t yet know if 2022 will lead to an escape from the endless cycle of seemingly living the same day over and over and over again, but throughout the last three hundred and sixty-odd day, saying that it feels like groundhog day has become our go-to tongue-in-cheek analysis and recurring theme of our feelings of 2021.

Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.