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Tweet Less / Blog More

I’ll be real with you all. I have a few goals I have been working on for literally years, including things like “read 52 books a year”, and “develop a morning routine”.

One of my technology related goals has been to use this space more for my ~posts across the web. I’m almost weaned from instagram (and can tell, as I get angry about how different it is every time I use it). I will keep my twitter until the day the web servers fall over / we see our final fail whale / they take me away … but … I don’t really spend time there any more. It’s fuller of spam and bigotry than it ever has been, and I’ve opted to time box it a lot more restrictively.

It’s wild to think a website I used to spend upwards of probably six hours a day on is now in my life for about 45 minutes a day. Nothing gold can stay, and twitter was never more than pyrite.

I still check in to see what my internet friends are up to, try to help my poorer friends get visibility for their financial asks, and see if the excellent curation I’ve put years into fine tuning has bubbled up quality journalism. Also people do post pretty good TikToks there and that’s nice, as I won’t be learning a new app.

So, in the spirit of a new year’s resolution and doing things differently – welcome to this short first post of 2024. Look forward to content this year like: book reviews, home project musing, and (coming soon!) an entire blog post about gold bond lotion. What would you like to read more of? Let me know!

In the interim, make sure you’re wearing a mask, drinking water, sleeping as much as your schedule allows, and finding a way to laugh and build community as we experience the fall of Rome. Love y’all.

(dog photo tax)

my dog asleep on me
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March 2022 Goals

Sometimes you have to write shit down to hold yourself accountable. This is my attempt to do so.

My goals for March 2022 technology things are:

two blog posts (after this one)

sort photos in one location (either drive or my external)

finish typing up hand written notes from old professional development

read one smart contract

set up this domain’s email (DONE BABY)

I am a firm believer in “write a to do list you can actually do”, so I’ll stop there. What are your goals for spring, either for technology in general?

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technology Uncategorized

in the sin bin

My Twitter account has had various features removed (e.g. posting / shit posting) for my belief that racists should be cyber bullied. I would bully them also in real life, but the Internet is more convenient.

This is a test to see how the wordpress integration works. If you see this week during my ~timeout~, well, that’s just another reason to take the blog more seriously and that mIcRoBlOgGiNg pLaTfOrM run by Neo-Nazis less seriously.

Stay safe and take care out there, folks. It’s still a pandemic everywhere. I’ll be at the house.

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Real Estate is a Scam

I am utterly consumed with trying to find a house to live in where I cut a check to a bank instead of some creep who doesn’t sell their labor. And my partner & I are white technology workers who make decent money, so we’re self-aware of where we push the needle in the gentrifying forces of a city.

I am so salty about the idea of an “assessor” – like, are you kidding me, you’re just going to walk through a property and say “yeah, since this was seemingly owned by white people it’s gonna be worth an extra $50k” like that’s a feature?! We don’t wash our legs! This is common knowledge!

As salty as I am about assessments, I’m also salty about how Zillow now has “homes listed by Zillow” like that’s not a massive conflict of interest. I’m flabbergasted that we don’t just FUND ALL SCHOOLS EQUALLY because that would actually make the “I need to live in the ~best~ school district for my children” problem go away! I hate that people think their house is/should/can be their retirement strategy – this is unsustainable and unwise. I’m angry that house prices have increased but wages haven’t. I’m mad that we have enough empty houses to have everyone living inside, and we would do it if we weren’t a broken society. This whole process has really shown me that we have commodified property in the most dangerous, wasteful, inaccessible, absurd way possible. It’s all so broken!

I was telling a friend we were trying to buy a house, and he roasted me extremely well:

A text bubble says "Also I thought you were against participating in oppressive systems like property ownership" and I respond "I just wanna pay a bank to store my dishes instead of a landlord!"

But also, points were made. Anyway, maybe one day I’ll have a house. Then it’s time to think about the garden and a dog 🙂

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Gravatars are Still a Thing?

I’m just shocked when I see an endangered internet species. It’s like someone giving you a mixed CD of MP3s. As if a person gave you their email address and it ended with “at AOL dot com.” As time moves faster, you start to realize that a lot of relics are just detritus.

I missed out on the heyday of RSS feeds, which I think would have really fit into my internet usage vibe. Let me sign up for content I’m actually interested in, instead of paying a bushel of tippy tappy boys a lot of money to build features I won’t be interacting with – looking at you, Reels and Fleets.

Anyway, I need to get back to my day job, but I was playing around in WordPress and saw Gravatars and felt compelled to comment. Soon this website should actually have my domain properly configured – ah, waiting on a DNS record sync, reminds me of my professional life. Just curious – what’s our rollback plan? :p

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Lani + Caffeine, A Love Story

When I was in high school, I ran on an absurd work ethic, the love and support of my community of fellow nerds, and diet mountain dew. Many thousands of dollars of dental work later (not all caused by soda, a solid half is genetic, sarcastic “thanks parents”, but also a real thank you for paying for the dental work), I realized that maybe I needed to switch to something less acidic. I moved to coke zero, which sustained me through college and for most of my professional career.

Last year, when the world broke, I still had a costco purchased flat of coke zero in my work cabinet (I would put two to three at a time in the kitchen fridge, I’m not trying to hog all the space). When we immediately transitioned to remote work, I started to realize I didn’t want to buy soda in bulk to get it home from the grocery store, which I walk to and from. The costco pallets of soda didn’t fit in our kitchen, and I knew that it was bad for my teeth (also that phenylalanine has been linked to various health issues). So I figured I would become a True Grown Up and switch from soda to coffee.

What I started to realize about coffee is that I’m never going to be a person who cares about the aromas and the flavor profile, but I do enjoy the ritual. I like to spend a few minutes reading my book or doing a puzzle while the water boils and the grounds steep. I’ve even expanded my ritual to include a bi monthly walk to a local coffee shop to buy beans, which feels both like a COVID approved activity and a great way to explore my community. There’s something to be said for making space for rituals in your life – not habits that make you as productive as possible, but rituals that actually enrich your life.

[This story doesn’t have an ending, which I’m beginning to realize will be a common theme in these posts.]