Move to your own little island archipelago on the internet. What Warren Ellis coined as “The Isles of Blogging”. Each blog “a little radio station broadcasting though the night”
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Early 2018 being the start of the Archipelago (re)settlement in my mind. The seas of social media have risen around us. So blogs, what once were the mountain tops of internet culture have become little Islands.
I love this analogy of blogging in today's age where social media dominates the internet.
Years ago on my first job, I was working as a software developer on a support team. That job was tough and stressful. Being on-call often didn't help. Calls at 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM, 4 AM? Yeah, I would get up and answer my phone. I even answered calls as I was trying to get ready to go to work. There was a day or two where I didn't get to sleep at all, because we were stuck on a conference call trying to fix something. It was a very tough job.
I developed a bad case of eyestrain then, though I didn't know it yet. It became so bad that it would cause dizziness every once in awhile. Just moving my eyes from one monitor to another would sometimes trigger it. Just sitting down and looking at something would sometimes trigger it. It became so bad that I was worried that I had some sort of issue with my heart. So I bought a Fitbit with a heart rate monitor. The idea being that whenever I felt dizzy, I would check my heart rate to verify whether something was wrong with my heart, or if it was something else. I've worn my Fitbit everyday since then.
The title of this video is kinda misleading. It almost sounds like the blame is being placed on millennials. It is not. It actually is a great video talking about smartphone addiction and how this is wreaking havoc on the younger generation. This was a really good watch. I even learned a thing or two about alcoholics.
There were so many good points that Simon discussed in this video. I'm kind of annoyed at myself at not having found this video sooner. If you have any interest in trying to get your attention back or have an interest in digital minimalism, you should definitely watch this video.
I'm subscribed to the Word on Fire newsletter. I've recently learned that Bishop Barron did another podcast with the guys at Mind Pump Podcast. Before listening to the new one that he appeared on, I tried to the listen to the first one. What I found was a wonderful, really good introduction to Christianity and God. Whether you are a believer or not, there is something for everyone in here.
So when I started this experiment, I wanted to see what would happen if I disable the ability for me to view this site's stats. The result, a much better online writing experience. Not being influenced by the number of readers I get, allows me to simply not worry about it. It makes it easier to just write about something I want to write about. It makes it easier to write for myself.
As a related update to the results from Experiment Log – 001, I found that the number of readers did not increase in the 2nd half of that experiment. It stayed low when my posts were not being listed in the Read.Write.As feed. As I stated in the results for that experiment though, I no longer care about that.
For some reason, Spotify “Shuffle Play” does not work at all on my car. When I play a playlist with “shuffle” turned on, it will work fine for a number of songs, but after that, it starts playing songs in alphabetical order by artist or title.
The problem specifically is that the Spotify app will randomize a set number of songs and then put them in your play queue. Once you reach the end of the queue, it should randomize a new set of songs again and add them to your queue. This is the part that doesn't seem to work in my car. It will generate a random list of songs the first time, but then it gets stuck after that and just goes through songs in alphabetical order. This apparently is an issue specific to my car, a 2013 Mazdaspeed3, so I would think this also affects 2010-2013 model year Mazda3s with the Bose audio unit. My wife, who drives a 2016 Mazda does not have this problem.
A surprisingly, pretty good read on struggling to justify the love of automobiles in the face of climate change. Written from a car enthusiast point of view. Not something that I expected to read from a car magazine.
But. How else do you go anywhere in America? Outside a few select corridors, our public transit is patently terrible. And at the risk of sounding like a selfish ostrich, I like driving. You control a satisfying machine. Travel independently and with minimal restriction. In this vast country built by and for the automobile, the machine too often makes sense.
This is definitely a problem here. I've a tried a number of times to find a way for me to cycle to work, but it just won't work. My ride would force me into roads with inattentive drivers who drive with their eyes glued to their phone screens. Yeah I'm not risking my life riding my bike alongside drivers like that. Which is unfortunate, because I think cycling is a better, more environmental friendly alternative to internal combustion engines than electric cars are, as far as work commute goes.
It's been almost one month since I started this experiment. I've decided to end it at the start of a new month, just because I didn't see any benefit to prolonging it. I started this experiment with the intention of answering the questions below. And so here are the answers.
I want to see if not publishing to the Read Write.As feed will decrease the number of people reading my posts.
So this was interesting because during the start of this experiment, I still had access to my site's stats. However, a little over a week after starting this experiment, I started Experiment Log – 003, which basically hid my site's stats.
Update 06/05/2020 — Redid this music log with YouTube videos and an updated post slug. This used to be Music Log – 014 | Falling in Reverse Part 2. With the updated post slug,you should be able to use the footer links to navigate from this entry, all the way down to the first one (Music Log – 001), and vice versa. Note that the footer links will only show up if you have Javascript enabled.
This is part 2 of the Falling In Reverse music log edition. Let's start off with the song “Fuck You and All Your Friends”. Don't let the title of the song stop you from trying to listen to it. It is a really great track with an awesome build up to the chorus. The reason the title is so negative, is because if I'm not mistaken, the song is based off the fractured relationship between the band's vocalist and his friends from his previous band (before he formed Falling In Reverse).
That “something else” might be something similar to the Hawthorne's. Of course it might not be on that intimate of a level, but to have another individual read our entries and build a joint narrative alongside us – a vision of writing on the web as writing in a shared journal.
I think CJ Eller in this post touched upon something that I didn't know was at the back of my mind; part of me wants my close friends to also be writing journals or writing on their own blogs.
Back when I was in high school, it was me and a couple of friends who were always playing around with computers and consequently the internet. We had our own Archmage guild. We tried to find ways to end up in the same kingdom when playing Utopia. We spent countless nights hanging out on mIRC channels. We had customized Friendster profiles. We had our own blogs. We basically followed each other online, just like close friends do.