Journal

I was going through my Braintoss messages and this one from April, 2023 jumped out at me:

there's a low-level specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones

Ouch 😬 (It's from ― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility)

Also this one:

The thing I miss most about working is canceled meetings.

And this:

you know I think I want to read a book about minimalism as a concept but really I just want somebody to tell me how to organize my closet

I hate to judge, but I have trouble taking you seriously when you use a half-naked anime character as your desktop background.

I thought maybe I'd change themes here just to change things up a bit, without completely bailing on Hugo, as I'm wont to do. Changing Hugo themes is almost as much of a pain as changing blogging engines. I gave up after an hour.

jAlbum is pretty good at creating nice static web photo galleries. I made an elaborate gallery last year. It was nice, but now I can't find my copy (or settings, originals, etc.) I'm not mad because I have to start over. I'm mad because all I do is organize stuff and despite that, I still can't find things. Probably because of that, honestly. Anyway, starting over.

I need some new sources. Everything I read is related to AI or social media or some gadget I simply must buy. I'm bored with all of it.

See, the thing is, I need to somehow keep the the "Reduce & Simplify" dream alive. It's OK if my system takes a little work to maintain, but it has to be one system. I can manage one. What I can't do, is have a bunch of completely different setups that each take "a little work" to maintain. I've become overwhelmed as a result of my never-ending urge to tinker (combined with boredom). So here we are, on baty.net, doing daily notes again. One Blog, One Life or some such thing, right?

Speaking of limiting my systems, I just paid for an entire year of Adobe Photography 1TB plan (~$250). That committment requires that I don't renew my Capture One subscription, which is about the same cost, but C1 doesn't include Photoshop, LrC, Bridge, and 1TB of cloud storage. Seems like a no-brainer, but I still find it difficult to decide. Lightroom it is, I guess.

I'd rather have Reddit posts slurped up by AI than hit a bunch of [deleted] dead-ends when I'm trying to find the answer to something just because someone left in a huff.

Maybe my favorite "feature" of Flickr is...it remains Desktop-first. Mobile phones ruined proper photo sharing.

See how the way I'm doing this blog ruins the archives?...

Thanks Frank! It's good to know I'm not alone.

I went to sleep last night having decided that, "Tomorrow, I'm going to revamp my Emacs config and go back to my home-grown config." This morning, I thought, "Life would be easier if I just used Obsidian instead." So yeah, normal day so far 👋🏻.

The market has chosen Markdown over Org mode files and I hate that.

Wouldn't it be great if, instead, we just stopped wanting more stuff?

I am almost embarrassed to admit that Adobe Bridge has become my default for dealing with photos. After dismissing it for years, it might now be my favorite "new" app. Weird how that happens. It does so much more than I thought.

I don't have the energy to go around looking for things to be mad at.

The only thing Obsidian has to offer over Emacs is convenience. That's not a good enough reason to use it.

JFK Jr. is a public health emergency

Online following and Starter Packs · Luna’s Blog

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.

Hold on a sec, do we want to make it easier to find interesting people to follow or not? I can't keep up.

I can understand why it's worth the conversation, but this sits wrong with me. I can't help but read it as, "Sure, we want to make it easier to find people to follow, but leave me out of it. Those people haven't earned the right to follow me. And take me off your blogroll while we're at it."

On daily.baty.net, each little whim of a post has its own page and is part of the RSS feed (and gets cross-posted to my mastodon.social bot account). Some days, that's exactly what I want. When I write daily notes here at baty.net, using the single-entry-per-day format, I feel less pressure to make anything "count". And some days, that's exactly what I want. Living in my head is frustrating.

Century-Scale Storage:

But at the century scale, even our most widely adopted file formats are completely untested. Digital history is not long enough to definitively settle on best practices.

So, WordPerfect, then? 😁. Seriously, though, it's a really interesting article.

I joined https://izzzzi.net/ for some reason (I'm jbaty).

I know y'all are sick of me waffling about where to post these little daily notes, but I can't help it. I'm honestly split right down the middle about it. I want everything to be in one place, but I can't seem to make it all fit in one place. At least not the way I want things to fit. I could leave baty.net for the longer posts and daily.baty.net for these daily notes. Or, I could try combining everything here. Or maybe combine everything there and make this a landing page. I think each of these options has equal merit, so I haven't been able to decide, and probably never will. I guess I'll continue posting wherever I'm in the mood to post on any given day.

Today, I'm in the mood to do it on daily.baty.net.

I'm in the middle of re-reading "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport and I must've put the book down to check my phone at least a dozen times last night. I'm doing it wrong.

The best way to avoid having to organize things is to not have things to begin with. I'm deleting so much stuff right now. I'm going to regret it, but I need this. It's self care :)

Markwhen is a markdown-like journal language for plainly writing logs, gantt charts, blogs, feeds, notes, journals, diaries, todos, timelines, calendars, or anything that happens over time .

(h/t @AnthonyBaker)

I spent a good portion of yesterday offline. Well, not technically offline, but not on social media, which feels like the same thing.

Trying to remember to step away from the computer once I notice that all I'm doing is clicking things basically at random. That means I'm done for now, but I rarely heed the clues.

I'm looking at the contents of the media drive on my 2014 Mac Mini and there are dozens of seasons of TV shows in the Plex folder. I don't rewatch shows. Ok, I rewatched The Wire and West Wing but that's about it. I'm planning to decomission the Mini so I'm deciding what I need to keep. I don't need to keep the TV shows. That's a start.

I spent most of the day rejiggering my backups and other parts of my setup. It's December and I have not yet Reduced nor Simplified. I pulled everything off the Mac Mini (2014) server. Consolidated all of my "Attic" folders. Moved backups into one spot. Rebuilt the Roon Core on the original NUC server, where it belongs. Things were getting out of hand, and it felt good to reel it in just a little.

Mastodon is great when I want to listen to people scold each other. Bluesky is for listening to people being performatively clever. I am not enjoying either of them.

Most people care nothing about the things I care deeply about. I'm feeling too old to try convincing them.

Suggesting that people start a blog instead of joining a new social media platform is a category error.

Typing my little takes here on the blog is better than doing it on the socials because here no one bothers to correct me. I don't feel like arguing.

I canceled my membership at 500.social. I wasn't using it enough, so it didn't make it through my end-of-year subscription cutting exercise.

"I don't know anything about what you asked, but here's what I got from Perplexity..." is not helpful. Plus, you still don't know anything about what I asked. We've gotten nowhere and you've wasted our time.

I find that I kind of enjoy starting the day with a quick jab/hugo-new-daily in Emacs and here we are. The issue with publishing right away is that for people who use RSS they may think I'm finished for the day, and that's seldom the case. Sometimes I worry about this, but most of the time I remember that the people subscribed via RSS know me, and I think they understand. :)

Our internet was clocking at around 0.4Mbps second for most of the day yesterday. This morning it's reading 475Mbps so that's, what, 1,000 times faster? So much better.

I replaced the OpenGraph image here with something at least a little less unpleasant. One day I'll try to actually "design" something, but this will do for now.

The Red Hand Files Issue #305

I find there is no more heartening sound than laughter, and in particular, the laughter of my wife. There is a gentle defiance to it, a bell-like music of love that gives grounds for hope

Nick Cave understands.

Oh dear. It's OK, though. What happened was that I started to feel twitchy about having my posts and photos locked up in Ghost. "Locked up" is an exaggeration, of course, but you know what I mean. It's better when everything is in a nice, tidy set of folders on my hard drive, in Org or Markdown format. So here we are, back in Hugo.

I've noticed a drop-off in interaction on Mastodon the past week or two. Is it because people are leaving? Maybe they just don't find me interesting anymore.

What have we done?

In 2016 I was shocked and disappointed. This time, I feel anguish and hoplessness. I have to believe this will pass, just as it did the last time. An old man getting older always ends the same way. And time does that thing that time does, but JFC how did this happen? My mental model of the world and the actual world no longer align.

I thought maybe I'd give up on blogging for a while, but this is one of the few things that helps.

I hope you're voting for Harris today. Other than that, I'm shutting my political brain down for the rest of the day. My heart can't withstand this level of sustained anxiety.

I have a lot of anxiety around flying, so before and during a flight, my brain and body sort of shut down and go into internal, primary-systems-only mode.

That's how I'm reacting to the election.

This is mostly because of two things:

1. Things will probably be OK, but they could end in catastrophe.

2. Once we take off, the results are completely out of my control.

It's terrifying.

Post: A Doom Emacs status update after several days | Baty.net

Do you ever feel like your life's wake is littered with missed opportunities?

I spend so much time looking backwards that I don't pay attention to what's ahead.

I don't understand people who post overconfident, often controversial posts on social media, and then say things like "This is NOT an invitation to debate!...". I mean, where do you think you are? I'll tell you where, you're in a place where everything is an invitation to debate, whether you like it or not.

The time change around DST is not big deal to me. People get all dramatic about a single hour twice a year. I just go about my day as usual.

VOTE FOR HARRIS.

I did. You should too.

ChatGPT is really very handy sometimes. I just asked for a simple bit of lisp for Doom Emacs and it spit out a perfect working function with instructions and an explanation of every step. It's amazing and I'm a little ashamed for taking advantage of it.