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Author: Josh

Nothing But Blue Skies Do I See

Published by Josh on November 29, 2024

Minor update to the blog: I eliminated the Twitter link from the sidebar. We’re done with that.

I joined Bluesky in August of last year and, since then, it’s been a revelation in my social media experience. I was a long, long time user of Twitter, from the days of the early failwhales and the open wonder of the platform up until the current bad times. Twitter was my connection to a wider world, unfettered by the vagaries of distribution and scale.

It wasn’t the personal twee of Facebook nor the judgmental essays of Tumblr, nor the empty pictorial promotion of Instagram. It was people, in concentrate, saying things. It required brevity, encouraged wit, and acted as a filler to the empty hours between.

And then some asshole who won’t hear No decided to do what assholes with too much money do. He bought the thing, and because Twitter wasn’t a collective in the end, but a company beholden to the values of a corporation, it sold at the obscene price he offered. Ever since, he went on to make everything worse for the worst reasons.

Bluesky, though similar in tenor, has been just that. A clear blue sky compared to the torrential rains of bullshit Twitter became. It isn’t gamed, isn’t bought, and isn’t for sale. It doesn’t push what users don’t want to benefit those who want their eyes and not their voices. And it has an ethos of telling people they are free to speak, but that we are free not to listen if they so offend our ears.

I lived a long time on Twitter, but in the words of Ella, I’m through living in the storm. Come join me.

Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now on

Blue Skies – Song by Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Weston & His Orchestra

Half A Year

Published by Josh on July 4, 2024
How quickly daily became weekly became silence while time was absorbed by those who’d purchased it wholesale. I assure you, dear reader, I still live, still breathe, still think and feel and jot and jitter, just not here, not so publicly, not so regularly. The tick has not given to tock in this space.

Half a year marked and spent. Half a year to go.

The work is good, fulfilling, if oddly tangential in form. It has evolved from the rote cranking of various knobs to the patient tooling of new parts. From maintenance to engineering. Satisfying, if with more ripples, deeper valleys to descend and climb back out of. It saps, but develops in the stretched places new tissues, new joints, and thicker fibers.

Outside those hours, things continue. A table built, some maternal material requests acknowledged and answered. Items acquired, cataloged, and stored, for further use, or further ponderous potential.

Hopes for various projects to regain their steam stare at the back half of a year, parcelling out potential. Casting their wisps into the unwritten mornings and evenings and ends of weeks, playing for holds upon un-yet-tethered time. We shall see.

Time marches, on and apace. On and apace. Ticking and, here, now, at least, tocking once more. Ever forward.

Weekly Journal – 2/5/24 – 2/9/24

Published by Josh on February 9, 2024

Holy hell, I forgot how much goes into starting a new job. Took three or four different courses on how not to be a dick, plus all kinds of fun trainings on PPE and Tool Safety and Asbestos (asbestos? yes, seriously, asbestos.) which were wild to run through as a tech worker whose office is inside his own house. My brain is a thick sludge and I’m gonna sleep for 12 hours tonight, but it was nice to have some structure and some duties for which I have an agreed-upon wage. ANYhow, here’s some stuff I took in this week!

Also, yep, likely going weekly for a while. At a minimum until I get into the groove with work.

Inputs

1: I was not at all aware how difficult it was to make blue LEDs. I remember when white LEDs first became a thing commercially and how that shift in light generation fed throughout the world, but didn’t quite grok how going from white to colored emissions worked. Pretty wild lesson in physics wrapped around this engineering problem.

2: In other brain-bending videos, the future may have already happened, and we’re just moving through our present experience of time. This, tied in with the proofs that free will doesn’t exist don’t break me at all. Nope. Not one little bit.1Don’t mind my existential screaming into a pillow.

3: “It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”2Ok, yeah, just posting a link to an XKCD is cheating, but damned if inflation projected outward in time isn’t fuckin’ nutty to grasp. Also, I got to share the Is it Worth the Time chart with my boss today, who’d never seen it before. So there, two comics.

4: De Bruyne’s back, Haaland’s back, and Foden scored a hat trick. It’s over for you bitches. Game on!

5: It’s Ten New Brews season! I’ve been playing Magic on and off since Revised (so, like 1994?), as a semi-serious amateur and a very casual, and all points in between there. It’s feeling like I’m near to picking it back up a bit again, at the start of a new set, and watching Jim Davis go nuts brewing gets at that itch that the game has always scratched for me, of finding new ways of solving a competitive puzzle.

I’m never going to go pro3Though writing that was harder to admit out loud than I’d have figured, but since that’s not the goal, I can allow myself the space to have fun while putting in the work to be good at the thing. Anyhow, niche audience for the last one, but I’m in it, and hey, maybe you are too.

Notes:

  • 1
    Don’t mind my existential screaming into a pillow.
  • 2
    Ok, yeah, just posting a link to an XKCD is cheating, but damned if inflation projected outward in time isn’t fuckin’ nutty to grasp. Also, I got to share the Is it Worth the Time chart with my boss today, who’d never seen it before. So there, two comics.
  • 3
    Though writing that was harder to admit out loud than I’d have figured