Why a blog?

7 April, 2018

Besides the narcissm…

Facebook feels likes it is rotting. My friends don’t say interesting things there any more. Mostly that’s moved to whatsapp. There is alot of ranting that i’ve mostly blocked. What’s left is mostly baby pictures and my high school friend meeting meeting wierd al. Both of those are great but not what facebook used to be. I never felt like I was a twitter person. There are definitely nuggets of gold but there’s also a never ending river of distraction. I was always a google reader person and still one of those wierdos on feedly (opml). Medium is interesting but as long we’re going open I wanted to go really open.

Leaving something behind…

So about the narcism. There used to be a time I didn’t believe I’d make it to 30. I feel like I’ve had important things I’ve let fade already. I want to have record of my thoughts mostly for myself and maybe for my son if he wants it. I also wanted to get some hiking/beer/travel stuff out of onenote.

So I did what an old person would do and started a blog. Trying this git backed blog. Should be able to keep all the real content in markdown and move it around easily. The formatting is jekyll/Pretzel. Practicing markdown should be good. As always laziness and typos will be the biggest obstacles.

Not trying to solve privacy.

I am not importantly not doing this as part of recent facebook/cambridge analytica controversy. I’ve long been of the opinion that anything you put/do online is already being slurped up and can be used by most other parties. Point to point encrypted messaging (whatsapp/signal) are a bit better but don’t be shocked if that leaks. Instead I try and commit my self to a sort of radical transparency. Is there anything I do online that I would be ashamed of? If a malicious advertiser has my personal details am I a big enough sucker to fall for their pitch. You could argue that in fact you might just get better more well targeted ads. But yeah this isn’t about facebook’s data policies which have never been suprising since they monetize their customer and which I think are mostly fine. If I actually do post here regularly I’ll probably find a way to feed it back into facebook. Turns out they still have a billion users. See the oatmeal.

a rwlated joke

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fixing-social-media