If you come from book culture, the Internet and social media often work the opposite of the way you expect. One of these differences is that readers pay for preserving books, but publishers pay for keeping websites online.
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Where now the blog and livejournal? Where the alert that was blowing?
With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien B.A.
Where are the drafts file and imagebank, and the wild words flowing?
Where is the strife about small wars, and the cathodes glowing?
Where is debate and discovery, and the archives growing?
They have passed like bits on a floppy, like tape in a dashboard
The sites have gone down one by one, by their owners abandoned.
Who shall turn the dry sheaves into green grass waving,
Or behold a sunken ship to the Sun returning?
So, 2021 is crawling out the door under a hail of bullets, arrows, javelins, beer bottles, and hurlbats. A lot happened.
I worked the 2021 election where Canadians told their representatives to go back to work and not ask for absolute power, and I got a part-time job with a large Canadian retailer after three years of unemployment.
I got vaccinated against the COVID-19 pandemic.
I finished the manuscript of my second book and am about to sent a draft around to contacts with the right interests.
I published my first article in a language other than English (Spanish, with the magazine Desperta Ferro).
Read moreThe Arms and Armour Society in the UK is holding a subscription drive to fund their excellent journal. I am informed that if you put a subscription in your shopping cart, go to the shopping cart and enter code facebook2020 you can subscribe for half off. If self-promotion in front of a camera is not... Continue reading: Arms and Armour Society, and the Great Migration
At first I thought substack were just good self-promoters. They managed to convince people to lend them more than $80 million to launch a blog platform with 2010s aesthetics. Most blog platforms will deliver posts by RSS or email if you sign up, and paid and unpaid newsletters go back to the 19th century. Getting people with too much money to give you some is harmless, and convincing people to read and write blogs is good. But then @22@octodon.social suggested I should look at their source code and I saw something as beautiful as the tale of Emperor Norton of the United States.
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My mental health has recovered to the point that I can work on moving the static part of my website onto its own domain name and server. That is good, because WordPress’ web interface has become even more intolerable. Automattic has other frustrating policies, like storing images on their domain not mine (so if I move the site links on other sites to the images break), and editing a customer’s site to stop them from using someone’s legal and most famous name. If you want to see how a computer scientist[1] thinks about this problem, read on!
[1] a scientist with a diploma that says CSC and a resume with “junior software developer” under work experience, at least
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So, it is 2020. It has been an odd year in an odd decade. And while I am tempted to just note who was king and the most exciting thing that happened in the heavens, I want to finish this section of my chronicle. The conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in May was exciting but there are other things to write.
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