January 2024

Luncheon.

I’m often reminded of how I consider myself to be one of the luckiest men in the world. Earl and Jamie were going out to lunch today, which would leave me “vending for myself”, as my husband likes to put it.

Apparently he does not trust my culinary instincts, so before leaving for his luncheon date, he made me a very pleasant salad with some steamed shrimp on top.

And it was delicious.

As an aside, after watching “Downton Abbey” over the years and now thoroughly enjoying “The Gilded Age” on HBO/Max, I feel inclined to enjoy luncheon, instead of just eating lunch.

Radiant.

I didn’t get to see the sunset last night, but the after glow that hung around for a long while was impressive. My iPhone camera didn’t capture the colors the way I wanted it to. It was a good moment.

Anti.

My love-hate relationship with Meta (the corporation that owns Facebook, Instagram, and others) continues.

As a private pilot without a lot of aviation friends in this part of the world, I like interacting with fellow pilots online. Facebook Groups lends itself to this. Instagram provides a lot of General Aviation content as well. I enjoy these things.

However, Meta has begun pushing Threads, their Twitter clone, in Instagram. Hard. In between photos and videos of folks I follow (and plenty of ads) on Instagram, my feed is now peppered with updates from Threads. I haven’t used Threads in months after giving it a try when it was first announced. I found it confusing and redundant at best.

Usually I would scroll beyond these Threads suggestions without a second thought, but one of the suggestions caught my eye. I’m not going to link to it and I’m not going to quote it because it was just incredibly gross. The link in question had an appreciable amount of anti-trans rhetoric in it. I scrolled down further and the next link had a good amount of anti-gay dialog in it.

I believe Meta’s algorithm was trying really hard to goad me into engagement by enraging me. And that’s why social media platforms based on algorithms controlled by corporations suck. That’s why we are in the societal disarray we are in today. Corporations want money and the way to get that money is to engage users by enraging them.

Now, I can ignore these stupid attempts at grabbing my attention. As a grown man I have the smarts and wherewith-all to just scroll beyond this idiocy. But I fear many do not and they go down the anti-whatever rabbit hole and then get poisoned by the rhetoric. This is how the new Republican party works in general. Outrage, yell, and hook the stupid.

I’ve always believed one should have a permit to get on the Internet and I stick by that.

In the end I can say that I’m not going to use Meta’s products and contribute to their bottom line but in reality I have just completely removed them from my phone and I only access their products on my computer where I have so many ad blockers and content modifiers in place that they need a physical crowbar to feed their stupidity at me. It’s worth the cost.

What isn’t worth the cost is the idiocy of Meta in general. I desperately wish the aviation community would move away from the paid platforms to open source alternatives like Mastodon and PixelFed. Hell, I’d be good with old fashioned GEnie Roundtables or AOL message boards at this point. Plenty of folks are moving away from the corporate social media platforms but not enough folks are following the lead.

Admittedly, I’m not helping the cause by still peaking from my computer. I realize this as I type this blog entry.

Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and start staying away from those platforms completely.

My aviation presence on Mastodon is on MyTransponder. My general presence on Mastodon is on Hachyderm.

Dance Break.

One of my favorite ABBA songs was never released as a single. They performed it a few times on television back in the day, but this one has always been relegated to album track status.

This particular mix is missing the harmonies on the chorus and honestly I prefer it to the version on their greatest hits albums.

From 1979, here’s “If It Wasn’t For The Nights” by ABBA.

Chase!

Dr. Reed Timmer, storm chasing guy of Team Dominator, has predicted a total of 1,207 tornadoes in 2024. This is based on data aggregated from years with similar weather patterns (El Niño, oceanic water temperatures, etc) over the past 50 years. It looks like New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida are going to see an above average count of tornadoes this year.

I have been on the fence about going on another storm chasing week during the peak season this spring. While I did see one tornado last year and experienced some impressive lightning storms, Mother Nature was in a mood for the week I was out on the Plains and I found 2023’s trip disappointing. My chase in 2022 was fun, though, and on both occasions I got to meet some other storm chasers and see some great landscape. It’s just that last year I had to do a LOT of driving day to day because of Mother Nature’s hissy fit last year.

It looks like this year could be more promising if I time it right and incorporate the lessons I’ve learned over the last few years into my approach for this coming year.

I know I have the support of my husband if I decide to go. I’ll be watching the weather patterns closely over the next few months and plan out a more spontaneous approach (ha!) to the trip in 2024.

2024.

So here it is, the 1st of January. I slept in a bit this morning. I’ve gone for a walk around the neighborhood (which was very quiet) and now I’m thinking about the New Year and what lies ahead.

It took me a little while to get my gears turning this morning. I looked back at yesterday’s blog entry and a couple of my social media posts and I probably wasn’t as optimistic as I really want to be. What the world needs is more optimism. Sometimes it’s hard to find that optimism but I shouldn’t stop trying to find it.

Getting through the holiday season is always an exercise of “getting over the hump” for me. I worry too much on the upslope, I love it when it peaks, and then I’m a little sad when we’re on the downslope and getting ready to idle into the winter months.

We don’t have a lot planned for the New Year’s Day; I may go browse a locally owned used book store. There’s a couple of titles around meteorology and storm chasing that I’ve been looking at online; it’d be great to support the locally owned bookstore by buying a gently copy of the title.