Ponderings and Musings

Social media is in such a state these days. Earlier this week, Bluesky announced they’re now letting folks sign up for their service without needing a referral code from an existing member. Apparently the sign up process includes having to give your mobile phone number so you can confirm your identity with an SMS message.

That should make privacy minded people a little nervous, but it’s become the norm with most everything online these days. Disheartening.

I have a couple of accounts on Bluesky that I don’t really use that much. One is for my tech and personal adventures, the other is for my storm chasing and aviation adventures. I use it as a stream of information more than anything, if I look at the platform at all. I don’t have it installed on any of my devices, opting to look through a web browser when I want to see what’s going on. I imagine I might use it a little more during storm chasing season later this spring. It’s good to know what’s going on with others when it comes to storm chasing.

Twitter continues to be a mess. I’ve maintained one account on the platform, again for aviation and storm chasing purposes. A vast majority of the people I followed in general life has fled from the platform. I keep my account purely for a data source and don’t really interact that much with anyone or even look at the platform with any sort of regularity. When I took a peek this morning the suggestions and recommendations went all political and angry and I figured Twitter continues to be the dumpster fire it has become notorious for being.

I really wish more storm chasers and aviators would move over to something like Mastodon, which isn’t controlled by corporate interests.  But when you’re “click-dependent”, whether for monetary purposes or for the dopamine hit, it’s unlikely you’ll immediately get that rush when you switch to Mastodon. And that’s a shame. 

I tuned into Mastodon this morning and saw a bunch of political posts, most of which were shrouded with a content warning as is the practice in most areas of the Fediverse. The never ending disappointment from the Supreme Court of the United States was populating my feed all over the place and it was making my blood pressure rise so I decided to step away from Mastodon for a few days.

The topic of “being a brand” versus “being me” online came up recently in a very interesting thread on Mastodon. I really enjoyed that discussion. I have always been a “what you see is what you get” kind of guy online, as I am in real life. Back in my early 20s, when I was working as a radio personality, I was told I should look a certain way and change my speech both in and out of the studio to meet a certain demographic expectation. I told the person making those recommendations that didn’t really fit my style and I was just going to be me to the best of my ability. My radio career is way back in the rearview mirror of my life but I still try to be honest and true to me when I share my nuggets of life here on this bloggy thingy.

The Mastodon discussion also revolved around people talking about their careers or other business interests first and foremost when it came to “sharing their brand”. I have a great job in tech, I lead an awesome team of developers, and like everywhere else in my life, I strive to be honest and true to who I am when interacting with my co-workers and the team that reports to me. I don’t know how to be any other way and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t get the idea of having to build a brand online or even building a brand in real life. If my husband and I are going to be multi-millionaires it’s because we got there being true to who we are, not because we followed a prescribed notion of who we were expected to be. 

As a complete pivot away from the subject, I’d also like to share that I’m typing this blog entry in an old favorite application called “Ommwriter” that seems to have been resurrected from the dead. I’m listening to music included with the app on my noise canceling headphones. It is suppose to encourage creativity, and it does.

It’s not a bad start to the week. Truman was curious about the tripod sitting on my back desk so I showed it to him.

To celebrate the Chinese New Year, Apple posted a video on their Youtube channel. It’s a well done 15 minute short that tugs at the heartstrings a bit. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

We have finally made it to the last day of January and wow, has it been a long month. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that we started this month with the usual New Year’s Day festivities and that we had a couple of days off for holiday and it still felt like a very long month.

Is it because of a focus on goals for the New Year? Is it because in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere it’s colder and darker than most people enjoy? Even here in the Sonoran Desert I’m wearing pants, though the weather has been surprisingly warm this week.

I’m looking forward to what February brings.

Please pay attention to this pre-takeoff safety checklist, courtesy of Pam Ann. It was nice of Boeing to just modify the 737 instead of coming up with a new design; this safety checklist works for the MAX too!

As I write this it’s 0850 on a Monday morning and I’ve already navigated through multiple fires at work. The only thing that’s keeping me moving forward is one thought.

“Would I want to feel what I’m feeling right now if this moment I took my last breath?”

Life is too short to sweat the small stuff.

I’m reading a book that suggests by remembering how we felt in the past, we possibly stunt our growth for the future.

There are many things I miss about the past. Eating food without worrying about calories. Big metal bowls of popcorn drizzled with real butter. Grandparents that called butter “oleo’. The smiles of loved ones that have passed. The friendly faces of a supermarket cashier named Ruth. The smell of decades old books in the library. Old school penmanship. Mom yelling into the back 40 trying to figure out where I was. Riding in the back seat of a car listening to AM radio. Watching airplanes come and go from a small grass strip. Enough cash to buy things. Going to church and noticing everyone seated in the same place week after week. Shopping in a downtown. Watching the Christmas decorations go up in the village. Wondering what the rest of the country was like and resolving to find out on my own.

The past builds our present. It’s all in the soup. Can’t take it out now. Stir it in and enjoy.

While going through a few general aviation related forums this morning I came across some sad news. A pilot associated with ATP (a flight school) in Addison, Texas, took a brand new Cessna 172, told Air Traffic Control that he was intending to take off, go up through the clouds and “look at everything”, and that he would not follow ATC instructions and was pulling the circuit breakers on the comms equipment. He took off, flew east to a fairly rural area of Texas. The last recorded flight track showed him descending at a very high rate of feet per minute and he subsequently crashed. I believe his name was Logan and he was in his early 20s.

This prompted discussions about suicide and things that lead to this in today’s modern society. The conversation on the forums swung to discussions about bullying in general. When us middle aged pilots were kids, we might have been bullied at school but that generally fell away when we went home. In today’s always connected society obsessed with social media, youngsters don’t get that reprieve. Instead of being bullied just at school (which is horrible in itself), kids continuing the bullying online using all the available social media outlets, and an incident that may have been forgotten in a few days at a school is now recorded, shared, and endures in perpetuity.

Kids have it very rough these days.

I don’t know what led Logan to take his life in a brand new Cessna 172 last night. I just know that it’s heartbreaking when any person finds no answer or no hope anywhere and decides to take their life.

And this happens way too often.