Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

Today in the Sonoran Desert the wind is whipping at 20+ knots with gusts as high as 30 knots. I can hear rain hitting the side of the house with regular reliability and there is a hard freeze warning in effect for tonight and tomorrow night. The National Weather Service is declaring we may hit the record low of 24F.

I guess we needed to get a reminder of a North American winter or something.

I’ve been busying myself in the house with geek projects. I’m playing around with my old ThinkPad T460s, tweaking Pop!_OS on my desktop, and communicating with friends and family via iMessage on my MacBook Air.

Why have one computer when you can swivel between a few of them.

I’m a little short on patience today. I’m finding that as I get older I’m getting a little short of patience on a regular basis. I need to keep that in mind as I work on my personal goals for 2024.

I probably want a nap because of the rain. I think I’ll drink a cup of coffee and go read a book or something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As 2023 comes to a close, I’m reminded of some of the dialog in this “Maude” episode that aired on December 30, 1974. The retching about 1974 giving way to 1975 starts around the six minute mark. It’s shocking how much hasn’t changed in nearly 50 years.

2023 wasn’t my favorite year. 2023 wasn’t my best year. A lot of good things happened in 2023 but it seems like there’s a bit of a wet blanket over the country. I wish I could say I’m looking forward to 2024 but I feel like it’s going to be a continuation of 2023… more war, idiotic American politics, and that looming presidential election. Oh how am I dreading the presidential election. It’s going to be another exercise in “vote for the least worst candidate”. And freaks are going to be running around with their weird cult behavior, folks are going to be saying asinine things online (I really wish you needed a license to get on the Internet), and people that are rich through idiocy are going to continue their idiocy. I know, I sound like a Debbie Downer on this New Year’s Eve.

I’m hoping 2024 proves me wrong.

I have made a list of personal goals and aspirations for 2024 and I’ve already begun work on them with the Winter Solstice. That’s a bright spot. I’ve also purchased a couple of bottles of decent champagne for tonight’s celebration, so that’s always fun. Living in the Mountain Time Zone, the time zone that America forgot, we get to celebrate New Year’s Eve at 10:00 PM from New York, again at 11:00 PM from New York when the rerun the whole affair for the Central Time Zone, and then we’re left with someone dropping a giant taco on Downtown Tucson at 12:00 midnight Mountain Time. I’m not really jazzed about the New Year’s Eve celebrations on the television anyway. We’ll probably just hang out with family and friends and call it a night. It’s like that one New Year’s Eve when I was kid when my mom and dad went square dancing and we were left with a babysitter named that didn’t move off the couch the entire night and forced us to watch “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?”

Maybe I should go take a nap so I’m ready for the frivolity.

I found this marketing display on the cash register at Wendy’s to be interesting. If you read the fine print you’ll notice it’s meant for the drive thru.

When I shared this with the family on our private chat, Jamie posted this which made me laugh out loud while I was still waiting in line.