Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

As I build up the blog list in the right hand column of this bloggy thing here, I’m noticing that some folks opt to not show their entire post in their RSS feed. Instead, the feed features a first paragraph, or in some cases a sentence or two intended to entice folks to their website for the rest of their writings. These are all perfectly fine approaches, but as I start to rely on RSS more as a way to discover content on the Internet, I sometimes have an unread feed list of 50+ items from the past day. Again, this is all perfectly fine, however, because I have varying degrees of attention span, I may gloss over a really blog feed because something in the tickler prose didn’t grab my attention.

This got me thinking about titles on blog posts. I have used titles on my blog posts for well over two decades. Around 10 or 11 years ago I started using one or two word titles in some sort of edgy (at least in my mind) way, and honestly, I think I got the idea from Jennifer Saunders’ titles used in certain seasons of “Absolutely Fabulous”.

Using one or two word titles has resulted in WordPress incrementing file names on the direct links back to these posts; I wouldn’t be surprised that if I hit publish it’s actually going to show as “titles-3” or something similar in the address bar of your browser when you read it. Nothing wrong with this and in a way it’s kind of nifty to see how many times I’ve used the word “titles” to title a blog entry.

As an aside, in early 2023 my husband and I binged “The Good Wife” from beginning to end, watching one or two episodes every night. It didn’t take me very long to figure out what the writers were doing there with episode titles.

• Season 1 = one word title
• Season 2 = two word title
• Season 3 = three word title
• Season 4 = four word title
• Season 5 = three word title
• Season 6 = two word title
• Season 7 = one word title

I think it was apparent from the very beginning of “The Good Wife” that they intended either a four or seven season run of the series. We never got into “The Good Fight” to see what they did with the titles there. If we want to see Christine Baranski below one-liners we have “The Gilded Age” where she can do a good Maggie Smith impersonation.

OK, I think I’ve gone off in a distracted direction.

Even though we are 13 days into 2024, I think I’m going to try being a little more verbose in titling my blog entries. Aside from the use of “Caturday”, because there’s really only one way to celebrate Caturday and that’s with a properly titled blog entry and some purr-fect photos highlighting the wonders of the local feline.

I hope my title titillated you enough to get to the bottom of this blog entry. I just had to use the word titillated.

I think out loud a lot. I often ask “why”. I think it drives my husband crazy at times, but sometimes I need to know the “why” so I can process it and understand it. I’d suck at just being told to do something without knowing the logic behind it. A weakness? I think not.

One of the things that definitely drives my husband crazy is I’ll process all the “why”s and the outcomes of a discussion out loud when he’s just asking for me to answer a question. For example, he’ll simply ask something like, “do you want to go to DiCastro’s for dinner”? Before I respond I may say something like, “well, I really like the pasta at DiCastro’s and they have a great selection of beer. They’re also really good at Chicken Marsala, but the Trackside has those great bread knots and it’s not too far away. We haven’t seen Lisa in a while”.

“Who is Lisa?”, he asks, with a slight hint of annoyance in his voice.

I look at him in disbelief, “The owner of DiCastro’s, of course”.

You’d think that after almost 28 years he’d be able to keep up with my multi-threaded approach to thinking a problem, but as we get older my multi-threadedness is a bit more scattered and he isn’t the fountain of patience he used to be.

We still make it work.

I try to rail in my ever charging trains of thought but as I get older I simply do not have the bandwidth to keep the herd of cats in my head in the same litter box. I just go with it now, knowing very well that I will come to a sane outcome that probably only I can understand and hope to relay coherently to the rest of the family.

And this is why I’m looking into Focus and Productivity webinar type things on the Internet in this here New Year.

Wish us all luck.

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.