w/e 2024-11-17

Back home this week, to my other life, and settling back into those habits and routines.

§ As a distraction from other thoughts I’ve started tinkering with the Kirby CMS. I’ve been wondering how to simplify my personal website and Kirby seems to hit a sweet spot: it’s PHP so could run on good old shared hosting; it stores everything as flat files so doesn’t even need a database; and it has a decent admin front-end (unlike static site generators). At version 4 it seems pretty mature and has a small but helpful community.

So I’ve enjoyed learning something new for the first time in ages, getting very stuck with basic things, learning new shapes and ways of doing stuff. I wrote a script to export my 1800 or so blog posts to files and, running on my laptop, Kirby works well, as far as I’ve got.

I might end up not using it, but that’s fine. Some interesting, personal, low-stakes coding is the best kind.

§ I’m enjoying the sudden influx of collaborators refugees from Twitter/X to Bluesky. My feed there is now busier than my Mastodon feed and, if I mute some of the politics posters, it’s a fun place.

I definitely agree with Cory’s take on Bluesky, that it’s yet another (currently) locked-in, VC-funded social network, and we shouldn’t be jumping into yet another one of those. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

I would love Mastodon, or similar, to be the most successful network but unless it changes I can’t see it. For one thing, there are too many little hurdles for normal people to jump over. So I’m reluctant to go all in on Bluesky but at least, sigh, I guess it’s an improvement.

Occasionally I pop on to X to see who’s still posting and it baffles me. We all make compromises with this stuff – I use WhatsApp and Instagram and, rarely, Facebook despite the awfulness of Meta, and I occasionally buy something on Amazon when there’s no other option, despite the terribleness of it and Bezos. But it’s surprising to see the otherwise reasonable people who are posting on X still. At this point I guess there’s nothing Musk could do that could wean these people off their dwindling followers. It’s an odd look.

§ We watched season three of Industry this week which was really good. It’s nonsense, and doesn’t withstand comparing most of it to reality, or wondering why the characters explain so much to each other in ways they wouldn’t, or thinking about what the morality and lessons of the whole thing are… but if you just go along for the ride it’s good fun. I’m surprised there’s going to be a fourth season because it felt wrapped-up, and already drifting further away from the financial industry at its heart.

§ I finished reading Adam Greenfield’s Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire which was good.

I don’t read many contemporary non-fiction books and most of those I have read over the past decade have been quite disappointing, in a “this could have been an article” kind of way. There’s also a tendency to write a lot of first-person stuff which maybe authors and publishers like because it feels personal and gives it “character” or something? But that always feels “light” and non-serious to me, again more like a magazine article than a non-fiction book about a serious subject.

Anyway, Adam’s book doesn’t suffer that – the only brief bit of first-person experience supports his discussion of how people can get together to help their communities in a time of crisis, and be ready to do so.

I’m not sure I’ll actually do anything as a result of reading it though. Obviously, collective action requires working together with people in your community and… I’m not much of a joiner or a talking-to-strangers-er. Especially recently. My Dad, involved in local politics for decades, said of it, “you have to enjoy meetings,” which he did. I organised my working life around as few meetings and as little in-person interaction as possible, so.

But despite that the book was good, and got me thinking and wanting to read more in a similar vein.

§ I know there were one or two other things I was going to write, but I didn’t make a note of them – “Of course I’ll remember!” – so that’s all.