Frosty had a followup appointment at the vet today after his TECA procedure. After years of trying to handle his chronic ear infections, surgery to remove the ear canal was the only solution. He's now deaf in his left ear, but should lead a better life.
I wonder why these animals love us. Could you imagine being packed up in a box brought to a place where a doctor removes your canal leaving you deaf, spending the night in that unfamiliar place, coming home the next day and curling up next to the person who sent you to that place? It's not like you and I that have some reason I can't understand why things are being done all you know is this person who you love has brought you to a place to be tortured and damaged and yet you come home and you love on them. It baffles my mind.
Posted this on Facebook today:
But I knew that I would fight hell
And I knew: We will
Go for another time we can see
For another time we'll be free
For no more farewell”
- Farewell, The Metal Opera, Avantasia
First off, thank you all for the birthday wishes, in spite of this post, they are truly appreciated.
I’ve been involved in one sort of online community or another since the late 80’s: BBSes, usenet, IRC, MUDs, CompuServe, AOL, GeNie, forums, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Twitter, Pounce, Plurk, Facebook, (I know I missed many), What started off as exciting exploration in media hacking has devolved into proving you lead the perfect insta-life. What used to be a pleasure has become a chore. I could probably deal with all that but the algorithm constantly hides what’s important. I’m more likely to find out what Star Wars character you are than the important developments in your life. I have to hunt to find out about your new marriages, but am quickly inundated with what song is your perfect 80’s power ballad.
I’ve decided, at least for a while, to take a pause, reflect and enjoy the air around me. I’ve been feeding the online beast for over 35 years I think I’ve earned a break. So, for a time I won’t be paying attention to social media.
This is not you, this is truly online fatigue. I’m not closing my accounts, I’m just going to leave them alone for a while, at least until I miss them. I’ve already deleted the apps from my phone and am enjoying taking in the world around me instead of at my phone as I walk around.
If you long to meet again”
- Farewell, The Metal Opera, Avantasia
I will long to meet you again. My email is sean@seanreiser.com. My personal number is REDACTED it’s an iPhone so FaceTime and Blue Bubbles are there. I promise not to discriminate if you’re a green bubble. I plan on keeping Facebook Messenger open. I’d love to see you in person, even if it’s a socially distanced conversation at the opposite ends of a 6 ft park bench under N95 masks.
If you want me to have your contact info, I set up this form a few months back feel free to fill it out: REDACTED . If you don’t, I understand maybe we’ll meet at a con or bump into each other IRL.
I know this isn’t an airline and I don’t need to “announce my departure”, but as I’ve been detaching more and more from social media, I wanted to let you know why.and how to find me if you desire.
I’ll probably be on in the next day or 3 to handle any comments from this post. Please feel free to react / comment to game the algorithm.
Expect me, when you see me,
sean.outAHere()
It's interesting the above post shows the some of the things that I missed tailoring my post to Facebook. The block quotes for the songs, the italics for the credits even the bold for the redacted information that I didn't want to post here on my blog. It also shows some of what I am missing by not posting on Facebook. Since I can target my posts there to a certain population I can freely share a phone number or a deeplink.
Today I was reminded of one of the weaknesses of grouping posts by date using a Drupal. Posts are just going to be listed on any given day in reverse chronological order. So where I've had a number of posts about my birthday today add a couple of posts about this relaunch they're not being grouped logically. Also from an editorial control perspective I want the birthday post on the top of the page and the other posts logically grouped down the page. In the past I'd change the time of the posts to put them in the order I'd want. It worked but it was inelegant. This time around instead of using a view to grab the posts I think I'm going to have a parent node, a day node for lack of a better description. This note would have three fields: a date, the title, and a node reference to collect the posts. Using the edit page, I can simply re-order posts as I want.
This gives me the added benefit that I can have a post appear on multiple days. In the past when I had to do this I'd redate the post but I'd lose it off the original day it was posted. That might be useful.
I just looked at the code for the TWIG template for the post contact type. My site is usually the first one I use when learning something new so when I move to Drupal 8, this is one of the first TWIG templates I wrote and it shows. I'm going to take a deeper dive at this later in the week I think I'm going to desperately need to re-factor this template maybe even rebuild it from scratch. On the plus side it's good to know that I can still learn things this is a good way to measure that. Improvement in progress are important.
Project Clean Slate
I'm sure it's obvious to people who paid attention that I've been less active here on my blog. I've been writing content for online consumption since the 1980s when I participated in BBSes and for most of that time I wrote to an audience of one, me. I believed that some subset of the population would enjoy what I write and find things interesting.
Then I made a mistake of cross-posting content onto Facebook and things started to change. At first I change the layout of this blog to more closely resemble the timeline that you see on apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Then I stopped using HTML elements that would not supported by these are the platforms (hyperlinks, blockquotes, lists, etc). Next, folks said to me "you know, if someone doesn't react or comment on your post you're wasting their time" and "you should be creating content that's more accessible to all your friends, not all of us like her understand Drupal, and geeky stuff". And that's when it happened, I began prioritizing chasing likes and comments over producing contact that was interesting to me. I have a folder of posts that were abandoned because I was concerned that they fit into two small an audience. Over time, creating content went from being a pleasurable experience to a chore. Since I'm not doing this professionally but for pleasure, I posted less.
It's natural to begin to chase likes, shares, comments on Facebook. It is the currency for the algorithm. The higher the rate of engagement will spread your content by more of your friends and future content you post is more likely to be seen by more people. I just want people to know what was going on with my life so I post to feed the algorithm rather than to make me happy.
I've decided it's time for a change. Instead of trying to get what I've done in the past to fit in with what I want now, I'm going to archive my old posts. You can find them here. I'm gonna start with a clean slate and play and experiment. I think I'm going to start with the current blog post type that I'm using and use a Drupal Viiew to group entries by date. This is pretty much what my blog was five years ago before I started catering more and more to Facebook. And we'll see where it goes from there. I like the way things are going I'll find a way to take my old posts and bring them into the same format if not I'll try something else and move on.
In addition to rebooting my blog, I am pulling away from Facebook as a consumer for a bit. I've always felt that the signal to noise ratio is a bit too low for me. At least for me, the API seems to surface the more banal contact over the important things that are published. For some reason I always seem to have to search to find important moments in my friends lives but Memes and quizzes are always in my face. I really don't care what somebody's perfect 80s power ballads is, I do want to know when they have major events in their life which is always a quest.
I have already deleted the Facebook app from my phone, so I can only access FB via the browser. I find that I'm looking around more in the world as I walk or sit in a park or whatever which is nice. I don't know if I can keep that up I'd like to try.
| Seán Reiser