I meant to post when I planted but did not because, “reasons.” More specifically, a lack of motivation to do so. It’s not exactly anything impressive anyway, but that isn’t really supposed to matter anyway. My 2024 gardening is underway, and if it’s anything like the past several years, it will not be very fruitful.
At our old house, we had a pretty decent garden. I built a nice tiered raised bed pyramid thing, we grew plenty of peppers and tomatoes and the plants were super large and full. We had so many tomatoes we made a ton of salsa and I think I still have hot peppers frozen somewhere, though I doubt they are any good years later now.
The new house has been, not so successful. We get a lot more backyard animals here, and generally speaking, they eat all the fruits and vegetables. We have tried a few things to discourage it from keeping them up high on the back deck, to rubber snakes and other things.
I am trying again this year. I moved all of the plants (everything is is pots or buckets) down to the lower deck area, the pots still have the useless rubber snakes. I put my wind chimes down there as well, I am hoping the noise deters the animals a bit. In the past, we could not really use this lower area because we had our dog outside down there fairly often and she would get into things. She passed away a few years ago (like 20 years old, we thought she was immortal). So the lower area is available.
Anyway, also for deterrent, I have planted a bunch of garlic in the bottoms of all the pots, and a few mint plants in small pots nearby. Both are supposed to deter animals due to the smell, or so I hear.
As for what, it’s nothing super fancy, a tomato plant, a cherry tomato plant, a green pepper plant, a poblano pepper plant. I also have some oregano and basil. I also had a cilantro plant but something has already come along and snatched it up completely. Most of the plants I picked up from a sale at the local college agriculture building. They did not have any mint there though so I picked those up at the Kroger. They were conveniently on sale in the vegetable department later the same day I had gone to the college sale.
I also had my leftover plants from last year. Sadly, none of those had made it. We took them inside for the winter but they don’t seem to be coming back at all. Something took and ate my oregano and basil from last year anyway. I also had a Lemon and a Lime tree I had bought on clearance at the end of the summer last year. Both just seem to be dead sticks still.
I don’t have enough plants to make any huge batches of salsa or anything, but hopefully I can start getting some vegetables to eat occasionally.
It’s been a bit since I’ve last posted, I admit. Today I mostly wanted to address a few housekeeping matters.
I’ve moved the Letterboxd movie post syndication to Lameazoid.com. These posts were filtered from the home page and primarily serve the purpose of archiving what I post on Letterboxd. Frankly,. if you cared about these, I’d prefer a follow over there. They also now appear here on Lameazoid. They are still excluded from the main page. I post TV and movie content on Lameazoid, it’s just a “better fit” over there.
On the subject of “mostly for archival purposes”. I believe I have at least made the BlueSky archive posts slightly less ugly looking. Maybe not. I am not entirely sue how to use all fo the options on the RSS feed plug in and it’s not really important enough to care that much. It’s primarily for archival purposes, in case Blue Sky, or Letterboxed, etc close, I still have my posts. I want to add Threads as well at some point.
My wife is trying to get more serious with her online sales business. We’ve set up a website and Facebook page for it. The website collects the various sales pages mostly. Anyway, I’ve replaced the old “ebay” link with a link to the site. If you want to buy vintage (and some newer) clothing, that’s the primary things for sale over there.
Also notable, I updated the theme to something else. Mostly, I was bored with the old one.
I keep telling myself I should post and write more, I have ideas and thoughts to post on, but in the end, I just get in the way of myself and don’t. I even started writing in my own private journal a bit more just to sort of, try to get the juices flowing more. Which sort of works, but also not. Anyway, I just wanted to get these couple of housekeeping things mentioned.
I have really really tried to mostly avoid discussing Twitter and Musk and everything that has happened over the past, year and a half to two years there. I do occasionally share news in the link blog posts, but even there, I mostly just avoid it. I am pretty outspoken about my dislike of Musk and Twitter on other forums but not on my own forums.
Watching this death spiral is really entertaining though.
And it is a death spiral. It may not actually result in the death of Twitter, god knows we won’t get that lucky, but it’s just increasingly looking shittier and shittier over there. I stopped using Twitter completely the day Musk took over. I deleted a bunch of random secondary meme accounts I had after that, and I did log in a few times to pull all my Tweet archive data. I want to, someday, maybe, write a Python Script that will parse through it all and compile it into a bunch of daily digests I can dump into a WordPress blog, for posterity. I also started running some Python scripts before the API was cut off to delete all my old Tweets from the site. As far as I know, I still have my @ handles, mostly kept to prevent them from getting scooped up by spammers and bots.
I am not sure though. I blocked Twitter shortly after I started using NextDNS (Referral Link) everywhere. I can’t even check on my own accounts without a bunch of extra steps anymore. At this point, I really don’t care. I am not going back ever so long as Musk is even remotely connected to the service and I doubt he ever gives it up. I do keep watch from the sidelines. I see mentions of large businesses or politicians or news outlets moving permanently to Threads. I see people talking about how blue-checked bots are topping all the replies. I see complaints about all the crypto scams and weed gummies being advertised. I see it, and I quietly laugh to myself. Because all of this happening was clearly going to be the outcome of a big winey racist narcissist forcibly taking things over.
I’m not entirely convinced this wasn’t the intended outcome honestly. People like Musk, with their “free speech advocacy”, generally dislike actual open discussion and speech. They dislike when people can talk openly to each other and let ideas swell and become reality while smashing down stupid racist bull shit and conspiracy lies.
Fun fact, you can post a tweet with phrases like “Transwomen aren’t women” but if you post about “CIS people” you get flagged for using a slur.
Probably the first and biggest stupidity was the new pay-to-play blue check system that was implemented pretty early on. Blue Checks were originally issued as a way to verify people and companies were actually who they were. Someone at Twitter would do due diligence to make sure @McDonalds was actually run by the popular restaurant chain. This also meant not allowing blue checks for “@MacDonalds” or “”@McD0nalds” or various other typo-style fake accounts. It meant something. Early on, this was changed so Blue Checks just meant you had a paid subscription. Anyone could get a blue check. It also showed that you were supporting the racist jackass and his company, so a lot of previously verified celebrity types, refused to pay. Some were given checks anyway, which also upset these companies and people since it of course, implies support. It’s essentially a false endorsement.
As more advertisers fled the platform as it became increasingly filled with assholes and bots and scams, the Blue Check system has just been pushed more and more in a desperate attempt to make up for lost ad revenue. The irony being that even if EVERYONE signed up, it’s not where neat what advertisers were paying. The latest stupidity is that they now require new users to pay in to start posting. It’s pushed as a way to “deter bots”. Twitter doesn’t seem to understand just how cheap $8/month/account is for priority visibility for scams. One might wonder if it’s still worthwhile if so many are jumping ship, but it’s like those scam emails full of spelling errors. The scammers do this to weed out the intelligent users so only the choices of marks remain. Twitter is doing a GREAT job of weeding out the intelligence from its system leaving nothing but easy marks for these scammers.
I almost would feel bad for these people if they weren’t mostly the same people pushing all the hate-filled stupidity on the world in politics during the past decade. But that’s probably left to another discussion, if ever.
The really funny part is how this isn’t even the first time this has happened to a microblog service centered around “Free speech”. Gab, Truth, Parlor, and others I am sure I’ve forgotten are all basically complete failures after they failed to take off and get any real traction after being filled with right-wing extremists which at best just drives away any legitimate advertisers. Truth recently pushed a scam IPO as a way to grift money for Trump’s lawsuits which is failing pretty spectacularly.
Because of course it is. It was a grift to funnel money in a “legitimate” manner, and now it’s just a bunch of bag holders getting fucked over.
Alternatives
I have not really quite settled on a good alternative to Twitter yet. I’m not entirely sure I really NEED one. I wasn’t using Twitter a lot before the fall, though I had used it since 2006 when it was very very new. The alternatives all have their own sort of pitfalls.
Threads seems to be the most active. It’s run by Facebook and is technically a spin-off of Instagram. I kind of like Threads, because it’s full of people posting Toy photos. Basically, everything I used to like about Instagram, before it became TikTok but with ads every 3 posts, is Threads. I don’t super like that it’s a Facebook property. I also hate how the timeline feels really really algorithm-driven.
BlueSky feels the most like “old Twitter”. and I don’t mean “2021/2022 Twitter”, I mean like, “2007-2008 Twitter”. OLD old Twitter. But it’s also kind of dead as fuck. Even now that it’s open to anyone without the need for invites, it feels a bit deserted.
Mastodon is probably my favorite. People claim it’s “hard to use” but it really isn’t. The real technical hurdles on Mastodon kind of stem from servers and admins who tend to be a little… eccentric, for lack of a better thing to call them. There are admins who will ban entire other instances because ONE user on that other instance says something that is kind of maybe offensive to … somebody. Or heck, even blatantly offensive to everyone. But the whole server gets banned over one person. Which feels a bit shitty, especially since there also feels like a lot of mindset that “once banned, it’s banned forever.”
The federation also had some weirdness. Sometimes I get a new follower, so I go and check them out to see if I want to follow back, but in the app, they LOOK like they have a blank profile. But if I open their profile in a web browser, it’s complete and they have posts. So there is clearly some weird syncing issue there. I’m not familiar enough with how the federation works to know the details, but from what I have gleaned from other discussions, it’s something like that. Or maybe that server is banned for some reason.
It’s also kind of clunky to re-toot something, from that something. If I link to a Toot, and you want to re-toot it, from what I can tell, you need to cut and paste the URL and do a search to find it from your own server. Or do a weird login jaunt from the local server. And it’s all very doable, but it’s cludgy as fuck.
Anyway, I kind of post to all three, sometimes I post the same thing to all three, sometimes I kind of segment it out depending on “audience”. Not that I really have an audience. My pseudo plan is to mostly use Threads for Toy stuff, and BlueSky or Mastodon for everything else. I’m not entirely sure yet. There also aren’t really easy tools to post things like, blog posts, automatically to Threads or BlueSky. This was a factor that always felt like part of why Google Plus failed.
In 2017, I took a trek with my parents down to Carbondale Illinois to view the total solar eclipse. While these are reasonably common occurrences, they are not super common in an area where it’s easy to go see them. At this point, I’ve been fortunate to have two of them come nearby within a few years. We had vague plans to go back to Carbondale again for the 2024 eclipse but instead opted to go to my aunt and uncle’s place in Indiana. With one big benefit being that it meant avoiding excessively pricey hotels. Last Eclipse, we stayed in my parent’s camper, but they don’t have the camper anymore so that wasn’t an option this round. It also meant it was much easier to stay an extra night and avoid the stress of the traffic leaving the area.
Aside from visiting my relative’s new house for the first time, my main draw is trying to take photos of the event. It’s also just, neat to be here. My pics from last Eclipse came out pretty well, and I wanted to give it another go. I also tried a little experiment this time using my laptop and a spare webcam I had to try to take a video of the while thing. This… sort of worked out, but it’s not exactly amazing footage. It was still a fun experiment though.
The actual eclipse photos themselves came out alright, though I am not sure why they have such a blue tint to them. It looks pretty cool though. I tried a variety of F-stop and shutter speeds to try to get some of the different layers based on some reading online but they all kind of just came out pretty similar. For these photos, I used my Pentax K-3 DSLR and a 300mm telephoto lens.
I really should look into a better lense at some point, this one is quite old I had a bit of trouble with it zooming out on it’s own while pointed upwards because the weight would cause it to collapse back into itself. I “fixed” it with a spot of tape on the barrel, but it’s been a bit of an issue off and on for a while. For a filter I reused the one I had from 2017. I’d kept it in good shape stored in a small plastic box.
Ramen Junkie 
