Imminent Death Of The Blog Predicted!

While prophecies of the end of Usenet or the wider internet never came true, notwithstanding the latest variant that itā€™s already dead, this blog is coming to a close. Since most people likely read via RSS, this final post serves as your notice.

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One Of Those Hiatus Posts

Iā€™ll try not to belabor the issue, but obviously I am having some issues when it comes to what I want to be doing with my blogging, as well as starting to deeply consider the fact of having it, and the restoration project, on a domain that should Automattic ever decide my time in their dotblogger program is over, would cost me upwards of $1,500 each and every year, which I donā€™t and never will have, and so if the domain could go away how much effort should I put into things here. I donā€™t know what any of my answers will be, but in the meantime Iā€™ll be tinkering with a blog of a different sort on a different domain just to keep myself writing, and Iā€™ll note that here when the time comes, but for at least a little bit, Bix Dot Blog is on hold.

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Am I Blogging Or Not?

The sort of existential crisis Iā€™ve been having lately about blogging happens to be coincident with the controversies over Automatticā€™s various deals to provide data for purchase, sometimes for the purposes of A.I. training with sketchy and somewhat hidden methods of opting out, and thatā€™s not helping any as I try to engage in some self-reflection and make some decisions.

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Why Do I Blog, Anyway

It started with an offhand mention on Mastodon that Iā€™m tired of my blog design, again and already, then turned into a whole other thing on Bluesky because I do wonder whether unease with technical things like this isnā€™t actually about other things entirely.

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System Failure

Thereā€™s a moment in Lost when Desmond is down in an access tunnel beneath the Swan station trying to turn a failsafe key while a recorded voice on a loop warns of a system failure. That loop was stuck in my head for a time this evening as I struggled to remember its source, because today was just such a system failure.

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Can I See Baseball This Season?

Hot on the heels of my various posts about wanderlust and past travels, today as I watch a Red Sox exhibition game against the Northeastern Huskies to begin Spring Training, my thoughts turned to Seattle, whose Mariners open the season at the end of March at home against Boston.

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Aphantasia, Meet Anauralia

Just a couple of weeks ago, I referenced what I called my aphantasiac monologue, an attempt to describe how i only can conceive of sounds, much as I only can conceive of pictures. Basically the idea that in addition to not having a mindā€™s eye so, too, do I lack a mindā€™s ear.

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The Disablement Of Spacetime

At the end of a long and trying day that did not go in any way that especially resembled how Iā€™d hoped it would go, disability access designer Nick Colley posted some thoughts to Mastodon about an overlooked aspect of designing for disability.

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We Shouldā€™ve Had A Web Of Personal Data Servers

Recently Iā€™ve been exploring, once again, options for book tracking that arenā€™t Goodreads, prompted in part by this very long read about the site. Whenever I do this, it quickly becomes obvious that there simply isnā€™t one site or service that replicates everything Goodreads provides me: book tracking, author recommendations, and listings of new releases of the types of books I tend to read.

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From Alaska To Bajor In Search Of Identity

Like many other people my age, Iā€™ve been rewatching Northern Exposure ever since the digital release a few months back more recently was followed by Amazon picking up the streaming rights. Yesterday, it was the episode ā€œCrime and Punishmentā€.

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