I’ve listened to a lot of country lately. It’s not a genre known for its questioning of religion, for obvious reasons. And I didn’t go looking. But the above all turned up, and have things to say.
Me playing Spotify artist-radio during lockdown:
Me: Who’s this?! It’s great
Spotify: It’s Brandi Carlile
Me: What about this?
Spotify: Another Brandi Carlile
Me: Ok but this is definitely someone else and it’s excellent
Spotify: Still her
Me: Wh…
Spotify: Just go listen to her albums
Turns out I really like Brandi Carlile. You might too, if you like country but not, like, heavy country.
If you like The Story, you’ll probably enjoy everything else.
Only country singer I’ve ever heard mention skeptics, too.
Hey. It’s been a while.
If you’ve come over from my old blog: this is a fresh start. All the old posts are now private, because I can’t face hunting for dumbass opinions in 4000 posts from my 20s.
The blog died out because Twitter and Facebook took over. But it feels like time to make something of my own again.
I still like Twitter, despite the obvious. I follow a bunch of delightful people. Most days I can log on and see lovely things. I’m not interested in broadening my bubble by following people who aren’t lovely.
But, like the blog, the day is coming when I’ll need to scrub my past tweets. I have 12 years of them, and no doubt some could come back to cancel me. I have enough seniority at work now that this would cause problems. If I were sensible I’d install the app that scrubs tweets on a 2 week rolling basis.
Certainly Twitter is no longer the place to store thoughts I want to keep. Ditto Facebook. I still like Facebook too. I enjoy seeing my friends’ baby photos and holidays and thoughts and worries. I just unfollow anybody ranty.
Facebook is also important. It’s such a part of the cultural landscape that IT people should know what’s going on. Plus, who am I kidding – it’s nice to get engagement! And Facebook is obviously very good at engagement. I’ve been using Facebook for little blog posts for a while – it’s a good way to share tech advice with non-techie people and I like getting the feedback and reactions. I’m not fond of reducing nice things to dopamine hits and declaring them bad.
But, let’s face it, one day Facebook are going to do something beyond the pale. Many would claim they already have, although those roads often lead to Cadwalladr and nobody wants that.
So: back to blogging, where I have more control. And after all these years I still like playing with WordPress.
In particular, I want to understand Gutenberg better. At the start of lockdown this led to a brief flirtation with front-end javascript frameworks like React and Vue, moving onto Gatsby and other static site generators.
That didn’t last long. JS has tentacled such that it’s inaccessible to broad-spectrum IT guys like me. I’ll figure out enough to understand Gutenberg, and leave it at that. WordPress and PHP it is.
I have a few life things coming up that I’d like to document. Some photo stuff. And there’s a lot of niche knowledge of work tools – CiviCRM in particular – that I’d like to make public.
So, hey. Nice to be back.