if I had a centralized single-location non-computer business, my business would be safest if the software I needed to use had absolutely nothing to do with the internet. every time we push small businesses into the cloud we're setting them up for pain.
the cat still running his auto garage in eastern europe on a commodore 64 clone and a dot matrix printer will never ever succumb to ransomware or the whims of a cloud app.
offer free wifi. stream soma fm over the intercom system. have damn web browsing kiosks if you want.
but keep your business recordkeeping off the ding dang internet and it won't get ding dang ransomwared or virused or anything. you don't need to spend more money on subscriptions, you need to have something stable and secure that'll work for your record keeping needs for a decade or more.
yesterday I crashed pretty hard energy-wise. I've been pushing, trying to get a lot done on multiple fronts, and my body finally called me on it and knocked me back into sleep mid-day to try and recharge a bit.
still tired even after my nap, I decided to listen and go easy on myself and my body.
ended up spending my evening doing something I rarely do anymore: binge watching a video series.
I used to watch a lot more video content, and it wasn't unusual for me to spend long stretches of time watching an entire tv series or what have you.
but my attention wanders a lot more easily these days, and I always feel the pressure to be doing something productive, and you know how it is. so, I don't end up watching a lot of video anymore. short pieces, disconnected, light.
but yesterday afternoon, post-nap, and through the evening, I decided to catch up on some video that I've been way behind on wanting to watch for the last nine months or so. so I did, and the world continued to spin the entire time - phew!
maybe it's not as important for me to feel so tied to productivity on a moment by moment basis, hm?
but this isn't a thread about my feels or my hangups (directly ha) but about the video I was watching.
y'all have heard me go on about the band I play bass in, Doctor Deathray and Her Implements of Destruction, and my wonderful bandmates - the good doctor herself, drum slayer extraordinaire taxdan, and our keyboard pounding multi-instrumentalist Connor.
but what's not always apparent is how versatile and diversely talented my bandmates are, and how incredibly active they are.
so, let's talk a bit about Connor and his video production work of late.
Connor's been killing it keeping new content flowing on New Ellijay TV, and nowhere does it shine through more in my opinion than in his ongoing series titled "The Hastening (of the end of imperialism)". The writing, the research, and the production of The Hastening is all headed up by Connor, and while I've had the opportunity and privilege of being on the inside of the conversations about making The Hastening happen, I haven't been good about sitting down to watch it.
The Hastening is one of the most well-researched and laid out looks at the USian empire and its long-term strategies and imperialism around the world and the effects thereof and the impact on our daily lives. It's a look at US history from an angle that US residents do not get in our public or private education systems, and I believe that it's a critical piece in self-educating towards a more humane and just society.
"To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyse Customer Data (e.g. messages, content and files) submitted to Slack as well as Other Information (including usage information) as defined in our privacy policy and in your customer agreement."
I would have uploaded this directly but the video came in at a half gig and by the time I got it small enough to appease mastodon it was even shittier than what the goog does with it, so here ya go:
a demonstration of the strength of a wisteria vine (and your chance to hear me narrate a silly short video if you've been curious as to what I sound like (this title has gotten long suddenly, yet nowhere near as long as a fiona apple album title probably, but whomst count))
for a more thorough yet less entertaining update about #StormageddonInSundogistan2024 I've put another half-day into limbing and analyzing and limbing some more and finally got to take the top ten meters off tree #2 (the hemlock directly in front of the garden shed, to the left of the one in the video) and most of the supporting branches removed as well, so once I get another ten meters off the top I'll revisit the supporting branches bc they're under hella pressure and I'm tryna finish this without being tree-bucheted (listen, it's funny, I'm gonna re-use it once in a while)
anyway, that's a sneak peek at what we've been working on, and I expect by Friday we'll have a few sample cryptids hanging out at a few sample points of interest in and around New Ellijay so we can play our game that has no rules yet and figure out what rules there should be, and then we'll go from there, and eventually this summer we'll release the code and let y'all see how bare bones it really is and how simply you could bend it to your needs, and I'm really excited to see where this all leads. that's my fun meta-game haha.
thanks for reading, thanks for supporting our wild experiments and projects, and thanks for doing what you do to try and make the world less sucky.
really appreciate all the support and positive feedback about our game project!
I was already excited, and my excitement got some of y'all excited, which gets me more excited, which makes me wanna make more stuff like this, which is exciting hahaha
and while I'm at it, thanks fediverse - not one person has replied to that thread (that I've seen anyway) and said "this is dumb and will never work and here's why" and that in and of itself is a kind of magic.