Bluesky: @mrwmrw.com | Mastodon: @mrw@social.LOL | Pixelfed: @mrwmrw@pixelfed.social
It’s been a long year this week… and pretty much every week for the last 7.
I’m grateful to have a 4-day weekend to recharge and recover and reconnect with the good in my life. This weekend is going to be 100% self-care and good energy.
It is tough to do, but feeling off-balance and despairing is by design. All of this is intended to keep us stuck.
We can’t let it. We must push forward and push away from the darkness toward the light.
I just passed 200 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire! I have a sense that was around my count back at the peak of RSS before social media exploded and reconfigured how we used the Internet.
Even before enshittification set in on the corporate social media sites, I liked the “curated by friends” aspect of it. And a lot of things I stumbled onto via Twitter (I joined FB much later) ended up getting the site’s RSS feed added to NNW.
I keep FB because I manage the page at work, but mostly do all of that through a third-party scheduling tool. I deleted my Twitter a couple of months ago… I honestly can’t remember, and don’t miss it.
Hey, so I’m testing a thing.
Did the thing work?
Maybe.
It’s cute, but now more than ever, as some are starting to pay attention to the current situation… please, for the love of all things good… use the proper names for people, places, parties, etc.
When you use goofy spellings, rude nicknames and the like, it is WAY harder for those who may be starting to awaken to what is happening to see critical thoughts that they may also share, but not quite know how to express or characterize it.
It’s really important to bring those folks into where we are now, and have been for a long time.
Community can save us.
I’m increasingly annoyed that there are tons of sites that have no RSS feed options, requiring either scraping tools or just not being able to follow said sites in my RSS reader.
Of course, this deprives some sites of traffic and eyeballs on paid advertising.
What’s RSS? https://aboutfeeds.com has a great explainer! The biggest benefit is you have 100% control of the content you see, without algorithms deciding what shows up in your feed. Click. Follow. Read. All in one place.
My partner only really knows the Internet where content comes through social platforms.
I am exhausted with how all of the things happening are being reported as just *BARELY* outside the so-called “norms”….
That said, let me be 100% CLEAR.
This is my personal place to say what’s on my mind. These are solely my personal thoughts and opinions about things going on in my life, be it personally, locally, statewide, nationally, or globally. IN NO WAY DO THEY REFLECT THE FOLLOWING:
I am fucking tired. And I have things to say.
I’ve been more and more and more focused on more fully moving away from social media as a primary source of my media awareness. I’ve been reacquainting myself with RSS and rediscovering blogs and sources of knowledge I’d lost track of in those early days of social media when sharing with your connections meant they’d see it and could interact with it.
I have to keep Meta due to work obligations that have nothing to do with my mostly dormant personal profile there. However, X is gone and my social focus is on (increasingly Mastodon/ActivityPub) and Bluesky (ATProto)… but even then, and especially on Bluesky (though we do have more agency in our experience than the majors) it’s still an outside mediated feed outside of the specific accounts I’ve followed.
I’ve been working through changing that on both Mastodon and Bluesky, but hadn’t given thought to “newsletter” type content from Substack, Ghost, etc. Today I focused some energy on making sure newsletters I want to read, both paid and not, are in my RSS reader and not also hammering my email inbox.
Anyway, that was the nerdy part of a holiday/day-off. One more day off and then back to doing the things for money.
I’m slowly organizing social content I follow into lists so I can filter out some categories from my main timeline one Mastodon/etc. and Bluesky. Ultimately I want this to be about connections and not performance/clicks/whatever.
Bf and I were just discussing the “old” (pre-algorithmic money vacuum) internet and RSS feeds. (Younger, so puzzlement.. LOL)
Un-ringing the engagement bell is going to take time (and patience) but a start is the non-algorithmic social web, including the various permutations of ActivityPub, RSS, Webmentions and more… some of which I’m reacquainting myself with as I go.
It just feels even more pressing as our major platforms and mainstream media control what, collectively, we get to know.
So this place is going to be about this experience of our society and….. well…. all of this.
I can’t promise more than writing here when I feel like I have something to say. Random posts on social media will likely continue unabated.
Anyway, if you’re reading this far… thanks. Lemme know. 🙂
Just trying this out again with some config changes. Will it work or will it look stupid?
Love this photo from a Hawthorne Heights show a few years back, with a Duotone filter on it. Neat, huh?
Oh hey… here’s the official recipe for school pizza from USDA.
You know I’m going to make this someday! Now I just need to find Sealtest chocolate milk!
I decided to make chili today because we were expecting a bit of cold, we misery in the form of a sleety/snowy mess. This has not materialized here in Maryland, but the chili has been in the slow cooker for hours and is literally driving me crazy with how good it smells. J is about to put cornbread into the oven, so we’re gonna eat good!
Also: not at all surprised at the fecklessness.
