Friday Notes (Nov 22, 2024)

It has been another slow month here, and I remain conflicted about trying to blog both here on WordPress and now, on Substack. Last May I committed to posting on my WP programming blog (The Hard-Core Coder) every two weeks.

I’d discovered that I didn’t like writing about programming as much as I enjoy doing it, but figured I’d give it one more try (hence the commitment). So far, I’ve been keeping it up, and plan to continue, but it’s one more thing taking time from this blog.

It’s possible (but maybe not yet likely) this is the penultimate Friday Notes.

By which I mostly mean this blog may turn into what amounts to Friday Notes all the time (with a few rare exceptions for highly technical posts, maybe). I’ve always wanted to get more into a “dear diary” stance — get away from constantly trying to explain stuff — and now events may be pushing me that way.

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The recent election is a new factor in all this. While I do have concerns about the new administration, I’m far more affected by what the election said about people and their views. In the last post, I presented two graphs of US elections in the 2000s. Late counts have changed the numbers somewhat, so here they are again (with data fresh off the web).

First, the raw counts:

(Both sides gained late-count votes.) And in terms of percentage of Americans:

Some are going on about how this isn’t a mandate, but I’m not sure I agree. 76.5 million Americans (just over 22%) voted for an incompetent convicted felon with an awful track record from last time. I’m sorry wishful thinkers, to me that’s a mandate.

As I commented on a recent Charlie Sykes post:

I dunno, Charlie. After eight years of zero accountability, with four more on tap, it has gotten really hard to give a shit anymore. It is what it is, and we get the government we deserve. I think modern culture has made everyone decadent (i.e. characterized by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline; luxuriously self-indulgent).

Until we start emphasizing a decent education steeped in critical thinking, I don’t see much hope for us. The question seems to be whether we can survive our own decadence.

These days that seems to be my bottom line. It’s hard to give a shit anymore. I’ve been watching this damned slow-motion trainwreck since the 1970s, so I’m not surprised, but I am so very, very disappointed. I find myself increasingly disengaged from it all.

And I think cultural decadence will be my new theme going forward.

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When I began writing this post, the Microsoft grammar system once again got in my way:

Where in the world does it get any idea of the plural there? Am I missing something? I decided I didn’t like the paragraph break where it was and rewrote it:

And now the grammar system is fine. Can anyone explain?

I continue to be very much not a fan of Ai. (Something I heard recently stuck with me: Why should I spend any time on something that took no time or real effort to make? I’ve never been much a fan of commodity.)

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I know, I know, everyone is sick to death of complaints about the daylight saving time. Normally, I weather it without much pain, but this year for some reason, it’s been kicking my ass. The days somehow seem slow and long, and the darkness at 5 pm makes the evenings also seem slow and long. I normally stay up until 1 or 2 am, but lately I’ve been in bed by midnight and grabbing eight hours rather than my usual five or six.

And FFS:

Bite me, Microsoft. There is no hyphen in daylight saving. (Technically, it’s also not “savings” but that ship seems to have sailed.) I’d turn the damn thing off, but most much of the time I appreciate its advice.

I also realized that darkness seems to be my signal that it’s okay to start watching TV, but with full night by 6 pm, that amounts to six hours of television, and I’m just not capable of that anymore. I like my shows, but TV leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve reached the point of only being able to take in smaller doses.

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In writing a recent Substack post, Digital vs Analog, one example I planned to use was a “tin can telephone” versus passing written notes.

I even found a soup can label I planned to use making a 3D model:

But then I thought: who even knows what a tin can telephone is these days? I don’t know that they were that common back in the day. It worked best if your friend lived next door and you both had upstairs bedrooms with facing windows (as seems so common in movies). When I was a kid, all my friends lived several doors away or across the alley.

I may still make the model one of these days now that I have the artwork for it…

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For many years, I assumed the Flat Earthers were like Renaissance Faire fans. They knew it wasn’t really like that and were just doing it for fun. I suppose because I find it hard to believe anyone on the modern world could think otherwise.

But apparently at least some of these folks are true believers. Which is a little scary, but mostly depressing. Humanity. What is it good for?

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I find I have less and less tolerance for the infantilism of modern culture (which is why I can only take TV in small doses). In so many TV shows, relationships are indistinguishable from those of high school students.

After twenty years of watching, I finally gave up on the TV show NCIS (see NCIS: Over and Out). For most of those years, I considered it my favorite TV show. But the relationship began to sour around 2019 (see Am I Over NCIS?) and declined until I decided I was done. Meh, whatever, nothing lasts forever.

The point here is that, even when I considered it my favorite show, I still found the behavior of Gibbs’s team childish. Those characters are all riddled with “quaint” twitches and phobias. I often muttered, “Oh, grow up” under my breath.

It seems to be getting worse, perhaps part of our growing cultural decadence and infantilism. I just finished the third season of Vox Machina (which is an okay show) and was struck by the childish nature of the romantic relationships (enough to make a note of it).

And apparently, fart and poop jokes are still a big thing, which is really weird to me. That stuff isn’t high school, it’s grade school.

I’ve been watching old NCIS episodes on Netflix (because I’m apparently too lazy to put the DVDs I own in the player). Funny how our attitudes change. I used to be an avid collector of TV series DVDs of favorite shows. Now it seems obsolete, and I’ve been donating those DVDs to the library. I hung on to my favorites, but obviously it’s time for them to go, too. A lot less shit to dust, then!

And part of my commitment to simplifying my life by divesting most of the shit I’ve been hauling around for far too long. It was stuff for my retirement, but now that I’ve reached that point, all that old crap… just isn’t interesting. I never was one for nostalgia, and I’ve long been aware of the contradiction between my “only the present matters” approach and all those past life souvenirs. Many of which, I find, have lost their meaning.

But those old NCIS episodes have often reminded me of why I loved the show. They turned in some outstanding stories. For broadcast television, anyway. The show’s debut episode is still very watchable.

But I recently watched the episodes involving Ziva David’s return from being dead (cliffhanger of season 16, first two episodes of season 17) and was reminded of how disappointed I was in the show for doing that (see NCIS: On Very Thin Ice). I realized that was the beginning of the end for me with that show.

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Speaking of NCIS, my Gibbs’s Rules page has been getting a lot of traffic starting around September 2023. This year, it’s my most viewed post (or page, rather) by a strong margin (with 2182 views).

The closest contender is the Babylon (Anime) post I’ve mentioned before:

Which is still pulling in views.

I’m glad about the Gibbs’s Rules page, I put a lot of work into it and sometimes still update it. It’s funny, though, how it spent eight years in relative obscurity before suddenly exploding. Might be a lesson in that.

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The existence of men’s and woman’s sports comes from that men and women are generally physically different in significant ways. Now there is much concern about transgender people being in the “wrong” sport. The only sport I care about is baseball, and it’s not an issue there yet, so I don’t have a strong opinion. Both sides have their merits.

A way around this is to eliminate the M/F distinction and group competitors by weight and strength classes. Let big people compete against other big people and small people compete against other small people. Sports are naturally merit-based, so why not make merit the only barometer?

Or is that naive?

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I agree to submit willingly to our eventual AI overlords if everyone can just stop talking about AI.

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At least sometimes I seem to have good instincts (I know, it shocks me, too).

I’ve never liked Elon Musk (or Tesla cars), Joe Rogan, Morning Joe (or Mika), Louis C.K., Richard Dawkins, or Israel (or their opponents or Middle East politics in general). I’m severely allergic to celebrities, “influencers”, trendy things in general, and awards shows.

Scott Adams caught me off-guard, though. Never saw that coming (although, in retrospect, there was always something a bit off with Dilbert — possibly the strong commercialization should have been a clue — compare with Sam Watterson).

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I started this post Tuesday. In the late afternoon, my page hit stats here exploded and were insane for almost 48 hours (see post from yesterday).

For all the hits, there was zero engagement. No likes, let alone comments, so I had no idea what was going on. Tuesday topped out at 2,483 page views, Wednesday at 7,581 (for a total of 10,064), and Thursday it was around 2,100 before things finally settled down (for a total of over 12,000 views). On the other hand, no real uptick in visitors: 68 on Tuesday, 83 on Wednesday, and 60-some on Thursday.

FWIW, based on traffic from September to now (81 data points), I normally average 85 visitors with a standard deviation of 26.8. The minimum/maximum in that period is 48/175. I believe the average is a bit high due to a busy September. If I add data from earlier in the year, I expect the average would decline.

This is beyond unprecedented in the thirteen-year history of this blog (or the ten-year history of my programming blog). Judging by the data — lots of page hits but no real uptick in visitors — I assume this is an automated process crawling my blog.

The suggestion is that this is a spam bot of some kind but why would a spam bot be only accessing posts? I’m not seeing any effort to leave comments, so what’s the point? I’ve wondered if someone is training a pet LLM, that would make more sense.

WordPress has heretofore been good at either entirely blocking spam or putting it in my Spam folder, but there is nothing in the folder, and the Akismet note on the admin page has remained at 424,499 (that’s over the whole history of the blog, but it’s not clear to me if it refers to spam it put in the Spam folder or spam it blocked and I never saw).

Oof. Just another distracting mystery when I have better things to do.

Whatever.

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Stay grammatical, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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