I don't do Twitter or Instagram. I mean, I have accounts, but I look at them rarely and hardly ever post. TikTok is something I actually enjoy, but I never post there. I'm merely a voyeur. The only social media I'm involved in is Facebook and I hate it. They can randomly ban you for arbitrary reasons that make no sense. I once got a three day ban for posting "sexual content." There was nothing remotely sexual about it. I don't even understand how they came to that conclusion. I appealed, but nothing came of it. Meanwhile, friends have been targeted with threats of violence and reporting it only gets them ignored. Needless to say, if you're popular enough, powerful enough, or rich enough, you get to post whatever the fuck you want. Including hate and misinformation which is literally killing people.

But, alas, Facebook is a necessary evil because friends from around the world are there and it's the only way to easily keep in contact with them.

And then there's Blogography.

Blogging isn't the social platform it once was. It used to be that everybody had a blog and you kept in touch by reading and commenting back and forth around the blogging community. Now only the tiniest fraction of my blogging friends are still at it. Bloggers who were only in it to keep in touch moved to social media platforms because it was so much easier. Bloggers who were in it for the money left when the money dried up. Bloggers who were in it for fame abandoned it when the fame never came.

Those of us who remain each have our own reasons.

At this point, blogging is a habit for me. But I do like being able to go back through old posts and remember stuff I was doing my life. Next year I'll have 20 years worth, which is a big chunk of my time on this earth.

Although...

From a historical perspective, I sure wish that blogging existed in the 1980's.

That's when my life just started getting interesting, and all I have are random memories from 1985 through 2003. That was college. That was time with the best friends I'll ever have. That was when I first started traveling. Sure I have photos, but they're just snapshots. What happened in-between is a messy blur that's mostly lost because alcohol might have been involved. Had I written things down, I'd be able to remember them too.

What triggered this post was my struggling to remember details of my first trip to Japan in 1996. I had found a journal where I wrote out single sentences with a bunch of space between them. I had always intended to go back and expand on what I had seen and done so it would be documented and I wouldn't forget. Well, that was over 25 years ago now, so there will be no filling in anything. Half of the sentences are meaningless to me. Take this one, for example...

"I hear it is a custom over there, to exchange cigarettes as a form of greeting..."

All I know is that it was a tag line written in English on a cigarette vending machine in the lobby of my hotel (which I was able to find thanks to some Google sleuthing back in 2014). I guess I wrote it down because I thought it was funny. But four pages later I wrote...

"Lonely night in Akihabara. Was happy to get back to my hotel where my best friend Fred was waiting to exchange cigarettes with me again."

And I'm like WTF? Because I have no clue what that means. If I were to venture a guess, there was probably an illustration or a photo of a guy holding out a pack of cigarettes next to that tagline on the cigarette machine. And I guess I named him Fred. Or something. I haven't a clue. And there's no way I'll ever know. Unless they invent time travel. Or I invest in hypnotherapy... maybe.

If this trip had happened any time after 2003, it would have been documented here. If it had happened any time after 2007, it would have been photographed multiple times and posted. But oh well.

There's still 20 years sitting here for me.

Thanks for spending another year with me here at Blogography! Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons for what's been a rather awful year. Again.

   
I'd wish for a better Christmas next year, but I did that in 2020 and look what happened!

Last night I finally, finally managed to get my WordPress cache turned off so that hopefully I can post to my blog again and have the posts actually show up. My frustration level is at an all-time high, so despite wanting to not think about troubleshooting Blogography I just couldn't take it any more. So here we are.

UPDATE: Annnnnd... shit. Now it's more broken than it used to be. Guess I'm not done banging my head against a wall after all.

UPDATE: UPDATE: Yeah, I'm giving up for the night. Maybe later tonight if I have any brain cells left I can worry about it then.

UPDATE: UPDATE: UPDATE: Are... are we working again?

UPDATE: UPDATE: UPDATE: UPDATE: No. Fuck.

My website is coming back as "WEBSITE NOT FOUND" half the time... but if I reload, it's all there. I can only guess that it's my cache plugin acting even more weird than ever? The PROBLEM is that when I go to send POSTS to Blogography my blogging software can't find the site either. This is bad when I get an error... very, very bad when my posts seem to go through, but are, in fact, LOST FOR ALL ETERNITY!

So... what to do? Turn off the cache plugin so that I stop having problems... or leave it on because otherwise my blog will go down any time it gets an increase in traffic?

I'm leaning towards turning it off, but I'll have to look into that next week, because my schedule is stacked.

No clue if it's Dreamhost, my internet, or what the hell is going on... but my blog takes fucking forever to load. FOREVER! Maybe it's the new "fast cache" plugin that's screwing things up? No idea. Which means it's just one more task to add to this weekend's "To-Do List." Which, as you might guess this close to winter, is packed full as it is.

The good news is that I managed to finish cleaning up my garage and putting away my woodshop projects so that I can park indoors. That's a task that got moved up the list because I've been having to scrape frost off my windows in the morning. And I really don't want to be doing that when the home I'm fortunate enough to call my own has a garage.

The bad news is that some of my projects got put away unfinished. That's going to really bug me, but maybe I'm going to have some time on the weekends that I can drag them out and get things completed.

BWAH HA HA HA!

Only joking. My motivation to do anything of use is at an all-time low. I'm lucky to be getting out of bed in the morning. And I probably wouldn't if my cats didn't need to be fed.

Which just goes to show that Jake and Jenny are good for something after all!

Maybe the internet is trying to tell me something.

Maybe it's time to just let go.

My blog has been mostly-broken for months now. Strange things happen where posts don't get posted or are lost completely. But sometimes they post just fine. And I never know which of the three it's going to be. If the post gets posted... but then doesn't show up and is lost... there's nothing I can do. It's just gone gone gone. It's so commonplace to me now that I automatically copy the post before posting so I don't have to start over from scratch if it's lost. It's maddening.

And has me wondering if clinging to blogging is even worth it any more.

My traffic is as high as it's ever been, but that's mostly due to Google searches. Everybody else has moved on to social media and left blogs behind, so why not me?

I just don't know.

One of these days Blogography is going to break down (again) and I'm just going to leave it there.

The other day I needed some information off of an old computer. A computer I don't think I've turned it on in two or three years. When it sprang to life, I noted that I had some unpublished blog posts. Some of them were old versions of things I eventually published. Other posts were just abandoned completely for some reason.

Take, for example, this one...

After the "I suppose" there's nothing. I have no clue where I was going with this.

Which could be why I dumped it?

I would still dearly love to visit India, but who knows if the world will ever open up again. Could be that it's just pandemics from here on out.

In which case I'm sure glad that I was lucky enough to see what I got to see of the world when I saw it.

When I got back on Friday, I posted all the entries I wrote while I was away.

They still haven't shown up on my blog, which leads me to believe that there is an issue with my new caching plugin. Oh joy.

UPDATE: Now everything is showing up except Saturday & Sunday??

UPDATE UPDATE: Welp. enough messing around for tonight. I'm beat. I guess my posts show up when they show up then.

I will still be blogging every day, but the posts will be saved and posted after a week's time. This is to help my blog caching plugin do its thing, because it keeps getting reset after I post and it's taking forever. I'm at a convenient breaking point, so the timing is good.

See you next Friday when (hopefully) things will be back to normal around here and I can flood Blogography with a week's worth of posts.

If you could ever say things were ever "normal" here to begin with.

My blog is dead.

It was hugged to death by a Reddit post talking about Lake Powell's water level being so low that junk which is usually underwater is now fully exposed. Like a boat that sank. A comment on the Reddit post had a link to a Blogography post where I had a photo of the same boat 15 years ago...

And since I pay for the cheapest web hosting available, I don't have the bandwidth available to deal with such a massive amount traffic. Which means my blog just kind of shut down under the pressure of it all. Somebody had to post a link to the page cache on the Internet Wayback Machine.

In an attempt to (maybe?) head off such a thing in the future, I installed a plugin called "Simply Static" which is supposed to help by generating static pages so WordPress doesn't have to generate it every time it's requested. Not sure how it works since WordPress still gets the request and has to reroute it to the correct page via the plugin, but I guess it's worth a shot.

Heaven only knows that a resource as critical as Blogography should stay running at all costs.

On the bright side, getting the "Reddit Hug of Death" did get me an opportunity to upload a higher resolution shot that looks much better, so I guess there's that.

UPDATE: I couldn't get my Simply Static site to work properly, so I ended up reinstalling WP Super Cache. Maybe it will work this time around? I had to remove it a couple years ago because videos wouldn't play. Maybe that's been fixed.