A weekly note

Hey, two weeks makes a habit.

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I took advantage of the time change this week and started getting up at 5:30am. I make a coffee, grab a pumpkin biscotti (thanks Michelle) and get 1-1.5 hours of focused time in before breakfast.

Happy Prime has been super busy—out of very much our own doing—over the last couple months and this is helping me knock out some things that I’m falling behind on.

It seems like I’m enjoying it enough to keep going. We’ll see what this weekend does to the schedule.

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I made the weekly homeowner’s trip to the hardware store on Sunday and bought an 8 foot ladder so that I could…. clean the gutters!

It was very exciting and very wet from a recent rain. My gloves soaked through with brackish leaf water, which was pleasant and led to dry, burning hands in the evening.

I also got up on the steep garage roof to try and access our upper flat roof. Once on the peak of the very steep garage roof, I saw what accessing the upper flat roof actually entailed and gave it a big nope. What goes up must come down and I’m pretty sure my down route would have involved falling.

Our ex-landlord is nuts for having gone up there every year.

Next year we’ll probably find someone to clean the gutters. But at least we have a very useful ladder!

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A did very well with the time change. Michelle—who is amazing—hi, Michelle—wrote out a schedule a week ahead of time that involved moving his eating, napping, and bed times up 15 minutes every couple days. He went to bed at 8:30 on Saturday, shifted fine on Sunday, and has been hitting his normal 7:30 all week.

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On Monday night, while on the changing table before bed, A pointed fiercely at the ceiling and yelled, “Bob!”.

And I said yeah, nope, we’re not going there.

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I’ve relegated Twitter as a place I visit a couple times a day and may reply to tweets, like tweets, and post links to blog posts like this one.

This isn’t entirely new. My engagement was already low early this year and then dropped severely when Elon announced his intent to acquire. It’s all very annoying and boring to think about a person with that much money applying his principles to a “social” network.

Of course, the advertising and the algorithms were already annoying and boring and the actual value of Twitter has just been less and less fun. IMO.

In the aughts, change was around every corner. A swarm of early adopters signed up for new websites every month and headed off somewhere else months later. That’s not exactly productive or interesting over the long term, but there’s something that’s felt really stale when billionaires are in charge of product.

Maybe the pendulum is swinging?

Anyhow. I don’t want to delete my account just yet. I made the mistake of ghosting everyone on Facebook without grabbing emails or phone numbers and Twitter’s been my jam for 15 years, so I don’t want to repeat.

Blogs are better, get a blog.

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Hahaha, what did I even tweet in my 20s? Do I even want to look?

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I’ve elevated Mastodon as a place I visit frequently throughout the day and I’m very much enjoying the experience this time around. I think it’s because I’ve gone all in and started to treat it like I used to treat Twitter: a place for flippancy. It helps that I post on my site first. The rest is just a fun stream to dip in.

The federated network has its quirks, but it’s very pleasant. I’ve followed people from several different Mastodon severs from my account on the indieweb.social instance. I chose that instance because I like the IndieWeb values and I’m able to support the network as a patron.

Outside of the regular following feed, Mastodon shows a local view in which I can see all posts on the indieweb.social instance. That’s fun to visit every once and a while because the stream of updates from a few thousand people is still slow enough.

It has a federated view—usually too noisy—in which I can see all posts on all instances the indieweb.social instance is aware of. That’s fun to jump in every once and a while just to see the river in action.

It has no tracking script. It has no algorithms showing me advertising. Swoon.

Lots of rough edges, but it’s a very calm and curatable place. I’m excited to see the variety of instances that continue to spin up and I’m pondering whether it would be interesting to either spin up an instance of my own or add ActivityPub support directly to this site.

If you’re on a Mastodon instance, I’m followable at @jeremyfelt@indieweb.social. Of course, if you subscribe to this site’s notes feed, then you aren’t missing anything. 😎

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But really… what is Elon’s motivation for intentionally running Twitter into the ground? There has to be an angle.

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Oh, also! I’m double verified on Tumblr now. I wholeheartedly appreciate the troll.

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I ran into Lankum today and have really dug The Livelong Day and Between the Earth and Sky.

Nice Irish trad/folk with a good frequent drone to it.

Last week I ran into Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin and have enjoyed his The Deepest Breath as well as a previous album with Ultan O’Brien, The Light of Day.

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Time for some pizza. Enjoy the weekend! 🍕