Thoughts of Widdershins

I was scrolling Reddit this morning (yes, I know... the detox is still pending) and ran across a post that actually made me stop. That's rare these days. Here's part of it: For your own sanity, let things be... I think one of the hardest lessons in life is realizing that not everything is yours to understand, fix, or carry. We spend so much of our lives searching for explanations. We want closure. We want people to understand us. We want things to make sense before we're willing to let them go.…

I have been a live performing musician for over 40 years now. I started in my teens, and here I am at 60 still doing it. A couple of things got me thinking about this. First, I am slowing down... big time. A 3-4 hour show locally is usually more like a 7-8 hour show if it is local. I have a gig this Friday from 9 p.m.-1 a.m. that is slightly over an hour away. I play more of these because there aren't very many local gigs to play. This means I'm loading gear at 5:30 p.m. and heading out at 6…

Hamish Campbell wrote something that I found interesting. In a post about why the Fediverse exists, he argues that when blocking becomes our default response to disagreement, it can turn "despair into the appearance of action." I think he has a point. There are perfectly good reasons to block someone. Harassment, abuse, threats, and people who seem to exist mainly to make everybody else miserable come to mind. Nobody is obligated to spend their time dealing with that. But disagreement is…

I have been using the Brave browser for a couple of years now. I used it when it first came out, then switched to Chrome. Then, in the process of trying to de-Google myself, I went back to Brave, even though it is based on Chromium. My history with browsers goes all the way back to the beginning. Netscape Navigator was the bomb. Mozilla, less so, but still better than any Microsoft browser. I also played with Opera for a while. But up until Chrome was released, I used Firefox... begrudgingly. I…

I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. This one about leaving Reddit, this one about leaving WordPress, and a bunch of others about leaving Discord, GitHub, Codeberg, Photoshop, and more. There are also those talking about leaving the web entirely for the smallweb (Gopher, Gemini, etc). The reasons vary. Pricing changes, AI training on everything you post, a new owner, a new policy, or just the slow feeling that the place stopped being built for you. But the posts all have the…

I read a post recently (Domains Cost More, Blogs Disappear) about personal sites going quiet. The owners don’t announce they’re done. One day, the site just returns a 404. The author wondered if it came down to burnout, social media, hosting costs, a lack of readers, or an aging community. They guessed many people still blogging are over 40, but called that an observation, not a finding. I went looking for data. Some of the hunch holds up. Some of it hasn’t been measured. Pew Research looked at…

Just for a little while. And then I might decide I want it back on, full throttle... but I would really like to see what a couple of days of no ideas, no plans, no scheduling, and no feeling like I have to do something would be like. I might hate it. I have so many projects started and not finished. So many of them are great ideas (at least, that is what I think) that are, more than likely, just a dopamine rush. I have a full-time job, I am going to graduate school, I have band gigs, and…

I am a huge fan of the Netflix series Peaky Blinders. When it first came out in 2013, I didn't really pay much attention to it. Then, around Season 3 in 2015, I watched it and was hooked. One of the things I learned while watching the series, and finally the movie this year, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, was how many bits of history were intertwined with the obvious fictional elements. It is a huge reason I am a fan. There is something about historical fiction that, as someone who studies…

I am halfway through my first class in pursuing my master's degree. It's been less than stellar and I have been experiencing a feeling I'm not sure I can describe. I'm doing this online because it's cheaper and I am paying for my classes out of pocket...no grants or loans. Part of the experience online is the weekly discussions and right now they feel useless. It's just the required research methods class, but I feel like after I posted my introduction in week one, I'm totally ignored. No one…

I've been playing music for a very long time...since I was in middle school. I have a pretty eclectic palate, but I have some staples pretty common for those of my generation. Shoegaze and its variations (specifically Dream Pop or Dream Rock) would never have been something I guessed I'd latch onto. Sure, the 1980s brought this musical idea to the masses with bands like Cocteau Twins, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine, but they were really overshadowed by synth-pop and New…

It is now 9:30pm. I worked all day, got home around 3pm and started working on my annotated bibliography for my current class in pursuit of my master's degree. Five grueling hours of identifying potential sources for my thesis, formatting those sources correctly, and then having to come up with master's level annotations for each source that define the source's thesis and then how it supports my thesis. I got 3 out of 16 of those done. My brain is goo, and I honestly cannot believe I am sitting…

Götterdämmerung, Act 3: Siegfried's Funeral March (Twilight of the Gods) very well could be in the top 5 of the most moving pieces of music ever created. Those of us who were around in 1981 may have seen the John Boorman movie "Excalibur" (or maybe watched it years later) will recall the final battle and the death of King Arthur, where his body is carried away to Avalon and the sword Excalibur is returned to the Lady of the Lake... all playing out with Siegfried's Funeral March emotionally…

Sometime around mid-November, Voyager 1 will cross the one light-day mark. That means the signal from a spacecraft we launched in September of 1977 now takes a full 24 hours to reach us at the speed of light. It launched before the original Star Wars was in theaters, before the IBM PC existed, before most people alive today were born, and it has been running continuously for 49 years. And in roughly 60 days, it will officially be one light-day from Earth. The number sounds manageable until you…

I remember back in the days of the early internet in the 1990's the concept of news, information and things that where beneficial to being a well informed person, being behind a paywall would have been a very foreign idea. How did we let that happen? Why should I have to pay for information, unless the goal is to keep us from being truly informed. This should not be a new concept — people like Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and of course, George Orwell, warned us that…

I sometimes wonder if we have, as humans, forgotten how totally inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of, well, everything. In Peter Brannen’s The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, he places humanity within the almost incomprehensible scale of geological time.1 Brannen argues that humanity’s presence on Earth is almost imperceptibly brief when viewed against that scale. Human beings tend to interpret the…

Trying to recover my health as a 60 year old man is not easy. In fact, it seems hopeless. I was never the skinny kid, but I was never the "fatty" either. Then came the military, I lost a lot of weight and was in pretty good shape... right up until I decided I was going to end my military time. The weight started creeping back, slowly at first, then gaining speed... like I reached the crest of a hill and then started barreling down the other side. I lost a lot of weight in my early to mid…

I read a this post I found on bubbles.town about a guy who determined he was a better person without his phone. It got me thinking, how much do I use my phone? I think for a 60 year old man I might use it more than others my age, but I also think that I don't use it as much as some slightly younger. To be honest, I use it to text my adult boys, to call my mother, stay on top of my calendar, use Spotify at rehearsals so the guys that didn't listen to the songs we are working on can here how they…

Yes, I am on Reddit every day... I think I am addicted. But honestly, I think it is time for a detox program. There is still good content there, but it is getting harder to find, and the reasons why are worth talking about. Years ago, Reddit used to be something I heard about, saw in search results, and then one day found myself scrolling thinking that's interesting or finding something I agreed with (or disagreed with) vehemently and jumping in. I always thought there were so many subreddits…

I know there is a lot of hate regarding this subject, but honestly, I really don't fucking care what other people think regarding music and AI... OK, that's not true... I have some concerns... but feel like it's up to the individual to determine how they feel about the two worlds of music and tech colliding. I have been a musician for over 40 years. I still perform live, even at 60, in multiple bands. I have recorded a few albums with bands over those years, and have released a couple solo…

My introduction to AI was with ChatGPT about 4 years ago. It was very cool, useful, and novel. Then I discovered others: Claude, Grok, and Gemini. Claude caught my attention more so than the rest. It seemed more intuitive and better and producing results for things the others struggled with. Then I discovered Claude Code. Being a Linux guy, CLI is natural to me. Claude Code blew my mind away. It could access everything... my folders, my files, my self-hosted servers, everything. No more copy…

I have read Hamish's articles before... Smart man, great ideas and insight, but between the overuse of hashtags and his private vocabulary, make a fairly straightforward argument much harder to extract than it needs to be This is a prime example: Why “common sense” is a cage – we don’t have to worship this mess Strip that down, remove the overused hashtags, images, and write it in normal English, it really can be summed up in one paragraph; The Internet and many of the institutions surrounding…

On September 11, 2001, I was 35 years old and had only been working a new job at a US Army base for about four months. The thing I always remember is that I was so focused on my new job that when a co-worker walked in and said a plan had apparently crashed into the World Trade Center in New York it didn't really register and I kind of shrugged and said "wow" and went back to what I was doing. Then everyone was flooding into the training rooms that had large screens on the walls and had the news…

I was born in 1966, which means as of this blog post, I am 60 years old. The fact of turning 60 really was a "oh... OK" moment.. nothing earth shattering or crisis generating. But since then, I have realized that I have considerably less time ahead of me than behind me, and that things I just sort of took for granted when I stepped into the adult world 42 years ago (and have not really thought about over those years), I should probably get cracking on. I'm divorced and my kids are grown. I live…

I was born in 1966, which means as of this blog post, I am 60 years old. The fact of turning 60 really was a "oh... OK" moment.. nothing earth shattering or crisis generating. But since then, I have realized that I have considerably less time ahead of me than behind me, and that things I just sort of took for granted when I stepped into the adult world 42 years ago (and have not really thought about over those years), I should probably get cracking on. I'm divorced and my kids are grown. I live…

I struggle with a very over active brain. I say struggle not because I don't like having creative or analytical thoughts very regularly, but because I find I am constantly starting multiple projects frequently. Is this a bad thing? Not really, but it also has really pointed something out about me that I probably try to ignore — I'm more intrigued by the planning/building than the actual finished product. And this is why I have projects in various states of completion, or worse, some that are…

I struggle with a very over active brain. I say struggle not because I don't like having creative or analytical thoughts very regularly, but because I find I am constantly starting multiple projects frequently. Is this a bad thing? Not really, but it also has really pointed something out about me that I probably try to ignore — I'm more intrigued by the planning/building than the actual finished product. And this is why I have projects in various states of completion, or worse, some that are…

So the latest thing is this Anthropic (for those unaware, that is the company that runs the AI "Claude") researcher who quit is now claiming AI will kill all humanity and we are "gambling with our lives." Here is the link to at least one of the articles online: LINK So, now what this post is about. I kid you you not, social media posts and comments on this show just how ignorant the majority of humans online are. I am sorry, but if you start basing your fear/concerns/whatever on pop-culture…

So the latest thing is this Anthropic (for those unaware, that is the company that runs the AI "Claude") researcher who quit is now claiming AI will kill all humanity and we are "gambling with our lives." Here is the link to at least one of the articles online: LINK So, now what this post is about. I kid you you not, social media posts and comments on this show just how ignorant the majority of humans online are. I am sorry, but if you start basing your fear/concerns/whatever on pop-culture…

My apologies to William Shakespeare 😂 To publish, or not to publish, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler to dwell within The walled gardens of the mighty platforms, There to harvest likes and fleeting notice, Or to take up domain, server, and editor Against a sea of convenience, And by persistence build a place of one's own. To write, to host, no more. And by a host to say We end the tyranny of engagement, The heartache of algorithms, And the thousand manufactured urgencies That modern…

My apologies to William Shakespeare 😂 To publish, or not to publish, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler to dwell within The walled gardens of the mighty platforms, There to harvest likes and fleeting notice, Or to take up domain, server, and editor Against a sea of convenience, And by persistence build a place of one's own. To write, to host, no more. And by a host to say We end the tyranny of engagement, The heartache of algorithms, And the thousand manufactured urgencies That modern…