Posting Less Often on this Blog Going Forward

Since I started this blog in 2009, I have been almost perfectly consistent in posting at least once every month on this blog, and even at times when I didn't have much to write about, I would think of something to write about so that I could continue my streak of posting. The one exception was in 2023 January, where my personal travel that month prevented me from posting in time (and I noted that in the post in 2023 February [LINK]). However, going forward, I see myself no longer holding myself to such a strict regular schedule of posting. This is for the following several reasons.

Internal reasons

There are a few internal reasons (in me) to consider. First, when I started this blog in 2009, I was in high school. I was in college during 2010-2014. During those years, my youthful energy surrounding the things on my mind and my enthusiasm about online engagement through blogs led me to post often, even when my posts weren't that well-formed. Since then, that enthusiasm & energy dissipated, so my frequency & volume of posts correspondingly decreased.

Second, in high school & college, I posted a lot of Linux distribution reviews and my takes on news surrounding free software, and this continued to a gradually decreasing degree over the first half of graduate school. In graduate school, especially around the middle, I read many nonfiction books, so I posted reviews of those books, and my youthful energy kept me motivated to read such books quite regularly. Around the end of graduate school and throughout my previous job at UC Davis, I posted about topics from physics & math, especially surrounding functional calculus, and these posts were interspersed with more introspective posts about my life as well as posts about moving away from popular cloud service & social media platforms. In the last couple of years of my previous job at UC Davis and slightly after that, I posted about my iteratively improving understanding of the Earth's climate. Now, I feel like I have said what I want to say about those things and learned & tried those things to my satisfaction, so I don't feel motivated to go further into those things for myself or for the sake of this blog.

Third, more broadly, my greater age now compared to the early years of this blog have led to a more calm & sedate mindset that makes me less motivated to post on this blog just for the sake of doing so. I find that my motivation to try some other things has decreased too, perhaps in part because of the traumas that I have experienced over the last several years (like being hit by a car [LINK]) and because of my current opportunity to fulfill my desire to live a quieter life where I don't have to hustle or live in suboptimal conditions just for the sake of my career. I am quite content to work at my current job, which I enjoy very much, to spend time with friends & relatives in my area and stay in contact with those farther away, and to take care of myself physically by eating right & swimming and mentally through introspection.

Internet-related reasons

Separate from my own internal motivations, there are a few reasons related to the Internet to consider. First, I have seen that most popular search engines on the Internet yield less useful information these days compared to several years ago because so much textual and even video content is garbage generated by artificial intelligence (AI). This both makes it hard stay motivated to post anything on the Internet (as a human) and makes me wary to post anything if my content will be used by AI in unpredictable or even dangerous ways.

Second, I had hoped that this may be of use to people who may come across this on the Internet. However, as almost all popular use of the Internet these days seems to be through social media platforms, especially Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, blogging seems to have been an abandoned medium within the Internet for a long time. I am satisfied maintaining my own personal diaries for my own use, so I won't necessarily miss posting things on this blog for that reason.

Third, the current political situation in the US is dire. Legal residents in the US are being forced to turn over their social media activity for the federal government to review for activity that may go against the government's foreign policy stances, per the Associated Press [LINK]. Arrests by federal officials have ensnared US citizens and have become arbitrary & seemingly without accountability, also per the Associated Press [LINK]. Even though I haven't posted much political content on this blog in a long time and even though I can't avoid the possibility that the government may arbitrarily punish me for posts from long ago going against the government's stated partisan beliefs, I don't want to increase my liability further by posting more.

Going forward

I will still post reviews of books that I read after I read them, though my reading of books has become less regular over time. If there are things that I ponder about physics, math, climate, or other things that compel me to write about them in this blog, then I will do so. Finally, I may post things about current events if I feel that such events compel me to no longer be silent in public.

With all that said, this post may be the last post on this blog, and even if it is not the last post on this blog, it may be close to the last post on this blog, with whatever post ends up being the last post on this blog likely not noting the fact of it being the last post on this blog. For whoever happens to be reading this, please feel free to peruse this blog, starting with its first post nearly 16 years ago [LINK]. I know that this blog has lost almost all, if not all, of its human readers over the last decade, but I do wish to express my sincere gratitude for every person in my life and every stranger online who read these posts and expressed support or constructive criticism.

Book Review: "The Attention Merchants" by Tim Wu

Originally, this post was supposed to come out a week ago, as a Linux comparison test between BunsenLabs Linux and CrunchBang++ ("#!++"), two quasi-official successors to the now-defunct CrunchBang ("#!") Linux distribution. Unfortunately, neither of them booted in a live USB. For that reason, this post is now a book review of The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. It is a relatively long and detailed book about the history of advertising and other ways that people have tried to get into our heads and sell us on either commercial goods or ideas. It has a fairly extensive discussion of the development of advertising in newspapers, city posters, and radios, as well as further developments through TV and the Internet. Additionally, it goes through the cycles of development and backlash with respect to each medium of communication, noting how the backlashes are fairly similar to one another in many respects throughout history.

The book is quite interesting, and despite its longer length, it generally reads easily enough that this length is less noticeable. There are many examples given through each period of history and with respect to each medium of communication showing how advertising techniques further developed, and each of them is quite compelling on its own. I even learned a few interesting bits of trivia that I take for granted on a daily basis: "propaganda" was originally a straightforward (not derogatory) term for "propagation of [religious] faith", "broadcast" was originally an agricultural term (for spreading seeds through a field) that later got co-opted in advertising, and drive-in movies originated from the British government displaying war propaganda films from vans on large exterior walls in WWI. The only issue that I have is that the latter parts of the book become a little tiresome to read; part of that is because I have read from other places about the issues surrounding Internet tracking and advertising, while part of it is because the author could have better connected developments in Internet advertising to prior developments in newspapers/radio, so the repetition of key points without those deeper connections being made explicit (or only being made partway) felt a bit wearisome. Overall, though, I recommend this book for anyone who'd like to learn more about the history of advertising, how people have tried to fight back, and how the cycle continues. Follow the jump to see more details, as well as further scattered thoughts and questions I have about this book.

Shakespeare's King Henry V: Full of Cliches

(For some reason on Linux Mint I can't get the keyboard shortcuts for accented letters to work right and it's a pain to manually insert them one at a time, so bear with me.)

OK, this post has nothing to do with Shakespeare, except that I was recently reading Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture and I came across a passage telling of a person who thought that Shakespeare's play King Henry V was full of cliches.
(For those of you who don't get it, that play originated almost all of the phrases that the person in question called "cliches".)

Basically, I wanted to avoid the cliche of eponymously (is that even a word?) titling my first blog. As it seems, I have failed miserably.

In this blog, I will be discussing science, technology, politics, ethics (somewhat), other current events, cars, video games, movies, and basically anything else that comes to my mind.

That said, for any blog I follow, my favorite part (just above reading the blog post itself) is to read the user comments. They are sometimes funny and often provide great additional insight into the topic at hand (grammar?). I strongly encourage those who read this blog to comment; I also would love to hear criticism about anything I've written (and I'll respond to you or update the post in question ASAP). That said, please keep comments reasonably on-topic, constructive, and polite; as Ken Starks, the founder and leader of the Helios Project says,

Please post anything you want but do it with the thought of an 11 year old child sitting next to you. Our kids get exposed to enough garbage in the world, let's not add to it here. We can't "clean up" the internet, but we can do our part not to add to the garbage pile.

By the way, his project aims to give Linux-equipped computers away for free or for a nominal price (as far as I know) to financially disadvantaged families; his charity is non-profit but gladly accepts donations, so if you have money lying around, you want to do something charitable, and you support the cause of free software and the benefits it can bring to anyone (and specifically in this case financially disadvantaged families), I would encourage donating to him: http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/
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(Disclaimer: I don't personally know him.)

If there is anything else you have to say or want me to talk about, please do let me know.
Happy reading!