Bring Fedi to Blog

One of today’s projects was getting my posts on mefi.social to post as posts on my blog. I just don’t blog anymore, because I rarely have thoughts requiring more than 500 characters, and it seems dumb to post something that short on the blog and ask people to click through to read it. Better to have it work the other way around. Post it in the fediverse, and send it to the blog.

Mostly working! So far, anyway. Yay! I accomplished something today! Time to play video games. 🤣

source https://mefi.social/@Orb/110533798249549062

Vigilante Justice?

There was a shooting somewhere between Cedar Park and Lago Vista on Monday afternoon, and the news stories about it are making me have thoughts and questions.

The timeline of events is as follows:

1. Man gets money out of a Cedar Park bank.
2. Man drives to Lago Vista and stops at a gas station.
3. Man goes into the gas station, leaving money in his car.
4. Two other men break into said car and steal the money.
5. First man calls 911 and informs them he is following the car of the other two men and intending to stop them.
6. First man pulls in front of the other car and stops it.
7. First man claims the people in the other car brandished a gun, so he pulls out his gun and shoots the driver in the mouth, and then fires a second time.
8. The suspects’ car drives away.
9. One suspect is arrested at the hospital, and the other is located in Houston after taking a Lyft.

The biggest question I have is has the “stand your ground” Castle Doctrine changed in Texas to make chasing down and shooting someone who stole from you okay? Nowhere have a read that the guy who had his money stolen was detained or is in custody.

My understanding of the situation in which one is allowed to attempt to murder someone else legally does not include following people and putting yourself in a situation where you fear for your life. I have found nothing in the law that seems to have changed recently, and I feel that following someone, even if they are thieves, pulling in front of them and stopping their car would fall under “provoking” which is very clearly listed as being a nullifying factor for standing your ground.

This story just contains a lot of weird and dumb, and I’m hoping it doesn’t fall off the news radar entirely, because I need to know more. Mostly what I need to know is that the guy who did the shooting receives some consequences. Right now it seems that someone who thinks it’s okay to chase people down, put himself into a dangerous situation, and then shoot his way out of it is apparently walking around free. If this is going to be considered an okay thing to do in Texas now, I feel like that should be bigger news.

I question why other news outlets aren’t digging into this a bit more. Here’s the link to the story all the others seem to use as reference for their own stories, and if I’ve not heard more about this in a week or so, I’m going to poke the news people to see if they wouldn’t like to follow up on it.

Thinking Out Loud

The weather has been rainy, which is great as we need rain, and so I’ve been stuck inside mostly playing video games. It’s also given me time to think about things. The thing I’ve been considering all week is do I want to move my blog to new software.

Not that there’s anything at all wrong with WordPress. I always loved it and still do, but the rise of the fediverse has opened up some interesting options. I’d been trying various ways to tie my WordPress install into Mastodon/the fediverse, and I find all the ways to do that to just be limited in functionality or otherwise irritating. Sometimes, they just don’t work. I’m sure some of these options will eventually get to where I want them, without me having to do the work (which I no longer find enjoyable), but it’s moving too slowly for me. I’m impatient.

But what if, instead of hosting my own WordPress site, I had my own instance in the fediverse, which then became my blog? And what if I paid someone else to run the whole backend, because I just don’t want to learn how to do it myself? I’m just not up to learning new stuff right now.

There’s a lot to consider, but it feels like the way forward. I think it might be fun and different and more suited to my barely posting situation. Or maybe I’d post more! What I’ve found since I left Twitter and moved to the fediverse is that I am posting more there, having great conversations with all manner of people, and I haven’t figured out why that is. I suspect it’s because it’s not a toxic hellhole. Maybe my blog needs to live in that environment too.

Anyway, that’s just some stuff that’s been bopping around in my head as the rain continues to fall. Maybe nothing comes of it. Maybe I do something crazy and really mix things up. Hard to tell at this stage of contemplation.

An addendum: It’s just so obvious from the Mastodon posts in my sidebar that I post things over there that in the olden days I’d have posted on my blog. But over here, very few folks will see it, and there will be almost no conversation, and the people who would like to see it are over there in the fediverse, so then I have to post a link to some short post on the blog, and I feel that’s irritating for everyone. Like, maybe I should just be over there all the time.

A New Old Adventure

I have bought a new camera. Okay, it’s not new. It’s actually quite old. I bought a new old camera. It’s an Asahi Pentax K1000, which was likely manufactured in 1981 or 1982. So it’s exactly the same camera I used when I was on the school newspaper staff in high school and college. Yes, I have decided I’m done with digital and will be returning to film. It feels a little crazy, but I’ve been having very strong feelings about digital vs. analog everything, and I’m coming down firmly on the side of all things analog are better.

Anyway, here it is! Isn’t it lovely?

A black and silver, vintage Asahi Pentax K1000 35mm camera, manufactured in the early 1980s.

It’s not an easy thing to shoot with film anymore. Just finding a place to develop film and do it well is a struggle, and heaven help you if you’d like them to make prints from the actual negatives instead of printing from digital scans of the negatives. It is my intention to eventually develop my own film at home, and I would like at some point to also have access to a darkroom to make my own prints. But for now, I just want to remember all the things I have forgotten about shooting photographs with a film camera. It’s a little scary, but it’s important for me to do things that feel scary. Things that feel hard. Things that move me out of my comfort zone.

The camera arrived on Monday, and I spent hours that day inspecting it, cleaning it, and familiarizing myself with its minimal functions. I’d planned to take it downtown on Tuesday to snap some photos, but the day started dark and when the sun finally came out, it arrived with a whole lot of wind. Like ridiculous levels of wind. If it’s that windy at my house, downtown would be a nightmare, so I worked on other projects, chased down outdoor things as they blew away, and grumbled quietly about my plans being ruined.

Today it looks like it’ll be gloomy and moist, but at least not windy, so I’m going to shamble around outdoors a bit and hopefully find something interesting to photograph. This first film is ready just a light leak test and to make sure the camera actually functions as a camera, but I might as well try to get good pics, or at least do the best my rusty skills will allow. I am not expecting greatness, but you know I’m always hoping for it.

And if the weather turns too foul for being outside, I’ll just work on the camera related projects I started on yesterday … going through my fabric stash to find materials for a camera bag, strap, and changing bag. To go along with my negative feelings about digital things, mass produced things also make me cranky. I’m simply not paying as much as they want for things I can clearly see are low quality and will need to be replaced regularly. If I make the things I need, I have only myself to blame if they suck.

Anyway, it’d been a while since I posted on the blog, and I thought maybe I should mention this thing that’s been taking up a good chunk of my free time lately (and into the future). I’d say I promise to post over here more often, but we all know I’d be lying. I post when I feel like it, and I guess I don’t feel like it all that often anymore. I’m okay with that.