Author Archives: Orb

About Orb

Artist, writer, dreamer, poet, philosopher, gamer, Texan. That about sums it up!

Vigilante Justice?

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.