Keeping in touch with everyone you ever met

In my post last week on my shift in social media habits, I wrote in a comment “the idea that we can keep some semblance of connection to everyone we’ve ever met is a pretty recent phenomenon. I wonder if it will last.” My friend Chris O’Donnell (who may or may not be the actor), wrote in reply

I’ve been questioning if keeping in touch with everyone you’ve ever met is actually a good thing. Also, I downloaded my friend list on Facebook (actually screen scrapped it as requesting it from FB only got me 10 names). Then I put it in a spreadsheet and went through all 258 names and rated then as yes or no on “would it really bother me if I never spoke to them again?”

Only 78 people passed the test. I’m considering if I could just check in with them via text or email occasionally.

I’ve been thinking about that. I am, as America sang, “one poor correspondent…but that doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind.” I’m the sort where once you become one of My People, you’re My People forever. I might go years without an interaction, but when I do, it’s like no time has passed. Just Friday I texted a friend that I hadn’t talked to in months because a USC basketball player’s surname was the same as her given name.

For the entirety of human history, people came and went from our lives, and only a few that went maintained some kind of connection. In the last two decades, that has changed. Not only has social media allowed us to stay in touch, but we even take our phone numbers with us. Your phone number used to indicate where you live, now it indicates where you lived when you got your first cell phone.

There’s an unprecedented permanence in casual relationships. I think I fall on the side of liking it. It allows me to remain at least passively connected to people I cared about without having to make the choice that “yeah, their presence in my life is actually done now.” Perhaps that’s a personality flaw of mine. Time will tell whether or not this is good for society, but in the short term, I think we need all of the connections we can get.

A shift in my social media habits

Amazingly, it’s been slightly less than a month since Mark Zuckerberg decided that hate speech is good and facts are bad. As you may recall, that decision led me to create a Bluesky account. It also led me to dramatically reduce my Facebook and Instagram use, although the latter was pretty sporadic to begin with. In that time I’ve noticed a definite shift in how I use social media.

For one, I’m just on it a lot less. It doesn’t take long for me to get caught up on Bluesky and Mastodon. I follow almost no one on Pixelfed so far, so that’s quick, too. This leaves me with a lot of time to do other things. For example, I successfully completed the “read every day in January” challenge on The Story Graph for the first time this year. There were a few days where I’d just do a couple of pages or a few minutes of an audio book in order to check the box, but most days I read for an hour or so. I’m also writing more, as evidenced by the number of posts on this blog lately.

Twitter always felt like the most natural platform for me, since it favors short shitposts. My brain makes so many of those. For some reason (perhaps because my network was mostly people I knew through my professional work), I never felt as comfortable doing that on Mastodon. But on Bluesky, it’s like the good old days.

Surprisingly to me, I’ve cross-posted a lot more than I thought I would, thanks to Openvibe. I’m normally opposed to cross-posting, but since Mastodon and Bluesky are largely the same format, I guess my aversion is lessened. Some stuff still goes to one or the other, but I really expected myself to always direct posts to a single choice. I’m still learning about myself at the age of 41.

I haven’t completely abandoned Facebook (and you are not invited to argue why I should), but I only check it briefly every few days. Years ago, I had gotten my usage to near zero, but then Twitter went to hell and Facebook had the largest share of my People™. Surprisingly, simply removing the app shortcut from my home screen has kept me from opening it out of boredom. Now when I go to Facebook, it’s because I’m actively choosing to check in.

Partially as a side effect of the smaller networks on the platforms I use and partly because of intentional choices, I find myself doomscrolling less. I’m following a lot fewer journalists and Online Political Opinion Havers than I did in the old days. I have enough ways of finding out what new terrors appear every day that I not need to immerse myself in it. That seems to have helped my mental state quite a bit (duh, right?).

By the way, did you know I have a weekly-ish newsletter? Subscribe if you’d like. If you have one, let me know and I’ll subscribe to yours.

Other writing: January 2025

What have I been writing when I haven’t been writing here?

Duck Alignment Academy

GUAC

Kusari

Would Teenage Ben in 2024 be a Christian Nationalist?

My friend Renee recently wrote how if her 20-year-old self were here today, she’d be a Christian Nationalist. It got me thinking about the political and religious beliefs of Past Ben. In high school, I was very conservative. My U.S. history teacher gave us a political spectrum quiz at one point and I was to the right of Reagan. The highlight of my school breaks was being able to catch Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

It’s an understatement to say I’m not like that now. I can’t pinpoint when I moved left. It was a gradual process throughout my early 20s in particular, but even now into my early 40s. Past Ben would certainly have blamed this on liberal indoctrination in college, but I couldn’t begin to tell you the political beliefs of most of my professors. The one professor where I did know his political views was, in fact, a socialist. He told us so at one point, but I wouldn’t say there was a particularly socialist bent to the class. I don’t really remember much of anything about it, other than his imitation of his Irish grandfather saying “It’ll be Tammany Hall or no hall at all.”

So I don’t think Professor Hogan had much to do with it. But after reading Renee’s post and thinking about Past Ben, I recalled what might have been the first step in being more self-reflective about my politics. I remember at one point in high school (I think) that I drew a bunch of sketches of politicians in a grid. They weren’t particularly accurate renderings — I was going for clownishness, not realism. Each of them were labeled with some prominent Democratic politician of the time. They had speech bubbles saying some silly thing or another. But at the end was Rush Limbaugh, and his speech bubble said “I am the truth!”

That gave me pause. I’m not sure if Limbaugh ever said that specifically, but it was certainly plausible to me. I thought “wait. That’s a statement only Jesus can make, and Rush Limbaugh is not Jesus.” Nothing changed for me that day, I think, but it opened the door for more critical thought.

As most kids who have any interest in politics do, I followed my parents. Or at least my dad. Mom has always been quieter about her politics. It wasn’t until I was an adult on my own that I started to examine my views in terms of “based on what I value, here are the positions and candidates I support” instead of “well I’m a conservative, so of course I’m in favor of such and such.”

Like 20-year-old Renee, I’d like to think that Teenage Ben would find Trump repellent and unqualified to be president, no matter what he thought of the policies. But I’d probably have found Elon Musk hilarious in a douchey edgelord sort of way. Would I have been a Christian Nationalist if I were a teenager today? It’s hard to say. I can’t remember ever having a desire to explicitly make my religion the dominant one. I had no desire to talk about my beliefs to anyone who wasn’t interested in them. Whatever else I may have wanted to promote politically, I believed that the promises of equality and freedom that the US was notionally founded on. So maybe I would have avoided that path. I’m glad I don’t have the opportunity to find out.

Listening to vinyl

When my grandmother entered a memory care facility a few years ago, I drove down to clean out the condo she lived in for the past three decades. One room was basically a dumping ground for things she brought with her from New York and then never touched again. In that room was an old stereo with AM/FM radio, an 8-track deck, and a turntable. I brought that, along with her records, back home with me.

To my dismay, I couldn’t get the system to make music happen. After a little bit of tinkering, I decided to junk it and just buy a working turntable. (I settled on the AudioTechnica AT-LP60X, in case you’re wondering.) Pretty quickly, I started listening to a lot of records. Which meant I also started hitting up flea markets to expand my catalog.

As my friend Lyz wrote,

I am not an audiophile, so I never really understood the recent rise of record player popularity. Day to day I’m perfectly happy to stream music through the tiny Bluetooth speakers that float around our house. It wasn’t until recently when I started seeing the value of slowing down and appreciating the warm, physical sound of a record. The discourse around this thread of thinking tends to be that we’re all running around living this fast-paced life, so we’re losing some of what is so beautiful about life. Mindfulness and other slowing down practices are bringing us back to enjoying the present, and this is right where the record player comes in. You slow down, pull out this giant piece of media from a beautiful sleeve, and hear the scratchy of the edge of a record before settling in. It turns hitting play on your phone into a ritual, one that I really like.

I also have come to appreciate the album itself as an art form, not merely a collection of songs. A well-crafted album can take the listener on a journey.

I also discovered another, more practical benefit: listening to a vinyl record is a great time box. When I was writing Program Management for Open Source Projects, I would put a record on and write until the side ended. Having to get up to flip or replace the record gave me a good mental break and also got me moving.

America has always been aspirational

A few nights after the election, I was at a basketball game. At the conclusion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” my buddy said “still the best country in the world.” “For a few more months, at least,” I quipped. I’m not convinced that America is the “best” country, if for no other reason than I don’t know what “best” means.

What I am convinced of is that America has never been what we claim it to be. America is not great, it is an aspiration.

From the very beginning, we have failed to live up to the story we tell about ourselves. Virginia’s House of Burgesses sat for the first time in the same year that the African slave trade began. Thomas Jefferson, while perhaps one of the greatest philosophers on human rights, did not act on his philosophy.

As our ancestors forced Africans from their home and sold them into slavery an ocean away, they also pushed out the indigenous people by force and treaty after treaty that would be broken to be replaced by another treaty that would also be broken. Centuries before Adolf Hitler gave it that name, it’s hardly a stretch to say that the British and Americans pursued a policy of lebensraum.

As late as 1840, the “antislavery” north still had 1,000 enslaved people. And while the Civil War may have ended legal slavery, that wasn’t the goal. Lincoln was more concerned with preserving the union than freeing an enslaved people. For almost a century more, segregation was legal, voter suppression was rampant, and racism ruled policy. The effects of these policies is still visible today.

The target of our racism has shifted over the years. For a time, southern Europeans were the lesser “other”. Then east Asian. The U.S. built concentration camps for the Japanese in World War II, but had no similar facilities for Germans or Italians. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of these, in one of the all-time worst decisions to come from that body.

We tell ourselves that America is a land where anyone can go from rags to riches. While some do achieve that level of class mobility, it’s not true for everyone. As far back as 1770, 1% of Bostonians owned 44% of the wealth. Wealth disparity has only continued to grow in my lifetime. The educational outcomes of school districts remain best correlated with the income of the districts residents.

We have done much of what we accused the bad guys of. Sometimes to a lesser degree, sometimes not. So as the worst person to occupy the White House returns today, I will remind myself that the work never ends. The poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes captures the sentiment far more eloquently than I could.

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Chris O’Donnell didn’t tag me in his post on this topic, but I liked the idea and I want to write more in general, so I figured I’d do it anyway.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Let’s ask 2008 Ben:

I’ve started this blog as a platform to discuss the more technical side of my life. Let’s face it: the people who read my Live Journal aren’t very likely to care about Linux discoveries and web design. People who care about Linux and web design aren’t very likely to care about my personal life. Now I have an outlet for both.

So that explains the start of this particular blog, now nearly 17 years ago. But clearly I was already posting on Live Journal at that point. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and blogging offered an opportunity to do that in a way that I could inflict share my thoughts with others.

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

I use WordPress because my hosting provider at the time offered a one-click install. I’ve stayed with it because it works well enough for my purposes and I don’t feel like going through the effort to migrate to something else.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I used Live Journal in the aughts. Some of my early Facebook statuses were somewhat blog-like. (And of course, there are “microblog” platforms like Twitter, App.net, Mastodon, and Bluesky.) I’ve also used Webflow and Hugo for work blogs.

How do you write your posts?

Typically I sit down in WordPress, bang out some words, and then I’m done. Occasionally I’ll plan ahead and write an outline or something. Mostly, though, it’s words-until-I-run-out.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I have the least amount of time to actually do it? A lot of my posts are reactive, so the motivation comes when I have a strong opinion to share about something. I do have a huge backlog of other ideas, so sometimes I’ll find myself with a bit of time and I’ll get some writing done then if I can.

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

I typically schedule posts to publish in the morning. Usually I aim for a Monday or Friday since I publish Duck Alignment Academy posts on Wednesday and I want to not overwhelm people. Since I’ll sometimes write several posts in a burst, I want to keep them well-spaced. But typically, once I’ve scheduled the post, I don’t come back to it. It’s in the CMS, so it’s out of my mind.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I’ve published just over a thousand posts here. That’s a lot. I don’t remember most of them. But there are a few posts that have helped total strangers solve problems, and I love when that happens. Since I enabled Jetpack stats in 2015, the top posts are:

As you can see, most of those were of the “I solved a problem I had and here’s how I did it.” They didn’t make the top posts, but I’m also particularly proud of “When your HP PSC 1200 all-in-one won’t print” and “Building GEMPAK on Fedora” in that vein.

Any future plans for the blog?

Nothing huge. I want to keep writing — and maybe even write some more — as I grow weary of major social media sites being shitty. If Matt Mullenweg’s temper tantrum causes long term sustainability problems for WordPress, I’ll look at switching to another platform (but I really don’t want to do that).

Who will participate next?

I’m not going to tag anyone. Do this if you want. Or not. But if you do, please let me know!

Why SemBr doesn’t work for me

There’s one problem with prose stored in version control systems: line breaks. Longer lines mean bigger diffs, which can make it hard to review changes. One approach, and the one I take, is to put each sentence on a line. This works pretty well, but there’s a better approach: semantic line breaks (SemBr). In SemBr, line breaks separate sentences into logical pieces.

The problem with SemBr is that I struggle to make my brain do it. It took me a while to figure out why I struggled with SemBr despite understanding the benefits. A while back I realized it’s a simple answer: I overthink it. When I write, I think about the meaning of words. When you add in thinking about the line breaks, the cognitive load goes way up.

Sentences (and character counts) are unambiguous. Everyone who uses the same style will end up with the same line breaks. Semantic chunks can be more ambiguous, so if you’re working with others, there’s a (self-imposed, no doubt) pressure to get the breaks Right™.

My friend Matthew offered this succinct summary:

put things that are likely to change on their own lines.

Like
URLs,
dates,
and
list items.

So maybe I’ll give it a try again. And if not, at least I can explain why not.

FunnelFiasco: now on Bluesky

TL;DR: You can now follow @funnelfiasco.bsky.social on Bluesky.

This morning, the admins of Hachyderm defederated from Threads. This was a result of recent changes that Threads parent Meta made to moderation policies. It’s now totally cool with Mark Zuckerberg if you say someone’s gender or sexual identity, for example, is a mental illness. The Hachyderm admins rightfully said “fuck that noise” and, since protecting Hachyderm users from this garbage would greatly increase the moderation load, they took the only other option available: defederation.

I understand and support this decision, but it put me in kind of a bind. My social network on Mastodon is way smaller than what it had been on Twitter. This isn’t just ego starvation, but it means that people I enjoyed interacting with are beyond my reach. Some of them started using Threads, but now I’m cut off from them again. Bluesky seems to have really caught on with both my tech- and normal-people circles lately, so I’ve finally gotten around to creating an account there: @funnelfiasco.bsky.social.

I’ve started following some people haphazardly, mostly from people I have seen post elsewhere about being on Bluesky and also the people followed by I’ve started following. So the list is still small, but hopefully I’ll be able to build it up quickly. I don’t know yet how I’ll route my posts to either Mastodon or Bluesky. I’m opposed to the idea of crossposting all the things, so I won’t do that. I’ll probably settle into some kind of pattern eventually. I have time to figure this out.

On a related note, I’m trying to reduce my use of Meta properties in general, although the network effect will probably keep me on Facebook for a long time. But in order to promote the web I want to see, I’m going to try to start writing here more. Wish me luck!

New Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame entry

Last week, WYMT meteorologist and fellow 812 native Erik Dean shared a great forecast discussion from the Riverton, Wyoming office. As Erik said “come for the forecast, leave hungry!” I’m hungry after reading it and I just ate lunch an hour ago. It’s now the newest entry in the world-famous Funnel Fiasco Forecast Discussion Hall of Fame.

When I got to the end, I said “of course it’s Chris Hattings.” Chris has several entries already, so it’s good to see he hasn’t lost his touch.