An unexpected truth

Ever had anyone say something to you that’s so profound it momentarily stops your breathing? That happened to me today.

I have a relatively new friend I’ve been chatting with lately, the wife of a woman I’ve known through social media for years. They’re a binational couple like Nigel and I were, and that’s something that always catches my attention (of course…). We shared our stories, and I told her my story of love and loss, of the life that Nigel and I shared, how I’d married into an awesome family, and how utterly improbable all of that was.

Today, she said, “Nigel brought you home”, and I instantly realised she’d got it exactly right! I have no idea why I never realised a fact that I now see as obvious.

If Nigel and I had never met, I still would’ve visited New Zealand as as tourist like I’d planned, but I’d have had no reason to move here. Because we met and fell in love, we formed our family and built a life together. Back in those days, me moving to New Zealand was the only way we could be together, and so, Nigel really did bring me home, even though I never saw it that way before today.

There’s that old expression, “home is where the heart is,” something I know I’ve said plenty of times throughout my life. But today, thanks to my friend, I truly understand what it means.

Photographic reality

It won’t surprise anyone that uses social media, but social media isn’t reality. There are all sorts of ways in which that’s true, but maybe the photos and videos shared are the best example of that. But, it doesn’t have to be.

I recently watched a YouTube video by a photographer who was talking about how people aren’t taking photos for the fun of it like they used to, and how so many people now only share photos to reflect a sort of curated reality, what they want their life to look like to others. Put another way, rather than showing what is, they share what we want they their life to look like.

I thought the photographer’s larger point—that we should all do more creative stuff for the fun of it, that we should take photos of things that speak to us, that we think are beautiful, that make us happy, whatever, rather than just trying to present a curated version of reality. That much I totally agree with.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that there are any users of social media who don’t understand that folks—especially “influencers”—share things that present them and their lives in the best possible way, and may never share “real” glimpses of their “real” lives. If I'm correct that people do know that, then does it really matter if some people only share highly curated glimpses of their lives?

Naturally, this made me question myself—not a new thing for me, of course. I sometimes share photos on social media, and regardless of subject, I share the best version of that photo (and I usually take several shots of the same photo to give me options). The photos I share are real, but by no means perfect, though as a former professional in printing and publishing, when I look at photos I’ve shared, I often wish I’d taken the time to touch up the photo.

Selfies are harder for me, but I still don’t try to present “perfection”. Instead, instead I usually try to take a lighthearted approach, or else take a photo with Leo so his cuteness can draw the viewer’s attention. That sort of insecurity is probably the best reason why I could never be an “influencer”.

And yet, I reflected back on my photos and wondered if maybe even my photos were too “perfect”, even though they were never actually perfect. Last Friday, I decided I wanted fried eggs on toast for my brunch, and as I always do, I cracked the eggs into small ramekins so I can easily pour them into the pan (same with poached eggs). Not only is it easier, I can also change plans one or both yolks break. That happened on Friday.

When I cracked the second egg (it’s always the second egg…), the yolk broke. I put that egg into a container for the next day, cracked another egg—and that yolk broke, too. I decided to fry them anyway. The photo up top is the result, and it’s similar to the sort of photo I might’ve share if both eggs had been perfect—but I wouldn’t have shared it precisely because it wasn’t perfect. I instantly realised that, and took the photo, anyway, because no one is perfect 100% of the time, and maybe it really is better to be honest about that.

The next morning I took that egg I’d set aside, added another egg (the yolk of which didn’t break…) and made scrambled eggs because I decided I wanted a scrambled egg sandwich for my brunch, rather than eggs on toast. When I make that I put a little mustard on it and some tomato sauce (aka ketchup). And that led to a problem.

Many years ago, Nigel and I started using a squeeze bottle that we could pour the canned refills into (for so we could fill it with two cans and not have to refill it as often). When I opened the little cap on top, the tomato sauce shot out the top (it was under a bit of pressure for some reason). By accident, I noticed that by accident—which was fortunate!)—that the sauce hit the kitchen ceiling (photo at right; it cleaned off easily). It struck me that it was another bit of reality that most people would never take a photo of, much less share, and that just slotted into my thinking about how reality and what we share online are often very different things.

I’m absolutely not judging people for what they share or don’t share, and since I don’t strive for perfection in the photos I share, I’m unlikely to change much, if anything. As it happens, the VAST majority of the photos I take are of things that interest me, scenes I think are pretty, or maybe things I want to remember later (like where I parked in a large and unfamiliar carpark so I can find my car later). And yet, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for us to pause and consider how “real” the photos we share really are?

In the case of the two photos in this post, they’re no more “real” than other photos I share, but they are ones I wouldn’t necessarily share were I not making a point of sharing harsh reality. Maybe “real enough” really is enough.

Strangeness on Facebook

Everyone knows that what we see on Facebook, as well as their other services like Instagram and Threads, is driven by algorithms. Their goal is to keep us using Facebook as long as possible so that we’ll see more ads, and the best way to do that is to show us more of what they know we interact with of click on. But what if there’s more to it than that? What if they’re engaging in some sort of deliberate “de-emphasis”?

I noticed in recent weeks that I wasn’t getting notifications when the New Zealand Labour Party posted something, including a Live Feed. Instead, I’d get a Notification about something they’re supposedly posted “5 minutes ago”) or whatever. When I follow the Notification, I find out that it was actually posted six or seven days earlier. Here’s an example, first a Notification I saw yesterday morning (October 30):

And here’s what it sent me to, a Reel that had actually been posted on October 23—not an hour earlier, but a week earlier:

I also realised yesterday that I hadn’t seen any Facebook Posts from Kamala Harris in a long time. I went to the Page to make sure I was following it (I was), clicked “Like” on a post, and then a little while later a post from the page was in my feed. That has never happened with any Labour Party post, even though I often leave a “Reaction”.

I don’t think this is any sort of censorship of centre-left politics, and as far as I know the same thing could be happening with any other politically-focused Page. I also vaguely recall reading that Facebook made a decision to de-emphasise, or whatever they called it, political posts for the US elections. For all I know, this could be nothing more than them trying to keep politics out of people’s feeds, not necessarily completely, but just a bit slower.

Whatever the truth is, it’s annoying as hell. I’ve followed the Labour Party Page for at least a decade, yet I no longer see their posts in my feed nor do I get timely Notifications of posts as I used to. The fact that clicking “Like” on a post from the Kamala Harris Page made another post show up in my Feed, when doing the same on Labour Party posts never does is odd, though.

I’ve noticed something odd in Instagram, too: I’ve Liked and followed numerous political folks in recent months, and yet I seldom see their posts when I launch the Instagram App. Threads isn’t quite as much of a mystery, though, because I use it so little that the algorithms probably don’t have anything to work with.

I think that Facebook should respect our choices in what we want to see in our Feeds, or, at least, they should give us timely Notifications so we can choose to look at the post. Facebook deciding for us is a bit condescending and even infantilises uses to some extent. They already feed me lost of posts I never asked for and don’t follow, but not posts from people and Pages I do follow.

Pretty much every Facebook User I know has complained at some point about how Facebook often fails to show us things from people we actually know and/or have been FB “Friends” with for many years, and instead it shows us posts from the same handful of people over and over. There’s simply no way for Users to change this situation. Seems to me Facebook would have better luck in getting ads in front of eyes if it gave us more of what we want rather than what Facebook decides for us.

Just let us have more say in what we see. I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to ask.

Update – November 2, 2024: Yesterday evening, I noticed I was getting Notifications of posts on the Kamala Harris Page again, and today there were several more, as well as posts showing up in my newsfeed, too. However, I still don't get timely Notifications about Labour Party posts, nor do I see anything in my newsfeed. That particular strangeness is still going on.

Have nice things. Or not.

People have opinions about everything possible. Of course they do: It seems to be a large part of being a modern human. Even so, it’s amazing how people seem to feel the urgent need to spout their negative opinions about things that don’t matter, like pop music. I had two reminders of that this week.

I don’t take part in any of the numerous social media arguments over something in pop culture—movies, TV/streaming shows, music, etc. In general, my feelings about pop culture are summed up in Arthur’s Law:

Everything you love, someone else hates; everything you hate, someone else loves. So, relax and like what you like and forget about everyone else.

Not everyone feels that way—shocker, I know—and many of the Internet Fights I’ve seen are centred on, or related to, something in pop culture. I honestly cannot understand why people get so bothered about what other people enjoy. To me, it seems like such a colossal wast of time and energy.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I saw a Facebook “Memory” about what I posted after the death of Prince in 2016. I later blogged about that, and the post incorporated much of what I said on Facebook. At the time, I was taken aback by the fact that some people couldn’t even leave people alone to grieve the loss of an artist they liked and admired. I said:

The Internet has provided a great way for people to share their grief with people who feel it, too, and that’s wonderful for them. Really, that should be good enough for the rest of us.

Of course, it wasn’t good enough for some people who chose to be truly awful to other people. It just felt wrong to me—not the first time that’s happened. That made me think about all the other times I’ve seen people that seemingly decided that the world simply HAD to know how much they hated a particular thing in pop culture, especially in pop music, which seems to draw the greatest level of attacks.

At the moment, there seems to be no one in pop culture who is a bigger target of hatred than Taylor Swift, but, to me, it’s utterly mystifying. My cards on the table before I go a step further: I like a lot of Taylor Swift’s songs—actually, that should probably be written be as “a LOT”. However, I wouldn’t call myself a “fan”, mainly because I’ve never bought any of her music (I’ve added her music to my Spotify library), However, her song “The Man” was one of my favourite songs of 2020, and the music video [WATCH — no, seriously, watch it!] is quite probably my favourite video of that year (and on my list of all-time favourites). It’s one of the things that got me through the first Covid lockdown. All of which is to make clear that I think she’s an enormous talent, even though I don’t call myself a “fan”—actually, am I a fan of anyone anymore? A topic for another time, maybe.

There’s a thing called toxic fandom, and they can be fans of literally anyone in the public eye. Personally, I’m not too keen on the aggressive and toxic fans of the frequently napping oddly-hued senior citizen politician from Florida, and the toxicity of such fans can be alarming. However, the number of such fans is astonishingly small considering how much attention they get in the media. Taylor Swift absolutely has aggressive and toxic fans, too, but they’re self-evidently NOT the majority.

I think part of the problem is the imperative of modern journalism to promote the sensational and even outrageous in order to get clicks on links (and, even still, eyes on broadcasts). It’s the old-timey journalist’s slogan, “if it bleeds, it leads”, or even “dog bites man isn’t news, man bites dog is.” The news media, then, has a financial incentive to give airtime and print space (online especially) to the most extreme examples of toxic fans being toxic, and while such fans are absolutely not the majority of a given fandom, and even though it can be argued they cast a shadow out of more normal fans, that doesn’t make those more normal-behaving fans insignificant.

I mention all that because part of the hatred directed at Taylor Swift is “justified” but some people as their supposed reaction to the antics of some of Taylor’s aggressive and toxic fans. The question is, those particular fans’ behaviour aside, why do so many people seem to hate Taylor so very much? Far too much of the answer comes down to politics and culture wars.

Not long ago, the news was filled with fans of NFL (American football) reacting bitterly to Taylor’s relationship with Travis Kelce, a tightend for the Kansas City Chiefs. Fox “News” picked up the chorus, condemning her for having the utter audacity to go to watch Kelce play, and declaring there was a fix in for the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl so that she could endorse Joe Biden for president amid all the media coverage. The Chiefs won, and, of course, Taylor didn’t say a word about President Biden.

Fox and other rightwing media outlets then switched their attention to Swift’s hugely, insanely successful Eras Tour. Fox performers claimed Swift would use the platform to urge her fans to support Democrats, something that apparently came from her previous non-partisan urging of her fans to register to vote (and they did). Fox performers demanded that Taylor “stay out of politics”, which, oddly enough, is a demand they’ve never made of any rightwing performer since, well, ever. Amazing, isn't it!

With the rightwing media ecosystem promoting hatred of Taylor Swift, it was inevitable it would metastasise. Now, it’s become part of the USA’s far-right religious-political activism.

Today I saw a cut-and-paste share of a Facebook post by a far-right “Christian singer, songwriter, former worship leader,” and failed Republican candidate for Congress (because I’ve never heard of him, it seems prudent to not name him, so as to not give him a Google boost). He wrote on his Facebook post, “Almost half the songs on Taylor Swift’s new album contain explicit lyrics (E), make fun of Christians and straight up blaspheme God. Is this the music you want your kids listening to? Do you think I’m overreacting?” Well, since he asked, yes, I absolutely do.

He shared small portions—in one case a single line—of lyrics to songs from Taylor’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, and I found nothing in those quoted lyrics to be even remotely offensive, so I decided to listen to the songs in their entirety to find out for myself what he was clutching his pearls about.

The fact is, I liked all three songs, and the two the guy seemed to be the most apoplectic about (because he shared more than a single line from them)? I liked those two the best of the three. This doesn’t surprise me in the least. The rightwing is constantly bleating on and on and on about how “the Left”—by which they actually mean anyone who’s not a rightwinger—is “woke” and they’re all “snowflakes” who can’t accept offence and should “just to grow up”, and because this is the rightwing mantra, I have a question: What should mainstream people say about rightwingers when they entirely overreact to a song’s lyric and claim to be mortally offended by “attacks” on supposed Christians and their version of the Christian god? Are they “woke”? Well, yes, and insofar as that has any meaning, it’s their version of it—though they’d probably prefer their version of the term, “red-pilled”. What’s clear is that, by their own definition, they’re being “snowflakes”—people who can’t accept offence.

It’s easy for people to be cynical about their ideological opposites, presuming they’re arrogant, aggressive, that they lack intelligence or, at the very least, self-awareness, and that their defining trait is hypocrisy. It’s also easy to point out things that seem to justify the prejudice, like the pearl-clutcher who attacked Taylor who then used the comments on his post to market t-shirts he sells on his website. Obviously, neother hypocrisy nor grifting is defined of limited by ideology, even though it seems like the Right has more than their fair share of it.

Decades from now, Taylor Swift and all the nonsense thrown at her by the rightwing in particular will be items in history books, but is this really the way her loudest critics want to be remembered, as intolerant pearl-clutching snowflakes? I ask for a very simple reason: The rightwing constantly demands that mainstream people should “just get over it” whenever rightwingers say or do something the mainstream finds offensive or over-the-top. Shouldn’t righwingers do the same?

Everything you love, someone else hates; everything you hate, someone else loves. So, relax and like what you like and forget about everyone else. No, really!

The graphic up top is something I've seen on social media for several years. Sometimes the graphic has been altered to make a different statement, but the text in this version is the first I saw. I couldn't find who originally created the graphic or where it's from (or even if this version has the original text), however, the first online use I could find was from 2016.

New, not old

Today Facebook served up two different things that caught my attention. One was another “Memory” (more about that in another post), but it was a"Brand survey" (screenshot above) that made me stop for a moment. It’s probably the oddest thing I’ve ever seen Facebook offer me.

What made this so weird is that FB apart from the title, “Brand Survey”, the thing they were asking me to fill out was entirely in Dutch. Surprisingly, I don’t speak or read Dutch. Sometimes I can get a rough idea of the meaning of a word, or maybe a very short phrase, because I tried to learn German in high school (and a bit after that). This was funny enough (to me…) that I shared it to my personal, sarcastically asking:

Um, you okay Facebook? Or, did you just get confused and not realise that I live in New Zealand and not old Zeeland?

I then added a brief explainer in the comments:

Zeeland is a province of The Netherlands, and the Dutch named the country of New Zealand after the province. Aotearoa is believed to be the original or most common original Māori name that the Dutch didn’t even know about at the time. The British, who later anglicised the Dutch name, didn’t care what Māori called it.

This was simplifying the story a bit, because Dutch cartographers, as was the European custom at the time, used named the places they "discovered" with Latin versions of the name they chose, in this case, Nova Zeelandia, which in Dutch is Nieuw Zeeland (the ending “d” is pronounced more like “t”), and the current official name, New Zealand is just the anglicised version of that. It became the official name when the British started colonising the islands.

The Wikipedia article on the province of Zeeland talks about all of this, and also the fact that at the same time New Zealand was named, the country now known as Australia was named Nieuw Holland (New Holland), something I've mentioned in the past. They did that was because, as the article puts it, “the two major seafaring provinces of the Netherlands in its Golden Age were Holland and Zeeland.”

Personally, I think this country should one day be officially renamed “Aotearoa New Zealand”, though with the current surge in racism and racist attitudes, that day seems farther away now than at any point since I arrived here 28+ years ago. Actually, I don’t even think an adult conversation can be had about it right now, let alone any consideration of a change.

As far as I can remember, Facebook’s post today is the first thing they’ve shown me that wasn’t in English, so that’s—a thing, I suppose. On the other hand, the actual paid ads it shows me are often for Auckland-based real estate companies, and that’s mostly likely because I access the Internet through a VPN (“Virtual Private Network”) that’s set to say I’m connecting from Auckland. But the Netherlands doesn’t have a place called “Auckland”, so—dunno, maybe their algorithms had a computer's equivalent of a brain fart?

Mainly, being served up a “Brand Survey” in Dutch was just funny to me. I don’t know if their algorithms really did mix up New Zealand with old Zeeland, or if there was something else going on. For example, my surname appears in both Germany and The Netherlands—although, I’ve never (yet!) been served up anything in German, so, I guess it’s unlikely to be that?

As corporations decide to rely on computers exclusively, all sorts of problems are emerging. So far, most of them are more annoying or hilarious than they’re actual problems (or worse). For example, people’s posts on Facebook and Instagram being taken down in an automated process using algorithms because there are no human checkers any more. One of the problems with this, apart from having no one to appeal a deletion to, is that the algorithms cannot understand either context or nuance. As corporations push automation farther and harder, serious problems will inevitably emerge. Getting a survey in Dutch will seem so quaint and innocent by comparison.

Still, at least I got a laugh out of it, and it was all a bit of fun. For now.

I got Wrapped

Well, all the cool kids were doing it, so I decided I must, too: This past Sunday, I got my “Spotify Wrapped”—um, report? List? Whatever it’s called, the highlights are in the graphic above. I’ve never actually paid all that much attention to it before, but this year I did, and it was—interesting.

I'm not upset about the rankings in the graphic—how can I be? It's based on an astounding 81 minutes of listening in 2023! Clearly I don't listen to Spotify, which is a waste since I pay for it (to get rid of the ads). That's going to change: Last week, I decided to listen to more music (it clearly can't be a New Year Resolution since I decided it in mid-December, but I never make those, anyway, as I’ve said many times). Instead, I simply decided that music is something I need more of in my life.

I was surprised that UK band Deco was my top artist, but it was probably because I went through a flurry of listening at one point this year. Even so, I really do like their 80s synth pop-inspired sound, and I really did like their cover of "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (so much so that I listened to it a whopping three times! Spotify threw in a video from Deco's vocalist, Max Kendall, thanking Spotify listeners for listening to their music and promising "something a little bigger" than the EP ("Nice Car") they released this year. Personally, I hope it has a full version of their cover of Miley Cyrus' "Flowers", or at least that they release one eventually (I mentioned that cover in a post back in August of this year).

As for the other songs, The The and Sonic Youth are part of a Spotify Playlist (“One Night in 1987”) I made to recreate one of my mixtapes from 1987, back in the days before I moved to New Zealand, and I think I listened to the entire playlist at least once (if so, that'd be 46 of my 81 minutes). Wafia and Auckland artist K M T P are probably there because I heard a song somewhere, like backing music on TV or in a commercial, and thought, "who's that?", used the App Shazam to find out, then listened on Spotify (my listening to only 81 minutes in 2023 meant it wasn't hard to get on my top list…).

My Top 10 streamed songs in 2023.

My "Top Songs of 2023" playlist has 31 songs that add up to 1 hour 54 minutes of listening time. So, I guess I must've only listened to some of those songs for a minute or two for me to have had only 81 minutes listening time. Those 31 songs included all ten songs from the 1987 playlist, seven of which were in the Top 10 (graphic at right). I suppose this must be some sort of evidence that listening time really does matter for these things. That makes sense: They keep track of everything streamed in part so they can pay artists, well, something.

In any case, maybe Spotify made the list too soon, because after getting my “Wrapped”, I listened to the entire playlist in the hope I might remember why I added some of the 31 songs that ended up on this year's list. It turned out that there was only one piece I didn’t recognise at all: “Tuesday – Instrumental Version” from a 2014 EP called “Sine Muscia Nulla Vita”—or is that who it’s by? I can’t figure it out. The piece didn’t sound familiar at all, and I also had absolutely no recollection of adding it to my library—which is probably because I didn’t. The only explanation I can think of is that I was listening to Spotify—possibly that 1987 Playlist—and when it was done Spotify played it next as a “Recommended” song (even though none of the playlists I curated have any instrumentals, so… yeah, no idea. Still, that was the only “WTF?!” moment on the 2023 Wrapped Playlist, so I count that as a win.

All of that made me think a bit more about some of the anomalies on the list, like how Deco was my “Number One Artist” even though, Spotify told me, I only listened to them for five minutes in 2023. I think it could be that they’re top of the list because with four songs on my top 31 they have more than anyone else, so if 5 minutes was also the most I listened to anyone, I guess that makes me sense?

This whole thing was just a bit of fun for me—I mean, if I only listened for 81 minutes over a year, I simply can’t take this thing seriously. On the other hand, if I really do listen to Spotify more in the coming year—and, in fact, I’ve already listened more since I got my “Wrapped” thing than I did in the year before it—then I might take next year’s a bit more seriously. Maybe. I’ll have to see how the coming year unwraps, I guess.

Related:
My Top Songs 2023 Playlist on Spotify
Top Tracks of 2023 Spotify’s playlist of the most-streamed songs in 2023
"Weekend Diversion: Old Tunes, Part 1" from June 25, 2017.
"Weekend Diversion: Old Tunes, Part 2" from July 2, 2017.

A very weird thing

Something may be going on with my blog, something that can’t be my doing: When my blog is accessed from the web address, all the sidebars disappear. That means none of the regular links are visible, and that includes the list of tags on the left side, the list of posts on the right side (and the various external links). Instead, they ALL appear at the very bottom of the page. However, if one clicks on the title of a post, it opens with all the sidebars displaying normally. I have absolutely NO idea why this has happened.

I first noticed it late last week when I published a post in exactly the same way I always do, and when I went back to the blog, all the sidebars were gone. I accessed it in three different browsers—Chrome, Safari, and Firefox—and all were the same. I tried accessing it on my iPad using Safari and Firefox, and, again, it was the same story (on my phone, it’s the normal sidebar-less version maximised for devices).

Naturally, I started Googling to find answers, but as near as I can tell, no one has reported anything similar for several years, and even then it was related to mistakes they’d made. The advice back then was that it was a conflict in the code when a page is rendered in https but has elements that aren’t https-compatible. Back in late 2018, I had to upgrade several things to fix similar, but different issues: Sidebar items weren’t displaying because they weren’t https-compatible, but the sidebars themselves were still there. I haven’t touched it since then. I opened each visible blog post in a new window under the theory that if there was something in one of them causing the problem, it ought to cause the problem in any window. They all displayed normally.

Because I never touched any of the blog settings, my first guess was that the Blogger team must’ve made some changes to the underlying code that broke my customisations. The years-old instructions to fix the problem back in the old days was to increase the width of the display, so I did that: It changed nothing.

So, for now, I have no idea how to fix whatever’s wrong. In the meantime, if you want to access the sidebars, click on the title of any post and they’ll be back where they’re supposed to be. I’ll keep trying to figure out what the hell happened and how to fix it, but, for now, that’s the only solution I can offer.

I certainly don’t need yet another new problem to fix, but here were are.

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 390 is now available

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 390, “Networks galore”, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast episode, along with any other episode.

The five most recent episodes of the podcast are listed on the sidebar on the right side of this blog.

I uploaded this episode on Wednesday, but forgot to share the announcement here at the time.

More online weirdness

It seems it’s easy to find weirdness in the online world. Sometimes, it finds us. Only days after I had weirdness with Google’s Blogger, Facebook decided to have its turn.

Friday morning, I got this email from Facebook. I had no idea what they were was on about:

Unregistration notice

Hi, This is to inform you that your developer account does not have any roles on any apps (such as an admin). As such, to keep your developer account registration, we ask that you create an app or receive a role on an existing app within the next 30 days. If this developer account is not associated with an app by this date, this developer account will become unregistered. Please note that this will be the only reminder you receive in this time period and if no action is taken, this account will become unregistered in 30 days.

I knew that I do not have, nor have I ever had, a “developer account”, and didn’t even know what that is. I’ve never in my life done anything even remotely related to developing apps. I can’t even imagine that ever changing.

My first reaction was about how their systems can send out irrelevant mails, but they just can’t seem to find a way to identify or deter actual, real-live extremists on their platform, even when content that goes against their “community guidelines” is pointed out to them. Totally checks out.

Later, I checked, and it turned out that I DO have a Developer Account for some mysterious reason. Their "Meta for Developers" site has absolutely no support options whatsoever—of course!!!—except for being able to ask questions in a community forum. When I checked on Thursday, he most recent topic was about this very topic, and 18 others had also posted to it that they'd received the same cryptic email—18 people who'd also bothered to dig around the Meta for Developers thingee to try and find support. Two people mentioned that they had a separate Page, as I do (for my AmeriNZ Blog and Podcast), but that's part of Meta for Business, not the Developer stuff. Maybe one of their few remaining coders accidentally messed up the code and ended up creating Developer Accounts for people with Pages?

No one from Meta posted an explanation to the forum (of course) and the question remained marked "Unresolved"—because it was. The most common thing people were worried about was that in 30 days Meta/Facebook will close ALL a person's FB accounts/Pages, not just the Developer Account. It'd be, ya know, kinda nice if Meta had an actual human who monitored forums and could post an explanation—since there's absolutely NO other way to get an answer—but so that seemed too hard for the company.

The next day, I saw that the Facebook Developers blog had an update to a post about this (I found the post about ten hours after it was updated). They’d added: "Unregistration [of Developer Accounts] will only apply to developer accounts; this change doesn’t impact personal Facebook accounts." So, that's that: I don't have to do anything, and my normal account will be fine.

Two things: Given that the company doesn't believe in having actual human beings available to answer users' questions, why couldn't they have been clear in the email and avoided all the confusion? After all, it was clearly important enough for them to update their blog post a day or so after the emails had gone out. Second, why don't they have anyone monitoring their "community" forums to answer the question like this? The answers, of course, are found in one simple fact: We don't pay anything for FB.

There's a common saying about social media companies: "If you're not the customer, you're the product". I'd say "inventory", rather than "product" because selling access to us is how these companies make their money. This is why the blue checkmark Facebook offers by subscription specifically offers access to customer service PEOPLE as a benefit: By paying for services, people with the checkmark become customers and get things we inventory folks don't.

For me, frustrated as I get with Facebook, right now it's not bad enough to make me quit. Yeah, I'm inventory, but FB is still good for hanging out and interacting with my fellow "inventorians". For now, anyway.

But I could do without so much weirdness.

Google’s Year in Search 2022

The video above is Google’s “Year in Search” video for 2022, and below are some of the “top five” searches globally, in New Zealand, and in the USA. This is something I’ve done several years because, as I said in 2020 (the last time I posted about the Year in Search), “I think it’s important to have a record of what was on our collective minds during a year, and posts like this make it easier to refer back to later,” and these posts make it especially easy for me.

Here’s what was trending in 2022:

Global

Top 5 overall searches in the world: 1 Wordle, 2 India vs England, 3 Ukraine, 4 Queen Elizabeth, 5 Ind vs SA. Top 5 news searches in the world: 1 Ukraine, 2 Queen Elizabeth passing, 3 Election results, 4 Powerball numbers, 5 Monkeypox.

New Zealand

Top 5 overall searches in New Zealand: 1 Wordle, 2 Locations of Interest (probably refers to Covid), 3 Australian Open, 4 Covid cases today NZ, 5 All Blacks vs Ireland. Top 5 news searches in New Zealand: 1 Covid cases today, 2 Ukraine, 3 Queen Elizabeth, 4 Costco, 5 Will Smith.

United States

Top 5 overall searches in the USA: 1 Wordle, 2 Election results, 3 Betty White, 4 Queen Elizabeth, 5 Bob Saget. Top 5 news searches in the USA: 1 Election results, 2 Queen Elizabeth passing, 3 Ukraine, 4 Powerball numbers, 5 Hurricane Ian.

What I find interesting about the searches this year is how common some topics are. The most-searched things within countries are often specific to that country or its region of the world, but somethings transcend borders. I wonder if “Powerball numbers”, the fourth most-searched thing globally, is because of the USA (where it was also fourth in the same category), because not every country has something similar to the USA’s powerball draw. I had lots of similar “I wonder if…” and even just “Huh!” moments when I looked at other search categories (you can get to the three I shared by clicking on any of the three section titles, and once there you can change the country whose search results are displayed).

Funny thing to me, though, is that “Wordle” was the number one general search term globally and in New Zealand and the USA (and for other countries, too). I hadn’t really realised it until I looked at what was trending in search in 2022, but I see now that this year was apparently a lot more boring than recent years preceding it. Here’s hoping the searches in 2023 are equally boring!

Jacinda Ardern delivers 2022 Harvard Commencement Address

The video below is the official video of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s address, provided by Harvard, and it’s well worth watching. I chose this version because it’s unfiltered—no commentary before or after, just the speech.

And, of course, I’m reminded yet again how glad I am she’s our Prime Minister.

Egging myself on

It turns out, using determination to help us power us through the list of things we need or want to do can actually work—just not always, and maybe not for everything. That’s what I found out this weekend.

On Thursday of last week, I talked about how on that day and the day before, determination helped me to get stuff done. In that post, I wondered whether it would continue to help the next day, and, by implication, days after that. The answer: Sort of.

Friday has always been my cleaning day, though in recent months it’s been a bit haphazard and incomplete. This past Friday, however, I was determined to be more thorough, in part because I needed to get the house ready for the cleaning project I mentioned on Thursday (that will be a post of its own). I accomplished most of what I wanted to do, and even cleared away the last few boxes that had been stored in my hallway for many months—maybe since shortly after I abandoned the garage project. It was nice to again have the hallway empty, even if in a couple cases that basically meant putting the boxes somewhere else. Unfortunately, that was pretty much it for me on Friday—close to to getting everything done, but not completely done.

The next morning, Saturday, I was exhausted, so I only managed to make some eggs benedict for my lunch (photo up top). Still, that was something, right? Actually, it was: As I said when I shared the photo on my personal Facebook, “It was the best poached eggs I’ve made yet,” and that was absolutely true.

There was one thing I didn’t like, though: I bought the same New Zealand brand of bacon I’ve bought for years. It says “NZ Made” on the front, right under the “window” where you look at the bacon itself. When I took it out of the fridge on Saturday, I read the smaller print (under the “nutrition” label) for the first time ever. It said:

“Made in New Zealand with pork raised in any one of the following countries: Finland, Denmark, Poland, Germany, Spain plus other local and imported ingredients.”

I have no problem with the fact it had imported pork, but I think putting “NZ Made” in big letters is deceptive, even though it’s literally true: The bacon is made in NZ, but from pigs that weren’t. I buy bacon only a couple times in a year (at most), but if I buy any again, it won’t be that brand. I also learned that I should bring a magnifying glass with me when I go to the supermarket so that I can read labels closely before I buy stuff like that bacon, just to make sure it’s NZ made in every sense.

There was one other thing that wasn’t quite right: The hollandaise sauce. I used the same recipe I always do, the same one Nigel always used, but this time I forgot that I don’t use as much salt as the recipe calls for (I actually don’t normally put any in because the bacon is already salty, something else I forgot). I also nuked it just a little bit too long—we’re talking mere seconds—and that left the sauce “less than ideal”. And this is why I never even mentioned the sauce when I shared the photo on FB and Instagram.

The thing is, when I make poached eggs normally, I just put mayo on them if I put anything at all (other than S&P). To be honest, eggs benny is a lot of work for not all that much payoff. I think that in future I’ll probably mostly stick to making poached eggs on toast rather than full-on eggs benny.

There’s a side note here: I was recently watching a vlog from one of the YouTubers I subscribe to, and he often includes a short cooking segment. There are also frequently brief scenes showing him making poached eggs on toast to illustrate the start to his day. But in this particular vlog, he mentioned how he likes tomato sauce (ketchup) on his poached eggs. Now, I couldn’t possibly care less what someone chooses to put on their eggs, but what struck me about that is that he’s never once shown that in a video of his poached eggs. That made me wonder if I’ve ever done that with food photos I’ve shared—have I ever not included something that I think someone may not approve of? Maybe? Probably? I know that I’ve sometimes not shared photos of something I made because the photo of the dish made it look less appetising than it looked in real life, so maybe that counts? At any rate, watching that vlog made me want to be extra careful to make sure that when I share a photo of food I’ve made, it’s as close to reality as I can make it. Having said that, though, I felt that the photo up top of my eggs benny, even with the incomplete success of the hollandaise sauce, was one of my better food photos—and, yes, the photo showed exactly as I ate it. FWIW.

Obviously, I’m well aware that making poached eggs isn’t exactly a momentous accomplishment, and it wouldn’t have been even if I’d also made perfect hollandaise sauce. However, I’ve been feeling so flat for so long now that this is remarkable simply for being something that I accomplished. Is this the start of a new phase? Of new energy levels? Could it be—and this could jinx everything—the beginning of moving onward and upward again?

Time will tell, but at the moment the signs are encouraging—and so was the success of my poached eggs themselves. I think it’s important to always celebrate the little successes, because sometimes they need as much determination as the bigger efforts do. Fortunately, I’ve also had some successes with those lately, but they’re tales of their own. I’m determined to share those tales, too.

This post includes brief bits I included when I posted the above photo on social media.

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 363 is now available

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 363, “Fifteen Years”, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast. A list of relevant links is included in shownotes.

The five most recent episodes of the podcast are listed on the sidebar on the right side of this blog.

Palindrome and ambigram day

Yesterday was 22-02-2022 here in New Zealand, several of us posted memes on social media yesterday. Today, that merriment was repeated when the date arrived in the USA, though with the less elegant “02-22-2022” marker. It’s one of the few times such special sequence of numbers in dates worked better in our date arrangement format.

At any rate, the whole “Twosday” thing was a bit of fun. A set of twins was born in Auckland on 22-02-2022, and while the time—around 11am—wasn’t exactly special, the twins were born two minutes apart. The births were the result of a pre-scheduled caesarian, but does that really matter? In future years, the twins will be able to tell the story (and their parents will probably tell it until they’re able to do so). The parents probably really didn’t realise the “significance” of the date: I certainly didn’t until I checked facebook yesterday morning and saw the first post about it that I’d see that day.

And, anyway, it was all just a bit of fun. With everything going on in the world, we needed that.

The image above was shared on social media yesterday and today. The author is unknown.

Brand name

Everything has a name, and sometimes it’s a name we’ve given to it. But what happens when we begin to question the name we’ve given to something? The “AmeriNZ” name is an example. Is it time to retire it?

There was a time when the name of this blog (etc.…) was obvious. I’d started using the “AmeriNZ” brand several years before this blog was born, so when I started it, using the name for it was the logical thing to do. It was still a logical name to use as I expanded the stuff I did (like when I added the podcast and YouTube Channel, among other things). But, so much has changed over the past 15 years, hasn’t it? After the biggest change of all, losing Nigel, I began to think about whether my brand name was still right for me. I began to wonder if it was time for a new one.

This thinking was awakened yet again when I realised that I no longer had the “amerinz.com” website. I was thinking about my options for the future, and that made me think again about whether or not I should even keep using the name.

When I first started using the AmeriNZ name, I explained that it was a shortened version of the phrase “American in New Zealand”, and that’s the crux of the issue: Is that an accurate way to describe me in 2021? After more than 25 years in New Zealand, and with no intention of ever leaving, am I not now arguably more Kiwi than Yank?

I knew that the name was accurate when I first arrived because I was absolutely an “American in New Zealand”. It was even still true once I became a permanent resident, because I was still a US citizen, but one allowed to live and work in New Zealand indefinitely.

Everything changed when I became a New Zealand citizen: While I was still an American, I was also legally a New Zealander. Put another way, I was no longer just an “AmeriNZ”.

That’s where I got stuck. A walk through this blog’s archives was the antidote.

Back in 2008, at the blog’s second anniversary, I added a banner I made for the top of the blog. That banner still had the original name (just “AmeriNZ”, not “AmeriNZ Blog”, as it is now; that came about when I decided I needed to differentiate the blog and podcast), but it also carried a new tagline “A gay American-born New Zealander talks about life, his two countries, and a whole lot more.” And that was when it hit me: The brand name now means “American-born New Zealander” or even just “American New Zealander”.

Today I made yet another revised banner for the top of this blog (at the top of this post), with one revision: I shortened the tagline to “A gay American-born New Zealander talks about life and a whole lot more.” Nothing’s changed about the blog itself, or what I might talk about, but by removing the reference to “two countries”, I’m taking the focus off of that. I now realise it should have been like this all along because “AmerNZ” is a personal brand about me and the stuff I create. My unique thing was never really just about where I was born, but about everything that’s happened to me since I moved here, and not all of that has anything to do with my origin story—well, stories is probably more accurate.

All of this will become more important (to me…) over the coming months. I’m making changes to allow me to better manage the content I create and save money as I move closer to retirement. I’ll talk about each step as it happens, but nothing will change in the way to get to things. Right now, the important thing is that this process made me realise the brand I’ve been working on building for the past 15 years is safe. It turns out that the name grew and changed, just like me. There’s still a lot of life left in us both.

Error prone

I make mistakes all the time. We probably all do that, but since I talk about nearly everything, I’m maybe a bit more open about that than most people are. Like, for example, I have a reputation in the family for constantly hitting my head on things—not huge knocks or anything, but enough to hurt for a moment or two. There are plenty of other things that I simply mess up, and I talk about those, too so that others can learn from my mistakes—or at least have a good laugh at my expense. Whatever works for them.

One of my biggest mistakes was the window coverings I chose for two of the bedrooms, something I talked about back in July of last year. My technological failures have been more common and often harder to fix than window coverings.

I’ve broken things on this blog enough times that I really ought to have a tag just for such posts, embarrassing though that might be. I haven’t done that lately, however, for the first time ever, I recently accidentally deleted a comment, one from Roger Green. Since all comments are now moderated (because of a problem that had nothing to do with me), I get email alerts whenever someone posts a new comment. I usually see them in the morning when I check my email on my iPad, and then tap “Publish” (I almost never get alerts about what are really spam comments). However, that particular day I did it on my phone, with it’s much smaller screen, and I accidentally tapped “Delete”. I suppose the learning moment was that there’s no “undo” if I accidentally delete a comment—that and to never moderate comments on my phone, with it’s much smaller screen. I was an honourable blogger, though, and emailed Roger to tell him, so, points for that, right?

There’s yet another accident—though one way or another, this one will turn out to be a good thing.

A few weeks (months?) ago, I began getting email alerts from the company that hosted my “amerinz.com” site that they were doing some sort of "upgrade" to a different (and more expensive) server, and I had to do something or other. I don’t remember what, but I think I told it not to do it automatically. Whatever the reality is (and I definitely have trouble focusing on things at the moment), my site was taken offline when the deadline arrived. I didn’t notice for ages.

I noticed recently, though, and I set the URL to redirect to my “amerinzpodcast.com” site instead, which is good enough for now. This mistake (?) will save me lots of money every year, and may lead to more streamlined organisation of my sites.

When I registered the amerinz.com domain many years ago, it came with free basic website hosting, so I eventually set-up the site I used to have at that address (which, by the way, is fully backed-up). Somewhere along the way they upgraded all such sites to C-Panel, which is very expensive—especially when compared to free—and far, far beyond the needs of what that site was and was for (basically, an online brochure). What I wanted to do is—and pardon the meta stuff, but someone may be interested—I wanted to use the domain as my main site with subdomains for everything else, allowing me to drop one or more of the hosting agreements I pay for. Long story somewhat less so, I missed a deadline and then let it slide for another year. The company’s expensive “upgrade” then made the decision easy—regardless of whether I actually “decided” anything or was just lucky.

I may leave it as it is (and save money), or I could set up new hosting (as I wanted it to be), cancelling one or more of my other web hosting accounts (and saving money). The jury’s still out on that (I have months to decide, unfortunately—a very dangerous thing). Whatever I do, I’ll make sure that everything is easy—invisible, actually—for anyone accessing the sites.

So, this domain stuff is yet another mistake I made, but like those window coverings and even accidentally deleting a comment, it’s not a serious one. It’s also far less painful than hitting my head. Apparently, I have a reputation in the family for constantly hitting my head on things. The technical stuff is, fortunately, definitely not in that league.

Some sun did shine

Three months ago, I lost ownership* of the Internet domain that Nigel and I had used for our emails for around a decade. When I lost the domain, and so, the email addresses. It felt, as I said at the time, “a bit like losing our family yet again”. There's a positive development in this story.

Yesterday evening I received an email from the company Nigel and I both used for some of our domain registrations: I had successfully obtained the domain again. I was really happy about that, and that someone else wouldn’t be taking over “what had been part of the life Nigel and I had for so many years,” as I said on my personal Facebook, before adding, “something I still want.” I was talking about the domain specifically, but it occurred to me later that it was equally true about the life Nigel and I had. I can’t have that back, but I do have the domain again.

Last night, after sharing the good news on my Facebook, I logged into my account and immediately set the domain to auto-renew. That means that I won’t have to remember to do it next year, which is always a good thing. The next thing I did was to buy email hosting from the company, and I chose a medium-priced plan and for two years. There are backstories to both of those two things.

Back in June, when I was still trying to work out what went wrong with the email accounts, I logged into Nigel’s account with the email host company to see if it would tell me anything. I really struggled with their site, which I thought was far more labyrinthine and opaque than it should’ve been (I’m being kind). There’s something else: When I accidentally broke my email account not long after Nigel died, I contacted that same company for help. They were, shall we say, extremely grumpy. I got it fixed in the end, but the person made me feel like a huge burden on their time, and like I was an idiot for not knowing how to fix the problem myself. In sum, I wasn’t exactly a fan of the company.

Last night, I tried to log in again, and the log-ins didn’t work (I originally planned on trying to update the settings so I could use the emails again). I presume that they cancelled the account for some reason, but I have no idea what happened. I wasn’t exactly upset by that development.

After checking the email hosting prices from that company’s services, anyway, I checked the prices with the company I got the domain from, and they were reasonably comparable when considering what my needs actually are. Also, I’ve had a different email address with the Internet domain company for years, and found it easy to use. More importantly, whenever I’ve had a problem, they've been friendly and awesome to deal with, and solve any technical problem that's popped up. I need good—and friendly—customer service because the fact is, I’m just not as good at such things as Nigel was, and there are times I need professionals to sort stuff out for me.

Once I got the confirmation email from them, I started setting up the email addresses (one for me and for “for” Nigel). Then I set up my email client, and tried to send an email to the "new" email address from one of my gmail accounts. Nothing worked. By that time, it was after midnight and I called it a night.

This morning they still didn’t work, so I used the domain company’s chat feature to sort it out and the friendly and helpful person found the problem and set the wheels in motion to fix it (it takes 24 hours for the changes to “populate” over the Internet). I haven’t used those email accounts in months, though, so what’s another day?

What all of this means is that what was a very distressing thing for me is being righted. Obviously, it would’ve been better all around if it had never happened at all, but getting something I’d lost restored to me is still important, especially in September, less than three weeks from the second “horrible anniversary”.

There’s one more things about this. Last night, I said on my personal Facebook, “This is actually part of my gradual process of changing what Nigel set up for us to things that work better for me (mainly because I'm a not as bright about such things as he was…). He'd actually be pretty proud of me for doing that.” I know that with absolute certainty.

*I think it’s odd how people talk about “owning” a domain—even though I do it, too. The fact is, we actually only rent them. It’s a bit like having a house on leased land: We control the house built on it (websites, email) and can do anything we like with the house, including selling it to someone else. But the land underneath it (the domain) is owned by someone else, and we have to pay rent (annual registration fees) to keep the right to use the land (domain). If we don’t pay every year, the owner can take it away from us. The only real difference is that with leased land there are legal procedures that must be followed and laws that must be obeyed, along with plenty of opportunities to avoid eviction. None of that is true for domains.

Update – September 4: My old email address is restored and working, just under three months after it stopped. Today I got an email from a mailing list I was subscribed to with the old address, which I thought was a bit odd. I would've thought their servers would have deleted the address when emails were bounced, but apparently not.

The title of this post is a reference to my post back in June (link above).

Rainfall in my life

Into each life some rain must fall, as Longfellow put it. This week brought a deluge to my life, and I considered building an ark. Metaphorical arks for those floods in life aren’t necessarily easy to come by, though, but maybe we can nevertheless find ourselves on dry land.

Earlier this month, I stopped getting emails on my private account. At first I didn’t think much about it—email traffic ebbs and flows, after all, and it coincided with the Queen’s Birthday holiday weekend. A few days later, it became clear something was wrong.

I thought that there must be a problem with the email service provider, so I logged into the account. I eventually found a link to check the DNS, the service that translates a website domain into the numeric Internet address that computers can access. It found there were errors.

I next logged into Nigel’s account with the company he bought the domain from, and I had a terrible time navigating the site, but eventually saw the domain wasn’t listed in his account. I checked his past orders and found the invoice from when he renewed the domain for five years. That five years was up on June 2.

This points to the part of this story that maybe could be considered my fault.

A month or so after Nigel died, I did something that broke my email. As I worked to fix it (and I did), I checked his domain account at the time and saw that same receipt. I don’t know whether it was “widow brain” (it probably was) or something else, but at the time I saw it as dated “2019”, when it really said “2016”. So, the domain expired in 2021, not the 2024 I thought it was. I should have been more observant.

The domain service provider also should’ve sent out a reminder email before it expired. But I’ve been monitoring Nigel’s email account since he died in case there was anything important, and there was never any warning email from the domain provider. I even logged into Nigel’s account online to double check they hadn’t sent a reminder at the very last minute. They hadn’t. The domain company absolutely should have sent a warning email (like the company I use for most of my domains does).

Finally, Nigel himself bears some perfectly human responsibility: He didn’t have the domain registration set to automatically renew so he wouldn’t have to remember (I have auto-renew on all mine for that very reason). Sure, in hindsight it’s obvious he should’ve done that, but when he last renewed it, he had no reason to think he’d be dead three years later. Besides, the payment method he’d probably have used was cancelled after he died, so it wouldn’t have worked, anyway.

Add it all up, and there were several missed opportunities, many of which were unavoidable, but only one—lack of preemptive support from the domain company—makes me grumpy. But how can I be angry at anyone when it was mostly a perfect storm in which everything went wrong? Besides, their customer support people did spend an hour and a half on the phone with me trying to help—it was just too late for them to do anything (it’s now in the hands if the domain registrar—yet another company involved in this, and one we had no direct connection to).

I was upset about all this because Nigel got the domain in the first place so we wouldn’t have to keep changing everything using an email address every time we changed Internet Service Providers, something we did several times over the years. Over time, that domain became a kind of metaphor for the family Nigel and I had, so losing it feels a bit like losing our family yet again.

All hope is not completely lost. Some IT professionals are trying to regain it for me. If they don’t succeed, then the last backup is that I have it on “back order” for when it’s publicly available again—in 90 days. All of that may fail, though, so I’m coming to terms with the fact I may never get it back, and I need to deal with the implications of that.

Yesterday and today I spent many, many hours changing the email address used for my various online accounts one way or another. There were dozens and dozens of them. I think I finally finished—I hope? It was every bit as awful as it was back in 2017 when I went through a similar process, and also not by choice, actually.

This isn’t all bad: Changing my email address in various accounts led me to delete lots of dead sites from my password manager (and to better organise the ones left). It also means an end to the perpetual stream of spam emails—the cockroaches of the Internet—going to Nigel’s email account. I’ve slowly unsubscribed his address from newsletters, stores, etc., and the last few left will pretty much take care of themselves now that his email address doesn’t work.

That’s the best light I can put on all this, I’m afraid. Still, maybe it’s all for the best. Maybe it was time to tidy up the last lingering details. I haven’t done it before now because it, too, feels like losing our family yet again, so slow and steady was a gentler way for me to proceed, and so, the only way I could proceed.

“Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary”. I think I’ve had more than my fair share of such days lately, but I still believe—hope—that “behind the clouds is the sun still shining.”

Things happened to me this time

I did not break this blog again, nor did I do anything wrong or improper. Nevertheless, I had problems with this blog yesterday that took me hours to work around and forced other changes. This time, at least, none of that was my fault.

Last night I posted an “Important Announcement”, the purpose of which was just to warn readers that there was a change to the commenting system, specifically, that I’d turned on comment moderation “due to a problem with Blogger.” And then the story gets very weird.

I went to my computer yesterday afternoon to finish the blog post I published last night, and I intended to return in the evening and finish another post. Things didn’t work out that way.

I checked my emails first, and saw that I received eight from Google’s Blogger unit (the division that hosts this blog, among thousands of others). Each email told me that Blogger had deleted a particular blog post because “Your content has violated our malware and viruses policy.”:

And how on earth did I do that? I didn’t—it’s all Google’s fault.

The specific policy they were referring to, buried deep within the overall “guidelines” was no clearer on why they’d killed eight of my posts:

Malware and similar malicious content: Do not transmit malware or any content that harms or interferes with the operation of the networks, servers, end user devices or other infrastructure. This includes the direct hosting, embedding or transmission of malware, viruses, destructive code or other harmful or unwanted software or similar content. This also includes content that transmits viruses, causes pop-ups, attempts to install software without the user’s consent or otherwise impacts users with malicious code. See our Safe Browsing policies for more information.

Yeah? And… what does that mean?

First, it’s important to know that I had absolutely no way of knowing what their issue with the posts was because they were deleted. Was there some sort of weird code that was inserted into my post? Did a scammer/spammer/cyberjerk manage to post a comment with “malware and similar content”? I had absolutely no way of knowing, but the one thing I knew for certain that whatever the problem, it was entirely Google/Blogger’s fault.

The whole point of using a hosted blog service like Blogger or Wordpress isn’t just because they’re free, it’s that the service takes care of all the nuts and bolts of running the site—including security. Not only is security not the problem of users by design, there also no direct way for a user to take control of it even if we wanted to.

One would logically assume that Google/Blogger has robust systems in place to prevent hackers and hacker bots from gaining access to the code for Blogger generally or specific posts published to it. If someone manages to hack a password they could do that—and data breaches are common enough, but Google hasn’t notified me of any data breaches so it was reasonable to assume my own blog’s HTML code was safe. That, then, left me to assume that whatever “malware and similar content” they were reacting to must’ve been in a comment. Spam comments ordinarily get caught in a queue to be reviewed manually, and the sort of comments that might contain “malware and similar content” would, one would hope, trigger the algorithms that send comments to that digital purgatory. Maybe not? Why did it catch some spam comments and real, legitimate comments, but let those with the “malware and similar content” through?

With nothing to go on, and with an abundance of over-caution, I switched on comment moderation, which means that I have to approve all comments before they’re posted. I was reluctant to do that because I remembered how much work that used to be, but I also realised that there actually hasn’t been nearly as much traffic in legitimate comments for several years now.

Yesterday afternoon, instead of working on the post I’d planned to publish, I instead worked on re-publishing the deleted posts using the back-up copies I keep on hand. My normal procedure is to write my posts on my Mac, adding some basic HTML code, then I copy the text and paste it to the HTML View of the “New Post” function in Blogger. Then, using Compose View (the visual post editor), I finalise the formatting (adding links, photos/images, etc). When I’m all done, I go back to HTML View and copy the text and then paste that in my document file. This gives me is a fully-formatted back-up copy of the post, one with all the styles, links, and images properly coded. And I do all that precisely so I can restore a post that gets munted in any way.

All of that means that all I had to do was to go to my back-ups and copy the text and paste it in a New Post. Blogger allows users to set the publish date, even one in that past, so I did my best to work out when the deleted post was originally published, both date and time. Then I hit publish and moved on to the next one. There was only one post where I’d forgotten to copy the fully-formatted final version, and that one took more time to do, of course.

While the process of publishing copies of the original posts was relatively straightforward for me, it wasn’t quick: It took me some three hours to re-publish those 8 posts, in part because I knew I’d linked to some of the eight in later posts, so I had to update those later posts with the new URL—and I also had to update their back-up copies.

I stopped there and went to my cousin-in-law’s for dinner, which was a very welcome break. When I got back home, I fed the dogs and went back to the post I was going to work on that afternoon. I published it, decided I was too tired to do any more, and just kind of surfed around for awhile.

Just before I went to bed, I checked my emails again: There were another eight emails from Google/Blogger. Each one said:

We have re-evaluated the post titled [post name] against community guidelines… Upon review, the post has been reinstated.

The last email arrived at about 11:50pm last night, and my honest first reaction was ”WTF?!”, but with the words, not the initials. By then I’d republished all the posts using my back-up copies, turned on comment-moderation, and even downloaded a back-up of my entire blog in case they really did boot me out over this as their earlier emails threatened could happen. I puzzled for a few minutes on what to do, and in the end I posted the “Important Announcement”, revising it several times along the way (mostly cutting a lot of stuff).

As of the time I’m writing this (shortly before it’s published), those eight posts have NOT actually been “reinstated” (I’d know because I’d have two copies of the same posts, since the restored versions have different URLs from the originals). Is this a case of Google/Blogger sinning in haste and repenting at leisure? I guess time really will tell, though, understandably, I’m a bit doubtful that those posts will, in fact, be “reinstated”.

When all this started, the first thing I thought of was that I should just quit blogging altogether because if the “guilt upon accusation” model used by most of Big Tech would make me a victim because of their own security shortcomings, then what was the point of using a hosted service? Hosting my blog myself would cost money and I’d have to do most of my own security work, so that isn’t an attractive option. Moving the blog to Wordpress is an option, but even that seems like more trouble than its worth.

I have absolutely no idea what more, if anything, I’m going to do about all this, but I’ll try to remember to make a new complete back-up every night just in case I do get kicked out because of their own sins. Oddly enough, I don’t particularly want to lose nearly 15 years worth of blogging, nor would I be willing to re-create the blog like I did with those eight posts yesterday.

I guess it’s still the same as it was in the last words of my first blog post: “Let’s see where this leads.” As good an idea as any.

Of no particular importance

This past Saturday was my 14th Twitterversary: I joined Twitter on April 24, 2007. Back then, I was going to use it mainly as a way to promote my podcast, but then I started using it more and more—until I didn’t. Now, I hardly even check it, let alone Tweet anything.

I saw the graphic at left by chance, displayed at the top of my Twitter feed when I signed in using my desktop browser yesterday morning—and I don’t even remember why I went to the site. When I saw the graphic, I was kind of surprised I’d forgotten about it. I forgot it last year, too, but I was a bit busy at the time: We were about to leave the Covid-19 lockdown. That, and I was still adjusting to my new life. The last time I mentioned a Twitterversary was 2019, before my life was blown up.

The hard, cold reality is that I just don’t care about Twitter anymore. I once had interesting discussions on it, and often found topics to blog about. But as time went on, it became more and more of a cesspool, so much so that every time I went on it I ended up blocking accounts—sometimes dozens at a time. It wasn’t because I thought we’d ever encounter each other, it was simply that I didn’t want to see their aggressive stupidity in my Twitter feed. By me saying that, one might assume the blocked accounts were all Righwing (or pretending to be), and mostly they were, however, I also blocked lots of accounts that were Leftwing (or pretending to be). I was actually blocking extremism, not ideology.

But why go someplace where every time I visited I had to take out the trash? Yeah, nah, just not worth it. The truth is, I often feel that way about Facebook, too, but far less often (I’ve also blocked dozens of accounts there, too, but at a far slower rate than I have on Twitter).

Mainly, I concentrate on people I actually know, or accounts I’m actually interested in. These days, I generally won’t take a chance on a random person, but the worse thing is, I don’t even care about that anymore.

So I forgot all about my Twitterversary—big deal. Chances are good I’ll forget about it next year, too. Times have definitely changed.

My Facebook-a-versary is in a few weeks. I wonder if I’ll remember that… (Spoiler alert: probably not). That’s fine, too.