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I'm a huge fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast. He provides long in-depth episodes on a multitude of historical eras and events. But one discussion he had somewhere along the lines makes me see modern day comparisons.

Last week I posted about how I built my new archives page. After releasing the post and getting back to my redesign, I realized that I overcomplicated one bit of code and figured I'd add an addendum to the post showing the simplification.

At the beginning of the year, I wanted to really make a concerted effort this year to try to improve my ability to focus on whatever the task at hand might be. Be it a task at work, writing, or a side project. I'd been realizing that my ability to focus on the task at hand was not as strong as I would've liked it to be.

One of the things I'm doing with my redesign is changing my archives page. Right now if you go to my archives page, it's a bunch of links to pages for year or month and year. The new page is going to just be everything broken up by year.

I know I'm a little late to the discussion here, but this has been stewing in my mind for a little bit and felt a little bit of time might help me articulate what I want to say. As many are aware, Jimmy Kimmel last week was indefinitely suspended from ABC after threats from the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Disney, ABC's parent company caved to the U.S. Federal Government's push to unconstitutionally censor them.

For the last couple of weeks I've been slowly starting to re-do my site. The design itself I don't see changing significantly. Part of it is my near constant desire to keep tweaking. Another is to try to clean up some of the tech debt I'd accumulated over the course of building this site. The one part I want to focus on is how I share links.

I read a lot. As I'm writing this, it's the beginning of September and I've read 49 books so far this year. It's the most I've ever read in a year (though it's propped up some by me delving into audio books and being able to juggle 2 books at a time so long as one is an audiobook and the other is physical or an eBook). But the one thing I've sometimes noticed is that I seem to quite often read books that make me angry, and I knew they'd make me angry when I started them.

At the beginning of the year I took I want to say close to 2 months off social media. I stayed off the two platforms I have accounts on (Mastodon & Bluesky), I deleted the apps and signed out of my desktop sessions. I have since returned to the platforms, but I'm still trying to figure out how I want to handle my use of social media.

It’s been a mostly quiet month.

One of the things that has sometimes kept me from writing more on my blog has been my own insecurity. I'm not always convinced I have anything worthwhile to say, or am concerned that I'm flat out wrong on something, or will just sound stupid. I don't know how many people actually read what I write, but the introvert in me is concerned with sounding foolish.

In today's chaotic world, good journalism is more important than ever. Lately, we've been seeing too many of the biggest news outlets who could be relied upon to report on the news, resort to letting up to maintain access, or readership, or both. For those that continue to report despite an increasingly fascist and authoritarian administration in Washington, it's becoming even more important. I want to support them, but damn, it gets expensive fast.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had a damning dissent in a recent ruling in the NIH v American Public Health Association case.