write.as/jonbeckett

It's been a few days since I last polluted the internet with any thoughts. I think the biggest surprise to me is that I haven't really missed writing. I thought I would.

Life continues to be quiet.

Saying that, we have been invited out to visit neighbours for dinner this evening – a reunion of sorts of school parents – our children progressed through junior school together. It's going to be fun.

While sitting out on the green with neighbours a few of weeks ago – an excuse we all used to use to grab a drink with each other – the conversation turned to what we had all been doing over the past year or so. Guilty admission followed guilty admission. Nobody had really done anything. Nothing has become the new normal.

I kept quiet about descending into my own Abed Nadir world of pretend aeroplanes (Community reference – we've been binge-watching it at home recently).

Actually – while mentioning Community – perhaps you can clear this up for me. In the middle of the LEGO Movie, Emmet names a number of cats that cross his path. The final cat has a deep voice, and is introduced as “Jeff”. I'm pretty sure it's Joel McHale, “Jeff Winger” from Community. I wonder if anybody has ever jumped down the internet rabbit hole to find that one out?

Anyway. We need to go soon, so I should stop writing. Maybe I'll just pause here, and write more when I get home...

(and entire evening passes)

It's now 11am on Sunday morning. I've already cut the lawn.

Last night was fun. It's easy to become stuck in an insular world of work, chores, errands and so on – before you know it, you haven't seen friends for months or even years.

The evening whistled by. We laughed, told stories, reminisced about the past, and looked forward to the future together. Our children are all growing up. While we are of course apprehensive for them, we're also adjusting to a new normal of our own – our lives are changing too.

We got home just before our daughters, who returned from the pub where Miss 18 had worked until closing time.

In other news, I've begun stripping away the results of recent tinkering – reducing the blog to it's core at Wordpress. Given my sphere of work there is always going to be a temptation to delve into the machinery of the internet, and lose sight of the reason I am here in the first place. While I might not agree with walled gardens, platforms, and “the man”, there are benefits to “just writing”, and taking advantage of platforms I don't have to look after.

Anyway.

The remains of Sunday are stretched out ahead of me. Perhaps a cup of coffee might be a good first step.

I've decided to step back from the internet for a while. Slow down.

I STILL have a huge pile of books I've not read, a LOT of movies I've never seen, and a LOT of TV shows I've never seen a single episode of.

It's time to climb out of the internet rabbit hole.

I'll pop back in every few days of course – as I have been – and perhaps I'll have stories to tell :)

It's been a few days since I emptied my head into the keyboard. I'm not quite sure how that happens. It's almost like the universe turns the tap on or off from time to time – sometimes the words pour out of me in a torrent, sometimes in a trickle, and sometimes I turn the tap myself and nothing comes out.

I've been busy.

Quite apart from attending end-of-year rugby team celebrations, going running, working, doing chores, grocery shopping, and all the other “usual” things, I've also been hitting pay-dirt with YouTube.

You might remember me mentioning many moons ago that I became engrossed in the world of “flight simulation” during the pandemic. I joined my Dad on several “group” events on the internet, flying pretend aeroplanes together at various virtual locations around the world.

Well... I started recording videos of my escapades, and uploaded them to YouTube for others in the group to enjoy. I didn't give it much thought after that until perhaps six months later, when YouTube informed me one day that I had enough “subscribers” to monetize my account.

I quickly enlisted the help of my teenage daughters, who obviously know everything there is to know about Youtube, Youtubers, and so on.

For the last several months the collection of videos have been earning a quite respectable amount of pocket money. Until last week.

While at a loose end at home and in need of an escape from work, I decided to “double down” on the video recording escapade. Over the course of perhaps 72 hours I recorded some new content, uploaded it, and watched as the viewers, subscribers and what-have-you started to increase.

It's kind of become addictive.

I'm now earning more per day than I was per month. It's difficult to put your finger on exactly how much, because the vagueries of advertising revenue on Youtube are not very transparent. It's more than I ever expected though.

Who knew that being able to pretend to operate an Airbus, a Boeing, or any number of general aviation aircraft would be worth something one day? Of course at some point in the near future my knowledge will be exhausted, and I'll quickly run out of things to record videos about. I'm not quite sure what I'll do at that point.

For an example of this rather ridiculous, and yet unexpectedly lucrative pastime, the following video might help somewhat:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAurWSp3ttE]

Today was a quiet day. A day filled with meetings, and a day spent excavating a rather deep rabbit hole with warning signs posted all around it. What's in the depths of the rabbit hole? Notion, Evernote, and Onenote.

I've been using a paper bullet journal for the last several years. Every so often I become tempted by various online note-taking applications, and every time – after a few days tinkering – I return to the paper journal.

I think perhaps the reason I go back to paper is because while notes stored on the computer are endlessly searchable, they're subject to the formatting and structural constraints imposed by whichever app you might use.

It frustrates me that each app is good at one thing, and terrible at everything else. Notion is wonderful at organising tables. Evernote is wonderful at capturing webpages. Microsoft ToDo is wonderful at organising tasks. Let's ignore that Notion slows dramatically, the more you put in it, or that Evernote has a ridiculous licensing model, or that ToDo is terrible at managing “things you have done”. OneNote is perhaps remarkable in that it's pretty terrible at absolutely everything.

Don't even get me started about “lock in”. Nothing is compatible with anything else – perhaps purposely so – meaning any attempt to shift platforms is going to be unneccesarily complicated.

Anyway.

I haven't got chip on my shoulder about any of this, honest. Maybe I need to step away from the computer for a while. Maybe a month or so. Or a year.

Another day. Another few kilometres in the running bank. The schedule moved on to “Week 3” this morning. It's so tempting to go further than the schedule dictates, but I'm only too aware of past injuries and how I caused them.

After scraping myself out of bed a little after 7am, I met my middle daughter in the kitchen – who had just returned from her own run. She's starting the “Couch to 5K” too – only I'll believe it when I see it. As with many teenagers she tends to be full of ideas that only get as far as doing something once or twice. Quite how she's going to make it through seven or eight weeks of running every other day is anybody's guess.

My run went well. I took a different route around town to mix it up – and of course ended up running in the road half the time. Why do some people think the entire pavement belongs to them? Why are they so thoughtless or ignorant? I really do wonder if I'm invisible sometimes.

After getting home I launched myself into the usual chores – emptying the dishwasher, filling the washing machine, and tidying up around the house. After that the lawn needed cutting. It never ends around here. While writing this I can hear that the washing machine has finished – guess who will be hanging it's contents out in a moment.

It's funny really – I look forward to the weekend, and invariably end up doing chores for most of it.

That's two week's of the “Couch to 5K” complete now, and after six months doing very little indeed my body appears to be remembering how the whole “running” lark works. Against my better judgement, I extended this morning's run a little (only by a kilometre), just to see how my legs felt. So far so good.

While it's tempting to increase mileage next week dramatically, I know I shouldn't. Fitness programmes are designed a certain way on purpose, and I'm not twenty-something any more.

I remember the first time I ran the local five mile running race – twenty years ago now – and began training perhaps a month before-hand. I ran a small loop around town a few times, and within perhaps two or three weeks was running five miles every other day. I ended up with all sorts of pain in my shins, and that's why I'm not about to do THAT again.

I've turned a corner though. The running is becoming easier. It's getting back to the “happy place” I remember from the past. When you're running you kind of get lost in the rhythm of your breathing – of your feet hitting the ground. I imagine there's something about the whole “zen” thing that people go on about, but I wouldn't presume to even guess.

I'm still losing weight too. No snacks between meals again this week. I had one “falling down” moment – the night before last. I ended up playing Trivial Pursuit with my other half late in the evening, and ate an entire bag of Doritos while playing.

There are murmurings about going out for something to eat tonight. A meal at the pub. I'm guessing I should stick to a fairly healthy option, rather than the stodge-fest I might usually choose.

Anyway.

Time to bring the working week to a close, file timesheets, and go collapse in a quiet corner somewhere (we know I'll just end up in the bottom of an internet rabbit hole, don't we)...

Somebody take the keyboard away from me – I obviously cannot be trusted. While taking a break from research and development on a work project this afternoon I lifted my personal blog in the air, threw it into what can only be described as a cloud-powered infinite improbability drive, and have rather miraculously ended up with a new blog.

Perhaps the term “miraculously” is a little disingenuous. This afternoon's escapade was made possible only by standing on the shoulders of far more industrious developers that did exactly what developers tend to do – when faced with building something, they don't just build something – they build the thing that builds the something.

Of course if you're reading this at Wordpress or Tumblr, you're only seeing a pale imitation of the results of my idiocy. Your words were brought to you by a daemon in the cloud called “Zapier” that watches what I'm up to all day.

Anyway.

The work day has just finished (hence having time to pollute the internet with these words), and my cooking, washing up, and tidying up services are probably required elsewhere in the house.

I promise to return to less tinker-filled programming tomorrow.

In what you might describe as an enormous re-invention of my blogging existence, I have moved the entire archive (including all manner of mangled text from the distant past) into the shiny new blog, and wired up Zapier to automagically cross-post elsewhere for me. All hail the makers of the interwebs for allowing pollution of cyberspace with my written idiocy in such quantity. It took a fair amount of somewhat inventive scripting in Python to assemble the past posts into a somewhat organised collection, but I got there in the end. I can't imagine anybody would want to read it all, but that's not really the point.

I can't help rembering the advice given during NaNoWriMo – it's all about the quantity – not the quality.

Anyway.

It's Sunday, and it's a bank holiday weekend. I spent the entire morning messing around with the flight simulator, and recording YouTube videos of idiotic escapades five thousand feet above London in a questionable jet aircraft – rabbiting on about radio navigation techniques. There's a simple reason why – my YouTube channel has been “monetised”, and this has turned into a lucrative rabbit hole from which to dig “extra money”. My other half laughs at the amount of hours required to make anything like a profit, but I keep impressing upon her that if I spend the next thousand years at it, I might be able to afford several packets of cookies.

I've just realised it's getting pretty damn cold in here. I should really go find something warm to wear. Perhaps if I type fast enough, the friction from my fingers will warm the entire room up.

Ah. A coffee. A coffee will warm me up. Why didn't I think of that before?

Throughout the last 48 hours I have been descending ever further into the federated internet rabbit hole. While trying to wrap my head around it all, the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to mind.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

from Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When I first encountered the “fediverse”, I wondered if people might not prove it's undoing. While it's wonderful to imagine a diverse network of communities spread across the internet, it's probable that people will turn variety into difference – and communities into factions.

In my experience, people tend to ruin everything.

Just as a community might form to foster and protect a vulnerable minority, another community might form to pollute surrounding communities with hate.

It's already happening. Groups are emerging to cater for every undesirable predilection you might imagine – from extremism, to racism, sexism, bigotry, and so on.

Thankfully the developers of the federated internet foresaw such obvious events, and built in the ability to block entire communities – and to share information with the wider network. A vaccine of sorts to a social virus – depriving tolls of the air needed to spread their hate.

It strikes me that gatekeepers of federated internet communities are essentially benevolent dictators. There's only one problem with that – when did you ever see a dictator remain benevolent?

It's going to be interesting – watching the federated internet build itself – watching it twist, contort, and evolve. A tipping point appears to have been reached in recent days – a trickle of newcomers has become a flood.

I wonder what will happen when the corporate and commercial worlds inevitably attempt to exploit the new networks. Any attempt to pollute the firehose with advertising or marketing is not going to go well for them – I can almost hear their complaints about being blocked from huge swathes of the internet landscape already.

Something rather interesting happened last night. Something I want to write about so I might reminisce in the future about “the day Elon Musk bought Twitter”.

I'm not quite sure why it happened, but a lot of people left Twitter last night – or rather, they cleared their exit route. I'm not entirely sure why so many people are so polarised by Elon Musk, but their apparently imminent exodus seems to have brought the potential future of the social internet into focus.

For many, the fediverse arrived last night. Of course it was already here, but it took a billionaire re-factoring the internet landscape to wake a lot of people up.

Somebody asked me yesterday what the “Federated Internet” means – wondering if it meant some kind of federal control. No. Not at all. Quite the opposite in fact.

If you look up “federation” in the dictionary, it describes a whole being made up of many parts (think countries in the world). Each part operates autonomously, and can communicate freely with the others. You might think of the world wide web as a federation – each website is autonomous, but connects to the wider world by agreeing on common communication protocols. Email works the same way.

Several years ago open source developers started looking at the tent-pole social internet platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and wondered if they might improve upon them. Given that the direction of an internet where intentionally incompatible social platforms can be steered by commercial decisions, the idea of a federated social internet gained traction.

Mastodon is one of the first federated social internet platforms to gain attention – a twitter-like collective of independent yet connected communities – run by the people, for the people, with no central ownership or control.

It's perhaps wrong to talk about Mastodon as a thing. It's not the thing – as the famous saying goes – “it's the thing that takes us to the thing” – to the communities – to the people.

This video explains it far better than I can:

wp:embed {“url”:“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE","type":"video","providerNameSlug":"youtube","responsive":true,"className":"wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio”} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE /wp:embed I'll stop lecturing now.

After tinkering with Mastodon for the last several years, I registered with one of the servers last night, and began reading, following, and watching a platform that had been a quiet backwater of the internet explode into life.

It's been fun. It continues to be fun. The marketers haven't arrived yet. A new social network has been born, and is filled with wide eyed people stepping through Joe MacMillan's Holland Tunnel, taking in the city for the first time.

wp:embed {“url”:“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi_fKu9WTAE","type":"video","providerNameSlug":"youtube","responsive":true,"className":"wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio”} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi_fKu9WTAE /wp:embed