RFC
TUESDAY EDIT. I’m going to leave this up this week while I ruminate. Also, lazy.
WEDNESDAY EDIT. It feels weird, not squeezing out a post every night. I feel like I haven’t brushed my teeth or something. How about guest posts? Any of you have something you’ve always wanted to tell the internet? I don’t have a big reach, but if you’ve been holding in some burning truths about stamp collecting or dressage, I’m willing to entertain the idea.
THURSDAY EDIT. The internet was quiet. Too quiet.
FRIDAY EDIT. Thanks for the input, y’all. I will probably publish my half-assed instance and whip it into shape in realtime. Because I just can’t get enough of my own incompetence. I won’t be deleting anything, just de-internetting it for now. We’ll see. Did I mention lazy? Good weekend!
Request for comments, that is. I went poking through my old content over the weekend. Twelve years and 3,500 posts and I don’t know how to begin to sanitize it of possible copyright infringements.
I don’t even know how to decide what’s infringing. Wildlife photographers and freelancers whose work gets picked up by the media are touchy as hell about their content, I know that. Fair enough; they get ripped off all the time and they’ve been sore about it for years.
But what about news images in wide circulation? Memes? How much do I have to change somebody else’s image to make it transformative? It would take forever to go back through, if I even knew what to wipe.
What I’m thinking is, I’ll start a new instance of WordPress in a new directory, switch over and just retire the old content entirely. My stuff has gotten pretty repetitious anyway, as I’ve exhausted the novelty of being in England.
But I think it would break my heart to shutter the blog completely, at least right away. I’d miss you guys; I really would. I’m sure viewership and participation will fall off a cliff if I switch to irregular vague-blogging, but I’m open to suggestions.
I surely can’t hang a whole blog off a Dead Pool, can I?
June 10, 2019 — 9:11 pm
Comments: 45
Disappearing the stupid
I’m thinking I will pull some images and insert this (or one like it) in their place. Prophylactically, you unnerstand.
And I may pull some old posts entirely while I’m at it. I’ve said some mighty dumb stuff in the last 15 years. Ordinarily, I would say I have a duty to live with all the dumb stuff I’ve ever said hung ’round my neck, but as long as I’m revisiting everything…I don’t think I can resist the temptation.
I’ll back it all up first. And the Wayback Machine will have most of it. They’ve taken a snapshot of this site 380 times so far. I don’t know if that’s just the top page or everything, but it hardly matters. The internet never forgets.
Well, seldom forgets. Uncle B and I have been internetting long enough that our earliest interactions appear to have fallen off a cliff, but I’m guessing there’s some geek somewhere with a punched tape backup of the entirety of USENET 1987.
Anyway, I figured I’d let you guys know. You have a stake, after all, as commenters.
Ah, don’t worry. It’ll turn out I’m way too lazy to revisit 3,431 posts. Have a good weekend!
June 7, 2019 — 9:03 pm
Comments: 6
mmmm…clean…
Uncle B and me at the car wash today. Car was covered in bird poop. This is a very birdy place.
I got a sort of extortion email at work today. Five years ago on our website, we used a thumbnail-sized photo on a blogpost and…turns out some durned fool grabbed it from a stock photography site. The email was from an agent representing the stockhouse. It demanded £100.
I have a feeling I know how this works. They probably have some kind of bot that catalogues the client’s portfolio and then goes looking for images from it on the web. Running the company name through the internet, quite a few people on forums are calling it a scam. But from what I know of copyright law, it isn’t a scam, it’s just extremely ugly practice.
The thing about copyright law, there’s no statute of limitations. So we could ignore it and they probably would decide it isn’t worth pursuing in the courts, but it would always be hanging out there. And the fact we ignored it would count very much against us and we might owe their legal fees and stuff.
I’m getting legal advice. The question is, are there other problematic pictures from the wayback?
No wait, the question is AAAAAHHHHH, MY BLOG! MY BLOG! HOW MANY IMAGES ON MY BLOG ARE NOT MINE??? I DON’T WANT TO BE SUED!!!!
Most of them are mine, but I’ve gotten lazy and pinched images from the online. I’m thinking of going back and removing any picture I think might potentially be a problem. There are only….3,430 posts on the site.
Good weekend, y’all!
June 6, 2019 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 10
Flight of the Daks
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a flight of 75 Dakotas (that’s C-47’s to us ‘Merkins) flew to Normandy today and dropped a cargo of paratroopers. It seems likely they won’t be able to do that for the 100th, so it’s a big deal.
Just to the West of us, sadly. We didn’t see nothink in the sky. But for all the plane footage you can stand, check out this excellent TwitchTV channel. They have hours and hours of behind the scenes (and in front of the scenes) footage of the prep and the flight. Badger House has resonated with the sound of aircraft engines all day.
Poor old Uncle B is an aviation nut and would love to have seen it go over. The picture is one of his from a couple of years ago. We crawled into this one and were astonished at how primitive the controls were. Not to mention the seats.
Those poor bastards, 75 years ago.
June 5, 2019 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 11
Behold, the size of mine ego!
Handwriting font. Specifically, my handwriting font.
There are many places online you can do this, many for free. They vary in the number of characters they’ll allow (special characters like ampersands and em dashes may not be included), but they all work similarly. Download a template, write the letters in the spaces provided, scan and upload. And viola, .ttf file!
I almost had a hissy fit when I realized I’d done all my work on a template that wasn’t the template of the website I had intended to work with. But as I had done a lot of the work in Photoshop, it was an easy matter to move it from one to another.
The particular site I used is Calligraphr. They have some neat features, like letting you adjust the letter spacing (my handwriting is generally crammed together tight) and letter variants (because if you get a big enough sample, the lack of variation in the letter forms sticks out).
I might even pony up the $8 for one months worth of enhanced service, so I can do a complete character set — numbers, symbols and so on. You get to keep the font when you’re done anyway, paying or not.
Behold, a handwriting crabbed by two and a half decades of communicating with engineers.
June 4, 2019 — 8:55 pm
Comments: 13
…and now for something completely badger…
Mr Lumpy. No, I’m not talking about my beloved. Mr Lumpy is a badger that lives in Manchester. Videos of him (and fambly and other critters) are one of the brighter spots in my Twitter feed. Check it out if you need a brighter spot in yours.
Only, I just got to the tweet in his feed about foxes and their soulful eyes when I heard a commotion in the garden. Everybody’s okay, but that bigass soulful bastard was definitely back trying to appreciate the wonders of nature in my henhouse.
Hippies. Feh.
June 3, 2019 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 15