Blog

I am a reader

Reading time: 5 mins

Recently I’ve been getting back into reading blogs. It’s something I’ve always done on and off, but tapping into what the kids are calling the ‘indie web’ has uncovered a lot of personal blogs that were (are!) a lot like mine. They are wonderful insights in a small part of a persons life. They meander. They have no clear topic or focus. They are part diary, part journal, part dumping ground.

I am subscribing to RSS feeds left, right, and centre. I am adding in interesting websites, some old favourites, some new discoveries. I am being mindful and making sure I don’t over subscribe and so dull the pleasure of a quick skim. It is a joy to return to this format of consumption.

It’s also noticeable, to me at least, that this has neatly coincided with my move away from most social media.

Part of my Digital Detox efforts, which are wholly focused on the volume of digital data directly under my control, also had me assessing things like screen time, social media use and, as I’ve hinted at a couple of times recently, I have silently slipped away from Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, as much as I can.

Yes, I am now more active on BlueSky but that feels like a more natural fit and has the benefit of being much less big bad evil corporation. I also don’t scroll it endlessly and have, again, been very careful with curation of who and what I follow on there.

I am enjoying reading blogs again and that has parlayed nicely into something that has been a life long passion for me.

I read books

They are about to bulldoze the town library (they’ve built a replacement already so all is not lost!) that I used to visit once a week with my Dad. I can still remember the smell of the place, and as Dad wandered off to the large rows of shelves to pick his next three books for the week, I’d turn and scamper down the stairs to the children’s area… but I’ve told you all this before.

That love of books has remained with me and while some years I’ve read more than others, it’s something I’ve fallen back into more and more these past few months.

Yes, stepping away from social media has obviously helped; the avoidance of doom-scrolling is noticeable in my sleep improving as I no longer lie awake scrolling aimlessly for the next stupid video that is about a stupid thing that I don’t actually care about.

It is more than that though and for me it becomes about value, and being far more mindful about what I spend my time on. Like you there are plenty of things to do each and every day, and being an avid list maker (thanks Mum) it becomes a double edged sword as much able to cut you if you don’t get the thing checked off the list as it is if you forget to put it on their in the first place.

So when I am choosing NOT to do something, I am finding that I am less willing to spend time on it if there is no real payback.

I am more than happy to admit that this is all largely because I’m getting older, and it’s something I’ve been pondering for a while now, with the distinct danger of falling into the habit of deeming things ‘for the kids’ more and more (I don’t like that line of thinking, just as I equally don’t like viewing The Brit Awards and realising I’m not entirely sure who everyone is…).

And at this point I now neatly turn back to reading blogs because this wonderful quote popped up this morning.

Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one’s own experience.

— Chang Ch’ao (h/t Futility Closet)

Yes.

Without a doubt this holds true, and as the novels I choose are also deepening and broadening in taste, so I find the absorption, the loss of oneself to a good book is deeper than ever.

I am a reader and in some respects a writer, so my love of the written word, whether delivered as prose, poem, or lyric, is deep.

I write all of this largely to make sure that people know that I am a reader. I am proud to be a reader, proud of my preference of the written word over the short form video, proud to have the ability (and yes, the privilege afforded to me) to read for long periods of time without interruption – although that is most usually in bed and whilst doom-scrolling in bed is bad, staying up to finish a gripping story until 1 am is just fine (don’t ask me, I don’t make the rules) – and firmly believe text is king.

As ever when I write up such thoughts, the timeliness may appear somewhat bandwagon-esque, and whilst the coincidental nature of finding the quote above not long after finishing reading my 14th book of the year so far (and no, I have no targets) and being struck by that number, and then making the immediate and obvious correlation of NOT being on social media so often, I can only assure you (dear reader!) that not only did that quote appear today, but the myriad of thoughts on this topic were already popping around my head because of the arrival yesterday of issue 378 of the ever wonderful Dense Discovery newsletter which opened thus:

Reading is dead. Attention spans are toast. We are, collectively, heading toward a post-literate wasteland of reels and soundbites – our once-curious brains reduced to dopamine-seeking mush. At least, that’s the general vibe online.

In the newsletter opening, Kai goes on to highlight and discuss a wonderful article by Adam Mastroianni that, as ever, outlines thoughts that have been gathering in my own brain for a while now, although with much more clarity and thought than I have mustered. As the author of the article suggests:

Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screen-time like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.

And there it is, the very reason I have moved more to reading books, or even blogs, of falling back in love with the written word, with screens of text waiting for me to consume them. I still look at stupid videos but as some point in the past few months something has changed. Maybe it’s the state of the world and it’s constant barrage on social media that pushed me away, maybe it’s my own digital detox and in taking more thought as to what I publish and consume. Or maybe it’s just coincidence, a cycle that will change again in the future (twas ever thus).

It’s akin to the lean-back versus the lean-in consumption models (~), it’s that depth of pleasure, of value, and I couldn’t agree more with the article: Text is King.

It’s also why I’ve remained a blogger for so long, I realise, as much for vanity as for the fact that I too can use words, I can type them on this screen here and when I publish them you will read them on your screen there.

And it’s why I will remain a reader, why I’ll take my son to the library and let him roam free to discover his own likes and dislikes when he’s a bit older, because even when looking at the moon through a crevice, it’s still a wondrous sight to behold.

Week 9 Notes

Reading time: 2 mins

Life

  • Just back from a weekend away. The joys of the motorhome! A couple of hours drive north, met up with brother-in-law and family, and spent a couple of days just bumbling about with the kids (they have a 1 year old). Bike rides, climbing hills, a soft play and outdoor adventure park. Got mostly lucky with the weather too. So much fun, so relaxing. I was barely online.
  • Which was nice because I picked up some sickness bug on Wednesday which wiped me out all day. I guess life is all about balance?

Read

  • The Winner by David Baldacci – fairly standard thriller but the male view of the female protagonist was awful. Won’t be reading this guy again and not gonna link to it either.
  • The Wedding People by Alison Espach – a recently divorced woman, intent on killing herself, books into a hotel full of wedding guests. Not my usual bag but great characters, deftly written (annoyingly so in one case!).

Considered

Watched

  • Pluribus – still not sure I really enjoyed it, but some great performances so, will give Season 2 a shot, I guess.
  • One Battle After Another – dramatic and ultimately hugely human, what a movie. Forgot how good Sean Penn is too. Yeah, enjoyed that!

Listened

Health

  • Gym sessions continuing, but not quite as much moving through the week as I’d hoped, largely due to the stomach bug on Wednesday.
  • Lots of walking/cycling this weekend though, the joys of the motorhome life (for a weekend).
  • Current Weight 111.5kg – Lost 1kg (I think the sickness bug helped most!)
  • Avg. Sleep: 7hrs 38mins (up 16mins, and trending upwards, just because I’m tracking it??).

Tech

  • Not much tech thoughts or changes or anything much this week. I read tech news but I’m realising how little I change my setup.

Blog Comments vs Social Media

Reading time: 4 mins

Blogging is, if you look in the right places, undergoing a little underground rebirth. Not quite a phoenix like rise, given its prominence in the early 1990s as Blogger bestrode the online world, but it certainly is gaining some traction in the nicer, friendly, quieter corners of the web.

I will happily admit that I have some bias to this growth and hope it succeeds for, just as when I was deep in my blogging heyday – creating Scottish Blogs, being interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland, featuring in the Guardian, being mentioned in the O’Riley Blogging book (modest, ain’t I) – I can sense the friendships sparking online.

I’ve been revisiting some blogs I used to follow ardently back in that day but, alas, my blogroll of favourite sites is now largely full of dormant links.

Sidenote; Diamond Geezer is still going strong and still churning out an amazing amount of top quality content. I once had the good pleasure to meet him briefly in London, along with a few other stellar bloggers of the UK scene, many moons ago.

I’ve got my RSS feeds cranked up, thanks to NetNewsWire which is exactly the no-cruft reader I prefer, and I’m taking time to click through to the websites more often, remembering my own excitement and the stats telling me how many people had visited a post rose from single to double figures!

There is one thing that is lacking, one thing that largely powered the exploration and explosion of blogging when it all first started. Back before there was social media, when the only influencers we followed were doing so because they felt passionately about something (rather than being paid to pretend to be passionate about something), it was the heady days of the early web and it was a place of happy joy for the most part.

Find a link, visit the blog, read, leave a comment, move on. I will admit I probably spent about an hour or so each day doing this. But as we had yet to have Twitter thrust upon us, it was the online equivalent of having a conversation.

Comments drove the interactions, drove the discovery, drove connections and created partnerships, some of those for life. All that from a few words and a shared link.

Time was I could posit a question on my blog, ask for advice about, say, which bands to check out at a local festival, and I’d have multiple people pitching in with their suggestions. It was a way to give back, and I did the same on the sites of others.

But it was more than that, it was discussion, open, honest, in public. A thoughtful blog post would inspire equally thoughtful comments, with people taking the time to craft a response, something we appear to have lost in the quick-fire ‘reply and move on’ approach that social media prefers.

And a lot of the newer blogs that I’m seeing don’t even have comments available, sometimes because the platform doesn’t offer a native option (Blogger didn’t, but that gave rise to options like Haloscan which I got involved with too), sometimes because all the writer wants is a LIKE.

Which is fine, and for the those of us who exist in the low-traffic locations of the web, I get it. We publish more to share and publish, than to interact. We have other places for that, yet, in a similar way to this quiet rise in the number of blogs appearing, there is also a noticeable trend of those self same new (or rediscovering) bloggers vocally quitting social media.

I fall somewhere in between, of course, with a long term blog that was only briefly in the mid-traffic zones many years ago, which still has comments, and who is slowly moving away from social media as best he can.

Oddly, on that latter point, whilst I ditched X a couple of years ago and happily picked up Threads, I find that my recent ‘pause’ of Threads usage has seen me on BlueSky treating it very much like early Twitter. Reaching out, interacting, and finding connections. It is bringing discovery back, it’s even fun at times (with careful curation of who I’m following), and it reminds me of when the internet was a place I enjoyed visiting.

The world wasn’t necessarily a better place back then, it’s only been 10 -15 years, but the way social media has skewed things, driven attention to outrage for clicks (and money), the casual forgetting that we are the product, means it feels bad.

OK, it IS worse as America has an idiot dictator holding power but, isn’t he only there because of social media?

Would comments on blogs have stopped any of this? Perhaps? Would gentler connections across the world, connections not focused on skewing attentions for the sake of generating more money for the billionaires, have helped soften our world and not left a bunch of hateful, racist, fascists at the helm?

Would a comment move a secluded individual from the pathway to incel? Would a kind word alter the choice of a disillusioned kid with access to guns?

How many of the anonymous social media gremlins, so used to spouting their hatred and vile with abandon with no accountability, would pause if asked to leave their name and email? Yes these things can be faked, but dashing out words of spite on X is one button click from being published. Comments have a tiny bit more friction and, perhaps, the awareness that IPs are tracked too?

I admit, it’s a leap. But in an online world driven by algorithms, if every interaction was softened a little maybe it would keep the more extreme views of the world at bay, or at least reduce those making the noise. Of course that presumes that there is kindness remaining to be shared, and again I look at social media and the permission it has given so many to be so awful.

Maybe we are doomed, and the blogging heyday was just that, a short period of time of popularity which we won’t be able to revisit.

Or maybe, as with every stone dropped in the ocean, we can slowly change its course?

I realise this is a ridiculous notion, and I am not actually positing that blog comments can change the world. Plenty of bad things happened when blog comments were prevalent. But there is a definite correlation (not causation I know) between the decline of blogging as we all moved to social media. The decline of effort to ease, the decline of thought to mindlessness. I followed it too.

Week 8 Notes

Reading time: 2 mins

Still not 100% sure about this format, maybe it needs to be fortnightly. Monthly? We will see.

Life

  • As well as this blog I am writing a story (dare I say “novel”?). I’ve got two others unfinished but this one feels more suited to me. It’s set along the West Highland Way in Scotland. About a third done.
  • Sports! Watched Ireland beat England, Scotland squeeze past Wales, and then the TeamGB silver medal in the curling, so close to gold!
  • Quieter week thankfully, got some little things done that have been on my list for ages. Some stuff up on Vinted to sell, the back gate lock fixed (a lose screw is all it was but we use it everyday!), those wee odd jobs that easily get pushed to next week, and the week after…

Read

  • The Future by Naomi Alderman– near future times, the end of the world, rich tech billionaires. Feels scarily prescient right now, and some nice fun twists. Although when you add it to the next two things I read, it’s starting to mess with my head a bit….

Considered

Watched

  • Pluribus – “Hi, Carol”. An intriguing show, dark, funny, odd, I’m sticking with it. It takes a few episodes to really get going and more emotional driven than I thought. So far so good.
  • Schitt’s Creek – still plodding through this, it’s our “together” watch. It’s glorious. Funny, poignant, and reminds me that outside of the noise of the news, most people are decent, and neighbours are important.

Listened

  • Jill Scott’s new album – To Whom This May Concern – is sublime R&B. What a voice, what a talent! I lucked into her first album at a listening post in an HMV in Sunnyvale, California in 2001 and been a fan ever since. Great that she’s back.
  • Idols by Yungblud – which is, ok. A little too glossy? Too on the nose in terms of production and influence? Plenty of catchy riffs but still feels a little “trying too hard” to me. Still, it’s all rock n roll!

Health

  • Gym habit is working (Strength app is a huge help), and I’m actually enjoying it because I’m pacing myself for a change.
  • Current Weight 113.2kg – Lost 0.7kg. (And for the eagle eyed, no I’ve not put on 10kg, I mis-typed last week (and the week before!)).
  • Avg. Sleep: 7hrs 22mins (up 45mins).

Tech

  • Mostly Digital Detox stuff this week, chipping away at old blog posts, some photos too. I’ll stop mentioning that here though, but will post monthly updates instead.
  • And yes, if you are viewing my site you’ll have spotted the new blog theme. It’s temporary as, in testing the one I’m building on here I managed to break the previous theme. Apologies for the mess whilst I continue to work on it.
  • iPhone Desk Stands – there are so many on the market but what I really want is one with a power switch on it. So it can be a plain old stand until I turn on the charging. Simple? Nope, apparently not.

The Detox continues

Reading time: < 1 min

I know you’ve all been waiting on this update, it’s been a few weeks after all… is he finished, did he get halfway through and quit, is he procrastinating about it by writing a blog post instead of just getting on with it… read on, dear reader, and all will be revealed!

So yeah, I’m making slow progress but it’s progress and I’m trying to stick with the view that ANY progress is good. I’ve not really set a timeline for this either, by the end of the year would be ideal but ultimately as long as there is LESS STUFF that’s fine by me.

So, to recap, I am:

  • Deleting Photos and Videos, mostly duplicates or v.similar shots
  • Deleting old blog posts that have lost meaning (if they had any in the first place)
  • Deleting old journal entries that don’t serve a purpose (mostly me ranting about things I can’t even recall now)
  • Changing email addresses from Gmail to my own domain (why?)
  • Updating passwords to be more secure (as flagged by Apple’s Passwords app).

Progress so far

Table showing data pertaining to the blog post

Which I’m quite happy with, given I have a full time job which keeps me very busy, and a 4 year old to chase around (which keeps me even busier), plus trying to get to the gym, and then all the usual life stuff… yeah I’ll take it!

After all you know what they say about eating an elephant! (Ehhh don’t do that, we love elephants, please don’t eat them!).

Mostly it’s just fun to see the progress and knowing the numbers are there helps me keep accountable to myself. Let’s see how I get on.

Week 7 Notes

Reading time: 3 mins

A week of highs and lows, busy at work and getting busier, and still trying to get into a routine.

Life

  • HIGH – Jack has been attending Squirrels, he’s always a bit reticent to join in new things (which is fine, he’s 4) but he’s starting to enjoy it!
  • LOW – My niece is on our Apple family plan, she’s 10 so I have her account locked down. App purchases require approval by me, and whilst I don’t mind a few quid here or there, we got caught out when I forgot to cancel a trial of Duolingo. £68.99 whoooshed out of my account and as soon as I spotted it that morning I whooooshed Apple a request for a refund. It was granted. The money may take up to 30 days to be returned. Annoying. Not whoosh.
  • LOW – Driving to Blairgowrie this week involved a road traffic incident, avoiding an oncoming BMW in the middle of the road, I mounted the kerb with a loud bang, and by the time I’d wrestled the car back onto the road, the offending vehicle had disappeared. Car likely to be written off (an 18 year old Mini). FUN TIMES, NOT. (More on this later).
  • VERY HIGH – Scotland win the Calcutta Cup, and what a victory.

Reading

  • Artemis by Andy Weir – big silly moon thriller, great characters and only made me roll my eyes once.
  • Babi Yar by Anatoly Kuznetsov – a stunning, horrifying, and true retelling of the destruction of Kiev before and during WW2, from the point of view of a 12 yr old boy who survived. Hard to read at times. Tellingly current though, scarily so.

Considered

Watched

  • Down Cemetery Road – finished this and, it was ok. A little bit too “suspension of disbelief” but great performances all round.
  • Pluribus – One episode in and I’m HOOKED.

Listened

Health

  • Two visits to the gym this week, forgot about the DOMs!
  • Current Weight 103.2kg – Lost 0.4kg, slowly slowly and all that. Although I do need to eat better.
  • Avg. Sleep: 6hrs 37mins (down 2 mins on last week)

Tech

  • Bye bye gmail – because I’m not doing enough it seems… more about the rest of my digital detox soon.
  • Blank Spaces app – Almost had me, but with no way to deal with the iOS dock, it loses it’s appeal (you remove apps from it in one focus home screen and it disappears from all of them, not ideal).
  • Facebook deactivated as I barely use it and can happily live without it.
  • Bluesky embraced because I can’t go full cold turkey.
  • And my blog plans now become focused on creating my own custom WordPress theme. I’ve built them in the past but it’s been a few years, learning curve ahead!