Everyoneâs Favourite - Housekeeping!
A couple of days ago l saw that Micro.blog had started offering plans for $1 a month, which is basically free. Without too much thought, I decided to move my blog over, away from blot.im.
Iâve had a couple of concerns with Blot in my time using them, the main one being the price of Dropbox storage. Blot itself is very competitively priced, especially for the quality of service. But it relies on outside cloud storage to work, and the number one option is Dropbox. If I ever ran out of Dropbox space, increasing it would be prohibitively expensive. I also use Dropbox for things aside from my blog, and yes I guess I could create multiple Dropbox accounts to separate them, but it just felt like a lot of faff. Blot also offers Google Drive and Github as back ends but Iâm not a Github user and I try to avoid Google services where possible.
My second issue with Blot was always ease of use, although I got into a good rhythm with drafting my posts using Bear.app. I have wanted something that was also easier to use on mobile, though, and something with image hosting (since to avoid using Dropbox storage I was hosting images elsewhere).
A while back, I found a really great post with some simple blog options, and I tried all of the ones I thought might meet my criteria. Bear and Pika were standouts. Pika is relatively new, but has an awesome design sensibility and a great vibe. I really like Bear as well, itâs got a good mission statement and a simple UI that I enjoy. But both cost more than Blot, so that ruled them out for me; I just donât blog often enough to justify their prices.
Microblog was also in this camp until they started their $1 a month plan - that made them the cheapest option out of all of them. And they have a bunch of official and third party iOS apps, so that was all my criteria met.
I had planned to move all my archives over but the import tools werenât really working for me. So I only moved posts from 2023 onwards. There werenât many. (Who wants to read a 15 year old Tumblr blog anyway?) The archives do actually exist as static html files on Neocities and the Blot archives will be live until my subscription runs out, so I may still figure out something other way to archive them at some point.
Getting to Know Me
Saw this list on Bluesky, thought it would be fun to answer:
- Favourite scent: Clean laundry
- Something you collect: Tamagotchi
- Dream Date: Staying in with my husband and ordering pizza
- Favourite Mythical creature: Unicorn
- Fun fact about yourself: I was the 4,897 person on Twitter. The Prime Ministerâs account followed me for a bit
- Fun fact about not yourself: Babies are born with all their teeth. A baby skull is literally full of teeth. Wait did you say fun or horrifying?
- An unforgettable experience youâve had: I was an extra on the movie White Chicks
- Your mundane super power: Remebering quotes from TV
- Dumbest way youâve been injured: Running on a cobbelstone street, twisted my ankle, tore ligaments
- Deep sea vs. Deep space: Neither, both are terrifying
- Love Language: Thatâs a stupid book that Iâve never read
- Tattoos/piercings: No tattoos, three piercings in each ear and a cartiledge piercing in my left ear that has since closed over; belly button pierced too.
- A food Iâm good at making: Lasagna, my lasagna is legend
- Song/Album I love: Boxer, by the National
- Something very stupid Iâve done: Spend time filling this out when I should be working
# IMG_0001 đş
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.
IMG_0001 via beSpacific and Wired
The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years
A great idea for a list: The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years. Includes caesar salad, the last word cocktail, Marcella Hazenâs tomato sauce, Julia Childâs beef bourg, no-knead bread, and Kenjiâs reverse-sear steak. Whatâs missing?
Murdoch Mysteries
Iâve decided that my new thing is going to be watching Murdoch Mysteries. Thereâs just so much of it. 18 seasons - so far! Itâs filmed in Toronto, and all around Ontario. Apparently former PM Stephen Harper had a walk-on role?
In the first episode âMiss Toronto Electric and Lightâ is murdered by electricity. Irony!
Yannick Bisson (Murdoch) has a real John Reardon (Hudson) quality that gives me high hopes for this as a very Canadian sort of âwhy do they continue to go there!â murder mystery show. Like, why do people keep going to the Hudson and Rex version of St. Johnâs? It is so small and there is literally a murder a week now. They used to do more kidnappings but lately itâs all just murder. Murdoch is murder right off the bat!
Wish me luck in my new journey to become an afficianado of Canadian crime shows.
Watching old Antiqueâs Road Show Episodes andâŚ
The most bizarre thing I think Iâve seen so far popped up. A giant cradle for your cranky wife!
I found this great write up about it on Tumblr:
The Hen-Pecked Clubâs Peace Box, a âpatent cure for a cross wifeâ. The Hen-Pecked club was an organisation which encouraged men to do more household tasks to take some of the pressure off their wives. The âPeace Boxâ, also known as ‘the wife tamerâ, was invented by a club member called Harry Tap in 1862. If a wife was nagging her husband too much, the husband could put her inside the box, which could be rocked like a childâs cot in order to send the wife to sleep. While she was sleeping the husband would perform all the chores then release his wife who would hopefully have calmed down.
â Write up via Victoria Fan Guide on Tumblr, and look at Fiona Bruce inside it in this old article about the Roadshow episode.
âCarbonara in a can? This Italian chef thinks itâs âgenius,â but heâll never eat itâ
Is it wrong that I would absolutely eat this?
Chef Alessandro Pipero says he doesn't begrudge Heinz for selling a creamy spaghetti in a can. But he wouldn't call it carbonara.
"I'm a Roman man and I love the real carbonara," Pipero told *As It Happens* guest host Tom Harrington.
In a press release, Heinz billed its new canned spaghetti carbonara as a "fail-proof" version of the traditional Italian dish "that comes with absolutely zero drama."
But it's already causing quite a bit of drama among foodies and high-end restaurateurs. A chef in London called it "a disgrace," and a BBC presenter suggested it could mark "the end of culinary civilization."
The controversial culinary creation hits shelves in the U.K. this month, but it will not be coming to Canada.
Carbonara in a can? This Italian chef thinks it’s ‘genius,’ but he’ll never eat it | CBC Radio
What Happens in a Mind That Canât âSeeâ Mental Images
What Happens in a Mind That Canât âSeeâ Mental Images
This article in Quanta magazine was really interesting to me! Iâm aphantasic, and I always thought things like âcounting sheepâ and âvisualize itâ were just metaphors. I remember discovering the concept of Aphantasia in 2016 or so, and it blew my mind that there were people that could actually visualize things when they were told to imagine a concept.
Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didnât actually *see* an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didnât see it. Behind her eyes, âit was completely black,â Shomstein recalled. And yet, âI imagined an apple.â Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.
That is me. I imagine the apple, but see nothing. But I do dream in images! I just canât conjure an image. Apparently, this is normal for aphantasic people!
Because many people with aphantasia dream in images and can recognize objects and faces, it seems likely that their minds store visual information â they just canât access it voluntarily or canât use it to generate the experience of imagery.
I also have a pretty weak autobiographical memory, particularly for things like day to day memories of high school; and a terrible sense of direction. Turns out, these things are related!
They found that people with aphantasia indeed tended to have weaker autobiographical memories and less activity in the hippocampus, which helps encode and retrieve such memories.
Overall, just a really interesting article.
They went to space for eight days - and could be stuck until 2025
Oh look, my actual nightmare!
When two American astronauts blasted off on a test mission to the International Space Station on 5 June, they were expecting to be back home in a matter of days. But things didn’t quite go to plan. In fact, Barry âButchâ Wilmore and Sunita Williams are still there, floating high above the Earth nearly two months later.
They went to space for eight days - and could be stuck until 2025
I am Just NOW finding out about this??
To celebrate its stateside debut, KFC will transform its restaurant at 242 E 14th St. in New York City â the pizza capital of the U.S. â into a one-of-a-kind “Chizzeria” pop-up where customers will get to try Chizza before anyone else for free.** The KFC Chizzeria offers one menu item only, hot & fresh Chizza, in a KFC-ified, modern take on a classic pizzeria. The world’s first Chizzeria (probably) opens its doors for a limited time, Friday, Feb. 23-Feb. 24 (1-9 p.m. ET), but don’t worry, Chizza is available to the rest of the country starting Monday, Feb. 26.
Found via this random post on Bluesky and frankly KFC is not doing its job because that should not have been the first place I learned about this. Yes itâs only in the states but I HAVE A CAR, KFC.
New EXO comic made me lol
via exocomics by Li Chen on Bluesky, which I can link to now because Bluesky is out of beta! The twitter replacement is real and viable, yâall, get on board.
Proud of this Run
Just ran my first 10KM in ages. Slow but good progress. Iâve been struggling to go for a good distance due to pain issues, and it feels really good to have worked through them to the point where I can do 10K. Proud of this one.
The Last Thing I Wrote
Was a big long post about running that I neglected to share, and now having read this McSweeneyâs piece Iâm glad I didnât
Via kottke