Driven by Cheese

I Didn’t Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong

Same with President Donkey Kong’s press conferences. Reporter asks a gotcha question? Barrel. Someone wants to know what he’s doing about the price of eggs? Barrel. Softball from a friendly reporter? Barrel, barrel, barrel.

(via McSweeneys and kottke.org)

This is actually crazy.

Canadian details the hate she experiences living in the U.S.

A Canadian working in health care in the U.S. shared a disturbing incident she faced in the operating room amid a discussion on the tariff war. … The neuroscientist described how she was in the middle of surgery when she “outed” herself as a Canadian during a conversation about tariffs.

This is a neuroscientist working with a nurse.

(S)he says, ‘You guys have been stealing from us for years, and it’s about time that someone stepped in and stopped it.’ And I was shocked," she alleged. “Stealing? She thought the Canadians are stealing from Americans.” … “What I took from that is what she meant was all she wants to be left alone, as in, she doesn’t want foreigners around her,” she explained. “And she thinks that she’s due all this money because Canadians have stolen from her, and not the oligarchs, not the billionaires, not the system — it’s the Canadians.”

These people are in a cult. There’s no other explanation. I bet you any money they didn’t think about Canada for even 10 minutes a day before they elected their current dictator. And now all of a sudden a nurse is shaking and crying in an operating room because the Canadians have stolen from her and she thinks tariffs will fix it?

I have no idea what to do with this information.

(Article via blog.to)

When I first got on Bluesky I was really stoked. It felt like old internet Twitter. It was friendly and exciting and fun to engage with.

Then it got more popular, and started feeling a little more like twitter in the middle years. People seemed more interested in gathering followers, increasing engagement through “starter packs”, and more businesses got on board. It was still fun, it still felt like a cool place to be on the internet, but the shine was starting to wear off for me.

And then, within the last couple of weeks, it began to feel like Twitter of a couple of years ago. As in, Twitter as it was right before it got sold. I was seeing a huge increase in followers - I’ve always been a micro-presence on the internet (and let me be clear, I still was/am, but having over 500 followers felt extremely weird to me). I actually didn’t like the feeling of having more followers, it didn’t jive with where I’m at with my internet presence these days.

More than my issues with my own personal profile, it started to feel as though most posts I saw were about self-promotion. Artists I follow were promoting stores and sales, and I was hardly seeing any actual art. There were more political posts (and don’t get me wrong, in this climate if you have a platform, speaking out is definitely a Good Thing. It was just a vibe shift.). I also started seeing things like Wordle scores in my feed, which I had joked would be the signifier of an established Bluesky. I had worked really hard to create a feed of comedians and artists that brought me joy, but all of a sudden it just felt like… being on social media. And I realized, I hadn’t missed that at all.

So, sort of unceremoniously, I’ve decided I probably won’t be posting there any more. I didn’t delete my account or anything. I still like the idea of Bluesky, and it’s not their fault I wasn’t having fun on the platform any more. But, I exported all my posts, and I think I’ll just be posting here from now on.

This is definitely a me-thing. I think I like just putting my thoughts in my own little sphere, and not having people really engage with them at all. I like the sort of return to a livejournal-esque internet that I find with blogging. I post when I want, I don’t if I don’t want to. I don’t feel pressure to engage with anyone or respond to things.

Honestly, I think I’m just over social media.

I did a big hair colour switch over the weekend.

Click here for selfie

Went from dark brunette to a bright copper-red! I love it!

A few days ago I posted about how I was moving to micro.blog, but I was having trouble with the import feature. I said I was just going to let that go, and leave all my archives on one of my backup sites.

Of course this was a lie, I would never let that go. I ended up taking my Tumblr back up, importing it to a Wordpress account, exporting that backup, and using that to import to micro.blog.

It’s mostly working! There were some issues with the tool, so I contacted support and they’ve been super duper helpful! Imports are rolling in, but slowly.

If you have a great desire to read a bunch of posts I made on Tumblr in 2010 (so. many. 2010. posts.) then they actually are already viewable in a number of ways, which I’ve linked to on my way back page. I actually don’t recommend most of them, 2010 was a different time on the internet and Tumblr was a whole other culture.

But anyway, they’re there. And they will soon be here. Fun!

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.

I’ve 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 I’m 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, it’s 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 don’t 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 weren’t really working for me. So I only moved posts from 2023 onwards. There weren’t 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.