I’m about to complain about a hyper-specific feature of Facebook, so if that’s not your thing, I’d suggest skipping this post.

I was just on Facebook – again, I know, big mistake – and they have a new feature that tells you when you are offline. I only know about this feature because I keep getting false positives from it when it goes off right after my computer wakes up from sleep. It would appear my computer reconnecting to the wifi from sleep mode is not fast enough for an already cached website and it feels the need to inform me.

Why on Earth does this exist? Why would you code in a system for your website to ping through a user’s browser and look at its connectivity to the Internet? There is no way that this is a requested feature. There is no user that cares to know from an individual website that their computer has lost web connectivity when all they are trying to do is scroll already cached data.

I can see it being mildly useful the site to do this check when the user tries to post something. That would be useful. “Hey, you can’t post this right now and I know the reason: your computer isn’t online.” But it throws up this notification while you are scrolling the front page.

This means they are doing to check too much. This means the information is be collected and returned to Facebook when the computer re-establishes connection with the web. Since there is no user who could want this kind of feature, chances are the data is not being collected for our benefit.

Just a thought. End rant. You may now return to your day. Thanks for reading.

I have five huge deluxe edition comic collections sitting on my coffee table unread, mocking me. I’m still making my way through 100 Bullets and it’s still very good. There’s just a lot of it. There’s 100 issues because Brian Azzarello likes to be cute. I’ve read over 60 issues of it, which is where a lot of Vertigo series liked to end. This means that the story is feeling like it’s dragging just because it’s now outside of the normal rhythm.

And after that I have Y The Last Man lined up.

So Am I reading any of this? Fuck no, I’m on like looking at volumes of Judge Dredd. It’s a comic I’ve always lusted after as it’s hard to get here in the states. Or at least it was when I was a kid and really wanted to read it. Now they’ve collected it into huge volumes that I can go through in chronological order.

Because I need a bigger backlog.

So I’m trying out another productivity system. Anyone who knows me is probably rolling their eyes because productivity systems is something of a hobby of mine, which is a nice way of saying I read a lot without doing much. The thing that’s unique about this one is that I’m building it myself out of bits from other systems. Just the bits I like and I’m exited to use.

And that’s about all I’m going to say on the subject right now. The thing I don’t want to do is lay everything out and have the system need to be changed or I abandon it in three days as is normally the case with these things. So I’ll hopefully go into more detail in a few months. The last specific I’ll give is that it involves a cork board which shall here by be referred to as The Board.

It might seem weird to be implementing something like this in the middle of the world falling apart, but I have to try something because my current plan of stress watching YouTube isn’t getting me where I want to be. But if this does fall apart, I will try to be gentle with myself.

When I got into comics in the fall of 2000, it wasn’t too long until I walked backwards into Vertigo Comics. For anyone that doesn’t know, Vertigo Comics was an imprint of DC where they put all of their “Adult” titles. In comic parlance, adult means boobs, blood, swears, and big ideas.

Think if HBO only did lurid genera stuff. It’s everything EC Comics ever wanted to be, but that’s another story for another day.

Vertigo is gone now. Phased out this year – after it’s near decade long death-throws – for the new DC Black Label. (At least for now.)

It took me longer than I’m proud of to realize that all the comics I was collecting at the time – Transmetropolitan, Preacher, and The Invisibles – were from the same publisher. After that, I would buy books because they had the Vertigo name on them. It was a name that implied taste. (Or lack there of, depending on who you asked.)

So time has gone on and Vertigo, before it was finally killed of, re-collected most of their series into large volumes that make up two to three of the ones I already have. Some of these series I’ve either never fully finished getting: 100 Bullets, Y The Last Man. Or I’ve had some volumes damaged from over use: Transmetropolitan, The Invisibles. So I’ve started to buy the deluxe volumes and getting rid of the old.

And of course I can’t just bring these into the house and put them on the shelf, I have to read them first. Which has been really nice to re-read some of my favorite stories. I finished Transmetropolitan – even though not all the deluxe volumes are out for that – and I’m currently working on 100 Bullets. Which I never actually read all of. I’m still in stuff I’ve already read, but I’ll be getting to “new” stuff soon. So that’s exciting.

It’s been nice going back through these hard, little nuggets of angry tales. If anything, it’s kept be for doomscrolling through the news.

So I hopped onto my browser to add a book to my have read folder in GoodReads, and it took me an hour to do that because I kept getting sucked into Facebook and Reddit.

Yeah… Social Media. Super productive. yeah…

Taking a break from the Internet for a while.

That’s a thing right?

It’s the first of the month, and I think I’m moving into a phase technology phase and will be rebuilding this site. There’s a few things on the site that I’m not 100% happy with, and the entire point of building your own blog from scratch is to be 100% happy with the outcome.

I’ve been in an artistic phase, with lots of research of modular synths, but I can feel the next phase starting to raise. Mainly because I’m not in a place where I can pull the trigger on building my rig, so I’d like to move into something I can actually action on.

This week is going to be a lot of pulling things together to start building test sites, and building some things out for my D&D campaign.

Note: I’ve been quiet on here lately because I’ve been reading a lot of news and the current cycle has been the most horrifying in a while, and it’s been hard for me to actually do anything. But I’m trying to pull out of it.

The good thing about this blog is that I’ll have a log of how this all went after the fact. Which is why I think this place deserves some care.

All email is processed, moved into its correct folder or deleted outright. In the last two days I have gone through thousands of emails that were of no consequence and only distracted from the mail I actually needed to see. This is why people hate email and are intimidated by the internet in general.

I probably should have something more clever to say about that, but I’m tired. Will be back online tomorrow after a good nights rest.

Note: while I was typing this, a new email came in… It’s been processed, but I think that says more about this situation than I could.

Still hacking away at the email. In the late 00’s there was a term called “bacon” that was spam that you signed up for. It fell out of usage quickly but it applies here. I have tens of thousands of bacon emails that I’ve had to sift through. I have uncovered and processed some actionable emails from my burner email address that I never check.

I’ve also installed even more email filters in Gmail so I should actually start seeing actionable things easier from that account. But Gmail makes it just tedious enough to make filters that you don’t want to do it all the time. So I might be back in this boat in a few months. We’ll see. Google makes this a bit of a moving target.

In my two main email accounts I get a lot of junk. I don’t really clean it out or even check one of my accounts. This is ironic because I’ve taught email productivity professionally for years.

The shoemaker’s kids go barefoot, and all that.

My Inbox is at a massive number – which I will not share with internet – and I’m currently downloading all of my mail into Apple’s desktop email app. I was going to use Outlook, which I know a lot better, but Google has blocked all of the features that make that application useful. In fact, the Apple app was able to use some basic organization features with Gmail that Outlook couldn’t.

Once the download is complete, the great email purge and reorganization begins. I will post updates.