disassociated

As if climate change, and the increasingly unstable weather it will bring, isn’t enough to worry about, parts of Australia may see an increase in volcanic activity. Not in the immediate future, thankfully, but at some point nonetheless:

It is much less likely that a volcano that has already erupted will start again. It is a lot more likely a new volcano will form somewhere else. That is almost a given. It is going to happen. The follow-up question is when is this going to happen? It may be in 100 years, or 5,000 years. We don’t know. We need to have more information to answer that question.

I’m unsettled by this lack of certainty here… one-hundred years isn’t really much. Nor, for that matter, is five-thousand years, speaking in geological terms. Let’s hope these new volcanoes appear later rather than sooner, or ideally, not at all.

Mick Tsikas, writing for The Conversation:

The severe weather rounds out a weird winter across Australia. The nation’s hottest ever winter temperature was recorded when Yampi Sound in Western Australia reached 41.6C on Tuesday. Elsewhere across Australia, winter temperatures have been way above average.

41.6°C? It doesn’t even get that hot in summer, at least where we are on the east coast of Australia. Well, hardly ever. There have been one or two days when highs have pushed into the forties, but that’s usually at the height of summer, and still, is rare.

There’s been some strong winds recently. But the trade winds are common around this time of year, particularly August. The warm weather experienced in parts of Australia last week — in what was still winter — is definitely unusual though. I looked up the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), and found the value had been neutral in second half of August. The SAM is a metric of how close cold weather fronts come to the southern part of the Australian landmass.

A negative SAM value means they reach quite some way inland. Cold fronts bring rain and cooler weather. With SAM values being neutral or positive though, these fronts have not been coming through, which may partly explain why it was so warm. But I think climate change, of course, is the remainder, or most, of the reason.

On one day, temperatures almost reached 30°C during this late winter heatwave, in our part of the world. I truly dread to think what summer will bring…

There’s been a bit of a surge in discussion recently about Indie Web, and seemingly what it means to be a true adherent. This time the focus appears to be about what I’m going to call technical proficiency. From what I can gather, having your own website, with your own domain name, and your own content, isn’t quite making the Indie Web grade, in certain quarters.

Some people, who have the website, the domain, and the content, say they feel excluded because they’re apparently not doing more. Not doing more technical stuff. And I’d be in that category. It’s strange talk really. After all, Indie Web is many things to many people. There’s no Indie Web head office, dictating what we must, or must not do. But here, thankfully, is the sort of clarity we need:

Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don’t even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.

Just make it yours. This was the web I always knew. I just came here to self-publish. To speak to whoever would listen to me. I started out with static HTML pages, on Notepad. Then I started adding CSS. I eventually arrived, ten years later, where I still am today, with WordPress.

Of course there were cashed up, corporate, players around in the late 1990’s trying to turn a profit on the web. But we, the personal, non-commercial, website people, who later became known as bloggers, co-existed quite harmoniously with this big-end of the web. We did our thing; they did theirs. And both parties, from what I saw, seemed to prosper in their own ways.

But that was back in the good old days.

Indie Web to me — and the definition seems to be subjective to some (quite some) degree — is a foil to what the web has become today, twenty to twenty-five years later. This despite the founding of the IndieWeb group in 2011. Indie Web, at its essence is our own place away from the corporate web, the social media behemoths, and the algorithms preventing us from finding the content we really seek.

I’ll admit to be being somewhat befuddled by the likes of webmentions, micro-formats, and ActivityPub protocol (which actually baffles me fully at present). Clearly these technologies serve a purpose, but in reality they don’t help me much with my primary objective here, which is to write.

If I’m not Indie Web enough then for someone, they can go somewhere else. But, with an attitude like that, I don’t know how much more “Indie Web” I could be. Well maybe. Thing is, I’ve never quite considered myself to be naturally Indie Web. Not one-hundred percent, as much as I like the general concept. Instead, I’ve often seen myself has being independent.

I’ve written as much on my about page:

The word disassociated has a number of meanings, but in this context it means to do my own thing, to go my own way, to have my own gig, to be independent.

So perhaps, independent web is a more suitable moniker in my case.

Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want.

Perhaps though we could leave FrontPage out of this. I too had an ill-fated, though infinitesimally brief, run-in with the Microsoft (MS) product, many moons ago. FrontPage was a WYSIWYG website design editor with all good intentions, but terrible execution. What on earth, for example, were those server extensions that MS kept banging on about?

By 1998, the web was picking up momentum. People just wanted to get a website, usually a personal/family affair, online. And they wanted to do so pronto. They didn’t have the time or patience to learn about HTML, CSS, and FTP, let alone propriety server extensions. Too many, FrontPage must have seemed like the answer to their prayers. Until they opened the box*.

But look, if FrontPage is how you Indie Web, or just web, then don’t let me stop you. But please don’t come asking me for any help with those server extensions.

* this in the days when software apps literally arrived in a box.

Well, I’m sure pretty no AI is involved.

What’s really incredible about this three minute video, made by Faruk Korkmaz, is that it was filmed entirely by a device, a smartphone, many of us carry in our pockets.

The narration is fitting also. It comes from a speech given by Canadian-American actor and comedian Jim Carrey, for the 2014 graduating class at Maharishi International University. This excerpt seems somehow as relevant today as it was ten years ago:

So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect. So we never dare to ask the universe for it. I’m saying I’m the proof that you can ask the universe for it.

Talking of short films shot on iPhones, take another look at Float, made by Aundre Larrow, about three years ago.

Publication of Irish author Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, on 24 September 2024, nears. It promises to be quite the event. I don’t know about Australia, but in Ireland and the UK, some bookshops will open early on the day, so eager Rooney fans can get hold of her latest offering.

But Sally Rooney is only one of a cohort of popular Irish writers. The Emerald Isle* may not be the world’s most populous nation, yet it is up there with the best of them when it comes to literary output. Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch, and Edna O’Brien, are among Irish authors who are household names.

So, what’s the go? What makes Ireland a country of great writers? As Kate McCusker, writing for The Guardian discovered, the propensity to put pen to paper comes down to a number of factors.

One is the Irish love of entertaining and storytelling, of which I have some first-hand experience. Another is the diminishing influence of the Catholic Church. People no longer feel they need to restrain themselves, subsequently they can write about whatever they want, including divorce, gay marriage, and pre-marital sex. The things we all love to read about.

The Irish government is also arts-friendly. A few years ago they launched a three-year trial scheme that pays selected artists and creatives a basic weekly income. There’s an initiative that has to make a difference. Artists and writers can focus on being creative, and not getting distracted as they try to juggle day jobs and art.

* the term the Emerald Isle comes from a poem, written in 1795 by William Drennan, a doctor no less. Even non-professional writers make for great writers in Ireland…

Brazilians are turning to Bluesky — the microblogging platform founded by then Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey — in droves, following a ban on X in the South American country. The surge in signups however has prompted warnings from Bluesky that the service may experience outages, as a result.

But that seems like a good sort of problem for Bluesky. Things, meanwhile, seem to go from bad to worse for the X platform, now owned by Elon Musk. Late week, a Brazilian Supreme Court judge ordered local ISPs to block the platform, after the company refused to appoint a new legal representative there. Under Brazilian law, major social networks are required to have a legal representative based in the country.

It’s a sad state of affairs for the platform once known as Twitter. I joined in 2007, and made a number of acquaintances there, both in Australia, and elsewhere. Some people are predicting X will not see out the next two years. I’m not so sure of that, but there’s no doubting that the microblogging service is but a shadow of its former self.