Plague Update: From The Past

It’s January 27th, 2022, but you’re reading this in the future.

I’m writing this after my intended bed time, having just helped a friend learn how to purchase an NFT. I guess you’ll know how that turned out.

It was a pretty standard day working from home. The dog got let out into the back yard a few times, the kids got into the video games of all sorts once home from school, one bumped their head on the table playing with the dog, and the cats remained skeptical of the value of having a dog.

Supper was vegetables, sausage, perogies, and chocolate cheese cake for dessert.

In the news, the Omicron variant has mutated into a stealth version, while there are hundreds of truckers rallying against Trudeau for the Conservative and the http://www.PeePC.ca parties.

Premier Moe pissed off some journalists when one of his PR flacks told them they shouldn’t ask about his disastrous interview with Saskatchewan’s Shock Jock.

And the climate crisis melts on, with the massive Antarctic glacial shelf poised to start its coast-altering slide into the oceans. Most people remain blissfully ignorant of this pending danger to disrupt daily life, instead focusing on land-grab/NATO tensions along the Russian/Ukraine border.

2023

It’s a new year. I’ve been blogging for over 21 years now.

Sudden writer’s block at 83,000 words. Tempted to just write “and they we were all killed by a giant meteor,” the end.

— Alex Kenna (@AlexKenna9) January 2, 2023

How Bad Is WordPress’s Block Editor? Bad.

I have over 2 decades experience editing websites. 18 years of writing blogs, from Angelfire, to CMS systems like WordPress. And the latest update to the editor is mystifying. Who wants it?

I wrote a blog post just a few minutes ago. I tried to find where to tag it, I couldn’t. I pushed Publish in defeat, and then it gave me the option to tag it.

I tried to find where to write my next blog post. I couldn’t. I went back a few pages, and pressed a button to write a new blog post. I pasted in a tweet. It failed to embed it and gave an error. I re-opened the tab, I tried again, again it failed. I finally found where to edit the code for the block, but at that point I opened this blog post in a different browser and started writing this instead. Now I see why experienced blogger Elan Morgan was remarking about how much the block editor sucked in WordPress.

I went back to try to edit the failing blog post and got this instead:

“The editor has encountered an unexpected error. Attempt Recovery | Copy |Post TextCopy Error”

Then I tried to move it up a line so there isn’t extra space, and a text formatting box popped up into the spot where I was clicking in between lines, so I turned bold on, and when I tried to turn it off, it didn’t lose its highlight so I couldn’t tell if it was really off or not yet. Some of this is just normal interface frustration, from using a new interface, and some of it is bad UX design by WordPress.

I haven’t blogged very much in the last year or two, but if it’s this hard now, I’ll probably stay with writing mostly on Twitter.

I just had to dismiss a button at the bottom saying the site uses cookies. Well duh!

Facebook Corrections Leave Questions

The problem with this Facebook censorship/correction of disinformation is that they’re really bad at censoring. My blog has been blocked for years, and they’ve never responded to my appeal to find out why. I can share links to my blog only if they’re in a tweet, not a direct abandonedstuff.com or saskboy.wordpress.com link.

As Time notes, it’s well established that Facebook is responsible for spreading misinformation, and disinformation (intentional misinformation) throughout society, but if it’s also blocking websites like mine that attempt to share information debunking the problem. That exposes Facebook as a threat to the spread of reliable information. Social media may be your primary source of news, so you should each day wonder what it is literally not letting you see. Who is it steering you away from talking to? They aren’t blocking only some Nazis and some snake-oil salespeople.

I Didn’t Blog in December

I was distracted by things more awesome than blogging. What could that be? I’ll tell you some day.

For now, I’m back, complaining about litter.

Everyone is focusing on a crappy coffee shop chain in Canada, and giving them even more brain-space free marketing because too many people are addicted to the sugar and caffeine and cultural experience their wretched business offers the world.
The bigger story is how their disposable cups are such common litter that they’re almost as destructive and unsightly as smoking litter. The unit of measure of litter is measured in #Timmies, which counts how many littered coffee cups of waste are in a m^2 on the ground. Coffee shops and places selling “disposable” cups should be forced to charge a deposit on the cups and lids, and re-collect them for refund.

The Most Dangerous Writing App

I tried this silly online app, and won on my first try. I chose the easiest 5 minute difficulty though.

I’m certain I won’t be able to use this dangerous writing app effectively. I should have a screenshot of it, just in case, I fail. It’s been nearly one minute, and I’ve not been interrupted, or felt I’ve had to look something up to support what I’m saying. There really is a lot of trouble in having to write without citation because I’m used to including hyperlinks, it’s what bloggers do.

The page seems to lack margins, so I am a little uncomfortable about this editor. Does copy/paste work? I’m scared to try lest I task switch to the mouse, and it assumes I’m not writing and deletes my progress. I’ve stopped watching the clock, because I have made it 2 minutes. Oops, that means I’ve peaked at the time.

The benefit of this app is no more than the one provided by Snapchat. Snapchat if you don’t know is a photo messaging app designed to delete your photo after someone has viewed it for a time length you set, up to 1 day, but more typically only a few seconds less than 10. I’ve used Snapchat for a few years now, and it’s actually pretty useful in showing people different parts of the world, thanks to its useful Story feature. Stories are automatically assembled video clips and photos you can add chronologically, and not from your phone’s Gallery.

This paragraph was the hardest to start, because I was searching for something next to type. My wrists are getting tired, as I’m racing against the clock to see how fast I can type also using the timer on this app. I’m about to be interrupted? Nope, false alarm. Whew.

That was a close one. Looks like I made it! Wow!
I win!

Keep writing or this app will delete all your work https://t.co/vfLO880D0S pic.twitter.com/qkTk4gtLKl

— Killscreen (@KillScreen) March 4, 2016

FOAD #Tarsands

With the mountain of evidence piling up against dirty tarsand bitumen extraction, those who’ve sucked on the oilpatch teat too long to maintain any perspective, are desperate to save face.

Some think saving face means making fun of mine.
https://twitter.com/welloiledgun/status/498190788447064065

Federal government has spent $40 million in promoting the #oilsands: study http://t.co/ffYK7SOnIr cc @CleanEnergyCan pic.twitter.com/RsqMfOXKlJ

— Canada's National Observer (@NatObserver) August 9, 2014

@saskboy @JJRossi_ @Fitzzer777 I am tired of the BS CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. A little jar, hahahahahahaaaa!!!

— RJ (@RJHimself) August 9, 2014

They’ll take assistance from scientifically illiterate trolls out of country, so long as they’re against anyone who talks honestly about climate change.

@saskboy @JJRossi_ there is no proof that CO2 is a GHG, there is much proof it is not. FYI it is still under study. U r victim of ignorance

— RJ (@RJHimself) August 9, 2014

They’ll claim that Al Gore invented Global Warming as a hoax, despite it being talked about by General Electric at least as early as 1956.

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/498201805965111296

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/498205746102689792

No, these rednecks are mostly crude “rig pigs”, or “oilpatch arm candy”, as their own bios attest to those facts. They proudly proclaim that they have too much oil money, and not enough booze (it’s even in their hopefully satirical favourite songs). They’re proud racists, homophobes, and of “Pissing off hippies since 1982”. They’ll respond to criticism of their economic time bomb, with a crude hostility one would expect from blue collar workers who’ve traded their souls to crush the earth for a few dollars.

If the facts won’t work, they’ll make up a lie.

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/498166795283345408

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/498165350697955328

When caught, they’ll start stalking you and saying they wished you had no access to medical care or modern communication, so that you’d be silenced.

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/498229235664687105

https://twitter.com/FatMcBastard/status/498171002992730112

@JJRossi_ @saskboy And! apparently tweeting on a piece of wood and not on an oil bases product. I congratulate him on that feat.

— oops (@Oopseedoodle) August 9, 2014

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/498160435749584896

I kicked this off by responding to a manipulative pro-tarsands promoted tweet, and a Calgary based Big Oil shill named Cody Batershill retweeted it.

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/498017322490015744

For the “oilsand” shills, who understand only crude insults, I say FOAD. Look it up if you want to be offended.

Cardiac Canada Day

[This is written August 2nd, 2014, but published July 1st, 2014, as it wasn’t possible for me to write a first-hand account of this year’s Canada Day (broken link).]

Canada Day started out like many other vacations spent in the city, with me volunteering an hour at a community booth. I was a bike valet from 11:00 a.m. to noon, watching peoples’ bikes for them. Soon after noon I rode off to find a few minutes of adventure before planning to return home to my girlfriend’s, where we were taking the kids over to a local park to meet another friend and her kids at 1:30.

https://twitter.com/saskboy/status/485514108934967298

I found the SaskPower propaganda booth with a game. It was a stationary bike where you could see how much power you could produce on it.

And that’s one way that SaskPower has tried to kill me ;-). As I finished at the top of the leaderboard, and biked off into the distance, I soon was collapsed on a bench near the band stand in Wascana Park. A crowd gathered, and two police officers came up to find me without a pulse and my bike helmet still on. They began CPR and called for a pair of EMTs on bikes who were on the other side of the park.

The EMTs arrived about 10 minutes later and after shocking me twice, my heart was beating again. About 40 minutes and a $325 ambulance ride later, I was in the Emergency Room of the General Hospital. I was scoring a 5 out of 15 on the Glasgow Coma scale in some regard, 8 in others. A 5 can mean that I could need to be tube fed, while 15 would be normal. So I was put onto a cooling blanket and given an immobilizing drug to cool my body down to just 32 degrees Celsius.

My first-hand memories from the next three or four days are few and I barely recognize them as my own experience. A tube coming out of my body that wasn’t there when I woke up and started remembering is one clue. In my defence, I was sedated and intubated for the first two days. Pretty extreme considering I’d not spent a night in hospital since I was born.

I then had an MRI, and various radiating scans on my head and elsewhere to check I was all there. In the coming days I managed to impress the professionals enough for them to let me out in the wild again (but not after tagging me first).

And here I am. Alive. Surprised that I died, and came back to life. Thankful for another chance, whatever that means.

ConCalls: No Charges Despite New Prescott #RoboCon Information

After giving some immunity to a man who either lied to me, or to Elections Canada’s investigators, Canada’s election agency has no new charges to announce against the perpetrators of 2011’s Guelph or national election fraud robocalls.

Andrew Prescott’s information fingers the already charged Michael Sona, and the exiled Ken Morgan who is living in Kuwait. Prosecutors will have to decide if he is telling them the truth, or if he was telling me the truth when he told me in an email conversation he’d asked me to share on my blog last year:

Feel free to think whatever you may… however, know that pretty much every point you touched on in your e-mail is wildly incorrect. Specifically, your assumption that I know anything about whatever happened on a local OR national scale.

You are wrong. Period.

That’s an odd person to give immunity to.

.@ChristianConsrv You told the whole country for 2 years you knew absolutely NOTHING about #robocon. Don't you think people are sad w you?!

— Pierre Poutinievre (@PrrePoutinievre) April 4, 2014

Elections Canada has clarified position on robocalls investigation report: EC won't say when or if it will report http://t.co/GT5YUdnIJz

— Stephen Maher (@stphnmaher) April 4, 2014

Spysplaining

The CSEC commish, entrusted to the task of ensuring CSEC doesn’t break the law during its spying on, err, for this country, is not coming out smelling like a rose.

It was a puppet head trifecta today – the new CSEC *watchdog* defending NSA puppet CSEC to the PMO puppet Senate.

==

This is my 1500th post on wordpress.com on this blog! My stand-alone WordPress blog posts I’ve still not restored, containing archives circa 2006-2009 are not all included in that number.