Here we are again…
Markdown editing For a long time, I was a bit sniffy about Markdown. In fact - I think it’s still fair to say that I continue to be sniffy about Markdown, but my specific gripe is about the use of Markdown for “non-technical editors”. Having spent - ouch - 20+ years working with content teams of various sizes, shapes and competencies, I can say with a huge amount of confidence that for normal people, editing websites using Markdown is a disaster.
I’ve now been off all social media for about 18 months. My last post was on May 8th 2020:
https://twitter.com/m1ke_ellis/status/1258692676582608896
I’m only embedding that because …WordPress…
Do I dip into it? No. I never, ever do. I mean, I never was one of those people (weirdos) who log into their Twitter account and look back over the last X hours of postings while they were gone - this just seemed to me to be a weird misuse of the media.
I’ve noticed an interesting phenomena in These Strange Times. I might be late to the party in noticing this, but hey, fuck it, shoot me. Whereas it’s obvious to all concerned - and there has been much written about this - that we’re all spending forever on Zoom calls, this one is everso slightly not this.
The phenomena is this: whereas before lockdown it was totally ok to talk to a client on the phone, now it’s absolutely expected that we have a video call instead.
Like most sane people, I’m concerned with issues around freedom of speech, so I was interested to see recent discussions about Trump and Twitter, the removal of Parler from All The Places and the end of Voat.
With each of these - and yes, I’ve also just listened to the hilarious James O’Brien / Piers Morgan interview (mellow at first and then… hots up…) - you get the old Morgan tropes coming out: “political correctness gone mad” or “groups are being silenced” and so on.
A few things seem to have coalesced recently to make me think quite hard about “moral redundancy”.
A bit of a trigger for this post was the story about the lorry deaths in Essex (and can I just say that the graphic on that page showing the positions of the people in the back of the truck is strangely affecting for me, perhaps as much as the pictures of the people involved - so terribly poignant :-( ).
{ I wrote this in February 2020 - firstly just for myself, then a limited “audience” of a few friends - but now for anyone that is interested… }
I’ve been a dabbler, an infrequent sitter, for ten years or more. I’ve been a semi regular for two years. It’s been a proper daily thing for what my meditation app tells me is now 233 straight days.
This is all relatively unimportant, especially the whole gamified notion of a “streak” which seems so at odds with the gentle, always-there nature of the practice.
My editorial policy* roughly for this blog roughly aligns with: if rant, post on The Rantimator, if more considered, post here.
I’m going to break that rule: here comes a rant.
I get that Christmas is an important time. I get that families like to hang out together. I get that an awful lot of people (unlike me) have big families and have always had that “25 round a table on Christmas Day” thing that I have never really been a part of.
