Blog 4.0

I was a Twitter user for over a decade, not because I truly loved the site, but because as far as social media went, it kind of felt like the best of a bad bunch to me. It still allowed you to just see a chronological feed simply containing the posts of people you followed (if grudgingly), it focused on text (even if images and videos were available) and it had a clean layout that wasn't cluttered with ads, games or other "features" I didn't give a damn about. Then Elon Musk came in and things degraded rapidly. An acquaintance gave me an invite code to Bluesky in July last year. It felt more like the Twitter of old again, but was very quiet. Still, I persisted and continued to post there, even if I was still checking Twitter as well. About three months ago, my Twitter account got locked down for not having a birth date tied to it, and since I was already annoyed with the site, I didn't bother to unlock it and switched to posting on Bluesky exclusively. There were

I feel sorry for my American friends. More than anything though, I've got to admit I just don't get it. I watched a video of some analysts discussing the result and one comment that stood out was to me was something along the lines of: What everyone always gets wrong is that most people don't care about politics and don't pay attention to it. And I do get that to some extent. I'm not blaming people for not keeping track of all the crimes Trump was convicted of for example. But when someone goes out there and openly talks in his speeches about how he wants to let the armed forces loose on his internal enemies, roll back women's rights etc. - that's not complicated or niche. That stuff was broadcast globally and should have given people pause. How so many people can be either totally oblivious to what's in plain sight or just not care, thinking it won't affect them personally, is beyond me.

On the whole, it makes me sad to see my elderly mother diminish, get slower and weaker every year. However, there's one strange upside to her no longer being capable of doing anything that requires a minimum amount of strength or dexterity: I get to feel like a bloody hero for performing all kinds of simple tasks. Need a match struck to light a candle? A box with a slightly stuck lid opened? Batteries in the small torch need changing? Not to worry, I am here to save the day. It's a good thing I'm only visiting for a few days or it might go to my head.

Overheard our social media person at work trying to explain Gen Alpha slang to our brand person today. The latter, who is the older one, was entertainingly confused ("But what does Ohio mean?"), but what was really amusing to me was that I had heard pretty much all of the terms she was explaining before - which was weird in so far as I'm an elder Millenial and among the oldest people there (most team members are younger Millennials or older Gen Z). I guess it's something about my degree of online-ness? I'm not really sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like understanding what people are saying, even if they are using terms I wouldn't necessarily want to adopt myself, but on the other hand it kind of makes me feel like that "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids" meme .

Tomorrow is the big day, when the new website is supposed to go live. You'd think with the event being mere hours away, I'd be able to speak with more confidence, but well... Last I checked, payments were still not working correctly. Just a minor thing for an e-commerce business. At one point during the testing, literally only one guy could get his payments to go through. At least my colleagues still had a sense of humour about it. "All future sales will just have to go through him then." "You'd like to pay? Please hold while we connect you to George." I wonder what I'll wake up to tomorrow.

The big project is still targeting the 1st of October for launch. With less than a week to go and everybody scrambling like crazy, somebody up top decided that this was the perfect time to announce an internal reorganisation including a bunch of job cuts. I can only guess that this was driven by a desire to have all the redundant people gone by the end of the year (as I think most of them probably had a three-month notice period). I get to stay employed, but my little team of four will basically cease to exist, with two people's roles being made redundant and me and one other guy getting shunted off to somewhere else in the org chart. The talking points were about what great growth plans the company has for the coming years, what agile innovators we are, and what amazing new opportunities this will bring for all of us. I guess I should be grateful that I get to keep my job, but I just feel bad. I'm simply not good at this capitalism thing. All I want is to earn enough to get b

I finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go. However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable. What was less und

For as much as I'm into PC gaming, I've never really had the slightest interest in virtual reality. I'm not sure why, other than that watching other people with a giant brick strapped to their head doesn't exactly convey an image of fun. Then again, I'd never really had a chance to try a VR headset for myself either... until last week, when the husband and I visited a friend who made us put on his Meta Quest 3 and play some games. I had some familiarity with the concept of Beat Saber from YouTube videos I'd seen, but I've got to admit I was still kind of shocked by just how fun it was. I can totally image buying that headset purely to play this one game for hours and hours , I thought to myself, though I didn't want to quite admit the level of my delight out loud. Then it was my husband's turn and he was even more excited than I was. "I've got to admit, I'm considering buying one of these for ourselves," he admitted when we went to

I have this (occasionally) re-occurring dream about my first boyfriend. In it, I go to visit him for some reason (he lives in the Netherlands) and we're really friendly and get along great... as if we'd remained friends over the last twenty years instead of breaking up and never speaking again (which is what actually happened). Sometimes I may even end up getting flirty in this dream and express an interest in getting back together... though around this point a part of my subconscious usually seems to raise the alarm that something isn't quite right with this scenario and throws some kind of curveball into the mix - in the case of last night's dream, this meant me finding out that he's actually married and has a six-month-old baby. The latter was funny to me upon waking up in so far as I could tell exactly what piece of real life news my brain had pulled inspiration from for that one. As far as I can tell from my ex's public Facebook profile, he's not actu