technology

I just want to…

Instagram announced new updates to their algorithm again. I have a couple of accounts on Instagram, so I suppose I have some skin in the game.

It’s just mostly I consume. I don’t use Instagram professionally; and I don’t want to. I use it to a) share some photos and art with my friends and b) see what they share with me.

This type of user doesn’t matter. I mean, what I would like is to see the accounts I follow in reverse chronological order. But Meta have not wanted to give me this for years. Lately they have been giving me insane quantities of sponsored posts both in Stories and in the main feed.

There was a time I loved the idea of recommender systems. The idea is that the recommend accounts, posts, whatever, that I would really be interested in. But this isn’t really happening. When every second sponsored post is from Temu….is this really that personalised? I don’t think so.

From what I can see, recommender systems have moved from being what is most interesting for me to what is most interesting to the social media provider, mostly Meta in this case.

I’d like to say that somewhere, the tech giants have lost their way; but I think they haven’t. I think that everything they do is specifically so they can fleece money out of somewhere, be it me or an advertiser. Just for a short while, their interests and mine as a media consumer aligned.

Now though, most of the time I spend scrolling Instagram is time spent frustrated. My main objective is to look at excellent photography and drawing/painting which I find interesting. I’ve a special interest in water colour and travel photography and these form the bulk of what I post myself. Some time ago, I wound up seeing more short videos rather than single shots. I’m really not interested in moving photographs – if I was, I’d go to actual travel documentaries on Youtube (which I do) – and what the artists did to deal with this was start making reels which are close ups of fineliners moving around a centimetre, dabs of paint so detailed I get a headache trying to process them visually. All of this sucks to high hell as a consumer; and I can’t imagine it suits the average illustrator either.

I understand the problem is that the likes of Meta can’t make a huge amount of money out of delivering what I want. I’m not someone they can get to pay them for business services. I’m not going to pay 35E a month for services getting my posts in front of more eyes. I’m not buying stuff from their advertisers. But their ability to offer their professional users access to attention depends on a critical mass of people like me.

I recognise companies need to make money to survive. But the social media companies do not have a guaranteed right to my attention and lately, Instagram are heavily wasting it. I feel sorry for those who use it as a business platform. I’m not interested in the latest lot of algorithmic changes because again, it focuses not on me deciding what accounts I want to see = it focuses on them deciding what accounts they will promote to my timeline. And if god forbid on mobile I want to switch to the accounts I follow, well then I still can’t set that as a default.

life in general, reading, stationery

inspired by Walter Mitty

I saw a thread on Reddit today where the Secret Life of Walter Mitty was recommended. I have some troubles with the idea of the film – I loved the novelette by James Thurber as a child and of course, they messed with the plot significantly. But I discovered it was streaming on Disney so I had a look at it. I haven’t watched all of it because I did my watching from the end trick.

I was a child with a big imagination. One of the stories I wrote as 12 year old I still feel like expanding into a kids’ book. I grew up in a small town in rural Ireland in the 1980s. Very often, my imagination was about the most exciting thing happening in my life. I identified a lot with Walter Mitty. I’m not a fan of Ben Stiller but he turned that character into something interesting – someone who did get to live life. I think about that sometimes.

I’ve written a personal diary for about 30 years now. I haven’t stopped yet and since I have a shops worth stock of notebooks, I need to do a whole pile more writing. Circling around my head lately has been the idea of travel memoirs. My mother says it’s a tragedy I wasn’t sketchbooking at the time that I was doing what seemed like more exciting travel. I get what she is saying. I documented them with photographs and around the time, with photos. I think I’d prefer sketchbooks too. I have a troubled relationship with all that at the moment. I’m working on fixing it.

Some time during the pandemic lockdowns, I realised that I was very deeply stressed, and doing very little for myself and I was not even finding the time to write my own journal. So I had picked up some A6 notebooks (pretty ones) at some stage and I pulled one out to be a five minute diary. The idea was that I would write into this little notebook for at least 5 minutes; in theory in the morning although that doesn’t always happen. I don’t often forget. I think it’s a habit I’ve had in place for around 3 and a half years now and I’m pretty sure I started this after I moved to Brussels. I also occasionally did a ten minute one at night time; I think I completed about 5 of them and there is one still by my bed that I am not writing in regularly at the moment, mostly because I actually have more time to write in what I call my big journal; the series that has been more or less unbroken since 1992.

I think a lot about writing and reading at the moment. Mostly because the person I am now is not necessarily the person that a 12 year old Treasa envisaged me becoming. I never did write the kids books I wanted to, never wrote the opinion pieces I wanted, nor the adult romantic fiction or indeed the fantasy. More oddly, I’m not reading much fiction (apart from escapist romantic stuff when I can’t sleep). There are a couple of reasons linked to that: a) I read a monumental amount of non-fiction in fits and starts and b) Terry Pratchett died.

I can’t emphasise how much the loss of Pratchett impacted my fiction reading. I don’t think I’ve read Snuff through yet and like a lot of Pratchett fans who have one or two left to go, it’s hard to do it, knowing that that will be it.

For a lot of the period 2003 to now, I blogged in one form or another. I had a long running photoblog as well, and there were variants linked to this domain name as well. In the grand scheme of things, I have been writing all my life, and a good chunk of it I self published. And then I wound up on Twitter for a long time. In a way I miss Twitter as it was and then I think that the loss of it is probably a good thing for me. One of the things that happened to me between having to snatch time to find out what was happening in the world, getting it from Twitter and not watching much television, my attention span shortened. I think this, again, was linked to stress related issues but I do think short form media did not help.

I own a monumental number of notebooks and sketchbooks at the moment. I bought a lot of them during the lockdowns, not so many since but even so, I have lots of them. Not all of them are lined so they will eventually be sketchbooks. I’m back sketching for myself [which means my Instragram followers don’t get to know much about what I am doing] and I am hoping they will get used up. I don’t need to save them for special occasions; I have so many now that it doesn’t seem like they are so special. One or two maybe.

On one of the shelves where I keep “live” notebooks is a sketchbook that was started during the pandemic of places I would like to go. I think the part that makes me most sad (aside from the fact that the sketchbook isn’t finished) is that my expectations of a post covid world were somewhat different to what the post covid world would turn out to be. I think about that sometimes too. How we figured out that if we got the world vaccinated maybe this immense economic and mental health stress would be replaced by something better. It wasn’t really.

I talk about that part with friends, sometimes. It may be a measure of getting old or something else but I’m not alone in thinking that the mental health of the lockdowns at a social level remains to be quantified.

And so, I think of Walter Mitty a lot lately, even the original Thurber persona. We used to talk about how much of the world was a known entity now, and how little exploring there was to be done. My mother would have given anything to see glaciers; I go to Zermatt in Switzerland twice a year and I’ve seen the glaciers in Iceland as well. They are accessible in a way that they weren’t to a woman born in 1930s Ireland. I don’t know what constitutes “adventure” any more.

One of the prices 50 year old women pay for perimenopause is highly frustrating insomnia. I’ve found I can deal with it more effectively if I can wander off in a daydream. I don’t always find them. It’s somewhat not reassuring when I look at the notebooks I tidied today and thought about feeling with imaginary adventures. What adventures?

One of my friends gave me a most excellent notebook for my birthday and it was hidden in my stash to be used for something special. I came across some piece of life advice (instragram is so full of this, it’s not even funny) about making a list of 100 things you want to have done by the time you die and of course, based on when you were making the list, it could include things you have already done; that were on your list. Anything else should be something that you have a realistic shot of making happen.

So I decided to set that book aside for it and will also journal the ones I have done.

The thing about that is that realistically, there are things you don’t know about and then don’t know you want to do…until a moment. It’s like walking into a book shop. I never knew this book existed but now I have to have it.

I’ve had some fantastic opportunities in my life. A lot of adventure is sanitised. Much of what isn’t is not an adventure I’d like to risk. If you asked me whether I would be photographing kitesurfers in Brazil or Western Sahara or at world championships, I would have laughed at you. Things like that don’t happen kids from rural Ireland, not much.

But beside that, I will think about the impossible dreams too, and write them as narratives and see where that brings me.

annoyances

The new world of work

I’m tired of the office debate. From what I can see, where the question arises (ie, the work can be done from anywhere), there is an argument for facilitating people within reason. You want to work from home all the time? Hotdesks in the office should you have to come in. You want to work from the office at least 60% of your time? Here’s an office.

How hard can this be? I’ve no objection to people working from home a maximum of time but the person who invented flexible desks (ie, you don’t get a desk assigned to yourself because Flexibility) is a sociopath for those who actually come to the office.

I’m in favour of working from home, fully, partially, never, whatever you’re having yourself. If you want people back at the office, give them desks. If you want them not back at the office, then don’t give them desks or access badges.

Oh well.

life in general

Who was this person

I have entries on this site going back to 2012 and to be honest, this site, when it was built, replaced sites that had gone back to 2003 I think. So I have been blogging here or elsewhere the guts of 20 years.

That’s a frightening thought and then I went and read some of the older entries. I’m not sure I recognised myself. What was interesting though were a few entries about decisions I had made.

I’m back in Belgium, and have been for 4 years. I’m disillusioned with most of the social media around me – the recommendations on YouTube are heading for trash, their shorts package I really would like to have the option to not have served to me at all – I’m a Premium subscriber so it would be nice if they allowed me to tune content more effectively. Mostly I see viral content which can only be described as WTF.

But then I’m old. Maybe if I were back in my 30s, I might be more tolerant and I might even be on TikTok. * shrugs *. Anyhow, I have been blogging about my piano journey over on concertoincminor.org and I was thinking about what would replace the Twitter shaped hole on my life. I don’t spend much time in Threads or BlueSky – what’s the point really? If I do social, it tends to be image based. So the thought of coming back to the world of blogging was on my radar. It’s a question of time; I don’t have loads of it and I’m generally quiet tired. I’m also not sure I want to get into 386s on Reddit where the viral content has been getting a bit dire as well. At least, I have learned one thing and it’s that I don’t want cats.

Back in 2012, I still worked in IT operational support in a private sector company. I still lived in Dublin. I was doing an Open University maths degree which a year later I abandoned in favour of a MSc in Computer Science in UCD. I was still taking occasional photographs with a DLSR and spent a chunk of time on beaches. I drove a lot of places.

Since then, I’ve spent 4 years in Luxembourg and almost the same in Belgium. I still don’t own property. I still have very strong opinions, and I still take a dim view of other people’s unkindness but I’m a bit more resilient about it. My Ecridor, and assorted fountain pen collections are out of control and I have a family of toy elks and marmottes which started when I was living alone during Covid. There are Covid entries on this site from the early days.

But I have less certainty about who I am than I had 20 years ago. I’m still shy but also, I questioned whether I could in fact start blogging again. Almost afraid of the risk of doing so. There are so many unkind people in the world now. I don’t even get the worst online bullying.

So, looking back, there’s this person who used to inhabit this body that I am who had photos published in papers in two or three countries, who could stick a camera in people’s faces and they wanted me to do so, who moderated two major forums in Ireland, got nominated for blog awards back in the day, got profiled on TV for photograph (and recognised in a knitting shop for that)…who decided to start part time evening university courses, who was willing to learn anything, who decided to learn how to draw because really, practice was what mattered.

and now it’s not really me. Odd, really.

annoyances, on the web, open messages to other people, technology

Messing with an interface

IMG_2023

This taken from the Aiguille du Midi outside Chamonix. I have just learned an awful lot about WordPress and flickr from the mere hassle of trying to embed this picture.

Time was, you could go to flickr share, pick up some embed code and drop it into your editing window and everything just worked. THis was handy because you could decide which size image you wanted to put in the entry, for example.

It doesn’t work any more. It messes up your blocks and when you go and google “how do I get a flickr embed into WordPress” you get pointed at a block type which you cannot bloody customise. You give it the link to the picture and the software does everything else for you, including making design decisions.

This is beyond stupid. It is stupid in a way that I honestly wish to hell the people who did the user testing for Automattic would just resign en masse. When you change how the editor works significantly like that to the extent that I have to go and google how to find something, because “edit in html” doesn’t appear to work either, well that’s just horrible,

No doubt the team behind this have perfectly good engineering reasons but hell, this is the kind of thing that makes me look at the market again.

Please, for the love of all that is holy make it possible to drop embed script into a block and have it appear and work. Stop making me scroll through the block menu. Make the product better to use rather than worse to use.

I intend to write a travel piece. Now I am completely frustrated. That’s a great win. Not.

being me

New way of working

I promised myself 45 minutes to blog this morning but before I get onto the meat of the next entry (Switzerland and France), I wanted to voice my own opinion on the arguments around remote working that are increasingly destroying my twitter feed.

Look, I get it. You want to remote work for the rest of your life. More power to you. But the world does not revolve around you and your needs. I hated, hated, hated teleworking. The lines between work and not work blurred to the point of being meaningless for me and while I technically have the space for a work desk in the corner, the fact remains that I had other plans for that space.

I’m fortunate enough to have a hybrid option and mostly I work in the office. But the reason that people want remote working seems to me to be because a) they have too long a commute and b) they loathe their coworkers/managers.

I’m utterly disillusioned with the debate. When I see it online, it is clear as daylight to me that the homeworking brigade cannot possibly absorb the fact that they might remotely be limited in their outlook. You cannot accidentally run into someone homeworking. Being stuck on video conference calls all day long is physically exhausting.

Home work if you want but for the love of god stop pretending that the people who hate it don’t matter. or are idiot managers who want to monitor. In my case I just want my bloody sewing machine table back.

Uncategorized

Poetry and its place

I did not much enjoy English class in secondary school and this is something which people around me find difficult to believe. I read an immense amount and sometimes that is even in the form of books and I like writing. Surely to God English class should be my happy place.

Most of it after the age of 13 was literary appreciation and depressing enough at that. I think one of the greatest books ever published is Exploring English Three, the collection of short stories (and I hope to hell my version, with Augustine Martin’s notes is at home somewhere because I don’t much appreciate Joseph O’Connor). School ruined my enjoyment of it. Anyway, that’s a side note.

I don’t own a lot of poetry books and what I do own is split between here and there, But for the last year, I have had a regular pilgrimage trip to the poetry section of my local Waterstones.

I live in Brussels. I can also buy English books in FNAC, but no poetry, and Filigranes (very limited poetry). Mostly I buy non-fiction and some fiction. I buy books in French as well. But I don’t have a huge poetry collection and don’t especially want loads of poetry. I consider poetry to be chicken soup for the soul, something of a comfort blanket that I dip into as and when I need.

So why the pilgrimage?

Well, when I went to Waterstones for the first time, it occurred to me that they should, if they had a poetry section, have an anthology of Robert Frost. I already owned one but it is in storage, somewhere, and given I arrived when quarantine ruled out travel to Ireland, finding that copy of Frost was not going to happen. But books can be justified as they do not cost as much as CDs. Robert Frost is my favourite English language post after Patrick Kavanagh.

[cf that note about English class at school. It left me wholly unimpressed by William Butler Yeats]

He wasn’t there. There would only be stopping by woods on an iPad screen for the time being. Or possibly a kindle.

Robert Frost being a major poet, and possibly the greatest of the American poets in my humble opinion based on being sh1t bad at English in school. I assumed he was just temporarily out of stock. So I figured I’d check back the next time. It was a bookshop; it was unlikely that it would be long before I went back in there. It was quite a busy one too so stock turnover had to be reasonably frequent.

And there he wasn’t again, and again, and again. I considered ordering it, or ordering it from amazon, and then I bought a book of Edward Lear’s nonsensical but heartwarm poems, illustrated. Eventually, it became a habit to look through the poetry section every time although after several months I wondered how cultured the buyers were that Robert Frost never showed up.

Which brings me to this morning. I picked up some fantasy fiction by the genius that is Garth Nix, and then I briefly wandered to the poetry section to not find Robert Frost and found reality did not match my expectations. Robert Frost had finally arrived.

My home feels complete now.

And for the record, I got a C in Leaving Cert honours English. I think I dealt with George Herbert’s The Collar, mostly because that was the one that was printed on the paper and it meant I did not have to remember quotes from memory.

being me, organisation

Organisation

I’ve aspired to having a beautiful, tidy, but above all else, windsandbreezes type home. Elements of this have been hard but today, I cleared the dining room table.

I suffer from flat surface syndrome and the dining room table is just inside the door of the apartment. This means that lots of things wind up on the table, post for previous tenants, junk mail, stuff I bought but have not got a home for yet. I resent the post for previous tenants of course; they get far more post than I do although most of it lately has been from their bank. But they seem more popular than me.

But I know deep down that in fact, I sleep better if a) the table is clear and tidy ready for next use and b) the kitchen is tidy and I have not run out of teaspoons.

I confess, I ran out of teaspoons this morning. I am drinking tea that does not require a teaspoon because it has a string and a label. I don’t take sugar. And the dishwasher is on at the moment.

So I’ve cleared the table mostly – there is one cup of tea, and a sketchpad. Sketchbooks and sketchpads are the bane of my life but I’ll come to that separately.

My family laugh when I say things like “I want tor educe the amount of clutter in my life. They are, I think, scarred by just how many different varieties of tea were on offer in my house in Dublin. Most of my kitchen stuff is in storage and mostly the problem is an out of control art supply and stationery problem. And books. I lack self discipline on the book front. It’s probably lucky that because of Apple Music I don’t buy CDs any more; there are 300 plus of those also in storage. I don’t like my life being in storage but this is a thing I may rectify next year. Moving swiftly onwards.

Life is full of small jobs that together, take a lot of time. We let them stack up because ultimately, life is full of some big things that tire us out, sap of of time and energy. Every time I sit down to make a list of the things I do, I get depressed. It is out of control and although one million self help and youtube influencer videos cannot possibly wrong, I am question whether in fact, making a list is exactly what we should be doing. Apart from clearing the dining room table, one of the way overdue jobs which I will start on today is the Great Battery Replacement.

Possibly not obvious to readers of a blog which I broadly neglect, I have a few watches. I own a sports watch because apparently I swim (I don’t have time lately but moving swiftly onwards), although I wear that on my right wrist and mostly I don’t use it as a watch except during the night because well it does light up. I otherwise have two watches that do not require batteries and then there are the various things that I bought at times I could barely afford them, which are definitely not automatic and weren’t, with one or two notable exceptions, manufactured in Switzerland. The last time I did the batteries was before I left Ireland. As the average battery tends to last around 2 years, it’s a safe bet that absolutely all of them need new batteries. As I’m DONE with them all running out at the same time (despite having 3 other watches which do not require expensive trips to a jewellery store) I have decided to stagger the battery replacements. THIS IS IMPRESSIVELY HARD because I work in IT, am quite systematic and would like to do this battery replacement trip in an optimised manner by only having to go to the jeweler once.

In fact, apart from fitness trackers, I have not bought a lot of watches in the last few years. The solar watch I wear frequently now, I bought less than a month ago. The automatic which I wore all the time until I bought the solar watch was a gift 5 years ago. The last watch I remember buying I bought in Paris as a memorial to the job I had just quit and that was 8 years ago.

Against that I own 3 Mercedes Benz promotion watches of which I definitely bought one at least 25 years ago. I have a Fossil which was a gift. I think there is one RipCurl watch which I bought in Tarifa around 12 years ago. Watchbuying seemed to be something I did occasionally but not expensively. Aside from a basic Tissot, none of these watches cost more than around 30 euro or the equivalent in Belgian Francs at the time. IF you watch watchYoutube, I don’t know how they would call them (apart from cheap) because the ones they deride as fashion watches (the ones that are fashion labels rather than watchmakers) aren’t anywhere in the ball park of a 30E watch with a 1999 Mercedes Benz logo on it. I don’t think even Mercedes flog watches that cheap.

But this is not an essay on watches, but on being organised and the sad fact is I cannot possibly wear watches that do not tell me the time. So I need to get my act together and get batteries for them and arranging that is an organisational issue. There is a jeweller less than 50 metres away.

All I have to do is go there.