End of month thoughts

It's been a warm week with quite a bit of sun out which has meant the layers have been well off and windows opened for longer than the hour or so it takes to clear stale air from the room as it hides in corners.

In lots of ways it is great to feel fresh air around you, you do feel more alive, able to do more as much as hay fever does trouble me at this time of year and I love to see the cherry blossoms out plus the daisies in the garden.

Unlike some we've not replaced with concrete or dead to wildlife artificial grass so actually we had Cabbage Butterflies out yesterday which is a bit earlier than usual and some bees thankfully away from the washing line.

So much so really the perils of social media - the one who managed to make the first "Ignore" list did it big style - with unrelated and irrelevant aggressive rants with cuss words might as well navigated by just keeping away from those types.

Me-ow.

Outdoors away from screens is better.

Musical discourse

 One of "those" adult spoof Ladybird books we've had for a good few years like people can't treasure  a series but try to take it into areas it doesn't belong but there's a bit of truth in this covers mash up.

Like anything, take a passion to the extreme and house can get filled up while are savings consumed by with everything to do with it whither it's fashion, sowing or music so it makes sense to say "do I really need that?"and "what does it exactly give me?"

It's like while the Now People have reissued the LP (and cd bookform) 1983 and 1984 Yearbooks, I'm not buying which may feel like collector "oh my goodness you're not getting a complete set that might be worth more money" but simply there's nothing I don't already have and no, owning them doesn't mean anything to me.

When it comes to the umpteenth issue of some individual albums I'm very selective so there's only three issues of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on lp, the 2014 mono, a mid 70's analogue stereo and the 2017 Digital stereo remaster and when one Doobie Brothers album recently came my way that was a one on one replacement after doing a comparison

One private forum that sometimes acted as a enabling place for such things recently closed which was kind of sad given I'd been there since 2007 when having been given the boot by the management of a bigger site we set up our own place.

Thing is many of them drifted towards Facebook making groups where I point blank refused especially when being partially pushed to go to the no longer with us Google Plus social network by them only to see them move back to Facebook for free coffee at Costa and the like and it that point slowly over time it just drifted apart.

It's like be on Facebook or be cast out.

Sorry I'm not prepared to jump through the hoops and privacy issues that site has just to keep in touch with people who just left me.

On posts elsewhere

There will be no doubt other stuff going on when this post is set to be published however that may turn out and that's why I tend to do things a bit in advance.

I'm not really much good at that on social media having never really got the hang of scheduling posts so whenever I'm doing something that may involve being away from a keyboard given my cellphone is not "smart", then you can expect no posts.

And that's before you take in the disinclination to with off colour messages and people with pretty disgusting everyday morals that try to interact with you with the time it takes to block people and sadly file reports too in extreme cases.

I'm working on a new style of posting that I might enjoy more as I find the constant discourse and tension tends to take me away from the very reason I made an account in the first place and that seems to be working out much better.

I should be able to log in and just feel like making posts rather than agonizing over how that might seem to one group or other so long as they're decent.

That's the thing going forward.

Evolving online times

This coming week or so is looking like a pretty draining one to be honest with large scale Political instability over here (we'll skip the groan up political stuff behind it, it's just bad shall we say) and because of upcoming changes in UK law that in likely to bring in  age verification though registering details to a provider to access some sites if if like me you're strictly sfw although how effective this might be in practise remains to be seen.
I most admit I am taking a more pragmatic approach to it because sometimes you sign up to sites and through a combination of changing interests and time constraints you really don't us them that much.
So from that point of view there are a couple of sites I have effectively outgrown that makes losing access to them no real loss but there are a few others such as FA that  I do find handy keep in touch with favourite artists and friends and they won't be adopting the scheme the UK government wants so either it slips through as they're more into commercial ie money making sites or not.
The likes of Tumblr aren't effected nor as far as I'm aware Similar Worlds.
Sometimes it's hard to believe this blog has been around in its present form for some thirteen years since I moved from a freebee on an early social media site that's no longer with us to blogger which remains a popular choice for long form blogging.
It's seen various places come and go such as Google+, Yahoo360, Geocities, friends reunited, tinier me and the experience project in all that time in a variety of interactions with people, some good, some not so good.
You could say the only real certainty is that cycle keeps on repeating itself  so having stand alone structures for your blogging still makes sense.

Bestuff - early social media

Thanks for everyone who read and enjoyed last weeks outdoor edition of the blog not least the pictures.
This week I'm going back a bit in time to around ten years ago before some of you were online even and looking at one site I loved in the before Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr were the social media of choice.
The main reason you join any kind of social media is to form connections with others,  in other words it's the cyber equivalent of face to face networking so you need to find thinks that link you to who share things in common.
The mainly British social media of choice in the 2000's was Friends Reunited that worked though connecting you to schools, colleges, university and workplaces to others who had connections to them.
Bestuff was an international site that did things in way that soon become more the norm.

Rather than looking at where you've been, it looked at what you liked such as favourite films, foods, pets, hobbies, dating likes and so on in groups created by users which you'd mark up as likes that added into a mosaic collection of your "Bestuff".

 New Stuff, new categories were listed you you could keep up and by going through categories you could find your "Bestuff" and share it.
It was a bit like a game where you'd go around looking for and creating things you'd share.
It's a bit like Tumblr where you look for thing you like, reblog and follow each other except it was a bit less high tech and didn't have the messaging sophistication.
There was a Friends section you could add those you shared the most stuff with and a messaging board and my best buddy on there is in that screenshot, Tribble, to whom we had a keenly felt relationship between us.
It closed down after a period of graveyard languishing a few years back but part of my past includes this early social media so when I think  back to things when this blog was in its infancy, I do think of those days by the "Big Computer" on sites like that before joining Google Plus and Tumblr.
Of the two I'd say Tumblr is the busier by far and Google Plus is one of those things I file under was encouraged by a group of friends who seemed to want to leave Facebook but then decided freebees were worth more to them than better privacy and control of who you posted too and promptly left me on there as I refuse to do facebook. Actually I have two accounts but do wonder from time to time about scrapping one completely since I seldom use the other.