Personal — Numeric Citizen Blog

Hello Again, Facebook!

Today, I posted something on Facebook; and honestly, it felt weird. I can’t remember exactly when I last wrote on Facebook. I also had this symptom of missing out on things from my old colleagues and friends just by glancing at my timeline for a few minutes. It felt heavy. My post was about telling my “Facebook friends” about the two sites where I share my photos online: Glass and Pixelfed. I don’t know if people will take time off their busy lives to visit or even bookmark the sites. I shouldn’t care about that. Those who pay attention might even notice a link to my digital hub, where I share all my other sites. Because I’m curious, I’ll return back to Facebook in a few days to see if I got some comments. I’ll report back here in any case.

Memories

Today is my mother’s 91st birthday. She passed away 18 months ago, but the memories of her remain vivid. This morning, my iPhone suggested a video memory highlighting cherished moments with her, which nearly brought me to tears. Time may have flown by, but my affection for her endures, even though I wasn’t that close to her, not has much as I would have liked. One of my last photos of her. 😔

Trying to Find Comforting Thoughts

Manuel Moreale reflecting on one hundred people who took the time to sign his guestbook (I did):

It’s the number of people who have taken a few minutes out of their busy lives to write something on my guestbook. One hundred doesn’t seem a lot in the grand scheme of things, especially on the web. If you have one hundred followers you might as well have zero. One hundred views on a YouTube video? That’s nothing. You need at least one hundred thousand to be part of the conversation. And yet, I find one hundred signatures in a guestbook to be a lot. Can you imagine having one hundred people in front of you, all saying something to you, one after the other? It would feel overwhelming.

I often think about this. Just like Manuel, I have a blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast (sort of). Globally, my follower counts are very low (even lower than Manuel’s) when looked through the Internet scale lens, but if those people were in front of me, in the same room, that would be quite something else. I find this thought to be comforting.

I support LGBTQ+ cause. I read MacStories story about Threads murky management of controversial posts. My personal take is simplicistic: stop using Meta platforms. I do understand that for some people to be heard, they want to be on Meta’s platforms, though.

It’s time for me to return home, sadly. This vacation has been one of the best at many levels. I feel rejuvenated mentally and physically. I’ll use flight time (ten hours) to reflect on my time here in Croatia and to look forward to resume my blogging and creative activities.

Reddit can be a toxic environment, with bullies and users who aggressively enforce their views on what is appropriate content for a specific subreddit. Today is a bad day for me. 😞 How should I react to this?

I just created a quick poll on my Ko-fi page! I want to know, “how did you discover me?” Please, fill it in, the post is public! Thanks.

Slowly but surely, I’m refining my use case for my Ko-fi page: more personal stories and content, something that I don’t share elsewhere. The very small paywall makes me feel comfortable to share this kind of content. When I get millions of supporters, I might revisit this, but until then, I’m glad of doing what I’m doing there¹.

Of course, if you want to support me and my creative work, you’ll make me even happier! ↩︎

Since getting my new iPad, I decided that this would be the only device that I use when eating launch because it is smaller and I reduce the risk of food falling on my MacBook Air keyboard. 😩

Posted a photo on my Ko-fi page this morning. It’s for supporters only. I shared some thoughts about street photography. I decided to use that page to share more personal stories that I don’t share elsewhere. It’s only the beginning. It will take time to open up more. It’s a journey.