Ideas For New Blog Posts (And Posts I Abandoned)

I’ve got over 1,000 files sitting in my drafts folder. Here’s a few ideas I have for new blog posts once I get around to it.

• Overthinking My Site’s Images. Site images is something that takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. You need to factor in various image formats, determine what quality to encode images, how do encode them programatically and ensure Hugo understands them, among other things. I’ve done various bits of this individually, but I need to bring it all together for one post.
• Dumping Attributes in Hugo. I want to document a design pattern I do often which is to iterate over an object and spit out the attributes in an HTML element.
• Computer Olympics. I had this idea a long while ago where I satirize how modern tech has become total shit. Examples include popups, endless login prompts, crytic password requirements among other things. It’s like you have to do the whole Airplane! fight scene [VIDEO: 0:27] just to use a website¹.
• Zero, one, many. It’s a great way to think of data, but I’m trying to explain it well.
• Media literacy is hard. I read two books on misinformation and as good as they are, they uunderestimate just how hard it is, epecially given how much bullshit we encounter daily.
• Making a media taxonomy on my site. This is very hard to do but has the potential to make my site easier to navigate.
• Yet another post on digital discontent. Somehow I can’t function without some sort of podcast/music going on.
• Tech research worth pursuing. So far I have verifying that someone is human in a non humiliating way and handling obsolete devices (which Samsung tried but ultimatley abandoned).
• Sort out infosec before you need to. In this post I’ll try to provide simple but effective security advice
• $100 life changers, inspired by a video by struthless [VIDEO: 12:52]

Abandoned Posts

These are posts I don’t want to write about anymore for some reason.

2023

• Zimbabwe’s Gold Coin. It’s pretty clear whatever supposed benefit the coin was supposed to bring didn’t materialize so there’s no point in summarizing the event I went to discussing it.
• Media Boycotts. The drama surrounding the game that shant be mentioned has long passed. Both sides can look to the drop in popularity and think it was much a do about nothing as people have since moved on. There’s a debate to be had as to whether boycotts are effective at drawing attention to the creator’s actions as well as the limit to allyship where people can’t be bothered to not play a single fucking video game.
• Why Africa Seems Neutral in The Russia-Ukraine Conflict. I’m not a geopolitical expert so my opinion isn’t worth much, but I don’t see what Africa can really do. We can’t send HIMRAS, we don’t have the money for aid, we aren’t a nice place to seek refuge in and we can’t really turn our backs on the people who (seemingly) give a damn about developing us. Besides, we have other things to worry about and Russia is on the permanant security concil so nothing we do matters.
• Starting to Rank My YouTube Subscriptions. I’ll try this project again some other time.
• 2022 Web Development Research. Too much time has passed between the research being written and me wanting to write about it.
• Various old Apple Events. I never got around to publishing my Apple hot takes.
• China’s surveillance state. I don’t have much to say about it besides that this will be the end of privacy given that you can tie all these identifiers together.
• Lessons from COVID. I couldn’t be bothered to care about COVID anymore but these are the lessons I jotted down
  1. The next pandemic won’t be like COVID so we can’t ever be prepared
  2. I think antibiotic resistence might cause the next pandemic. There has been little R&D on this front and given their overuse, I expect this to cause lots of problems
  3. Don’t forget about mental health. A lot of people struggled to cope with reduced contact which explains a lot of “selfish behaviour”.
  4. Certain advice makes sense at a certain point in time. Starting with a lockdown is fine until we realized that outdoor transmissions and kids would be fine. Also, vaccines exist so doomerism isn’t warranted.
  5. Ensure all are safe, including those who have to work and those with disabilities.
• Cultural Appropriation [VIDEO 22:23]. The video sums up my thoughts pretty well. In my opinion, the issue isn’t necessarily with using something from another culture but rather doing so disrespectfully. Being angry at some white teenager for wearing a chinese dress is stupid, but I understand that getting the reward of innovative dances that others gave away for free isn’t fair.
• Bitching about Facebook. As much as I complain, it’s not my website so it’s better just to make your own instead.
• Elon and Twitter. That idiot and his site isn’t worth the storage. Seems he wasted 44 billion on entertainment.
• Just Stop Oil and other environmental attention seekers. They won’t go away until the problem is solved. The aims are worth pursuing but the details are where things get tricky. For instance, they want to stop oil but complain of high energy costs caused by too little oil.
• Languishing. Doesn’t apply anymore because I got a job in early 2022.
• Laws of UX—read them yourself.
• NEOM City. this stupid idea doesn’t need any more clowning.
• COVID vaccine procurement issues. Really done with COVID now tbh.
• Speech rider. Not like I’m giving any talks soon nor am I in a position to negotiate.
• In car dine in trend during COVID. It never caught on.
• Various old links. Don’t see the value in sharing them now.