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Weekend Update #26
Aug. 10th, 2025 12:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
odonnellweb_feedYesterday was the anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation from the presidency. Just pointing that out. No additional commentary should be necessary.
I had a pretty great weekend. Yesterday we were out doing all the usual weekend errands, then had dinner at our favorite local joint, and did the Netflix and chill thing last night. Do people still say Netflix and chill? Anyway, we watched Always Be My Maybe, a better than average Rom-com with a hilarious 10-minute cameo from Keanu Reeves. Today we went to the Carytown Watermelon Festival, which is a thing here in RVA. I had some fabulous watermelon basil ice cream. I did not expect basil to work so well in ice cream, but as I said earlier, it was fabulous. My wife had watermelon pina colada ice cream, which was also quite good. We also each had a cup of straight watermelon. That was our lunch today. After making a lap of 100+ vendors lining the streets and checking out a few of the bands playing on the 5 stages it was getting hot and very crowded. So we headed to our local brewery and sat outside on their covered patio day drinking and reading. I did burgers and fries for dinner.
Like I said, it was a pretty great weekend.
I switched my primary browser from Firefox to Chromium running the Duck Duck Go extension for privacy a couple of weeks ago, and I switched my note taking app from Zim Wiki to Standard Notes. In the process, my save a link for this email workflow got all screwed up. So even though I have not written one of these for a couple of weeks, I've only got a couple of links. Those of you on the paid plan can request a refund at whatpaidplan@odonnellweb.com.
Cory Doctorow wrote a really great post about how enshittification is a systemic problem. I may feel better not using Facebook, but individual action is not going to fix that problem.
Brilliant Crank makes the maybe encouraging point the history is cyclical. The US went through this sort of malaise in the 70s, and that downturn is what gave us MTV, punk, hip-hop, Silicon Valley, and the personal computer revolution. Another revolution is brewing. You can see hints of it in the push back against hustle culture, corporate owned social media, and algorithmic content via the Indieweb, newsletters, and the growing interest in disconnecting from surveillance capitalism. It's just simmering under the surface today, but so was the PC revolution and punk rock in 1977. Things get good, then they get bad, then they get good again. It's just how things work.
I'll be at Drupal GovCon on Thursday and the first half of Friday this week. Maybe sure you say hello if you will also be there.
And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.
