On the plus side around here, anyway, I haven't written more blog posts in a year since 2010.
(I tied 2013 and 2024).
A year ago I expressed some confidence I'd be able to move into the new house last year. That didn't happen, my friends. For reasons I shan't go into. This year definitely, tho.
Our little guy (pictured above) continues to be an absolute joy and delight.
Okay, scanning last year's bullets, I guess I mostly talked about TV and videogames. I've already written blog posts about those and said most of what I'd care to say at the moment. Imagine!
Still kind of amazed I actually managed to get the blog converted.
Still kind of bummed RSS redirects didn't work. At least not for my RSS reader.
I did actually turn 50, as predicted.
We're still mostly in a holding pattern waiting for the house to get done. I guess I never did post pictures. I might. We'll see.
I did manage to get Home Assistant up and running at the new house and I can turn lights on and off with my phone. Which I'm still very much enjoying. Maybe I'll post something about that...
I both love and hate YouTube. I originally subscribed to Premium because it's only $2 over a YouTube Music subscription. Now I'm glad I did because it's intolerable otherwise. I'm pretty good at YouTube algorithm curation, crafting a feed that generally give me stuff I want to see, although I remain largely dissatisfied with the algorithm experience.
The little guy would be very happy to just sit and watch YouTube all day. He very much knows his way around smartphones and Chromecast interfaces and can get into YouTube and use the search without assistance. And he will. He has absolutely no interest in YouTube Kids because it doesn't have half of what he wants to see. If you ask him what he wants to watch, he'll still say "Fans!" As we discussed last time, YouTube Kids does not have fans.
I've got to keep on him. He's using a profile on my YouTube Premium account, and even if I'm not with him, it means I can periodically go through his history and nudging him back on a reasonble track. YouTube, thankfully, hadn't tried to show him the worst shit, but it does occasionally try to get him to dip his tow in the garbage sewer to see if he'd like it. Specifically, if you search for fans, you get videos from obsessive fan nerds like you'd hope, but you also get videos of idiots just smashing the crap out of fans for no reason. With millions of views. He thinks that's pretty hilarious. I purge them from his watch history and tell YouTube not to suggest the channel if it shows up on the main page.
There's no way to block a channel on YouTube, frustratingly. And worse, it now knows that the person on the browser on a Linux desktop and the kid on the Chromecast are different people, so it makes different suggestions. This is infuriating. But it's probably making some line go up somewhere.
Anyway, what he ends up watching most of the time is generally pretty wholesome and kid-friendly, but I am not unaware of the dangers of giving a kid free rein on YouTube and I hate that the platform gives you next to no tools to mitigate them.
