Oh, boy. Where do I begin?

As you probably have heard, someone decided to go to the YouTube HQ near San Francisco to shoot the place up. When the news first broke, ‘progressives’ naturally assumed the perp was white, male and conservative. Imagine the shock when it broke that the shooter was female, vegan/animal activist/extreme left, and Iranian. Even though I felt terrible about it, I couldn’t help but laugh. It just proves the point I have always made when it comes to these things. It’s not the weapons. It’s the people wielding the weapons.

This just might be a sign that I’m getting old, because I just fail to understand this.

The picture in the header does speak a thousand words. This is what I see when I go see a show of a larger known band. A sea of phones, recording the performance from a thousand angles. All of them with crappy lenses, and crappy microphones, all of them recording a subpar version of whatever is happening on stage. Why? Why look at the performance through a crappy lens and a crappy screen? The actual resolution of your eyes is a lot higher. Hell, you could even make eye-contact with the performer! How about that! That famous person might just remember you because you weren’t a soulless mobile-phone being held up aloft.

I’ve been active in reenactment groups for many years together with my wife (who will be continuing this hobby), and we both started getting involved in historical reenactment together. I kinda lit the match, but for me personally, the fire has died out. I have lost interest in it. You could say my heart is no longer in it anymore, and I wish to move on.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think teaching people about history by showing it to them is a wonderful goal, and the people involved in reenactment are wonderful, but I personally don’t get any enjoyment out of it anymore. I have had some awesome moments with my fellow re-enactor friends which I wouldn’t want to trade in for anything, but I won’t be part of it anymore.

This is quite a long read. It’s also based on my opinion and how I look at things. Firstly, since I’m writing this in English, I will assume you are unfamiliar with the way Dutch government works so I will give some high-level primers first which are a tad simplified, but hopefully won’t detract from the flaws I’m pointing out.

1. Introduction

As some of you know, I’m Dutch and I live and work in the Netherlands. You might have heard a bit about the Dutch government and its quirks. It’s a monarchist representative constitutional democracy on paper, but over the years, quite a few nasty kinks have crept into the system that made it quite less representative, and also a lot less democratic. EU involvement in our lawmaking hasn’t helped matters either.

What is this?

Just a test. I need to see if my IFTTT triggers still work the way I want.

Please ignore. (Or don’t. Do whatever you want.)

Wait, did he get rid of Wordpress?

Yes, he did. I hope you like how it turned out. I’m using Hugo with the Tranquilpeak theme.

It’s going to change my workflow though. I have to commit my new articles into a github repository, where a webhook will trigger a rebuild of the website. An IfThisThenThat recipe will take care of posting stuff to google/twitter/etc.

I’m also looking into converting other sites over, but having my first main weblog in this format is a good first step.

How’s this for click bait? But there was some study that said that people (yes, this includes women) don’t prefer to have a woman as a boss. Of course, the femibots start frothing at the mouth, but all the frothing on the planet won’t change the facts.

First, for the impatient folks, the TL;DR:

I enjoy having women as coworkers, but I prefer not to work under them (modulo exceptions, but see below). As for the why, well, just read, okay? It’ s not that long.

It seems general stupidity has moved into a lower DEFCON level again, so I’m tapping out for a bit. So, you won’t see any posts from me again for a while. You can have your little bubble, while I lurk on and watch the shit flinging from afar. If you do value my input from time to time, I’ll be listening on Messenger, e-mail, this here weblog, Minds, Gab, Twitter, Bitchute, etc. Feel free to look me up there, and while you’re at it, create an account for yourself in those places as well. They are going to be a safe haven for your opinion when Faceberg decides to clamp down on wrongthink.

I did some shuffling again. I’ve moved all my websites over to FreeBSD and the venerable Caddy webserver. I also ditched SaltStack and went full Ansible for maintaining everything.

So, this releases me from quite a few nasty dependancies. The SSL implementation of Caddy is based on the internal Go one, which doesn’t need the dingy OpenSSL at all. The configuration is a lot simpler and less complex than nginx’s. If only WordPress would work on PostgreSQL, then I would be shot of MySQL as well. Yeah, I could use MariaDB, but it’s actually the same bloody thing,

So, I’m dipping my toe into the Steemit waters, and I’m kinda excited. It seems there is a large community out there on this Blockchain-based platform that seems very friendly and will interact with you. And as a bonus, you can earn a little bit of cash as well if your stuff seems to be interesting enough. I have also found DTube, where I will upload videos. It seems like a better alternative to Youtube, and very censorship-proof. Given the crazyness the Googles, Twitters and Facebooks are up to lately, an alternative seems worthy to check out.