After a month of using it, I've deleted the WordPress Gutenberg plugin.

Editing tools shouldn't get in your way. Editing tools shouldn't make you fight them. Editing tools shouldn't make the process frustrating. Editing tools shouldn't make the process take longer. Editing tools shouldn't make you have to roll the dice on whether that paragraph has the right amount of whitespace under a photo.

But Gutenberg did all those things. And now I'm back to the old familiar intuitive interface. Posting is a breeze and easy and quick. Which makes me happy, albeit temporarily. For I know it's only a matter of time before this is forced in WordPress core. Perhaps by then a lot of the bugs will have been worked out?

Jason Kottke has a post about the new Laurel & Hardy movie. Got me thinking back to those old black & white re-runs I used to watch as a kid. Flash Gordon, King Of The Rocket Men, Zorro, Harold Lloyd. I have fond memories of them (the nostalgia blinders) and I wonder how they'd hold up now?

Outside in the back garden on this pleasant Arizona evening doing back garden things.  Three neighbors around us are cooking wonderful things.  Depending on which side you walk towards we have rich spicy Indian food, somethin' somethin' fishy, and that has to be burgers?  All fantastic, all making me hungry.

I'm always wondering what people have in their storage units.  Like a Silence Of The Lambs situation with heads and such?  How creepy would it be for a security guard to wander around here at night?  One of those doors suddenly starts shaking and rattling.

It's that time of the year where for a brief few hours the windows can remain open.  It's nice sipping coffee outside with the sound of birds instead of neighbors air conditioners humming.  And breathe.

While watching the trailer for the new Magnum P.I it became clear that some TV shows should just be left alone.  There's really no need to go back and remake every single one of them.  It's ok to just let the past be the past.

This rolled in late afternoon.  The sky was completely black 20 mins later.  So what to do but sip some red wine and look to the heavens to see how it unfolds.

No rain or thunder this time.

A millisecond before launching off the fridge to catch the moth.  Cats.  Fast.

As far as I could tell, we got all the rain for about 10 whole minutes.  And then it stopped and what remained was a sense of calm and quiet.  You step outside and take a really deep breath and just for a moment, everything is alright.  That, and the car got a wash.

There have been some rumblings about Twitter of late.  A lot of discontent with their seeming inability or unwillingness to address the abuse problem.  I myself have found it slightly less fun to use than it was in the beginning.  Partly the reason why I unfollowed all of political Twitter the other week.  Just done with the negativity.

There's been a push to show Twitter a lesson, leave and use something like Mastodon instead?  I get it.  Every few years there's a kerfuffle and the new shiny is touted as the way to go.  I mentioned:

If my timeline is to be believed, people are angry and leaving Twitter this week. It's noble. But I've seen this movie before, and it's called Ello.— Kevin Spencer (@kevin_spencer) August 17, 2018

At the weekend Simon Willison had an idea.

How about if, instead of ditching Twitter for Mastodon, we all start blogging and subscribing to each other's Atom feeds again instead? The original distributed social network could still work pretty well if we actually start using it— Simon Willison (@simonw) August 18, 2018

It's great.  A lot of people are a little put off by the idea of "blogging" in the who has time to write & consume long form posts sense.  But nothing says you have to write long form posts.   Short post-lettes from your blogging software of choice sounds like a great start.