This might sound a little odd. Quite a lot of my prose is indeed odd to the uninitiated, but this is a post about communication, specifically integrations. I know I’m not the first to write about this but I’m on a bit of a journey right now.

You’ll probably have visited web sites integrating a chat thing into their pages. Often it’s an intrusive popup asking cheerfully if you’d like help with something anything. The only time I ever used one I was deeply unimpressed with the abilities of the person at the opposite end of the chat. It seemed to be a copy and paste session, the likes of which is these days run by ‘bots. To be honest I much prefer reading FAQs, and if my query is sufficiently complex I prefer email to a web form.

Today I installed a tiny code snippet on my GitHub Pages site. It creates an anchored button which links to a chat room I created at the GitHub.com-related third-party service, Gitter. The service offers public and private chat rooms, and logins are required, via either GitHub or Twitter. Logins make sense.

I honestly don’t expect my use of it will amount to much, and thus fully anticipate removing the code if no-one really uses it. But why?

I blog at GitHub Pages, to a blog I adapted from a prebuilt solution, composing posts on my phone in Markdown before staging, committing and pushing the post to my repository. Other people may call this ‘publishing.’

I then copy the raw Markdown and paste into a new blog post at 10Centuries.org. Being a not particularly cumbersome workflow it works well for me.

Now, notifications of posting go to 10Centuries chat, to Twitter and to Facebook, and I get occasional feedback at all three.

In a nutshell I see my social networking future at 10Centuries (10C.) It’s a peaceful haven away from the in-your-face occasional nastiness and immediacy that intrudes into Twitter and the insulated, walled garden of Facebook. There’s a web app (linked to above), and Android and iOS apps are being developed right now. Yes I know I’m being awkward here, but it is after all my prerogative!

Ok, back to the point. I’d love to be able to integrate a link to Cappuccino (10C chat) at both my GitHub Pages site and my 10C site but don’t have the skills (or, currently the vision) to implement it elegantly. So right now I’m making do with a thing that only nerds are likely to want to login to use.

I could, I suppose, create a link in the GitHub Pages site header to a page which links to 10C chat, and that might be enough.

But it won’t be. I’ve used message boxes which posted into either Disqus.com and, until recently, App.net (2 months away from closure.) I recall extremely limited use providing me with comments. It’s perfectly reasonable; Disqus is a comments-focused service and App.net is/was a limited-appeal network.

It’d be nice to have all my eggs in the one basket. But, when all is said and done, I do write for myself.

I am @bazbt3 on 10Centuries.org (Jason Irwin’s social/blogging/podcasting network.) If you want a change from the misery of the mainstream I have invite codes! Oh, I’m also on Twitter.

With weeks to go before a billing cycle I've downgraded my App.net (ADN) account to the 'free' tier. Having not been there for a while the decision was, heartless as it sounds, easy.

I'm not closing the account, I'm thankful for the memories.

@Schwarzenegger:

"Some people say Sunday is a day of rest. I say if you eat, sleep, and breathe on Sunday, why not train? What are you doing today?"

@bazbt3:

"@Schwarzenegger I'm sitting on my lardy British arse & considering which diet programme will fit my tiny attention span. Thanks for asking!"

I'm going to start reposting some entries from previous incarnations of my blog. (I already posted about this.)

The only way most of the old stuff can be identified is by the page URL.

[Medium posts end.]

Maybe I can resume reading now?

For years I looked at Cussons Imperial Leather soap as being nothing special. Through my childhood I had little exposure to it (not soap!) and always wondered why it appealed to so many. I thought ‘how could so many be taken in by the ads or its long history or…

During December my wife brought some home, a six-pack on special offer (of course) and when my previous, moisturising, bar became too small to handle comfortably whilst attempting to wake up, and to avoid the newly-present danger of it escaping my grasp and exiting via the washbasin plughole, I opened the pack.

What a revelation! It has a distinctive aroma, of course it has, but unlike anything else I’d experienced when my parents and I shared bars, or visiting someone else’s home.

So I sat and pondered for a while. Insularity, navel-gazing, easily bests following the news any day, and especially the latter days of the year just ended. But I digress…

Now I understand this soap’s appeal! It’s mine, untainted (too strong?) by other peoples’ lack of handwashing skills, disparate fragrances, and of course inability to empty the water and soap scum from their soap dishes. In short, no-one washes with it but I.

And, while the fragrance remains on me, I smell almost human. Yes!

But how? Well, here’s the thing. No-one else’s sweat, sebaceous oil, flakes of dead skin, faeces, earwax, nasal mucus, none of it touches my precious bar of soap.

Its a rubbish moisturiser for faces though, my newly-scaly forehead is testament to that! Perhaps it’s as well one of my Christmas presents is a moisturising cream. Now I’m definitely on the lookout for an Imperial Leather face soap.

Cussons Original Imperial Leather hand soap thus gets Baz’s seal of approval and, new for 2017, a rating of 9/10 for its intended purpose.

Here we are at the end of another year. I've seen a lot. More than some, fewer than others. It qualifies me to say this: to the mountains it's utterly meaningless, to the trees and the squirrels it's irrelevant, and to humans though arbitrary it can be a time for regrouping.

I see people saying it's silly that dates chosen by another age to signify year-end and year-beginning have such significance. But this regrouping I mentioned is important; maybe even necessary. Sanity helps.

Everything we do is governed by our impressions of the world around us; family, friends, acquaintances, social media buddies, and the rest of the world. Though nothing we experience is totally random, chaos is a necessary component of life, provided we can guess what's coming up next.

And then 2016 arrived. I'm not going to meander through a year-end list of stuff that's been important to me, no. Looking back through my previous posts, I'm confident another reader will get some inkling of what it is to be me.

It's not one I'll look back on fondly, not by a long way. Usually I'm close to trembling with optimism at this point, resolutions tripping over themselves but not voiced lest I break them in humiliating fashion. But today, though I'm no longer scared of the year ahead, I'm resigned to the fact I'm not going to enjoy it.

It's not that I'm fully immersed in the depressing, doom-laden frame of mind I anticipated six months ago; surprisingly I'm simply resigned to the fact that circumstances outside my control will have an impact on me.

The need to know what's going on remains as strong as it did a year ago, and though I know I won't be prepared for it, I'll be ready for it.

This may make sense to no-one but me: I used to the word 'cathartic' in a question yesterday. Blogging is that for me, gives me a perspective that talking about stuff with others can't bring.

Talking helps. A lot.

Ah… peculiar paradoxes.

So, what will we be talking about throughout 2017? How 2016 was comparatively benign‽

We have an Amazon Echo Dot. It's touted as a voice-controlled electronic assistant. It's more than that: can stream music, create todo and shopping lists, play rudimentary games, control heating, lights – and all at the sound of one's voice. It's, and I hesitated to use the word but shall anyway, a neat gadget, and one that works really really well.

I've already posted the following to Twitter and Facebook: with a parental advisory to not trust a small child with an Amazon Echo/Dot. Ever! Such is the ephemeral nature of social networks though that I thought it best to commit this particular memory to my blog. For posterity.

Here is the video. You'll need the sound on. Funny, definitely and gloriously NSFW*:

https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=qDMbXT8c6Q8

*Not Safe For Work. Trust me.

If I were to die tomorrow I'm reasonably sure I'd be mourned, and remembered for being a reasonable facsimile of the best human being I can be.

But there's no profit in that for the type of individual whose life depends, having no other publicly visible skills, on being a professional shit-stirrer. Paid obscene amounts of money for deliberately constructing antagonistic opinions of someone else's misery, hurt, sorrow; opinions designed to inflame, incite and, most insidiously of all, to desensitise the reader to the kind of stimuli that would ordinarily bring to the fore empathy, understanding, and tolerance.

Employed and encouraged by a deeply broken media intent on retaining their services because readers equally bereft of common decency lap up this kind of commentary, and snapped up by the highest bidder because another company run by amoral businessmen would think it appropriate to make money using identical tactics…

Not exactly a golden age this, is it.

So, to all who feed the Hopkins woman and those like it, and to the nasty creature itself, this:

One day you too will die. You'll be lucky if your family retains any respect for you by then for simply putting the bread on the table by any means necessary. Attempting to make it acceptable to publicly express hate in the world my children will grow up into by the constant drip-drip-drip of bitterness isn't how I'd like to be remembered.

Rationalise it how you will, but headstone or not, your obituary won't be kind to you.

I made and uploaded a second video to YouTube! 20 seconds long, I guarantee it will not change your life.

A scroll down memory lane, it's all the Twitter accounts I've blocked in the nearly 6 years I've had the account. I started to delete a few of the first, hit the Twitter rate limit, and then simply gave up.

There never was a plan to gain followers, prestige, influence. To anyone who knows me that should be obvious.

Here is the evidence, my video.

Incidentally, at first playback it started off as low-resolution (144p) on my phone. It goes all the way to 11 (720p) for the more curious.