Category: blog

I want to take a break from reading the news for the month of February. Specifically, political news. It’s hard to avoid, but I’ll admit that I seek it out and read more than I need to.

Why do I want to avoid the politics? Because the news is mostly unpleasant, and it’s upsetting, and it doesn’t make me happy, or improve my life or my family’s life, in any way. I can see how it’s because of my white privilege that I have the luxury of blocking off the news. I’m unlikely to be directly affected by anything that might happen in the next month. I’m not at risk of being deported, or experiencing financial problems.

So where do I get my news, and how am I going to block it?

Email

New York Times. I get the daily newsletters. I’ll need to stop reading those. I’ll unsubscribe for the month of February.

There are a few other newsletters that include the news such as NextDraft, and Casey Newton. While I don’t subscribe to them for the politics, it would be impossible to miss any large news events. I’ll unsubscribe from those. If I unsubscribe from any others, I’ll add them here.

I’m not planning on unsubscribing from Pocket Hits that sends the most popular articles of the day. The articles aren’t political, too often, and there is a lot of good content, so I’m just going to skip over anything referencing politics, etc. If things get too bad, I’ll archive the emails for a month.

Twitter

Log out, and don’t log back in for a month. No way around it.

There is lots of great tech content, but politics are just in the mix, and a part of everything, and it would be impossible to miss.

Facebook

This is tough. I could hide people from my newsfeed if they share political news. But there are plenty of Facebook pages that also share articles, and I don’t necessarily want to block all of those.

There are Chrome extensions that can do the job for me. I’ll probably go this option if I can find an extension that doesn’t look sketchy and won’t steal my personal information.

I could disable Facebook, but I use Messenger to keep in touch with my family, And Facebook is great for getting updates on people, and seeing photos.

Reddit

I’m not sure, I don’t really go onto Reddit for the politics. I might be able to hide a few subreddits, but if I stay away from “All”, I’ll be able to avoid almost everything.

News

New York Times, Drudge Report, etc. I’m going to use my hosts file to actually block these sites, since I might type in the URLs out of habit. By blocking the websites with a hosts file, I can’t access the website or any articles at all. Of course, I could easily remove the block by editing the hosts file… but it’s a lot more effort than just clicking on a link, so I won’t do it.

I’m not going to freak out if I hear about the news. The goal of this is to just decrease my own exposure to the news, and then see where I am in 28 days, and how I feel, and whether or not I need the exposure. Will I be happier knowing less? Hopefully, I will.

This is a restored backup from January. And I’m lucky that I’d even done that backup in January. Unfortunately I lost a few posts that I’d made. I downloaded what I could from Google cache, so that I can re-add them, but Google cache didn’t even have all of my posts. This site is barely even indexed in Google now, because I took so long to restore things.

It’s my fault for not backing up more often. But this is the first web host in 20+ years to lose everything. I haven’t even switched hosts.

It was very tempting to just let everything go away. Let the domains drop, and fade away, but I’ve decided to keep some of them. I’ll make sure that I have regular backing-up happening now though.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

I am another gringo*.

I wanted my own place so that I can keep track of things that interest me. When I go off on a tangent of a topic, I can write a post, instead of just saving hundreds of bookmarks, which it is impossible to keep track of.

I track what I watch by rating things at IMDB (1,284 ratings as of this amazing post).

I try to track what I read using LibraryThing, but I really slack at this. Too many books I haven’t added.

I keep track of books I want to read with Amazon wish lists. Not super effective when you have hundreds of books.

Random ideas / crap get saved as email drafts. And eventually I’ll clean out my drafts, and shuffle and organize things into Trello.

And otherwise, I try to find a website’s Facebook page, so I can “Like” them. Right now I’m liking 535 Facebook pages, so it becomes kinda dumb, and a really bad way of getting updates.