As everyone ran to export and delete their Twitter data in waves when Apartheid Clyde came to town, I sat back and watched with a chuckle from my cozy perch on my Mastodon instance. You see, I’d already done all that months ago, as the site had continued to fester into a sad pile of misery, even without a lot of the banned bad actors. And there were rumors that ol’ Space Karen wanted throw money he didn’t have at buying the site, simply to prove how minuscule his genitalia are fragile his ego is. I was high and dry with a place to watch the show begin. And as we’ve seen, it’s been a dumpster fire driving a car wreck into a freight train about to scream off an unfinished bridge. And lo, we all laughed, for the failure was hilarious.
Until we learned Twitter’s data was for sale on the dark web. Oh, we laughed about it, those of us who never DMed private info, those of us who knew we’d deleted everything. Until the data came back to haunt us in the weirdest ways.
Wherein our protagonist chooses their top picks in the past year of music listening and epic album buying.
Sadly, in the last few years my only blog posts have been these, the yearly lists. Even now I’m only writing this on 31 Dec 2022, knowing full well I likely won’t publish this before midnight. But if I’ve learned anything this year (and expect a long post about that) it’s to go gently with myself. I’m hoping to make these more common, because as always, I am anything if not opinionated.
So, as a semi-pro music listener, what did I enjoy the most this year?
I’ve been using services built atop the ActivityPub standard for several years now, but have continued to host my random musings on a self-hosted instance of WordPress for about 20 years now (never mind the brief period where I insisted that Textpattern was the future, and Textile was superior to Markdown—though I still think that when I’m formatting links). I may keep those writings up indefinitely (maybe make them a static archive), but I wanted to start writing more, and feel less constrained by what I write about. I’ve been leery of being too personal when my blog is connected to my portfolio site, and it’s somewhat limited me with regard to my position on things that might make a hiring manager blush. I won’t be linking to this from my portfolio, and I’ll likely make any posts I’m particularly proud of part of a more static articles section whenever I redo my portfolio site.