I was reading an article about Ice-T doing the Grammy show and how far rap has come over the last 50 years. I agree and it made me consider my own memories.

I remember the first hip-hop song that got me hooked on the genre – Wipe Out by the Fat Boys. I have always loved The Beach Boys, so the mashup was awesome but strange. I think even then though, I was aware The Safaris originally sang wipeout and I was initially confused by the collaboration.

The thing is, while there are better earlier hip hop/rap songs – beyond the rare appearance of The Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers Delight – rarely was rap played on any stations my parents listened to. That meant my exposure was very low, but this crossed over to being played everywhere because of The Beach Boys’ connection.

I attended a birthday party where it was played over and over – and I wanted it for myself. I had my birthday money and really wanted the cassette. My father, who only had exposure to the band through this one song, stated the music wasn’t for me and wasn’t going to allow it. My mother on the hand stood up and said it was my money and I should be able to buy what I wanted. In the end, my mother won the argument.

I was taken to Hill’s in Amherst and purchased the cassette. When we arrived home, I went straight to my room and started listening to the cassette. I loved the whole thing, but the language and themes in the rest of the songs meant that I knew I wouldn’t be able to listen anywhere in earshot of my parents. This broke me because I loved it. I just didn’t want it ripped from me.

I ended up doing the logical thing and told my parents I didn’t like the album. Even though I had and would continue to buy albums just for a single song – I asked if we could return it. I was 11 and this was 15.00 (50.00ish today with inflation). My father took me back to Hill’s and handled the return (he gave the I told you so speech on the drive). Dejected I spent the return money on a lego set I believed.

This is a landmark moment in many ways. Not just because of what the music was, but, because I had purchased music instead of a toy. It was that cusp of growing up, and I went back to being a kid (which could be why I still buy toys today). It also dealt with awareness of perception. If my parents had heard the music I was listening to, the next thing they would have done was paid attention to the books I was reading. It was all self-preservation. It was also the only time I ever returned music for a refund.

Time would continue t march on. The genie didn’t go back into the bottle. I still loved the music. I could point out songs here or there – but it wasn’t until my sophomore year that I made it past things on the level of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Let’s be honest though, parents wouldn’t have been a fan of every song on To The Extreme – which would be my first majorly played and owned hip hop album.

I joined the marching band. For every away game and band festival my friend Jeremy brought along his boombox. There was quite a bit of harder (non-parent approved) rock played – but in the regular rotation were Beastie Boys and NWA. I was back to being fully in and most of the cassettes I would purchase for the rest of high school would be hip hop and rap.

Even then in my town, with my friends, I was an outlier overall. Most didn’t enjoy the genre unless it was a top-ten hit. Others had stricter parents paying attention to their music – so didn’t own the albums. They mostly stayed with rock. I would like to say that after graduation I purchased my first CD – Tag Team, Whoomp There it is. It was 30.00 in 1994 at Fisher Big Wheel. Also, not a great or deep album – but for the second time in my life – the first time I purchased music in a new format for myself and once again the same genre.

Outside of all of that though – even as a preteen – I was confused about why rap was nominated for Grammy’s or on the Billboard charts in the R&B category. MTV awards acknowledged the genre was distinct and separate, but everywhere else just lumped all black music into R&B. today though that has all changed.

Growing up rock was the dominant genre of music. Then we had the dark ages for years where country became dominant (thank god that is over). Then for the last decade rap/hip hop became the dominant genre – with rock selling so low they dropped the TV time for most rock awards from the Grammy’s last year. The genre is getting its proper recognition and place finally.

Between friends stating it sucked or my father stating “it wasn’t music for me” – it seems, with time, both were wrong. People can still dislike it – I suffered through farm emo being the dominant musical genre – I can’t say it sucked – it just wasn’t for me.

Congratulations to hip hop/rap for its life and evolution over 50 years. I’m glad that I was there for most of it.

A few months ago my website ran into an issue. WordPress crashed, and while I could take time to fix it – I opted not to. At first, it was “I’ll get around to it”. Then it became “do I need it”? For quite a while I wanted to take my site to a static deployment – removing the backend needs. This really was the opportunity to start on that. The problem was old data. I wanted that back.

I previously designed a comprehensive backup strategy. In retrospect, it had some gaping holes in ease of use. Digging through MySQL exports, building new development environments, and tweaking settings because the upload size was too large – gave me access once again. It was time to tackle another problem – blog rot.

Blog rot is one of those things that just comes over time. Embedded YouTube videos no longer exist. The linked images you used for posts disappeared. Decisions made for optimization cause problems decades later. Blog rot arises from all of these. It was time to do a top-to-bottom clean of the site.

This idea isn’t as pure and simple as it sounds. I started with thousands of posts. The website was a central repository of tweets, image uploads, videos, data from sites that don’t exist anymore, and general fluff. It was time after two decades to get rid of the litter and noise that I didn’t need. Unedited backups are safe, but the future site didn’t need that litter. Posts conceived with original thoughts behind them were the target.

With the first cleaning, the site was whittled down to two-thousand posts. The archive still had lots of white noise amongst the soundtrack. Unfortunately, something else turned its ugly eyes upon me. Looking through my posts, there were spelling and grammar issues galore. It wasn’t unawareness from when I wrote, it just wasn’t a concern. I wrote a stream of thought. This approach leads to many writing issues for anyone. The downside is that I wanted the writing to pure versus edited. I now have a different view on that approach.

I just stared down at the amount of work ahead. The work involved opening each of the two thousand posts and deciding which had a place in the future. The culling survivors would have to make sure they had a working featured image. If an image was missing, stock imagery was used. Each post was scanned by Grammarly. Grammarly highlighted spelling, grammar, and punctuation issues. Those issues were addressed or corrected. Writing this post, Grammarly prompts are almost non-existent compared to the legacy posts in the edit screen.

Revisiting writing for the first time in years is an interesting experience. I read a wide variety of topics including family issues, defunct web services, older political views, and general geekery. I remembered each and every post. No matter how random or insignificant, it was remembered. Detachment is beneficial though. Not everything being read was going to survive. Their ghosts haunting the Internet Archive will keep them preserved.

Future website development was still going to be done with WordPress. This meant consistency as I was going through. After reviewing, cleaning, grammar, and trimming the blog rot took about a month from beginning to end. From thousands of posts to under five hundred. It was quite the trimming the in the. I left behind a good mix of who I was and what I wrote about over the years. Posts were removed for a multitude of reasons. The largest reason was relevance, specifically relevance to me and not necessarily the site. I will admit that some of the removals were just due to the level of effort to get a post up to snuff.

During all of this content work, thoughts and plans started emerging for the backend. I’ve been trying to get away from my hosting provider for years. I keep it for a site that no one visits. Why should I be paying actual money to keep it going? Time is money – and that is the larger cost sink though. In the end timing of everything came together. My domain name was coming up for renewal. That caused me to consider now was the right time to start digging into DNS and all that entails.

Through all of this, my idea of my hosting needs has changed a bit. Originally I thought about migrating to an AWS hosting solution. My personal journaling script had been running there already. Looking at the numbers though, it was costing me more than my regular host. All I needed was a web directory to host flat files that I could point my DNS to. I ended up testing and migrating to GitHub. Using their page feature was all I needed. It also had the benefit of a free SSL certificate. It does have a downside. Anyone could download the totality of my website easier than just loading a scraper. Thankfully they will only receive the same information a web scraper would provide.

The last step of the backend was considering DNS. I ended up using Google and handing more trackable information about myself to the evil overlords. It ended up cutting my domain registration costs in half. Over the next year, I will be migrating my remaining domains over to Google also. For digital items that make no money, but have a cost – cheaper is better. The .com and .net iterations for my domain were expiring at the same time. Historically, I used the .net as a beta mirror for changes. Since I’ll be doing changes offline – that wasn’t really needed anymore. Creeva.net became a profile linking site that is also hosted on GitHub.

The amount of hours is going to save me hundreds of dollars year after year going forward. Everything I’ve been working on has ended up with tangible and feel-good benefits. In fact, this is going to be my first post going forward. I have to make sure that the RSS flows I have in place continue to function. I’m also back to if the let’s write a random post bug hits me, I’ll be able to actually publish something.

I was looking through my draft posts, trying to clear off the cobwebs of antiquity and readdress the things I started and never finished. I came across one post which was personal, but I just don’t think I can get into the mindset this particular post needed to continue as it is. This is not a normal thing for me though. I can normally capture the mindset and voice I had at different eras of my life. Granted you don’t want to see my third-grade writing mindset, I mean it’s painful.

This piece though needed a time, place, and moment to write about it for its particular voice. Anything else is a complete and utter rewrite. So I am working through the thought process of why. I have the same interests, and the same unabashedly sharing of personal stories. The writing in the piece was even fine. So I’m looking over what part of me has changed.

I shared this sentiment with my Facebook friends, in slightly more detail – but in a more off-the-cuff manner. Writing that I think it’s the tone that throws me. Because the original article was written in 2016. Between the changes in the world. The changes in society. The changes in the country. It has been so much change. While I feel I’m the same person, the rotation of the globe has moved me without permission. Which is strange.

Nothing is less or more meaningful to me compared to what it was five years ago. I still have the same beliefs neither stronger nor weakened – but more expressed. This may actually be the key since the writing I was addressing had a key function that dealt with expression. I’m at a stage for those things that are important need to b expressed differently. This is likely why in the last year I’ve been writing significantly more again. Obviously not on my website, but significant long-form writing has been done.

Between data-basing and cross-referencing everything I’ve written in my life to working on a project to record each and every childhood story – it’s a matter of expression. If we disregard the world and just look at personal changes in my life in the last five years, it’s been a lot. I don’t however share what I’m going through in the present tense. It’s easier to relay the building blocks from twenty or thirty years ago that echo forth to how I got here. My own therapy.

Now some people think we should leave the past in the past. That doesn’t help you deal with who you are today. Granted at some point every story I tell, it might be the last time. Last week when recording my own personal memories I stumbled across one in the grey matter that I haven’t thought about in one to two decades at least. It was how I got my blanket when I was two. Now the pathway there was recording other memories and working them out to record a different story. Without chasing it down, that would have been lost. Is it important? No, and at this point, I can tell you the end of my blanket has more to do with my personality than the beginning of it. It was a fantastic memory to revisit though.

For those that know me, I obviously have boundaries that I won’t discuss openly. I’m open about so much, yet we guard certain aspects that just make us whole as we share most of the pieces with the world. It is how I deal with issues. I take the approach that Mister Rogers gave us growing up.

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.” – Fred Rogers.

Obviously many people didn’t get that memo. Because they just won’t talk about their issues in public. They won’t share random thoughts or deeper meanings. That’s fine also though, some people are guarded and find their own way to make things manageable. I’m more personally worried about those that don’t

So here we are talking about things like I always have, on the same subjects I always have. Why does it feel like I’ve changed? If anything in the last five years (granted on Facebook) – I’ve been much more open about things I’ve gone through growing up. The good things and the bad. I’ve shared things that some others don’t discuss. Granted my profile is locked down so it is a fake pseudo-privacy. Yet, I always write so I’m fine with whatever gets recorded or shared – I can stand behind it without issues.

I don’t know what it is. But I feel it, I feel that I’ve stayed the same a very core has shifted. I can contemplate many reasons for this, but nothing definitive that I thought would color my writing. I’m still the same flawed and optimistic human being that suffers through joy and tragedy – just a different joy or tragedy of the week. I don’t know.

I just thought like discovering that story from when I was two in my brain that writing all of this out would shake things loose. To help with a self-discovery that I might be missing by letting it stew as words on the page instead. Chasing down the thoughts as they escape out of the fingertips. Here we are, almost a thousand words later, and with no clear answers. Maybe this has helped me and I just don’t realize it yet. Regardless, I’m still the same, yet I’ve changed.

The image above looks so great taking on the Final Fantasy classic style. Now if it had felt like the classic style, I may have enjoyed both of these games more. I’ve owned both these games on multiple platforms (original PS2, PS3, PS4, Switch) – I’ve owned the original since back when the PS2 was the dominant system. However, I never played them until now. Though I had the choice between two modern platforms, I chose the PS4. Enjoy the announcement trailer for when this first came to PS4 six years ago:

I guess my biggest issue with both these games is that I felt the story was uninteresting and I just didn’t care. From Final Fantasy X the only character I cared for was Auron, and that is because he shows up in the Kingdom Hearts franchise. I get that tons of people like this game and have fond memories of it – but since my last RPG was Dragon Quest XI – this is very hollow (which truly is an unfair comparison).

The one thing I did notice is that while the game looked pretty, the controls and such were very much still PS2 controls. There is no camera spinning, movement can be choppy and lacking precision. Thankfully there wasn’t as much grinding as I feared. The biggest challenge battle I had in Final Fantasy X was the big battle right before the wedding sequence. So while I have comments about both games let’s separate them out.

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X, as I mentioned, didn’t give me any emotional hook that I enjoyed. I was very very very meh about the whole experience. If anything this one took me the length of the two for in front of the screen paying attention (more on that in the next game). I skipped the whole collect monsters for the arena – to be fair I skip most side quests in RPGs. I get joy from the main storyline more than how complete I’ve seen of the game (hence I’ll never ever get knights of the round in Final Fantasy VII).

If anything it dragged on, there were some neat sections like the lightning strikes, and even climbing the mountain was fun. I had to do some grinding but just enough that it didn’t seem unbearable. I also wasn’t a fan of the board game-based leveling system. The limit breaks and such were fun and interesting, but later I just ended up using the summons as a crutch to get through the game. The final boss battle was all about the proper order of deploying summons.

Most of this game is a train going down the railroad tracks, there is rarely ever a need to backtrack to complete the game. I mean this is good or bad depending on how you are used to playing RPGs. Some have you go back and visit the same area multiple times – for others, it’s a continual march forward. So it’s something to be aware of more than it is a problem.

Finally the version of level editing using the sphere grid system. I prefer more of a traditional leveling system. You spend the whole time with this wondering where you missed out on or if you should have gone a different direction. It was neat at the point that I could switch from the white mage line to the black mage line without losing any spells – but beyond that, I wasn’t a fan. It made leveling feel slower overall and grinding (if you were targeting a specific skill) feel longer. I know it may just be a mental thing for the length of the grinding. Maybe traditional leveling would have taken just as long. It just didn’t feel like it.

The most unique thing for me was playing all the characters in each battle. While in a traditional FF game, you can’t switch out party members mid-battle. In this game, it’s encouraged (if not slightly required at times) to switch out members quickly from those on stand-by to those that are active. This was probably the most interesting thing about the game to get used to, it also allowed for a much more varied combat experience.

Final Fantasy X-2

Final Fantasy X-2 same world as Final Fantasy X – but it’s a much different game. First, they try a more open-world system overall. This gave you the option for more exploration and revisiting of areas than X. Which means in theory if I had availed myself of the side quests and activities, I would have had a much longer game. However, since I prefer to just plow through a main story – I will say I likely missed out on half of the game offers.

Going into what it offers, let’s jump to the job system for a second. Your character (once you find the job within the game) allows you to switch between different job classes. I do know as I would look at the strategy guide it would say to use this class for this battle and this class for another. However, since I didn’t do many side quests – I never even had those classes. I will say the setup made grinding a piece of cake though. Whenever I did get a new job class, I took my characters to the arena. I would find a battle they could easily win by just hitting X over and over again. It was taking advantage of the system instead of random level grinding across the world.

An important thing to note, like I stated – I just play the main game and avoid side quests. However, by avoiding side quests, when there was a tough battle I would look online. Every single time it told me to use a job class I didn’t have. I managed to make do and plow through, but honestly, if you want the full design of what the game is meant to be – you are better off exploring and treating this more as an open-world game than I did.

Conclusion

It’s good that re-releases bundle these two games together. There is a balance between them. I prefer the story of Final Fantasy X more than X-2. However, I enjoy the gameplay more in X-2. The story is streamlined in X – and opens up more in X-2. It’s a difficult decision. They are far from my favorite Final Fantasy games, but likely they will be unforgettable. I do wonder if I would have been more open to exploration in X-2 if I was playing on the Switch vs. PS4. It opens up the mobile option to play when others are using the TV.

The one thing I won’t miss is Blitzball.

I know looking at the title you are thinking to yourself, but I just saw Gobstoppers in the candy aisle at the local big box store just the other day.  That these are the Gobstoppers that you remember and have loved your whole life.   But that life is a lie.  I don’t mean the crazy-shaped Gobstoppers from the movie that have weird ends coming out of them.    Those were never made and sold to the general public – if a candy version of those were ever made at all.    I’m talking about the Gobstoppers that you could buy in a two-pack for a dime or a quarter (depending on where you got them).

You see kids, back in the 80s dime and nickel candy was an actual thing. Sometimes we bought tootsie rolls three for a nickel. Lemon heads and such were a dime a box. And Gobstoppers sat right alongside them in a two-pack. Like many other candies in my young life, I bought Gobstoppers by the truckload. You would buy them and suck on them for 5-10 minutes until you get to that satisfactory moment that you could tell would release the Sweet Tartesque center. It was fantastic.

However, those don’t exist anymore.   The Gobstoppers that are sold under the brand name today were originally Gobstopper minis.   The new Gobstopper minis the size of a pea would have been considered Gobstopper micro. Part of the Gobstopper legend is how long they lasted, so the current versions actually less than the two packs I used to get. That’s some false marketing. Another bonus was you could choose which two colors you wanted to start with, which seemed to influence the overall flavor as you could get to the continuing layers below.

From a first-hand perspective, I, unfortunately, have a pretty good idea why the original size is no longer available. Choking hazard, plain and simple. Having twice in my elementary school life swallowed an almost full-sized Gobstopper, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It was similar to a time I accidentally swallowed a quarter (why did I have a quarter in my mouth – I was a kid – who knows). The experience and after-effects were the same. I had some pain and I assume bruising inside my throat. I’m working under assumptions here since I didn’t tell my parents – there wasn’t a medical diagnosis. The pain lasted a few days though, reminding me to think twice before accidentally doing it again.

The one thing to note about all three experiences (quarter, gobstopper x2) is that I applied kid logic to the problem. I was breathing, so I wasn’t choking. I did freak out because of how the pain was that it might be stuck somewhere between my mouth and stomach. I went into the bathroom and stuck my head under the faucet and started downing as much water as possible to make sure it didn’t fill up my throat. These incidents were between the ages 6-9 if you were wondering. Why did I use the bathroom sink? Well, otherwise I would have to explain to my parents why I was drinking glass after glass of water all of sudden. The bathroom sink removed those possible questions.

Even out of that momentary youthful trauma, I still want the originals back. There are generic ones the same size. Of course, you’ve always been able to buy the fist-sized jawbreakers that are more of a trophy than an edible treat. None of these experiences are the same, because I was fairly Wonka Candy loyal in my youth. They didn’t taste the same either.

Maybe one day – some special retro release.

This week it was announced that Yahoo Answers was shutting down. In that fact, I kind of go maybe it’s time, Reddit has replaced it. The current ownership of Yahoo is not putting in money or updating properties. Likely it’s time. Though Ars Technica had an article that the far right is saying this is to silence their speech, this far more falls into a straight business decision to turn off the lights of a very lightly used service than to actually put the thought into what happens if they do.

Yahoo was nice enough to provide a method to export your data. Since I’m a data hoarder of content that I have wittingly or unwittingly generated – I wanted to get my data before it was gone. It took me four attempts. The first three about an hour after I submitted the request to back up not all my Yahoo data – but just the section from answers – I received an email saying that I had canceled my own request. I assure you I did not. I wasn’t even on the page the second or third time (for fear that a page refresh canceled the request). So that was my first hurdle. But once again, the current owner isn’t dumping money into the company to fix things – so you have to expect that some of the rubber bands have snapped and the duct tape is torn by now.

The fourth attempt though worked, though not necessarily as advertised. I downloaded a 6.2kb zipped file and was happy that it wasn’t canceled though it took 18 hours to generate (lack of money means poorly fed hamsters). I thought the file was a bit small – since I can generate a 3kb text file in my daily journal. But it was compressed, so maybe they spent hours really really compressing it and making it small. They did not.

When I opened this file, all that it contains was some .json file (which is fine) and privacy notices. Opening the JSON files, they include solely my basic profile information. It did not include any questions I asked (1) or any I answered (80). You literally are better off and closer to complete to save your Yahoo Answers page to a PDF or an Image. It’s easier to read and gives you a better look in the long run at what the profile would have looked like. Just all around better.

Now I’m going to go through and manually copy my data out of the service. I have a few weeks and not much data to grab. I just shouldn’t have to. When I submit a data request that offers to export all of my data out of service – I expect all of my data. It doesn’t matter if the data is important or not. Secondary gripe – everything gives a vague time period (such as over a decade ago) and no real dates. Which for a life logging cataloguer is very very annoying and likely would have been included in a proper data export.

While few people reading this will even bother to export their data, just don’t bother. Look at your profile and manually grab what you need. Between the hoops and problems of the export process, and the lack of information exported, it’s just going to be easier and more complete to do it yourself instead of trusting the starving hamsters to do an accurate job.

I have an overall goal of trying to move one laptop over to a terminal-based only laptop one day. However, I can’t do that until I can survive more than a day or two in the shell. It’s not a goal of “only” having a system that is GUI-free. I have multiple systems. I just want one singular system that is terminal only and mobile (because I do have multiple headless Raspberry Pis in my environment.

So while I can use vi (but really I normally use Nano) – I wanted something slightly simpler yet more powerful if that makes sense? So I was looking at command line-based word processors and wistfully remembering the ones I loved. My favorite was a dos-based one I used around 1993 or 1994 called “write”. Try googling that and finding an accurate result. My next favorite word processor of all time was actually windows-based, Wordperfect 5.1 for Windows 3.1. The Geowrite part of Geoworks (a GUI shell that competed with Windows) was another that was much loved. Other than that it becomes kind of meh, I have no love for other word processor software. Normally I use notepad or whatever plain text GUI equivalent exists for whatever operating system I’m using. So back to looking.

As I said, I do quite a bit with Nano in the command line. For a text editor (not a word processor) I still love editing from DOS, but Nano works very well for my needs. Now the bare minimum has been established, what can I get that’s a little more? If you ask around online, everyone gives one main example – Wordgrinder. So since I was just starting out the search, who was I to argue? Sudo apt-get me some Wordgrinder.

I fired it up once it was finished and at first I was impressed but did have some annoyances. The first is that I wasn’t happy with white on black. I decided I wanted to go old school and do bright green text on black, but I couldn’t figure out how. So I went on Reddit and asked if anyone knew how. Someone was nice enough to answer, they went through the original source code, and there was no option for changing font (or background) colors. What you got was what you get. Not that I’m ungrateful, but things might still be great (kinda).

So color choices aside – one thing that isn’t in the image above is there is a top and bottom ribbon (I disabled that). You also can only bring up the menu by hitting escape. However, one thing that psychologically was an issue for me was that typing was always at the middle of the page. You can scroll up or down, but your active data line is in the center. It’s my issue, not an application issue. I’m sure I could have gotten over it.

I attempted to do my daily journal entry. Writing it in Wordgrinder is easy and smooth. I went back a few times to do later updates before the day ended. Then the problems happened. I had my file named properly with a txt extension. My script pulled it into my daily activity file – and then there was markup everywhere. Even though I didn’t have any special markup in my file, the application saved its own anyways. I’m sure there may be a setting or something I could use to change this behavior, but frankly for my desires and the fact that I was bowled over otherwise – I’m moving on. For many, this would be a great program. If you are looking to edit plain text with word processor options – this isn’t it. Or it might be just a flag I didn’t set while starting the program. There is absolutely nothing bad I can say about the program other than no color change and the middle of the screen typing. It just didn’t fit with my workflow and processing needs. Time to find the next experiment.

I had an issue with my daily journal script. If I collected all the data from sources, generated my daily post, and then made notes – I was leaving out too many details. If I kept a separate file with notes and then pasted it in, that didn’t help me either. Especially if I’m away from my computer, I wanted something that I can use from my phone. It was important that it could sync through Dropbox (hence use it anywhere). Finally, it should be saved with plain text or a simple markup where I could script out the extra markup details.

At first, I went to the de-facto standard – Evernote. This is where millions of people make daily notes to organize their lives. It also works with IFTTT, which means I can use Dropbox with it. So I spent an hour testing this solution, unfortunately, Evernote can mark a post as complete before you are done typing. This means IFTTT pulls and processes it before you might be done typing. This is an issue because you may lose relevant data once it enters your workflow. After wiggling and jiggling, dancing and prancing – anything to try to make this work I gave up. I thought about OneNote – but it didn’t work with IFTTT. It also likely would generate too much traffic to offload it to a similar service.

To the plain text file, it was. I went through over a dozen free applications. I don’t want to disparage the fact that the 9.99 text editor for the iPhone may have done exactly what I wanted. I also didn’t want to pay for something when all I needed was the simplest of editors. Some had to manually sync. Some had a completely intolerable interface. Some advertised functions that weren’t actually there. I was fed up – life isn’t supposed to be this hard for something with two requirements – plain text and Dropbox.

Well, it turns out that Dropbox has a plain text editor built into it. If I specify my save folder – it even hits my workflows and scripts correctly. I’ve been using this for the last 4 days, and you know what? It works great. I wasn’t aware there was a text editor built into the phone app before. That is how you test a simple issue over a dozen different ways and end up with a simpler solution.

Last night I finally managed to watch The Last Blockbuster on Netflix. Of course, being the age I am, I have video store nostalgia. I won’t say that I was a huge fan of the Blockbuster company. I was more of a small video store person. When my family purchased our first VCR a friend of the family gave us a bootleg copy of Gremlins. That movie was watched so many times over and over – it’s probably one of my most watched movies that aren’t in the regular re-watch rotation. The other bootleg we had was Robocop, also watched many times, but not as many Gremlins.

Then a video store opened right near our house. A world of movies opened up. Now I know we went there regularly, but not being a family that spent tons of money there – I’m going to say it was about once or twice a month. However, there are a couple of specific experiences I remember with the store. The first was when my father allowed my 5-year-old brother (I would have been 10) to rent Rambo First Blood Part 2. That went down as a family legend of a story that managed to get brought up time and time again. There was however no blowback about me, a 10-year-old watching it (because of course my friends had all seen it). In the grand scheme, it was fairly amusing.

I do think this whole thing came around because when I was a teenager my father (who once again rented Rambo for a 5-year-old) had an issue with me (once again originally I was a 10-year-old during the Rambo incident) seeing R-rated movies. Down so far that even when I was 15 he had a major issue because I had seen People Under the Stairs at the movie theater, which in all fairness is a fairly soft R mid-budget horror movie. It was, however, the first R-rated movie I saw in the theater.

Back on topic though, video stores. The other cherished memory of the video store near our house was when I had chicken pox. The Friday or Saturday of going through infected my parents were going out on the town and my grandparents came over to watch us. As part of this, my parents rented us a couple of movies. While I don’t remember the second one – the first was Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark. That movie has since become a constant companion in my life – and all thanks to that video store.

Now in Amherst on Leavitt Road there was another video store near my grandparent’s house. I refer to this as the “good video store”. While the one near me was the size of a cell phone store, this one was about 3-4 times as large. The best part about it – it had an updated printed pamphlet that listed all the videos in stock. 10 year old me always wondered why they never changed the typo and or why Flash Gordon was listed twice. Right there it is listed as Flash Gordon and beneath it Flesh Gordon, 10 year old me thought this should have been an easy thing to catch and correct. Whenever I managed to twist my parents to go to the good video store – I looked over that pamphlet on the whole drive over. While it was a much better selection, I had to make sure it wasn’t something I could have just gotten at the smaller store. I also had to have second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth choices planned out just in case movies were out of stock. That moment in Clerks where Randall goes to the good video store – that’s how 10-year-old me felt going to this one.

Then my family moved to Vermilion when I was 12. One of the new experiences was being able to take off on a bike all over the town. Which did mean I go to the local video store (called The Movie House) on my own. It was an interesting mixture. The selection fell more in line with the good video store from Amherst – but it was the size of the small video store where I lived in Elyria. The best part about the store was that they sold movie posters and cardboard stand-ups once they were done with them. My bedroom was plastered with movie posters from this place – some movies I hadn’t even seen like Circuit Man – the poster was just awesome. There were other places to rent in town, but this was the best place to go.

Then as the mid-90s occurred gone were the independent video stores. Chain video stores started creeping in. All those smaller chains mostly were taken over by Blockbuster by the early 00s. The good thing about independent stores was that if you had late fees you could balance them around between stores and decide if it was worth paying back fees to see some new movie. Sometimes you could have late fees at a dozen different stores, but that kind of financial teenage/early twenties juggling disappeared when there was only one business in town. So blockbuster and I played the late fee game and I only caved when I really wanted to watch something. I would pay my late fees and new rental fees – and start the cycle again.

I would say this type of financial irresponsibility lead me to prefer the independent stores, but I played the same game there. I just wasn’t a fan of the sterility and lack of personality that defined the chain stores. It was what it was. I had an easier time getting a copy of a movie – at the price of a soul (sorry Blockbuster, just how I feel). I was more likely to go in and buy a used VHS or DVD than I was to actually rent. They became retail outlets for me. I could rent it for 3.00 or own it for 6.00. Factoring in possible late fees, it was mostly cheaper to buy. I ended up owning hundreds of VHS tapes and DVDs.

Then along came Netflix, not the streaming Netflix – the DVD Netflix. We had the 3-movie plan where you could have 3 movies out at any given time. Now knowing that it took about 2 days to get there, I was good at returning them almost immediately after watching by dropping them in the mail. We had new movies 3-4 times a week in the house. Life was good and I paid around 15.00 a month. I was fairly done with renting from blockbuster anymore – though I still shopped there for used movies from time to time.

Of course, by the time Netflix started streaming, I was fairly done with purchasing movies. This was around the same time Blu-Ray arrived on the scene. I do have Blu-Ray movies, but my collection is only about 10% of what my VHS or DVD collections were at their peak. I pay my monthly streaming subscriptions – paying more a month than I paid for video rentals in the past – but less than half of what I paid for cable in 2006. For me renting was over (with the exception being the random rent to watch Amazon movies).

The documentary though, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it though more for the lost art for the lost mecca of the video store. Blockbuster itself doesn’t really hold a large nostalgia for me. The celebrity cameos and personal stories were fantastic. If you are looking for video store nostalgia or Blockbuster kicks – it is definitely worth watching. I think this will be the best of breed on the subject.

As the movie was winding down the end of it was finished in 2019. Over the last year of the pandemic and Covid, I had to google. Did the last Blockbuster, the most fragile of creatures, survive 2020? I’m pleased to announce they did. They also mention this during the end credit clips. One day though, it will close its doors for good. I know another video rental chain in Ohio, Family Video, recently went out of business. I’m guessing the Blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon may actually end up being more than the last Blockbuster. It may end up being the last member of any video rental chain. It may actually survive long enough to be the last rental store on the planet.

Who knows – but as far as endangered creatures go – this one is beautiful with its blue and gold plumage.

As I’m going through the daily journal generation script I previously mentioned, I made it to the point that I have most of what I can grab on a daily basis. I’m now working on “maybe one-day” items. So this led to Feedburner.com. You see, Feedburner and I go back a long time. Back when APIs were hard to come by and RSS feeds ruled the world – I routed all my accounts through the Feedburner. It also has the advantage of generating daily emails of RSS items which I still have for historical tracking. I was using it as IFTTT before IFTTT was a thing. It was my central hub which I could manipulate data from.

However, let’s just say it has been a few years since Feedburner and I had any real contact. Saying it has been a decade would likely be about accurate. I showed up sheepishly and looked around, kind of asked how it was going, and just checked in. While on the surface everything seemed to be chugging along as I left it – underneath the still waters was some anger. You see while 10-15 years ago might have been the height of public profiles and web services – many of those did not go on.

I started by clicking the feed information for the most likely dead and buried web services. Instead of pulling up a page, it showed a 404 error. Then I did the same thing. Feeds that I knew did exist and were good are still working correctly. So while I have the bulk of the work done – I had to wade through over 100 different feeds. Kind of clicking and saying “hey I haven’t been to this domain in a decade what is going on”.

The most amusing to me is the domains that were purchased by other companies. Later they’ll be going through their referral log and go what is this? I’ve had to have deleted over 60 defunct and dead feeds. Some of the services it was meh – I only used them to test the service. Other services gave me a mental tear going down my face – some good service names or web apps went to dust.

We are now in 2021 and instead of RSS feeds being heavily prevalent (and back when I used to do massive cross-posting) – now it’s all APIs and cross-posting is almost dead. It was a different time and a different era. In many ways, the internet has gotten smaller – or maybe just less brave in putting out new ideas. Many things moved to apps and some of those apps don’t even have standard web page front ends anymore. The idea of the open-sharing web is almost completely dead.

Here I am writing on a blog. A personal blog not monetized – just sharing my thoughts away. This site itself is a dinosaur of another era. Someday all of it gets trapped and vanishes into the tar pits.