Regression

I’ve been ignoring Facebook for a few months, now, and my engagement with Twitter has mostly been retweets and likes. Yesterday, a friend who takes what other people say more seriously than I do decided he needed to back way off and go back to writing blog posts instead of tweets. Frankly, I would way rather read his essays, as I think his analyses are interesting and insightful and I’m really a fan of the long form. I’ve always felt that if a position is short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, it’s far too simplistic to be useful.

So then I thought, “Man, I sure don’t want to miss his writing, but I also sure do want to miss these 18 screens of ignorant hot takes and performative dunks; I wonder if there’s a decent RSS reader…”

There is.

And then I thought, “You know, I like being able to work offline and then occasionally connect to the world to send and receive. I wonder if there’s a decent^[1] client app for my blog.”

There is.

Also, a few days ago I finally went ahead and updated my laptop to run Mac OS Catalina, which means that the GPG plugin for Apple Mail no longer works for me. I’d read that Thunderbird with Enigmail works okay, and hey, it sure does!

So now, here I am, with an up-to-date operating system and a blogging and email experience that feels like the late nineties. And that’s not bad, actually. I kinda like it.

Endnotes

1 – I do not consider a native app that simply wraps a web view and delegates all the logic and storage to the browser and/or remote host to be “decent”. If I wanted a web page, I’d just use a browser, not install a whole new application.