Inspired by this post on Threads, I thought about which Pokémon would be the most useful to me in real life. Here’s what I came up with (in index order)…

This month’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by James (of James’ Coffee Blog), is “Museum memories”. I wouldn’t say I’m a big museum go’er or anything, but I’ve been to my fair share. As such, nothing immediately sprang to mind as I thought about how to respond to this particular prompt. Ultimately though, I’d say my favorite, and most memorable museum is the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (Air & Space Museum).

My response-to / thoughts-on Neil’s write up, ‘Self-host it’ is not the answer.👹 Strapping on my devils advocate horns hat…Neil is right, self-hosting isn’t a panacea for the ills of big tech, and barriers absolutely exist, some insurmountable for many, but I think spreading the self-hosting gospel, i.e. educating the larger populace of potential self-hosting aspirants, is a good thing. The subset of folks who could self-host but don’t is probably pretty large. Heck, that includes me! The subset of folks who never knew, or never considered self-hosting something is also non-zero. As others have pointed out, solutions/services/platforms (e.g. YunoHost) which help bridge the gap between big tech reliance and full-on self-hosting have started multiplying. Why? As a direct response to the enshittification of big tech and the growing demand that has sprung up in that wake.

I want to self-host a bunch of things. Why? Let’s see here… techno-fascism, privacy disasters, tech companies randomly sunsetting things, enshittification spirals, etc… I’m tired of it. I want to run some stuff myself, own the data, and be happy with my tech.

I previously introduced the idea of using CSS as a means to selectively style references to other sites/authors/creators. There I also suggested using indieweb.txt as a place to share one’s own reference info, including this css styling. Since I somewhat routinely credit or otherwise shout-out other IndieWeb personalities throughout this site, I wanted an easier way to apply these styles when making said references. Why? Because I think it’s a fun way to pay homage to these other unique sites I enjoy and respect. Enter citations.css, a place to centralize these styling directives for referencing other sites and authors.

A list of things you’ll absolutely NEVER hear me say…

Hey everyone, I’m still here. If you’ve wondered where I’ve been, or if everything is OK—I’ve been around-ish and YUP! everything is A-OK over here.

Riffing on Axxuy and Elena’s posts about how they drink coffee, here’s how I take my coffee… ☕️

My song ranking of Sleep Token’s album Even in Arcadia. Honestly though, that top 4 is super hard for me to decide as they are all mind-blowing. Also, had to roll back into this post and drop the lyrics to my favorite parts of each song. Behold!

OK, so you’ve got a blog/website, but you’re wondering “now what”? Here’s some ideas for what to do next!

Fedi has been around for ~13 years and Mastodon has been around for about 9 of those. For anyone wondering how Fedi “wins”, I think you need to ask instead, “what does it mean to win”? We’ve gotten this far w/o VC funding and continue to grow (even if it isn’t at breakneck speeds). We win by being here. Being here for everyone who finally realizes that corporate social platforms are forever-doomed. Everything else is second, and will probably come in time.Here’s to 13 more years of winning!

I saw a thread recently which asked people to share their “path” in cybersecurity. I’ve long maintained a few lists that sorta represent this path, so I decided to mush them together to create this simplified timeline of notable career events (e.g. degrees, job changes, certs and other large life or professional-adjacent events).

Answering a particularly random set of questions via the Blog Questions Challenge Bot…

@darius@t54r4n1 I’ve never thought of a “newsletter” as being defined by its transmission medium, though I understand the instinct to associate the “letter” suffix with e-“MAIL”. I’ve always emphasized the “news” part of newsletter (w/ “letter” referring to the fact that newsletters were written, i.e. not videos or podcasts). In this way, newsletters would be defined more as written pieces that focus on recent topics (i.e. news), regardless of how it is delivered.

Answering the Blog Questions Challenge Outdoor activities…

I like this from @bradenslen - Blogger How Pushy are You About Getting Paid?This is one of the reasons I loathe Medium and Substack—they’re all WAY too pushy with getting me to sign up, subscribe, pay—before I even have a chance to read a single thing from that author. Not to mention all you give up by being on those platforms instead of building your brand and establishing an identity via your own personal domain.If I like your stuff, Ill find your subscribe links. Get’m outta my face.Adding to this: I have some donate links in a few places my site. But I try to keep them to a minimum, and mostly out-of-sight/discrete. I’m not a professional writer/blogger, and though I do write pretty frequently, I don’t expect $$ from anyone, and I never will paywall my content. I don’t need $$ from anyone, but I like to have the...

We need to stop platforming Nazis—available on my Substack.

Assortment of Nicole musings…

A line I see repeated a lot amongst infosec professional circles is “infosec is not an entry-level field”. This is typically followed by recommendations from these same “professionals” to first get jobs within the help desk for a few years before trying to move into a true cybersecurity role. This is crap advice, and very gatekeepey.

I saw this post from Jacob titled Beware tech career advice from old heads and I think it’s spot on. Infosec, even back when I was first getting into the field in 2010-ish, has always had that seemingly artificial barrier-to-entry, but there was A LOT that was different then and just doesn’t apply today. The technical/experience expectation(s) for newcomers has skyrocketed, the competition for jobs has ballooned by several orders of magnitude it seems, opportunities have stagnated to a degree, and the advent of AI has started to put pressure on these sorts of technical roles.