I do not know where they are going to go from here. I feel that all the actors really did a great job doing their individual roles. I found them to be believable on a lot of levels. But, I don't feel excited about visiting The White Lotus again in the future.

The White Lotus is like a sugary treat. It’s nice but you shouldn’t eat too much of it.

This season promised and delivered more of the same things that we saw in other seasons; people behaving poorly in exotic location.

I’m ok with that, because it’s part of the shows DNA. It takes a spotlight to the inequities involved with these vacation resorts. Other have written about this so much better than I have, so I won’t go into details¹.

I felt the acting was amazing in this, but overall the season felt rushed and yet too long at the same time. I later found out that some things were edited out of the show due to our current political climate and maybe that’s what I’m needing to get this show over the top.

Overview

Set at a luxurious wellness resort in Thailand, the lives of wealthy guests and dedicated staff intertwine in unexpected ways. The season explores themes of privilege, personal transformation, and cultural contrasts, all set against the backdrop of stunning locales and intricate social dynamics.

I've been working on an update for my website theme to scratch a technical curiosity I was feeling related to authorship of individual posts in comparison to the entire site. After reading a couple resources, I decided to ask on the Hugo forums if there was an ideal way to add author information. I kept running into an issues and figured that it might be related to the version change.

Here are the warning messages if you want to read over them.

WARN  The "gist" shortcode was deprecated in v0.143.0 and will be removed in a future release. See https://gohugo.io/shortcodes/gist for instructions to create a replacement.
WARN  The "twitter", "tweet", and "twitter_simple" shortcodes were deprecated in v0.142.0 and will be removed in a future release. Please use the "x" shortcode instead

I have flashbacks of when I was working with another static site generator called Pelican that I enjoyed for many years until one day I did an update¹ that took the site down because I had to find fixes for all the different components that weren’t working anymore.

On some levels, I understand that I don’t need to upgrade and that’s part of why I’m on my current hosting provider. The point of my blog is to communicate with the World Wide Web, get my thoughts together, and fulfill that part of me that likes to create. I feel that some of the things that I create for this blog are only used during the creation and never utilized afterwards.

What’s frustrating about these warnings are they are related to shortcodes built into Hugo itself. They are part of the documentation and examples that Hugo has to showcase what the project can do. I feel that it’s a real help when writing an article to avoid pasting the larger and larger code blocks used to embed something into a post. But with the changing technical and political landscapes, I can see why these changes are coming.

I’m sad.

Further bitrot.

I’ve already removed most if not all of the twitter links on my site and based on the last time I checked traffic, no one was reading it anyway. The gist changes are a little sadder for me because I was using them as reference in some of my favorite posts and I feel that people still read those.

But, I’m not updating the version today

The current version on the server is 0.117 and that’s been really solid. There is a version .140 that’s available but I wasn’t able to get it working.

Problem for stoot

I was able to take a code sample from Bryce last year and make it a plugin for Micro.blog users and I named it stoot after the shortcode that Bryce used for it. Unfortunately, it’s now giving me an error in my local environment.

The following is a truncated snippet of the error.

ERROR render of "/" failed: failed to render shortcode "stoot": failed to process shortcode: "/Users/mandaris/Code/local-hugo/themes/stoot/layouts/shortcodes/stoot.html:13:28": execute of template failed: template: _shortcodes/stoot.html:13:28: executing "_shortcodes/stoot.html" at <$urlToGet>: can't evaluate field Err in type resource.Resource
---
toot.html:13:28: executing "_shortcodes/stoot.html" at <$urlToGet>: can't evaluate field Err in type resource.Resource: Resource.Err was removed in Hugo v0.141.0 and replaced with a new try keyword, see https://gohugo.io/functions/go-template/try/

And yes, it did say toot.html even though it was from stoot.html. One problem at a time!!

The code in question:

{{- with resources.GetRemote $urlToGet  -}}
	{{ if (resources.GetRemote $urlToGet).Err }}

Next action(s)

I’ve decided that my next actions will be the following.

1. Ignore the gist issue. It’s marked for a future release and there are directions on how to replace it. I have a about a handful of examples in my test suite of content (mostly the same code but on different pages)
2. Learn how to keep multiple copies of Hugo local so that I can test this kind of thing easier.
3. Learn how get replacement to work according to the error message.

I heard about this book📚 on episode 757 of The Incomparable podcast. It seemed like a nice little distraction and was a nice little adventure.

The book description states that it’s part of a wider universe, but I feel the story is mostly self contained with an option to make it the start of a larger series. The author has even set up a webpage that contains information about the book. I especially like the Notes on influence section.

He even has a video on making the script for the novel.

So check it out if you want to do a little light reading.

Overview

Robin Sloan expands the Penumbraverse to new reaches of time and space in a rollicking far-future adventure. It is eleven thousand years from now. A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a remote village under a wizard’s rule. Like many adventurers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of eye-popping discoveries and challenges: unknown enemies, a mission to rescue the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this happens before Ariel encounters an entity from an earlier civilization, a sentient, sensitive artificial intelligence with a special perspective on all of human history—who becomes both Ariel’s greatest ally . . . and our narrator. Moonbound is an adventure into the richest depths of Story itself from the creator of the Penumbraverse, Robin Sloan. It is a deeply satisfying epic of ancient scale, blasted through the imaginative prism of one of our most forward-thinking writers. And this is only the beginning.

I’ve switched to another theme so that I could feel that I can make more drastic changes and customizations without worrying about effecting other people.

I’m calling this version 1.4.0 and would like to know what others think.

Key changes in this one are as follows:

• Change the font to Atkinson Hyperlegible
• Make the index only show the posts with titles
• Attempt to remove h-feed from single pages
• Correct header values on archive page
• Add view-transition to meta tag in header
• Change default OpenGraph image to not have words
• Remove border and filter around <figure>
• Add margin-top and change line-height on <figcaption>

I’ve got two other major changes that I’m still working on. Really highlights why you should do branching for both personal and professional projects.

Upcoming projects

• Author page
• Share buttons using the webshare api
• Changes to stoot due to Hugo method deprecation

My next design tweak will be to start using the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font for this site.

At Braille Institute, we’ve created a family of hyperlegible™ fonts designed to improve legibility and readability for individuals with low vision. These carefully crafted fonts feature clear, highly distinctive letters and numbers that make reading easier and more accessible.

I’ll probably serve it directly from the site instead of linking it from google or adobe.

If you're looking for something light and easy going than this is a good place to find it. Easy to follow plot that one of the characters jokes about being easy figure out.

I was tired of doom scrolling and this popped up. In fact, I started watching it fully expecting to be interrupted. I also thought it can’t be that bad; they’re making another sequel and I got what I expected:

1. Cartoonish action where there’s ton of danger and yet noone gets hurt so much that they don’t make it to the end of the movie
2. Jim Carrey acting over the top

All in all, I don’t remember much about the plot but I’ll check out the third one when it becomes available to stream.

Overview

After settling in Green Hills, Sonic is eager to prove he has what it takes to be a true hero. His test comes when Dr. Robotnik returns, this time with a new partner, Knuckles, in search for an emerald that has the power to destroy civilizations. Sonic teams up with his own sidekick, Tails, and together they embark on a globe-trotting journey to find the emerald before it falls into the wrong hands.

The world has always been crazy. The only difference between when I was a child and now is that the world has been become smaller. The effects of the proverbial butterfly wings come faster than I am ready for. How does someone respond to so much so quickly?

In a lot of ways, I guess this is what “we” wanted.

The world’s knowledge at our fingertips.

But, in order to not get lost in the storms that the butterfly wings produce, you have to ground yourself.

To do that, I’m challenging myself to do more reflection at the beginning and end of my day.

I’m just mentioning in on this blog so that those who know me will hold me accountable. I’m also hoping that those who are reading this will find it comforting to know that, if they feel the same way, that they are not alone.

Apple announced the days for the upcoming developer conference and for the first time that I can recall, I didn’t really know what to feel. For years, I’ve had being a Mac user as part of my identity. I have shirts still in the original plastic celebrating different operating system releases. I remember standing in lines for products and software while chatting with everyone else in line about what feature they were looking forward to.

But, what about this one?

What am I feeling?

If I had to sum it up in one word?

It would be “joyless”.

Now - more than ever - I feel that Apple is no longer the Apple that delights but the Apple Inc. we see today.

Is this release going to make development of good to great software easier or is this another chance to navigate more services into our lives?

I love going to the European meetings of the Homebrew Website Club because I can do it during my lunch and then get back to work.

One of the key things that I enjoyed was the talk about linking to libre.fm. I’m excited by the possibility of sharing what music that I’m listening to with others but not sure about having to maintain another system to connect to my blog. Thus far, I’ve been using Robb’s Lantern website to get information to share media online.

Another thing that we discussed is the desire/need to make websites accessible. Mark Sutherland mentioned that he was using WAVE and I mentioned that I was using ARC. I was kind of embarrassed to say I used the tool just to run it again and find a number of issues with my site.

There was also a small discussion about hidden information on the website. I’ve been trying to get authorship as defined on the indieweb site to work correctly. I’ve since went back to my old way of having the data there but hidden with css.

Dodgeball is one of my favorite movies and Vince Vaughn has been a lot of movies that I've enjoyed over the years. That being said, it can be hard to watch him for an entire season unless you like that kind of humor. Thankfully, this show has a wonderful array of additional characters that reel you in.

To be honest, I didn’t get a chance to check this out when it first came out and it wasn’t on my list of things to checkout. Silo was supposed to be my next show but I couldn’t bring myself to watch something so dystopic. So, I chose this one because I wanted a mix of crime story and comedy, and I’m very happy that I did.

All in all, this is very well executed detective story that shows that Apple TV really know what they are doing…

I just wish more people would watch it.

Overview

A detective turned restaurant inspector in Southern Florida is pulled into a world of greed and corruption after a tourist finds a severed arm while fishing. And yes, there's a monkey.