At the start of 2024 I switched over from blogging on Wordpress.org and using my own server space on www.frot.co.nz to using the Blogger platform because I was totally over the ever increasing complexity of using WordPress, and the hits on my old blog had dropped by more than 90%.
It used to be worth the extra effort back when I was getting hundreds of thousands of hits, but these days, now that everything I post is grey-listed to oblivion, I can't be arsed jumping through hoops, and I wanted to go back to the simplicity that I used to enjoy back in 2014.
Using Blogger this year has been great, I can just about post content with my eyes closed, and even after 10 years of not using it, everything was exactly where I remembered, and it all worked perfectly. I hate Google, but I really like the Blogger platform
1. Blogger is owned by Google, and Google are evil deep state data spies and globalist scum. I am using their platform, so they having their evil way with my content, and also there could well be some unspoken line in the sand that I may one day cross, that will cause them to totally blacklist my blog, or even shut it down all together. This is my enemies space, so by using it I am arguably a hypocritical sell out.
2. The hit count is terrible. Despite pretty much posting something every day all year, this blog has had very little traffic. Only about 100 hits a day, and not only is that amount not increasing, but every time it gets up to about 150 hits a day it seems to then drop back down to about 50. I suspect that is because searches for my content just don't come up with any results on this blog.
My old Wordpress blog is certainly grey listed to some extent, and the hits are pretty crap on that blog too these days, but at least the search results are vastly better for content on my old blog.
3. There is no longer any capacity to put anchor points on pages. Apparently Google removed that feature at some point. It doesn't matter for blog posts, but for longer pages a menu is often needed. I'd like to add more pages with longer content in the future, because most of my posts are fairly short, but without an index long pages may not be very useful.
Nevertheless, in 2025 I'm planning to continue using Blogger because it's simple to use and makes posting on line easy and fun like it used to be in the early days.
But this is by no means an endorsement of Blogger, I keep backups of everything in case they shut my blog down, and I'm not expecting much in the way of hits. This little blog is for my own amusement, I've given up any illusions of changing the world!
Lately I've seen more discussion about the latest wave of AI spyware that is currently being rolled out. But most people seem to be blissfully unaware that pretty much everything they do online is being monitored and recorded by big tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, along with advertising companies and deep state agencies like the CIA.
A common response upon being informed that they are being spied on, is to just accept it as "normal" and pretty much give up even trying to maintain their privacy. But as we saw with the covidhoax and the death jabs, unless people take responsibility for their own freedom, the deep state plans to enslave and kill us.
Yes it is possible to maintain your privacy in a surveillance state, but not if you are using a regular "smart" phone or a modern commercial operating system. You can actually keep using computers, phones and the internet, if you want to, and maintain your privacy, but you will need to make the effort to stop using big tech spyware and switch to using different technology.
If you want any privacy, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are total no go zones. They are all spying and have been for years, but their latest tech is next level. An example is Windows 11 which has a new "feature" called Recall that is essentially taking a screenshot every five seconds and using AI to analyze it.
If anything, the AI on the latest Apple I-phones is even worse, but some normies seem to be more open to the idea that Microsoft is spying rather than Apple, so it's often a good entry point to the whole AI rabbit hole.
Normies are so addicted to their spy-phones they will pay thousands of
dollars to be tracked, recorded, and monitored by the deep state. On average, an Android smartphone sends data to Google 90 times a day and an iPhone communicates with 51 servers per hour.
So what do I recommend doing to maintain privacy? Here are some good first steps:
Switch to using a Linux operating system such as Linux Mint
Stick to using Free Open Source Software (FOSS) such as GIMP
Use a "de-googled" phone such as a Brax 3
Use privacy mail services such as Proton Mail (& especially avoid Gmail)
Use online aliases and avoid using your real name, especially on platforms like Facebook
There is a lot more to it than this, and I plan to cover all these topics in more detail.
When a friend said she remembered Cuba Street, Wellington as being “bohemian” in 97, and I laughed and said that by 97 it had already become a safe space for office dwellers to visit and pretend they were living dangerously.
And then I dug out my “Cuba Street 92” calendar from my treasure trove – all of these photos are from that and were taken in 91. When we opened our bike shop “Cycle Services” in 1991, Cuba Street was not just where you went for a grunty coffee or some second hand stuff, it was also the first place to go to for drugs and prostitutes.
Now I’ll go on about drugs a bit here. I was new to all this scene, and to me “drugs” basically meant smoking some pot or maybe spotting some oil.
As a cyclist I was pretty familiar with ephedrine which was actually still legal in NZ in 91 and was very popular, used as a sort of everyday speed. When it was outlawed it just went underground like all the other drugs.
Most people use coffee for the same purpose now. And coffee in Cuba St was said to be some of the strongest in the world.
The first time I walked in on a drug deal my eyes nearly popped out of my head. A respectable looking man in a suit with a large brief case had it open and was discussing bulk pricing with a couple of our bike shop customers on the huge range of drugs that he had samples of.
Apart from pot, the popular one in Wellington in those days was acid. But you could buy anything you wanted really, including heroin. I was told the cocaine was a rip off in NZ, and that was why nobody here was much into it.
What Wellington was infamous for in 91 was glue sniffers. And sometimes Cuba St was like zombie dawn of the dead. Bloody glue sniffers everywhere, staggering about, holding their plastic bags and drooling.
Some of the people on the street were fairly tough, and just up the road was the BP’s (Black Power) who ran a tinny house ($20 foil wrapped servings of pretty average pot). But you didn’t take photos of the BP’s, you casually crossed the road when you saw them coming, so there are no photos of them here!
This was in the days before digital cameras, and mobile phones had only just come out. They cost $3000 and were the size of a brick. This next photo was taken in front of the second hand book shop next door to us (note our Cycles Peloton sign in the top left). And the poor guy in the photo was stabbed to death a few months later…
Our neighbours on the other side were Midnight Espresso, the legendary coffee shop, and this is a young Geoff Marsland (Havana Coffee Works) in our doorway
Although I did have a camera, I didn’t take many photos because buying film and developing it was expensive. Part of why I started taking thousands of photos when I got my first digital camera a decade later is because I knew just what I had missed getting photos of back in the early 90’s. And some of them would have been quite something.
I guess this is all looks like a window back to an old forgotten time now, but as a young and impressionable goober, this was the environment that shaped me. And even now I’m partly still a guy from old time Cuba St, rather than an over the hill computer addict.
When I hear millennials getting offended by lame bullshit I wish I could push a button and transplant them to Cuba Street in 91. It was an amazing place, but some of them might just have gotten their whingeing faggy heads smacked in…
All photos taken by Barry Thomas
The start of a new month is always the best time to try a monthly challenge. And this is the last month of 2024. Next month will be the start of a new year, and I'm really not sure if I'm up for attempting this one as a new years resolution. To tell the truth I think I might be struggling with this after about two days.
Last year I decided to quit all social media for a month and did actually manage to do that. Afterwards I went back to using Facebook, but permanently quit all the others, so that worked pretty well.
For the past quarter of a century I've been digging into various rabbit holes online, and doing my best to convince as many people as possible that the narratives are all false. Not just the "mainstream" narratives, almost everything we are told, is fake. From both sides. Yes there are some bits of truth here and there, but they are like bait on a hook.
At this point I have an urge to rattle off a bunch of examples. But for once I won't do that, because this is my monthly challenge. I'm going to stop posting about all the fake narratives this month and leave that stuff for other people to talk about. This is a multi level game, and we are all being played, including me...
I came up with an acronym, PINE: Positive, Inspiring, Necessary, Entertaining - and for the rest of this month I'm going to aim to make all my online posting (and thinking too, as much as possible) PINE.
Let's see how this goes!
