Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 1037)
Hello Everyone!
When only napping works, What a social media ride, Gratefulness for Hive & The passion flower vines are alive.
The sun is about an hour and a half past its zenith and I have yet to write anything in this entry. Which is not to say that I have not written anything... because whoa have my 'little fingers' been busy clacking away at this keyboard for much of the morning... and throughout the evening as well! I am sure that to some folks it even seemed like I never slept but the truth is that I could only get in about two hours of sleep at a time before I would find myself awake again.
Although that is not all that problematic for me in and of itself, I do like to get six hours of sleep at a time and if I am going to wake up over and over like that... I am way more okay with it being in three hour intervals. To make things a bit more wonky I had engaged with some posts on both Hive and that Web 2.0 platform that I often complain about... and each time I awoke I had some kind of notifications related to comments.
To be utterly clear I am unsure if I have ever had such a juxtapositioned experience where I was bouncing between the two platforms and dealing with that level of engagement on both... but whoa it really drove home how many differences betwixt the two... exists... to say the absolute least... which I seldom do! Lets just say that I used the awesome interactions on Hive to bolster my morale to face the horseshit that I encountered on the other.
Which all sounds like 'oh the interactions themselves must have been stressful' on the Web 2.0 platform... but that was not so much the case even though they were terse in some regards. What really got me is that for the previous month or so I have been getting maybe one to ten percent of my notifications on there and often do not even get any notifications at all even from interactions folks have made on my own posts.
For anyone wondering, I have even tried several different ways of interacting with that platform via both their mobile sites, their main site and I even installed one of their apps on a phone which is something I dislike doing to start with. All with the same results and the more I actually engage the fewer notifications that I get. Heck, I even double checked all my settings when it first started happening but everything was fine in that regard.
Anyways, in the comments of a post that I made last night (on the Web 2.0 site) I shared some info about Hive (as a response and not as a promotional pitch) and of course that got met with the usual responses of folks who have either never heard of it... experienced it... or taken the time to even remotely try to understand how it works. In other words the dull boring knee-jerk I am all too familiar with by now when folks cannot instantly pigeonhole something in a tidy box. All of which is fine because I often welcome doubt, skepticism and folks sharing their outlook on stuff.
Not to harp too much on it but not long after sharing the Hive stuff is when things got rather weird because at one point I left to relieve my bladder and when I returned the page that I was on (on the Web 2.0 platform) had redirected itself (while I was absent and wholly on its own) to a new page. At first as I was approaching my desk and saw the monitor's screen I was like 'oh shit I got hacked' but then I saw that it was a survey from the site itself.
It gets weirder at this point because it was a survey about whether I would pay them for some kind of 'supercharged' account. I cannot remember the exact term that they used but it was a multiple choice question in the first step of the survey... asking me which one of their offerings I would be willing to pay for... with no option to say 'none of the above' or leave the survey entirely. I gave the best noncommittal answers that I could and on the final page I clearly indicated I was not in the least bit interested in paying for anything they might have to offer.
The question is: Why would I do so for a company that gets my content for free, claims rights to it, sells my personal data, advertises to me, tracks me, gets free site traffic... and does who knows what else with my information, data and even my frigging 'private' messages. Honestly, when is 'enough enough' when it comes to all that highly invasive stuff mixed with some good ole fashioned breach of privacy and exploitation for profit.
Would anyone believe me if I said that it got weirder from there? Probably... because it sure as hell did! So, after finishing the survey (when I could finally use the service again instead of being locked into the survey) I rather quickly found out that nearly everything I did (except mindlessly scrolling through my feed) resulted in a 'notice' saying I had been temporarily blocked from using this or that feature... and thus could not interact with folks or respond in any way. Seriously, I have never been blocked (especially from using a feature) on any social site (for any reason) because I do not frigging abuse the platforms I am on!
Okay, now that I got all of that out of my system I should say that was the point that I was like THIS is really why Hive (and to some extend Web 3.0 in general) is so important. Because at the end of the day I have enough damned problems with communicating with folks and do not need further problems created for me by some company and/or corporation... that wholly profits off my contributions to their frigging platform! In short I have plenty of my own self-control and do not need unwarranted 'control' extended upon me by some digital frigging nanny.
That was good to get out of my system!
Whoa! I just woke up from a very long nap that spanned from late afternoon until well after sunset. It was pretty much like getting a full night's rest (I think it was five hours long) and although I feel rested... I wish that I had gotten that one more hour of sleep to make it six hours long! I am sure that I will get back to my normal routine with all of that... and that this phase of just napping will pass... so in the meantime I have pretty much been making the best of it and doing things in small phases with no real rush or hurry involved. I guess that what I am saying there is that instead of struggling against this spurt of just 'napping' I have planned accordingly and gone along with it as if everything were fine.
All of that must be working because throughout the day I managed to cut a bunch of kudzu vines off near the bottom of their stalks, make a pile of kudzu plant matter (for chicken feed), trim back the vegetation on the main internal road... and I finally remembered to dig out the uphill side of the solar shack (again) where too much soil tends to collect. At least the soil that had collected there was so dark and 'rich' that it was worth saving and will make for good potting soil. It was so good in fact that I threw it into the 'fire pit' atop the low-grade biochar in there. Now that I think of it... that soil might work well for rooting passion flower vines in. Especially since it does not have as much sand, clay, plant matter and grit as the soil that I usually use from the main topsoil trap.
As far as that current passion flower rooting project goes... that uses living vines in the terracotta pot... so far one vine is looking rather healthy and the other is struggling but still alive past the point where they 'lace' through the soil and they are both a very dark green color. Both the bottom portion of both stalks (below the rim of the flower pot) are a bright green color but in a healthy way, and not in a 'they have gotten too much water' kind of way. In other words neither vine has died and by the end of the week I will have turned two passion flower vines into four!
On a different note. Today it felt really good to take care of early morning correspondences and do the online stuff in small increments... interspersed with doing chores and other activities around the area and going hiking. With all that rain the vegetation has really come to life and there are flowers and mushrooms all over the place that I had not seen in that amount... and it was actually quite impressive. This was also the first day that I awoke to it being a bit chilly outside... as if 'something in the air had changed' and it was getting that much closer to the colder time of year.
Per usual I am on track to keep plugging away at stuff each day and gradually ramping myself up for when the first freeze arrives so that I can safely run the dogs on all the wood piles and places that are rat and mouse homes. There may well be temperatures close to freezing that could work... but with those larger venomous snakes (and a tarped or plastic covered) semi-rotting wood or even lumber pile... the snake might be just sitting there coiled in on itself... toasty warm... and not even close to being lethargic! Like I said I think it is way safer not to risk the dogs on such scenarios... hence the waiting!
Anyways, once I can 'run the vermin' a few times... I think that I am going to go ahead and inventory the damage and see what all that I actually have to work with. All of which will be good and go along well with my other plans for the colder season. I am not going to commit myself to doing anything by writing about it in this entry but... I have some ideas and I want to enjoy what remains of the nice weather with minimal bugs and cool temperatures.
Well, this is all going to be interesting to edit (and I again failed to get any new pictures) but as with many times before... I will manage one way or another. Not to get too hung up on that note but some days are sure easier than others to say the least!
I hope that everyone is doing well and has... "long days and pleasant nights" as that favorite author of mine likes to put it.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
Actually I had a pleasant night and my day is going on well.
It is good to know that we are finding hive more interesting compared to other web2 app.
I was just imagining what that payment was meant for when they are already benefitting from the information you post there already.
It's good to see you've been posting regularly again.
I got kind of stressed just reading about the Web 2.0 experience! It must have been good to escape into your outdoor work after that.
Is passionflower also passionfrui? I had one of those and it was doing fine, then I think it hit the clay layer and drowned on me. I want to try again at some point...
That's an excellent looking mushroom in the photo. When I was bittering it s a thumbnail it almost looked like part of an animal skull.
Yeah! Ugh the Web 2.0 stuff! I was like 'whoa I devoted too many paragraphs about that' before I rained it in and switched topics!
The plants/vines are in the Passiflora family and are Passiflora incarnata as far as I can tell. They do produce passion fruit (I have three such fruits off a very small vine) but I am unsure which other species produce fruit.
Yeah, those big bolete mushrooms can be really weird looking. I have yet to try identifying them... but whoa if they are edible... there are so many that I could easily collect enough to freeze and later make into soups during the winter... and probably still have frozen stock come spring!