The recent events in the US have made me seriously re-evaluate the idea of using US-based services for web hosting, social media, streaming, and all that jazz. I’m deeply saddened by the state of things, but it is what it is. I know there are a lot of good folks out there in the US (hopefully the majority) fighting the good fight. But in the end, the way things have progressed is forcing my hand to take some drastic measures.

I’ve been moving things to European services where I can, but the reality is that—especially in the web space—most of the best services are based in the US. Replacing them is really hard. At this point, it’s impossible to replace all of them. And I feel torn about having to reconsider even those services that I believe have responsible ownership.

Are any of you facing the same dilemma? I’d love to hear how others are approaching this.

I’m trying a new approach to social media usage for the coming weeks: I’ve removed most social apps from my phone and will use them only on a desktop. That means Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog are now gone from my phone.

Facebook was already removed earlier. Instagram stays because I still want to post stories directly, and WhatsApp remains for communication. So, that’s it for Meta apps on my phone—less Meta, even if just in terms of installed apps, feels like a win!

This should also help minimize doomscrolling and spending too much time on these platforms. Checking feeds a few times a day from the desktop browser should be enough.

Wish me luck—let’s see how this goes! 😅

In my endless quest of “trying out new blogging things”, I lured myself into a new experiment for this weekend: What if I keep my existing (in english) Micro.blog site where it is at micro.juhaliikala.com, but also start a Finnish variation of the site on a separate domain at juhaliikala.fi. Would that fly? In other words; will I end up writing on both sites for a longer run, or is one or other going to get buried as a failed experiment? Guess we’ll just have to try and see!

Anyway, both now use Hyde theme (or a variation of it), the other one runs on top of Micro.blog and Hugo (actually, the micro.blog version uses my own custom theme), the other’s build on top of Eleventy. If you’re ever curious to try the same, micro.blog’s variation of Hyde can be found here and the eleventy version can be found here.

The idea is not to publish the exact same content in both English and Finnish. Rather, I’ll probably end up writing “independently” on both blogs, depending on the topic and the gut feeling of where this particular post belongs.

Either way, it’s way overdue for me to actually start blogging in my native language. Let’s just do it. No more analysis paralysis on that then! 😁

Okay(ish), but felt bit too slow burn in the beginning. Action scenes were nice, but I'm afraid this flick will be forgotten relatively fast. Overall: meh.