Can I ask why? I'm interested from the perspective of the whole blog vs. digital garden discussion.

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In that light, the change makes sense.

And your site is very cool, btw. Though I do wonder what you mean by roleplaying online. Is it roleplaying as in relating in a way you wouldn't face to face..... or roleplaying as in you're a 65 y/o guy in Dubai with an oxygen tank pretending to be a female goth in the US?

One of life's mysteries, I suppose. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

On the digital gardens thing. It's just a modern, perhaps fashionable way of describing an old fashioned, non chronologically ordered site, where existing pages get added or updated as and when needed. That's my take, anyway.

Good luck with the changeover!

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I've been wondering lately how the shift to streaming has affected energy usage when compared to older tech like terrestrial or satellite? Any ideas?

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Thanks for clarifying. Now I'm regretting uploading a pic of myself as an avatar here....

Here's an enormous explanation if you're interested.

https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

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I suspect that the use of streaming multimedia on the internet has driven energy usage way up. We used to joke about underestimating the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes, but imagine the bandwidth of a USPS van full of DVDs. Netflix should have stuck to mailing out physical media.

When the public at large started getting on the internet, streaming was an inevitability, someone was always bound to do it. I do miss the early days when no one cared about streaming rights, so Netflix had anything and everything you could think of, and a near infinite supply of things you never would have thought of.

Thanks for the answers guys. Rootling around, I see some guestimates put the internet as accounting for up to 20% of global electricity usage by 2025. That's a lot of solar panels.

All this in mind, I can't help but wonder if what we need isn't some kind of data frugalism, or perhaps digital conservatism?

Thanks again.

Oh, and, going forward, I'm now never going to be able to see DVDs as anything other than crystalized bandwidth. :)

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At risk of sounding like a Republican, this isn't a technological problem. Our culture is fucked because it privileges audio and video over text. We live in a post-literate society, where people are encouraged to watch or listen rather than reading. We're using Fahrenheit 451 as a societal roadmap. If we could get off that track and encourage people to prefer text with occasional illustrations over audio or video a lot of problems would solve themselves.

My website isn't that big, for example. It's just HTML, CSS, and some images. I run the images through ImageMagick to resize them so that they're no bigger than 1024x768 and conver them to interlaced JPEG at 85% quality. I could probably make my images even smaller by using WebP, but fuck Google.

This ain't no shit: a single Tweet/X post takes about 2MB of data. Most of it JavaScript. And for what? A 280 character shitpost?

By way of comparison, the text of a 110,000 word novel I published a decade ago this November weighs in at less than 320KB). Takes less than 2 seconds to load on a decent connection. The Web doesn't have to be a shithole. Web developers make it one because we won't unionize and stand up to suits who demand user-hostile shit.

Seriously, though, sneakernet can be a lot more efficient than sending data over the wire.

https://burntelectrons.org/2021/08/never-underestimate-the-bandwidth-of-a-station-wagon-full-of-tapes-hurtling-down-the-highway/

Just like you can probably use basic UNIX tools instead of Hadoop to parallelize data processing.

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html

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I do now that you reminded me. Just had to add "-strip" to the relevant ImageMagick calls in my site's makefile.

Well, you're probably not dicking around with React or Angular, and you probably aren't trying to implement every user-hostile design pattern known to man or demon.

Soy, schmoy. Hadoop sounds like something I'd do in the bathroom with the door locked and the exhaust fan overclocked.

I guess we should be grateful these techies aren't trying to start heavy metal bands. They'd probably come up with names that make it impossible to take them seriously once they run out of fantasy and sf novels to rip off.

I'm not touching that one without a hazmat suit.

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I think most developers can. Unfortunately, the programmer I was six months ago is also "somebody else".

I know. I read it.

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Yeah, maybe there are two overlapping problems here. The replacement of a functional technology with a newer, less efficient one, sitting alongside an ever accelerating drift away from written sources of information, with both tied up in a self reinforcing doom spiral.

Good point. Nice and gloomy. Satisfying.

I'd also say the problem is only exacerbated by the fact that so much of what counts as culture these days is cooked up in toto by marketers and corporations. Of course, the ultimate, eventual effect of streaming on the financial viability of the media industry is yet to be determined.... so we'll see what happens on that front. Fingers crossed.

True enough. Though, for various reasons, I fear the glory days of unionism are firmly in the past. But who knows? We might get lucky. :) It's also possible (at some point) that economic realities could do the job for us.

As only a semi-tech person, I had not heard the "bandwidth of a station-wagon" quip before. It is a thing of beauty. Thank you.

EDIT: Hey, you're an author. Cool. I look forward to giving your book(s) a peruse.

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