Apologies and Update on Billionaire Boycott
9 Feb 25
I recently moved this site to a secure server and everything is boogered up. I'll get it straightened out eventually. Scroll down for links to a few of my other activities. In the meantime, I've deleted Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Friendica is proving a challenging and sparsely populated substitute for Facebook but there's no way I'm going back. Have managed to delete about 90% of my Google reviews and working on the rest. The struggle continues.
Contact Me
26 Jan 25
I'm at habeck (dot) mike (at) gmail (dot) com. For now, anyway. Looking into alternatives to gmail. After all, if it's "free", I'm the product.
Boycott Billionaires
25 Jan 25
My latest project is attempting to disentangle myself from the grip of billionaires, mainly by not buying or using products from companies owned by billionaires. The more I get into this, the more this is looking like a significant challenge. Billionaire-owned enterprises are everywhere and have their tentacles in everything, not least our governments.
Some recent efforts:
Amazon: Spent down the last of my gift card balances (they had the money already anyway). Will continue to use the site to browse for books of interest, which I will then either purchase or order from a local bookstore I've chosen to support - Golden Hour Books, an exceptionally well-curated shop focused on ideas and "living right", if I may say it that way.
Facebook: I'm winding down my presence on this app and will be trying out Friendica as a potential substitute. Friendica is distributed over many different servers or "instances", but that doesn't prevent you from connecting with others over the entire interconnected system. I happen to be on the friendica.world instance, but there are many others to choose from. It allows you to connect with all other users, friends only (contacts), and within groups. It seems to have a lot of other capabilities as well, which I am just getting into. The big problem, of course, is that it makes your typical western Kansas gravel county road look traffic-choked. Hoping that will change as others seek an alternative to FB and give it a try. I need to wind down a Facebook group that I moderate and download the stuff I want to keep, and then it's lights out for Facebook.
Goodreads: I recently saw that this site is owned by Mr. Bezos, so into the dust bin it goes. I've signed up on Bookwyrm and will be moving my lists and whatnot over there.
Google: Need to do more research on this but for now I've changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo. There are still things I use Google for, at least for now, but my initial searches are typically on DuckDuckGo. I've written a few dozen reviews and recommended new locations to Google, especially of natural areas, and will be attempting to delete all of that as time allows. Why should I create free content for Google, especially now that they're scraping all sorts of original content off the web and using it to train AI models?
Twitter or "X": I left this a few months ago in favor of BlueSky. What a difference! Highly recommended, especially if you take advantage of some of the better block lists to screen out nazi trolls and their ilk. If one happens to slip through, block quickly, remorselessly.
Whole Foods: Used to eat lunch here quite a bit, and relied on it for a few specialized food items. I've identified substitutes for those items and will be minimizing my visits, with the goal of eliminating them. What I'd really like to patronize (and be a part of) is a local food co-op. Even though it was quite a bit out of our way, we do miss Pogue's Run Grocers. I'll be on the lookout for a substitute.
That's it for now. I'll post more as I progress.
Other Projects
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A large directory of environmental organizations with brief descriptions and links to their websites, arranged by state. There are separate pages for regional and national organizations. |
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Profiles of Indiana natural areas |
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Images of more than 1,000 historic Indiana buildings. |
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Wild Indiana, my book about Indiana natural areas, now out of print. Every once in a while copies show up on ABE Books, eBay, and sometimes other vendors. The first edition (yellowish cover) sold far more copies and is more abundant on the second hand market despite being about ten years older than the second edition (foggy pond cover). |