samjc

Media lens describing the electoral and media conditions under which Starmer won, as compared with Corbyn

Corbyn lost by a landslide in 2019. Starmer won by a landslide in 2019.

Corbyn got more votes.

Yet the media narrative is Corbyn was uniquely unpopular, and his supporters fringe lunatics.

I ended up voting Lib Dem despite not being a supporter. Mainly a protest against Labour on Gaza, but Lib Dems were the right tactical vote as well. They were a strong 2nd, Labour 4th. Shows how wrong MRP can be – Labour didn’t campaign here at all, parachuted a candidate in. MRP doesn’t see this.

Adam Ramsay on how First-Past-The-Post distorts our political discourse

[…] it means we don’t spend that time, effort and headspace thinking or talking about what we want for the world. […] That conversation is shut out by the one about who does or does not have a chance of winning here. Voters are forced away from something we are excellent at – determining what policies represent our material interests and values – towards something we are terrible at: trying to game a stupid system.

I was too young to vote in the 2010 election by only a few months. Politically unaware and uncommitted, I’d probably have voted Lib Dem like most young people due to the policy of scrapping university fees; marching against the Tory/Lib Dem coalition’s subsequent decision to treble tuition fees was my first political protest just a few months later.

Since then, I’ve voted in every local and general election based on strongly held convictions (including once for myself — though only as a “paper candidate”). This has generally meant the Green party. For about 8 years I lived in Labour-stronghold Liverpool, and voting and knocking doors for the local Green party to Labour’s left was a way to keep Labour honest.

Now I’m back in a deep-blue rural constituency, with no commitments to any major party. There is no clear challenger to the Conservatives based on 2019 data. It’s a choice between two flavours of Tory-lite, or another vote for the Greens (whom I currently consider a bit of a basket-case party despite aligning with them on many things, something I may elaborate on in another post). Perhaps more polling data will point to a decent tactical vote closer to the date.

This is what it feels like to be an undecided voter. Not in the usual sense of being a floating voter between Red or Blue (a creature I don’t think I will ever understand), but just… so uninspired and uninterested. We are on the verge of ending the 14-year streak that has left the country in tatters. Every public service is failing and living standards have barely budged over the entire period. The pandemic killed over 200,000 people despite the strategic advantages of being an island-nation (New Zealand had around 5000 deaths and overall less disruption to business as usual by taking early decisive action against outbreaks). Why does this not feel… better?

Starmer has demonstrated he is a snake who courted the left only to utterly betray and purge them. He’s also deeply boring, and not much different from the Conservatives on many key issues, notably fiscal policy and Gaza. The end of Tory rule should be a time for hope and relief. But here we are, and the government will fall not with a “whoop” but with a “meh”.

What’s stopping you from publishing to your blog more? Is your boring life giving you nothing to write about? Demotivated by the chronic lack of engagement your posts have been getting? What about that crippling self-consciousness and perfectionism manifesting in dozens of “unfinished” drafts? Of course not — we all know it’s the friction of having to take 15 seconds to copy your post from your favourite text editor into the micro.blog window and clicking publish (probably even using the mouse, ugh).

Thankfully, I’ve made a Neovim plugin (really, a curl wrapper wrapper) to create and update micro.blog posts with just a couple of keybinds of your choosing.

Isn’t Neovim for coding? Why would you use it for blog posts?

Vim’s motions (keyboard shortcuts that are used to navigate and select text) are good for all editing tasks, not just source code. For example, to select a sentence, including the full-stop and following whitespace, place the cursor anywhere in the sentence and type vas ("Visually select Around Sentence"). Similar commands exist to select/delete/change words, paragraphs, text in brackets, up to a comma, in quotation marks, etc. It’s also easy to configure tools like spellchecking, dictionary, and thesaurus in Neovim.

Other popular text editors (including Obsidian) often implement a “vim mode” to emulate a subset of Vim’s shortcuts. If you’ve never tried learning these, I highly recommend giving it a go — the learning curve is steep but it’s fun, and you’ll never want to use the mouse or hold down modifiers to edit text again.

Neovim loads virtually instantly. Even with over 80 plugins installed, my startup time is around 200ms¹. With just a couple of keyboard shortcuts I can go from having a shitty half-formed opinion to having published it on the open web in just a few seconds.

The plugin

The plugin is based around just four main commands. publish (used to both create and update posts), quickpost (which is like publish with some default settings for “micro” posts), and two commands for opening a post to edit and update. First, let’s look at getting set up.

Configuration and installation

You need to have curl installed, as well as the Neovim plugins telescope and plenary. You can pass the following table to the lazy plugin manager:

{
    's-cassidy/microblog.nvim',
    dependencies = {
        'nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim',
        'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim'
    }
}

Next you need a micro.blog App Token, which you can get from the Account Settings page. This needs to be set as an environment variable (default MB_APP_TOKEN). As shell processes only have access to variables defined when they start, you need to set this before starting Neovim (there’s a configuration option to warn you if the plugin starts without setting the App Token).

The only bit of configuration that is absolutely essential is a Lua table containing your blogs. Each entry is a table with your blog’s url and uid (probably https://something.micro.blog). You’ll also probably want to set some keybindings. Here is what my configuration looks like in the lazy table

      local mb = require('microblog')

      mb.setup({
          blogs = {
            {
              url = 'https://samjc.me',
              uid = 'https://samjc.micro.blog'
            },
            {
              url = 'https://samjc-test.micro.blog',
              uid = 'https://samjc-test.micro.blog'
            }
          },
          no_save_quickpost = true,
        })

      vim.keymap.set({ 'n', 'v' }, '<leader>me', mb.pick_post, { desc = 'Edit a post' })
      vim.keymap.set({ 'n', 'v' }, '<leader>mp', mb.publish, { desc = 'Send a post' })
      vim.keymap.set({ 'n', 'v' }, '<leader>mq', mb.quickpost, { desc = 'Quick post' })
      vim.keymap.set({ 'n', 'v' }, '<leader>mu', mb.get_post_from_url, { desc = 'Open micro.blog url' })
      vim.keymap.set({ 'n', 'v' }, '<leader>ms', mb.display_post_status,
        { desc = 'Display post status' })

Some other configuration options:

• no_save_quickpost will let you quit without saving if you used the quickpost command. Since quickpost is designed for sending short “micro” posts, you can set this to true if you don’t care about keeping a local copy of your micro posts.
• always_input_url when set to true will always give you the option to manually edit the url of the post you are updating. Most users will want this set to false, because you’ll use one buffer per post, so the target url for a publish either won’t exist (brand new post) or it will be the existing url of the post in that buffer. However, some workflows might benefit from this (multiple posts in a single file, for example).

Using the plugin

The simplest usage is to make a new post. We open a new Neovim buffer, type out our post, and then run either publish (which will prompt the user to pick which blog to post to and input some options like a post title and categories) or quickpost, which skips the prompting and just posts to the default blog with no title or categories. We can also visually select some text and run either command to only post that part.

To edit an existing post, we can use edit_post_from_url which will prompt for an url (or takes an url as an argument) and then open that post in a new buffer. You can then make your changes and run publish to publish your updated version.

Alternatively, pick_post will load a large (full?) list of posts in telescope that you can fuzzy search. The search includes the date, title, content, and even url of the post. I’ve not yet got around to a previewer for pick_post, so it’s slightly dependent on you being able to recognise a post by its title or first sentence, but I imagine I’ll add a previewer soon. You can then pick a post to open and edit as described above.

Thanks

Thanks to HeyLoura — it was very useful to be able to read Lillihub’s source code to see examples of the micropub protocol in action. And thanks to you for reading and showing an interest; I’m not a developer and this is my first attempt at a plugin. If you give this a go and find bugs, please do open an issue or PR, drop me an email, whatever.

I’m a maths teacher to young girls from age 11 to 16, and this is the longest I’ve ever gone without teaching. Previously, my students’ burning passion for life could make me forget about the tragedies we are living through in Gaza, and they pushed me to be a better person. Nine of my dear students have been killed in Israel’s unfolding genocide, each one a talented and kind girl who will never be able to follow her dreams now. I mourn each child as if they were my family. ~ Eman Mohamed

As a maths teacher this hits very hard

Finally finished constructing another crossword. Annotated solutions available. Comments, quibbles, and feedback always welcome

How do the kids I teach know about Salad Fingers?

Just done my first bit of gardening that’s not mowing or weeding

I had a blast trying the micro.blog 30-day photo challenge (link is to all entries — mine are here. I decided to play with a self-constraint: despite owning a Canon DSLR, I decided to only use photos from my Lumix LX100.

The LX100 is a fixed-lens, compact camera from 2014. It has a micro four-thirds sensor (I guess that’s appopriate for a micro.blog challenge?) with an output resolution of approximately 12MP depending on the selected aspect ratio. Its Leica-made zoom lens has a focal range of 24-75mm (FF-equivalent) and attains f/1.7 at its widest.

Despite it being an old, small-sensored, and relatively low-resolution camera, I absolutely love it. It was my first “proper camera” (barring a Pentax K1000 I had as a child), acquired second-hand during the first lockdown for about £250. Although I have only been taking pictures as a hobbyist for only a few years, and am nowhere close to being an actually good photographer, I think many of the pictures this camera and I have produced together are very Okay, and a couple may even be Quite Good.

In design, it’s essentially a poor man’s Fujifilm X100-series camera, with a zoom rather than prime lens and no built-in flash. It uses similar “retro” physical dials and rings for controlling exposure, has an electronic viewfinder rather than the X100-series' fancy hybrid, and is quite a bit smaller.

This size advantage is key — in most cases, it’s still the camera I reach for over 90% of the time. It’s easier to carry, and less intrusive in social environments. I know how to use it inside-out, with everything set just the way I like it. The design, as well as the number of settings, makes it clear this is a compact camera for a “serious” enthusiast. The dials and rings are an invitation to shoot with intention, and not just “point-and-shoot” – the usual name for the market in which cameras of this size compete.

12 mega-pixels sounds very small by today’s standards. But 12MP is twelve million pixels. My laptop screen is around two million pixels. How many pixels does a non-professional photographer really need? I’ve never made a print bigger than my laptop screen either. The pain only comes if you need to crop an image. One of my biggest photographic regrets is that Day 17: transcendence was taken from too far away and I had to crop — the resolution does suffer a bit here.

The micro four-thirds sensor is basically fine for everyday shooting. I don’t need ultra-fine control of depth-of-field for most scenes, and in fact the increased DoF means I rarely miss focus (which can’t be said when I’m using the full-frame DSLR…). I also get a zoom from 24 to 75mm with a lens about 7cm long.

The only real drag of this camera is that the zoom lens’s mechanism sure loves to eat dust, and being a fixed-lens camera, there’s no way to clean the dust from the sensor without disassembling the camera. This happens a lot, though it’s usually not too visible unless you’re stopped down to f/11 or beyond — you can see it clearly in Day 11: sky.

Would I really like an X100VI? Of course I would. But I don’t have two thousand pounds to spend on an out-of-stock-everywhere camera. And that’s fine. A £250 everyday-carry is fine. I’ve not outgrown it in terms of skill. I’d even guess learning on an older, cheaper camera has been good for pushing me to develop my skills. You really don’t need an expensive camera to get into photography. Just get an affordable camera that’s small enough you’ll actually take it with you, used with intention. I hear some phones have cameras these days, so you could use one of those as well. It’s just about shooting with intention.

The games in my backlog these days are ones that are supposed to have profound themes that I just don’t have time to give the attention they deserve