All Blips
Short answer:
This is a blip.
Long answer:
I've moved away from doomscrolling and pretty much every social network out there. But I still like the idea of microblogging - that's what a blip is: my own little tweet, skeet, toot or however it is named out there.
The #esc this year was one of the best ones I ever saw. Lots of great acts, some very funny ones and Germany got a decent result. Kudos to the host, Switzerland.
OMG, the awesome #Murderbot Diaries are now a series! Here’s the trailer. I loved the books and will definitely re-read them now. The first episode was pretty good, and to my absolute delight they have actually shot episodes of the in-universe Soap Opera Sanctuary Moon. And, almost a given since it runs on Apple TV, the production value is pretty high.
Here's a piece of info that I totally missed, which shows just how out of the loop I am for active web development: The View Transition API. This works when clicking an internal link (which results in loading the new document from the server). What it does is:
- Store a snapshot from the current state on screen
- Load the page in the background
- Do a smooth transition from the snapshot to the loaded page.
You can even declare which elements are the same across pages and make the browser smoothly animate them into place. I enabled this with the defaults on this page, it's most clearly visible if you navigate in the top nav e.g. from now to About Me.
That looks really neat!
#til
Not sure where all this inspiration is coming from recently, but here's another #braindump for potential future blog posts: The history of saving, coming from systems like the C64 where saving was neither the norm nor trivially possible, moving on to systems where saving was expensive in terms of time and memory, and arriving at today, where saving as a concept is fading out. Things that might be worth mentioning: The saving icon, which has lost its meaning with the decline of diskettes, and how changes in the ability to save changed gameplay mechanics (save points, save scumming and so on).
Another short #braindump : the following quote is stuck in my brain and waits to be persisted here at the very least, or reasoned about and turned into a proper post: Der Wurm muss den Fisch schmecken, nicht dem Angler. This translates roughly to: it’s fish who needs to like the worm, not the fisher. Which is a great mantra for #ProductManagement .
Don’t mess with my daughter, she’s level 100.
I added a lot of QoL improvements for this page. I logged a lot about what I did here: My Digital Garden Setup. Once I have more time I consider transforming this note into a series of shorter blog posts.
Quick #braindump of a few things that popped up on my radar. Some of which might make it into blog posts later, but I wanted to persist them here before I forget.
- I really enjoyed The White Lotus, Season 3. I didn't like the intro as much as the respective intros of the previous seasons, but the extended version is absolutely awesome.
- In one of the recent episodes of The Pragmatic Engineer, the concept of "Desirability, Feasibility, Viability" came up. Cursory Googling results in blog posts which seemingly don't go as deep into that topic as the podcast episode did. Need to re-listen to that part, as it really resonated with me. #ProductManagement
- The host is called Gergely, not Gregory or Gregerly. Reading Skills are so important. #til
- This article, called The Deathbed Fallacy, is an interesting read, and it somewhat relates to thoughts I had in the past about over-estimating the abilities of our Future Selves (I related that to coding and the willingness to accumulate technical debt, for example). I need to re-read that article and see how it relates to my mental model. #futureself
- On a darker note, I stumbled over an example of Rape Culture - the idea that there are factors in our culture which normalize male-on-female abuse or rape. I found it in an old song book used by german Scouts. The song is literally about a bishop promising salvation to a girl in exchange for sex. The same songbook also contained at least one similar song. If I find the time, I need to look up that book (I have a copy around here somewhere) and review it.
Its done - flenker.blog and philippflenker.com are now merged again. You’re looking at the new shiny world right now.
All my bearblog.dev posts have also moved over. There are a few tidbits missing, but all in all I am ready to flip the switch and make this the main page.
All my old blog posts (before I used Bear Blog) are now migrated. I even restored some that I didn't migrate to Bear back in the day, and I re-added pictures I used for the blog posts back then.
Some of the articles are missing images, looks like the Digital Garden plugin I use for publishing has some issues when bulk-uploading hundreds of files. I will fix these manually.
OK, all my instagram and threads posts are now also part of my blips collection. The one thing that I didn't migrate are stories, because my setup doesn't currently support this. Maybe I am going to solve this at some point, maybe not. Let's see. But so far I am very pleased with the results.
Instagram is also gone. However, I was able to download all my posts, stories and reels - even Threads! - , so I will turn them into blips as well!
I now moved all my Mastodon posts over to my Blips page and closed my accounts. I wanted to do the same for Bluesky, but then I realized I closed my account already a while ago. Next, I'm going to delete Instagram (and threads, if it's still active), and then all my social media accounts will be gone!
My wife and I are re-watching The White Lotus, Season 1 right now. I want to capture here a quote from the resort manager, Armond, who over the course of the season enters a downward spiral, after having been sober for five years. The quote seems like a good opening quote for a potential future blog post about my fear of becoming an addict, so I'm leaving it here:
I know you’re too intuitive for me to bullshit you. I fell off the wagon yesterday. The whole thing with Lani put me on edge, so I took a Xanax. But then I was dragging, so I took an upper. And then I took another and then another. Then I went down to the bar after work and had a few shots.
I recently heard the word "frupidity" in the context of Amazon: When Frugality borders into stupidity. Just leaving this as a blip for now so that I don't forget - once I find the time I'll turn this into an article.
Here's a Multi Line Regex for VSCode: [\s\S\n]+? (Source). It comes in handy e.g. when you want to move stuff around in a file, and I use this a lot when refactoring my notes. Let's say you want to use the title tag from your front matter as the first heading:
Example.md:
---
someprop: "foo"
title: "My Title"
someotherprop: "bar"
andanotherprop: "baz"
---
This is my note, it started out without a H1, it should end up with one.
Use the Search function in VSCode, enable regex and enter this in the search field:
---
([\s\S\n]+?)
title: "(.*)"
([\s\S\n]+?)
---
Then enter this as a replacement:
---
$1
title: "$2"
$3
---
# $2
This transforms our Example.md (and all other files) to this:
---
someprop: "foo"
title: "My Title"
someotherprop: "bar"
andanotherprop: "baz"
---
# My Title
This is my note, it started out without a H1, it should end up with one.
I just migrated my old Blips (before I called them that 😀 ) over here. That went surprisingly well so far.
My new blog/web presence is coming along. Time to fill this with some info. I am considering importing my old posts from other social media platforms as well.
This is a blip.
How a windows update makes a plane in an old game disappear: cookieplmonster.github.io/2025…
🎥 Watching Season 3 of The White Lotus
As part of a wedding gift I have let someone draw me (and others of course) in the style of TNG, and I absolutely LOVE the result. Look, that's me:
I always wondered what the lyrics were, but now I can finally sing along!
I just wanted to check how good LLM is as a sparring partner and now I'm sitting here discussing Luhmann, Wohland and Meadows with it like a maniac.