We finished our Sydney Festival experience for 2025 tonight at the volunteers’ party down at the Thirsty Mile. The Festival team put on food and drinks for us, and the CEO thanked everyone for all their hard work. We got to meet the new incoming Festival Director Kris Nelson, and we even got special certificates! This was a really fun experience, and I’m glad we were able to do it.
We had our final Sydney Festival volunteering shift today down at Barangaroo Reserve. We supported the “Caring for Spirit” talk as part of the Vigil: Gunyah series of First Nations events. It was very inspiring to hear from three smart, passionate Aboriginal women about how they support each other and their communities, and how they maintain their fire in spite of setbacks. (Very relevant to the world right now!)
I saw this video linked on Bluesky a few days back, and I’ve spent the last two days bingeing the series. I’m almost up to the end. It’s great! This young guy is a rapper and a music geek who nevertheless hates musicals and somehow hasn’t ever seen Hamilton. He watches a couple songs at a time, pausing to react to what’s happening, call out motifs that are repeating, and analyse how the writing illustrates character. Needless to say, he ends up loving it and gets fully invested in the story. His enthusiasm is infectious.
Apparently a Hellmouth has opened on Grafton Street in Chippendale. That seems appropriate for this week.
In addition to demonetising my Meta data, I’ve decided to take a break from Meta platforms this week. It turns out that it’s surprisingly difficult to log out of Facebook Messenger on your phone, to the extent that I had to dig up a Wikihow article to show me how. Even after I managed to log out of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Threads, they kept showing me a single-click “log back in” option due to some saved profile, which I then had to delete. The fact that they make it so damn difficult kinda reinforces my decision, to be honest.
The only one I haven’t signed out of is WhatsApp. This is solely because my main friend group uses it to communicate, and I haven’t yet figured out how to convince them all to move to an alternative.
Why just a break? Why don’t I delete my accounts? The temptation is definitely there. Sadly, FB remains my main channel to keep up with my family and friends in the US. It’s where I see what my brother and sister-in-law are doing with their cafe this week; it’s where I see whatever dodgy Jeep memes my Dad is laughing at; it’s where I see whatever quilt show in the Midwest my Mom is supporting; it’s where I find out if my college friends in LA are still safe. Instagram is literally the only way I know what’s happening with my young nieces and nephews, who would never be so crass as to text me or talk on the phone. It’s hard. I suspect the way forward will just be to cut my usage way, way back, and to move towards a read-only method of interaction there.
Here’s a fun story. When I originally moved this blog to Amazon Lightsail five years ago, I followed the recommended best practice and installed the AWS for WordPress plugin. I used that to set up an Amazon CloudFront distribution to manage the site’s cache. For several years, everything worked great. Then in September 2022, AWS abandoned the plugin and removed it from WordPress.org. As far as I can tell, they provided no information for users to tell them what to do without it. I continued to use the plugin for sometime, even though this is generally seen as pretty bad security since it’s no longer receiving updates. A few months back, I got tired of my Security scanner blaring at me about this discontinued plugin and deactivated it. The CloudFront distribution still existed and my site continued to work as intended, so I figured it was safe to delete.
As you might guess, there have been consequences. I noticed recently that my site was sometimes caching things too aggressively. I’d write a new blog post and tell Rodd to check it out, but he’d still be seeing the old one for some time. I’m far from a CloudFront expert, but I’ve been looking at my distribution behaviour settings and comparing them to current best practices. This site, for example, recommends using “Origin” for your cache key. My plugin-created distro however uses “Cloudfront-Forwarded-Proto,” “CloudFront-is-Tablet-Viewer,” “CloudFront-is-Mobile-Viewer,” “CloudFront-is-Desktop-Viewer,” and “Host.” For object caching, my distribution had “Use origin cache headers” selected instead of a custom option. Without any documentation from AWS on how their plugin actually worked, all I can theorise is that it must’ve set some sort of header that CloudFront was using, and by deleting the plugin, I’ve mucked up that behaviour.
So what to do? For the meantime, I’ve changed the default behaviour object caching to have a default TTL of 5 minutes. I’ll see if that helps the situation at all. Otherwise I’m going to either have to look at my backups and see if I can reverse-engineer what the plugin was doing, or else figure out how to modify my distribution to work properly without it. Ugh.
Mad at Meta? Don’t Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data | Electronic Frontier Foundation
I just went through and checked all of these settings. Not only is Facebook a privacy nightmare, Zuckerberg’s pivot to right-wing broligarch is sickening. I’d delete my accounts entirely except it’s my main way of communicating with some family members back in the US. At least I can limit how much I contribute to their coffers.
I was excited yesterday to find at a Mittagong antique shop a set of 6 placemats depicting artworks from the famous Australian artist Tom Roberts. Mr. Snook was similarly excited to find a red metal EAT napkin holder for $2 at the Vinnies. 😂❤️
It’s weird that a lot of the media I have consumed lately – Wolf Hall, The Tudors, and Conclave – revolves around cardinals and Popes. Yesterday I was talking about papal conclaves with Rodd and he told me in all seriousness that they check the genitals of every papal candidate these days. “What?! No way,” I scoffed. “Yes way! It’s because there was a lady Pope once. They even have a special chair,” he claimed. A few minutes of research later, I crowed as I revealed to him that the papal toilet chair is a myth. He remains disappointed.
