Meta

And Sowed the Ground with Salt

The old site at vitia.org is now mostly razed. I put up a custom redirect, partly for my own amusement (take a look if you like; it’ll bring you back here after 20 seconds), and partly to start re-training myself with those long-unused (and pretty minimal to begin with) skills in Javascript, PHP, and CSS3 that the redesign and integration here has lately stretched, even if it’s been largely template-based. I don’t miss using Dreamweaver one bit—it feels a lot more comfortable doing the changes by typing in a text editor.

Move Complete

I’ve moved the weblog and database over from vitia.org, which will no longer be updated, and in the process I’m updating and tweaking a variety of other things as well. The most significant two tweaks, still somewhat in process but to be wrapped up in the next few days—new email is myfirstname at this domain and anonymous at this domain for encrypted, and putting together a self-hosted webfont stack rather than relying on external—have in common a move away from Google, which is perhaps much more understandable to those who’ve read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which has my vote for the #1 most important must-read book of recent memory. On the one hand, I do stuff with digital technologies, and I put effort into using integrated stacks of digital technologies (shell scripting, operating system scripting, URL hooks and scripting, keyboard automations, messaging and file system automations, et cetera) to make my life easier and declutter my headspace, and on the other hand, I teach classes that critically engage with digital technologies in ways (q.v. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression; John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data; Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity; Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want; Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation; Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society) that make what I used to think of as paranoia look increasingly like not only usefully cautious skepticism, not even only good common sense, but socially imperative just and caring practice toward ourselves and others. (And I continue to be so much happier having almost entirely abandoned short-form social media: no, Facebook, I don’t miss you at all, and yes Twitter, I’m absolutely fine not seeing you until my next academic conference.)

So now that I’ve got the overhaul done and the tune-up mostly complete, I figure it’s time for me to start putting this blog through its paces again and doing some laps before I take it out on the highway.

Vroom, vroom.

Maintenance and Moving

I’m moving I’ve moved vitia.org to a new hosting provider, and I’ll soon be changing changed the URL to integrate with my professional site at preterite.net. That means vitia.org will be mirrored at preterite.net for a while. This URL (vitia.org) should be good at least for the next few months, and I’ll have more details as I get the move finalized. Please consider the blog vitia.org now defunct and reincarnated in updated form at preterite.net/blog/.

Short explanation: I started this weblog as a graduate student way back in the early social media days of 2003 (!), when fabulous beasts like the Invisible Adjunct and Culture Cat and the Happy Tutor roamed the green hills of Academic Blogistan. In those days of MySpace and Friendster and LiveJournal and Movable Type 2.6, my default mode was that of grad student critique-ish-ness. The blog’s title, Vitia, indicated that splenetic mode in Latin, and its tagline translated the second declension neuter plural noun: “faults / sins / abuses.”

I like to think I’ve mostly moved away from that splenetic mode, especially with sobriety and being a dad. Thomas Pynchon fans will recognize the reference to preterition, which for me intersects with praeteritio, the rhetorical device (like occultatio) associated with saying something by not saying it or explicitly “passing over” it, as well as with the notion of grace.