On the Fediverse you can follow everyone on an instance, or you can follow the people that you want to follow. Hypothetically you can follow key words, and with time follow more people, and eventually find a community.
On Threads, BlueSky, X, Instagram and TikTok what you see is selected by algorithms, so you don’t need to follow anyone because every time you scroll or refresh you will be fed something new.
Yesterday morning I set two alarms for 0600 because I wanted to wake, have some free time, and then run at 07:50/08:00 but I don’t remember it waking me. I remember looking at the phone or watch and seeing 07:53. With the heat wave making sleep difficult, followed my a music festival making sleep difficult I reached such a point of exhaustion that the alarm failed to wake me. It even failed to register in my conscience that I turned off the alarms.
Near where I live there are three or four music events and two of them are multi-day events. Last night when I was walking home I noticed just how much noise was bleeding from the festival and it polarised me into commenting on it, on Strava.
When I walked in town two days ago, and again yesterday I was struck by how dead the town is. Cars are rare, swings are empty. Roads are empty. There is barely any sign of human presence. If I didn’t know better I’d say we’re back in Lockdown, except we’re not. It’s not even because of heat that people are hiding.
In the news they tell people over and over, “Don’t run in the heat” and don’t go out during the hottest part of the time" and yet they organise fan zones in Nyon, or other events in Asse and more. They tell us that we shouldn’t run, that we shouldn’t cycle but they don’t tell those that make sleeping even harder during a heat wave not to make noise.
Last night I went to sleep absurdly early by recent standards. I went to sleep before 2300, slept for about an hour and a half and then was woken, either by the dish washer that I programmed, or by geniuses (ironic) in cars beeping every few minutes after one of the football teams won the ugly game. Ugly because of the antisocial beeping of horns. Ugly because of the Royal Belge Football Club concerns about corruption within FIFA.
Europe is in the middle of a heatwave where the afternoon temperatures reach 33°c or higher, but where night time temperatures are just 20°c or even less. Local governments are saying “Avoid strenuous activities in the sun” and “make sure to keep cool”. They also offer going to churches or museums because they’re nice and cool.
On the flip-side music festivals such as Crapibana (intentional spelling) choose to have loud banging music from around 1900 last night right up until 0300 this morning. Now, in the best of times this is a nuisance but during a canicule this should be treated as criminal.
Last night was the first night of the Caribana and for the most part it was quiet. It was quiet until 23:30 when one of the less competent sound gremlins got to the audio mixing desk and made it tremendously loud. So loud that I could hear the music clearly. If I knew the artist I would tell you who was playing.
Given that noise pollution is encouraged, from music festivals in summer, on a regular basis, despite all the hot air about them caring for the environment I have come up with a splendid solution.
On Monday we were running in the rain, and getting soaked and two women were discussing Caribana, Paléo, Festineuch and more. During another hike people were speaking about Montreux, and during a book discussion someone said “I don’t think I can be at the next book discussion because of a concert.
Now, on the flipside you have groups that wake up to run at 6am on a Friday and normal society says “But that’s too early” because normal society considers that going out at night until 2am, or watching TV until late is a good use of an evening.
I know, without a doubt that if I ride with one group, especially if there are only 25 people, that it will be hard. It’s because of how hard I know the ride will be that I am not keen to join that group. despite this I still considered going for a bike ride this morning, until noisy neighbours made it impossible for me to have an early night.
There is a bad habit among alcoholics that they need to make noise at night without considering that others may want to sleep. I use the label noot because the people are alcoholics but rather because, in my experience people who behave in a toxic, selfish manner, are usually fuelled by alcohol. They only made noise until midnight but that still scuppered any chance of me going for that ride.
Yesterday afternoon I heard some very loud banging. I thought that it was due to an idiot driving a farming machine into something solid and they were trying to fix the damage. As it continued it made me furious. It’s for this reason that I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon on my bike.
When I rode by the absurd people making a huge amount of noise I saw that they were hammering at the bed of their flat bed truck. For some reason they were hitting it as hard as they could with hammers.
Recently I noticed that with the iPhone 14 checking notifications is a challenge. You have to really want to see notifications for them to show up. In some cases I find that they are automatically bypassed by the current iOS.
Whilst this might seem problematic, most notifications, in 2025 are a waste of time. They are duplicates from Strava, Linkedin, Udemy and plenty of other sites. If these sites are sticky enough, then we will see the notifications on the site, while we’re sitting at a computer, so we don’t need them to appear in our phone notifications.