David Peach

Longer-form writing. Things I’ve maybe been mulling over for a while. There is no pre-determined topic — I could end up writing about anything really.

  • How I share videos on my website

    The standard way nowadays, to share a video online, is to post an embed link to youtube.

    This then displays that video in what’s called an iframe — an embedded website within the website you are on.

    What this allows youtube and parent company alphabet (read: google) to do, is to track you whilst on that website.

    I want my website to be a bastion of the once-person-centric web. When people would share things on their own websites because they enjoyed it and wanted to share it with other humans.

    Self-hosting videos myself

    So to ensure that I don’t subject my visitors to any tracking, I choose to download any videos I wish to share and then manually upload them to my own site.

    When you watch a video on my website, it actually is from my own website.

    A novel idea I know.

    It’s how it used to be, and it’s how it should be.

    Mind your bandwidth

    I am also putting a note beneath each video to show what size the video is in megabytes (mb).

    My site shouldn’t preload the video — it will only start downloading it once you press the play button.

    I recommend just waiting till you’re on a wifi connection. Nothing I’m sharing can’t wait till later.

    Enjoy the fresh air whilst you’re out.

    Disclaimer

    I may still have some very old posts in my archive that have historic youtube links in them. Yes, I did it once too.

    But I am endeavouring to get rid of those and replace them with self-hosted versions where possible.

  • Watched The Fog

    Watched The Fog

    I do love a John Carpenter film.

    Last night (and today, as I was too tired to watch the whole thing late last night) I watch The Fog for the first time.

    At least I don’t remember watching it in my youth.

    I enjoyed it thoroughly.

    It actually made me jump in two separate parts, which was nice.

    And it was more violent than I was expecting. It’s not actually that graphically violent, but there were a couple of moments I did wince.

    And that’s a good thing in horror.

    I loved how quick and to the point it was too. As with many of Carpenter’s films I’ve seen, it gets straight into the meat of the film and then as soon as it’s resolved it gets out quickly.

    I do enjoy a slow-burn character story from time to time. But when it comes to most horror, I do enjoy it when it stays concise and gets to the point fast.

    There’s still a couple of Carpenter’s films I’m yet to watch, and “The Thing” that I desperately want to re-watch.

    It’s been a while since I was fourteen.

    Till then, Tata.

    Fediverse reactions
  • Watched Alien Romulus

    Watched Alien Romulus

    I’ll just start by saying that I really enjoyed Alien Romulus.

    After the atrocity that was Disney’s How to train your alien (Alien Earth) I have been in need of a good Alien fix.

    This started with me finally playing through Alien Isolation and absolutely loving it.

    I then thought I’d give Romulus a chance, on the advice of a friend. And I’m so glad I did.

    What I thought worked really well

    The general vibes of the film. It felt somewhere between the first and second Alien films. And that sat great with me.

    The storyline is nice and simple.

    The Alien itself was actually scary again. None of that running around in bright daylight rubbish.

    Some nods to previous films were okay (more on this shortly).

    The face-hugger scenes were incredible. Instead of being a means to get the Alien born, they actually featured in two of my favourite scenes in the film. Creepy AF.

    And the ending, although I was warned that it was a bit iffy, I actually didn’t mind. Gory as hell and went to a place I didn’t think it would.

    What made me cringe

    The CGI Ian Holm. This was not needed in the slightest. Pure uncanny valley that just didn’t need to be.

    All the bloody fan service. Whilst a couple of scenes that seemed to nod back to previous films were ok, most were just pure cheese.

    The re-saying of certain iconic lines were just out of place. They sounded like a film student had won a competition to write some lines of dialogue for the film.

    We don’t need fan service dialogue.

    The film would have been a strong 8 out of 10, if it weren’t for those bits. I think it sits at about 6.5 for me after all is said and done.

    Fediverse reactions
  • Watched The Innocents (1961)

    Watched The Innocents (1961)

    We decided to watch The Innocents (1961) for halloween evening film watch last night.

    A bit of a left field one, but is considered one of the top horror films.

    I thought it was okay. Good creepy vibes throughout and lots of abiguity.

    I was surprised when the ending kicked in.

    I guess I was expecting more of a gut punch ending or something.

    All in all glad I watched it. Its another classic to tick off the list.

    Fediverse reactions
  • Watched The Wicker Man

    Watched The Wicker Man

    Last night I finally got round to watching one of the classic horror films that has somehow been evading me for all this time — The Wicker Man (1973)

    Not the apparently-dreadful remake. Oh not the bees.

    I loved it.

    Despite knowing the ending already, probably through some kind of film osmosis over the years, I still enjoyed it all the way through.

    It was wonderfully creepy, occasionally inappropriate and all with a glorious feeling of a creeping dread.

    Now thinking back to the film Midsommar, that now feels like The Wicker Man on acid in retrospect.

    I should probably rewatch that soon.

    Im not going to attempt any kind of analysis, only to log for myself that i saw it.

    How that copper got any sleep in that pub bed and breakfast I dont know.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Stop the racists

    On my way to get some chips from my local chippy last night, my faith in humanity was restored.

    As I sat there waiting for red to turn green, I noticed white spraypainted words written across a sky plus billboard advert.

    The first two words I read were “Stop the…” and my eyes immediately rolled in anger, expecting the third word to be “boats”.

    However, my mood was immediately shifted when I saw the third word was actually “Racists” with a heart painted next to the whole thing.

    “Stop the racists”.

    Yes.

    To whoever wrote that, Thank You. Let’s have more of it.

  • My website is now cut off

    I’ve decided to bring my website back to a traditional website without all of the “social gubbins”.

    I love the IndieWeb, but I just can’t be bothered to jump through the hoops of marking up the posts with the extra classes and fiddling with my theme to make sure other sites can parse it fully.

    And the Fediverse. The fediverse is great. It feels like a last ditch effort at having some kind of nice social interactions online. Without all the capitalist bullshit and “influenzers”. (Yes I intentionally spelt it that way)

    But I don’t want my website connected to it anymore. I dont want all my posts going out and getting saved in other peoples servers, regardless of how trusted they may be. Especially now big tech is hustling in on the fediverse game.

    So this is all there is. A single website, built on ClassicPress, with basically no plugins, with me as the sole author. The author who does not use AI in any stage of this website, or any other website for that matter.

    Just me, myself and I. And any of you lovely people who pop by and visit.

    Unless you’re a fascist. In which case you can fuck off.

    Tata.

  • “ai” is the worst thing to happen to society.

    “ai” is the worst thing to happen to society.

    Removing more and more people from working, whilst making cancerous billionaires richer, is only ever going to result in greater and greater inequality.

    Everything else is parlour tricks.

    There is pretty much nothing good to come from any of this crap being peddled as “The greatest thing to enhance human capability”.

    The whole “human in a loop” thing – this is essentially taking people out of creative and critical thinking and reducing them to glorified conveyerbelt workers on a production line of “content”.

    Whilst “ai” is the worst invention to flood the world in recent times, the word “content” is the word I’d love to confine to room 101.

    People talking about “content” just pull every creative expression down to its lowest form that all comes down to “engagement” which itself basically equates to “analytics clicks / views / whatever”.

    The World Wide Web was a gift with the greatest of potential.

    It has been reduced to a mincing machine that steals from the creatively-gifted amongst us, in order to give non-creative people the false sense that they are.

    All so they can create, and I use that term very lightly, slops of images and videos that will be forgotten tomorrow.

    All at the cost of ours and the planet’s future.

  • Remember the websites?

    Remember when websites used to be just websites?

    Just a little site for someone to call their own.

    It didn’t matter if people visited or not — it was there because the person creating it had a desire to build and maintain it.

    And yes, I said “Person”. NOT “user”.

    Websites didn’t have to be “socially connected” and posting back and forth with APIs and messages. Don’t get me wrong – I think the indieweb and activitypub are nice things. But I can’t help but yern for a simpler time.

    (Yes my website posts are discoverable via activitypub) But I’m now only interested in sending out one way (as opposed to following loads of people and scrolling just as I would on twitter et al.

    I will still welcome friendly comments and will also reply where possible.

    I’m sick of scrolling. And I’m sick of “consuming”, as the marketing/bullshit “influencers” would have you call it.

    I just want a little website where I post my thoughts; my ideas; my observations; my peeves.

    Whoever comes around, I welcome you with open arms. Unless you are either an LLM training scraper or a fascist, in which case you can FUCK THE HELL OFF. YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.

    love to the humans out there.

  • The Walking Dead : The Ones who live

    The Walking Dead : The Ones who live

    The Ones who live has immediately gone up as one of my favourite series in The Walking Dead universe.

    Top spot of course is Negan’s introduction. Holy Christ that was intense.

    But I gotta say that after finishing the six-episode series of this Rick and Michone spin-off, it has catapulted up to near the top.

    And it was a single moment that solidified it for me.

    Now I always enjoyed watching Rick grow increasingly capable and deadly as the series moved forward.

    I was lucky to start watching The Walking Dead when series three was just coming out, so I didn’t have too much catching up to do.

    And it also meant that I’ve been able to see the characters grow steadily over the years, including Rick’s son, Carl.

    So when the scene in episode four “What We” came on, where Rick opens up about Carl and the effect that his few years imprisonment has done to his memory of Carl, it destroyed me.

    I’ve always been easily triggered by these sorts of emotional scenes. However, since having children of my own recently, it’s basically changed how I see pretty much every thing.

    Everything has an additional dimension to it now, it seems.

    And the fact that in that scene’s flashback, Carl is shown as being of toddler age — the same as my son — honestly it couldn’t have cut any deeper for me in the world of The Walking Dead.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Pockets of time

    When you’re young, free and single you don’t realise how much free time you have.

    “Don’t have time for that” shouldn’t have even been in my vocabulary.

    When you meet someone and start getting serious, you will probably start seeing them most evenings and / or weekends.

    Despite enjoying the time spent with your new partner, you will remember just how much extra time you had for those pursuits.

    Then you move in together and perhaps get married.

    You may then start to reminisce about those evenings every other day when your time was all your own to do with as you wished.

    Staying up till 3 am to play video games? No problem!

    And then you may have a child together.

    Now yours and your partner’s every waking moment is there to make sure that your child is happy, healthy and loved.

    They have no past memories.

    They are a clean slate.

    Their time for pursuits and discovery is in front of them.

    When you are woken at random times in the middle of the night, which then makes you too tired in the day, you will remember how much time your partner and you had before your bundle of joy arrived.

    And then the second one arrives.

    You will start to reminisce over how much time you actually had during nap times. And at night when your first one started sleeping through the night finally.

    Now it’s just small pockets of time.

    Concentrated moments for you to really focus in on the things that you want to pursue for yourself.

    I’m lucky.

    I found the person I’m happy and grateful to be spending the rest of my life with.

    And we’ve been blessed to have brought two perfect children into the world.

    I love my life now.

    This is a post for my children to read when they are old enough.

    I want them to consider the path they choose to walk — with whoever they hope to walk it with.

    I want them to know that if they find the right person as I did, then the sacrifices are merely exchanges; upgrades to an even better, more fulfilling life.

    All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us

    Gandalf — The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien.

  • The Flies are re-grouping

    It’s warm.

    Really fecking warm.

    The kind of warm that when you take your t-shirt off, you get that really uncomfortable heat surrounding your head as you take the t-shirt off over your head.

    It’s also the kind of warmth that throws up the signs outside of every open window — “Flies, inside this way”.

    I managed to destroy the previous wave with one of those electrified tennis rackets that shock and kill the flies.

    Then the weather cooled.

    But now the heat has returned. And with it, the second battalion of airborne pests.

    So now I wander the halls* of my home like Negan, looking for fly skulls to bash in.

    So if you hear the sound of electric shocks and/or cupboards being hit with cheap plastic, don’t worry. It’s just me working the perimeter.

    Enjoy the weather.