I'll make my own news website
Pixel 5 - 40007/1000000 sec, f1.73 at 219/50mm
I used to be an avid consumer of the news.
Back in my early 20s, commuting into Wellington city from the Hutt Valley we found Radio New Zealand and loved it. Morning Report in the morning on the way to work, back when Sean Plunket and Mike Hosking were regular people. Kim Hill hasn't gone crazy, so I don't know what happened to those other two bozos. Actually, I do know what happened. The grift is what happened. But that's all an aside. On the way home from work it was Radio NZ again.
If we took the train into town, there usually was The Dom left behind on a seat that we could read and the Evening Post on the way home again. I loved knowing what was going on in the world.
20 years and then the WWW happened, and slowly at first and then all of sudden, aside from Radio NZ, the news machine turned into bloody madness and it just became too much for me.
I think perhaps the first time I stopped being involved with the news was about November 2001, but for only about 3 months. And then again after the Christchurch Earthquakes but this time for about 6 months I actively avoided the news back then. It was just too much to take on mentally. Of course there were people who that was their life, but the media was making it my life too and there was nothing material I could do. It was about that time that I stopped listening to RNZ on the radio. Stopped completely. Haven't tuned in since.
Some time before that I had started to appreciate the mental load the news was starting to add to my life. Covid and then March 2021 was the end. Could take no more.
But I can't be an uninformed cave man either. That's not healthy or useful. So I've made my own news website that I can control how much of anything I have to consume. After a couple of weeks of coding, it's good enough that I've stopped looking at Stuff to see if I;m missing anything important. First to go was all the bloody opinion pieces, although some still slips through every now and then that I have to code around.
This is me getting back to consuming news again by being my own editor.
The Photo
Another photo of the same tree from Friday's mission to the optometrist's back alley.
)