Well, it worked. The ugly and sometimes weird and vaguely offensive advertising that was becoming so intrusive has prompted me to pay for an upgrade and go ad-free. Given how few people read this blog, this is hilarious hubris.

(Slightly inside baseball post here, whatever baseball is, and whatever inside is, and whatever a post is.)

If you’re a regular visitor, you may have noticed me messing around with different blog templates. I’m never particularly happy: always in search of the lost chord. I like bold typography as much as the next person, but I don’t really get why headings have to be huge and intrusive and yet other elements so small as to vanish into insignificance. The thing I really hate is when the page header and the title take up the entire screen of a laptop and you have to scroll to see the actual content.

I’ve been a bit bugged by WordPress for a while now, but I stick with it because there’s a lot of history here, and I made the mistake before, when I abandoned Blogger, of leaving myself with no way back in to even delete spam comments on the old blog(s).

That’s all ancient history, and I currently find myself vexed, as ever, by what I still think of as WordPress growing pains. I hate the block editor with the fire of a thousand suns, and loath and despise the contextual formatting bar that pops up when it’s not wanted, all the fucking time. Here it is:

I’m a keyboard shortcutter, so when I want italics, I hit Command-I, and so I don’t need that fucking thing popping up and getting in my way.

Anyway, I digress. Regular visitors may have noticed that the name of this blog has changed. Part of the paid upgrade was a domain — at least for the first year. So I just went with my name and the “uk” address, and then changed “Frequently Arsed Questions” to “McMinn and Cheese” which is only a joke if you say it out loud and mispronounce my name in the same way that my dad always used to when he was talking on the phone. So that’s MACMinn and Cheese to you.

I thought it was about time my blog had my name in it, and if I drop dead people can some here and see what I thought about various pepper grinders, sociopathic motorists, and popular fiction. I also hope that because I’m now paying for the privilege of no ads that I’ll be prompted to post slightly more often. It’s about to get cheesy around here.

I’ll never reconcile myself with the block editor, however.