At the beginning of this year I was burnt out on the web. All of it. The social game, the corporate gatekeeping, the enshittification of every corner of it, and now AI landing in the hands of people who shouldn’t have it.
That’s a lot to unpack and I’m not going to do it here. Those are their own posts.
What the burnout did was push me sideways, into the smallweb. Gopher. Gemini. Pubnixes. Places built by people who wanted a place, not an audience. I found some peace in the simplicity of it and I’m still there, more or less. It has its own problems. They’re just different problems, and smaller ones.
From there I found the Fediverse, and for a while I thought that was the sweet spot between the modern mess and the smallweb’s limits. It isn’t, quite. It has its share too. Another post.
Here’s the part I should be honest about. I’ve had blogs before. Most of them held my attention for about two months before something shinier came along. I have no track record here worth bragging about.
This one might be different. Might. What’s different is that I own it — the domain, the files, the whole thing sitting on my own machine. Nobody’s algorithm decides who sees it. If it dies, it dies because I stopped writing, not because a platform folded or changed the rules.
So this site is my voice. What’s here will be the stuff that makes me me.
Music, both the listening and the live gigs. History, and a lot of it. Writing and blogging, which I’m apparently doing again. Tech, which is what I’ve done for a living for forty years. And the deep-thinking end of things — philosophy, existentialism, and some ideas that sit further out than that.
Some of what I write will be filed under dissents. Those are the pieces where I’m arguing against something most people seem to have settled on. I’m not trying to convert anyone. Disagree, tell me why, and if we get a few exchanges in and we’re still apart, that’s a fine place to stop. I’ve watched enough people argue online into their fourth hour. Not doing that.
What this isn’t is a place for being nasty. We’re all biased, whether we admit it or not, and disagreement isn’t hate. Those two things get collapsed constantly and I’d rather they didn’t get collapsed here.
One last thing. I’m not going to tell you these are truths. They’re my views, arrived at over sixty years, and where I’ve got reasons I’ll show them so you can see for yourself where you think I’ve gone wrong. Some of what I write I hold loosely. Some I don’t. You’ll be able to tell which is which.
That’s the plan, anyway. Let’s see if I make it past two months.