This was originally posted on USWM as a sort of “Hello, World!” post.
You know, it’s funny all these years ago when I first installed the GeneratePress theme on my WordPress blog I really thought I was something else using a theme that was less than 40kb in size (or at least it was at the time) and now to see in 2023 you can get the job done with something 10x smaller. This is an example of something that makes me happy down to my core. There have been a lot of cruel and evil things that have happened on this planet since I became a an inhabitant, but forward progress on the internet has always been a constant we can all hang our hats on. We are miles and miles away from InfoSeek and textfiles.com but things like Bear Blog are reminders we can reclaim what was beautiful of the web in the first place, the information.
I have maintained a blog since the earlier days of LiveJournal. I suppose the only purpose those blogs served was to have a purpose of tinkering with those technologies and seeing how they worked. Eventually undesirables took over LiveJournal and so my loyalties remained firmly placed in the WordPress camp ever since. It could very well be true that I did not want to spend the quality time learning anything other than WordPress even after they presented the Gutenberg Editor as a singular solution to all the world’s problems, including world hunger. I’m never going to post anything important enough to the world to justify paying for Ghost, despite how everyone feels like it’s the Best Thing In The Universe.
Last year I finally pulled the trigger and bought a membership to Medium. I’ve always been paywalled in the past and unable to read articles (most of which didn’t matter anyway) and thought I’d dip my toes back into the water in posting in a public space that wasn’t on my domain. They lay the website out real nice and everything, and has a very “digital newspaper” feel to it. But it is also very clear that everyone on that website is there to make money on their words or intend on improving upon their craft and plan to monetize their work in the future. There is also an extraordinary amount of low effort posts that haunt the platform with the most clickbaity titles seen in human history. I’m all about some off-the-wall titles but when the title holds more emotional impact that the totality of the post itself, one has to wonder where their minds are at. With a site that put so much time and effort into the typography and UX, it just seems wrong.
Don’t get the story twisted tho, I am 100% Grade A Nobody Special. Purebred working-class nobody. Working hard in the background so the more important people of this world can get their shit done. But we all have our role in this world, and I am going to continue to do my best to fulfill the role I have assigned to me.
My requirements for a good day are not too demanding: A good cup of coffee, some pleasant music, nice lighting, an outstanding internet connection, and this lovely application called Obsidian.
Located UP NORTH in the United States, we’re under snow for half the year so it’s safe to assume I’m nestled in during the winter hibernating in Obsidian – but during our lovely springs and summer we try to spend as much time on the back of a mountain bike as possible. I’ve met some pretty hardcore mountain bikers on my humble rides. One thing is certain, I’m not hardcore. I shattered my kneecaps several years back and only started riding recently because mobility was becoming an issue. A butcher by trade, if your mobility becomes an issue, you’re worthless to the team and the mission, and need to be replaced immediately. Nothing can slow down production.
Recently, however, we have taken up photography after giving up on it entirely back in the early 00s when Flickr was in its Golden Age. I had a crappy point-and-shoot by today’s standards and I was always so put off by how “uppity” photography people seem to be. It’s overstood that camera stuff is expensive but like a lot of nowadays YouTubers who talk about cameras are so over-to-top that it makes the everyday nobody like me seem like they can’t just pick up a camera and have the time of their life. I have over 30,000 images on my external hard drive that were taken with a camera no better than 5MP and when I view those photographs, the emotions invoked and the places I go back to make the quality of the photograph almost irrelevant.
I often have a fair amount of things to say about the goings on in the Obsidian plugins arena, and so you can very much expect lots of that to show up here. There are about 20 posts related to Obsidian on my domain and I am unsure whether I will import them over here, or revisit the posts and extract the most the timeless links out of them. Either way, let’s get after it!
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