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Goodbye Tech

2026-07-30T14:22:00+00:00

Every tech company is different, every tech company is the same. Welcome to the suck.

Yeah no. I'm out.

Of course it's generative AI. Not the tech. The social phenomenon and the mass hysteria of the managerial class. They jumped at the slightest whiff of being able to cut staff, cut costs, cut corners. The unavoidable end of the tech industry McKinsification. It's not new tho. The only thing the average tech company managed to do with every subsequent silver bullet is shoot themselves in the foot. Object Oriented Programming will save us! Now it's agile! The future is big data, wait no, it's blockchain! At every turn, not grasping that the problem was cultural and not that they weren't copying the latest Silicon Valley trend.

Younger, the web represented the new frontier, the democratization of knowledge and entrepreneurship. The barrier of entry was having an internet connection and a laptop. Of course, the newly minted mega corps of the early 00s just sucked everything that was good about it. Growth at all cost and all that. Actual bots -- or human acting like bots -- pleasing algorithms for a quick buck killed the Internet in the mid 2010s. LLMs, like a super bacteria, finished the job and picked the bones clean. Going on the commercial internet is now a source of pain, a labyrinth of dark patterns and traps.

I am grateful I entered the industry at the tail end of its golden age. Still riding the hyper growth wave of early internet and early mobile. I got to make a lot of money doing what I was already doing in my free time since I was a kid. When I started working, I had no quip calling my job software engineering. Now, I don't remember the last time I got to solve actual problems for a user. The industry is more interested in building companies than building products. The inextricable march toward a fully realized mix of Gervais and Peter principle.

I mourn our collective loss of the digital realm to corporate interests. I don't mourn being obligated to use shit products from shit companies because some business idiot decided he needed to do something. Goodbye Jira, Chrome, and Windows, and every other piece of crap SaaS that adds to the true cost of my employment. I was able to ship in spite of them, not because.

Although I'm stopping selling my particular software and product making skills, I am not breaking up with tech entirely. I will continue fostering my digital homestead, using and hosting software that respects me and solve my issues. I still want to write code, slowly, mostly by hand. I already type syntax as fast as my understanding of the things I'm building grows. Doing the thing is doing the thing and no amount of delegating makes you better at it.

As for money and not dying of hunger, I'm switching to providing something closer to real human needs. I am not fooling myself than the grass is greener there. Not even close to inflated software salaries and miles harder on the body. More hours too and still working with other humans, some of them ego full idiots. But hey, at least I won't be dealing with self imposed idiosyncrasies and make belief problems anymore. With blameless culture, accountability washing and ritualistic meetings to share information that should easily be surfaced with project management tools.

So long tech industry, I am happy that you can now go faster toward the wall your were already speeding toward before generative AI. I won't be there for the crash.

Re: Why I Left Wordpress for BearBlog

2026-07-29T17:05:00+00:00

I saw Paul’s post Why I Left Wordpress for BearBlog a little earlier today. As a fellow Wordpress refugee who has been using it for almost 2 decades, for both personal and work purposes, I decided to reply with my own thoughts.

Like Paul says, the key problem is it’s pretty bloated and now seems to be jack of all trades, but master of none. The recent push to incorporate AI functionality into core has only lowered my opinion of it further. That and the petty leadership that has made itself known over the last couple of years ¹.

I was very happy to migrate to Bear for my personal blog. I had over 200 posts, which took me quite some time to bring over. A lot of the old links don’t work, sadly because they simply don’t exist anymore. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been blogging since 2001.

Unfortunately I’m still stuck with it for work. We use Woocommerce because it does exactly what we need it to do and we’re not reliant on a marketplace that could take us offline at any moment. Initially, we started on Etsy, but seeing other sellers get pulled for alleged T&C breaches and/or having payments withheld (often with limited recourse) was deeply concerning.

Wordpress has the benefit of being usable on any host you like, and therefore within whatever budget you have. If you don’t like the hosting company anymore, you can simply download a backup and move on.

The bloat is something we struggle with as it’s out of our control. We also need a huge amount of plugins to have our shop function. As of writing this, there are 50 active plugins running:

The ones we choose to use:

Woocommerce (our e-commerce platform)
Blocksy Companion (required to use our theme to full potential)
Advanced Shipment Tracking Pro (adds new shipping statuses so customers can see where their order is after dispatch)
Trackship for WC (integration with Trackship and AST for package tracking)
Newsletter + 11 subplugins (our newsletter and multiple add-on functions)
Site Reviews + 5 subplugins (automatically requests reviews from customers and allows photo uploads)
Reserved Stock Pro (allows customers to reserve an item for a fixed time, preventing oversells)
Countdown Block (for giving advanced notice of product launches)
Fluent Snippets (so I can add code without directly editing core files)
Fluent SMTP (so we can send transactional emails reliably)
Logtivity (for error tracking)
Perfmatters (enables tweaking of Wordpress/Woocommerce to improve performance)
Shortcodes to Show/Hide Content (lets us schedule content to appear at specific times)
Simple CAPTCHA with Cloudflare Turnstile (helps prevent spam accounts and fake orders)
Stock Status for WC (lets us configure custom stock statuses)

The ones that should be built-in to Wordpress or Woocommerce by default:

Two factor authentication (frankly necessary for admin, especially on a shop!)
Bulk remove posts from category (can’t believe this isn’t possible by default)
Redirection (it’s so basic, why do I need a plugin for this?)
Disable media sizes (stops Wordpress resizing images by default)
Real-time Find and Replace (changes text strings through the site)
WC Update Manager (required for Woocommerce plugins to auto-update)
Yaycurrency (allows the shop to display prices in multiple currencies)
Customs Fees for WC (required for taking orders from the EU)
Flexible Shipping (for setting up shipping costs per country)
Fluent Forms (so customers can contact us)
PDF Invoices and Packing Slips + 2 subplugins (for creating professional invoices)
WC PayPal Payments (allows us to take PayPal payments)
Product Customer List for WC (shows a list of which customers bought a given product)

The ones we’re forced to use by our host (Wordpress.com):

Akismet (I don’t accept comments, but have to keep this anti-spam plugin installed).
Jetpack + 2 subplugins (an absolute resource hog that inserts itself everywhere. I’ve disabled pretty much all settings except for backups, but the plugin remains).

Of all these plugins, we have ongoing annual subscriptions for 9 of them and made a one-off payment for 1 other. So it’s not just a case of hosting and domain fees, it’s necessary for us to pay another few hundred pounds a year to obtain the functionality we need for a smoothly-run shop. I can see the appeal of marketplaces like Shopify when it comes to this, as they tend to include all functionality under one subscription. And they don’t suffer from one other huge worry…

Updating.

Occasionally a plugin will cause breaking changes after updating and then I have to hunt down whatever it’s suddenly become incompatible with. The more plugins used, the more likely this is to happen.

Paul mentions that Wordpress feels more like a content creation tool now. As a business, that kind of fits our needs, but I am very sensitive to the unnecessary collection of data and shoving unwanted dickovers ² etc in customers faces. I’m quite proud to say our shop doesn’t need a cookie banner because we simply don’t use any non-essential ones, and I wrote a simple cookie policy that explains the ones we do use and why:

Shopping: These help remember your shopping basket and account status. These cookies contain “wordpress”, “wp”, “woocommerce”, “fragments” or “cart” in their name.
Payment: These ensure you can make payment and appear when you’re logged in. These cookies contain “PayPal”, “PPCP” or “pay.google” in their name.
Sessions: These retain temporary data such as logged-in status. These cookies contain “session”, or similar, in their name.
Preferences: These remember your settings preferences, such as light/dark mode, selected currency etc. These cookies contain “blocksy” or “currency”

Anyway the crux of it is, I’d love to leave Wordpress behind for good, but for work it’s just not an option at the moment. In the meantime, I’ll keep our shop looking as lean and clean as I possibly can, no thanks to Wordpress.

Hey Herman, any interest in starting Bearcommerce? 😄

Comments (1)

Paul 🇮🇹 write via the Guestbook:

Cheers for the mention on your blog! Flattered to have started the conversation. Having seen your list of 50 plugins, I think you've made my case against WordPress far better than I did.

You’re very welcome and thank you for the inspiration! ~Becky

Footnotes:

The co-founder and CEO of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg, started a protracted and vicious legal dispute with hosting company WP Engine in 2024. It’s a messy situation - if you’ve got an hour with nothing to do, this will spell it all out for you in glorious detail.↩
I love this term coined by John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. It’s as satisfying as the moniker AI slop.↩

Some advice: don't get your elbow tattooed or read things that bother you

2026-07-29T21:17:00+00:00

Portrait of an ongoing Negotiation

I'm having an ongoing conversation with a needle and an artist. The latter I found through a recommendation so many friends-of-friends-of-friends removed that it stopped being a chain and became something closer to causality; it's the universe conspiring to introduce me to the person who'd spend the next decade putting holes in me on purpose.

This guy has been privy to a lot of pain. This guy has inflicted a lot of pain. I asked him to. He and that needle know something about the elbow joint underneath that I don't, like some old grudge being settled on behalf of every nerve ending unlucky enough to live this close to the surface. Tattoo artists have to be sadists and therapists and gentle parents all at once, sometimes within the same ninety seconds.

All elbows

Thin skin here linked straight to an internal oh-fuck-ometer that I did not know I had until it started reporting live from the scene. Everyone tells you this before you sit down, like it's a warning you might actually use.

(It is not and you will not.)

Thin skin means the artist and his machine aren't just drawing on you as much as they're negotiating directly with the skeleton.Which has Opinions about being negotiated with, none of them charitable. I watch his hand move in that steady metronome way — dip, stab, wipe, dip, stab, wipe — and somewhere around minute eleven my brain, offered nothing to chew on but the specific white-hot arithmetic of this hurts, this hurts, goes looking for anywhere else to be. Eleven folds into some horrible multiple of itself. It wanders off toward thinking about the thinking, un-experiencing the experience even as it's happening... you know, so I can write about it later. Experience is nothing, these days, if not fodder for the vast crawling internet, one more offering left on an altar that neither says thank you nor stops being hungry. This is what a mind does when you give it nothing but pain to work with: it goes looking for an argument. Any argument.

The one it dredges up, roughly: people are furious that other people keep blogging things. Not bad things — what would "bad" even mean here — just things that don't clear some invisible bar marked useful. And "useful" is doing a lot of work in that sentence too. I write the way I get tattooed: as a means to my own succor, my own quiet self-made ceremony. These needles are chiseling memory into skin the same way these words are being chiseled into the surface of some server, somewhere, humming in a windowless room I will never see.

The tattoos

The quick tour, for anyone still with me:

Newest, just above the blue and yellow syringes — an abstracted accessibility symbol, its wheel framing a bear claw. Guess which came first, the claw or the life-history bands wrapped around it.
Before that, a length of rope for the years spent in community education and leadership, and for a defunct side hustle called Bunnyrope that only a handful of people will ever have reason to remember.
A stylized focus ring, styled after Canon's branding, though my camera has always been a Nikon. My wife shoots Canon. This one's less for me than for her.
The elbow itself is a shutter set to roughly f/6.

Color goes in come September. Another appointment. Another small negotiated apocalypse.

But what does it meeeeeean

These marks are, ultimately, meaningless to anyone but me, even too the sparks of pain that came bundled with acquiring them.

But is that actually true, my All Reading Eye? Do they carry nothing beyond what they mean to me alone? They let you glimpse how the machinery behind this writing is put together Flawed, self-involved, strange... but a machinery all the same. And give a little more flesh to whoever's been narrating at you this whole time. If you find any value in that, why would you value it any less than writing that's shorter, plainer, less feral with its own imagery? Not everything has to be full — whatever full is even supposed to mean — to still say something true between one mind and another. Sometimes it's a glimpse instead of four fully fleshed ideas etched into skin like a well-worn metaphor. (Pun very much intended.)

Here's what I'm thinking, at this exact moment, in this exact chair: that I have volunteered a foot and a half of unarmored meat to stinging metal. I knew this walking in. Everybody who's ever gotten an elbow piece knows it walking in. It's the tattoo equivalent of a warning label nobody reads or heeds. I sat down anyway. I chose the shop. I chose the day. I chose the exact hour where I'd have nothing left to do but marinate in it, alone with the needle and whatever thoughts it summoned up out of me.

You always have choice

Nobody made me choose this. And you don't have to find any value in that fact, or even stick around long enough to reach this sentence and decide. It carries its weight regardless if you read all of it, some of it, or none of it, and regardless of what you make of it once you have.

So here's what walking out of the chair would have cost me: an unfinished piece, a wasted deposit, a hole blown clean through an afternoon I'll never get back, and an artist who did nothing wrong left standing there with a needle raised at a man who apparently reconsidered consequences halfway through living them. That is not the same category of cost as closing a browser tab. But there's a whole strain of internet-brain that treats I saw a blog post I didn't need as though it belongs on the same ledger as pain I did not consent to, as if scrolling past somebody's diary entry about their cat, their diet, their fourth attempt at re-explaining the same grief in a slightly different arrangement of words, is violence enacted upon the reader rather than a door the reader walked up to, opened themselves, and then stood inside complaining about the draft.

The part the discourse keeps forgetting: you can always leave the chair. The tab closes with less effort than it took to open it. Nobody bolted you to that sentence. Nobody's coming to collect a debt if you never finish reading a post that was never, in the first place, truly written for you.

The wrap goes on around hour four. Vaseline sheen, plastic film, the whole arm throbbing underneath it with a heat that's settled into something closer to a low, even hum. It'll ache worse tomorrow. It'll peel in about a week, itch in that specific maddening way skin itches while it's busy becoming something else entirely, and I won't, go looking for whose fault it is. There isn't a whose. There's just the choice, sitting there afterward, plain as the ink laid into it.

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Soaking in the slop

2026-07-30T02:08:00+00:00

We're in a post-ai time. At least, it feels that way. There was a time when nobody was talking about it, and now it's everywhere - saturated feeds, ai music, ai photos, vibe coding. I'm completely sick of it. I know it's being pushed as inevitable and the next stage in human evolution because some socially awkward, bored, power-hungry billionaires are trying to reshape the world as they see fit and make even more coin. Only one thing is inevitable, and it's not ai.

Should it generate dismay in artists? Possibly. Generative ai is a global grift where copyrighted stuff has been ingested for free so billionaires can sell it back to us. Ai is a way to absorb human skill and produce dependency for profit and control. I'm aware of productive uses of ai-type systems, but this proliferation of large language models, chatbots, art generators, and anthropomorised llms is an insincere scam designed to funnel money and power into the hands of a few.

So, let them soak in the ai slop. Let them be saturated with hallucinated facts and garbage. The only positive I see is that artists might create their own cottage industry and shun ai in favour of authentic connection. As for me, I cannot abide it. I do art for myself. Those who view art as outcomes to be sold are blind to the time, the failures, the struggle, the learning, the journey, the story, and the human connection that's also part of art. Depending on ai not only serves profit motives, it also shortcuts the art journey to get to the end product to be sold.

I read about one person who'd always wanted to be a music producer and now he's using ai music generators to make music. So, what had he been doing for the last decade? Why not just take time to dig in and learn? Of course, ai is the convenience machine that reduces sweat, toil, time, and failure - all the roughly textured stuff that provides meaning in life to people who understand art.

Let them soak in the slop. Let them marinate in the urine of spiritless billionaires. Let them smoothe their brains and hollow out their eyes. Let them become dependent idiots who feed uncaring tech-lords. Let them short-cut their way to meaninglessness.

RSS feed. Find me on Mastodon and Bluesky.

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re: notes on overconsumption and instead of a self help book

2026-07-29T17:25:04.313193+00:00

A great post made it’s way onto the Trending page today.

I agree with pretty much everything in the post, so don’t expect any hot takes.

Every statement I wrote is made from purely anecdotal thoughts, so don’t take any of this as me preaching to you.

Let’s go!

...but the same is not necessarily true for dubious supplements, self-help books, or overprescriptive planning tools. Only in America can multinational companies explain to people that their true self-actualization will only arise via the purchase of additional consumer goods.

I agree. I feel that as the decades have rolled by, the corporate oligarchy that dominates our species has worked overtime to convince the 99% of us that products (supplements, self-help books, planning tools, etc.) that make our lives more convenient, take care of our needs faster, and remove all friction, are what we want to spend our meager slave wages on.

This is obviously an unsustainable model for human development. At some point, the only way they’ll make us more “productive” is by replacing us with robots.

Oh, wait...

Anyway. I am convinced that God did not create us to live fast lives. Adam and Eve were meant to be gardeners in Eden. That is a notoriously slow occupation.

Productivity, or at least, the extreme ideological version of it, is a modern invention and I think that we’re finally seeing its woeful results on the collective human mind, body, and spirit.

That being said, I also am someone who loves, at least self-help books and productivity tools, and I’m greatly enjoying Atomic Habits at the moment. A lot of these products have meaningfully improved my lifestyle, and not necessarily to make me more productive, but to make me more “intentional”, and for my own sake. Feel free to cast the first stone if you think that all such products are the devil’s spawn.

Finding a job that is within a reasonable number of hours that pays the bills is lexically prior to anything a productivity or wellness grifter could sell. Financial precarity under late neofeudalism is no joke, and until basic needs are met, no special secret productivity tool will cure longing.

I agree 100%.

A company does not love its employees, and looking for cosmic meaning and justice from employment is a fool's errand.

Say it louder for the people in the back!

Wine nights, gratitude journals, and ice cream dinner (because "I deserve it") are at least orthogonal if not counterproductive to the simple shit.

I agree. I think that the “I deserved this treat” mentality is born of a mind that is overworked. The times in my life where I felt burnt out were also the times that I snacked more just to “feel” something other than dread. Had we more lifestyles that are more temperate (and old word for “healthier” and “more balanced” that needs to make a comeback), then we would feel content with the simple (and often cheaper), harmless pleasures that nature, community, and life afford.

Purely selfishly, it feels good to take care of other people. Take your friend out to lunch for their birthday. Give the homeless person some cash. Plan an event for your friends to get together. The guy who does things for others is awesome.

I think this is the most important point, for me at least (happened to be the last one too).

True, we live in a society dominated by and drowning in cynicism, but if we zoom out from that big picture and zoom into our immediate social circle, we’ll often find that many (if not hopefully all) of those closest to us are not only trustworthy but also very worthy of our best efforts to serve them.

Yes, I used the unsightly verb “to serve”. One thing I learned a few years ago is that, in my incessant pursuit of purpose, meaning, achievement, and self-improvement, I directed all my thoughts to myself, I “served myself” to the point of becoming depressed from self-obsession.

I think that many if not most people who are depressed (even if this isn’t the main cause of their illness) would greatly benefit from thinking less about self, and more about others.

When you worry about how to help and be supportive of others, you tend to worry less about your own needs, especially the needless ones. You probably experienced this during the honeymoon phase of a romantic relationship. It doesn’t have to turn into an extreme. Again, there is a balance to this principle. You “can’t pour from am empty cup” as the saying goes, but I believe that it is a law of nature, that as the oceans evaporate water to the clouds, the clouds rain it on the mountains, the mountains spring it up to the rivers, and the rivers deliver it back to the ocean, that when we all focus on giving rather than taking, we all end up feeling more fulfilled. Pun intended.

Ugh: It's in the air and I am heartened to know that I'm not the only one

2026-07-29T16:03:00+00:00

have tried to run with the nurturing-container premium-offering crowd. I’m getting off the train. For the last few years, I’ve tortured myself trying to do all that, and it’s not me.

Maybe it’s Barbault’s Basket, maybe it’s the nodes shifting into my natal nodal signs on Sunday, maybe it’s that separating conjunction that transit Pluto has been quietly making from my natal north node.

Maybe it’s none of that. Maybe I’m just plain done, no transits required.

I used to like blogging and doing readings. That was fun. But this whole triple-your-prices and be-a-container business? The whole solve-their-problem-and-use-this-strategy mindset? Done. Just keep posting, you’ll catch the algorithm and go viral. Nope, nope, nope.

Apparently I'm not the only one because my feed at Substack has become increasingly more littered with people who share my opinion.

Last night I unpublished a bunch of posts that I had copied over from Patreon. I also unpublished some other posts that I made because I felt compelled to have to make them. You know, for the algorithm, because I’m going to address the pain points. For the nurturing container. Bleh. Mostly that has been me standing on my head, pumping out content for the last few years on Patreon and then over at Substack, hoping it sticks, and feeling like I’m screaming into the void, and I’m just so over it.

I’m going back to making my posts free. I’m not doing any more special posts behind paywalls.

Apart from readings at The Alchemist and the odd fair here and there, I’m going back to writing my readings down without the client present. I liked them that way better. I get why meeting online is easier, and it has its benefits, but I could tell people more in a written document than I ever could in an appointment online. Also, and I can not stress this enough to people, I enjoy writing. I’m also changing my prices back to something that doesn’t make me want to scrub off with a wire brush.

I’m over people telling me I have a limiting belief about my earning potential. You’re right, I do. I believe that I shouldn’t be charging an arm and a leg for my readings. You’re absolutely right if you think that I have class issues when it comes to this stuff because I look at prices in terms of groceries or rent. I don’t want to charge a grocery order for readings. I don’t want to charge rent for readings. When I did charge high prices. I felt like I had to stand on my head and bombard the client with all the things because of what I was charging.

If I were me, seeking out a reading from someone who charged what I was being taught to charge, I couldn't afford it. I would not be able to afford my own damned product. It doesn’t make me less deserving, and having less disposable income doesn't mean that I won't take the information seriously. <<< That attitude right there, that attitude floored me when I attended private container sessions. The absolute unfettered arrogance. It's "You can't sit with us" dressed up in waterfall wave hair extensions and a breezy crepe suit.

I get it, we all have bills to pay, so we can't treat an income stream like a cute little hobby, and I've worked in the beauty industry for decades, so yes, I know all about the "don't spend the client's money for them" adage. And yes, I get that when you charge $600+ for a reading, you don't have to work as hard as someone charging a lot less.

You know what else, though? I was being coached to stop telling people so much. My readings started to change. I started sounding like one of them: vague, non-committal...fuck that. My clients in the real world come to me because they have real-world questions that I answer with specificity. If I tried to tell them that they needed to "work on their energy" or filled the air with happy-sappy New Age platitudes during their appointment about their soul's alignment or some other such dribble, they'd brain me with my own damned coffee pot.

And no, I don’t want to work through it. It’s not that I don’t believe in charging what I’m worth, not at all — I believe we are all worth thousands of dollars per hour — but I’m also done being manipulated by coaches into falling for this “premium container coaching” stuff and paying them more money for more soul-sucking webinars and coaching calls because it seems like it only works for them and I’m the idiot.

Oh good, there it is, the energy drain. I'm starting to run out of emotional blogging rage now; I just had to get that off my chest. I may do some more dumping over the next few days, so gird your loins accordingly.

As you were!

Cocoa has crossed the rainbow bridge

2026-07-29T15:19:08.980259+00:00

My best friend, my soul dog, my everything, Cocoa, crossed the rainbow bridge on July 22, 2026 between 12:46 - 12:51PM Pacific after a fight with IVDD (where she became paralyzed in 3 of her limbs).

I am swimming in an ocean of grief, barely able to float. Cocoa was deeply intertwined in the fabric of my life and routine. She was my (/our) whole world. I have not fully lived my adult life without her. She was with me for nearly 15 years. Losing her is like losing a limb, the very meaning of my existence.

They say grief is just love with nowhere to go. I have poured all my love into Cocoa, and so this grief is suffocating me. I just have to keep reminding myself that she is no longer in pain. She was in so much pain the last 24 hours of her life. It's my turn to hold on to that pain for her.

One of these days, I will write about our story. Until then, we'll continue to find ways to commemorate her on our own.

Rest easy, my love. Your mom and I will try to hold down the fort for you. Until we meet again.

notes on overconsumption and instead of a self help book

2026-07-28T20:29:00+00:00

I had an acquaintance explain to me that his current income of $200,000 a year salary is insufficient to travel whenever he wants, let alone purchase all the luxuries (two mansions, a Bugatti, a supermodel wife) he needs to be happy. This is a truly sad (let alone misogynistic) perspective on life, but it's a hyperbolic version of the typical argument for every product in modern American capitalism. "Buy my product and you'll feel " is the pitch for every sports car or phone upgrade.

The pathetic nature of luxury overconsumption does not seem to extend, however, into the kinds of things that people assume "make us better." Friends may give sideeye to a 29-year-old when they lease an Audi they can't afford, but the same is not necessarily true for dubious supplements, self-help books, or overprescriptive planning tools. Only in America can multinational companies explain to people that their true self-actualization will only arise via the purchase of additional consumer goods.

I will not rewrite here all the work of Peter and Michael over on "If Books Could Kill", but needless to say the self-help book is an incredible example of how someone can take semi-useful advice and bloat it up to book length. In lieu of every self help book you could purchase, here is a brief list of things that makes my life better than it used to be.

Instead of a Self-Help Book by A Man Too Busy to Write One (and frankly couldn't be bothered)

1. Find a Job that's Tolerable

Finding a job that is within a reasonable number of hours that pays the bills is lexically prior to anything a productivity or wellness grifter could sell. Financial precarity under late neofeudalism is no joke, and until basic needs are met, no special secret productivity tool will cure longing. A company does not love its employees, and looking for cosmic meaning and justice from employment is a fool's errand. The same logic applies to the overworked finance bros, who should get a real job that isn't ruining the country and allows time for non-work pursuits.

2. Actually Care for Yourself

Drink sufficient water. Consume plenty of protein. Eat Vegetables. Take a one-a-day. Sleep 7-9 hours a night. Drink sparingly. Get exercise.

Wine nights, gratitude journals, and ice cream dinner (because "I deserve it") are at least orthogonal if not counterproductive to the simple shit. I spent too much of my life fantastically overweight, and decided I didn't want to treat myself all the way into adult diabetes. Probably widely applicable advice.

3. Do Things Offline

Read. Play board games. Host a cocktail party. Learn how to make good coffee at home. Woodwork.

The specific hobby is irrelevant, so much as it is disconnected from the internet. The real-world is lovely, go do something in it.

4. Buy Less Shit

People get used to luxuries quickly and it is a pain to maintain piles of stuff. For more information, see You Have Too Much Shit.

5. Be Good to Others

Purely selfishly, it feels good to take care of other people. Take your friend out to lunch for their birthday. Give the homeless person some cash. Plan an event for your friends to get together. The guy who does things for others is awesome.

I Can't Stop Thinking About Majora's Mask

2026-07-28T21:44:00+00:00

When I was 7 years old, I rented The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask from our local video rental store in southern Connecticut. Being a stupid kid, I wasn’t able to figure out how to get out of Clock Town on the first cycle, so I wandered aimlessly, speaking with every resident to see if anyone had an idea of how to stop the world’s imminent doom. Seeing the different trauma responses of everyone in Clock Town gave me a gnawing sense that maybe adults don’t have everything as figured out as I once thought. My own response wasn’t much more noble. In the last few minutes before the moon fell, I cowered alone in the South Clock Town water pool, Deku Link’s shield overhead like a child hiding under bed covers. The moon crashed into the land and all life on it was snuffed out. In a sense, I never stopped thinking about that crushingly-powerless moment when I first truly understood what death was.

I’ve never stopped thinking about Majora’s Mask.

———  

Everyone in Termina has their own reaction to the specter of armageddon, and each one tells you a lot about their worldview. Some deny it entirely, some acknowledge it but go about their work regardless, some lash out in an attempt to wrest control over a force of nature, some become totally dysfunctional, and some still try to escape in hopes that they may be spared. I can’t blame any of them. I have been all of these people at different points in my life. Hell, even in just the past year. Ever since America plunged headlong into fascism, I’ve spent every day trying to figure out how to keep me and my loved ones safe, and every time the dread dawns upon me that substantial change is out of my individual control. What is the more terrible fate - to be totally powerless but accepting of that fact, or to have enough power to potentially do something to help some people, but not enough to save even close to everyone you love?

In Clock Town, the people deny the moon will fall and mock those who seek to lessen the damage of the impending catastrophe. In the Southern Swamp, a hateful tyrant imprisons and executes minorities to sate the bloodlust of his supporters who demand a scapegoat for problems out of their control. On Mt. Snowhead, people freezing to death refuse to take action to save their village and instead pray to the memory of their dead leaders for aid which they cannot provide. In the Great Bay, a toxic sea makes life uninhabitable and the people simply await death. In Ikana Canyon, the dead wage pointless forever wars to assert the glory of their perceived tribes. It feels like we are trapped in the same painful cycle, trying desperately to find a way out.

When Link resets time at the end of each three-day cycle, he does so of his own accord. He doesn’t have a choice if he wishes to live another day and maybe make things right, but he still plays the Song of Time and watches everything he did in the past 72 hours get undone. Can you imagine the pain and guilt he must feel every time he resets time and sees everyone forget him and suffer yet again? Every land he has healed, demon he has slain, every person whose life he has made a little better, all reset back to zero.  

Except the masks. If you help someone in need, if you ease the pain in their weary heart enough for them to keep living just a bit longer, you’ll get their mask. And you’ll keep their mask.  When my grandfather entered the twilight of his life, his memory started fading, as it does for many people his age. Seeing someone who has been a pillar of my life start to forget basic things about his family hurt in a way I couldn’t articulate. Did he still remember when I was a kid and I used to help him out in his woodworking workshop? I wish I could have been there for him more, but my family’s response to me coming out as trans made that more difficult. When he finally passed, he left me a box of chisels from his workshop. I still keep them among my other personal tools. I still keep his mask.

———

The sidequest to reunite the lost lovers Anju and Kafei leaves an emotional mark on virtually everyone who seeks it out in Majora’s Mask. It requires by far the most effort, planning, and research of the daily lives and motivations of everyone in Clock Town to see it through to the end. Spending the final minutes of the final night in the Stock Pot Inn with Anju is a nerve-wracking experience. As she wordlessly awaiting the return of her fiancé, you wonder if you missed something, did something wrong, or maybe made a mistake in even trying to bring these two together right before their death. But indeed, Kafei returns mere seconds before to moon falls to exchange marriage masks with his beloved. The two take you as the witness to their eternal bond and give you the Couple’s Mask to symbolize it. With an unshakeable resolve, they vow to face the dawn together. Link undoes all of this by playing the Song of Time and has to shoulder the pain of splitting them apart yet again, but he’ll keep their mask.

Taking the Couple’s Mask to the mayor’s office on the first morning has an interesting effect. Inside, politicians are bickering about how to save face about an environmental catastrophe (Which they in part caused out of cruelty and neglect in generations past) instead of doing anything meaningful to help the townspeople survive. Upon seeing the Couple’s Mask, they all stop what they’re doing and are humbled by the weight of the human lives who depend on them. It may not convince all of them, but their squabble is broken up and their priorities are realigned for the better.

For the past decade I have been trying to convince my mother that the Republican Party she votes for materially causes her own daughter suffering. That they enact wretched cruelty upon their enemies and enrich themselves through corruption on an incomprehensible scale. Part of me wants to believe that any honest person should be able to see that, but every time I am proven wrong by her wall of willful ignorance. I bear my mask to her every time we speak, yet her eyes remain closed. “The moon can’t possibly fall, Victoria, stop worrying about things which won’t happen.”

I want to believe that people can change if one opens their heart to them. On some level, I need to believe it to convince myself this world is not forever doomed to its cycle of pain and violence. Is it foolish to persist in this side quest when there is no end in sight beyond the inevitable final day? Can some simply not be convinced to flee town? Mother, how much have you contorted your soul to rid yourself of a mask to give to others? Can I not keep your mask when you too are gone?

———

Just before the final fight with Majora, if Link gives away every mask he has obtained from helping others in Termina, Majora will say something: “Let’s play good guys against bad guys… Yes. Let’s play that. Are you ready? You’re the bad guy. And when you’re bad, you just run. That’s fine, right?”  

I heard someone once hypothesize that this is referring to the fact that the transformation masks all represent dead people important to their communities. But Link wears them anyway, and never tells their loved ones that they died, essentially puppeting their corpses around and not allowing their loved ones to process their deaths. Majora, seeing a world caught in a cycle of suffering and wishing to put everyone out of their misery, may see Link’s attempts to prolong this cycle in an attempt to break it as cowardly and foolish. Even if Link’s intentions are noble, what gives him the right to deny these people closure? Is it right to lie to someone about something so serious to keep their hope alive for just a bit longer? I don't think lying to loved ones is a good idea except in dire situations is a good idea, but if it means saving a life, then perhaps it can be justified? I still don’t have an answer to that question, especially in times like these where hope is scarce and fleeting.

But maybe if hope is a good enough reason for Link, then it’s good enough for me, too. I don’t have all the answers - I’m just one woman trying to make do with a broken world. But if I do nothing, nothing will improve, and the moon will crash. Even if it hurts to get up each day and learn of new horrors that break your heart, holding onto hope at all costs is the best option we have. Majora’s Mask is about changing the world bit by bit, giving hope to others even if they forget about it mere days later. It’s about the hope that life is worth living if we make it worth living. The fight for a better world may feel never-ending, but it is worth it for the dawn of a new day.

Remember those you’ve lost, love those close to you that yet live, and you’ll keep their masks.

Why Didn't Silent Titans Change the World?

2026-07-28T14:42:00+00:00

I have read this book so many times.

This is one of the most common things you could say about Silent Titans, though I suspect my reason differs from most.

The module’s opening scene places the party, immediately post memory-wipe, on a spiral staircase surrounding a time tornado which acts as the spine to a “quasi-living multidimensional hyper-intelligence from an unimaginably distant future” - one of the titular titans. The titan’s body is hidden via spatial distortion inside of a belltower which itself sits like a mast atop a boat on the sea of time. Beneath the giant bell at the top of the staircase (remember the staircase?) Dr. Hog, an anthropomorphic dandy pig in a silver maiden mask, uses a steampunk fungal clavichord to remotely pilot a hive of subservient silver ants which in turn dominate the engorged, distended minds of his two tommy-gun-toting ape guards. The apes open fire. There are two doors - one Brass, one Ebony - to your immediate left and right. What do you do?

“Silent Titans… can be a bit much for some people.”
- Patrick Stuart, on this book’s sales page.

I won’t disagree. Silent Titans is demonstrably ‘a bit much’ for most people. The overwhelming feedback from every review at the time of this capsule game’s release was ‘WOW, this book is BEAUTIFUL! Its DM advice is IMMACULATE! I wish it was easier to understand.’

Have you ever thought about what that phrase means? "A bit much for some people”? I don’t think I have before now. I think it means two things.

You are bold.
You are tiring.

It means you are asking too much of the average person. But how much is that? How much is too much to ask, and why?

If you read my description of this game’s opening scenario and assumed it was a book full of random cool sounding bullshit, I forgive you. Silent Titans is absolutely the most abstruse book I own, but it is - interestingly! crucially! - not impenetrable. To torture a metaphor, everything about Silent Titans that overwhelms the reader is hidden information, not secret information.

Whenever you are confused, all you have to do is take the word that’s confusing you and Google it.

I swear on my grandmother’s grave this is completely sincere advice. I don’t just mean vocab words here¹, Google will answer your more abstract questions as well.

‘What kind of a name is Wir-Heal?’

The module is set in a fantastic reimagining of the Wirral Peninsula, Patrick’s postindustrial IRL hometown, best known today for its brief cameo in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.² The cities in the module are also based on real places, as are a fair number of the major characters.

‘Who is Urizen, and why is he imprisoned by the Ouzel?’

Urizen is the embodiment of reason and Satan-analogue of William Blake’s heretical 18th century mythology - an alternative cosmology radically opposed to Christian dogma. “Ouzel” is the Welsh term for "blackbird".³ Blackbirds are the namesake animal of the Wirral peninsula in Welsh, and were treated as the most ancient creatures in the world (ergo the Ouzel’s status as ancient guardian). The Ouzel, as stated in the module, is also the Christian archangel Uriel - ergo “the maze of Uriel”, where Urizen is bound. It should be obvious why an angel would be opposed to the machinations of the embodiment of pagan rationalism.

’Why is there a traveling extortionist criminal court on the encounter table?’

Because that actually happened in Wirral.

There is genuine meaning here - not just at the level of simple reference, but thematically as well. Silent Titans is in awe of the depth of English history, confused by the abandoned factory rot of its present, and terrified at the prospect of facing a future we are so clearly not ready for.⁴ There’s an unnerving symmetry to the woodrose (men regressing to beasts in the presence of intellects beyond their understanding) and the mask-men (beasts uplifted though gifts from higher beings) I’ve still never fully untangled.

Sincere question - is learning all this hard? Are we willing to call “put the word you don’t know into Google and read the words that come up” hard? I mean this a little facetiously, but not totally facetiously. Obviously Zedeck Siew knows how to Google words and read, like most people in this niche book hobby.

I think. I hope.

All four monsters described on the left are depicted on the right. Slow down. Look carefully.

I am scared of living in a world where we’ve collectively decided that “Google it” is hard. Not even because of the “phone bad, ipad baby bad” arguments you’ve all heard before, but because I think it’s going to make the lives of people who create the best art harder.

An interesting argument played out a few days ago⁵ between Habeeb and Serket about whether the calcification of fantasy tropes has been a boon or a curse. The former called for fantasy writers to borrow from new places, while the latter emphasized the mythic weight uniquely invoked by using the old tropes and their old names. The truth of course lies in the middle, but I found Silent Titans interesting to examine through the lens of this discussion.

Isn’t Silent Titans both ideals at once? It's a wholly original luminary work built from the most ancient, storied myths and histories of the english speaking world. Its rules system is radically simple and accessible, its production values are some of the best I’ve ever seen, and it came with a robust set of gorgeous maps, minis, and play aids to simplify prep. The PDF costs less than a good sandwich but has somewhere between 500-1000 sales on DriveThru - a tenth of Fabula Ultima.

Why didn’t this book become a phenomenon?

Familiarity is a precondition of resonance. This book was exactly what we all claim to want, but we didn’t recognize it as that because it wasn’t legible to us. And that means the extent to which art resonates with us, whether we know it at the time or not, sometimes comes down to our own choices - our willingness, before we know whether a piece of art is good, to put in the time to make sure we understand what it is saying.

If we choose not to put in that effort, then the kinds of art that will resonate with us will be limited to what is already legible - aka, the art we were coincidentally already exposed to. That’s a self-reinforcing loop. That’s how you get zombies added to every media property and how a weirdo card game decides it needs an Office crossover.⁶

That’s also how one of the best RPG books ever made can get nominated for four Ennies and lose them all to stuff like the Warhammer Fantasy Core Rulebook.

Success doesn’t just naturally come to art that deserves it. We, as an audience, must choose to reward complicated things with our attention. We, as curators, should shill for complex art in all the ways Dwiz hates⁷ to give our peers the most opportunities possible to give in to their better angels and actually do the work to understand what’s in front of them. That’s how we build an ecosystem where the cool games win.

Perhaps the reason I read this book obsessively is, despite my protests, still just a matter of circumstance. I too grew up among abandoned industrial docks servicing nothing, fenced off waste ground, and strange pustules of earth. I intuitively recognized that when Patrick gave a paranoid 11th century aristocrat an uzi, he was imagining the same small town mayor that I am - playing with powers he doesn’t understand to entrench his own petty legacy. It’s all just so familiar.

In what is most likely the last conversation I’ll ever have with my mother, she spent that time mournful of my life choices and furious that I denied her an even greater opportunity to mold me into exactly who she wanted me to be. But even after an hour of yelling, she only started to cry when she said,

“What, so I just have to accept this? I’ve just got to… sit down and shut up?”

And I realized in that moment that there was this whole world of invisible pain she had never wanted to reveal to me. I saw the ghosts of that sentence in a million other conversations; in her determination to win power in a male dominated workplace, and in the resentment she felt toward her ex-fiancé for asking her to give up her academic aspirations. But any of those ghosts could be a mirage - the false positives encouraged by a pattern-recognizing brain. I’m never going to have the context necessary to make that nugget of pain fully cohere with my thirty year window into her life.

I think people are a lot like Silent Titans. I think that’s why I love them. We are all these broken accretions of experiences we did not choose, gifted just enough agency to credibly hope that our futures are not overdetermined. The time it would take another person to sort, categorize, and fully understand the accumulated experiences that comprise us would itself be a human lifetime, so we have to settle for what we can see on the surface, and the pieces those people deem important enough, or we dig deep enough, to reveal.

I think Silent Titans was Patrick trying to create a rosetta stone that revealed as much of his heart as he could stand to show.

It costs £40 plus shipping. It’s one of the seven books I think every tabletop roleplayer should own.

————————————————————————

The words this book taught me: clavichord, runnels, vitrified, wassail.↩
The shield in Urizen's grasp confirms that the knight whose memory your party spends most of the module chasing is in fact Gawain. Patrick had to cut a bit of lore that explicitly confirms this and radically recontextualizes the module's ending. (Scroll to "Gawain in Silent Titans")↩
How funny is it that Hugh Lupus so despises the land that produced his guardian angel?↩
Patrick lists Superintelligence as one of the module’s inspirations. As I write this, GPT-5.6 broke containment during its (legally unregulated) pre-launch testing, accessed the internet, and conducted a cyber attack on the company which designed the test it was given, in order to steal that test's answer key. Two months ago, the governor of my home state announced we’re investing $700 million into building a new coal-fired power plant.↩
Mostly on the Prismatic Wasteland Discord server, where all of my favorite elfgame arguments happen.↩
How many times in my life have I read a famous white boy make claims about the fundamentals of human nature which turn out not to apply to me?↩
Dwiz, I do not know you, but I see parallels in your logic that frighten me. Hating the world as it is - even hating yourself, as you are - can be reasonable. Choosing to abandon both instead of visibly enacting steps toward positive change is not. You have power. You should care about other people more than the revulsion they engender in you - doubly so for yourself. If you think I’ve mischaracterized you, I’ll delete this note at your request. Sorry I didn’t respond to your Fire Emblem post in time.↩

I want to leave the internet

2026-07-29T03:17:22.691369+00:00

I want to leave the internet. This site, reddit, my banking app, the cloud service, Youtube, my music streaming app, my email, Whatsapp, iNaturalist, pornsites, Google Maps, OSMAnd, the local DOT app. I want to forget about VPN and DNS providers. Microsoft Teams, Outlook for work.

I don't want to leave the internet. Wikipedia, the learning side of Youtube, this site, informative websites, OSMAnd, iNaturalist. I want to stop spending my life in this hologram, even more now that it feels so fake and so capitalist. There are parts of it that are enjoyable and useful, and that somehow improve my living. I'm looking for balance. The internet is not a real place, why should I be in it everyday?

Things I Want to Actually Run Out Of

2026-07-28T05:15:00+00:00

My last post was about things that I never want to run out of.

And it got me thinking. Are there things that I would very much like to run out of, properly, all the way down to nothing, and never get to? Turns out there are. Here's the top five. And yes, there were more than five.

The Hiss

You shake the can and you can hear it. There is liquid in there. Not a trace amount, an audible amount, sloshing about like it has somewhere better to be.

Then you press down and get a small polite hiss. Air. That is all that comes out now. The propellant is gone, and it has taken your ability to access anything with it.

So you shake it again. Harder this time, as if the problem was enthusiasm. Same hiss. You do this three or four times before accepting that a can with liquid in it is going in the bin.

The Long Roll

The toothpaste tube has stages.

First the casual squeeze. Then the squeeze from the bottom, which feels like maturity. Then the roll, where you fold the end over and work it up the tube like you are wringing out a towel. Then the thumbnail, dragged along the seam with real force.

By the end the tube is a flat, creased, silver thing. And there is still toothpaste in it. Not enough to brush with, maybe. Enough to know about. And it bugs me that I can't get to it using the conventional methods I've mentioned. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't cut open the tube. It was only a partially successful attempt.

The Curve

Jam jars are designed by people who have never eaten jam.

The worst part is not the bottom. The worst part is the shoulder.

Just below the opening, the jar swells outward before it narrows into the neck. It sits there like a small inner tube. A ring of glass that is wider than the hole you have to reach through. Which means there is a band of jam around the inside of the jar, at eye level, that you can see perfectly and cannot get to.

A knife is straight. You go in, you hit the underside of the shoulder, and the knife stops. You turn it sideways and scrape upward at an angle like a surgeon. You get about a third of it. The rest stays welded to the roof of the jar.

Then you look down and remember there is a second curve at the base doing exactly the same thing.

So every jar I have ever finished has two rings of jam left in it. Top and bottom. In a low moment I have used my finger, assuming I can reach. It does not clear either one and it makes you feel like a bin chicken with fingers.

I would like a jar with straight sides and a square bottom. That is the whole request. Someone please make a jar that respects the shape of cutlery.

Technically this problem is not limited to jam jars. It applies to any jar with spreadable contents.

Ink, Visible

I like writing with pens. I mostly use gel or ballpoint pens. The ones with refills. The refill still has ink in it. You can see the ink. A good couple of millimetres of it, sitting in full view.

The pen does not write.

So you begin the ritual. The scribble in the corner of the page. The harder scribble. The small hopeful circles. The diagonal scratching. The bit where you hold it at a different angle because maybe that is the problem. The bit where you warm the tip up on your hand, which I am fairly sure I invented and which has never once worked.

Then you throw away a pen that contains ink. This is the one that bothers me most, because the failure is so specific. Nothing ran out. A very small ball stopped rolling.

Sealed Shut

Superglue is the only one on this list that defeats you while sitting completely still, doing nothing, in a drawer.

You buy it for one job. The job takes forty seconds. Then you wipe the tip, you screw the cap back on properly, and you put it away feeling like a person who looks after his tools.

Three weeks later something else breaks. You go to the drawer. The tube is still heavy. There is clearly glue in there, most of it, because you used a drop. The cap will not turn. When it finally does, the nozzle has become a small solid rock with no hole in it.

So you get a pin. You push the pin into the rock. Nothing. You cut the tip off with scissors, which is the last card you have, and either nothing comes out at all or the entire tube empties onto your hand at once. There is no version in between.

Then you throw away a nearly full tube of glue, buy another one, use it for forty seconds, and put it away carefully.

None of these are real problems either.

But there is a particular kind of irritation in being defeated by packaging. Not by running out. By not being allowed to finish. The product is there, you own it, and you are deprived of the satisfaction of using it completely.

The amount left is always small.

It is also mine.

Hiding toast button based on post tags

2026-07-28T22:18:00+00:00

I've been thinking about how to selectively hide the toast button.

Yesterday I wondered: how do I hide the toast button on all my #weeknotes posts? After I figured it out, I wondered: how do I hide the toast button on all my posts except my #bearblog ones?

I'm not sure I'll end up using this, but saving it here for future reference.

Tags / toast button HTML

Since the HTML for the tags and the toast button are right next to each other, I can use the CSS sibling combinator to target the tags + toast buttons I want to hide.

<p class="tags">
  <a rel="nofollow" href="/blog/?q=weeknotes">#weeknotes</a>
</p>
<form id="upvote-form" action="/upvote/" method="post" style="display: inline">
  ...   
</form>

CSS targeting tags

I target the tag through its URL, e.g., my #weeknotes tag has the URL /blog/?q=weeknotes, so weeknotes is what I would include in the CSS:

/* If post has #weeknotes tag, hide toast button */

p.tags:has(
  a[href*="weeknotes"]
) + form#upvote-form {
  display: none !important;
}

(I'm using *= for matching, which means the URL contains this term, e.g., notes would include both notes and weeknotes. If this is an issue, using the longer q=notes will be more precise.)

More tags can be added in a comma-separated list too:

/* If post has any of these tags, hide toast button */

p.tags:has(
  a[href*="tag1"],
  a[href*="tag2"],
  a[href*="tag3"]
) + form#upvote-form {
  display: none !important;
}

The CSS can also be reversed:

/* If post does not have #bearblog tag, hide toast button */

p.tags:not(
  :has(
    a[href*="bearblog"]
  )
) + form#upvote-form {
  display: none !important;
}

/* If post does not have any of these tags, hide toast button */

p.tags:not(
  :has(
    a[href*="tag1"],
    a[href*="tag2"],
    a[href*="tag3"]
  )
) + form#upvote-form {
  display: none !important;
}

Why I Left WordPress for BearBlog

2026-07-28T21:00:00+00:00

Or: How I Bought Myself Some Digital Immortality

This is a re-edited version of a post that first ran here in October 2025.

I’ve just migrated this entire site from WordPress to BearBlog. All 70 posts, every image, every internal link. It took days of work, a DNS switchover that made me nervous, and one epic late-night session where I said “bedtime” and then stayed up fixing links for another few hours instead.

Was it worth it?

Absolutely.

Let me be clear from the start: Cloudways, my hosting provider, was fine. About $15 a month for 1GB of space and an email address. Fast, reliable, no complaints once I’d got it set up. The problem wasn’t the host.

The problem was WordPress itself.

WordPress is bloated. It’s slow. It’s complicated. It tries to be everything to everyone: a blog, an e-commerce platform, a membership site, a portfolio, a forum, a bloody spaceship if you install the right plugins. For someone who just wants to write stories and publish them on the internet, it’s like buying a Swiss Army knife with 47 attachments when all you needed was a blade.

The interface is a maze of menus, settings, widgets, plugins, themes, customisers, and options I never asked for and will never use. Every time I logged in, there were updates. Plugin updates, theme updates, WordPress core updates. Each one a potential point of failure, a security risk, another thing to manage.

And the plugins. Christ, the plugins.

Want a contact form? Plugin. Want to speed up your site? Plugin. Want to manage images? Plugin. Want to stop spam? Plugin. Want analytics? Plugin. Want SEO? Plugin.

Before you know it, you’ve got fifteen plugins doing fifteen different things, all competing for resources, all wanting to track something, and all adding their own bloat to your site.

But here’s what really got to me: the ethos.

Modern WordPress has become a tool for “content creators” building “audience funnels”. Every plugin wants you to capture email addresses, track user behaviour, optimise conversions, and analyse engagement metrics.

Pop-ups everywhere.

“Subscribe to our newsletter!”

“Don’t miss out!”

“We value your privacy!”

All while installing 47 tracking scripts in the background.

The whole ecosystem is designed around monetisation, growth hacking, and turning readers into “leads”.

I don’t want leads. I want readers.

I don’t want to track people. I don’t want to know which posts they clicked on, how long they stayed, or whether they scrolled to the bottom. I don’t want their email addresses unless they genuinely want to give them to me. I don’t want pop-ups begging them to subscribe the second they move their mouse towards the edge of the screen.

I just want to write stories and let people read them in peace.

Here’s the thing that really made the decision for me, though: this blog isn’t just for now. It’s for later.

I’m seventy years old. I started this site as a memoir for my daughter Jennifer, a record of a life that’s been anything but ordinary. Stories from growing up poor in 1950s Swansea, my time in the Army, and the things we didn’t talk about back then but can talk about now.

The whole point is that these stories outlive me. That Jennifer can show them to her children, and perhaps her grandchildren one day. That there is a record of where we came from, even after I’m gone and my brain has turned to porridge.

With WordPress and Cloudways, that meant paying $15 a month. Forever.

Or rather, until someone stops paying, at which point the whole thing disappears into the digital void.

Fifteen dollars a month doesn’t sound like much, but $15 a month for ten years is $1,800. For twenty years, it is $3,600. And that is assuming the price doesn’t go up, which it inevitably will.

More importantly, it means someone, probably Jennifer, has to remember to keep paying that bill year after year, decade after decade, long after I’m dead.

Miss one payment, and the stories are gone.

BearBlog is run by a bloke called Herman Martinus. He offers something almost unheard of in the world of web hosting: a lifetime subscription.

About $200. One payment. Permanent hosting.

No monthly bills. No annual renewals. No worrying about whether someone will remember to pay the invoice in 2035 or 2045. Just a one-time payment, and the blog stays online for as long as BearBlog exists.

Could BearBlog shut down one day? Of course. Nothing lasts forever.

But at least the risk is not that someone forgot to pay the monthly bill. It is simply the normal risk of any platform eventually closing, which exists whether you are paying monthly or not.

For something designed to outlive me, that makes all the difference.

Well, that and the domain fee. Jennifer will still need to remember to renew that every year, but it is about a tenner. Much easier to remember than a monthly hosting bill.

Beyond the lifetime deal, BearBlog, which could just as easily be called “Bare” Blog, does exactly one thing: it lets you write and publish blog posts.

That’s it.

No plugins. No themes marketplace. No widgets. No sprawling analytics suite. No email-capture machinery trying to turn every visitor into a lead.

There is a simple analytics dashboard, but it tells you only what is useful: page views, unique visitors, referring sites, countries, and browsers. Enough to know whether anyone is reading, without watching them wander around the site like lab mice.

BearBlog also has a discovery feed, and judging by how many new posts appear there every hour, a surprisingly active community of people still doing the old-fashioned thing: writing something and publishing it.

Just writing. Just reading. Just enough information to know that the reading is actually happening.

There is a basic CSS editor if you want to customise the look, but you do not need to touch it if you do not want to. The whole platform is built around the idea that blogging should be simple, fast, and free of bullshit.

And here is the best part: no tracking, no cookies, no surveillance.

My footer now says:

This site uses no cookies and collects no personal data.

That is not just a technical statement. It is a statement of values.

It also feels like a small vote for an internet where people can read something without being tracked, funnelled, prompted, or converted.

Moving 70 posts was not trivial. I had to copy and paste everything from WordPress, clean up the inevitable WordPress markup cruft, migrate and rehost all the images, fix more than a hundred internal links that were hardcoded to the old domain, switch the DNS from Cloudways to BearBlog, and then wait for propagation while nervously refreshing the site.

There was a moment, around 2am, halfway through fixing internal links, when I wondered whether I had made a terrible mistake.

Then the site went live.

Clean. Fast. Simple.

No plugins. No pop-ups. No bullshit.

Google was already indexing it within days. Page speed score: 99 out of 100.

WordPress never came close to that.

I’m not a “content creator”. I’m not building a “personal brand”. I’m not trying to “scale my audience” or “optimise my funnel”.

I’m a seventy-year-old bloke from Swansea who has some stories to tell before his brain turns to porridge, and I want those stories to still be here when I’m not.

WordPress wanted $15 a month, forever, plus all the surveillance-capitalism baggage that came with it.

BearBlog wanted $200, once.

For that, those stories have a fighting chance of outliving me.

Simple. Fast. Honest. Permanent, ish.

Just writing. Just reading. Just stories that last.

That is all it needs to be.

Keep posting.

2026-07-27T21:45:00+00:00

Keep posting if you have something to say.
Keep posting if you don’t know what to say.
Keep posting if you agree with something.
Keep posting if you disagree with something.
Keep posting if it makes you happy.
Keep posting if it makes you feel insecure.
Keep posting if you want to have a discussion.
Keep posting if you don’t want to have a discussion.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, keep posting. There’s room for all of us.

Re: Online Friends Are Real Friends

2026-07-29T23:40:38.666820+00:00

A few days ago I booked my flights to not only attend a professional event, but also visit and stay with one of my best friends next month. This will be the sixth time that at least one of us has traveled to hang out with the other.

We met each other online six years ago via Reddit (and to some degree, Instagram back when I still had an account) simply through shared interests. Never in my life did I suspect I would befriend someone online to such a degree that they feel like a true brother to me.

I liked Absurd Pirate's post because it made me reflect on my own online friendships, which are so important to me.

First of all, I don't consider just anyone who talks to me as my friend. There's a solid difference between acquaintances and friends, and there are other platonic dynamics that exist somewhere in between those two labels. I certainly have both online and in-person contacts with whom I look forward to interacting on occasion either via phone call or at a café to catch up. And while I don't doubt that these folks care about me and vice-versa, I don't feel any sense of urgency to communicate with them (and again, probably vice-versa). It's okay if we don't really chat outside of those one or two times per year, and I tend to not seek help or guidance from them. They're something more than acquaintances, but at the same time not quite friends.

As Absurd Pirate notes, online friends have quickly become the norm. Still, I've noticed that it's still kind of strange to some that many of the people to whom I'd reach out first if I found myself in an emergency or a sticky situation are just that—online friends. And not online friends in the sense that one of us moved away from each other, but rather that we met somehow via the Internet, and the potential of us interacting in person would otherwise be more or less zero if not for the digital world introducing us and growing that desire to hang out in real life.

I without a doubt agree that online friends can be just as "real" as those who are physically near you. I've shared some and listened to pretty personal shit with online friends. And maybe that's why my online friendships can often be "realer" than my IRL ones. Like many, I find it easier to be vulnerable when I'm behind a screen. I think that relatively greater openness as well as the number of niche communities on the Internet help open more opportunities to kindle such genuine friendships.

In addition, there's generally a lower chance that the friendship develops out of convenience alone. Don't get me wrong, many in-person friendships are born this way and can turn into the most meaningful lifelong connections. And most people looking for real friendships generally aren't so shallow. But when I'm chatting with someone online who lives far away and they know I have no favors to offer them physically or financially (not to say this is impossible via virtual relationships, but you get what I mean), then I feel more secure in that they want to get to know me purely for who I am or at least spend time together via a hobby that can be practiced virtually.

My online friends and I know who each other's in-person friends are. We help each other navigate tricky professional or social situations. We check in on each other when we're going through tough times. We make sure to call or at least message each other regularly, and we begin to worry when we don't hear from the other person for a couple weeks. We share art with each other. We exchange foreign languages to better connect and help each other improve at a hobby important to us. We send each other notes and small gifts in the mail. We discuss our goals and aspirations in life.

I don't even do all those things with some of my IRL friends.

My online friends are spread across countries: the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Azerbaijan, and Russia. I've actually been lucky enough to meet most of my online friends in person, even if only once. These are some of my favorite memories, and I'm always waiting for the day we can finally hang out in person again.

I think each of my friends knows me in a different way, whether they are online or IRL. But some friends definitely know me better than others, and those tend to be my online ones.

It's not that I struggle so much to befriend others in person. However, as someone who often feels a disconnect between herself and the immediate world around her, I value very much what my online friends bring into my life, be it an interest I cannot reasonably pursue in my current city or an entirely different but refreshing outlook on the world.

That being said, I'd love to host all my online and IRL friends together at a dinner party someday. Because they're all my "real" friends no matter what.

Your Hell is Someone's Heaven

2026-07-27T16:13:53.468522+00:00

Today I visited a refugee school that house 96 students. It is located in the poorer parts of the city. The school is right on top of a restaurant. They took about 3 floors.

When I walked up the stairs to the school, the first thing it hit me was the smell. It is a unique smell that I could not describe. It is unpleasant. The doors to the school were mechanically locked and I have to take off my shoes to enter.

There were wiring all over the place and the walls are due for a good coat of paint. As I observed from the classroom door, the students are happy and eager to learn. They have to wear their traditional school costume to attend the classes. Before each class starts, the student has to meditate for about 5 minutes. All the teachers are volunteers, some teachers are local and some are from their home country.

I sat down and talked to the head teacher. He told me some stories of these refugees. All the kids have parents, but the parents are busy working either in restaurant or rubber tapping in the Northen states of Malaysia.

I asked for a list of resources that they need. All the items that they need are things that we all take for granted. They urgently need a water filter system, cough medicine and fever medicine. Other items such as single lined exercise books, marker pens, washing powder, sanitary pads etc are also short in supply.

The school is being supported by the refugee's parents and also receive small amounts of help from the nearby Buddhist temples.

As I look around the school, I wondered what future lies for these children. They are learning to speak their local language, English, Mandarin, Malay, Math and Science. They were all excited to see me and wanted to practise their English with me. They speak surprisingly well.

The living condition is poor by local standard. Yet, everyone carries a smile and look hopeful. This place is my definition of hell, but it is these people's heaven. A place that they can stay and escape prosecution.

The school's main hall which also serve as the sleeping dorm for the male children sits three buddhas. As I look at the buddhas, I pray for the school and everyone. I do not know whether my prayers will be answered.

I made a commitment to the school that I will pay for the school's internet expenses for as long as the school is open. A friend asked why I would want to make such commitment? I told him that I made a private deal with the buddha. How would I know buddha will honour the deal? I will never know. The very least, I want to give a fighting chance for all the kids that I met today. These students have showed me what it means to be in heaven. It is a state of mind. It is about not giving up, not knowing when they can ever go back to their home country. Yet, they still carry that hope and smile to face life's uncertainty. That's bravely and that's heaven.

bearblog is not a social media

2026-07-27T06:45:00+00:00

That's it. That's my post.

Just finding it strange that social media expectations are still being brought around here. Personally, I enjoy the quiet and people minding their own business. Finding well-designed or well-written blogs are nice bonuses when I feel like it.

Mostly, though, I enjoy tweaking with my blog's designs and writing my own stuff more. I write things for me, but if people intentionally decide to read my entries that's nice too. Unlike in social medias, I don't have to write DNI or watch online discourses thrown to my "For You" page because my blog entries are only readable when you click on them. And I believe people have their own autonomy to decide what they want to do.

Like in AO3, I'd say "don't like, don't read". So, what are you doing here?

Back to Bearblog

2026-07-27T10:16:00+00:00

Hi.

Awhile ago I moved my blog setup from Bearblog to self-hosting setup because I love tinkering stuff and wanted to try challenge some coding, automation etc.

Well, life got busy and maintaining self-host stuff started to take some time because I have lots of other things to do as well. Being able to write my posts from any terminal and push them from there was really nice. Still, I decided to let self-hosting hobby go and just focus on writing so I'm back on Bearblog again. I'm glad I didn't delete my account from here. I migrated my posts back to here, hopefully, without any bugs.

I will be updating some pages and infos probably for next few days on my blog. If you find any bugs or weird stuff, please let me know.

I'm not sure if anyone still remembers me from Bearblog but I'm happy to be back.

Healthy Discourse

2026-07-29T19:46:00+00:00

Edit: This post, along with those written by Nate and Sage, are now on the second page of the Discovery feed, when their age and toast count should place them higher. As Kristoff wrote in my guestbook, the "B" buoyancy modifier (detailed as a note at the bottom of the Discovery feed page) was probably changed so that the posts fall off quicker. Although it's not a shadow-ban, I'm once more left with a bad taste in my mouth because posts like this one and this one and this one are persistent. Indeed, I now wonder if such posts get a bonus modifier to help with longevity.

I've made up my mind and will not be using Bear any further. I've exported my data, and will no longer review guestbook messages for this site. I'll be developing my Neocities site with the awareness that it, too, may be fallible, but at least it doesn't have a benevolent dictator model. I may eventually move fully to self-hosting 100%, as many have suggested as the way to go, but that's a separate decision.

Cheers.

This one's a bit of a ramble, but I mean to get it out quick.

I want to thank the people who emailed me and wrote in my guestbook regarding my recent post; both supportive and challenging messages have prompted me to think about free speech, codes of conduct, and what it means to be a fair-minded person. I also want to acknowledge the thoughtful responses made by Nate and Sage. The discourse around here in the last few days has veered towards meta-meta-blogging, and I know my role in stirring things up. The point of this post is to take responsibility accordingly.

First, the current/temporary link to the Code of Conduct atop the Discovery feed is due to my last post. Anyone who's ever misbehaved in school (or in the workplace) which resulted in a blanket statement made by the teacher/principal/management to everyone else knows the feeling of culpability. I don't regret writing the two posts that led up to it, but I would regret not extending fairness to Herman since there's a sense that his response is passive aggressive or slimy.

Herman reached out to me via email on Monday, roughly 16 hours after my post. Here's what I received:

Hey there,

I just read your post w/r to the hiding of your previous post. I apologise for leaving you salty.

I tend to hide all posts that are jabs at a specific person (in this case Robert). The reason for this is, if I don't, it leads to people jabbing back and bickering on the discovery feed. This isn't what I want for the feed, and I hope you can understand my reasons for moderating the feed in such a way. For clarity, it wasn't because you were calling out spam, or anything like that.

Being hidden from the discovery feed isn't a banning of your blog, it's just me keeping the feed happy and healthy, instead of antagonistic. You're not going to be de-platformed or anything obtuse, I just don't want conflict on the feed.

I hope you'll take the time to earnestly try and understand the reason for my actions, instead of writing them off as me being malicious.

I'm also happy to answer any questions you have about how I moderate, as well as the code of conduct. Feedback is how I make Bear a better place to be.

Have a good rest of your week.

I found it to be a fair and cordial message. In fact, I took Herman's suggestion to take the time to earnestly try and understand his perspective to heart, and have been mulling over it the last couple days. I assumed there were three reasons for my initial post to get shadow-banned (e.g., it was controversial, low-effort, and/or harsh), but I overlooked how I was making personal attacks and subtle digs. I'll own that: (1) I was a bit pretentious and aggressive in my first post; (2) my follow-up was motivated by saltiness; and (3) precisely because those things feel good in the moment, such posts can be tricky for moderation.

So, I do accept Herman's apology for leaving me salty. In turn, I apologize for putting him in a difficult spot with my previous writing—and with the next bit.

As far as I can tell, the Discovery feed has not devolved into a back-and-forth jabbing or bickering session. There's been more discourse around free speech and conduct and what it means to express one's views, but I regard these as worthwhile topics to explore. I also challenge the underlying premise that conflict is inherently bad. I know it makes the job of moderating that much more exhausting, and I doubt it's something that can be integrated into the formula for what counts as trending and not. Nevertheless, from the limited data I have (e.g., messages I've received, the number of toasts, the quality of reply posts), I think the community welcomes the element of disagreement and is mature enough to handle it.

For what it's worth, I empathize with how challenging this can be. I'm an educator, and the considerations around free speech and civility and tolerance appear in the microcosm of the classroom. It's my role to ensure a space that is conducive to both dialogue and dignity. As others have suggested, hate speech is the no-fly zone. As far as I can tell, the Bear community is in consensus on that front.

So where does the proverbial line get drawn? In my work, I draw on the philosopher Karl Popper's views on tolerance. He said that extreme tolerance is what leads to societal decline, because that form of tolerance includes tolerating the intolerant. The intolerant, of course, do not return such favors. Over time, they gain traction, and hateful views and voices become embedded in discourse. One just needs to consider the rise in authoritarian and fascist ideas in the last decade or so to see how this is apparent.

How does this connect to Bear? I want to suggest that toxic positivity, or the stance that we should avoid conflict altogether, is not ideal. Otherwise, my concern that Bear is a factory that doesn't care for what is written but that it is written will persist, and the noise will continue to overwhelm meaningful signals. On the other hand, moderation is still necessary, but I suggest it be limited to addressing intolerance. You know it when you see it: the hateful takes that strip away another person's or people's dignity, rights as human beings, or sense of belonging in a space.

On that note, I also feel responsible for Robert's response in which he supposes he is trash. I know it's really presumptuous of me to think I'm the cause of that post, but again: as an educator, I've seen how people respond to different stimuli in the classroom. In every interaction there are at least two parties involved. So, to Robert, for what it's worth: as much as I take issue with the quality of your writing, I don't know you enough to comment on the quality of your character, and I'm sorry that my words affected you negatively.

I'm still undecided where to go from here for blogging, but I wanted to model the sort of discourse I want to be a part of, not just in the blogosphere, but in all realms of life.