I’m bad about overthinking. Like obnoxiously bad.

I can never leave well enough alone because I start thinking about what I should have done or how I can do the same thing, only better.

Then a few days later I’ve forgotten all about whatever it was and I’m already overthinking the next thing.

It’s a self inflicted scam. We’re constantly learning new things and getting better at the things we already know through repetition. So I end up in a perpetual battle against myself that I can’t win. I guess I can’t really lose, either.

I don’t get the anti-tipping culture on Reddit. There’s a whole community of people who never leave tips, pretending to protest in favor of the tipped employee because their wages should be higher? “Hey I don’t think you make enough money so I’m punishing you for your boss making you rely on tips to survive”

I’m so fucking lazy. I’ve never really messed with robots.txt. I’m kinda new to personal blogging; back in the 2000s I had a tech blog but I wanted everything to index my site. I even submitted my link to a bunch of off brand search engines to get my name out there.

But now there’s AI bots scraping websites like iFixit literally a million times a day.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get on the right medications to bring my anxiety levels from a blood curdling scream to a dull whimper. I think I’ve got it mostly squared away at this point in my life.

The circular thinking and stressing over things I shouldn’t care about are pretty much gone, but then there’s the issue of actual anxiety. The kind you’re supposed to feel when something’s wrong - like when you’re in physical danger or when you fuck something up so bad you know the only option is to stand up and face the music.

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to numb this stuff that it’s kind of a shocker when there’s actually something to stress about. I hate it so much my first instinct is always to do whatever I can to shut it down. That usually means drinking too much and...

I was a loyal Android fanboy since my very first smartphone: the LG Optimus running Android 2.2 Froyo

Before that, I was obsessed with everything Google was doing. I was naive enough to think they actually lived by the “don’t be evil” mantra. Search was still good and Google+ was a cool nerdy alternative to Facebook. They were making Linux mainstream with their highly customizable open source iPhone alternative and I was there for it.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone else shares the same views on “the end” as I do. I’m not trying to be edgy and I’m not a doomer or an accelerationist but with all the crazy shit going on in the world, it’s easy to imagine a doomsday scenario where we don’t have to pay bills or go to work anymore. There’s probably radioactive fallout and immense suffering involved, but you gotta weigh the positives and negatives, ya know?

I’m a little too young to have really appreciated the pre-Web 2.0 internet. Me and my cousin had our own Tripod sites when we were kids but we really didn’t know what we were doing.

Then we got a little older and MySpace came out. It was like having your own little stripped down website but some guy named Tom hosted all of your data. You could customize some things with html but it was more locked down than actually hosting something on your own.

I’ve never done much in the way of web hosting or development. I ran a more “professional” tech blog a long time ago, but that’s about as far into it as I got. I’ve never messed around with SQL, PHP, SSL certificates or different DNS configurations. I just ran a Wordpress site on Hostgator during the Web 2.0 days. Digg.com was still where you went to updoot links and Reddit was just a weird back alley of the internet back then. Crypto still referred to actual cryptography and not some kind of shitty Kohl’s Cash on a blockchain.

The landscape has changed.

…or maybe it hasn’t. Like I said, I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.

I set up a shared hosting plan on Namecheap because that’s where my domains are. It was something like $24 for the first year so I figured what the hell. Initially, I just wanted it...

A lot of my posts have covered stuff I don’t ever have the time of day to talk about. I work too much and almost all of my coworkers are conservative boomers. I don’t talk to most of them much but every once in a while I’ll have to share a store with some of them. Sometimes they give me random phone calls. Luckily I have the option of just not picking up the phone.

I just don’t relate with the people I have to interact with on the regular. I mean we aren’t having heavy political conversations 24/7 but it just doesn’t feel comfortable being around people who you know are the polar opposite of who you are.

I feel like being able to write about the stuff I never get to talk about is a healthy counterweight to that. I’m not a great writer, I know a lot of...

I’ve spent the last month blogging and surfing the indie web. It’s still so new to me I can’t shut the fuck up about it. You’ll have to excuse me, because before that, I spent a lot of time scrolling Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, big news publications, listening to big commercial podcasts and watching tv.

I’ve been on Mastodon for a few years and Lemmy for the last year or two. Those two sites were really my only exposure to the indie web, and even then most of the stuff being shared is the same stuff you’d find on Twitter or Reddit, bar crypto currency nonsense and other celebrity techbro junk.

Since starting this whole blogging thing, I’ve noticed something that doesn’t really change across all the personal blogs I’ve been reading.

No one’s trying to sell me anything.

If someone talks about a product they like, there’s no affiliate link. If I come across...