It’s been a long time since I’ve written a normal post on this here blog. It looks like the last time I wrote what I would consider a “normal post” — meaning not a post about a podcast episode or an essay about a book I finished — was January 2021. So almost a year.

My absence wasn’t just here, either. It spread across basically all of my social media. Early in 2021, I finally had enough. Not long after the Republicans and Trump attempted a coup to overthrow the United States government, I decided that I was tired of being online all the time. It felt like I spent all of my time stressed out about things — some rightfully, some probably not as much, most of which I could do very little about. So I eventually started to disconnect. It was very nice. Very freeing.

As I mentioned in my last post, that wasn’t entirely intentional. It was a combination of exhaustion and disgust at the state of things: both the world and social media. Instead of burrowing into online drama, I focused on other things: D&D, crafting, and eventually 3D printing.

It was great to just dive into stuff and learn and not feel like I had to farm it for content, and it wasn’t something like writing that I wanted to do for a career, so I didn’t feel like I had to meet some outsider’s standards on what was good or not. I could just make cool things for my friends.

In the meantime, big things happened in my life. I got a new job that I absolutely love. At my old job, while I was able to work from home because of the pandemic, there was always the likelihood that the company would reverse the decision and I’d have to return to the office. But working from home made such a huge difference for helping my disabled wife that I needed to make sure I could keep that arrangement. And thank goodness that is built into my new job.

Not only did I get a new job, but my wife and I were able to buy a house! This was a huge deal for us. It felt like redeeming ourselves after losing our last house. And the new place is so nice!! We’ve had our friends over a couple times a month since we moved in, and it feels amazing to have a space that’s our own where we can entertain people. And there’s so much more space! It’s nearly double the size of the place we were renting. It’s near enough to town that it doesn’t feel like it’s too long to get there, but just out of the way enough that it feels like we have some privacy. And we have critters! Toads and hawks and stick bugs and cardinals and woodpeckers and all kinds of cool things.

Being a homeowner again feels funny. So many things that I didn’t really do my first time around, I’m jumping into with both feet. I cleaned my gutters for the first time last week, which filled me with a stupid level of pride. And I mowed my lawn weekly to make it as short as possible so it was easy to mow going forward. I used to avoid mowing like the plague, although I did buy an electric lawnmower and weed eater, just like when we owned the last pace. Quieter, easier to start, and way better for the environment.

Speaking of the environment, we have gotten really into the idea of having a clover yard. We eventually want to replace our grass with clover, but we didn’t have the chance to really get into it before the cold came. The fancy lawn grasses are trash and consume an absurd amount of water just to keep them green. The fact that fall leaves can kill them means they’re an absolute waste and an absolutely unnecessary drain on resources. Thankfully, our HOA has been pretty relaxed so far and doesn’t seem to have a lot of rules or restrictions in place, and our neighbors seem like mostly good people willing to help each other out when needed.

On that topic, we had our first Halloween in probably a decade where a bunch of trick-or-treaters came, and it was so great. It’s everything we’ve wanted.

And I obviously can’t wait to decorate my house for Christmas. It’ll be the first time in a long time I’ve had more than a window and a door I can decorate. We bought some inflatable lawn ornaments, which I’ve always disliked, but when you see an inflatable Oogie Boogie, you have to buy it, y’know?

Beyond that, I’ve just been trying to find stuff to occupy my time. I got into crafting for D&D and made some terrain to use in some of our games, leading up to a really elaborate campaign finale that I was really proud of. Then, I got a cheap, small 3D printer so I could print minis and some small scatter terrain (like tables and crates and shelves and stuff). I’ve only just started exploring the non-D&D stuff I could print, but it’s been a lot of fun.

Overall, life has been pretty good. The year has definitely had its ups and downs, but on the whole I’m so happy with how things have broken for us lately.

As for life online, as I settle into this new phase in my life, I want to reevaluate how I engage with the internet. I think I’m done chasing social media audiences and getting wrapped up too tightly in online communities. As Twitter immolates itself under Elon Musk’s ineptly steady hand, I realized that my blog is one of the longest places I’ve had a place online. The blogosphere of the early to mid 00s was always my favorite iteration of the online community — I felt like the pace was slow enough to avoid the worst of the knee jerk ass-hattery, although there was absolutely, unavoidably some of that. Plus blog posts being what they are, it’s easier to post more fully formed ideas that are harder to take out of context.

This probably makes me incredibly old and out of touch. That’s fine. I’m not attractive enough for Instagram, and I don’t take a ton of pictures anyway, and I definitely don’t have the bandwidth to make TikTok videos. Facebook is just an arm of alt-right and Russian propaganda at this point, and while Mastodon is fun, there are things about the platform I find troubling. Meanwhile, I know that as long as I can afford hosting, I can always have a place online via my site. Folks that want to keep up with me can always find me here. And I control this space, what goes up here, and who can use it.

All that to say, I want to try blogging more. That may not happen since I am a scatter brained ding dong that can’t commit to most goals and/or projects, but I’m going to try to take my instinct to post Twitter threads and instead turn them into blog posts. Also, as newsletters increasingly become a thing (at least for Gen-Xers and Millenials from what I’ve seen), it’s nice that folks can subscribe to my blog as though it were a newsletter. I’ve also been using WordPress as a blog aggregator like good old Google Reader (rip), and it’s mostly worked pretty well.

Anyway, this is sort of a boring catching up post, but I wanted to share some life updates and say hello again. If you’re new here, I hope you enjoy what you’ve found and want to stick around. If you’ve read me for a while, I’m flattered and glad to have you here.

Till next time.