2026-02-01 18:13:58
It is time for another topic in the Bear Blog Carnival and this time I ask to reflect on boredom. Are you ever bored, what do you do when you are feeling bored or are we even capable of feeling bored in this age of limitless digital entertainment? This is just a writing prompt and I encourage everyone to write whatever comes to mind and what makes sense to write for you personally
Throughout February this page will be updated with every post I receive, and in the beginning of March I will do a write-up of all submissions.
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2026-02-01 15:20:00
Yeah, it's actually 31. I had no plans of doing this experiment until Jan 8th when I saw I'd had eight continuous days of walking 10k steps and maybe I can do it for the remaining month. The idea partly comes from a Matt D'Avella video where he eloquently documents his experiment. For me, the thought of walking so many steps was not alien as I've liked walking and averaged about 5k for some time now.
The biggest constraint apart from just getting yourself out of the house in this cold is of course -- Time. I substituted my commute with 30 mins of walking to and fro my workplace. Morning walks and Incidental Activity spread throughout the day were equally helpful. Sometimes, I found myself a few hundred or a thousand steps short at 11PM and I was out there walking around the neighbourhood for the sake of my resolve.
My Takeaways: The first takeaway of this experiment was me figuring out my walking speed and number of steps I walk in a minute, 10 mins and half an hour (It is around 1.1k steps per 10 mins). I also figured that my skin and musculoskeletal structure did not show any aversion to this amount of walking, which varies from person to person. I did not feel too exhausted but clearly more active and flexible as a result. My glucose levels were normal because of immediate walks after every meal, and at the end of the day the lightness was something I had not experienced before.
Results: Throughout this experiment, I also had a balanced diet and avoided ultra-processed food and sugar. I have been doing home workouts for a while, and continued during this period as well. This clearly affected my caloric burn and fat percentage, and the result was a significant weight loss of about 2.4 kilos. I can feel the reduced belly fat and enhanced calf muscles which was not the goal but definitely feels good to see visible progress.
Will I continue this? Well, this was much easier in January because of the cold weather, but moving forward, I cannot walk after every meal because of time and weather constraints. Nevertheless, 7k seems like a sweet spot for the rest of the year coupled with increased physical activity. This brings me to an idea that I can do more 30-day challenges in the coming months, which I'll document here as well.
2026-02-01 02:02:00
Like others, I've noticed a bit of tension in the Bear community recently. I know we can all be a bit protective of our little internet space, especially when it contains our private and sensitive thoughts.
Blogs are often used as an outlet for posting things we might not say offline. Perhaps it's because we want to talk about things that don't interest our real-life friends and family. Perhaps we worry our views could be seen as offensive or unwelcome. Perhaps we just want to rant to nobody in particular. Or perhaps we're afraid, with opinions that could put us at risk of real harm.
Of course, when we dump all our varying thoughts into this virtual soup, we're never going to agree on everything. We can't see body language or truly understand intent. We don't know how hard it was for someone to write that post.
What we read in a blog is one tiny snippet of a person's life, at a single point in time. The words are all we have to go on.
I used to be very sensitive to criticism. As someone who struggles with poor self-esteem and social anxiety, it’s hard to take it on the chin and walk away. I am generally non-confrontational and absolutely hate conflict, but I also have a strong urge to stand up for my beliefs and opinions.
Nowadays, if I read something that upsets me or that I disagree with, I take a step back and ask myself "will responding to this achieve anything positive or productive?" Nine times out of ten, the answer is no. So I just breathe and let it go.
I also remind myself that it's very rare a person is intentionally being cruel when being critical. They might take a tone that you don't like, or be a little brash with their opinion, but perhaps that's just the way they speak and they'd probably be mortified to know they'd genuinely upset someone.
When one writes a well-constructed critique, it tends to be a good thing as it encourages further thought and discussion. The intent isn't usually to try and bully or censor the original poster.
I'm actually quite glad that Bear doesn't natively offer a comments system, because that's an easy (and very public!) way to respond in a heightened emotional state. By needing to send an email instead, it gives time to consider what's been written and form a more reasoned reply - by which time you may have changed your mind about responding at all.
We don't have to censor ourselves, or quit blogging. We're allowed to throw our random thoughts into the wind - so long as we remember that occasionally those thoughts will hit someone, and that person might not feel the same way.
So this post is really just a gentle reminder to be kind in our responses, to welcome feedback and constructive criticism, and to please keep contributing to the lively discussion that makes a small community like Bear such a nice place to hang out.
2026-01-31 23:20:00
While I was laying down to take a nap today (yes I take a nap every afternoon) I started thinking about what a fucking shit show social media is and how in my opinion it is destroying society.
Social media as we know it today started in 2003 with MySpace and was then overtaken by Facebook and has progressed to what we have today. I was born in 1945, which means I lived the first 58 years of my life without social media. At 81 now, I've had a front-row seat to watch what it's done to society over the past two decades. My introduction to personal computers was in the mid-1980's. I had a Compaq portable that was my work computer and a Commodore 64 that I bought and used at home. I've always been fascinated with computers and considered tinkering with them a hobby that I still enjoy to this day.
People born after 2003 have never known life without social media, which is a shame. Life was so different then, and honestly, simpler in ways that matter.
What We Had Before
Back then, we actually experienced boredom - and that wasn't a bad thing. Waiting in line at the grocery store or sitting in a doctor's office meant your mind wandered. You thought about things, came up with ideas, daydreamed. Now everyone just reflexively grabs their phone the second there's a quiet moment.
If you had a disagreement with someone, you had to work it out face-to-face or over the phone. You couldn't hide behind a screen or fire off a nasty comment and walk away. This meant actual conversations, real conflict resolution, and learning how to regulate your emotions when talking to people.
Your social world was the people physically around you - neighbors, coworkers, friends from local organizations. You invested in your immediate community because those were the relationships that mattered in your daily life. There were no parasocial relationships with strangers halfway across the world.
News came at specific times - the morning paper, the evening broadcast. You could stay informed without being perpetually anxious about every crisis happening everywhere all at once. And here's a big one: privacy was the default. Embarrassing moments, youthful mistakes, stupid things you said - they weren't permanently archived and searchable. People could reinvent themselves, move on from their past, grow without dragging everything behind them forever.
My Commodore 64 and Compaq portable were tools that enhanced what I could do without demanding constant attention or messing with my head. They didn't buzz at me all day or make me feel bad about myself.
The Damage We're Seeing
The mental health crisis, especially among young people, is staggering. Depression and anxiety rates have spiked dramatically since social media became widespread. Constant comparison, cyberbullying, fear of missing out, seeking validation through likes - it's created a generation struggling with basic self-worth.
Truth itself has become slippery. When the business model is engagement over accuracy, misinformation spreads faster than anyone can fact-check it. People end up living in completely separate realities based on whatever their algorithm feeds them.
And let's be honest about what these platforms really are - they're engineered by some of the brightest minds in tech to be addictive. Infinite scroll, variable reward schedules, notification systems - all deliberately designed to hijack our dopamine systems and keep us scrolling. It's not an accident that you can't put your phone down; it's the intended outcome.
The algorithms promote whatever triggers strong emotions because outrage drives engagement. This pushes people toward extreme positions. Nuance and thoughtful discussion die because they're boring, and boring doesn't keep people on the platform.
We've also surrendered an unprecedented amount of privacy. The data harvesting and behavioral manipulation happening behind the scenes is staggering. We've become products being packaged and sold to advertisers.
And now we're seeing particularly disturbing developments like the Grok AI issues on X, where the technology is being used to create non-consensual intimate imagery - including of children and women. This isn't just another social media problem; it's a tool being weaponized for sexual exploitation and harassment. The fact that this technology exists on a platform claiming to champion free speech while enabling the sexual exploitation of children shows just how morally bankrupt things have become.
I'm not saying we need to go back to the Commodore 64 era - technology has brought amazing things too. But social media as it exists today? It's not making us happier, smarter, or more connected. It's doing the opposite, and I think more people are starting to realize it.
2026-01-31 16:02:00
There’s been some discussions about the Bear upvote button lately. In short, it’s about hiding the upvote button to free your mind from count concerns.
I can fully understand that, and I sometimes do it myself for shorter periods when things start to feel a bit too much.
I’m sure most Bear users know that it’s possible to disable the button by adding the make_discoverable: false attribute to any post or page. But this also means:
So, display: none to the rescue. Well, it’s not a perfect solution, to be honest. There are some concerns from a usability and general “web-hygiene” point of view, the main ones being:
Not a deal-breaker, but it’s one of those technical details where “easy” and “clean” aren’t quite the same thing.
What I’m proposing is a dashboard setting for disabling the button, while still letting the post appear on the “Most recent” page. It feels reasonable to me, and I don’t believe it clashes with the spirit of Bear. It would fit nicely together with the analytics settings:
Collect analytics: [X]
Disable to not collect read analytics
Allow upvotes: [X]
Disable to remove the upvote button
Well, that’s my two cents in the discussion.
Upvote button or not, keep on blogging.
Update: A reader kindly pointed out that display: none actually removes the button from rendering and accessibility. That was news to me, and I appreciate the clarification. For those curious, the MDN docs explain this well.
Still, as the original discussion showed, it’s possible to upvote if someone really wants to. That’s why a proper setting feels like the cleaner option.
2026-01-31 06:51:00
I subscribe to the discovery feed of bearblog, I realised there was one after signing up, I was pretty pleased there was one as it seemed a good place to discover new voices - and it is! - and to get a pulse on the people that value simple and privacy preserving blogging like me, so it went among few dozens other feeds in my RSS reader.
All good right? Well yes, articles are mostly interesting, not too many that it becomes spam in my reader, and I found couple of blogs I started to follow already.
I am quickly realising there is another (dark?) side to this website, a community?, something self referential, I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I’m not sure if I’m up for that part too.
Today one post (A) I got to see was about another post (B) on this platform that has criticised the content of the bearblogs, something along the line we are all boring as hell (guilty as charged!), well then the guy (B) crashed-out because of backlash (!?) and deleted the post and the blog (???), other people ( C) started commenting on it, and God only knows how many words have been said analysing this already (lots of platitudes for what I could read, first of all mine).
It’s fun, it’s a bit like inside baseball), but what is going on? Is there lore at bearblog? Are there tiers of creators? An implicit editorial line?
Another one (or maybe two different post?) was about upvotes: people hiding the functionality, people upvoting people that don’t want upvotes, people feeling the pressure of not getting enough upvotes and writing to get them… why!?
I don’t care, it’s fun to read, but I’m not gonna be a card carrying member of whatever that is.
I’m open to discussion, people can call out my bullshit, I’ll read it (if I find it) and might reply, but, and this is true, I write this for myself, I speak to you as you exist, but right now as I type this, it is just me and my screen, in one year it will still be just me and my screen, if you read it it will be just you and your screen at that time.
Spoilers: you’re reading “The Old Man and the Screen”!
And really, why would it be any other way?
I don’t know you, I will never know you and I don’t want to know you, and I’m expecting the same from you.
What I want is to know what you say, what ideas you have, why you have them, what you find beautiful, what you find awful, what was that thought you had while sipping coffee and reading the news (remember the smell of newspapers & coffee? No?) - those are the things I care about, those are the things I’m looking for, and in return, as some blogging karma I let you poke around mine.
I guess all I got to say on this is: more writing, less drama, isn’t that what a (bear)blog is for, after all?
24 hours after the initial post: I find it hilarious that this post, out of all the amazing posts that have been published on this platform today, it is this post, that got to the top of the trending page - actual lmao
When I was speaking of “there is another (dark?) side to this website, a community?, something self referential” - this is it!
How else do you explain that the most interesting topic discussed on bearblog - according to bearblog trending algo - is bearblog!?
I’m new here, so maybe it has always been like this? In that case the trending RSS feed lost a lot of credit in my book, or maybe is just a trend and I managed to embed myself on the platform at the right (wrong) time. Time will tell. 🤷♂️