2026-09-14 02:01:36
We often are told about NPCs/locations/adventure elements to say, "What does this want?" But, this can be boring - "He wants more money." Make that want desperate - "He wants more money to pay off the assassin aiming a sniper rifle at him right now."
2026-09-14 00:59:36
required listening
FIRST LP! by AutobahnsI went on reddit's front page this morning to try and monitor the impending collapse of civilization and what do I see? AskReddit: Cancer survivors of reddit, what was the moment you first realized something was seriously wrong with your body?
As a hypochondriac and general anxious person I should've known better. But I clicked it anyway. What did people experience before finding out they have cancer?
Uh oh...
2026-09-14 00:36:45
Taken in September 2025
Today marks us celebrating your first birthday without you. We're extremely broken about it, but determined to do all of the things that you loved to honor you, including eating all of the chicken dishes.
I wish you were here to celebrate with us. I wish we could give you all of the birthday treatos, watch you get excited about boiled chicken, and watch your mom take approximately 500 photos of you because she could never get enough.
Instead, we'll carry you with us like we always do. We'll talk about our favorite stories, look at all of our favorite pictures of you, and probably cry a little lot. We will find ways to make sure your birthday still feels like your birthday, even if you're not physically here to celebrate with us.
Happy 15th birthday, baby girl.
We miss you every day, and we'll keep celebrating you for the rest of our lives.
53 days without you and not a day goes by that I don't think about you.
I love you, Cocoa.
2026-09-14 00:11:00
I’ve been writing here for a few months now. There’s really no rhyme or reason to anything I’m doing. I don’t care about improving my writing or building an audience. I just write for the hell of it. Ars gratia artis.
But I’ve caught myself slipping. I’ve been checking the little upvote count at the bottom of my posts. I find myself looking over the Discover pages to see where my posts sit in the rankings. I wasn’t thinking much of it, this social-media-fication of blogging, until I read Laura Michet’s post reflecting on her two years here.
She has some strong opinions that I don’t necessarily share, but they were thought-provoking nonetheless. At first, I got all sanctimonious and thought, “Just don’t check Discover then,” but then I realized my hypocrisy. And then I got to thinking, which rarely does anyone any good.
I deleted most of my internet presence long ago. I even deleted LinkedIn after some women I knew from high school, now divorced and bitter, realized I might be a catch after all and got weird. Reddit continues to be a problem, and I go through phases of deleting accounts and then returning with vows of self-moderation. I even deleted my chess accounts after realizing I was obsessed with rapid games and talking shit. “Mate in two, you Turkish douche!”
And now Bear Blog. What started as a journal people were free to stumble upon is slowly turning into a blog that I want people to read. I don’t want to be like that. It’s another thing on my mind and it’s unnecessary. It defeats the purpose.
So, first off, I’m going to remove the count from the little icon down there. Additionally, I’m going to limit myself to the Discovery RSS, because I still like reading y’all’s nonsense. Well, most of you; I’ve been hiding anything with a cross and a Bible verse. They’ve been increasing in number lately and I have feelings about that.
I don’t want to care if you read this. So, I’m not going to. While I do like the occasional human interaction, it’s always available via the Contact link in the nav bar up there.
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With that out of the way, on to the lazy Sunday ramble. Mei (aka Mei-Mei or Mei-chan), my beautiful Bombay, missed the memo about today being the one day of the week I can sleep in. How is she so good with time? At 6:30 AM, she was standing on my chest, staring into my soul, demanding wet food.
My wife took care of it, which allowed me to drift off again until nine. Then came coffee and an Egg McMuffin, which seems to have become our Sunday morning tradition. The neighborhood is especially quiet because it’s suburban Texas and most of these dorks are in church. The Mormons across the street head out early, presumably in their holy underwear, to secure their own planet, or whatever other goofy doctrine drives them.
We’ll need to do some grocery shopping for the week, which I dread. I hate going. My wife just stands there and stares at stuff, as if we don’t get the same things every week. Otherwise, reading and gaming are all I really want to do today. If the boy has other ideas, I’ll be happy to oblige, of course.
And then tomorrow it’s back to work. The mind-numbing routine. The boredom and the apathy.
2026-09-13 23:14:35
A lot of my posts have been about reducing my use of technology and leading a more analog life. It's something I've been trying since Trump won the 2024 presidential election, and it's something I've been trying pretty hard at since I realized I didn't want to upgrade my iPhone... ever again.
My success at this endeavor has waxed and waned over the last few months. Sometimes I'm almost entirely offline (obviously work and certain obligations necesitate the Internet) for days or weeks on end; sometimes I'm on social media as much as ever.
My most recent bout of sickness has made it all a particular challenge. It's hard not to spend a lot of time on your phone when you don't have the energy for anything else.
But it is those periods of greatest "success" that are the biggest challenge to my goals, here. It doesn't really feel as great as I think it should.
One big problem is that I've always been somewhat tenuously connected to society: I don't follow a lot of pop culture, I don't know a lot of people who do, I didn't go to high school and I was an older college student, I don't use conventional social media even when I'm going on an Internet bender, I don't have a lot of real life friends and acquaintances from a lot of diverse backgrounds and beliefs. When I'm offline, I really don't know what's going on on the world. I hardly know anything that's going on outside my own head and my kids' last meal.
It's not loneliness I feel; having work and kids and related obligations is more than enough to meet my basic need for socialization. This is a disconnect that gets more eerie the longer it goes on.
The other problem is I like technology, and the Internet. That's always been my problem. I've been obsessed with reading what's happening on the Internet since I learned what it is, when I was 7 years old, in 1992. I blame the Internet for a lot of the terrible things that have been happening in recent years, and I know I'm not wrong about that. But these things are largely the fault of Big Tech and algorithmic social media, and honestly, why should I change, when they're the ones that suck?
I need to find a middle path here, but its tough! I'm going to focus on the web experiences I enjoy, and the services I get a lot of use from. I enjoy my homelab a lot so maybe I'll try to self-host more things. There's a lot of possibilities with technology. I haven't exhausted them all yet.
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2026-09-13 22:21:56
I think it’s time to say goodbye.
When I started this blog, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. It became a place where I could experiment, learn, and, in a strange way, step into the lives of other people for a little while. There was something genuinely interesting about that, entering someone else’s world and seeing how they experienced things.
I’m grateful for that experience. I learned a lot from it, and I’m sure I’ll keep learning from it for a long time.
But lately, I’ve been feeling that it belongs to a different moment of my life.
24 hours a day has been not enough to live. And when I look at the next few years, I see too many projects, too many things I want to explore, and too many things I want to make. I want to put more of that energy into my own work. Into my own ideas. Into becoming more inspired by myself, rather than constantly looking for inspiration somewhere else.
There’s also something else I’ve been thinking about.
At some point, I created a persona around this blog. Someone obsessed with retouching, with making things better, with constantly improving the image until it finally became right.
I don’t think I ever really became that person.
Sure, I got better. I learned a lot. I improved in ways that I’m proud of. But I never reached that imaginary point where everything suddenly made sense and the work became effortless.
And I’m okay with that now.
Maybe that point was never supposed to exist.
Maybe life isn’t about finally getting everything right. Maybe it’s about making things, trying things, getting a little better, getting tired, changing your mind, and moving on when something no longer fits.
So this is me moving on.
Thank you to everyone who spent time here, read something I wrote, followed along, or simply found something useful or interesting in this little corner of the internet.
It was a really interesting experience to be here.
I’m leaving with a lot more than I came with.
And, for now, I think that’s enough.
Thank you, and see you somewhere else.