2026-04-14 05:59:00
I gotta be real, the list of Bad Places™ I'd like to leave behind has been growing for years and seems to only be expanding. To the point where it feels too overwhelming to even get started. Which is why I haven't as much progress in that area as I'd like to. Enter: DI.DAY (website currently only available in German, other languages "coming soon")
DI DAY, or Digital Independence Day happens every first Sunday of the month and is a call to leave some of the billionaire owned, quasi-monopoly tech-platforms controlling our lives in favor of smaller, more open alternatives.
A perfect opportunity to get started crossing some points off of that to-leave list, so I've decided to dedicate that first Sunday each month to one of those oh-man-I'd-like-to-I-just-never-get-around-to-s. And when that is too much, when it's a bad day, when an entire day is overwhelming, at least do a little something, or get started on it. Some transitions need a little time, aren't done in just a day, but can be easy to get started with.
This month I've installed VSCodium - an alternative to VSCode. Though "alternative" is kind of underselling it. It IS VSCode, minus Microsoft's tracking and "AI"-pushing. The code of VSCode is open source, but the app itself is not. You could just head on over to GitHub and build VSCode from source, VSCodium exists so you don't have to.
How this is going to go we'll have to see. I'm going to need some day-to-day time with it, check if I'll run into any deal-breakers. One of the benefits of VSCode is the vast ecosystem of extensions and plugins, which should work with VSCodium, but some are only licensed to be distributed through Microsoft's store. I can't really think of anything where I'm expecting this to be a problem, I have no plans to install Copilot, in fact, it's one of the things I want to get away from, but you'll never know what else this may apply to.
This has been my first DI-Day, and it's certainly one of those small steps ones, but you gotta get started somewhere.
Oh, and I also moved my website from a big name, overpriced, under-featured, upselling, AI-pushing, traditional webhost to Bear, that should count too, right?
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2026-04-14 00:16:00
Having a hard time coming up with ideas for what to blog about?
Maybe you just need a little push in the right direction. Something to get you past that writer's block.
Here are three great topics to get you going:
Don't overthink your blogging.
It's your blog, write about whatever you feel like. Your blog is not a billboard, it's a friend. And true friends can talk about anything, right?
Whatever you write about, no one else could have written it. Because you wrote it from your perspective, from your corner of the world, based on your life experiences.
Now go write. Nobody else can.
2026-04-13 22:33:00
Egg in photo was consumed by me at a restaurant located a few blocks from Taipei Main Station.
2026-04-13 22:10:00
Recently, I learned the term "hurry sickness," the compulsive exigency to race time, to chronically chase after the Next Big Thing in hopes it would save me. (Note: We tend to confuse this with "ambition.") I'm not cynical, but I often treat the present as an obstacle to survive rather than a period to fully inhabit.
These days, I find myself mourning being nineteen. At least I was a university freshman and had no career anxiety from a shitty job market! But I was miserable at nineteen. I hated being nineteen, but now at twenty-five, I look back at this period of my life with a nostalgic tenderness that would've baffled my teen self (Another note: Memory is a stealthy editor that buries the dread and keeps the soft parts).
Which means my future self is already doing to right now. These days, I've been convincing myself I'll finally enjoy life when I start my career and run a successful newsletter and become a successful artist. I wonder if me at thirty-five will say: Remember when you were twenty-five and felt like you had all the time in the world?
There's a version of you, years from now, who would give almost anything to be back inside this exact moment. It's not a particularly beautiful moment, but it's yours and it's now, and this version of you realizes something you didn't back then: everything passes.
I’m not interested in toxic positivity, of feigning the hard parts aren't hard; but perhaps I need to let this chapter to count. The side projects slowly taking shape, the feeling I can be anything right now, the skills/experiences I’m accumulating — these are becoming the past I'll one day miss. Your older self isn't asking you to be grateful every single minute, but rather not to sleepwalk through your life, constantly waiting for more!, more!, more!.
2026-04-13 14:48:00
It's been a thrill to read coverage today about Victor Orban conceding the election to his opponent. I don't know enough about Hungarian politics to know much about Magyar, but it's been great seeing reporters translate what people over there are saying. In particular I liked this quote recorded on Bluesky.
Perhaps Magyar's most important promise, and the one that certainly resonates with voters: "never again a country without consequences!"
The crowd chants: "To prison! To prison!" [with the corrupt officials of the outgoing government]
Re: the situation in the US, I posted previously about Peter Shamshiri's blog post about the need for retribution. I am comfortable calling it revenge, rather than retribution; in situations like this, you gotta let the people take revenge. To heal from a moral wound like this, you gotta show the people their tormenters going to jail, losing their wealth, crying for mercy and not getting it, and so on. You have to commit really hard to showing people that the rules have changed.
I hope Hungary gets this! They deserve it!!
2026-04-13 09:54:30
Hi my name is deadcore. While my LinkedIn profile might make it look like I have it all together, in reality, I really don't.
It looks like I have a "strategy" for my career. In reality I've been putting on a blindfold, starting a chainsaw, spinning around in a circle, and throwing the chainsaw and seeing where it lands.
I'm also ultra-paranoid because this is the internet and I'm a girl, and we all know the internet seems to hate us. Not sure why. Girls are awesome. Boys are awesome. Humanity is awesome, mostly. Except for some of us.
Thanks for reading my first post on bearblog.