2026-03-13 23:29:44
I used to laugh when I saw people "liking" their own posts on social media. It seemed silly but honestly the +1 is a reminder that you like your own stuff.
That's why I appreciate that Bear Blog defaults to one toast after we publish. Thank you for that, Herman. It's a perfect reminder that if I'm wanting to leave an impact with my writing, then at least I've already touched one soul: my own.
2026-03-13 23:10:40
The title is slightly clickbait, as I'm not 100% sure when exactly I originally started this. I've been on here for a while before I became Absurd Pirate, with this blog going under a different name, but I figured it was close enough to the 1 year mark.
So, this is my obligatory 1 year on bear post.
I first found bear because of a video that has since been deleted with the title of something to the effect of "Beginner's Guide to the Personal Web", which is the video where I discovered sites like Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, Neocities, and of course Bear.
I started with just making my Neocity, and it's gone through several redesigns with the current design being the one I am still working on as of now (as slow as it's going). Eventually I thought it would be fun to start a blog. I dabbled in content creation for years, starting all the way back in like 2011 when I was in middle school, inspired by channels like JohnCJG and Shane Dawson (before he got nuked for being a creep). I was like 12 at the time, made some videos here and there before making one video that got so much hate (a video where I took cardboard and made "juggernaut" armor from it) that I decided to quit and hadn't returned since.
Now I'm a grown man with a mostly developed frontal lobe, and wanted to get back into posting things. I didn't have social media, and was kinda longing for that sort of internet show-and-tell. So, I created my blog.
As mentioned above, this blog originally went under a completely different name. It actually had my IRL name in the title, but decided later on to adopt the Absurd Pirate name. The blog originally was just me yapping about random stuff in my life, hardly anyone read it. I posted pretty infrequently and then went on a bit of a hiatus for about a month or 2, give or take.
I came back and wanted to sort of reinvent myself on this blog. I got inspired by the naming convention of Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, and so sparked my neocity site Absurd Pirate's Internet Lounge. I then had my blog follow suit which is now Absurd Pirate's Internet Blog. I kinda like this naming convention, kinda reminds me of various video games like Sid Meier's Civilization/Pirates, American McGee's Alice, and so on. My personal channel on the Matrix server for the Grizzly Gazette is Absurd Pirate's Matrix Bedroom.
My first post on the newly rebranded blog was posted June 9th, 2025. Where I detailed the process I took with quitting social media and the positive effects it had on me.
I was a big fan of Ava's blog, I reached out to her at some point asking her questions about how she designed her blog. Things like how she added the little latest/popular posts feed on her home page. She was really helpful and I attribute that moment to being the reason I stayed on Bear.
I wrote pretty consistently, often multiple times per week. Just writing about things I enjoy or life events. Recalling my journey using Linux, going to a protest and escaping a shooting, cackling like a maniac after running over a traffic cone on purpose, shit like that. It felt nice just to get things out with the possibility there is someone out there who would relate and which could potentially spark an internet friendship.
That day would come when I wrote the article detailing all my relationship fuck ups. I got reached out to by some dude named Cris. He mentioned how he related to the post, and invited me to join this little club on discord. I was hesitant at first, I have a tendency to be cynical and thought "yeah, what's the catch?". But when he mentioned that Ava and Kami were there, I decided to hit the fuck-it button and join, and I'm really glad I did.
I had previous interactions with Ava and Kami over email, but joining this little club had me a little star struck as I was a huge fan of both of their blogs and they definitely had viewership that was 10x mine at the time. It felt like interacting with a local celebrity.
I became the 10th member to the Simple Chats discord server.
On the first of September, I brought up to the group about a fun idea of starting a collaborative blog in the spirit of Machinima from back in the day. Where each person has a sort of topic they cover and we all add it to one website. This idea is what snowballed into The Grizzly Gazette. We decided on things like the name and such democratically, Ivan began working on the theme, and Kami worked on our ability to submit posts via email. We launched the Gazette 5 days later.
This little project quickly blew up on Bear, even getting a seal of approval from the man himself, Herman. My post 'Upgrading by Downgrading' was my first post to ever hit trending. I even sparked my first drama on here by replying to Herman's post about Piracy. Essentially biting the hand that feeds. It became a sort of inside joke in the discord server for a bit that Herman essentially has a dart board with one of my avatars pinned to it.
Overall, the project was a pretty big success and it was a joy to write on. I haven't posted there in a while, haven't really thought of an idea that I thought would fit, one day though.
I began to find my voice and writing style. I feel like my early writings were a bit too formal to really sound like 'me'. I started to experiment and let loose on my writing style and try to be as authentic to myself as I possibly could.
My first post on my blog to hit trending I think was my post You're not a "high value" man, you're just a prick. I think this was where my blog started to grow the most. About a month later I wrote my take on the Performative Males trend which also blew up. This was when people started to reach out to me via email, and it was really cool talking with people who liked my work enough to reach out. I'm so used to the internet being a hostile environment that his was a breath of fresh air.
Our friend Cris, the man who introduced me to the community of great people, decided to exit stage left on the internet to prioritize his mental health. Can't say as I blame him. It was sad to see him go, but I hope he's doing well.
By this point the little community of Simple Chats had grown, functionally doubling in size since when I first started, due in large part to the success of the Gazette.
I wrote a post titled your self worth isn't on trending, which ironically got onto trending. This was partially a talk to myself, because I was starting to see some popularity on Bear and didn't want to let that get to my head or diminish my self worth/reasons for blogging in the first place.
My post with the most views to date was the one I wrote in regards to the influx of posts that seemed to be hitting trending which basically was just Hacker News garbage. It got cross-posted and I actually had a brief moment of anxiety where I thought I was gonna have these tech bros wanting my nuts in a jar. Thankfully nothing like that came about.
2026 rolled around, had a few more posts hit trending that I didn't know about till way later. I don't normally know that my post is on the front page of discover until I get a message from one of my friends on here or just randomly check back on a post one day and see it's got like 30+ upvotes.
I started doing more political takes after getting fed up with right-wingers on here talking about shit they clearly know nothing about. With 2 posts going back-to-back on trending. One I think was my most openly hostile to the point it got downranked from the front page. One more dart on the dart board I suppose.
My 2nd heat of drama came from the 2 political posts I made around the time of the whole Trump and Greenland fiasco. These were the ones are what made me realize I'm considered one of the "big ones", or at least that was what one person on their blog said criticizing my post for bullying "the little guys". I was kinda confused because I never really saw myself as that and kinda thought the notion was laughable. I can't remember who exactly, but someone on the server pointed out (after I made a jab at the notion that I'm some sort of micro celebrity), that even they considered me a micro celeb on Bear, similar to Ava. Which still sounds weird to me.
There's an often reoccurring joke on the server that I'm in this back-and-forth competition with Ava to see who can get the most posts on trending at one time. Which is not something I ever thought would come around when I first started blogging on here.
My first post to ever hit 100 upvotes was why i love my low-traffic blog, which in hindsight is a bit ironic with even Suliman joking that I'm not exactly "low-traffic" with the readership I seem to be getting. He even marks this as the point at which my blog really started to take off.
I then proceeded to write 2 more posts that hit trending, basically making back-to-back-to-back posts to hit the front page.
I don't think all that highly of myself. So for me it always comes as a shock when a post of mine hits trending because I just feel like I write stuff and just throw it out there. I basically write everything in a single sitting and hit post, often coming back to fix typos that Kami points out. I just say shit and sometimes it strikes a chord with people on here. Can't wait to see a post titled "I'm tired of Absurd Pirate Slop".
Got into my 3rd heat of drama from yet another round of political posts I commented on. It kinda started with someone writing a braindead take that ripped on my wee boy Mono that Suliman proceeded to rip into. That person then replied to Suliman ripping into him. The back-and-forth got shared in the discord server, so me being me I decided to verbally dropkick this asshole. They tried to play the victim like all rightoids with their pathetic pearl clutching about hurling insults at them. They have no problems spitting hate, but when they get rightfully called a douchebag they get all butthurt about it. It's basically that scene in the Bee movie where that lawyer starts stirring shit, gets stung, and then starts being over dramatic rolling on the floor. That's what these piss-for-brains-wannabe-fascists act like.
This seemed to spark several other people commenting on the situation, all windmill dunking on this person. Wrote another post that kinda became a sequel to the previous post that served as a rhetorical T-bagging.
And that brings me to now. God what a journey it's been.
I guess I wanna first thank you for reading all of this. It was kinda fun going back down memory lane, pulling up old discussions from the server and looking back at some of the posts I wrote.
This blog has grown in a way that my older self wouldn't believe, barely seeing over 10 upvotes on a good day to now regularly seeing 50+. I just wanna thank you personally if you've enjoyed my writings, for all the people that reached out via email, the people that signed my guestbook and wrote in my neocities chat, all of it really does mean a lot to me.
I sometimes read emails I get from people who read my blog to my wife, which sounds silly I know, but I hope that shows how much I really do appreciate all of it.
I love this platform, I love it's simplicity, and I love the community it's fostered.
I write for the love of the game, and I hope that reflects in my writing. I have no plans of ever stopping this blog. I've had way too much fun with it, and it's been a place for me to find some catharsis.
So here's to 1 year on bear, and to many more to come.
Previous |
Reply via email: [email protected]
woke up this morning not wanting to get out of bed. My wife and I got new bedsheets that are luxury hotel soft. I like sleeping a cold room so that I can bundle myself all warm under my weighted blanket and the comforter. Coupled with my recently acquired buckwheat pillow that has functionally fixed waking up with neck pain, I sleep pretty soundly at night these days. So when my alarm went off the thought of "do I really need a job?" popped into my head. If the lure of the One Ring feels anything like trying to pull yourself out of your comfy bed in the early morning, I fully understand why Frodo kept falling prey to it. I've been slacking on my journal a bit as well. I tend to keep it in my work backpack, but that is probably the worst place to put it for my ADHD brain with its tendency to go into the out-of-site-out-of-mind pattern. Oh well.
2026-03-13 20:23:00
I haven't had much time to truly live lately. Between work and housework, there's not much time left for anything besides spending time with my girlfriend and playing with my cats. It's not a complaint, but I often say I need 36-hour days.
Like any other human being, I find joy in certain activities: photography, games, drawing, music. Somehow we always try to fit our hobbies into our lives, even if it means watching a movie during my lunch break.
Next Sunday, a mini pool table arrives at my house, and I'm obsessed with it. My Magic: The Gathering deck, is already set up.
So what exactly is stopping me from doing what I want?
Perhaps the answer is uncomfortable: nothing.
Maybe the only thing between us and what we enjoy is the constant feeling that hobbies are a luxury, something we should only do after all the world's responsibilities are resolved.
But the truth is, that moment never comes.
There will always be something to do. Some bill to pay. Some problem to solve.
If you wait for life to be organized enough to have fun, you might end up waiting forever. Maybe fighting for our hobbies is precisely about that, protecting our small fractions of free time before the world takes them from us.
Even if protecting those fractions is a game of pool on a tiny table in the living room.
2026-03-13 20:19:00
Back in 2024 we went to China for a trip to see my sister who was living in Guangzhou at the time, along with my dad, his partner, and Sofia (my partner), and we spent a few days travelling around the country to parts unknown and generally having a good time.
One thing that struck me was that, my goodness, people there absolutely were glued to their phones. Old, young, everything in between: it was just wall to wall TikTok scrolling, except the Chinese version called “Douyin”. I’ve never seen anything like it. The amount of truly mindless scrolling was unfathomable and at times fairly hard to watch.
We also saw many people trying to make their living on the platform. I’ll never forget the person standing on the bank of the Lijian river as we drifted by, who had no less than three different tripods with, naturally, three different phones, all streaming their dancing antics while they were dressed in local regalia and, by all accounts, seeming to be having a fairly good time. Whether or not that was just for the cameras is another story.
I want to add that I really respect people putting in the effort to create, I just wish it didn’t have to contribute to something that clearly, at least to me, is a problem that is getting worse and worse.
However, the mindless compulsion of the end users to flick their thumbs ever upwards culminated in one of the funniest and honestly, most disturbing, and indicative moments I’ve had in a very long time.
We were on a train going somewhere (Lanzhou I believe) and of course, the Tikety was in full swing from 98.4% of the passengers. Naja, I guess the landscapes outside the window were a tad barren, but I digress.
We were just a few minutes from the station, and doing the usual hubbub of standing up, awkwardly getting our bags onto shoulders or making sure rolly bags are taking up the entire walkway, and after all that is complete, I find myself hovering behind a young man who is sitting down at his seat, with his phone (or was it his second phone) out on the foldout table in front of him.
I can clearly see the screen and he’s on donyuan (obviously). He is, at that moment however, not looking at the phone on the table, which is, on repeat, showing one of the most perverse things I’ve seen.
On the screen is a small Shiba Inu dog, facing away from the camera, showing its butt directly to the cameraperson. Then, the persons hand appears in frame, index finger extended out like a finger gun, and they proceed to insert said finger directly into the dog’s anus, to which the dog is obviously not impressed, turning back toward the camera with teeth bared. The video ends and starts again.
I am stunned. It’s not just me standing there, there’s people all around him, and he’s busy completely checked out on the other phone or what have you, so it takes a few cycles of said video before I watch the back of his head slowly pivot towards the phone on the table, followed by a comic-level panicked jump in his chair as he rapidly reaches for the phone to lock the screen.
I am dying behind him trying to contain my laughter.
He clearly did not mean to do this. In fact, I doubt he ingested more than one of the last 3,562 tikkos he’d watched for the past hour, and probably most of them were innocuous enough to leave on the table while he tried to remember what universe he was currently situated in.
Despite being hilarious and something I immediately relayed to our fellowship the moment we got onto the platform, this felt like such a clear example of the colossal waste of time that EVERYONE we saw was engaged in. Shit, at least there was that one person creating something, but my god, when you’ve scrolled so far your just watching animal abuse videos, at what point do you say, “perhaps I should uninstall this…”.
I don’t care what you do, but I do hope whatever it is you are doing is fulfilling to you. If that’s scrolling until you find yourself watching some fuckwit fingering a dog, then may god have mercy on your soul (theirs: I don’t know). If you’re not fulfilled, then all I can say is that a hobby here or there never hurt anyone, but endlessly absorbing that much shit is robbing you of any discoveries you’re yet to make for, and about, yourself.
Seeing all that in China, and it’s clear parallels in Germany (albeit not nearly to the same levels), have really pushed me to pick up my old hobbies, start new ones (this blog for example), and generally just do anything that reminds me that it’s not all just scrolling that needs doing because everyone else is.
Happy Friday!
2026-03-13 01:32:00
I wish I did. I love people, and there are SO many people in cities. But the smell, the noise of machines, the rampant surveillance (though flock is bringing that to suburbs too), the obvious civic mismanagement that has people begging on street corners... I don't like cities.
(can you tell i don't feel very well today?)
2026-03-13 00:01:00
It often feels like I spend most of my writing time using a keyboard, but I also have a fondness for nice pens, and an obsession with notebooks.
My day-to-day pen is a black-ink gel Japanese Muji 0.5mm. However, if I want to savour the writing moment I always select a fountain pen.
I have a few to choose from but I generally reach for a very special, hand-made creation.
A friend, who is a very talented wood turner, surprised me a few years ago with it. He selected a fallen branch from a storm ravished tree in my garden and fashioned it into a pen.
It has a beautiful weight, is well balanced, and feels natural in the hand.
Of course, it's pumped full of green ink — my only choice in a fountain pen.