2026-01-28 18:19:00
There are a few times I run across a Bearblog without an upvote button. Fair enough, some people really don’t do well with having metrics in their faces telling them how their posts did in the public eye and it becomes a burden more than a helpful tool or insight.
I remember reading a post a bit back about finding a roundabout way of still upvoting them regardless of the measures OP put in place to stop getting them. And I remember thinking: Is this okay?
To me, I’d feel like my very clear boundary was disregarded. Like someone had snuck in through an open back window and rifled through my underwear drawer. When someone doesn’t want to be touched and they tell you so but you do anyway because you think you’re being “helpful”, that isn’t okay. So no, I don’t think that this is okay, either.
Boundaries don’t stop being boundaries just because they’re digital and “unseen”. If someone removes a feature for peace of mind, they’ve made a choice; and that choice deserves the same respect we’d give in any other space.
Reading can be appreciation enough. And if they have an email, maybe send them a line too.
2026-01-28 13:01:30
Two-hundred and fifty years is a pretty decent run, all things considered. Still I cannot help myself from lamenting over the end of the empire. It's a strange duality of spirit being both a veteran of the United States military and frequent detractor of the military industrial complex. I am proud of my service. My reasons for joining may have been a bit idealistic, or romantic at the time, but at the core of my being is the duty to serve others.
I was a victim of American exceptionalist propaganda. I bought the narrative laid out in our carefully manicured history books in school. I indulged in the American film industry. Whose shilling for the military in war films (Jarhead, Saving Private Ryan, etc.) and non-war specific films (Transfomers, Marvel, etc.) alike gave them incredible PR.
I grew up in the post 9/11 world. The government told us we were doing the right thing. That the war on terror was a necessity. They used lies about WMDs to topple unrelated nations. But at the time...it seemed like a good idea.
I didn't join the military to fight terrorism. I did it to, in my mind, pay my dues to society. To give something back to the nation I loved. To be in service to others. I signed a check to the government payable up to, and including, my life. It still cost me more than I bargained for. I sacrificed more than I could explain easily in a blog post. But suffice to say I left the military without my physical or mental health intact. Some of my friends paid the ultimate price, so I reckon I got off pretty clean. But what did I get for my sacrifices?
A nation that has forgotten herself. A nation that puts a criminal and a traitor back into the highest seat of power. So he can wipe his ass with the constitution on a daily basis. I get a Veteran Association gutted and dysfunctional. I get to see the mask come off. For the nation to reveal themselves to the world for who they have always been.
There is no going back. Our reputation on the world stage cannot be restored. Our allies are moving toward other, safer avenues. And when we need help, far fewer will come to our aid.
I hope the 65% of veterans that voted for Trump have had an enlightenment.
2026-01-28 04:27:00
hi! welcome to my website!!
right now it's still kind of ugly, but i realized you can just write html in posts and pages. there's also an option to customize css. that makes bearblog a website maker! and you also get a nice blogging system too.
so yeah i want to try to make a fun site that's similar to those cool neocities ones! wish me luck!
that's all for this update, thank you for reading!
2026-01-28 04:05:00
I’ve noticed that most conversations don’t really start anymore, they’re triggered.
Someone sends a TikTok. A reel. A screenshot of an Instagram post. We react to the thing, maybe exchange a few lines about it, and then the conversation just dies as soon as the content runs out.
It made me realise how rare it’s become to just… talk. To text about anything and nothing. To rant and rave about something that’s happened in our lives. To just say hello or how you doing without a prompt, or to check in without a goddamn link attached.
I watched a video recently where someone switched to a dumb phone and gave everyone their number. Out of the whole friend group, only one person actually texted it. Everyone else texted their iPhone and just waited for a response instead because what they wanted to send wasn’t a conversation, it was just a piece of content.
And I’ve noticed the same thing in my own life. Conversations that start with something being shown rarely turn into genuine connection. It’s shallow and superficial and once I’ve responded to what I’ve been sent, well… there’s nothing left to say.
It makes me wonder how much of our social lives now are built on sharing things instead of sharing ourselves. We’re always “on”, always reachable, and yet somehow more distant than ever.
Maybe that’s why so many of us feel lonely? Because we’ve replaced talking with… forwarding.
2026-01-28 01:42:00
Wake up. It's 5:20 am. You're still tired from the night because your daughter is sick and you spend half an hour cleaning vomit off a Pikachu plush. You hear the sound of Lease by Takeshi Abo, a familiar song if you circle niche aesthetic forums. It brings a slight bit of comfort in the otherwise existential dread of the routine you stumbled into. The rut.
You didn't make a rut, you stumbled into one that was premade for most people like you. The rut was already made by people who existed long before you.
Loving wife, beautiful daughter, a comfy desk job with full benefits, and a salary that's just big enough for said wife to be able to stay home and raise your daughter.
You feel this dichotomy. By seemingly most measures of societal success, you've won the game. It's all side-quests from here. So why does it feel hollow? Is it because a significant part of your life is taken up by the mundane and exploitative nature of corporate America? The fact you spend most of your life either asleep or working for a group of people so out-of-touch with the needs of the people they deem beneath them? You've gone through this thought pattern before you've even brushed your teeth.
You get dressed in attire that you hope screams "I refuse to participate in this masquerade", kiss your sleeping wife, and walk to the garage. You get into your boring car, turn it on, look for what album you want to listen to for your hour long drive to your cognitive labor camp while the car warms up.
There's almost a dissociation that occurs between the half hour mark and the near-end of you commute. Lapses in consciousness that make you wonder how you even got there if you look it in the eyes. Only ever seemingly disrupted by cars with headlights that were engineered to make even Stevie Wonder think it's too bright. I am Jack's burning retinas.
You arrive at your office. You take a light puff of your THC vape pen, a jingle from a Serj Tankian song plays in your head:
anti-depressants controlling tools of your system. Making life more tolerable, making life more tol-er-a-ble.
You walk out into the city, it's quiet. No surprise, it's not even 7am yet. It feels almost like a liminal space to your liminal space between home and home. You get inside and walk to the kitchen for water, making sure to check and see if your boss's boss is out. If he's out, leave an hour early. If he's in, 15 minutes early.
He's in. 15 minutes it is then.
You're earlier than basically everyone else, so nobody can tell you're skipping out early. It's like playing hooky for a class where the teacher barely knows you exist.
You've zoned out by this point, entrenched in doing literally anything else other than work. You check the news. Another person killed by ICE. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. You go onto YouTube to get something out of anything.
It's now somehow 9am. Either because of the THC in your system or you've slipped into another state of unconscious consciousness. Have your ADHD meds kicked in? You can never really tell.
Meeting, followed up by another meeting, followed up by another meeting to extend the previous meeting. Is this all there is?
You get around to doing some work, it's done in less than an hour, but you gotta make yourself look busier than you are. I am Jack's sore office chair-fused ass.
It's 12pm, lunch. Brief period to take your headphones off and soak in the mundane conversations of people on your floor. Waffles with 18g of protein that taste just like eggos. Another kid is sick, you almost wonder if they indirectly got your child sick. You eat at your desk because it's one of those days where your coworkers aren't hanging out in the lunch area.
You get done at around 1. Now to just survive the longest 1 hour 30 minutes of your life. You wish time moved as quickly now as it seemingly did in the morning.
You reply to most messages received via Teams using the default generated responses. It's almost as if even it knows this shit is mundane.
You start to visualize an elevator interaction with the CEO of the company you work for, where you proceed to verbally rip her apart for her obtuse return-to-office policy. You're angry that you spend more time doing things you don't want to do for people that don't matter instead of spending that time doing things you want to do with people that do matter. You used to be so optimistic about work.
It's ironic actually. You spend the same amount of time on Teams calls in-office as you did work from home. It's almost like the whole "it's to promote more in-person cooperation" is just another example of corporate double-speak.
Somehow, the hour-long 10 minutes finally pass and you get the hell out of there. Same hour-long commute just backwards. You go 15mph over the speed limit like the rest of left lane traffic, keeping an eye out for cops.
It is now an unbroken dissociation between work and home. What have you even actually done today? What are you going to do with the rest of your day? Northbound traffic is clogged for reasons you can only theorize based on the presence of police and highway assistance vehicles that come after a car accident.
Exit freeway, find the rest of your way home. You finally get to the best part of your day. Despite your little girl being sick, all she wants to do for the next 3 hours until bed time is play with you. Is this why work exists? To make you appreciate the limited time you get with loved ones? They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. I am Jack's burning hatred for corporate America.
Seems like you've just begun when suddenly it's time to put your daughter to bed. Where did the time go?
You cherish a moment that you know won't last forever. Sitting in a rocking chair, singing to your sleepy girl. You put her in her crib and kiss her goodnight.
You walk out, wife is studying for her classes in the bedroom, again. You almost take it personally, but you remember why you have frequent date nights.
You go sit on the couch in your office and turn on the TV to play video games for an hour. You're well past exhausted. 8:30 rolls around and you decide to go to bed early. Your wife is still studying. You finally drift off to sleep at 9-ish.
This isn't every day, but it's more often than not your day.
Welcome to my world. Poor me, right?
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can you tell I wrote this while bored at work?
2026-01-26 21:12:00
Average is a perfectly neutral word.
But what if someone were to call your life average? What would you feel?
In statistics, average is a descriptive tool. It does not praise or condemn, it simply names a reference point. In large datasets, someone will always fall near the centre of any measured scale let it be life expectancy, income, height, someone has to sit in the middle. But when we take this concept out of mathematics and apply it onto human lives, a tool for describing data turns into a judgment of one's worth.
Humans love comparing themselves. Numbers fascinate us because they simplify complexity. But simplification has a cost. It leads to rewarding extremes: exceptional beauty, exceptional success, and expectational failure - especially in mass media. What it leads to is the erasure of average. The middle becomes synonymous with invisible.
Once your sense of self depends on your position on a graph, average stops being a description and becomes a threat. If you are not above, you feel below even when you aren’t.
However, human life is not one variable. You can’t average curiosity, loyalty, humor, moral courage, values, or the way someone notices small things. Compressing a person into a single metric always produces a lie, even if the math is there.
The fear of being average is really the fear of being told your life didn’t matter. But meaning isn’t assigned by percentile. It’s generated by what you do, what you refuse, what you protect, what you care about.
The real tragedy isn’t being average. It’s wasting your life chasing numbers that were never meant to measure your worth.
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