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.
2026-03-12 23:00:00
Not knowing what to write about is probably one of the most common blogging struggles. Believing you have nothing interesting to say.
The reality, though, is that you most likely have quite a lot to share. There’s a forest of stories hiding behind the trees.
I think interesting is one of the biggest misconceptions. What actually makes something interesting? It’s getting a glimpse of something new to you in one way or another.
My daytime job is doing house inspections. If I tell a colleague about the bats I saw yesterday in a tight crawl space, that person won’t find it very interesting. It comes with the job.
If I tell the same story to someone who might not even know what a crawl space is, let alone have been inside one, that person might find it very interesting. A tale about a world they didn’t even know existed.
When you think you have nothing interesting to say, that might be true. But only from your perspective.
Someone else out there will think it’s an intriguing read. Not everyone, but some will, guaranteed. That’s all that matters.
So please open the door and invite us into your world.
We want to have a peek. We are interested.
2026-03-12 21:37:00
I’ve run three blogs before this one and they’re all dead. And all for the same reason: a post became popular, attention arrived, and I froze.
For a writer, a hit changes the room. You quickly stop writing for yourself and start writing for an audience (with imagined expectations). You stop exploring and start performing, and that next post can become impossible. You feel you need to match the last one, and repeat the success.
So you polish, you wait, you doubt. Drafts pile up, unpublished. And with a burgeoning drafts folder the blog silently dies.
My last post – "I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21" – did well on Hacker News and the Bear Blog discover page and got a lot of traffic.
Right on cue, I froze. I could write, I just couldn't hit "publish". Weeks went by without a new post. And I learnt yet again that success doesn't always breed confidence, but fear.
I reached out to Robert Birming, who seems to write a few posts a week without fail. He published his advice to me on his blog:
I don't think my blogging doubts ever will go away. I just try to accept that that's the way it is and probably always will be.
Every time we've hit the publish button, the imaginary worst-case scenarios have never become reality.
Essentially, the doubt never goes away – you just need to accept it and publish anyway. The only antidote is a deliberate indifference to the outcome.
So that's what this post is. My previous post distilled 34 years of my life's lessons. This one is more ordinary. And that's okay. I'm killing any expectation by refusing to wait for perfection.
My advice to my fellow writers is this: the next post doesn't need to match your last one. It just needs to exist.
2026-03-12 20:30:00
today's realization: i don't draw enough of what i enjoy!
if you go thru any of the public platforms where i share my art, you may notice a large gap between the last time i shared an illustration and the most recent one. going thru my private sketchbook will give you the same conclusion.
over the past few years, there is a noticeable decline in the quantity of work that i finish (and share). the quality's going upward tho! which is great! but still, i'd like to draw more. at this point, i'm very envious of my 15-year-old self, who keeps finishing sketchbooks within weeks of buying them. last year's sketchbook took a year and a half to finish.
so! starting this month, i am intentionally making myself start AND finish an illustration within the day! it doesn't have to be polished (even when i want it to be) and it doesn't even have to be amazing (even when i want it to be). it just has to exist!
and to make things easier for me, i drew illustrations featuring my own original characters. somehow i keep forgetting that i love drawing my ocs, and then i act surprised when i remember. drawing what you enjoy is actually freeing??? imagine that??
this post is basically just showing them off.
my favorite trope is when one continues to look fondly at their angry partner
they don't have names yet. i just like figuring out how they'll interact with each other. i don't know anything about them aside from the idea that they're classmates during the 1960s in the philippines. (uniforms probably wouldn't look like that in the 60s; i just drew my high school uniform from memory)
one may have (accidentally) influenced the other to start smoking.
(points) this one's my favorite...
one of my reasons for focusing on strength-training was so that i can lift my partner into a princess carry. i'm not able to do that yet without breaking my back (or other parts), so these two get to do it for me.
initially, this was supposed to be their wedding. but green looks cuter on them. either way, these two are adorable! i imagine this was during a "kasalan ng bayan" (a public and free mass wedding) in their town. one of the brides threw a bouquet, and the guy caught it. his friends tease him about it, and the woman, unfazed, lifted him up.
he raised his bouquet triumphantly, and they ran out of the venue, with the guy still in her arms, laughing all the way.
see, it still surprises me how drawing these scenes and writing about it just brings out joy that i can't find anywhere else. this post is primarily a reminder for myself to keep doing what i love. i hope it encourages others to do the same for themselves.
i'm using krita, which meant that i no longer have access to my usual brushes in clip studio paint. at the same time, it means i have access to exploring different brushes from the community! here's what i used in each piece:
for the 2nd piece, i used one of the default basic brushes for coloring. both illustrations were layered with a cardboard texture from tomb of null's set.
happy making! :>
2026-03-12 14:26:34
This something that I have been unwinding out of my system - this underlying feeling that doing anything creative needs to be monetized.
Don't get me wrong. This is a great time in the world for artists to have these different outlets online to actual make money with their art. Given, there has been some ups and downs with those outlets in recent times. There was great upheaval at one time with artists when IG changed the algorithm. Etsy was once a place where you could find hand-made, artist created products. Now it's inundated with drop shipped products from China and AI generated art. Pinterest used to be one of my favorite places for images and see artists' work, and now it's mostly ads and AI generated art. And those are just three platforms. I'm sure there have been changes in other places where artists used to share their work.
But that's not REALLY what I want to talk about. There's always been talk about "turning your hobbies into a business", especially over the past years where it's technology has made it easier and easier to sell things and services to people all over the globe. This has opened up a lot of opportunities for people.
Over the past years I have listened to so many "make money online gurus", watched countless videos of people making "passive income" by turning things they enjoy into products for sale, and felt the ever increasing need to "monetize", etc, etc...
I recently realized that my brain was wired to think that anything I created must be monetized. Anything and EVERYTHING. Yeah, it sounds like a big leap. To me it doesn't make sense. But here I am. I couldn't do anything "just for fun." Creativity wasn't creativity for creativity's sake. Not anymore.
So that's part of what I am unwinding with this blog. This blog is literally just for fun. And expression. And creativity. And connection might be nice. There's nothing major at stake with this. Especially in this space. I'm not trying to get views. I am not trying trying to get "Likes" on my posts.
Although, me being a week or so in, it's kind of refreshing to see that people actually at least saw my post. And some read it. And some toasted. And some even wrote me an email. It's an entirely different feedback loop, in a different kind of echo system. The attention doesn't translate to dollars. And that is quite freeing.
So that being said, I had fun today messing around with the theme of the blog, making little updates, figuring things out. And these are fun things that I find rewarding. For the sake of the fun of it. For being able to solve a puzzle. For just being able to create, just for the sake of creating.
And now I have created this post.
End of transmission.
2026-03-12 05:21:00
At work, I have to use AI.
Let's not argue that "have to" can be worked around, and that no one has gotten into problems for not using it. I generally do what I am told to, I am not the type to protest.
A few days ago I have tried to pick up a personal project I started six months ago: its use-case came up again, with much more narrow scope, so it was actually achievable.
And man, was it painful.
Portion of it could be attributed to my nostalgic choice of using Sublime Text 4 instead of PyCharm. Without intellisense, I had to look up more of the Python's standard library than usual, and I have made a few syntactic mistakes I do not think I should have done.
But what was even worse, it felt really exhausting. To write out every line by hand was like trying to walk in a viscous liquid that sticks to your legs. My brain hurt.
It was not like sugar which you can fight by not buying those snacks when doing groceries. It felt like a literal withdrawl. I got nervous, my focus was gone, and so was clear thinking about what I was trying to achieve.
I am aware this was not the only thing that was different. At work, I am contributing to major projects that have had most of their architectural and technical decisions made a decade ago.
Greenfields done by myself for myself have them all unresolved, and it may contribute to that uneasy feeling.
But the fact I craved AI, not a stable project I would be improving upon, points me at the direction I have described above.
And I have got no idea what to do about it. My job is my dealer and until the whole system collapses, it will not stop inviting me to take more shots.