2025-11-28 23:10:00
You’re sitting at a table. In front of you, a series of plates. They’re full of shit (like some people). Not the same shit, mind you. It’s different types, produced by different animals, in different quantities. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that you have to eat the contents of one of those plates. Yeah, it sucks, I’m sorry. But you just have to.
So you understandably start going through the thought process of figuring out which one is the “best” one. You start examining the shape, the texture, the animal that produced it. You start finding reasons to pick one over another. You start rationalising, trying to justify your decision to the other people who, like you, also need to pick which one to eat.
It’s a process. A shitty one, I might say. But in going through this ordeal, you start losing track of the only thing that really matters: this situation fucking sucks, and there’s no good answer. The only reasonable thing to do is to pick the plate with the least steamy, smelly, nasty pile of shit and then figure out a way not to find yourself in that situation ever again.
Sometimes eating shit is unavoidable. The only thing you can do is make it as painless as possible.
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2025-11-28 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Karen, whose blog can be found at chronosaur.us.
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Hello! My name is Karen. I work in IT support for a large company’s legal department, and am currently working on my Bachelors in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance.
I live near New Orleans, Louisiana, with my husband and two dogs - Daisy, A Pembroke Welsh Corgi, and Mia, a Chihuahua. Daisy is The Most Serious Corgi ever (tm), and Mia has the personality of an old lady who chain smokes, plays Bingo every week at the rec center, and still records her soap operas on a VHS daily. My husband is an avid maker (woodworking and 3D printing, mostly), video gamer, and has an extensive collection of board games that takes up the entire back wall of our livingroom.
As for me, outside of work, I’m a huge camera nerd and photographer. I love film photography, and recently learned how to develop my own negatives at home! I also do digital - I will never turn my nose up at one versus the other. I’ve always been into assorted fandoms, and used to volunteer at local sci-fi/fantasy/comic conventions up to a few years ago. I got into K-Pop back in 2022, and am now an active participant in the local New Orleans fan community, providing Instax photo booth services for events. I’ve also hosted K-Pop events here in NOLA as well. My ult K-Pop group is ATEEZ, but I’m a proud multi fan and listen to whatever groups or music catch my attention, including Stray Kids, SHINee, and Mamamoo. I also love 80s and 90s alternative, mainly Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and Garbage.
And yes, I may be named Karen but I refuse to BE a “Karen”. I don’t get upset when people use the term, I find it hilarious.
So I have been blogging off and on since 2001 or so - back when they were still called “weblogs” and “online journals”. Originally, I was using LiveJournal, but even with a paid account, I wanted to learn more customization and make a site that was truly my own. My husband - then boyfriend - had their own server, and gave me some space on it. I started out creating sites in Microsoft Frontpage and Dreamweaver (BEFORE Adobe owned them!), and moved to using Greymatter blog software, which I loved and miss dearly.
I moved to Wordpress in - 2004 maybe? - and used that for all my personal sites until 2024. I’d been reading more and more about the Indieweb for a while and found Bear, and I loved the simplicity.
I’ve had sites ranging from a basic daily online journal, to a fashion blog, to a food blog, to a K-Pop and fandom-centric blog, to what it is today - my online space for everything and anything I like.
I taught myself HTML and CSS in order to customize and create my sites. No classes, no courses, no books, no certifications, just Google and looking at other people’s sites to see what I liked and how they did it. My previous job before this one, I was a web administrator for a local marketing company that built sites using DNN and Wordpress, and I’m proud to say that I got that job and my current one with my self-developed skills and being willing to learn and grow. I would not be where I am today, professionally, if it wasn’t for blogging.
I’ll be totally honest - I don’t have a writing process. I get inspiration from random thoughts, seeing things online, wanting to share the day-to-day of my life. I don’t draft or have someone proof read, I just type out what I feel like writing.
When I had blogs focusing on specific things - plus size fashion and K-Pop, respectively - I kept a list of topics and ideas to refer back to when I was stuck for ideas. That was when I was really focused on playing the SEO and search engine algorithm game, though, where I was trying to stick to the “two-three posts a week” rule in an attempt to boost my search engine results. I don’t do that now. I do still have a list of ideas on my phone, but it’s nothing I am feeling FORCED to stick to. It’s more along the lines of that I had an idea while I was out, and wanted to note it so I don’t forget. Memory is a fickle thing in your late 40s, LOL.
My space absolutely influences my mindset for writing. I prefer to write in the early morning, because my brain operates best then. (I know I am an exception to the rule by being an early bird.) I love weekend mornings when I can get up really early and settle into my recliner with my laptop and coffee, and just listen to some lofi music and just feel topics and ideas out. I also made my office/guest bedroom into a cozy little space, with a daybed full of soft blankets and fluffy pillows and cushions, and a lap desk.
In all honesty, my preferred location to write is at a coffeeshop first thing in the morning. I love sitting tucked in a booth with a coffee and muffin, headphones on and listening to music, when the sun is just on the cusp of rising and the shop is still a little too chilly. That’s when the creative ideas light up the brightest and the synapses are firing on all cylinders.
Currently, my site is hosted on Bear.
I used to be a self-hosted Wordpress devotee, but in mid-late 2024, I got really tired of the bloat that the apps had become. In order to use it efficiently for me, I had to install entirely too many plugins to make it “simpler”. (Shout-out to the Indieweb Wordpress team, though - they work so hard on those plugins!) Of course, the more plugins you have, the less secure your site…
My domain is registered through Hostinger.
To write my posts, I use Bear Markdown Notes. I heard about this program after seeing a few others talking about using it for drafts, notes, etc.
I honestly don’t think I’d change much! I really love using Bear Blog. It reminds me of the very old school LiveJournal days, or when I used Greymatter. It takes me back to the web being simpler, more straightforward, more fun. I also like Bear’s manifesto, and that he built the service for longevity.
I would probably structure my site differently, especially after seeing some personal sites set up with more of a “digital garden” format. I will eventually adjust my site at some point, but for now, I’m fine with it. (That and between school and work, it’s kind of low on the priority list.)
I purchased a lifetime subscription to Bear after a week of using it, which ran around $200 - I don’t remember exactly. I knew that I was going to be using the service for a while and thought I should invest in a place that I believed in. My Hostinger domain renewals run around $8.99 annually.
My blog is just my personal site - I don’t generate any revenue or monetise in any way.
I don’t mind when people monetize their site - it’s their site and they can do what they choose. As long as it’s not invading others’ privacy or harmful, I have absolutely no issue. Make that money however you like.
Ooooh I have three really good suggestions for both checking out and interviewing!
Binary Digit - B is kind of an influence for me to play with my site again. They have just this super cool and early 2000s vibe and style that I really love. Their site reminds me of me when I first started blogging, when I was learning new things and implementing what I thought was cool on my site, joining fanlistings, making new online friends.
Kevin Spencer - I love Kevin’s writing and especially his photography. Not only that, he has fantastic taste in music. I’ve left many a comment on his site about 80s and 90s synthpop and industrial music.
A Parenthetical Departure - Sylvia was one of the first sites I started reading when I started looking up info on Bear Blog. They are EXTREMELY talented and have an excellent knack for playing with design, and showing others how it works.
One of my side projects is Burn Like A Flame, which is my local K-pop and fandom photography site. I actualy just started a project there that is more than slightly based on People and Blogs - The Fandom Story Project. I’m interviewing local fans to talk about what they love and what their feelings are on fandom culture now, and I’m accompanying that with a photoshoot with that person. It’s a way to introduce people to each other within the community.
Two of my favorite YouTube channels that I have recently been watching are focused on fashion discussion and history - Bliss Foster and understitch,. If you like learning and listening to information on fashion, I highly recommend these creators.
I know a TON of people have now seen K-Pop Demon Hunters (which I love, and the movie has a great message for not only kids, but adults). If you’ve seen this and are interested in getting into K-Pop, I suggest checking out my favorite group, ATEEZ. If you think that most K-Pop is all chirpy bubbly cutesy songs, let me suggest two by this group that aren’t what you’d expect: Guerrilla and Turbulence. I strongly suggesting watching without the translations, and then watching again with them. Their lyrics are the thing that really drew me into this group, and had me learning more about the deeper meaning behind a lot of K-Pop songs.
And finally, THANK YOU to Manu for People and Blogs! I always find some really great new sites to check out after reading these interviews, and I am truly honored to be asked to join this list of great bloggers. It’s inspiring me to work harder on my blog and to post more often.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
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Make sure to also say thank you to Adam Keys and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-11-27 16:40:00
TL;DR: I hate having spare time, and I decided to launch another newsletter called Dealgorithmed. Will start on January 1st, delivered every 1st and 15th of every month. It’s gonna be a discovery newsletter focused on the personal/independent/whimsical/indie web.
I spent the last 15 years of my life working on the web, coding all sorts of sites for all sorts of people. Part of me loves the web, while another part of me hates what the web is becoming. One thing I refuse to do, though, is give up on it. This idea I see floating around that the web is dead and we should just give up the whole project and start from scratch makes absolutely no sense to me.
Yes, a huge chunk of the web is unbearable to use at the moment. Yes, an enormous percentage of sites are impossible to navigate without ad blockers. And yes, AI is not making the situation any better and also yes, I am so goddamn tired of hearing AI talk nonstop everywhere all the time.
All that is absolutely true. But that’s not all the web there is out there. The web is vast. It’s probably impossible to say with certainty how big it really is, but the Internet Archive recently celebrated 1 trillion pages archived. Yes, that’s trillion with a T. You know how long it would take to count to a trillion if you could count one number every single second without ever stopping? 31000 years.
The fact that people keep browsing the same 3 sites, day after day, getting served content by algorithms controlled by 3 companies is such a shame. Because there is so much interesting content out there ready to be discovered. And discovering new content also means connecting with new people, getting exposed to new ideas, different cultures. That’s by far the best quality of the web if you ask me.
The problem many people are facing is how to find that content, how to escape the algorithmic bubble. I think the only answer to that is curation. The vast majority of people on the web are lurkers which means someone has to spend time herding content and collecting it somewhere for others to consume.
Over the years, I realised that it is probably the only reasonable contribution I can give to this cause. I’m already doing this with People and Blogs, slowly composing a list of people—and blogs—worth following and engaging with. And I’m also collecting content both on the blogroll and on the forest.
If I already have these, why start something new you might be wondering. There’s a reason for this. Two actually. The first reason is that I hate having spare time, apparently. And if I have to burn myself to the ground in front of a screen, I might as well do it while doing something fun and useful. The second—and more serious—reason is that all those projects have some limitations. P&B moves slowly. It’s a weekly series, which means you’re discovering at most 5 new blogs a month. Yes, there are links on those interviews, but still, this is a slow-moving project. The forest and the blogroll, on the other hand, require intention. Those are sites you need to visit in order to discover new content, and we all know it’s a lot more convenient when content comes to you, rather than the other way around. Which is why I decided to start another newsletter.
The goal with Dealgorithmed is to provide interesting content gathered from all around the web in a convenient package delivered in your inbox twice a month. Content that you can then use as a starting point for your own internet explorations. If all this sounds compelling to you, feel free to sign up. The first email should land in your inbox on January 1st.
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2025-11-24 18:50:00
There’s something unique about visiting WW memorials. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s a strange mix of awe, sorrow, gratefulness, and many other feelings all bunched together.
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2025-11-21 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alexandra Wolfe, whose blog can be found at wrywriter.ca.
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The People and Blogs series is supported by Juha Liikala and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club.
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I’m a viviparous, mammalian, carbon-based biped — a veritable fossil from a bygone age sometimes referred to as the Good Old Days. Though, to be honest, that’s debatable to the nth degree. I was born in Germany to British parents and moved across the planet every 2-3 years, all of which seemed very natural to me at the time. Apart from studying for 3 degrees (I never finished any of them) I did several years in the military ostensibly as an air traffic controller. I then somehow stumbled from there into the print & publishing trade and made a comfortable living working on books and magazines. I even rubbed shoulders with a few names over the years, which in and of itself, was pleasantly entertaining.
Being in the publishing trade allowed me to indulge in a number of my fav hobbies, including publishing a couple of scifi ezines over the years, run a Star Trek club, hang out at several scifi and comic cons, and meet the stars and writers of many of my fav scifi shows.
I still have the photographic evidence to prove it.
I didn’t so much as decide to blog as stumble into it, like many back in the days of LiveJournal and MySpace, we all just followed the crowd. It then seemed logical (at the time) to upgrade from a MySpace account to bumbling around with HTML creating a static website that was then quickly superseded by me creating an official ‘Blog’. At that point I was using the then new Wordpress software. It was, for me at least, revolutionary. Suddenly, everyone was blogging about everything.
It’s at that point I think I bought my first domain name: wrywriter and used the dot com version till right up till a few years ago when I added the dot ca version and, sadly, let the dot com version lapse. Though now, I wish I had kept it.
Now, I still have the name, but have moved away from Wordpress and blog ‘lightly’ using Bear Blog and Micro Blog to scribble and share my thoughts on. Clean, small, simple and more focused on the actual writing and less on the tweaking and tinkering. Both platforms suit my current needs.
I’m not sure I have a process per se. I don’t plan posts, and don’t jot down ideas. I’m more of a pantster, I stare at the blinking cursor only when I feel like I have something to say. Whether that be some random thought I had over breakfast, a news item I want to respond to, or a response to someone else’s post. I don’t do research, or make drafts, or have endless notebooks full of ideas. Unless we’re talking about short stories or ideas for novels.
Blogging, for me, is more about spontaneity.
I would have to say that physical space can and probably does influence how anyone writes. And that we all have our own particular quirks and eccentricities when it comes to our writing environment. I like mine to be quiet, clean, and minimal. There are a few toys I have at hand I play with, but other than that, it’s me and the keyboard, and a large screen.
You’re asking a dinosaur who somehow lived long enough to stumble into a Jetson’s future what my Tech Stack is? Excuse me while I consult someone smarter than I am about what a tech stake might look like.
Oh, you mean where did I buy my domain name and that sort of thing? I want to say Porkbun because I just love saying Porkbun. But no such luck, I sourced my domains here, in Canada, with WHC.ca and, at one time I had hosting with them, that is, till they kept putting their prices up. I also got very disillusioned by Wordpress so moved full time to Bear Blog and Micro Blog.
I use Bear for more long form rambling posts and post my daily thoughts over on m.b. which is more suited to sharing said drivel on social media.
I find this a bit of an odd question, my experience is based on what I went through, that ‘living’ experience of places and spaces that no longer exist, so of course, in the here and now, it would all be different. I would probably start off with a simple blog on Bear or the Pika platform and skip the likes of Blogger and Wordpress altogether.
The web might be obsessed with money, but I’d say most bloggers are not. I’m not interested in monetising my blog, nor am I interested in reading blogs that are focused on making money. I avoid them like the plague. If someone quietly, and respectfully asks me to support their writing, however, with a discrete ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ button, then I’m almost always happy to make a donation.
There are so many great blogs about at the moment, but some of my current fav reads are:
I would humbly suggest you ask David Johnson of Crossing The Threshold for an interview. David lives in Hawaii and always has some thoughtful posts to read on his blog.
There are many things I’m always working on when it comes to writing projects. I do love to scribble. You can find more over on Alexandra Wolfe (alexandrawolfe.ca) and read my daily posts over on the Wry Writer (wrywriter.ca).
For those of you out there who love reading fantasy, I stumbled upon a great series by Robert Jackson Bennet starting with, The Tainted Cup and followed by A Drop Of Corruption. I sincerely hope there’s more in the series.
Some fun websites people might like to check out:
And finally, I would like to extend a big thank you to Robert Birming for suggesting me to join in this amazing series, People & Blogs, and an even bigger thank you to you, Manu, for asking me to take part. I feel honoured to be among such an esteemed alumni.
Much love,
Alex
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 117 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Cory Gibbons and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-11-17 00:15:00
I keep hearing and reading people bitching and moaning about the web being dead, lamenting the good old days of the web, when real people were out there, and sites weren’t all about promoting some shit nobody cares about or attempting to amass an audience only to then flip it in exchange for money. And I’m sitting here, screaming at my screen «That web you’re missing is still here, you dumbdumb, you just have to leave your stupid corporate, algodriven, social media jail to find it».
This past Friday the interview with the lovely Nic Chan went live on People and Blogs. Her site has something mine does not: analytics. And they're public! That offered the rare opportunity for me to see the effect the series has on a featured blog.
This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying. And see that bump on Nic’s analytics made me so happy. Because it means the series is working and doing its job. And it’s all because people like you are taking the time to read these interviews and click on those links to visit those blogs. And maybe you’re also taking time to reach out to those people and connect with them. This is the web many people are missing, a web that is, in fact, still here, very much alive. Y’all are great.
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