As you may have gathered from the fact that you’re reading something on it, I have a website! And guess what? You should have one too!
You see, back in the early years of the internet, most folks who were technically savvy enough did have their own personal websites. The web was a weird, colorful, and wonderful place to visit and browse for a while. Even corporate websites were filled to the brim with clashing colors, flashing animations, and the horror we now know as the font Comic Sans. It was a digital era full of creativity and free expression. It was also one of the earliest examples of decentralization on the web… Something that more and more people, like myself, are gravitating toward.
Building a website could be this easy!
Wikipedia defines “decentralization” as: “the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those related to planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and given to smaller factions within it.” If you’re looking for a modern example of decentralization on the web, look no further than the micro-blogging platform Mastodon. Rather than being hosted on a single company’s servers, Mastodon is made up of several servers hosted by its users on their own equipment. This means that users are directly in control of their own data, and some super-rich billionaire bro can’t come in and purchase Mastodon because it’s already distributed to the public.
Building your own website, in many ways, helps alleviate the stress of social media, or could maybe even help you eliminate it. Even though it has its dark sides, I love the internet and how connected it has helped us all become. So I didn’t ever truly feel like I could be completely without an internet presence of some kind. And being the technical, computer-heavy user that I am, building my own websites and blogs has come naturally. I’ve had one off and on since I was in my teens. The best part about having this website, for me, is that I can still write about my life and interests and post photos and other media without it being connected or networked to everyone else. My posts don’t automatically show up in your feeds, obnoxiously reminding you to read them, it’s true. But you know where to find me if you ever do find yourself missing me or my content.
That helps a lot with the feeling like I’m “out of the loop” with all my former Facebook and Xitter friends. And any time that I start feeling like I might miss Xitter, I log into my old account, take a gander at my feed, and immediately “nope!” right back out. Do I secretly hope that Elon will eventually give up on it, and someone else is able to revive it back to its former glory? You better believe it! But just in case that unlikely event never comes to pass, I’m hoping to keep this space for as long as possible. It’s my way of expressing myself and creating content in a way that is authentically me, just like the Mastodon post I shared up above states.
And quite frankly, I’d love to see you all express yourselves in similar ways! That’s my totally selfish way of advocating for you to build your own website, but it’s valid nonetheless. 😉
💡 Interested in building your own website?? I’m more than happy to help! Feel free to get in touch.
Edited on 11/21/2025: When I launched this campaign last weekend, I made a mistake and set everything up via Tiltify, a fantastic charity fundraising tool commonly used by streamers, because I was under the impression (from Twitch’s own wording in their announcement post) that they would count toward receiving the chat incentives (badges, emotes, etc.), but it turns out that is not the case!In an effort to resolve the issue, I’m transferring the campaign from Tiltify to Twitch’s native charity tools. Any further donations made on Twitch should now award chat incentives! I’ve also lowered our goal from $250 to $200 since we’re now a week into the campaign. You can still donate at any time, only now you can do so directly on my Twitch channel page. Any and all “donate” links and buttons around this site will also be updated to reflect that change! Many, many apologies for the confusion!
I’m excited to announce that I’m participating in my very first livestream charity campaign!
Many of you already know that I spend three nights a week livestreaming on my Twitch channel. In fact, in case you missed it, this very website now has an entire page dedicated to those streams, and you can monitor when I’m live on the homepage! It’s pretty cool, they are a lot of fun, and it’s absolutely one of the biggest extensions of my passion for creating things on the web, so naturally, it should be featured pretty prominently here. And now, I’ve decided to take it up a notch and give something back this holiday season!
I’m going to be participating in Twitch’s own Together for Good campaign, presented by Wicked: For Good, this year. My channel specifically will be raising funds for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) beginning now through December 2nd. While I will still humbly accept any support from the community in the form of subscriptions, tips, and bits, I’m asking that you instead donate to this cause that’s very close to my heart. As an animal lover, I believe that we share this world with them, and they deserve to feel safe and loved just like all of us do. The ASPCA works to make that happen for as many neglected, abused, and homeless animals as possible here in the United States. Together, we can hopefully make a difference.
My Twitch Together for Good charity livestream schedule.
In return, Twitch and Wicked are offering up a bunch of extra perks! I could potentially be featured on the front page of the website, which in turn, helps new viewers and potential donors find us. And those of you who donate or share clips from our charity streams will earn fun things like chat badges, emotes, and more! Plus, you just might see me get forced to try some weird gaming challenges, catch cameos from my kitties, or try an odd-flavored candy cane or two during an 8-hour streaming marathon that I have planned on Black Friday (November 28th)!
If you have no interest in hanging out during our streams but still want to help out, not a problem! You can donate to the campaign fundraiser any time before December 2nd. Also, since I know some folks are already spending a ton of money during the holidays, you can help out simply by hanging out in the stream chat whenever we’re live or sharing and amplifying the campaign! Since I still have such a “smol” community, my initial goal is to raise $250 for the ASPCA, but if we happen to smash that goal and go above and beyond… Even better!
Hope to see and hear from you all soon. I can’t wait to get started! ❤️
If my mom were still around, she would be making kids cry on Fortnite.
Unfortunately, however, my mother passed away in 2000 from cancer when I was still pretty young. But one of my favorite things about her, that most assuredly carried on in me and in my two siblings, was that she was also a gamer. She was a fan of some of the earliest video games, including the very first game in The Legend of Zelda franchise. Before Nintendo Power, internet walkthroughs, and official players’ guides were even a thing, she was not only making her way through each dungeon and collecting pieces of the Triforce, but also mapping them out by hand. On graph paper and in excruciating detail!
Despite all the resources at our fingertips today, I still wish that I had those original handmade maps. I don’t feel like the hardcore gamers that exist today would ever even believe that a working mother of three played a video game at all, much less enjoying it and progressing through it enough to be that dedicated. And so many times in the years that have passed, when we’ve failed to maneuver our way through an instance in World of Warcraft, she would be rallying us back in fighting shape immediately… Whether it was a school night or not! And you best believe she would have been pwning every noob in those Mythic+ dungeons on the daily.
And that could translate to just about any game she set her sights on. She was a big fan of classic puzzle games and tabletop games, too. Don’t challenge her to a game of Yahtzee! or Clue unless you want your ass beat. She was very polite, thoughtful, inclusive, and very loving, but she’s also who taught me this important life lesson: “Don’t get mad, get even!”
Her birthday just recently passed on November 4th. I miss her a lot and often wonder how our lives would be different if she were still here. Not just in the ways the gaming industry has changed, but also maybe in the ways she would have helped change it. But also, as weird as it is to realize, she’s now been gone for more of my life than she was around for, and I wonder what it would have been like to know her as a fully-formed adult. If you can even call me that. But one thing I’m glad for is that her love of gaming eventually became my love of gaming. I’m glad that, as a small child, she let me ”help” her play by pushing buttons on the unplugged controller next to her. It’s one of my earliest and most fond memories of her, that I somehow managed to absorb into my Jello mold of a brain, because it’s also one that I hope I never forget. ❤️
A few days ago, I was walking somewhere and noticed myself doing “the shuffle.” You know the one: where your entire weight seems to shift between legs the whole way because something is creaking and painful somewhere. My sister, who came from Indiana like the rest of us, likes to refer to it as a “hitch in your get-along,” which is somehow the most Kansas any of us has ever sounded. When I finally paused, I thought about how I’m going to be forty-one (!!!) in March.
41!
I’m still reeling from having entered my forties in the first place. I don’t think I’ve ever been someone who has cared much about a person’s age, except for myself. I distinctly remember being a kid and thinking that 25 seemed “old” and that I’d never make it there. (To be fair, I was kind of a LOT as a child.) And hey, look at us now! But do you want to know the really weird bit? While sometimes I physically feel my age, like when I got that hitch in my get-along or my incredibly painful feet back during my brief stint in retail, I don’t feel my age at all mentally or emotionally. I’m still me inside — the same kid or teen or twentysomething or even thirtysomething that loves computers, video games, TV shows, and good music. I love storytelling and a sense of community and fun. And the idea of owning a home or getting married and having kids is still completely foreign, while people that I graduated from high school with are starting to become grandparents!
Anyone else relate more and more to Ouiser lately??
An older friend of mine once told me that it’ll always be this way, too. You’re always the same on the inside; it’s just that your body grows old, weak, and tired without your consent, and it sucks. Because as we age, we also learn more about people and the world around us. Imagine me at 16, armed with the knowledge, experience, and insatiable craving for the things that spark joy that I have now? I feel like I would’ve been unstoppable! Most awkward kid ever? For sure… But it would have been incredible.
Sometimes it makes me sad to think about all the things I didn’t do when I was younger. Finishing college, pursuing things that I loved for a career, etc., because hey… I might have been somewhere and settled by now! But I’m also not upset about who I’ve become by taking the path less traveled. I’ve concluded in the last few years that maybe I’m not meant to have kids or a spouse of my own. I’ve got my dad, my siblings, and my kitties, which, quite frankly, I should be able to claim as dependents with how expensive it is to care for them. I’m learning and pursuing what I love now, and while it’s taking an excruciatingly long time for me to get it, I also have a better sense of seriousness and determination about it. The 23-year-old version of myself, who had spent his birthday in Las Vegas drinking and throwing money away, would not have even thought twice about coding and web development. Now I literally cannot even imagine having fun on a birthday trip to Vegas. And I’m pretty okay about it!
There’s this thought that I’ve always had, which is that you wouldn’t be who you are today if you had made different decisions in the past. And we maybe shouldn’t have many regrets in life because of it. I don’t ordinarily subscribe to the idea that “everything happens for a reason,” but in this case, maybe it’s true. Maybe the past made us all who we are for reasons we just don’t understand until the future becomes the present. And until we can jump in a DeLorean and hit the rewind button, we’re going to have to live with it. (How’s that for “elder Millennial” pop culture references?? 😉)
The popular British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said,
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
And let me tell you all this: I’ve started practicing magic.
That quote is the third of three laws Clarke put forward, and is probably one of the most repeated and cited. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Could you imagine someone from centuries in the past time-traveling to our present day? They would think everything was foreign, or maybe even sorcery. I recently saw this concept illustrated beautifully in the classic 1993 Halloween film Hocus Pocus. It’s one that we watch at least once a year during “Spooky Season,” and the one particular scene that stands out to me these days is when one of the teen characters, Max (Omri Katz), threatens and confuses the witchy Sanderson Sisters (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker) from the past with a power of his own: the “Burning Rain of Death,” which involves him holding a cigarette lighter to a fire suppression system and causing the sprinklers to engage. They briefly scream, assuming the falling liquid is deadly because they’d never seen a mortal child “make fire in his hand.” Clarke told no lies — the sisters witnessed Max perform actual magic.
The “Burning Rain of Death” scene in question.
As a lifelong Trekkie, I also like to throw it back to the ’60s. The casual Star Trek viewer might think that the technology Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew utilize is nothing short of fairy tale make-believe. But in today’s age, their hand-held wireless communicators, face-to-face video conferencing, and voice-activated digital assistants are all common tech you can find on the average device in your pocket. In fact, your iPhones and Androids are just a few small features short of literally being a “tricorder.” Recently, in one episode of Strange New Worlds (one of Star Trek‘s more recent spinoffs), the character of La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) makes off with vital information she found on a PADD that our new, young Scotty (Martin Quinn) had gathered. Rather than a simple prop made to look like said “PADD,” I think the series has just started using actual iPads, because I was struck by how unfuturistic the device looked… Despite the series being set hundreds of years in the future. And while scientists are still working on making them a reality, Star Trek still has plenty of tech that seems downright impossible for those of us still stuck in the past.
Uhura’s had it with this shit, too.
Well, I guess the future is now, because I’ve started learning more than I expected to when I started tinkering with an old PC of mine. I was determined to turn it into something of a “private server” for me and the family to use, however we wanted. You may recall that I initially tried to host this very website on it for roughly a month before I threw in the towel on trying to keep it up and accessible. The problem was largely that I had decided to use a platform called YunoHost (the name of which is clever internet shorthand for the question “y u no host?”), which you can install onto any available server and then run self-hosted software on it with just a few clicks. No less impressive than installing an app on your phone, really. The issue, though, is that YunoHost had a bizarre way of sinking its hooks into every part of the server’s system, which complicated the way that I wanted to host stuff outside of its services.
That was when I sorta made the hasty decision to quit the server project. I wiped the entire machine, moved this website over to a proper host (much of which you can read about in my last post), and called it a day. My brain kept thinking about it all, though, and I decided that I still wanted to experiment. Tinkering with this stuff and the feeling of creating something useful out of what was otherwise useless equipment was turning out to be a little addictive. My nephew was also still keen to at least get the Jellyfin media platform running for his library of literally hundreds of digitized movies. Plus, my frustration, in reality, stemmed from my mistake of putting all my eggs into YunoHost’s basket, not the homelab itself. So I started looking into alternative approaches to what I was already trying to accomplish.
For the non-technical, Docker is a platform that allows you to install services, apps, and other types of software into virtual “containers” on your computer (or a server), which not only allows for really clean and organized stacks of tech, but it also prevents software from gaining footholds in the rest of your system!!! Which I can’t emphasize enough, since that was the biggest issue from the last build that I did. Since it all stays isolated in its own little containers, you can actually test and experiment with stuff without them all conflicting with one another. Then, when you decide you aren’t going to use it or don’t like it, you can delete the whole dang container as quick as you can type docker compose down!
It’s perfect for someone like me, who mostly enjoys learning by doing. I’m still wrapping my brain around the concept of testing things before launching them or throwing open the door for others to enjoy stuff that I’m hosting, but even then, it’s still been a really fulfilling concept to learn. I had to learn how to set up network utilities like Nginx Proxy Manager and Pi-hole — the lack of which I have a sneaking suspicion may have contributed to my WordPress hosting issues before the wipe — and finally got Jellyfin up and running right before my nephew got me the media library to populate it with. I’ve even started learning how to customize the software by initializing it all via Docker Compose, a method that spins up an app based on your commands written into a docker-compose.yml file. It’s all pretty incredible, and has had me Googling topics like “fun docker images” for the past week.
Now, even my 72-year-old father can enjoy the hundreds of movies and shows we’re serving up on his TV’s Jellyfin app. Almost as if by magic. ✨
If you’re a regular viewer of jiggyflyjoe.com, you may have noticed that it has undergone some major changes this year since I launched it as a blog/email newsletter hybrid on Substack back in February. You see, what Substack is doing is pretty interesting. It has seen a growing number of independent journalists and writers like Aaron Parnas and Under the Desk News set up shop on the platform that could easily be described as a hybrid between traditional blogging, email newsletters, and social media. I’ve stated numerous times, however, that it was brought to my attention pretty early on that Substack also willingly platforms white supremacists. So I packed up shop and swiftly moved over to Ghost instead.
Ghost was surprisingly refreshing. That’s why Jiggy’s Journal thrived over there for so long. Ghost is also a hybrid platform that mashes up blogging and email. They’re also in the early stages of adopting the open web to add that crucial “social media” element to it. Ghost also has one of the slickest and most enjoyable editor, which allows you to utilize Rich Text and/or Markdown simultaneously. I had (and, honestly, still have) high hopes for Ghost. I’m still rooting for them. But ultimately, the platform was difficult for me to maintain as a self-hosted app on my own server, and paying for their Ghost(Pro) service felt like too much for a personal website like this one. Especially since I would have had to fork over even more cash for the full ability to customize the website’s look, layout, and other critical settings for me.
So ultimately, I wound up back on the old standard WordPress. And look, I thought I would be able to self-host WordPress on my own server because installing it and getting it running was surprisingly quick and easy. But since I’m still extremely new to the whole “self-hosting” thing, I kept running into catastrophic system failure after catastrophic system failure, and in my mind, jiggyflyjoe.com needs to be up and running 24/7. It’s the one link that I provide everywhere on the web. In my social media bios, on other website forums, and even on-screen during my Twitch streams. That said, when the link that I have posted all over the internet doesn’t work, it’s like OCD takes over, and I start to get itchy. What I wound up doing instead is scrapping the entire self-host server build, and I moved this site over to a proper hosting service. Because even while I continue to tinker and experiment with my own home lab and try to understand the concept of Docker, this here website needs stability that only the professionals can provide right now.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken steps to rebuild this site from scratch, and per usual, there were a few casualties. The mailing list was an important one, but I was thankfully able to log back into an old database on the server and manually extract it before fully wiping it, so you should all still receive these posts in your inbox. If not, there are plenty of spaces around jiggyflyjoe.com where you can still subscribe (or re-subscribe if I somehow missed you). One of those places is right below this paragraph! Most of the text from all my old posts is still available, too, but they may have some broken links and missing images, comments, and other elements. I’m going to try and restore the important stuff here and there as I’m able. Those old posts can now be found in The Ghost Archives, because it just sounds cool and spooky, but also because a majority of those posts were written on Ghost.
Essentially, I’m just trying to say: Please don’t mind the mess!
More cool things are coming to the website, as well. WordPress itself is kind of a fun place to experiment because there are so many compatible plugins and services for it. And unlike the platforms in my past, I have full control over this digital space, and we can turn it into whatever we want it to be.
Okay, admittedly, they are virtual chickens within a video game called Palia, that my sister and I have grown very fond of over the past year or so. The chickens (referred to in the game’s world as “pekis”) were added to the game this week in an update that also includes an entire animal husbandry and ranching system, as well as modular player housing, and a variety of other fun additions that player’s have practically been begging for since the game’s debut. It all comes on the heels of the game’s Elderwood Expansion, which opened up an entire “adventure zone” and brought Palia, which was available to PC and Nintendo Switch players, to Xbox and PlayStation consoles also.
An adult and baby peki in Palia.
Launched in late 2023, Palia is essentially a fantasy adventure life simulator. Players dive into a realm as one of the first ancient humans to re-emerge in a high-fantasy world. They will build a home and relationships with the villagers, develop skills in a multitude of different crafts and disciplines, and explore and shape the world and story around them. The game is also an online multiplayer service, which means you’ll see other players running around inside of it, and can even team up with them to reap greater rewards. The game even encourages it, providing bonuses for players who tackle their to-do list together!
Did I mention that the game is completely free to download and play?
Video games without a price tag attached don’t usually attract much attention. They often contain microtransactions or a “premium store” designed to earn their revenue in ways that can sometimes be a little scummy. If you find yourself in a free game, you usually wind up needing additional lives, turns, perks, add-ons, and other items to keep playing, and those are going to cost you some of your hard-earned dollars, and thus get dubbed “pay-to-win” games in the sense that they aren’t truly a free experience across the board. That’s why many popular titles wind up charging upwards of $60-$90 to purchase the game upfront and/or require a recurring subscription to play. Some titles like Palia, however, have turned that sales model on its head.
Rather than charging for the game or exploiting pay-to-win mechanics, Palia has subscribed to what I like to refer to as the “Fortnite model.” Much like that massively popular battle royale game, Palia also has a premium store, but nearly everything in it is for cosmetic purposes only. You can buy a virtual peki to run alongside you in the game, a fancy outfit, or even an entire landscape on which to plant your own farm and cottage. But the big difference is that it has a negligible impact on actual gameplay. You don’t have to spend a single penny in Palia to have the same experience as the people who spend a fortune on it. The wealthier player has no gameplay advantage over the poorer of the two. In my opinion, that’s actually kinda beautiful and makes games like it far more accessible for the average gamer.
In my game, I’ve started the new ranching skill and adopted two pekis. Initially, I named the two “Tigger” and “Rufus” after my oldest two cats, but as I played further, it turns out that you need to breed the two together in order to birth baby pekis. Though the game is genderless in most circumstances, it still felt awkward for me to have two of my boys mate to create offspring. So once I devised a new naming convention and acquired a few “Rename Cookies” once I was able, I set out on figuring out some fun new names for my feathered friends. Now I have four pekis — the original two and two babies — named Chick Jagger, Henifer Aniston, Angelina Jopeep, and Loretta Hen. No, they’re not completely original, but I did find them clever enough after racking my brain forever and eventually consulting Google for assistance (this page in particular was very handy). Just wait until I get Feather Flocklear and Chick Norris!
Anyway, in case anyone has been wondering where I’ve been for the last several days, I’ve been letting myself get absorbed back into my weird and wonderful little world of Palia. It feels a lot better than doomscrolling and letting myself be completely consumed by the constant darkness in our real world right now. Feel free to stop by my Twitch channel sometime to hang out while we wander through the game together live, or you can even find some clips from those streams on TikTok and YouTube Shorts! One of my favorites especially is when the hot pot table blows my hair off!
I’m trying to learn how to focus better, and I’m starting to scale down.
The past few weeks or so, I’ve been keeping myself busy ramping up production on my little home-based server. You might recall that I was doing something similar in the spring, only I was attempting to self-host everything on a paid VPS (virtual private server) and didn’t know much about any of it. I was learning things on the fly. I didn’t really have the funds to spend on web hosting as a hobby, and nobody was really interested or impressed in anything that I was trying to build, so I eventually shut it all down and fully moved just this website over to Ghost’s services proper. But I never really gave up the idea of building my own private “walled garden,” if you will, on the internet. The thought of a box physically set up here in my own home that’s harnessing and controlling my data instead of the corporate “broligarchy” dudes sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?
My nephew has also taken it upon himself, over the last few years, to slowly and painstakingly digitize our fairly massive film collection on DVD. Why? Because the DVD industry is rapidly dying due to the rise of streaming platforms and digital giants like Netflix and Disney+. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since they were physically mailing me DVD rentals (did I just date myself??)… Nobody loves the ability to do things without leaving my home more than me. But these big digital corporations are also the first to tell us that we own nothing. Did you know that when you digitally purchase a movie, TV show, album, video game, etc., you are actually purchasing the license to use it recreationally? You do NOT own that piece of media, and the license can be revoked at any time. And the streamers? They’re sometimes just playing an eternal game of roulette with one another as to which copyrights they’re holding each month, which results in movies and shows being here one minute and then either on a different service or completely gone the next.
And what’s up with that, my dudes? I just wanna watch my little short-lived, sardonically creative and comical Wonderfalls in peace, but do you know where you can find it streaming? That’s right: NOWHERE!
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There’s also this point: Ever since this last presidential election, my father and I have been slowly turning into doomsday preppers. Which, admittedly, sounds bonkers. I also used to think people who spent a lot of time in their handmade bomb shelters were a little on edge, too, but the world has completely lost the plot. Can you blame me these days? Digitizing our collection so that the only requirement to enjoy them is electricity makes his portable hard drive worth its weight in gold during the apocalypse. It fits in nicely with our bug-out bags, solar panels, weather radios, and raised garden beds we’ve been making efforts to acquire.
With his growing collection in mind, I knew that there were a few pretty popular pieces of free and open-source self-hosted software on the internet, the most interesting of which was Jellyfin. After it’s installed on your system, you can effectively create your own streaming platform similar to Netflix, but you also pretty much have to supply your own media to load into it. Thankfully, we just so happened to have someone who did have that piece of the puzzle. But Jellyfin didn’t work out on my VPS because, well… It’s sorta difficult to plug a physical hard drive into a virtual machine, right? But when I started getting the idea to turn my old PC into a physical server here at home, that wouldn’t be a problem! So off to work I went on my new side project for my whole “famn damily.” And this time, I was more cautious and had a slightly better grasp on how things needed to function.
Now we’re getting to the techno mumbo-jumbo that I know many of you aren’t going to be super interested in. Feel free to skip ahead if you’d like. I’m not the boss of you!
No, Toad, wrong kind of techno!
I knew that I was going to need to wipe the entire hard drive of my old PC to get this project going. In fact, I was going to need a whole different operating system. We don’t want to mess with Windows. I knew that I wanted to use a containerized system, and since I was really only mildly familiar with Docker, that’s the one I decided to go with. Some cursory research indicated that there are two options for an OS that would execute Docker pretty easily: Proxmox or Ubuntu Server. Well, that “cursory research” wound up pretty much failing me, because neither of those operating systems wanted to boot on the old machine. In both cases, I flashed a USB stick with the image of the OS, managed to get GRUB to start booting, and then wound up on a completely black screen that did zilch. Nothing.
I was already pretty defeated, and I was only at the first step of this whole thing. I think the old PC just sat, set up on a desk, and wasn’t touched for weeks because I got so frustrated thinking that Rufus (the flashing software, not my cat!) was somehow flashing corrupted images onto the USB stick, or maybe I was doing something wrong. I was reading horror stories on Google and Reddit, and saw some users suggest that some USB ports are better than others, and maybe you need to change the BIOS settings on your machine to read what’s on the stick before it boots what’s already on your hard drive, and so on and so on. Eventually, I stumbled across some information that suggested that I instead install something even simpler: Debian. “That makes sense,” I realized, pretty much as I was flashing my USB stick with it. After all, Proxmox is based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian. When in doubt, go to the source, I guess, because BAM!!! Debian 13 installed with zero issues. I also managed to get Docker installed and got Cockpit, Portainer, and Nginx Proxy Manager up and running so I could control everything remotely from my main computer! I finally started to feel a little tingle of technological prowess and, hey… Maybe even usefulness!
I still wound up having to retool things a little bit, and eventually settled for using a little bit of a cheat code called YunoHost. Mostly because I kept getting frustrated at Docker, and I also quite simply felt challenged and maybe a little inspired by their name originating from the simple internet question of, “y u no host?” But everything started falling into place. I was going to build my family the best damn closed-circuit network they’d ever seen! It wasn’t just going to have an instance of Jellyfin! It’s going to have private communication apps, a wiki platform, collaboration and whiteboard solutions, and even a few games! Not to mention email at our own chosen domain! Have you ever known the thrill of having an email address that is just your name before the @ symbol?! Getting your own name in an email address carries the weight of being busy and important, okay? My family was going to be so glad they had someone as cool and smart as me in the gang! Simply just ignore the fact that I think I look a little like this meme to them:
Not gonna lie, I can kinda see it.
That was my thought process until I built it and gave them their credentials to access and log into it. A week later, and the server has seen exactly two of them log into it and then promptly forget about it. And though my dad and sister (who are incidentally also the only two family members that subscribe to this publication, hi dad and sisterface!) would maybe disagree to spare my feelings, none of them really care. And I’m making peace with the fact that that is okay.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s painful and frustrating to continually get these wild ideas to build spaces and communities, hoping that others will want to join in, only to be met with constant silence. I’ve been doing it for a long time. From my very first web pages all the way up to this website, along with my Twitch channel, content creation as a whole, social media, the AMA page on here, all of it… I’ve just been begging and hoping that maybe one day people will want to join me and think that all this “stuff” is as cool as I do. But I also need to understand that it isn’t personal.
Meredith gets it.
It honestly isn’t. To other people, all of this “stuff” is unnecessary. My 72-year-old father and my 33-year-old nephew alike don’t care about their super cool new email addresses. Neither one of them likely even cares about email overall. So the addresses that they’re already forced to use for everything else work just fine. My siblings are a-okay with relaying group communication through Discord, so why do they need yet another login to manage? It’s a little overkill for just the six of us. And that Jellyfin server? Eh, we’ll get that movie collection loaded into it some other day. These kinds of things, while cool to me to get to check out and get hands-on experience with, isn’t scratching the same kind of itch for them. And that’s fine. I should stop expecting it to. Even if it’s cool and technically better, people prefer to default to what’s familiar, what’s easier, and what they already know.
And listen, I love my family. I think I’ve established that fact in multiple other posts. But why fix what isn’t broken for them, ya know? And if something does break, or if I can somehow offer a solution one day? They’ll know where to find me. In the meantime, I don’t need to keep subjecting them to never-ending digital journeys or whatever.
So I’m scaling it back down a bit. I’m going to keep Jellyfin and the emails available, but the wiki, the message board, and the browser games are being jettisoned. They’re already stale and probably won’t be missed. I’m instead going to refocus the server space on things that are productive, fun, and convenient for me personally. Maybe build some projects of my own on it, who knows? And hey, sometimes things happen when you stop trying to force it. I want to believe that there are like-minded people out there who do care about what I’m building, what I’m streaming, what I’m making, and what my brain can accomplish.
Disinterestingly enough, this submission actually landed in the form’s “spam” filter, so I almost missed it. They used an email address that was obviously fake, so I’m guessing that’s how it wound up there, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion once again that I know who submitted this one, so I figured I’d go ahead and publish my response.
If you’ve got questions, comments, or suggestions that you’d like me to respond to right here in Jiggy’s Journal, head to that page and submit them. Then make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss the response later!
Whatismath asks:
What is the square root of purple?
Okay, so the question is a bit nonsensical, so that may also be part of the reason why it ended up in the spam filter. However, I like making attempts to answer these submissions, no matter how silly they may be.
Canva helping me answer the hell outta this question!
That being said, I thought about perhaps trying to find the square root of the hex code for purple, which, according to Canva, is #CC8899 (as pictured above) or #A020F0 (via the link). I am no mathematician — in fact, I hate math with a fiery passion — but I know that letters aren’t numbers. And when they are, it’s algebra, and that’s about the time I dropped out of college. So I made the executive decision to use the RGB decimal for purple instead, which Canva says is 160, 32, 240.
Adding the RGB decimal numbers totals 432. I did a quick search on Google of what the square root of 432 is (because you didn’t think that I was actually going to do that shit, did you??), and it says the solution is 20.7846096908.
And there you have it! The square root of the color purple. ✨
Some of the time that I wasted on Facebook over the years was actually educational. As Americans, I think that we kinda knowingly turn a blind eye to where our food really comes from. While the words “pork” and “beef” are historical linguistic artifacts, isn’t it a little bit convenient that we have alternate words for a lot of animal products we consume? I mean, nobody really wants to think about sweet little Babe while they’re frying up their breakfast bacon, right? And after seeing some of the videos from activist groups on Facebook about some of the suffering and actual torture these poor animals face every single day from factory farming, I swore off eating meat. And I maintained it for two years.
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There were good days and bad days during that stretch. Even though there are some truly awful “meat alternatives” on the market, I was pleasantly surprised by how many are also delicious! I once even took Beyond Burgers to a cookout, and they were a hit even among the meat-eating crowd. And don’t get me started on Gardein’s faux-chicken tenders… I found that they were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing! I probably spent a small fortune on those suckers while I was living the veggie lifestyle. I used to order a mac and cheese dish topped with them from Yard House whenever I felt like I needed to spring for lunch at the office that I used to work at in downtown Indy, and the scent of the Gardein tenders even fooled a co-worker into thinking I was a fraud!
Sadly, though, after a little over two years, I did wind up falling off the wagon. Getting enough protein wasn’t the issue, although I know that concern does sometimes cause even some of the most militant vegans and vegetarians to go back to animal products. It honestly just got too hard to stay consistent. Being from the Midwest, a large part of socialization and our culture revolves around food made mostly from meat, cheese, corn, and potatoes, and my family is no different. As empathetic as they were towards me and my concerns about animal slaughtering and factory farming, I wasn’t going to convince them to change on my own. And honestly, being the only one who constantly has to find an alternative when we hit the drive-thru while honestly still having cravings for a damn cheeseburger was extremely hard.
I learned something simple but valuable during those two years, however. It may have been the moment in my life that made me realize: Nobody is perfect. And that’s okay.
Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sums things up perfectly in The Good Place.
I was discussing this with a fellow content creator recently, and she mentioned that it is amazing if you even care. That’s a lot more than most people in today’s age. With the planet and humanity practically deteriorating before our very eyes, the fact that you are even making an effort at times is enough. We’re never going to be perfect. Even the strictest vegan you could possibly imagine probably owns or has likely consumed something against their moral code or healthy lifestyle. And guess what? The world spins madly on. And I think we honestly forget that we’re all just kinda making it up as we go in life.
Just do your best. That’s really all we can do. Nobody is the morality police, and nobody is perfect. Anyone who tells you otherwise or makes you feel judged or wants to start virtue signaling all over their socials in response shouldn’t be in your life anyway.
I still hate where meat comes from, by the way. And I still stump for animal rights, as ironic as it may sound. I would be beyond heartbroken if someone were to hurt one of my cats, but honestly, what’s the difference between a cat’s life and a cow’s life? And then what’s the difference between a cow’s life and our lives? Don’t we all deserve to live them? I think that we do. But we can only do what we can do. I’m only one person. And I hope that my two years of vegetarianism and my ongoing efforts to still choose compassion when possible in other ways have made a difference.
We’re all just doing our best. And if that best includes a little more compassion, even sometimes, that’s worth something.
