If the apocalypse comes… uh, message me on Signal???
My time these days has mostly been engulfed with doing techie things with my computer and gaming, but did you know that I’m also something of a TV show connoisseur? I think I can pinpoint exactly why it is that I prefer television over film, and it all boils down to a conversation that I had with my sister recently. While working on a bit of writing herself, she had asked me if I ever get sad when a really good story ends. And I do! That’s why I love serialized storytelling like you see on TV—episode after episode usually expands upon the last. And don’t get me wrong: I also love and greatly appreciate standalone movies and stories in other media with firm beginnings, middles, and ends. But at the end of the day, isn’t it a little more exciting knowing that there’s more story yet to come?
There are plenty of shows that could probably make it into my personal Top 10 Favorite list, but I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had a pretty high-ranking position on that list for 20+ years now. People who have never watched the show often dismiss it as silly and frivolous based on the title alone, but honestly, the only thing you should judge the show on is its use of uh… Questionable special effects, especially in its early seasons. The show is built around the central character of Buffy Summers (played by the remarkably underrated Sarah Michelle Gellar), who is the latest young girl chosen by fate to fight against vampires, demons, and other nasty monsters that lurk in the darkness. Joining her in the show’s cast is her mentor, Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), and an evolving cast of friends, family, allies, and enemies alike, played by Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Charisma Carpenter, David Boreanaz, Seth Green, James Marsters, Eliza Dushku, Emma Caulfield, Marc Blucas, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Amber Benson.
The Buffy cast reunited for Entertainment Weekly in 2017. From left to right: Amber Benson, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Emma Caulfield, Alexis Denisof, Charisma Carpenter, Seth Green, David Boreanaz, Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Marsters, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Kristine Sutherland. Below: Joss Whedon.
Pre-dating teen girl fantasy vampire dramas like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, Buffy was ahead of its time and the curve. The show’s writers brilliantly used its supernatural theme as a metaphor for the horrors of high school and adult life in later seasons. For example, in a first-season episode, a fellow student of Buffy’s feels so ignored by her peers that she literally becomes invisible. After going off to college, Buffy’s first roommate is so annoying that she turns out to be—surprise!—a vile demon. The ultimate metaphor that the show employed throughout its seven seasons was a second-season arc in which Buffy’s ensouled vampire boyfriend loses that soul and reverts to his wholly evil and murderous persona after sleeping with Buffy for the first time. Raise your hand if you have ever had an ex turn into a massive jerk at perhaps your most vulnerable moment!
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The show fit into the supernatural and horror genre perfectly, but for these reasons, its storytelling was also surprisingly relatable and compelling, and perfectly encapsulates why it’s still relevant and beloved by its cult following to this day. It should come as no surprise, then, that series star Sarah Michelle Gellar is planning a return to the role in a series revival in development at Hulu. The new series is being spearheaded by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, Poker Face writers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, and executive directors from the original Buffy include Gail Berman, Fran & Kaz Kuzui, and Dolly Parton—yes, that Dolly Parton!—with her company Sandollar. Thankfully, the show’s original creator, Joss Whedon, is not involved with the revival after facing a boatload of misconduct allegations in 2021 from numerous Buffy cast members and his own ex-wife.
The thought of the big Buffy reboot has me feeling two disparate emotions: over-the-top excited and grimly nervous.
Sarah Michelle Gellar talks about the Buffy reboot on Access Hollywood.
Excitement because… of course I want more of the Buffyverse! Is that even a question? The fictional world that was built in Buffy and its spinoff, Angel, honestly lends itself to infinite expansion. Even as early as 2003, when it was reported that Gellar was leaving the show after its seventh season and that the series was effectively ending, there were reports of additional spinoffs in development that could continue the story of a few other popular characters. Those spinoffs never happened. It is not even the first time a revival of the show has been planned. Back in 2018, before the allegations against him came out, it was reported that Whedon was moving forward on a reboot with TV writer Monica Owusu-Breen, who had worked with him on Marvel Television’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series. That reboot never materialized either. But the hunger for more from this world is real, and the fact that it could happen very soon has me delighted.
There’s a great deal of trepidation on my part as well. It’s common knowledge now that Hollywood has produced a mixed bag of revivals, remakes, reboots, etc. Another one of my favorite series, Gilmore Girls, got a revival with a four-part miniseries on Netflix back in 2016, and feelings on it were middling at best. While it was lovely to step back into the show’s world again, the story left a lot of fans questioning why they bothered. If Buffy receives similar treatment, it would be enormously disappointing. I’m cautious, but optimistically so after Gellar’s recent remarks. Over the years, she has also been understandably wary about returning to the role of Buffy, but Zhao was the one who changed her mind.
“Every pitch I heard was just like, ‘Let’s just do Buffy again.’ Why?” Gellar said to Elite Daily last month. “But the passion that [Zhao] came to me with, what she wanted to do with the show and the character, and why Buffy is needed now — it was the first time where I thought, ‘OK, there’s a reason.’”
And frankly, in Sarah Michelle Gellar, I trust, so I think it’s time to put on our stylish but affordable boots and pick up those stakes again, friends.
The past several months have been a rollercoaster for dabbling in tech!
As most of you know now, I completed my Responsive Web Design certification over on freeCodeCamp back in January. I knew a little bit about designing static web pages with HTML and CSS from my younger days trying to make my LiveJournal or MySpace pages much more stylized, but there were a lot of new concepts that I wasn’t familiar with. I still struggle a little when it comes to Flexbox and positioning things exactly where I want them, but I got through the course and I felt really accomplished. So much so that I wanted to start building right away, so I coded my own website, started blogging again, and even started my own web server! You can read more about that and the trouble I’ve had with it over here.
Coding my website and watching it evolve as I learned more CSS tricks and even a small bit of JavaScript was a lot of fun and very educational. I completely understand now when seasoned pros at this stuff say that the best way to learn is by doing it independently. I also love blogging, writing, and creating content on the web. Even though my websites seem to change and vary and eventually disappear over time when I decide to start fresh or whatever, I’ll probably always have something similar somewhere on the internet. But let me be the first to tell you that installing and maintaining an instance of Ghost (the platform that powers this blog) was a struggle. Especially for someone with little to no knowledge of how the command line works. I’ve learned the whole process of cloning and pushing projects to GitHub, but that’s about it! What do you mean I have to make and move directories? What do you mean I have to edit a configuration file and set up my own transactional emails? What do you mean I have to expose ports on my server for things to work? That sounds dangerous!
I’m equally confused, J. Law.
With each new update of Ghost, I wound up breaking things and then spend hours trying to fix it. I had to uninstall and then reinstall the software three separate times. And don’t misunderstand me — Ghost is incredible. It is, by far, the best blog and email newsletter platform that I have ever used. And I’ve dabbled with quite a few over the years. The problem was me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I think that I bit off more than I could chew. I guess, by my flawed logic, I thought that managing my own personal server and hosting a bunch of different little things made me more of a tech enthusiast. In some ways, it kinda did. I learned quite a few new things. I even spun up an instance of Flarum to create a sort of chat forum on that server, which was a lot of fun and I really liked it, even though only one other person ever joined. I also wanted to spin up some wiki software for my family to privately use for important documents and information. But constantly breaking things and then spending hours trying to research the necessary fixes got tiresome really quickly.
I rolled this blog and the www.jiggyflyjoe.com/ website into one and the same and imported it back to Ghost's own hosting servers. And in the process, I feel like I freed up an enormous amount of time. I felt a little like a failure, but I was recently told that most developers don't self-host anyway unless they have to. And honestly, I felt that in my soul.
The good news is that we’re still here and this publication isn’t going anywhere now that it’s being hosted by the pros instead of me! And I can turn to other solutions for the private wiki, our planned media services, and maybe even still a forum at some point. I really love community building, and I keep telling myself that if I build it, they will come… But for now, if you want to join, you’ll have to join my community on Discord. Which, by the way, I had also been unknowingly giving out the wrong link to that community for years now. This one should actually work if you’re interested. You can also always find it through the Discord icon up at the top of the page and on the contact page! I’m still working on updating it across the board, so make sure you don’t click on any older links for it because it will take you nowhere. Into a scary, dark internet void.
As a kid, I legitimately despised being from and living most of my life in a state that most people have never thought twice about. I grew up in a small, suburban town just south of Indianapolis, and while my childhood was pleasant enough, I had the great misfortune of growing into a weirdo. I was a weird kid, and I liked weird things, and I likely have at least an ounce of the ’tism that made me act and feel very awkward. None of that made me very popular among my fellow Hoosier children. Even though there have been a couple of chapters in my life where I’ve had a solid circle of friends, I’ve never really ever been Mr. Popularity. You know where I did find friends, though? Online. Friends who lived in really fun, exciting, or fancy-sounding places like New York or California, or even foreign countries! England, Australia, India, Sweden, Italy, Japan!
My condolences to Jughead!
It’s not too hard to see why this weirdo spent a lot of time dreaming of ways to escape from Indy.
FedEx Foundations 📦
I think my perspective started changing around the time I got my job at the Indianapolis International Airport, working for the regional hub of FedEx Express. Back in 2006, I was in my early twenties and pretty much only making beer money flipping burgers. My older brother had been working at FedEx for a few years at that point, so when he suggested putting in an application, I was more than happy to do so! By the way, I wouldn’t normally advise working with family, but he had also mentioned that the facility was pretty massive, so the chances we would actually run into each other while working were kinda slim, so I was chill with giving it a shot. The company took about two months to give me a call back, but once they offered me a job that June, I jumped on it.
I’ve always been a tiny bit concerned that trading the smell of fries and onion rings on my clothes for jet fuel was probably going to cause me to develop some sort of terminal illness, but it was a trade that I was more than willing to take at the time!
FedEx was an important chapter for me, though, for a lot of reasons. It gave me my first “adult” responsibility outside of my sheltered little “small-town” life thus far. And some of those responsibilities were big. I started out just sorting packages and rewrapping packages that had broken open upstairs in a conveyor belt “matrix” of sorts that scanned the bar codes on mailing labels and then routed them to their appropriate destinations afterward. But the responsibility seemed to increase tenfold by the time I transferred to a position working outdoors on the ramp. Driving tractor-trailers, pulling long strings of huge aluminum containers filled with sorted packages, and trying not to hit the sometimes actively taxiing multi-million dollar aircraft with any of it in the process. It was stressful, and that wasn’t even half of the job! Those kids (and a few old dogs, too!) who are still out there doing that job, running heavy machinery and loading and unloading aircraft in practically every imaginable type of inclement weather situation, get the highest regards from yours truly. Especially since they’re only doing it for like $16 an hour!
WRTV 6 in Indianapolis reporting on the Indy Hub, my former stomping grounds!
I eventually became a “ramp agent,” a title that required me to go through several rounds of interviews and get a decent pay bump. My professional development skills weren’t the only things that grew while I was at FedEx, though. I made friends in my various work groups, many of whom I’m still in contact with and consider some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I attended numerous parties, festivals, concerts, graduations, trips out of state, at least four weddings, and two funerals. We did dinners, went out for drinks, had coffee or brunch on Sundays, holiday ugly sweater parties, retro-themed pub crawls, and formed a beer club at Shallo’s (one of Indy’s best hidden gems, by the way!). A few of us even got to join in Super Bowl festivities together during Super Bowl XLVI back in 2012 when Indy played host! These were the days when I felt young and fun and maybe only a little intoxicated.
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I had quite a few personal milestones during this era, too. Since the “Express” division of FedEx operates as an airline, they also used to have a perk where we could purchase standby seats on passenger flights through Southwest and other airlines for ridiculously low prices. Seriously, during a week of PTO, I flew from Indy to Arizona to visit some friends for like $75 round-trip! Is that even possible anymore with today’s prices? It was my first time flying alone, however, so even though I’d been an adult for a few good years, it still felt like a big deal. During this period, I also bought (and paid off!) my first car. It was a 2006 Chevy Impala that needed tons of work done on it after I got it, but it served me well up until the pandemic, when everyone stopped going places. That same Impala is still in the family. We had to tow that bitch all the way to Kansas when we moved, so needless to say, it’s still a hoopty, too!
“How Cosmopolitan!” 🍸
As much as I still love and appreciate FedEx for what it was, at the end of my tenure there, I had learned from experience that I’m not supervisor material. I may know the ropes of a particular job really well, but I’m not someone who can execute all of my job functions while also keeping tabs on what everyone else is doing. Nor did I appreciate taking the heat for what others failed to do. So by mid-2014, some friends from outside FedEx started helping me plan my next move, and that meant completely flipping the script.
In October of that year, I found myself getting employed by a local office that handled drug and alcohol testing for employers. A few good friends who already worked for the company vouched for me when I applied, so it made the hiring process a breeze. I was already acquainted with two of the three people who interviewed me for the job, so it was also the most comfortable job interview I’ve ever completed. And when the HR lady took me around to introduce me to everyone on my first day, it was almost comical that many of my new co-workers had the same response: “Oh yeah, we already know him!” So I went from working overnight with airplanes and boxes to data entry and paper pushing during the day.
The office was located in a fairly convenient spot in downtown Indianapolis. There was an office kitchen with free coffee! I had my own cubicle and a phone on my desk with my very own extension! And parking was free, which struck me as a rare perk among folks who live and work in urban environments! The first few weeks at this job felt impossibly cool. I was doing a big boy professional job in an office with a computer and a phone and coffee! Isn’t that like the poster image of an American working man? Now I was really living the life! It felt like I was living an episode of Mad Men or something. To put it into perspective, a former FedEx co-worker once asked my brother how I was liking the new job, and after he described all of this to them, they replied with a two-word exclamation:
“How cosmopolitan!”
Literally the rest of the office staff while I was hyping up my new job.
Throughout my twenties and thirties, and between working at FedEx and in this new office role for a majority of those years, my distaste for Indy started turning into something else. Eventually, I found myself growing fond of it. When big things happened for the city, like hosting the aforementioned Super Bowl or the annual Indy 500, it was a big thing for everyone. You couldn’t help but develop a little bit of pride in being from the Circle City. It was a blast whenever I got the time to get out and about in the city with my pals. I discovered new parts of the town that I didn’t know about before, including the city’s “cultural districts” like Fountain Square, the Wholesale District, and Broad Ripple Village. These are the places you could find most of Indy’s vintage, artsy, and independent restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues. Who doesn’t love the opportunity to shop at Silver in the City or go party at The Vogue? That honestly describes some of the weekends I’ve had in Indy.
Indianapolis is extremely underrated by the rest of the country. The entire state is often overlooked as “flyover country” to most of the population on the coasts. Honestly, I can kinda see why. Indiana is well-known for its miles and miles of corn and soybean fields. But it was also a really special place that is growing and creating its own cultural identity. Areas of the city, like Fountain Square, were being revitalized and were slowly moving away from being the kinds of places my family used to worry about me getting stabbed at. Buildings that were previously abandoned and run down were being transformed into funky spaces with stories to tell. A cross-section that mirrors Indy’s own mixture of young and hip with classic elegance and rural simplicity.
I wound up moving away from Indiana in early 2023. That was when we decided to join my sister, her husband, and their son out here in small-town Kansas. Two years later, I’m still trying to find my appreciation for this different kind of lifestyle. Moving so far away has allowed me to grow and spread my wings in different ways. And I love being closer to my family, and the convenience of being able to see them whenever I want is paramount, especially as the world grows weirder and more frightening every single day. But Indiana will forever be my home. I miss it deeply. It’s the place that raised me.
And I would kill for just a slice from Jockamo Pizza right about now!
The planet in question is currently called K2-18 b, and it’s only about 124 light-years away. Don’t get me wrong, 124 light-years is still a pretty big hike, but to put it in perspective, our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. In cosmic terms, that’s like walking a few city blocks to visit your favorite coffee shop. The possibility of there being a planet that’s teeming with life that is that close to us could be huge. Especially when you consider that we’re just now detecting light and the potential biosignatures from over a century ago. How far could life or even a potential civilization evolve in that timeframe?
Max was from up north, right??
As a self-proclaimed “nerd,” I’ve watched, read, and played through endless sci-fi titles. While I tend to prefer the Star Trek adventures to those from the Star Wars franchise, there’s a lot of other stuff out there that I’ve loved, too. Roswell was one of my favorites in high school. The OG, of course, but the CW’s attempt at a reboot was decent from what I saw of it, too. Last year, my brother also finally got me to sit down and watch the remade Battlestar Galacticafrom 2004, and I completely understand now why it ranks on so many people’s “best of” lists. I love it and can’t believe I didn’t watch it sooner. Joss Whedon’s short-lived “space western” Fireflyand its film continuation are big favorites in our home, too. I’ve also played and loved No Man’s Sky, Stellaris, and The Outer Worlds, the latter of which I still need to complete one day.
These are all sagas that take place in space or adjacent to space and feature intelligent lifeforms from other worlds. Sometimes these lifeforms are allies, and sometimes they are adversaries. No matter which angle the story in question decides to take, it’s given me a lot to question and seriously consider over the years. If and when we make first contact with an alien species, how exactly will things go? If they do exist, which seems incredibly likely now, why haven’t they found us yet? There are a few popular theories, and I have thoughts.
Why should we be terrified?
I don’t want to be accused of being a fear-monger or anything, but there are plenty of reasons to be terrified about the universe and what could be out there.
Before venturing further into popular theories, I think we have to first consider something called the “Fermi Paradox.” In 1950, an Italian-American physicist by the name of Enrico Fermi posed the question, “But where is everybody?” That question highlights a discrepancy: the idea that advanced intelligent life in other areas of the universe is highly likely and that it should therefore be extremely common for us to detect it. Yet… we haven’t. Why is that?
The Great Filter
In 1996, economist and author Robin Hanson proposed the “Great Filter” theory as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox. The Great Filter suggests a hypothetical event or barrier that prevents intelligent life from advancing too far into the cosmos. It takes into account that, yes, intelligent life on other worlds is probable, but somewhere in their evolutionary advancement, something is making it improbable or maybe even fatal for them to achieve interstellar travel or communication. Perhaps advanced civilizations do arise on other planets, but are always doomed to destroy themselves.
The big question about the Great Filter is this: Is it behind us, or yet to come? Some argue that abiogenesis, the process where life emerges for the first time, could be where the Great Filter falls in the evolutionary chain. That would mean that we’re past the hard part, and could explain that it’s actually rare for any life beyond microbes to form elsewhere in the universe. We were the exception, and amazing discoveries could still be in our future!
But… what if the Great Filter is yet to come? It could mean that we still have yet to reach a step in the process that any other advanced civilization didn’t survive. And we may not either.
The Dark Forest
Another theory, and perhaps the most chilling to me personally, is that of the “Dark Forest.” Even though the concept predates its publishing, this theory derives its name from the 2007 novel The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (the second book in a series that inspired a popular show on Netflix). It suggests that perhaps there are many advanced, spacefaring civilizations in existence, but they are all silent and hostile. They maintain their cloak of obscurity because they are already aware of others and fear their destruction if detected.
Sci-fi author Greg Bear, describing this concept as a “vicious jungle” prior to its Dark Forest designation, wrote in his 1987 novel The Forge of God that the human species and its broadcasts into outer space are similar to a baby crying in a hostile forest filled with hungry wolves. “We’ve been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that’s why,” one character explains in the novel.
Similar to the Dark Forest theory is the “Berserker Hypothesis,” also known as the “deadly probes scenario.” I tend to find this hypothesis considerably more unlikely than the Dark Forest theory above, but it does still provide an entirely compatible explanation for the Fermi Paradox. The Berserker Hypothesis, which is named after Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker novel series, suggests that we have yet to detect intelligent life elsewhere in the universe because it has all been or is currently being systematically destroyed by a series of lethal, self-replicating probes. Could it just be a matter of time before Earth is visited by such a probe?
A few things in my mind when thinking about malicious machinery are not just the origins of the Cylons and their nefarious “plan” for humanity in Battlestar Galactica, but also the emergence and current prevalence we are seeing with AI and robotics here in real life. Could the creation of such technology lead us to eventual ruin? Will ChatGPT or Copilot one day take over Earth?
Tell me those aren’t some terrifying explanations for the Fermi Paradox!
The Zoo Hypothesis
Another one of the many explanations for the Fermi Paradox is the “Zoo Hypothesis.” While not quite as terrifying as the Dark Forest, it’s still a doozy that could have many different outcomes. This one suggests that extraterrestrial life may be common and is already very aware of us here on Earth. They have already observed us and are intentionally avoiding contact. As if the entire planet is a large wildlife preserve or zoo for them.
Earth and Vulcan unite!
There could be a few different explanations. For example, in the fictional future that Star Trek inhabits, the good guys in Starfleet are supposed to abide by a rule they call the “Prime Directive.” This prevents them from prematurely interfering with the natural evolution and development of alien civilizations. The aim is to prevent any unprepared race from being introduced to advanced technology, knowledge, or values before they are ready. Typically, once a civilization has demonstrated its ability to achieve faster-than-light travel or subspace communications, they were deemed ready to make “first contact” with Starfleet. The franchise’s best feature film (in my humble opinion, of course) is 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, which depicts the iconic crew of the Starship Enterprise-E travelling back in time to prevent their cybernetically-enhanced nemesis, the Borg, from halting humanity’s historic first warp-capable flight—an event that eventually leads to first contact between humanity and their famed allies, the Vulcans.
As you have probably surmised by now, the Zoo Hypothesis also has some darker applications. For example, a variant of the hypothesis includes one called the “Laboratory Hypothesis,” which was developed by former MIT Haystack Observatory scientist John Allen Ball. That variant posits that humanity is being actively subjected to experiments and that our planet is serving as one single laboratory. It’s totally possible in this scenario that the experiments are also for the greater good of our species, but honestly, the idea just makes us sound like a bunch of lab mice, doesn’t it?
But there’s also hope!
There are obviously a lot of reasons why we should be terrified of the existence of alien life. And none of the aforementioned theories even have to do with aliens just showing up and immediately deciding to exterminate us, Independence Day-style. Think too long and hard about these ideas, and you’ve definitely entered into nightmare fuel territory.
But listen—hope springs eternal and all that. So I also want to share some solid reasons why the discovery of intelligent life in the cosmos could actually be really great news. Assuming any advanced civilization were to make contact tomorrow and extend their hands (or tentacles??? 🤷) in friendship, we could possibly benefit from all of the following:
Advanced Knowledge! Even a tiny glimpse at alien science could propel us hundreds or thousands of years ahead of where we currently are in our own scientific and technological communities. I’m talking interstellar travel, medical miracles, clean energy, and even solutions to climate change, poverty, and world hunger. The possibilities would be endless.
Paradigm Shifts! Science and technology wouldn’t be the only areas of our society to be touched by alien life. Discovering proof that we’re not alone in the universe would lead to colossal changes both psychologically and spiritually. How would world religions integrate this new knowledge into their belief systems? Would humanity embrace a sense of comfort knowing we’re no longer isolated?
Galactic Peace! If an advanced alien race chooses to make contact with Earth, it stands to reason that they may also have discovered the key to overcoming violence and greed themselves. They could provide us with the ability to do the same.
Unified Earth! Once we’re presented with undeniable evidence that something bigger than us really exists, maybe we could finally push ourselves to unite as one. And then maybe the idea of a United Federation of Planets isn’t too kooky anymore.
Cultural Evolution! Being influenced by a foreign culture could conceivably revolutionize our own. Language, art, music, ethics, and the understanding of life as we know it could change overnight.
Personally, I’m thrilled to learn more about K2-18 b as scientists continue their investigation. You could probably say that I’m cautiously optimistic about what we could find. Described as an “ocean planet,” it seems pretty likely that any organisms living there are probably microbes, or what we might consider marine life at best. But there could also be forms of intelligent life there that we just can’t imagine yet.
The idea of ghosts has actually been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been reading Trap Line by Timothy Zahn, a short story I found on Kindle that revolves around one engineer’s ability to “project” a ghostly apparition of himself across vast distances and makes first contact with aliens. I’ve also been listening to a lot of P!nk on Spotify while my sister and I continue our obsession with Palia. Recently, while reminiscing on a quest I had done for two of the game’s characters involving their mine potentially being haunted, the song “When I Get There” played, which is a beautiful and bittersweet song P!nk wrote as a letter to her late father in heaven. Today, my older brother told me, during a conversation about UFOs, that while he’s never seen an alien or a likely UFO, he is convinced that he’s seen a ghost. And lastly, I’ve mentioned a dozen or so times that Jiggy’s Journal is a blog and email newsletter publication powered by a platform incidentally called Ghost.
Needless to say, my vision last night could have just been light and shadow playing tricks on my fairly vulnerable psyche. Maybe this is all just coincidence? But I’m thinking not after last night.
“When I Get There” by P!nk.
Kitten Season 🐈
To tell the complete story, I need to bring you with me back to the summer of 2016. I was torn when my Dad came to me with a proposal: a friend of a friend of his in Kentucky had two kittens that were only a few weeks old, no longer wanted them for whatever ridiculous reason she gave them instead of “the novelty wore off,” and was simply going to dump them on the street if she wasn’t able to find a new home for them swiftly enough. “Do you want these kittens?” Dad asked, knowing very well that I wasn’t going to let two kittens get dumped on the street as an alternative. “Do I have a choice?” I asked him, looking at him like he were completely nuts.
I had little time to deliberate whether or not I was okay with forcing Tigger, who was my one and only pet at the time, to adjust to a more chaotic living situation with what amounted to two new babies in the mix. There were also a lot of adjustments to be made on our end in order to accommodate them. Including, but absolutely not limited to, kitten-proofing the house. We even bought a small dog crate to put them in at night when we slept because I was fearful that one of us might squish one of them on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. (Don’t worry—two nights into having them at home, they were completely free to roam the house at all hours. I couldn’t listen to them cry!) But I wound up deciding to take them anyway. Because, honestly, who says no to sharing their home with kittens?
Then, one weekend in June, Dad brought home the two adorable little furballs of joy. I didn’t know quite enough about cat biology this early into our journey with cats at home and wrongfully assumed that one of the kittens was a calico—a type of cat that is tricolored and almost exclusively female—due to him being mostly white with patches of gray tabby stripes in places. That explains why my nephew and I had initially given them the Star Trek-inspired names Curzon and Jadzia. We felt that they were highly unique names for kittens, but in retrospect, felt a touch too nerdy when my co-workers wound up needing a pronunciation after seeing my updates on social media. After learning at their first vet check-up that Jadzia was actually a boy, their names were quickly changed to what we know them as today: Rufus and Oliver.
Only about a month later, on what was easily one of the saddest nights of my entire life, Dad and I took a trip to the emergency vet with Oliver in tow. In the few hours up until that point, he had rapidly grown remarkably ill. So rapidly that it almost felt as though someone had flipped a switch in him. He had gone from energetic play with his brother to vomiting and was demonstrating an inability to stand or walk on his own. Dad could tell from his labored breathing simply sitting on the exam table that he was already suffering, and I did not want to subject him to further testing or procedures that they weren’t even sure would help him. Ultimately, as extraordinarily painful as it was for me, I said a tearful goodbye and chose the only humane thing left to do.
The only photo that exists of me with Oliver.
I was profoundly heartbroken. The veterinarian, who remained very kind and compassionate throughout the entire ordeal, had told us that it was likely that Oliver had been suffering from an underlying disease such as FeLV (Feline Leukemia Virus), and we just didn’t know since he hadn’t been exhibiting any symptoms up until then. It wasn’t our fault, but it didn’t feel that way to me. I was highly upset at the possibility that maybe he had gotten ahold of and eaten something that he shouldn’t have. I was also wildly fearful that his illness could have been spread to Tigger or Rufus, which resulted in us taking them to two different vets to be tested for FeLV and other diseases known to affect cats. Thankfully, except for Tig’s constantly recurring issue with ear mites, they both checked out to be perfectly healthy. Thus, the world spun madly on…
The Bond That Lives On 💖
Even though Tigger and Rufus received clean bills of health, I was still uneasy about them. Especially when it came to the youngest of the two. Oliver had technically been the only constant presence in Ruf’s life up until then. The way that Rufus constantly searched for his brother in those first few weeks without him made my heart hurt to watch. Sometimes, I think that animals have a better awareness of emotions and the world we live in than we do, but this was one instance in which I wish that I could have somehow given him the ability to say goodbye.
I consider myself a “crazy cat guy.” I love all three of my kitties, including my old man Tigger and our more recent addition, Cinnamon. They are practically my children. They are, without question, the loves of my life. But my bond with Rufus is special. The day we came home with Oliver’s empty carrier, I made a promise to Ruf that I would always love and take care of him. Now that he didn’t have his brother to confide in or to protect him, I felt like he was going to need a little extra love. While still painfully shy and could be considered the very definition of a “scaredy cat,” Rufus has been my best friend. He sleeps every night right beside me. And he has a way of always finding me when I need him. That old cliché about rescued pets rescuing their owners instead is true in a lot of ways between us. I tell my father constantly that Rufus is the best gift he ever gave me.
Perhaps the recurring theme of ghosts visiting us was what set the stage for last night’s encounter. I’ve been up late gaming, tooling around with my website or server, and launching my new public forums (which you should totally join!) a lot lately. Last night was no different, until I walked into the kitchen to grab another soda and caught, out of the corner of my eye, what looked like a white-ish colored cat sitting in our living room. I had to do a double-take, and even after taking a second look, I still thought the cat was sitting there. It wasn’t one of the others either, since they were all accounted for. It took completely glancing away and then back to the same spot again before the realization set in that no cat was sitting there and likely never had been. It was alarming, but after thinking about it from a few different perspectives, I’m convinced…
Oliver had paid me a visit that night.
I’m still uncertain as to why, but I do have a few theories. The first is that I’ve been dwelling a little on my own mortality. I’m still just learning at the ripe old age of 40 how to code/program and actually develop an understanding of how computers work. You see, I thought that gaining these skills might make me more employable, but I’m also aware that I’m getting into an age bracket that makes companies think twice. I’m also facing the unfortunate truth about how difficult it is to make friends as an adult. I’m an introvert, so it was already pretty hard, but trying to find time to “hang out” just isn’t a top priority for people who juggle multiple jobs and/or take care of children. Almost everyone else my age has a mortgage and grandchildren. It’s probably why the only other people I still know in this town outside of my family are retail co-workers that I don’t even work with anymore. Whatever the case may be, I think Oliver’s appearance last night—whether it was actually him from beyond or just a personal spiritual experience—means a couple of things.
It was a reminder of him being one of my babies, as brief as it was. It’s a reminder of how much I love my family and my other cats. It’s a reminder of my hometown back in Indiana and the friends I still have there. And the friends that I make going forward. I’m choosing to believe that the significance of Oliver’s spirit being felt nearby means something. These connections never truly fade away, despite time or distance. Love transcends physical boundaries.
My grandmother passed away in 2011, but I still recall having a serious conversation with her during one of the major holidays before her death. I told her about how the days leading up to holidays like that one made me incredibly anxious. I knew that I was going to see distant relatives that I rarely saw throughout the rest of the year, and I would be socially inept. But it never shook out that way because when the day actually came around, striking up a conversation with everyone wasn’t difficult at all. It was always as if no time had passed between any of us. And she told me that’s just what it’s like with family. My grandma, my late mother, and even little Oliver all remind me that love is maybe the only thing that lasts forever.
I have been in a literal state of PANIC the last few days!
Since the widespread adoption of the internet in the ’90s, much of our society has developed a very co-dependent relationship with technology. And that relationship only seems to grow stronger as time marches on. It’s not just Snapchat and TikTok-obsessed teens that are driving the demand, either. Businesses large and small, schools and libraries, financial institutions, and even our government officials now leverage digital tools to complete and keep track of sales transactions, provide informative and educational material to the public or to their students, and communicate with or keep tabs on allies and enemies alike. And hey, don’t tell me you aren’t looking forward to streaming the latest episode of Yellowjackets every damn week. (I know that I am!!!)
Key art for the Showtime series Yellowjackets.
Staying connected is a necessity now for people all over the world. Yours truly is no different. And I had two major scares the past few days! Fortunately, they are both lessons learned and can perhaps serve as cautionary tales.
Server Trouble⚙️
As I’ve mentioned before, one of my latest pet projects has been building and tinkering with my own little web server. This publication and Ghost, the software that powers it, are hosted on said server. I’ve also used the server to host my website and started trying to throw up some other fun projects here and there. One of the projects that I was going to spin up was an instance of Nextcloud, a service that functions similar to Google Drive, only it’s completely private, under your oversight, and out of the hands of a mega-corporation.
The problem is that Nextcloud seems only willing to operate with an Apache server, while my server has solely been using Nginx. There do appear to be ways to make both of those things play nicely with one another on the same server, but it involves a good bit of technical know-how to change which ports the two are listening to on said server and, to be honest, I don’t know that I was doing it right. Plus, I was having difficulty getting Apache to start up at all while Nginx was running simultaneously. So, after several days of trying to tinker with things to get them just right, I finally threw up my hands and hastily decided to just completely uninstall Apache, Nextcloud, and all of their modules. All of it. Every single bit. Gone. Scrubbed. Done. It can be a project for a future version of me to figure out.
Computer errors are infuriating!
Later on that evening, I went to click on my bookmark to access the backend of this very blog only to find that it was serving up an error message. “Um, what??” were the immediate words out of my mouth. I didn’t recall having uninstalled or otherwise messed with any settings or files associated with Ghost. The entire clean-up spree of that mess was isolated to only Apache and Nextcloud. So I consulted my trusty sidekick, the internet, and eventually discovered that in the process of removing Nextcloud and all of its modules from the server, I also uninstalled the MySQL database that stores all of the content on Jiggy’s Journal. That meant that every single post, page, photo, link, settings, design options, and even my list of subscribers were all gone. And not just gone! Unrecoverable.
They were gone gone.
Thankfully, reinstalling MySQL and enabling Ghost to start working again behind the scenes was an easy process. I also had my subscriber list and the firsttwo posts from the blog backed up from when we moved away from Substack. Most of the settings and design options were also easy enough to get back in the right place. Perhaps my biggest saving grace was that I was able to reconstruct the posts that weren’t properly backed up from the versions that were emailed out to our subscribers. I wasn’t able to save most of the images or reference links that were originally included, but my written text was still available, and I was able to post them back up right away.
I’m very fortunate that everything wound up being saved after all. But the idea of this publication, which I’m still just starting to get underway, being wiped away without my consent was highly alarming. You may notice some small changes in the blog’s main page and some other areas, but everything should be back in place now. It should also be common knowledge and practice at this point, but the lesson to learn here is this:
⚠️ Do NOT update, install, or uninstall files or software unless you have backed things up first!
This will be something that I do regularly going forward, regardless of how fed up I might be with the server being cantankerous.
Palia Pains🌿
I’ve been playing the life-sim video game Palia since early December. I’ve had the game for quite a while, especially since it’s the right price (FREE!), but I didn’t start playing it regularly until December. I was on the lookout for a “cozy” game that I already owned that had some winter or holiday-themed celebrations going on to fit in with what I was going for on my Twitch streams at the time. Palia wound up fitting the bill since they had their “Winterlights” events happening. So, in the process of getting festive, I also wound up getting… Well, a little bit addicted to the game, too.
I’ve been playing fairly regularly for the past several months. I managed to get my sister, followed by the rest of our immediate family, interested in playing as well. It turns out that when something is this entertaining and the cost of entry is nothing, it’s actually pretty easy to convince people to give it a try! Who knew?
Key art for the video game Palia.
Palia has been plagued by many issues lately, however. While the game is widely available for free and very fun and playable, it is still technically in a “beta testing” phase, so finding bugs and other things that are broken is pretty common. Especially since its last update on March 25th, where a large portion of the playerbase is reporting that the game completely crashes when transitioning between areas. I’ve personally experienced the game crashing a number of times myself, but I’ve typically been able to send a report to the developers and then either re-open the game or just move on.
Things were different today. Something you should know in advance is that my PC has extremely limited storage space left on its hard drive, so a majority of my games and files related to them are stored on a portable hard drive with 4 TB of storage. At some point earlier this evening, while I was in the middle of trying to obtain some in-game resources that I needed for my home plot on Palia, the game locked up on me, indicating that it was about to crash. This time, the game never closed and just sat there doing nothing. I was also having difficulty getting other things to work, so I opted to do a hard restart of the entire computer.
And then… Nothing.
The case of my PC lit up like it was starting and the internal fans started running, but my monitors were completely blank. Just a black screen of nothingness. I tried two more hard reboots to see if maybe it hadn’t finished processing something, but nothing was happening. It seemed like my PC was just dead in the water. And that’s when panic set in.
I don’t have a super high-end computer, but it was a fairly pricey one when I purchased it in 2019. A comparable machine today would be even more expensive. And without my computer, I’m cut off from a wide variety of things that are currently sustaining me. I would no longer be able to effectively stream to Twitch or YouTube, I wouldn’t be able to access and write to this blog/email newsletter or any of the rest of my server or web projects, I wouldn’t be able to continue my developer education at freeCodeCamp, I wouldn’t be able to game with friends or family online anymore, and my ability to continue the ever-frustrating search for a job or source of revenue would be extremely limited. Sure, I still have a laptop and my smartphone with which I could use to access information and perhaps “stay in touch,” but neither of those devices has the necessary power or capacity to do these things efficiently.
Enterprise Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) has some serious questions for me.
However, my nephew saved the day when he was able to get my PC back up and running. I often jokingly refer to him as our “Chief Engineer.” This is because he’s a genius at networking and getting our devices to power on. I love and am learning about software and web development, but hardware issues are kind of my blind spot. Plus, he’s also a fellow Trekkie, so bestowing him a starship-related title feels appropriate. He recalled that computers can sometimes have issues if they’re trying to process too much information at startup, so he started unplugging various USB devices from the machine. That turned out to be the trick! My PC started up immediately. I thought it would be smooth sailing from here on out!
Nope!
Things weren’t fixed yet. Upon going to sign back into Palia to try and finally get my game objectives completed, I was surprised to find that Steam didn’t seem to think that I even had the game installed. In fact, numerous titles from my collection were missing. All titles that were installed on my external 4 TB hard drive! Eventually, I discovered that the drive wasn’t being recognized by Windows at all anymore and, upon unplugging it from my system entirely, it had no more issues restarting properly. After a few more hours of troubleshooting and running Western Digital‘s diagnostic tools, I believe the crux of this issue is that my PC was in the middle of a read/write process with Palia on my external drive when it seized up on me. It was likely my hasty decision to do a hard reboot that broke things and left the drive in an error state. I also recall having Windows Update download new drivers for Western Digital devices a couple of nights ago as well, but I’m not sure if it played a hand in my dilemma at all.
After the diagnostics determined that the drive was still okay and healthy, Windows started recognizing it again and everything was good in the long run. Also, I could have lived without the drive if necessary. It would have sucked, because it was FOUR TERABYTES of storage that contained a lot of game data, but I could do some organizational gymnastics and reinstall whichever game titles were necessary. No big deal. Thankfully, now it seems that I won’t need to. So the next lesson we can all learn here from my stupidity is:
⚠️ Do NOT reboot your system or disconnect drives or devices from it while it is still processing!
This is also now something that I will keep in mind moving forward. I hope that all of you have learned something new as well! 🫠
Jiggy’s Journal recently experienced technical trouble, and some content was damaged. Fortunately, I was able to reconstruct said content from the emailed versions, but many of the reference links and animated GIFs in this post were lost. My apologies for the inconvenience!
For the last few weeks, I’ve been putting the final touches on a web project that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. And it may not seem like it, but Jiggy’s Journal is actually part of it!
To explain the entire story, I probably need to rewind quite a bit. And to be fair, this got pretty lengthy! So if you already know me and a large part of my most recent chapters, I’ve toggled the “previously on…” portions of today’s episode. 😉
From Indiana to Kansas🗺️
You might recall that I’m originally from a small town just outside of Indianapolis, IN. It was small in the sense that my high school’s graduating class in 2003 had just over 200 students, but it never truly felt small because it still only took me about 25-45 minutes to get into downtown Indy depending on traffic. Fast forward to a few years ago when my sister, who lived in an actual small town in a pretty rural part of Kansas with her husband and my nephew, started having some scary health issues. Our father did a couple of stints in the hospital, too. We all collectively decided it was probably in our best interests if all of us were in the same area. Not only would we be around to bolster each other’s quality of life, we also just generally would be around to see each other more. And since their return to Indiana was not in the cards, we packed up in early 2023 and relocated. It’s where I live today.
I was relieved that my employer at the time was willing to allow me to continue working for them remotely once we made the move, but ultimately, it didn’t work out. They had tried transitioning me to a more “call center” type of work. Ordinarily, I am excellent at customer service and even enjoy being able to help people, but dealing with angry people who were demanding answers to some of the company’s services that I had nearly zero knowledge of wound up being my kryptonite. I resigned and shipped their laptop back to them. And then experienced a health crisis of my own.
Emergency Pitstop💉
In mid-2023, only weeks after I had left my job, I started experiencing some abdominal pain. I’m really good about eating things that aren’t great for me, so some stomach rumbles weren’t uncommon, but this seemed to persist and it didn’t want to go away. We were initially convinced that it might have been a UTI, but just to be on the safe side, my brother-in-law took me to a clinic to get everything checked out. The staff at that clinic wound up suggesting that I report to the nearby hospital ER instead. That ER staff wound up admitting me after doing some imaging.
Putting it mildly, I was terrified. Up until this point, I had never had anything result in hospitalization. No major injuries or illnesses. At most, I’d had routine outpatient procedures done, but nothing that would require me to stay overnight. When they told me I was then on my way to emergency surgery to remove my appendix, I was VERY alarmed. I even asked my brother-in-law to bring my dear old dad to see me. Mostly to help calm me down, but also just in case it was the last time he ever saw me. Dramatic? Probably. Especially since I have seen enough Grey’s Anatomy to know that an appendectomy—fondly referred to on the show (and I’m hoping in real life because it’s adorable) as an “appy”—is one of the first surgeries that new surgeons get to perform on their own because it’s so basic and routine. I was likely in good hands—or fine enough hands, at the very least. But I still wanted my only living parent there. Like a toddler still wants his blankie.
After I was rid of the surgery pain and the drain of nastiness they had installed in my stomach, I really just had to deal with the other major diagnosis I received while at the hospital: Diabetes. It’s not entirely surprising since nearly my entire immediate family is diabetic. But it did mean a whole new world of having to manage it. Even though Ozempic is all the rage now, daily injections and having to limit your consumption of sugar and carbs are still not fun. Once I had recovered from the appy and started on my diabetic meds, I knew it was time to face reality: I needed a new job.
I came to find that, after working in office administration and customer service for the same company for over eight years, the job market has kinda dried up. You can still find thousands upon thousands of job openings listed on Indeed and LinkedIn, but most never even respond to your application because they are “ghost jobs” that aren’t even actually hiring. Also presenting a problem is the fact that I’m living in a much less populated area than I was before. In most circumstances, the jobs just don’t exist here. And you can basically forget trying to find a remote job unless you have very specific skills or you want to do call center work, which is exactly what I had already tried to get away from.
So later in the summer, I went to work retail at the only local big box store. The pay was better than I expected it to be (although still terrible), but I figured that I could run a cash register for 8 hours a day. It didn’t sound like rocket science, so why not? Plus, we got a meager employee discount! And health insurance, which was now obviously necessary. And I genuinely liked most of my co-workers! It was great to actually get acquainted with other people in the area since I didn’t know anyone here aside from my family. Even the customers were nice for the most part! That was particularly surprising since I had come from a job where most clients were already angry at us before they even picked up the phone. I was initially hired as part-time help, but my manager offered me full-time hours after only a few weeks and eventually asked if I’d be interested in learning how to work at the customer service desk, so I guess I was doing a decent enough job.
In retrospect, I probably should have declined the service desk position. It was there that I really started experiencing the ugly and sometimes horrifyingly ignorant side of customer service again. Sure, there were plenty of pleasant people, but a majority of the work done at the service desk was with customers who were deeply unhappy about one thing or another. And in recent years, I’ve learned that I’m someone who will generally match the energy of those around me. I think most people are like that. It’s probably where the old adage about luring flies with honey instead of vinegar comes from. If you come to me with a friendly demeanor, I’m much more inclined to assist you than if you’re a total Karen. Shit, I’m practically thrilled to help you if you’re kind to me. So, in most cases, it probably isn’t the greatest idea to have me assist someone who wants to get in my face and yell about how I’m “just a f**king cashier” and that he didn’t like my attitude. (Actual true story, by the way!)
My time in retail clearly came to an abrupt ending in the spring of last year. The rude customers started getting to me mentally. I just didn’t want to get up and go force myself to get berated by strangers anymore. I wasn’t doing much better physically. My legs were practically dead from mostly standing in one spot cashing people out all day every day. It’s been almost a year since I left that job and I still feel like I permanently have that Meredith Grey walk. And that’s not even to mention the time that I literally passed out while on shift behind that service desk. The reasoning is still technically a mystery, but I suspect that low blood sugar had something to do with it since I hadn’t eaten beforehand. I stopped taking care of myself and it was beginning to show. So I stepped away.
Outgrowing Academics🍎
The whole job search here continues to elude me. As I stated in the previous sections, it has been almost a year since I left the retail gig, and I haven’t found another source of income. I’ve sent out probably hundreds of applications and gone to a couple of interviews, but nothing else has panned out. Thankfully, my family has kept me afloat and away from being forced into actual bankruptcy and homelessness, but I know that that can’t last forever. That’s ultimately why I decided to go back to the root of what interests me: Technology!
I went to college back in Indiana for a short while to study Software Development. I’ve always been more of a “creative” type of person, but I’m objectively awful at the more “artsy” fields. I’ve had a few successes with projects in computer graphics and photography, but I was terrible in actual high school art classes. I can’t draw to save my life and don’t even ask me to paint or watercolor. We’ll just wind up with a big mess. So I needed to be able to pour my creative side into something practical and developing software by writing code seemed perfect! Not only was I constantly thinking of cool ideas for apps and web services that I already used, but I’ve been obsessed with video games since I was a small child. Developing my own video game or working in the gaming industry sounded amazing to me. So I started out learning about networking, databases, and even writing a little bit of code in Python! I was having a blast!
Those official studies came to an abrupt end when my advisor suggested that I change my major. The Software Development program had several math courses on top of the remedial algebra courses they were already making me take as part of my general education requirement. And if you know me, you know math is my nemesis. I even made my sister tally up my score for me during a family game of Yahtzee! just this weekend. Math is not a friend of mine. I can write computer code, but math? I don’t know her. So I did eventually change my major to Visual Communications, where I spent a few more semesters wasting a boatload of money but genuinely enjoying my time in classes like Photography, Video and Sound, and Intro to Computer Graphics. I loved taking all of those courses and I learned a lot about skills that I could put to good use in my existing hobbies like content creation and streaming on Twitch. But honestly, at this point, I was just floating in the wind with school. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore aside from just taking a bunch of classes that sounded fun.
After the move to Kansas, I transferred my studies to the University of Kansas (KU) and became a virtual Jayhawk for a year. Going from a two-year to a four-year university meant even more rigorous studying and it seemed like they were padding my schedule with required courses that were still wasting my time and were, quite frankly, kinda boring me. So I decided to step away from my formal education entirely after that first year here.
Back to Basics💁
And here we are now! Where I’m finding myself both unemployed and a college dropout. Don’t I sound like a real winner?
I’m continuing to send out my résumé and fill out job applications online in case I can manage to snag one of those elusive remote positions. I’m told that they do exist, despite my best efforts. In the meantime, I’ve decided to pick up where I left off with my web and software education without the rigid institution behind it. I’ve very slowly but carefully been working my way through freeCodeCamp’s completely free certification courses. I’ve been having a bit of trouble wrapping my brain around JavaScript, so in the meantime, I’ve also taken on a few other tech-related projects. That includes building out my very own server!
This publication—Jiggy’s Journal, the Ghost instance that powers it, and even the automated emails subscribers get from it—are all now living pieces of www.jiggyflyjoe.com/! And trust me, there has been a massive learning curve with trying to figure out how to do all of that. Including several little snafus with the domain and its nameservers that had me yanking my hair out for days. I was thrilled when I finally got everything up and running. It was a big achievement for me! I even decided to write and code my little main page with information about me and links to all the places you can find me. Now, when you navigate to www.jiggyflyjoe.com/, the page you are greeted with is 100% hand-made by me!
Screenshot of jiggyflyjoe’s website on desktop.
The page is written entirely in HTML and CSS, so it is admittedly a little “basic” compared to what I used before to simply drag and drop elements on a digital canvas over on Carrd. But as someone aspiring to work in the tech or gaming industries, I figured a website fully made and configured by my own hands was probably mandatory. And hey, its design and interactivity and overall awesomeness can and will eventually grow as I continue to learn, right?
The possibilities are endless with what else I can self-host on my server, too. My nephew has already been deeply invested in digitizing our large DVD collection that is otherwise just collecting dust. Perhaps I could spin up a media server? Maybe just a private file management service for me and the family? Perhaps we could migrate from our current family chat app to a private one on the server? I could always try my hand at hosting a forum for my web visitors, too! Trust that I’m always on the lookout for a new project! Plus, I’ve still got those JavaScript lessons on the back burner that I really need to get back to before they start bubbling over!
The “TL;DR” of it all is this: I may not currently be in school or have a job, but I’m still learning and doing actual work. I’m spending my days beefing up my employable skills as much as I possibly can. I can only hope that eventually, the right opportunity comes calling.
Jiggy’s Journal recently experienced technical trouble, and some content was damaged. Fortunately, I was able to reconstruct said content from the emailed versions, but many of the reference links and animated GIFs in this post were lost. My apologies for the inconvenience!
It has been five years since COVID.
I realize that, technically, the disease was first identified in China at the tail-end of 2019, but as many of us can probably recall, it wasn’t until March of 2020 that the World Health Organization (WHO) assessed the outbreak to be pandemic in scale. I was browsing the other day and saw that someone had written a line or a tweet or something referencing the five years since they were sent home from work with a laptop and told they would return to the office in two weeks. Remember when we only needed two weeks to “flatten the curve”? We were so optimistic!
I still remember hearing that a “severe respiratory coronavirus” had spread from Wuhan to other areas of China, then from China to other countries in Asia, and then globally from there. There were conflicting reports that it was just another form of SARS, which is another disease that generated some scary news headlines back in the early 2000s. And while it’s true that SARS and COVID are both coronaviruses that share a lot of similarities, they also have quite a few key differences, the most important of which is that SARS was contained and there have been no documented cases of it since 2004. COVID, on the other hand, seemed very different. Something that I think all of us would figure out soon…
The Immediate Impact & Long-Term Effects
I’m pretty torn on my opinion of the year 2020.
In March 2020, I was working for a company in Indianapolis that did data entry and processed lab results for companies that were drug testing their employees. Though my dad likes to joke around and tell people about how I collected urine samples all day, everything that I did was mostly office and administrative work. I was very hands-off with the urine, I promise! I always had a dream of being able to work from home though — in fact, I had just been rehired at the company after taking a brief little hiatus to pursue a job that was remote-based, but didn’t work out — so even though I was dreadfully anxious about COVID itself, I was ecstatic when my manager handed me a new laptop and sent me to start working from home! We were still deemed “essential employees,” but there was no reason why we couldn’t do our data entry tasks and answer phone calls and emails from our own home offices. So we did!
As an introvert and homebody, I was practically made for lockdown. Working from home? That means no 25-45 minute commute to the office and back every day! It also means that I can basically be in my pajamas all day and nobody will mind one bit! I was saving all kinds of money: I didn’t need to fuel up with gas or coffee for the drive, I didn’t need to order my expensive sandwich from Potbelly’s for lunch anymore, I didn’t need to chip in for Karen from Accounting’s kid’s birthday fundraiser or whatever. Hell, I didn’t even need to exchange fake pleasantries with Karen from Accounting anymore! Plus, I could take a nap in my bed with my cat or go on a walk around my neighborhood for some fresh air during my breaks! It all felt so freeing! Truthfully, I think a lot of us felt this sense of like, “Why haven’t those of us who could work from home been working from home all along?”
There were, of course, things about the pandemic that weren’t great. Hearing a constant barrage about the increasing death toll on practically every news outlet was depressing and terrifying. Everyone was afraid, confused, and scrambling for real information. The pandemic, for whatever reason, became a political issue here in the United States. Looking back, I think it was the start of people widely sharing misinformation on the internet. People started using ivermectin, a livestock dewormer, as a COVID aid and our clueless President suggested that we should inject disinfectants as treatment. Many Americans wouldn’t wear masks in public and refused to get the vaccine. So many that the WHO listed vaccine reluctance or refusal as one of the top 10 global health threats. It was also a nightmare trying to find supplies from people buying up entire stocks of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and other in-demand pandemic necessities.
Schools closed. My heart ached for kids who never got to experience some of life’s most important moments like homecomings, proms, and graduations. That’s not even taking into account the lasting effects on the behavior and mentality of kids who experienced the pandemic early on in life. Hollywood shut down. Many anticipated blockbusters and some of our favorite shows were either cancelled or indefinitely postponed because actors and crew were no longer able to report to set. The popular medical series, and one of my personal favorites, Grey’s Anatomy, not only shut down but later adapted the pandemic into its actual storytelling. Businesses also closed. Some permanently. So many of my favorite Indy hangouts went the way of the dodo due to little or no patronage during COVID lockdowns. (RIP Big Daddy’s, home of the amazing pot roast nachos and the first place that I ever played musical bingo!) Protests that occurred nationwide in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota a few months into 2020 also permanently altered the vibe of Indy for a lot of residents. It went from being an eclectic and growing city to something that almost needed to be feared. The world in general seemed to follow that same trajectory.
Where Are We Now?
Thinking about the entire concept of being five years removed from the onset of COVID immediately made me think back to an eerie moment in Avengers: Endgame when the film slowly cuts to a time jump of “Five Years Later” after an event that wiped half of all living creatures in the universe out of existence. Including several members of the titular team of Marvel superheroes.
Trailer for Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame.
While the Avengers were (spoiler alert!) successful in bringing back their friends and the rest of the universe, we weren’t quite as fortunate here in the real world. Alas, time travel isn’t exactly something we’ve achieved just yet, so we can’t really follow their blueprint to avert the crisis.
I recognize that I was extremely fortunate during this very turbulent time. Staying at home all the time is where I’m the most comfortable, the most productive, and where I’m the most in my element. Though I’ve been seriously sick a few times since the beginning of the pandemic and even had to have emergency surgery, I’ve never personally tested positive for COVID. But I have close family members who have had COVID, some who still have lingering effects of it. My father, who is getting up there in years and has some underlying health issues, was always in the forefront of my mind when it came to exposure or infection since he is essentially one of the more at-risk populations of complications from COVID. I’ve also known people whose lives came to an end due to COVID. It makes anti-vaxxers and those who deny that it was even real very difficult for me to stomach.
The plague of misinformation online and distrust that has been brewing with science and public health officials is a real crisis. I can get behind folks that are skeptical of their government and its policies. My fellow Americans should be questioning everything the current administration says and does. But science and medicine are real. Make sure you’re listening to the right sources of information. You may sometimes have to do a little Google research to ascertain what is fact and what is complete bullshit. And rather than limiting fact-checking like I mentioned Meta was doing in my last post, social media and tech platforms should be discouraging the spread of lies, not rewarding it. Somehow, we even managed to install a notorious anti-vaxxer as our U.S. Health Secretary! Seriously!
I often hear about things “returning to normal” these days as employees return to the office and students return to school. Many places don’t require a mask to be worn on entry or that you be vaccinated anymore. I’ve even been to a few conventions that didn’t turn out to be “superspreaders.” It’s nice that the world is regaining some of its normalcy, but I also think there are a lot of lessons from the pandemic that we should carry with us into the future. We should be embracing remote work. If it can be done remotely, it should be allowed to be done from home. We should also be embracing health initiatives like getting vaccinated, wearing masks and social distancing when you’re sick, or even just washing your damn hands! The number of people who needed clearer information and directions on effective hand-washing was seriously alarming. If your hands aren’t getting flaky and scaly from washing your hands too often, you’re doing it wrong! (Just kidding! Kinda. 👀)
All things considered, I think that the pandemic is an interesting study on humanity’s ability to adapt and survive. I think that our intellect might be one of the qualities that makes us so special and unique as a species. That intellect is what gives us our ability to adapt. I could probably write an entire dissertation about instances where humanity faced pivotal moments throughout history where adaptation was necessary for survival, but I won’t do that here. This story is already getting to be a little too long in the tooth as it is. But if you think about the history of humanity as a whole, we’ve gone through a hell of a lot that some species didn’t survive. And it’s important to remember that not all of us survived the pandemic, either.
Keep them in your hearts and minds during this five-year anniversary as they have definitely been weighing on mine.
This post has been revised from a previous version briefly published to my Substack account that I’ve now vacated. Apologies if you’ve read any of this before, and be sure to subscribe and/or update your bookmarks to our NEW HOME at https://journal.jiggyflyjoe.com!
I’ve made big changes to my digital footprint this year.
I’m part of a “micro-generation” the internet refers to as “Xennials.” A “Xennial” describes elder Millennials like myself who feel a little more like they were squeezed out at the tail end of Gen X. As such, my weird brain remembers a pre-internet childhood, spent in the analog world: playing in expansive backyards, catching lightning bugs, roller skating, and riding bicycles until the street lights came on. But I also spent my teenage years and young adulthood in a rapidly changing digital world. I’d already gotten hooked on video games thanks to the original Nintendo Entertainment System that my entire family enjoyed playing, so it’s no surprise that, later on, I fell in love with computers and technology. And, of course, the internet. You better believe I was in those crowded AOL chat rooms and instant messages while simultaneously taking care of my Neopet by the time I was 14!
A GIF of the old AOL start-up sequence.
In the decades that have passed, we’ve seen the rise of social media platforms. Though I recall my days on LiveJournal having a good bit of built-in social functions, MySpace was truly the first social media behemoth. Do you all remember the first time you were crushed when someone removed you from their Top 8? Though they had lengthy experimental phases in which they were only available to college students or work colleagues, it wasn’t too long before Facebook and Twitter were unleashed upon the public. And many of us never looked back. I was maybe more addicted than most. I loved seeing new content from my friends, family, and co-workers. I loved getting to make content for them, too. And don’t we all get at least a little thrill when someone “likes” our stuff? To say that I’m “chronically online” would probably be putting it mildly.
But lately, things have changed. Social media was originally meant to help us stay connected, even when we couldn’t physically be near one another. Now it feels a little like trying to navigate a landmine of bad takes, misinformation, and proprietary algorithms deciding what I should see versus what I want to see. At some point, I started to realize that my feeds weren’t mine anymore. Content that I cared about was buried by engagement-hungry outrage bait and an increasing number of ads. And while I don’t have a whole lot to hide — since I have a personal policy of not doing anything on the internet that I wouldn’t want my family to see — I don’t exactly feel comfortable with the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg digging around and selling my data to the highest bidder. Not any more than they already have anyway.
So in many cases, especially after the latest U.S. election cycle, I decided to shut down or step away from the platforms that concerned me the most. And in many of those cases, I’ve already found their replacements!
What I left behind…
Facebook and Twitter (now ridiculously called “X”) were my first casualties.
The former was surprisingly the easiest decision to pull the trigger on. I used to view Facebook as being essential to socializing in today’s world. While I always found it admirable that there were people who could resist Facebook’s siren song for so long, it felt almost akin to not owning a telephone. Though I always struggled with seeing outrageous posts, comments, and opinions from people that I was supposedly “friends” with, I felt that Facebook kept me “in the loop” with long-lost friends from high school, old co-workers, distant relatives, and so on. So what do you mean you aren’t on Facebook?
After the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election though, I finally had enough. Politically charged and sometimes outright disgusting conversations from people I was supposed to actually like reached an all-time high. It would only be a few weeks later that Meta would make sweeping changes to many of its policies including discontinuing fact-checking services, doing away with its DEI hiring practices, removing LGBTQIA+ protections and inclusivity, and much more to align itself with the far-right agenda. I had to make my exit. To be real, I know that the people in my life that care to remain in contact already know where to find me. So I requested a copy of my information from Facebook to keep locally and then deleted my account swiftly and silently.
Other platforms were going to be a little tricky. Twitter/X was, for a time, my favorite of the bunch and was the platform where I had grown the most. I didn’t want to just leave the connections I had made there high and dry. I also didn’t want to just vacate my “@jiggyflyjoe” username and let it get potentially claimed by a bot or bad actor who might have hacking or extortion or some other devious plans for it in mind. So once again, I requested a copy of my info from what I’m now calling “Xitter” (pronounced like “zitter,” because I’m petty AF and can only imagine Elon Musk would hate it), and saved it to my archives. Instead of deleting the account, however, I used an excellent automated third-party tool called Block Party to wipe out all of my previous content on the account to discourage Xitter’s AI bot Grok from learning and training with them. Then I threw up one final post letting folks know where they could find me going forward and bid them adieu.
I eventually made similar moves on Instagram and Threads to get Meta completely out of my life.
Thankfully, alternative platforms have cropped up around the internet. These alternatives aren’t controlled and censored by “broligarchy” tech billionaires or founders who have made messy blunders one right after another. Many of them are decentralized. That means that, since they aren’t controlled by a central organization or company like Meta, it’ll also be difficult for a billionaire with nefarious plans to swoop in and add them and their users to their digital arsenal.
Which alternatives?
I’m so glad you asked!
Initially, I set out to write this post as a means to share where I’ve landed across the web and instead, I wound up writing this entire manifesto about why you should leave these platforms behind and find better. Here’s what I’ve been using lately:
Bluesky and Mastodon are both decentralized micro-blogging platforms that operate very similarly to Twitter/X and Meta’s Threads. I prefer Bluesky, which recently hit a record 31 million users in the wake of unpopular changes to X, but I often find myself cross-posting most things to my Mastodon account and engage with users on both. Bluesky and Mastodon both feel extremely similar to how Twitter did in its early days, which is definitely a good thing. Very much the “internet town square” vibe that Twitter aimed to curate before Musk’s ownership. They’re both more community-driven and have a lot less of the algorithm nonsense that plagues X today.
Instagram was one of Meta’s properties that I was really apprehensive about letting go of because I just didn’t know if any decent alternatives existed for it yet. Then I found Pixelfed, which is exactly what I needed to make that final jump from the Zuck. Pixelfed is still very small (as in less than a million users small!), but it is still under active development and has a user experience that’s nearly identical to Instagram. If you need a new home to host your photos and other media, this is the place to do it. It is also decentralized and built right on top of the same protocol as Mastodon.
Unfortunately, Meta also owns two of the most popular messaging services between Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. It looks like the founder of Telegram may have been up to no good as well. And that’s all on top of the FBI’s warning that simple text messaging between phones is nowhere near as secure as we used to think it was. This is why you should be using an end-to-end encrypted messaging service like Signal instead. Not only is it free of ads and trackers, but privacy is also the default on its open-source protocol. Allegedly, not even Signal’s developers can access your messages. Their CEO, Meredith Whittaker, also recently said they’re willing to exit from Sweden if new government policies force them to make messages less secure!
In the original version of this post, I had recommended Substack — where Jiggy’s Journal was formerly hosted — before I realized that they had some rather alarming ethical issues that I wasn’t cool with. That’s when I discovered Ghost instead, and let me be among the many to tell you that it is miles and away better in every way. It is open-source, independent, and completely funded by its users and thousands of new publications are being launched on the platform every week. Like Substack, Ghost combines traditional blogging with email newsletter tools, but Ghost also includes powerful analytics, doesn’t take any fees from monetized authors, and you actually own all of your work! Talk about several birds with one stone.
If you’re as much of a nerd as I am, you might sometimes enjoy scrolling through Reddit and their seemingly endless posts, threads, and communities about basically any topic you can think of! I will often find myself searching Google for some niche hobby or interest, only to wind up in a lengthy, in-depth Reddit rabbit-hole that’s just waiting for me to fall into. Reddit is a big techno-corp though, so thankfully, I just recently discovered Lemmy. It’s very similar to Reddit in structure but it’s decentralized and censorship resistant.
I am admittedly very integrated into Google’s ecosystem. Their Pixel line of smartphones has been my go-to since swapping from Samsung years ago. My immediate family shares Google Drive and YouTube Premium perks. My “jiggyflyjoe” handle even originated as my Gmail address. I’ve loved and admired Google for decades — their former motto even used to be “Don’t be evil” — so it’s hard for me to consider the possibility that I may need to start de-Googling my life. It would honestly take a lot of time and effort.
However, the privacy-focused Proton aims to make a few steps of that process easier. Proton provides users with an account that gives them access to encrypted email, calendar, and cloud storage options that one could feasibly replace Google’s Gmail, Calendar, and Drive with. Proton takes it a step further by also offering a VPN, password management, and digital wallet services. I’ve signed up for a free account to check it all out and it seems pretty slick. If it sounds like it might be up your alley, or something you might even just use as a back-up, be sure to check it out.
And a few extras!
Okay, admittedly, the following suggestions aren’t exactly “social” in nature, but having tech selections available to you aside from Big Tech is generally a good thing! That being said, here are a few more great alternatives:
Chrome is another hard Google product to quit. Except for the dedicated Firefox users among us, I think most of us migrated to Chrome over time once Internet Explorer started showing its age. Websites just worked on Chrome! And they were a lot faster and snappier! Plus Chrome has extensions and all these other cool bells and whistles that you don’t always find in web browsers. But you also have the downside of Google tracking your every move, alarmingly even in Incognito Mode! Thankfully, the Vivaldi browser is here to help. Vivaldi takes privacy seriously by blocking ads, trackers, cookies, etc. It’s also completely customizable, from the actual look of the browser itself and its toolbars, to tab tiling and stacking. Vivaldi also has an email client built-in, as well as an entire community based around it. My Mastodon profile is even hosted on their Vivaldi Social instance! And if Chrome extensions are a deal-breaker, no need to worry: Vivaldi is based on Chromium, so most extensions still work with it, too!
Imagine getting the popular Microsoft Office suite for free. Now that you’ve imagined it, make it a reality and download LibreOffice! As the successor to Apache’s OpenOffice (and StarOffice before that!), LibreOffice is a free and open-source suite of productivity tools that is completely compatible with the same file types that Microsoft uses in Office and Office 365. That includes .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, and .pptx files! LibreOffice is also open-source and has attracted a large community of talent actively developing the software. Unlike Microsoft’s proprietary software though, LibreOffice is available on more than just Windows!
Unlike my previous suggestions, this alternative will run you a few dollars. But for the creatives out there, it just might be worth it and will save pennies in the long run! Affinity’s Designer, Photo, and Publisher programs cost about $165 total, but get this — there’s zero subscription fee! That’s right, after the initial purchase, you own that version of Affinity’s software forever. And you’ll get a sweet discount on future iterations on top of it! That’s practically a steal from Adobe’s popular Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign apps which, when combined with the rest of the “Creative Cloud,” typically run users about $60 per month! Unfortunately, Affinity doesn’t currently offer any video editing software comparable to Adobe, so instead we have…
Adobe’s Premiere Pro is one of the most popular video editing software suites on the market. Most editors are taught with Premiere and therefore struggle to find comparable software without the hefty subscription fee. Fortunately, Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve program is a completely free download (with a premium upgrade, if you so choose) that can not only take the place of Premiere, but it also features color correction, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post-production, so say goodbye to even more expensive Adobe apps like After Effects!
What’s next?
Ultimately, the decisions you make about your social media and tech options are up to you. Maybe the idea of people like Zuckerberg and Musk doing whatever they want with your personal information doesn’t rattle you as much. I have mentioned before that there is also a case to be made of staying put, holding your ground, and being one of the last bastions of truth and kindness on a platform. I just can’t be that person.
I really was a little long-winded in this one, huh?
But don’t you feel like social media and the rest of our digital tools should serve the user? The people who are using it? I understand that advertising can be a necessary evil to keep the lights on, but they shouldn’t cater to what the advertisers want to see happen. It also shouldn’t be controlled by one power-hungry billionaire CEO or a mad king who withholds services from his detractors. And they definitely shouldn’t reward engagement farms. That’s how we wind up with some of the more repulsive internet personalities. If you can even call some of them a “personality.”
And if you’re uncertain, know that I was, too. Remember that I used to think that going without Facebook was like going without a phone! I was obsessively doomscrolling on Twitter as little as 6 months ago! Now I can barely look at the links provided to me by friends and family still on those platforms without seeing something that makes me cringe. That’s how truly awful it has become. And it all made it that much easier to switch.
So what do you think? Are you sticking to Big Tech or do you think you’ll join me where the grass hopefully remains greener?
Last month, I made a little bit of an error in judgment. Upon deciding that I wanted to take my efforts at “blogging” and turn it into something resembling more of a lifestyle “publication,” I came across the blogging/email newsletter/social media combination platform of Substack and immediately started setting up shop. Little did I know that just a few weeks later, I would come to discover that Substack has a bit of a Nazi problem. Yikes!
Needless to say, we’ve made a swift exit from Substack. Not only had I just launched Jiggy’s Journal over there − which made transferring over only a handful of subscribers necessary − but problematic policies, misinformation, and bad takes from people who often didn’t know what they were even posting about were largely the reasons why I also left most mainstream social media platforms at the tail-end of last year. There’s something to be said for those who choose to remain. It’s commendable to hold your ground and conduct your fight from within, but I’m not the kind of person who can handle all that. I’m more the type of person who would rather you come hang in my quiet little corner of the internet instead of shouting and making a bunch of noise in the void.
So that’s what we’re doing here now! Here, we can connect, share stories and information, and try to escape the hot mess of life for a little while. I’ve taken up residence on Ghost and carved out a little space on my existing www.jiggyflyjoe.com/ domain to make things easier to find. Things might be a bit of a work in progress, but isn’t that always the way with me? Whether you already know me or this is the very first time our paths have crossed, welcome to Jiggy’s Journal.
Super great question! My name is Joseph, but I most commonly go by Joe among the people who know me. Even though I’m pushing closer to my fourth decade of life, I’ve come to find that I’m still constantly striving to learn and evolve. As a lifelong technology enthusiast, my latest pet project is that I’m teaching myself to code via freeCodeCamp, an excellent educational resource for everything programming. I recently earned my Responsive Web Design certificate and have since started chipping away at my JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certificate at the beginning of this year. I studied Software Development for a time in college, but eventually changed my major to Visual Communications after being discouraged by how many unrelated and difficult courses they wanted me to take. Since leaving school, I’ve opted for the self-taught and self-paced method and so far, it seems to be working out!
A photo of jiggyflyjoe behind the mic.
On the great World Wide Web, I’m behind the moniker jiggyflyjoe. You may be asking yourself why that is my “screen name,” but honestly, there isn’t really an exciting story behind it. Upon creating my current email address, back when Gmail was still in its invite-only phase (yes kids, I’m that old), my sister suggested “jiggyflyjoe” because it sounded like it could be the name of a cool DJ-type dude. With no better ideas, I went with it and have stuck to using it for my username everywhere. If you see “jiggyflyjoe” anywhere on the great big internet, there’s seriously like a 99.9% chance that it’s me. I mean, who else would take that name?
Just so you’re also in the know, I’ve got a little bit of a tip for you! I’ve heard my username mispronounced by probably hundreds of my fellow web denizens. So in the spirit of transparency, be aware that the title of this publication is not Jiggly’s Journal.
Outside of attempting to immerse myself in programming, I’m also fond of video games, movies and TV shows, music, content creation and live streaming, playing around with graphic art, and the occasional physical crafting (I’ve made candles and knit scarves, ask me how!). If you’d like a little more information about me, feel free to read my “About” page.
Oh, and last but definitely not least, I’m a very proud cat dad. I love animals of all kinds and tend to advocate for their conservation and welfare, but I have three furry little feline companions of my own named Tigger, Rufus, and Cinnamon. And you better believe I’ve got plenty to say about them, so be prepared for a whole host of kitty shenanigans!
What to expect… 🔎
This isn’t just a blog or an email newsletter. Jiggy’s Journal aims to be a sort of combination between the two with some added features on top, like the cherry on a very awesome sundae. You’ll be able to comment and chat with me and each other or even do a quiet lurk like one of my cats! How you connect with me and my content is completely up to you. But it is my space for like-minded friends and family to engage, learn, and laugh together.
That being said, I plan to be authentic with the writings that you’ll find here. You’ll find my casual and humorous takes on tech, coding, and gaming. You’ll get personal reflections and deep dives that might sometimes get a little serious. I’ll have my thoughts on the headlines and cultural commentary, which let’s be honest, is very often a rollercoaster. And like I mentioned before, you can be guaranteed a few cat stories.
And look, I won’t pretend that launching Jiggy’s Journal in the middle of what can only mildly be described as global uncertainty isn’t a little strange. To be perfectly honest with you, every single day feels a little like we’re living through the apocalypse. It can’t be denied anymore that the United States government is currently under siege. Even before that was the case, we’ve been dealing with unprecedented crisis after unprecedented crisis as a species since before I was even an adult. Simply existing on this planet right now is hard, no matter who you are. But maybe that’s exactly why creating this kind of publication matters. If there has ever been a time to carve out a space for meaningful (and sometimes ridiculous) conversation, and a time for everyone to create and embrace a sense of community, I think that maybe it’s now.
“One of us, one of us!” 🙌
As in all of my spaces online, I’m trying to build a community of people who “get it.” If that sounds like it just might be your cup of tea (or coffee! or whiskey!), then it is my sincere hope that you’ll stick around. Drop a comment, share your thoughts and your stories, and share with all your friends who might also connect. Also, feel free to find me in all the other places. I’m pretty social for an introvert who cried during the second week of kindergarten because he thought nobody wanted to be his friend! 🥺
