It’s been a little while. Sorry about that. I’ve been meaning to write this post for the better part of at least two weeks now, if not longer. Life has kept me busy, and the world at large has just been… Heavy. Which is, perhaps, the biggest understatement of the year.
The thing that I’ve been struggling with the most over the past several months, however, is how unsettling it is to watch the people closest to you change slowly and radically in response to world events. More and more often, it feels like online content is shaping people faster than our real lives ever could. And once we take a little peek into the systems that social media platforms employ to keep us hooked, it’s easy to see why it’s to blame.
Simply put: Algorithms reward outrage. Content creators often make the most revenue by the size of their audience or how many clicks they can get. Even in my own small corner of the internet, I see how engagement drives success. Platforms reward attention, not accuracy or empathy. As a result, many content creators have turned to the practice of “ragebait,” which is the practice of creating internet content specifically engineered to cause controversy. And once that pot is already starting to stir, their numbers are also skyrocketing.
My most honest digital advice.
A great example of this process at work is the new Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy. Google the reviews and YouTube commentaries, and they’ll have you believe that this new show is absolute “woke garbage.” Even putting aside the fact that being “woke” is actually a good thing (seriously, read the original definition), Starfleet Academy was getting poor reviews before the show ever even debuted. That’s because the show includes people of color, LGBTQIA+ characters, and oh my gosh, a female Jem’Hadar??! Say it ain’t so!
I can live with folks hating on it for being an angsty teen-targeted Trek (I’ve heard all of the Star Trek 90210 jokes, thank you very much), because that’s sorta what this show promised to deliver in the first place. But the old argument that Star Trek has always been woke is also true. Kirk and Uhura in the original series back in the 1960’s were one of television’s earliest displays of an interracial kiss! Star Trek has always been at the forefront of presenting an optimistic and progressive future for humanity. It has always treated diversity as our strength, not a threat or something to sneer at. People who are different than us can teach us a great deal about things we never even thought about. Frankly, Star Trek should have taught us better than this.
But the haters will continue to hate, so long as it keeps paying the bills. But mockery and outrage have a tendency to not only shield people against the discomfort they may feel toward others, but they’re also unsettlingly influential. Mutual hatred can create the illusion of clarity. It gives people a shared enemy, which feels like a sense of connection, but when it’s built on burning something down, you’re not really winning anything. Don’t the haters ever get tired of that? Hatred is so exhausting, y’all, and life is too short to spend it all on trying to prevent people from experiencing joy.
And no, I do not find the way Holly Hunter’s Captain Nahla Ake sits in that chair disrespectful. Give me a break.
Empathy and kindness take a lot more work, but man, they’re so worth it in the end. Sometimes it takes an uncomfortable moment or conversation with the people you love, but it’s an investment toward a better future. Like the one in the classic Star Trek stories that shaped us years ago.
It’s officially 2026, and I’ve decided that this is the year we should set ourselves free from tech corporations!
I’ve written a lot on this website in the past about my decision to leave X/Twitter and all Meta platforms in late 2024. Once upon a time, Twitter was actually my favorite social platform. The notion of “microblogging,” the method of posting intentionally short updates, was incredibly simple but also surprisingly powerful. After more notable individuals and organizations started joining the platform, you would see breaking news and historical events unfold right before your eyes. It became something that is often described as a “digital town square.” Being a Twitter user sometimes meant knowing what was happening in the news before it was in the news.
But here’s the thing: Social media doesn’t need to be a monolith!
Social media sometimes has me like this!
I know that by this point, email is pretty much an old standard way of communicating with one another. It’s boring, but it’s the standard for a reason. And that reason is that not everyone’s email is through the same company. I personally still use Gmail, Google’s free email service. But you might still use an old Yahoo! or even an old Hotmail or AOL address? No matter whose server our email resides on, we can still send mail to one another. It doesn’t even really matter what comes after that @ symbol! And I believe that we need more social media services and platforms to function this way, too! Why? Because if one day, AOL decides that it’s going to just disappear into the ether like its once-popular dial-up internet service, email as a whole won’t go with it. And if a billionaire like Elon Musk decides he wants to try and purchase the entirety of Google? Well, you can always move your account elsewhere. (Nobody asked, but I recommend Proton!)
Some folks think that I’ve moved from Twitter to Bluesky because I just wanted to join an “echo chamber” of like-minded Democratic-leaning individuals after Trump got re-elected to office. And while the rhetoric on Twitter was definitely getting nastier, and Bluesky’s community is much lighter, the constantly-shifting political landscape was hardly the only reason for my departure. You see, we suddenly have options when things aren’t ruled over by one singular billionaire or one singular tech megacorp. I generally see tech and gaming-related posts in my feed on Bluesky. To help users get accustomed to what they want to see in their feeds, they also allow users to set up lists and “starter packs” of accounts related to their particular interests. This results in a much warmer reception than the hateful comments paid blue checkmarks are known to put out into most Twitter feeds.
And fortunately, Bluesky is a distributed social network powered by the same protocol as several other really cool web apps like Frontpage.fyi, Bookhive, WhiteWind, Leaflet, and more. Mastodon, another decentralized microblogger, takes it a step further and allows anyone to host their very own server instance. You just join one of hundreds of Mastodon’s servers, whichever one you think is the best fit for you, and you’re still able to follow, like, and communicate with anyone on any other “federated” Mastodon server.
At the end of the day, you don’t have to disappear from the internet or scrub your presence from it. If Twitter or Facebook or whatever other evil social media giants are starting to get a little too weird or stressful for you to manage and their content moderation teams/algorithms/AI/whatever else seems like they couldn’t care less, there are still ways to preserve your digital footprint. Ways that allow you to break free from the oligarchy and interact online without the ruckus. And who among us wouldn’t want that?
You’ll see that line a ton from content creators, influencers, and the media as we move into 2026. It stems from the idea of “New Year’s Resolutions,” a concept that oodles of people latch onto to try changing themselves or their habits in the New Year. In the last several years, though, I’ve noticed more and more people denouncing those resolutions. It even seems like the trendy-but-sensible consensus these days. No point in trying to change if you, ultimately, are just going to slip back into your old ways, after all.
My personal opinion on New Year’s Resolutions oscillates between the two sentiments. I’m mostly in the latter camp, seeing as I’m maybe the most likely to fall into bad habits by February. But honestly, New Year’s is the best time to try and think up ways that you can better yourself and your goals. We can make the next year suck a little bit less than the past year, right?
So while I’m not setting anything in stone here, I do want to write down my two goals going into 2026. Maybe you can help me stay accountable?
And I would trust Joshua Jackson if I were you.
Being Present
Listen, I’ve never been great at taking care of myself physically or mentally. I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety for what feels like my entire life. I’m pretty sure that, at some point over the past year, I’ve told the story about how I cried in kindergarten one day because I thought I had no friends and nobody liked me. It’s only grown into a bigger ordeal as I’ve gotten older, and I am being medically treated for it, but sometimes I think that there’s a lot more that I should be doing for my brain that I’m not. I mean, honestly, it’s hard not to be anxious or depressed with the state of the entire world right now, but surely there’s still a way to find joy in our lives or something that meaningfully makes us feel whole, right?
This past year, I absolutely went through a midlife crisis. I might still be going through it. It’s the only way that I can explain the way that I’ve felt over the last several months. At one point, a couple of weeks ago, I had an emotional meltdown after seeing a TikTok video that someone made of their kitten growing up into an elderly cat set to the sounds of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” Justifiably, I had to get it together and then confront the looming question of why I’m a 40-year-old man sobbing at the image of an aging cat. Then Stevie Nicks popped into my head, repeating the lyrics, “Time makes you bolder. Even children get older, and I’m getting older, too.” And I realized that was what’s bothering me. The internet described it as “grief in advance.”
I’m very close to my father. Sometimes he’s incredibly frustrating, but I love his humor, his way of always supporting us, and even just sitting and watching TV and eating copious amounts of junk food together. But he’s visibly aging, and it worries me. My four cats, my babies, are visibly aging, too. We don’t know his exact age since he was an adult when we adopted him, but Tigger has been with us for at least 13 years. Even my sweet little Rufus, who is practically my shadow, is coming up on 10 in 2026. And me… I’m not ready for it. I still feel like a kid most days. And somehow forty snuck up on me. Despite my bad back, migraines, achy bones and feet, diabetes, and increasing forgetfulness.
I’ve started coming out of the “meltdown” phase of it all now, and I’m trying to take action now and in 2026. My goal is to FOCUS ON NOW. Indeed, I can’t choose when the inevitable comes for dad, my cats, or the rest of my family and friends. And even if I could, it still wouldn’t be enough time. But I can control here and now. And here, I want to spend more time in the living room with dad. Laughing and watching TV, even when it’s his ridiculous cop videos on YouTube. I’m trying to remember how it feels when petting one of my cats, sometimes even gently grasping their fur in an effort to hold onto them forever. I know they don’t understand my words, but I tell them that I hope to find them in every timeline.
And for me? I need to exercise more, honestly. I need to start working a walk around the neighborhood into my days. Maybe some light exercise videos. I’ve never been somebody who enjoyed physical activity, so it’ll be slow and steady. But it’s certainly better than the last forty years of nothing. I hope that spending less time seated will start easing the rest of my ailments, too. It’s so simple, yet so overlooked. I have a Fitbit that I’ve woefully neglected since I left my retail job. Maybe it’s time to start putting it to good use again?
Being Consistent
Another one of my worst characteristics is that I’m terrible at staying consistent, and it is often the biggest obstacle in the way of my achieving anything or making real progress. I’m just taking an educated guess in saying that it’s probably from undiagnosed ADHD or some other “neurospicy” explanation, but I lose track of my motivation pretty frequently. I’m easily distracted and maybe a little bit lazy, too. Which isn’t to say that I don’t also work really hard on things — when I do feel motivated, I can hyperfocus like a superhero! — but everyone has low-energy days, and as I get older, it gets harder to keep on keeping on.
Reframe your thinking, chat!
For example, I started my Twitch channel several years ago in 2019. I have just barely over 200 followers on the platform, though, and even that very “smol” community took years to grow. And the one thing making the growth of my channel feel like an uphill battle is my lack of consistency. Yes, the channel has been active since 2019, but I haven’t streamed to it that entire time. Work and school, for a while, made it nearly impossible to find time to do it. So I’ve taken a lengthy hiatus or two from Twitch! But toward the end of 2024, I decided that since I was no longer employed or enrolled at a traditional school, it was time to make my triumphant return. And as I wrote about in a past Ghost Archive post, streaming started feeling a lot easier this time around! But while my feelings toward going live have changed considerably, I still struggle with maintaining the schedule I’ve set for myself. If ever I don’t feel great or just don’t want to be “on” for the camera, I simply cancel the stream for that night. Going into next year, I want to BE MORE CONSISTENT.
Even when I don’t feel good, I still need to make sure that I show up. If I don’t feel like being on camera, I can turn the camera off and continue with whatever activity we’re doing. If I have trouble maintaining my presence, I can end the stream early. I mean, really, it’s my channel, and I can do whatever I want. But it’s important to keep your known schedule so people know when and where to find you. If you keep failing to show up, though, then why should anyone else? And it’s especially important for Twitch, since the tips and subscription fees are my only source of income at the moment. And even that is pretty slim!
And that’s just one example in my world of very poor consistency. I’ve waffled back and forth about projects on my family’s home server that I built, I need to keep working on my courses at freeCodeCamp daily and not just “whenever the urge strikes,” I need to take time to keep my bedroom and office clean, I gotta remember to update and maintain this website and other web projects, I need to play with the cats more often, I need to read more, I need to keep looking for job opportunities, I need to work exercise into my daily schedule as I mentioned in the last section, and on and on. I get so absorbed in the things that I’m doing that I forget to take care of the rest. And sometimes, I’m not going to lie, it’s important for me to get “me” time. As an introvert, I need time to unplug and decompress. Take a nap, watch a show, play a game, pet a cat, sit with dad.
And really, there’s not enough time in the day to do everything. And I say that as someone who doesn’t even currently have work or school filling up half their day. There’s never enough time. It’s a constant juggling act. And I guess what I’m saying here is that, maybe if I’m more consistent with my daily schedule and the pen-and-paper agenda that I keep for myself, it’ll make that juggling process a bit easier. Fingers crossed that I can start making that work!
So those are my two major goals for the New Year. Call it a resolution or just call it some goals that I’m personally going to be working toward. Until then, I’m taking the rest of the year off. From everything! But how are you feeling about the New Year? If you have any resolutions or goals that you’d like to work toward in 2026, tell me in the comments below!
It’s the season of all things “Wrapped,” folks… And I don’t just mean holiday gifts!
As we get closer and closer to bidding 2025 adieu, all our favorite sources for entertainment keep hammering us with the stats of which films, TV shows, music, video games, and more that kept us going throughout the year. It’s a trend that seemed to really take off once Spotify’s Wrapped recap became a must-share among users. Now, every platform, from Steam to YouTube, shares a tiny yet interesting nugget of data with its users each December.
I don’t exactly have a lot of “data” for a variety of reasons. For example, not all of my film and TV consumption was done on Netflix. In fact, our home has access to what feels like a dozen streaming services these days, so none of it would really be all that accurate. Instead, I’m presenting all of you with some of what I considered the very best options from what I consumed this year. A good selection that I can confidently recommend!
Film — Animation Ruled the Year
Netflix alone reports that I watched its content for 219 hours (or around 9 days). It is probably a lot by most standards, but do keep in mind that I’m still technically unemployed. When I’m not in my home office trying to remedy that situation, I’m either asleep or in front of a television. So, brushing my excessive consumption aside, here’s what I discovered this year in the world of film.
Like so many others, KPop Demon Hunters seeped into my soul.
While I don’t necessarily have anything against animation, an animated piece of media does typically have to really ‘wow’ me in a way that live-action doesn’t. Which is yet another weird fact about me, I know. Most geeks like me are known to love it, especially anime and manga, but I just never picked up that characteristic, I guess. But three films that I watched multiple times on Netflix this year got me right in the “feels.”
I’ll go ahead and get KPop Demon Hunters out of the way. Yes, I did completely buy into the hype, but only after I had kept reading glowing reviews one right after another, and friends of mine demanded that I watch it with them. As a lifelong, 40-year-old nerd, I do not believe that I fit into this movie’s target demographic in the slightest… But it still managed to capture me. First of all, the soundtrack is full of actual bangers, the mythology and lore is spectacular, and the story of the Demon Hunters themselves is heartwrenching, but understand me when I say: Cat. As a father of cats, it’s hard for me to avoid anything cat-related, so without question, Derpy the big, beautiful, silly, and supernatural blue tiger is the real star of KPop Demon Hunters for me. And I can only hope that any future sequels or tie-ins include Derpy as much as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade did!
The other two animated films that I fell in love with in 2025 were both Academy Award nominees that competed for Best Animated Feature Film. The first is The Wild Robot, a DreamWorks Animation venture that featured the voice work of an all-star cast, including Lupita Nyong’o in the title role. This film was first recommended to me as a candidate for us to watch together in my Discord community, which we did back in July. I have to confess here that the story of Roz, the “wild” robot in question, brought a little bit of a tear to my eye.
This is sort of like my reaction when Flow was first released.
The last film, which actually wound up winning the aforementioned Academy Award, was a little Latvian production called Flow. As I had stated earlier, it’s hard to keep me away from anything cat-related, and boy, does this movie deliver! The movie’s entire plot, which is presented without any spoken dialogue, follows a small cat trying to survive in a world that seems to now be largely devoid of humans, and the water level begins to rise dramatically. The way in which this movie is able to convey the emotion and panic through the eyes of mostly just this one cat (and occasionally his other animal pals) is incredible, and speaks volumes to the way the film was handcrafted in free and open-source graphics software Blender over the course of more than five years. By saying that I “highly recommend” this film is an understatement.
As for honorable mentions, y’all know that I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I would be remiss not to mention both Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four: First Steps. I think that both movies represent more of a “return to form” for Marvel going into next year, which will see them releasing the next Spider-Man and Avengers offerings. They were also far and away better movies than the fourth Captain America outing that was released in the early part of the year.
Television — This Was More Varied…
I’ve mentioned in past posts and on my Now page that I watch a lot of television. I think part of the reason why I also love the Marvel universe and a few other big franchises is that it’s all serialized. I like taking a big bite out of stories that are likely to continue in future installments. Big fictional worlds created to endure. So, needless to say, I consume more series than I do standalone films. You might want to strap in for this one! It’s gonna be a looooong list.
Key art from Showtime’s Yellowjackets, featuring actresses (from left to right) Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis.
And for the sake of time and length, I’ve also only included TV shows that I actually started watching this year. So the latest seasons of Stranger Things and Wednesday, spectacular as they are, don’t get featured here!
The Diplomat. I’ve loved Keri Russell since Felicity in the late ’90s/early ’00s, but I couldn’t really get into her award-winning turn on The Americans later on. But surprisingly, this series has hit all the right buttons for me. I’m already on the third season after having just started a couple of weeks ago!
Wayward. Toni Collette is absolutely chilling in this limited series!
The Residence. This series had me absolutely hollering! I’m so disappointed that a second season isn’t going forward. Please give Uzo Aduba all the flowers and awards, please and thank you.
Sirens. This is another limited series that had me captivated from start to finish. Parts of it felt very soapy, but in a kind of good way? Especially awesome performances by Julianne Moore and Meghann Fahy!
Yellowjackets. This one is a few seasons in already, but I discovered it for the first time this past February and wound up adding Showtime onto my Paramount+ account just so I could continue watching more recent seasons. This show is completely bonkers, but in the most addictive way! The cast is pretty star-studded, also, and they carry the show remarkably well.
Severance, Silo, & Foundation. Putting these three together for a reason, which is that they all felt like they blurred together for me. Let me explain: After gaining access to Apple TV+ this year, I knew that Severance was going to be one of their first shows that I was going to binge. I like a lot of the cast, and the sci-fi premise already sounded fascinating from the tons of posts I kept seeing on social media about it. And I clearly know myself, because immediately after the first episode, I couldn’t stop. While I was still in the middle of Severance, my brother insisted that I check out both Silo and Foundation, both of which are incredible stories adapted from sci-fi books. So, once Severance was finished, I moved right on to Silo, and then all three seasons of Foundation after that. Each one is quite the adventure, so if any of them sound appealing to you, I do urge you to check them out! I also wrote more about these shows and Apple TV+ overall in this post from the Ghost Archives.
Daredevil: Born Again. Technically speaking, this series “began” with the Daredevil series on Netflix years ago, but Disney and Marvel rebooted the series to bring it to their “proper” Marvel universe timeline, and its first season was released earlier this year. It still maintains its much darker and violent premise, and Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock/Daredevil), Vincent D’Onofrio (Wilson Fisk/Kingpin), and Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle/The Punisher) still star. It’s a must-watch for fellow Marvel fans!
And I’ll once again give an honorable mention to Marvel with the Ironheart series. Even though it was hugely delayed, only gave us six episodes, and it didn’t receive nearly as much pomp and circumstance as most of the other Marvel properties, it was still a highly entertaining watch for a few hours!
I’ll likely close out this year by finishing up Stranger Things and the second season of Fallout.
Music — Oops, All Throwbacks!
If it wasn’t actually released in the 1980s, then it probably sounds like it did!
According to my Spotify Wrapped recap, my most-played song was “Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure. And while that track was released on their 1992 album Wish, a lot of the band’s popularity and most of their gothic rock and new wave sound were straight out of the ’80s. Several songs in my recap were also from The Midnight—a modern-day band with a retro synthwave sound. You can visualize their inclusion on the soundtracks to every popular ’80s film you can think of.
Jumping back out of the decade I was born in, the rest of my favorite tracks are also tracks that I’ve been jamming to forever. Some selections I’d like to share include:
I know, I know… My favorite song from KPop Demon Hunters wasn’t the massively popular “Golden.” I love that song too, but it’s the closing number for me. Why? Because there’s something beautiful in the moment when you finally meet the real you.
I also resurrected No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom album this year. I don’t know why, but that album is just the sound of the ’90s to me. Probably because of “Don’t Speak” topping charts for an incredible 16 weeks back in 1996. That song was ubiquitous, and I can’t say that I don’t understand—easily one of the absolute greatest rock breakup songs.
If you had this album on repeat at any point in the ’90s, we should be friends!
Oh, and since it’s the holiday season, check my Spotify playlist for my favorite holiday tunes!
Gaming — Return to the Grind
Around this time last year, I stepped back into Palia because I needed something simple, cozy, and had that holiday flair. It served me well. According to my Steam Replay 2025 recap, I spent 52% of my gaming time in Palia this year. I recognize that it is a good amount, especially for a game that is still extremely underdeveloped, but there’s a lot of reasons why I kept going back to that one. I think it’s because the devs did a lot of work to make it feel very ”homey.” Plus, they’ve added a whole bunch of updates throughout 2025 that expanded the game considerably. You can also read a little more about Palia in this post that also appeared in my Ghost Archives.
The other games that I dabbled with this year have something in common with Palia: There’s a lot of grind. My current favorite game at the moment, Enshrouded, as well as Guild Wars 2, the MMO that I’ve decided to return to, all feature what gamers call a “grind.” They all include doing menial tasks as part of the built-in progression system. Mining, foraging, farming, ranching, crafting, etc., are all such tasks. Oftentimes, these games have daily or weekly quests that are very grindy, and once you do them, you earn rewards! If it sounds like work, that’s because sometimes it feels like it! But only in the most fun way possible.
I think it speaks to where I’m at in life right now, honestly. Having trouble finding meaningful employment throughout the last year has me so troubled that I’m looking for work in my entertainment, right? That’s one theory anyway. Sometimes I also just find it a little bit comforting or therapeutic to just sign on and go mindlessly till my garden, bust open some rocks, or can a bunch of pumpkin puree to go sell to the cartoon villagers, okay? Yes, I am an adult, stop judging me!
Palia also features a cat guy named Zeki. Could you blame me???
In any event, those are the three games I’ve been spending the majority of my time on, though I’m always open and willing to dabble in other types of games. If you’d like to come hang out with me sometime while I’m gaming, be sure to check out my livestreams on Twitch! I also try to post entertaining clips from those streams to TikTok and YouTube Shorts, so feel free to enjoy those also!
In Conclusion — Life is Lifin’
Not a lot changed for me overall in 2025. Even my coding and programming courses sorta did a reset. freeCodeCamp retired the Responsive Web Design certification that I earned at the beginning of the year, so I essentially started over with their full-stack course instead, only for them to break it up into modular pieces once more. Sigh. It’s fine… Running through all the HTML and CSS lessons has been a good review, and they’ve added quite a little more to their labs, workshops, and instructional pieces than they had before, so I’m still learning. I’m just very eager to start getting into courses for things that I don’t know anything about so far.
This year, I also started planning out my days. Which sounds weird, because it isn’t like I do a whole lot without a job or a big social life, but I try to stay busy most days. I did finally settle on Obsidian when it comes to a digital notebook, but I’m also keeping the old-school pen and paper agenda. I love when things are in the virtual space where I spend most of my time anyway, but there’s something about physically writing things down and taking notes that helps things stick to my brain a little bit better. I’m not too disciplined yet and sometimes have low-energy days where I do not manage to get everything accomplished that I set for myself, but I think the point is that I’m making an effort and trying every single day. Life is what you make it, you know?
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, I appreciate you big time and hope you have the loveliest of holiday seasons with a few of my recommendations found here. And I beg you to tell me: What were your favorites this year??
As you may have gathered from the fact that you’re reading something on it, I have a website! And guess what? You should have one too!
You see, back in the early years of the internet, most folks who were technically savvy enough did have their own personal websites. The web was a weird, colorful, and wonderful place to visit and browse for a while. Even corporate websites were filled to the brim with clashing colors, flashing animations, and the horror we now know as the font Comic Sans. It was a digital era full of creativity and free expression. It was also one of the earliest examples of decentralization on the web… Something that more and more people, like myself, are gravitating toward.
Building a website could be this easy!
Wikipedia defines “decentralization” as: “the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those related to planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and given to smaller factions within it.” If you’re looking for a modern example of decentralization on the web, look no further than the micro-blogging platform Mastodon. Rather than being hosted on a single company’s servers, Mastodon is made up of several servers hosted by its users on their own equipment. This means that users are directly in control of their own data, and some super-rich billionaire bro can’t come in and purchase Mastodon because it’s already distributed to the public.
Building your own website, in many ways, helps alleviate the stress of social media, or could maybe even help you eliminate it. Even though it has its dark sides, I love the internet and how connected it has helped us all become. So I didn’t ever truly feel like I could be completely without an internet presence of some kind. And being the technical, computer-heavy user that I am, building my own websites and blogs has come naturally. I’ve had one off and on since I was in my teens. The best part about having this website, for me, is that I can still write about my life and interests and post photos and other media without it being connected or networked to everyone else. My posts don’t automatically show up in your feeds, obnoxiously reminding you to read them, it’s true. But you know where to find me if you ever do find yourself missing me or my content.
That helps a lot with the feeling like I’m “out of the loop” with all my former Facebook and Xitter friends. And any time that I start feeling like I might miss Xitter, I log into my old account, take a gander at my feed, and immediately “nope!” right back out. Do I secretly hope that Elon will eventually give up on it, and someone else is able to revive it back to its former glory? You better believe it! But just in case that unlikely event never comes to pass, I’m hoping to keep this space for as long as possible. It’s my way of expressing myself and creating content in a way that is authentically me, just like the Mastodon post I shared up above states.
And quite frankly, I’d love to see you all express yourselves in similar ways! That’s my totally selfish way of advocating for you to build your own website, but it’s valid nonetheless. 😉
💡 Interested in building your own website?? I’m more than happy to help! Feel free to get in touch.
If my mom were still around, she would be making kids cry on Fortnite.
Unfortunately, however, my mother passed away in 2000 from cancer when I was still pretty young. But one of my favorite things about her, that most assuredly carried on in me and in my two siblings, was that she was also a gamer. She was a fan of some of the earliest video games, including the very first game in The Legend of Zelda franchise. Before Nintendo Power, internet walkthroughs, and official players’ guides were even a thing, she was not only making her way through each dungeon and collecting pieces of the Triforce, but also mapping them out by hand. On graph paper and in excruciating detail!
Despite all the resources at our fingertips today, I still wish that I had those original handmade maps. I don’t feel like the hardcore gamers that exist today would ever even believe that a working mother of three played a video game at all, much less enjoying it and progressing through it enough to be that dedicated. And so many times in the years that have passed, when we’ve failed to maneuver our way through an instance in World of Warcraft, she would be rallying us back in fighting shape immediately… Whether it was a school night or not! And you best believe she would have been pwning every noob in those Mythic+ dungeons on the daily.
And that could translate to just about any game she set her sights on. She was a big fan of classic puzzle games and tabletop games, too. Don’t challenge her to a game of Yahtzee! or Clue unless you want your ass beat. She was very polite, thoughtful, inclusive, and very loving, but she’s also who taught me this important life lesson: “Don’t get mad, get even!”
Her birthday just recently passed on November 4th. I miss her a lot and often wonder how our lives would be different if she were still here. Not just in the ways the gaming industry has changed, but also maybe in the ways she would have helped change it. But also, as weird as it is to realize, she’s now been gone for more of my life than she was around for, and I wonder what it would have been like to know her as a fully-formed adult. If you can even call me that. But one thing I’m glad for is that her love of gaming eventually became my love of gaming. I’m glad that, as a small child, she let me ”help” her play by pushing buttons on the unplugged controller next to her. It’s one of my earliest and most fond memories of her, that I somehow managed to absorb into my Jello mold of a brain, because it’s also one that I hope I never forget. ❤️
Some of the time that I wasted on Facebook over the years was actually educational. As Americans, I think that we kinda knowingly turn a blind eye to where our food really comes from. While the words “pork” and “beef” are historical linguistic artifacts, isn’t it a little bit convenient that we have alternate words for a lot of animal products we consume? I mean, nobody really wants to think about sweet little Babe while they’re frying up their breakfast bacon, right? And after seeing some of the videos from activist groups on Facebook about some of the suffering and actual torture these poor animals face every single day from factory farming, I swore off eating meat. And I maintained it for two years.
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There were good days and bad days during that stretch. Even though there are some truly awful “meat alternatives” on the market, I was pleasantly surprised by how many are also delicious! I once even took Beyond Burgers to a cookout, and they were a hit even among the meat-eating crowd. And don’t get me started on Gardein’s faux-chicken tenders… I found that they were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing! I probably spent a small fortune on those suckers while I was living the veggie lifestyle. I used to order a mac and cheese dish topped with them from Yard House whenever I felt like I needed to spring for lunch at the office that I used to work at in downtown Indy, and the scent of the Gardein tenders even fooled a co-worker into thinking I was a fraud!
Sadly, though, after a little over two years, I did wind up falling off the wagon. Getting enough protein wasn’t the issue, although I know that concern does sometimes cause even some of the most militant vegans and vegetarians to go back to animal products. It honestly just got too hard to stay consistent. Being from the Midwest, a large part of socialization and our culture revolves around food made mostly from meat, cheese, corn, and potatoes, and my family is no different. As empathetic as they were towards me and my concerns about animal slaughtering and factory farming, I wasn’t going to convince them to change on my own. And honestly, being the only one who constantly has to find an alternative when we hit the drive-thru while honestly still having cravings for a damn cheeseburger was extremely hard.
I learned something simple but valuable during those two years, however. It may have been the moment in my life that made me realize: Nobody is perfect. And that’s okay.
Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sums things up perfectly in The Good Place.
I was discussing this with a fellow content creator recently, and she mentioned that it is amazing if you even care. That’s a lot more than most people in today’s age. With the planet and humanity practically deteriorating before our very eyes, the fact that you are even making an effort at times is enough. We’re never going to be perfect. Even the strictest vegan you could possibly imagine probably owns or has likely consumed something against their moral code or healthy lifestyle. And guess what? The world spins madly on. And I think we honestly forget that we’re all just kinda making it up as we go in life.
Just do your best. That’s really all we can do. Nobody is the morality police, and nobody is perfect. Anyone who tells you otherwise or makes you feel judged or wants to start virtue signaling all over their socials in response shouldn’t be in your life anyway.
I still hate where meat comes from, by the way. And I still stump for animal rights, as ironic as it may sound. I would be beyond heartbroken if someone were to hurt one of my cats, but honestly, what’s the difference between a cat’s life and a cow’s life? And then what’s the difference between a cow’s life and our lives? Don’t we all deserve to live them? I think that we do. But we can only do what we can do. I’m only one person. And I hope that my two years of vegetarianism and my ongoing efforts to still choose compassion when possible in other ways have made a difference.
We’re all just doing our best. And if that best includes a little more compassion, even sometimes, that’s worth something.
If you’re anything like me, your earliest memories of spending significant time using a computer and the internet in general likely began on AOL. I met some of my longest “internet friends” by jumping into public chat rooms that revolved around mutual interests or were specifically tailored to teenagers who were roughly around the same age at the time. Honestly, with as often as I spent time online as opposed to socializing with people from high school, you could even say that I learned how to socialize on AOL. And maybe more importantly, in some circumstances, how not to socialize.
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If you can’t exactly relate or are too young to have been on the internet during the days of dial-up, let me put it to you this way: Millions of people used AOL to access the internet. In fact, according to some statistics about AOL, its peak user base was 35 million people and, in 1999, was worth $222 billion. At the height of the AOL craze, the company even bought out the massive media conglomerate Time Warner (as disastrous as that deal turned out to be) for $182 billion. It was enormously successful, and I personally believe that one could even say it is responsible for popularizing and pioneering the internet in America. The acceptance and adoption of online culture began with AOL.
Despite all of this, AOL’s misfortune started not long after the acquisition of Time Warner. Insider business decisions eventually led to Time Warner casting AOL out by 2003. Furthermore, the company saw shrinking numbers once dial-up started falling into disuse as users began favoring easier and faster broadband connections. I mean, who could blame us? Nobody wanted to wait 15 minutes for their internet connection to start up when they could just as easily sign onto a PC that was always connected. Especially once those upstart services started offering unlimited access, which ate into AOL’s model of selling their service hourly. And by 2017, the writing was truly on the wall, as AOL shut down the spinoff of its popular chat services, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
Truthfully, not many were aware that AOL’s dial-up services were still available, as they were. I, myself, had personally thought AIM’s shutdown was the end of AOL’s dusty vestiges, outside of its free homepage and email services. Apparently, per CNBC’s Alex Sherman, there are only users in the “low thousands” still relying on AOL’s dial-up internet. The recent announcement that they would be shutting it down at the end of September, though, brought on the same wave of nostalgia for me that the closing of AIM brought. Reminiscing about chatting and making friends with people hundreds or thousands of miles away. People that I would never have had the opportunity to meet otherwise. There was something special about the internet back in those days. And while the technology has gotten harder, better, faster, stronger… We’re still here, and so is the internet that AOL helped build.
🐈⬛ During the writing of this post, my newest and youngest cat Inky decided to jump on my keyboard. I was later informed that he deserves to be heard. So in the spirit of letting him voice his opinion, he said this:
Have you ever felt a sense of nostalgia for a life you never lived? If so, we share something in common, and it’s called anemoia.
We’ve all experienced loneliness or felt homesick at some point. Those pangs or feelings of yearning for something from your past. The people, places, and things of it all. The right song can almost make your brain teleport through time, back to your younger years. But have you ever driven through a normal, quiet American suburb and noticed the different homes, one right after the other, and wondered to yourself: Who are the people that live in these homes? What are their lives like? What about the people who lived in that home before them? What did they do for work? Where were they from? Did children grow up here? What’s their story? And if they no longer live there, how did their story in this home end?
These are the things I think about when a normal home that I’m passing somehow catches my attention. Maybe it’s because I think I’m a little more sentimental than the average human, but the spaces we take up can tell us a lot about the people in them. In a lot of circumstances, someone’s home is a character in the story of their life in its own right. It could also stem from my overactive imagination, or from the kid I used to be who constantly wished he was someone else. Craving a little insight into the lives of other people seems perfectly normal to me, though. But it goes well beyond that, too.
Recently, I saw a photo somewhere on the internet, and I wish that I had remembered where it was so that I could show it to you now. But it was a simple photograph of a suburban neighborhood with normal homes. An orangey-pink glow in the sky that you sometimes see just before the sun goes down. The streets were wet from rain. And I had the feeling of missing the place in that photo. Even though it was a photo from a random stranger on the internet of a random neighborhood that I’ve very likely never even been. Then I started wondering about the why of it all.
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And, in many ways, those places are gone. Sure, suburbs still exist all across America and beyond, but we live in a world where “normal” means something completely different than it used to. We’re all hyper-connected more than ever with our mobile devices and social media. Too many of us, myself included, tend to focus on all the distractions rather than what’s happening in front of our faces. People are concerned with the lives of celebrities and their 10-minute trips to outer space. We’re concerned about political scandals, seemingly one right after another in the current administration. We’re trying to figure out all the controversy surrounding the latest superstar athlete. We want to get our paws on the absurdly pricednew dolls and gaming consoles. Everything is so larger-than-life now as we doom-scroll through our curated feeds and highlight reels. There are even “normal people” who have become mini-celebrities through social media. And did you know that, according to a Morning Consult survey, over half of the Gen Z members surveyed want to be social media influencers, and an even more surprising 41% of older adults do, too.
With everything moving and changing at light-speed, I think I miss the normalcy. I miss the things that are almost boring. When life progressed slowly, and when things were unassuming. When we had local heroes and legends. When things could be mysterious and wonderful. I miss the people who could be described as “salt of the earth.” The people who aren’t broadcasting their every waking, performative move in hopes it’ll go viral. And I’m not even shunning progress or technological advancement. Y’all know that I love the internet as much as the next person. These are the digital streets that raised me. But there really is a quiet dignity and truth to just simply living. And it feels like it’s an increasing rarity to find.
Jed Whedon, the younger brother of someone I used to admire and who shall no longer be named in this space, released an album in 2022 titled blue noise [blōō noiz] n. nostalgia for a life you never lived and previously had an album in 2010 called History of Forgotten Things. It made me really consider that maybe Jed also knew the call of anemoia, and his music has helped me understand the feeling a bit better. It seems to tap into my subconscious that’s yearning for a different world. A world that maybe I didn’t even live in. Maybe it’s a world that I just idealized in my mind, and it has always been this unmitigated flaming crap basket, and I just didn’t realize it. But surely everybody hears that whisper from another universe, right? That alternate timeline version of all of us that valued just being human. The next time you get that internal vibration when you see an old photo, someone else’s familiar furniture or wallpaper, the cracked cement by your parking spot at work, or the twinkle lights above an old café you never went to…
Hi! It’s been a minute. Life’s been hectic. So much so that I’ve got a cautionary tale to tell, which involves me getting hired at a new job, starting work, and quitting all in the last week!
Some of you may recall that I’ve been looking for a new gig since April of last year. If you’re new or unfamiliar, you can read all about my trials and tribulations from around that point and onward in the “Retail Therapy” section on this post. I had spent the year (or more…) learning more about programming and coding, but also desperately applying for any job that came my way. Anything that I figured I’d be able to do, anyway. I’m a 40-year-old college dropout with very few in-demand skills (working on that, obviously!), so it’s not exactly an easy path in what is already a challenging job market. The icing on the cake is that I also now live in an area of the country that has practically zero jobs unless I want to return to retail. There’s also manufacturing and factory work, but I passed out working behind a customer service desk at a big box store in this town, so I’m not so sure manual labor is going to be on the table for me either.
In late March, my sister, MissFiasco, emailed me a job listing for a work-from-home role with a healthcare company. The title was “Radiology Scheduler.” It mentioned how much it paid — not much, but more than what any retail job in the area was dishing out — and as the title suggests, would involve scheduling patients for medical imaging and diagnostic procedures. It did involve talking to patients on the phone, which I honestly despise, but it didn’t necessarily sound like a call center, either. So I figured it would probably be okay. Not only would I get to work from home in my pajamas and start earning some dough again, but it also sounded like I would play a role in genuinely helping people, which is always a nice feeling. So I gave it a shot and sent them my resume.
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A couple of weeks into April, I received an email back from the company. They were interested in interviewing me! It was the first time anyone had even shown interest in me professionally since I went to talk to a temp agency in February with no success. Naturally, I booked the interview. And that’s when things started getting strange…
My first interview was conducted by an AI chatbot. Yes, you read that correctly. My interview was basically conducted by ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever. It asked me some fairly standard questions and suggested that I be as thorough and detailed as possible because, if I passed this round, then I would be invited to interview again with a human representative. It was weird, but I kept going because… Well, because I needed a job. I did enough to impress Chad (a nickname MissFiasco and I gave to ChatGPT), so I progressed to the next interview. It was scheduled to be a 30-minute video chat, and I was advised that the dress would be business casual. I did my best to look presentable since I’m almost always dressed very casually, snapped a photo to my family’s group chat on Discord, and joined the Zoom meeting early and prepared.
Photo of me looking my “best.” 🥴
Much like the interview with Chad, the interview went well enough, but it still just felt odd. The woman that I was speaking to seemed highly indifferent throughout the entire conversation. On the other hand, I like to sprinkle in a little sarcasm or jokes here and there, so the contrast was a little jarring. I’m not one of those creepy dudebros who think that women always need to be warm and receiving, but man… She did not show even the slightest hint of a sense of humor. It was as if smiling were simply not allowed while on the clock. Regardless, the process continued afterward, and I was sent an offer letter by mid-May. An offer letter that invited me to accept the role of an “Engagement Specialist,” which I had not applied for. The shift that I had requested was also changed, and the compensation was a bit less than the radiology scheduling role. I emailed back the recruiter and inquired as to why I was being offered a position with hours and wages that I did not apply for. She simply stated that the Radiology Scheduler role was “no longer available.”
This was my first major red flag.
The interview with Chad and the subsequent recruiter were strange, but I brushed them off because I was desperate enough to get working. But this was the exact moment that I remember thinking, “I don’t know about this.” The vibes were off and, frankly, I felt that they had pulled a bait-and-switch on me. And in retrospect, I see now that this is when I should have declined the offer and dodged the bullet completely. But again, the siren song coming from incoming money was too strong. I signed the offer letter and, in return, they shipped me a computer with which to work from home. And the family rallied to help me prepare. To the point where my brother-in-law (aka MrFiasco) transformed a room in our home that had been serving as a storage room into a home office for me. Complete with an actual cubicle! I was getting nervous but excited, especially by my new workspace. I was no longer going to be crammed into a small corner of my bedroom, where my current desktop setup is! I was going to be an unstoppable workforce of one back here!
Okay, I’m not Captain Marvel unstoppable, but I felt pretty close.
Last Thursday was my first day. I went through orientation and training on both Teams and Zoom, and learned that the company was effectively a healthcare call center. I cringe at those two words together because working for a call center is one of the last things I have ever had any desire to do. As I mentioned earlier, I despise speaking on the phone in the first place. But they informed us that we would only be making outbound phone calls to insurance members to try and convince them to schedule an in-home health assessment, which is where a nurse practitioner visits their home and reviews their overall health, medications, etc. My last office-based job that I had worked at for more than 8 years eventually threw me a phone and told me to play call center, but this company surprisingly had an entire automated phone system that included an actual script, and you were able to schedule the appointments in the same software! That seemed fairly easy and convenient. Maybe I could do this job! The trainers also seemed friendly and very knowledgeable. I won’t lie: The first three or four days were even kinda fun. I was digging it.
That was until Day #5. I don’t know if my trainer was just having a spectacularly bad day, but there were a few moments throughout the morning where her friendliness seemed as though it was starting to wane. At one particular point, I was essentially told to stop taking notes on a topic and to start doing a quiz about the same topic instead. And then, earlier in the day, we were directed to complete an activity that involved us recording ourselves doing a practice phone call with yet another AI chatbot. When the AI chatbot broke down for numerous people in the training class and stopped letting us progress, assistance was not exactly forthcoming. And when the assistance finally did show up, it was entirely useless. By the time we went on our lunch break yesterday, I started feeling pretty triggered. I’ve described the feeling to my family multiple times now as feeling like workplace PTSD. My eagerness to keep learning and to try and make things work for this job withered away and was instantly replaced by a sense of panic and dread in the middle of my stomach. My spidey sense was tingling. I’d been here before.
And in a moment of clarity, I came to the entire reality of the situation. This was a call center, I was a salesperson (there was even commission!), my higher-ups were unwilling to help, and I was once again going to be expected to address questions for people that I did not know the answers to. Furthermore, my target demographic was vulnerable elderly people who were likely being taken advantage of by their insurance policies anyway. We were instructed that these health assessments were yearly benefits that they receive for free, but as my famously inappropriate father likes to say, “there ain’t no free lunch.” And sure, the calls were mostly scripted, but we were also advised to “manage resistance” when folks tried declining the assessment, which also felt scummy. I quickly realized that I wasn’t digging it, after all.
Then I quit! I was that guy who went to lunch and never came back. After I signed off, I packed up their computer and immediately shipped it back out to them this morning in the very same box it arrived in.
Jiggy’s Journal now has an AMA (Ask Me Anything) page! You got 🔥burning questions🔥 for me? Maybe a comment or suggestion? Check out the page here and submit everything that’s on your mind. Afterwards, I’ll respond in a future post!
And while I’m absolutely certain this was the correct decision to make, I’m disappointed to say the very least. Nobody knows how much I wanted to be a productive member of society again. My family has been extremely supportive for the most part, but I know that I’m a drain on them financially, so I think they’re at least a little disappointed in me, too. I know that I’m also exceptionally privileged to have enough of a support system currently in place that I’m granted the option of even considering leaving a job when I’m mentally in distress. Not everyone can do that, so it wasn’t a decision that I made lightly. I did try my best. I took several pages of handwritten notes throughout training, did my best to fully understand the company’s campaign that I’d been hired for, and adjusted everything else in my orbit to rotate around my new work schedule. Despite my gut instinct frequently trying to communicate to my brain that this wasn’t going to work.
So my unemployment journey continues. I’m still working on coding. Maybe even refocusing on it a little more since I started to slack off on that a bit. Hopefully, I can eventually develop that skill into something employable. I’m still making web content, like always, for the love of it and because it earns me a little pocket change here and there. (By the way, have you subscribed to this publication? What about my Twitch channel?? Or maybe you’d like to buy me a cup of coffee??? 👀) I’m still open and looking for any other jobs that might surprise me and somehow won’t be completely soul-crushing. And otherwise, I’m chillin’ with my silly little games and shows. (Yo, Severance, Silo, and Foundation have been rocking my world lately. Get you some Apple TV+!)
Let this also serve as a reminder to listen to your internal monologue! Trust your gut instincts! I understand that they aren’t always right, and maybe we are just cucumbers with anxiety, but your feelings are valid, and there is a reason why they are making you feel that way. Don’t ignore the warning signs! Otherwise, you might just unwittingly find yourself in a call center.
In the meantime, you know if anyone’s hiring? If they aren’t completely drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, shoot me an email! We’ll be besties forever. ❤️
