About This Site

Well, this is almost as awkward as writing about myself. But this, at least, might be more useful.

This is a personal web site, in a sense all about me, but mainly as a venue where I can foist my writing on an unsuspecting (and largely blithely unaware) internet, a way for me to write the words to get them out of my head and pretend that someone, somewhere might have heard me.

I will write about all kinds of things. "Focus," the advice goes. "Build an audience." Well, if I was trying to build a following, maybe I would do that; I've done that before, I guess, in other contexts. But that's not really what this site is for. This one's for me, to talk about all the things that fascinate me, or that bother me, or that delight me. I will not promise any particular restraint. I will, however, try to tag things appropriately.

Some things are not going to be discussed. I am a dad, among other things, so I may occasionally reference my kids, but I'm not going to be talking about them in detail. I probably could do an entire section on my views of parenting and so forth, but every family dynamic is unique, and whatever my take is on my own family, it's probably irrelevant to anyone else's family. But that's not the real reason. Really, it's to offer my kids some degree of privacy, to give them the ability to grow up and figure out who they are without me posting an endless stream of photos and commentary. Certainly not on a social network notorious for mining and sharing users' data with barely a fig leaf of consent; but not here on the backwaters of the internet, either. So, just casual references to the fact that they exist, and maybe an anodyne anecdote or two. Sorry.

What you'll get instead are writing about tech, games, cooking, and social commentary. I may post some artwork here, when it's fresh, but likely not all of my art endeavors. I may post about fun code projects I'm working on, some of which might be connected to games, some to art, and some... well we'll just see when we get there.

Techy Notes

This site is a custom build using Wagtail and Django. There are a gazillion content management systems out there and it's completely valid to wonder why the hell would I spend my time building a site when I could just "grab WordPress". There are three reasons for this.

1. WordPress is a coagulated pile of post-rancid fecal matter ejected from the corpse of a necrotic jackal; it is fair to say I do not like it and do not care to run it for myself, thankyouverymuch.1
2. It pleases me to meddle in content management systems because I find the work relaxing.2
3. I have long-term plans for where I want to go with this, and if I don't get there, I'm still OK with having done this work.

What This Site Is Not

This isn't my professional site! I actually don't have one of those and don't really care to set one up. Yes, I'm a professional in tech. I like gadgets and software and cool things. As a kid the future always seemed like a more fun place to live, and now that we're here, I can confirm it is. I've made a career out of building small pieces of that. But... this site doesn't exist to get me a job, or to showcase what I know. Doing that would imply curating more of what goes on here to narrow my focus to that specific aim, and... that's an extra chunk of my stress budget I'm not particularly interested in investing.