Signal in the Noise
I took the old version of this site down a while back. The short reason is security. The longer reason is that I looked at everything I'd put online over the years and felt like I'd handed out too much of myself to anyone who cared to look.
Which is a strange thing to feel about a blog. Blogs are supposed to be personal. That's the whole point of them. You write down what you think, someone you've never met reads it, and for a second the distance between the two of you gets a little smaller. I still believe in that. But the web I learned to love was a geeky, welcoming sort of place, and that web mostly isn't here anymore. Pretending otherwise started to feel naive, so I stopped.
So why am I back?
Two reasons. The first is that I have things I want to share, and a site of my own is still the best way I know to do that on my own terms. The second is simpler: if I don't write, I go a little mad. The words pile up and they need somewhere to go.
I spent more time than I'd like to admit thinking about clever ways to thread the needle. Block the crawlers. Hide from the scrapers. Maybe publish nothing but an RSS feed and skip the HTML entirely, so only the people who really wanted to read me ever would. Some of that might still happen. But the more I schemed, the more it felt like I was trying to enjoy the web while refusing to admit what it had become.
At some point you have to pick. You can build the web you want to see, or you can hide from the one that exists. I'd rather do the first while keeping my eyes open about the second.
We're living in the cyberpunk future the authors warned us about. We got the surveillance and the walled gardens. We got the quiet certainty that everything we do is logged and sold somewhere. The warning in those stories was always the same: hold onto your humanity, because the machinery around you is built to wear it down.
So here I am, writing things down again. Trying to be a person in public, carefully.