In the last three days, in addition to my regular day job, I’ve recorded 10 videos for my YouTube channel. Some of them I’m very happy with. There’s a certain feeling you get when you’ve done things you had to do. But there’s a better feeling you get when you do things because you want to do them.

For a while now, I’ve not really felt up to making videos for my channel. I’m sure some of my long time audience members could feel that as the content got less and less. I was just a little burnt out and had a bit of impostor syndrome to go along with everything else going on in my life. But these last few days, that’s changed. And I’ve finally felt like making some content again.

I love blogging, and I’ve talked about that a lot. I also love reading other people’s blogs (blog roll coming soon). Even if they blog about things I have no interest in, I like reading them, and I usually subscribe to their RSS feeds. My “blog” category in FreshRSS is, well let’s say it’s well populated.

Most of the blogs I follow are my fellow “Small Web” bloggers, folks who aren’t doing this professionally and are just catering to a small community. But I have a bone to pick with some of these guys. They have RSS feeds, which is great, but they don’t enable the full content of their posts to be pushed out via that feed. They either limit it to a paragraph, or there’s one guy who limits it to a single sentence. WTF?

It’s really odd for a person who studied history to not be able to remember things. But I’ve always had an issue with my memory. And it’s not as though I don’t remember things. I know all sorts of random shit. I rock at Jeopardy! But ask me what the name of that one guy who did that, and I can’t remember it to save my life.

It’s why I’ve been so focused on notes for so long. I need to write everything down, and if I don’t, I forget it.

I have been a reader for most of my life. I was very excited to read “chapter books” when I was 5 or 6 years old. By the time I was heading into middle school, I was reading King, Grisham, and Clancy. I have no idea why my adolescent brain liked Tom Clancy, I can’t stand his writing now, but goodness, I read Executive Order like 50 times back then. Jack Ryan was my hero. I was a loner who preferred books. Damn, I’m still like that. 🤣

When I first used the Internet, way back in the mid-90s, it wasn’t really a thing people thought about. It wasn’t a big deal, because most people didn’t even have it. If you wanted to use the Internet, if you even had a reason to do so, you had to go somewhere else to do it. The library or your school. It wasn’t until 2001 or 2002 that I finally got dial up at my house. And I know that my experiences there aren’t all that unusual. You can look up the stats if you want, but the saturation of Internet in private households didn’t take off until the mid-00s.

I know a lot of you follow me over on The Linux Cast, but for those of you who don’t, it’s probably odd to hear me say that I’ve hopped to a different distro. What’s a distro? What’s Linux?

Well, that’s fine if you don’t know what those are, it’s really not the point of today’s ramble. Instead, I want to discuss change and how hard that can be.

I have used the same distro for the last two years. This was a challenge I set myself in 2023, hoping to curb my distro-hopping addiction. And it worked spectacularly well. I love openSUSE.

I don’t vibe code. I’m pretty proud of that fact. I like to create my own code, even though I’m painfully aware of how bad at it I am. I’m not a developer and I never will be. I can put out the simplest of things and be happy about that. It’s more than some people can do, so there’s no real need to feel bad about it.

Because I’m not a great coder, I have to constantly look things up online. I’m a long time user of the Google-it-always method of coding. The issue is, I’m doing that less and less and going to AI instead. And it is a serious problem. I can feel myself getting dumber every time I use “AI” for some menial task or question. Things I would usually go figure out myself by reading through other’s solutions on random forum 133, I now copy and paste from ChatGPT. Sure the AI bot will tell me what the code does and how it should work, but I don’t read that shit. I just take the code and if it works, GREAT! If it doesn’t work, I go back to AI, tell it that it didn’t work and ask it to try again.

Back in college and a little after, I worked the third shift stocking shelves at Kroger. I did that for about 10 years. It was a good job, and allowed me to make friends and be able to go to school during the day. I stopped working there in 2012. That’s 13 years ago, which just makes me wonder where the time has gone.

But what really gets me, is that even after all that time, my sleeping schedule still has not recovered. I’m still a work until 5AM kind of guy. If you’re on my Discord, you’ll often find me there chatting until the wee hours of the morning. And often times, I don’t get up and about until 10 or 11 in the morning, sometimes later.

I talked just a few days ago about how I’ve been in a severe reading slump lately. That same day, I picked up Apocalypse Gates: Book 1: Rapture" by Daniel Shinhofen. Amazon Link The book’s summary was interesting enough. Guy wakes up after his brain is basically stolen by mega Corp Inc and uploaded to a video game. I love me some LitRPG, so I figured this would be a fun little romp. I really didn’t expect to get into it as much as I did. This book is pretty good in a lot of places. It’s also really bad in some places, so much so that it kind of ruins it, but we’ll get to that later.