You know how things like this go, right? I saw this blog questions challenge from Kev Quirk, who saw it from some other people using Bear Blog and adapted it to be less platform-specific. Kev had tagged a few people to participate, but not me. That’s OK, though. It still came to me via RSS, and nobody needs an invitation to participate in these little games.
Kev’s questions are pretty similar to the ones Manuel Moreale uses for his weekly People & Blogs interviews, but instead of directing you to my entry it might be worthwhile to answer them anew. Preferably in less verbose fashion, no doubt. I’ll list them below before answering them:
- Why did you start blogging in the first place?
- What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
- Have you blogged on other platforms before?
- How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
- When do you feel most inspired to write?
- Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
- What’s your favourite post on your blog?
- Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
Here are additional questions from other posters, like Hedy:
“Why did you start blogging in the first place?”
I built my first websites in 1996 on The Globe, which was a free website host that competed with Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, etc... I wanted a place where I could write about heavy metal and Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, though I had stopped reading after Memnoch the Devil. I might not have written any actual fanfic — even then I was more interested in my pastiches — but the vampire Lestat helped me get through some rough patches as a young man.
Blogging wasn’t really a thing back then, and I don’t think it really took off until the RSS 2.0 spec dropped. But I’m going to use ‘blogging’ and ‘running a personal website’ interchangeably.
I kept at it because, quite frankly, it’s hard for a working-class American like me to access mental health care. Writing was a lot cheaper than therapy, and worked better for me. Of course, ailurotherapy worked best for me. A warm, snuggly cat purring in your lap can fix almost anything. What a cat can’t fix, they make irrelevant.
“What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?”
I’m not actually using a platform, unless you count Debian GNU/Linux as one.
My content management system is a git repository that contains my text (as raw, hand-coded HTML), templates, images, build scripts, and a makefile to tie everything together.
I build my website on a local computer, and deploy to my host — currently Nearly Free Speech — by running make install in a terminal.
That command pushes everything using rsync over SSH.
I’m basically one of those crazy people who aren’t content to use WordPress, or even Hugo, but insisted on building their own static site generator.
I wanted to get better at shell scripting, sed, awk, etc.
And I wanted to get better at writing makefiles and parallelizing processes.
Besides, I’ve never seen a platform or tool that wasn’t somehow opinionated in the sense that it was intended to build a certain kind of website a certain way. Since this isn’t Burger King, I figured that if I want to have it my way I’ve got to do it myself. And since I already had irreparable brain damage from exposure to Unix in college, I figured I might as well take advantage of it.
“Have you blogged on other platforms before?”
Oh, yeah. I’ve used Moveable Type (before it became payware). I’ve used WordPress. I’ve run self-hosted WordPress. I’ve used static site generators like Jekyll, Pelican, and Hugo.
I’ve even tried some tools that Roman Zolotarev and Bradley Taunt had created, so you can blame them for me deciding to ‘git gud’ at shell scripting and writing makefiles. After all, I’ve already beaten Elden Ring. Not to mention every other action-RPG that From Software has released since Demon’s Souls back in 2009.
“How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?”
I write plain HTML in GNU Emacs using web-mode and emmet-mode. I know emmet-mode is unmaintained, but it still works. I could write my posts with Markdown, RestructuredText, AsciiDoc, or Org mode text, and have before.
However, I’ve found that these markup languages that compile to HTML are relatively limited compared to HTML. I would also need a tool to convert Markdown and friends to HTML, which would slow down my build process and leave me dependent on pandoc.
Instead, I came full circle and went back to writing my own HTML. It comes in handy at my day job; I seem to be the only web developer on my team who knows more than the rudiments, so I’m not stuck trying to reimplement basic functionality in JavaScript. I’m also the closest thing my team has to a subject-matter expert on Web accessibility.
That should frighten my bosses, incidentally. What if I get hit by a truck and and become an isekai protagonist or a hero from a Rick Cook novel? Or, as a slightly more realistic possibility, what if I get my hands on a few million dollars and thus no longer need a day job? Trust me: if I had $10 million all at once, this is what I’d do after giving Uncle Sam his due: I’d pay off my mortgage, fix up my house, buy a new EV with cash (not a Tesla, though), park the rest of the money in index funds, live off the interest, and never work for a paycheck again. Hell, I could probably do that and create a real-life Fortress of Solitude with $1 million.
“When do you feel most inspired to write?”
Honestly? When I’m angry. When I look at the world around me, I find no shortage of excuses to rant.
I am, however, trying to get away from that in 2025. I don’t want to devote attention to things and people that piss me off. I don’t want to be angry all the time.
My anger is a hiltless sword. It doesn’t care who it cuts; innocent or guilty, they all bleed the same. Even when my anger cuts the guilty, innocent people who care for them might still suffer. And the blade of ire cuts me when I grasp it, too.
It’s still early days, but I think I’ve done a reasonable job thus far.
“Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?”
It depends. Sometimes I push immediately. Other times I’ll wait a few days and then push a lot of material all at once. I’d like to get to a point where I only publish once a month, as if my website were a magazine.
That’s why I’ve been updating my /now page monthly, and archiving previous entries in /zine.
“What’s your favourite post on your blog?”
I’m proudest of my /fiction, but that wasn’t the question.
Sticking strictly to blog posts, I think the following are my greatest hits. Any post that gets the ##recommended tag ends up on the recommended index.
- GNU Emacs From Scratch
- in which our intrepid schmuck nukes his overly complex configuration in favor of one only slightly less recondite
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(filed under recommended, personal, technology, configuration, and Emacs) - Your Body, Your Choice, Forever
- Even an asshole like Nick Fuentes might sometimes manage to say something useful.
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(filed under recommended, rants, politics, Women’s Liberation, and Men’s Liberation) - Fortress of Solitude
- I’m not Superman, or even Doc Savage, but I still need one of my own.
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(filed under recommended, personal, introversion, and autism) - Twenty Years
- I never thought I'd be married, let alone stay that way this long
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(filed under recommended, personal, marriage, and memories) - Guys, Let's Talk About Periods
- If we're going to live with women, we can't dismiss this as a women's issue.
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(filed under recommended, Women’s Liberation, and Men’s Liberation) - Speaking English on the Multilingual Web
- The Web is multilingual, even if I'm not, so it's on me to adapt.
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(filed under recommended, personal, language, philosophy, and indiewebcarnival) - Recursive Bulk File Renaming
- a HOWTO for renaming a bunch of files in a directory tree in a terminal with UNIX tools
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(filed under recommended, technology, and UNIX®) - Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
- Director Todd Phillips shows that Arthur Fleck can't live up to the legend he created.
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, and movies) - The (Plain Old) Web
- I don't need a POSSE, and whether you rebrand ActivityPub as 'the social web' or not, you can keep it.
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(filed under recommended, rants, technology, webcraft, and parasocial media) - Let God Speak, Dammit
- She's a big God; She can use Her words and speak for Herself.
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(filed under recommended, personal, religion, existentialism, and theodicy) - The Substance (2024)
- Brilliantly written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, with killer performances by Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, movies, and Women’s Liberation) - Prometheus Unconquered
- a hymn of defiance from the Titan's viewpoint, written on my birthday
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(filed under recommended, poetasting, Greek mythology, Romantic Satanism, and Prometheus) - Fourth Dominion
- If there’s ever a remake of Nightbreed, this band should do the soundtrack.
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, music, heavy metal 🤘, and Fourth Dominion) - The Power of Satan Compels Me
- People used to blame heavy metal for youth suicides in the 1980s, but it saved me.
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(filed under recommended, personal, memories, abuse, music, heavy metal 🤘, suicide prevention, and indiewebcarnival) - Power Underneath Despair
- In your darkest hour, what saved you? What helped you find the strength to carry on?
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(filed under recommended, personal, suicide prevention, and indiewebcarnival) - Transgressing the Law of Jante
- Affirmations for those who would defy a law that binds them but does not protect.
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(filed under recommended, personal, philosophy, and society) - Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant?
- No, it was always irrelevant if you had your own domain and site. Everything else is optional.
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(filed under recommended, technology, webcraft, and rants) - Behind the Mask
- I don't talk much about being autistic. I'm going to do that today.
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(filed under recommended, personal and autism) - Single? Looking? Why Not Make a /dating Page?
- Instead of using an app that makes more money if you stay single, why not use your website for online dating?
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(filed under recommended, personal, webcraft, memories, and online dating) - Footnotes: No Fun to Create, Either
- Tyler Sticka doesn't like reading footnotes online? Fair enough.
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(filed under recommended, technology, HTML, and webcraft) - Matters of Faith, Problems of Evil
- It’s a good thing I don’t believe in Hell, for this post alone might earn me a seat.
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(filed under recommended, personal, religion, existentialism, and theodicy) - Good Enough; or, Never Give Your Best At Work
- You get paid the same whether you meet expectations or exceed them.
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(filed under recommended, personal, workplace, Women’s Liberation, Men’s Liberation, and indiewebcarnival) - IndieWeb Carnival 2024: Accessibility on the Personal Web
- Is it just about disability accommodation and WCAG/Section 508 compliance?
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(filed under recommended, technology, webcraft, and indiewebcarnival) - Personal Web, Personal Sovereignty
- I often feel like I’ve only ever been free on my own website.
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(filed under recommended, personal, technology, webcraft, manifesto, and 32bit Cafe Code Jam) - Storming Heaven
- What if defiance of nature is human nature?
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(filed under recommended, personal, philosophy, rants, existentialism, Romantic Satanism, and indiewebcarnival) - IndieWeb Carnival 2024: Digital Relationships
- or, How I Met My Wife and Why I Might Not Try That Again
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(filed under recommended, personal, philosophy, online dating, and indiewebcarnival) - Concerning Trans Rights
- Most of the rights transgender people want recognized are basic rights of individual self-determination, and I’m OK with that.
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(filed under recommended, personal, politics, Women’s Liberation, Men’s Liberation, and trans rights) - HTML5 Needs a “partial” Element
- What good are web components if you can’t easily reuse them across multiple pages?
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(filed under recommended, technology, HTML, and webcraft) - Your Site, Your Rules, Your Way
- This is me sticking up for the “soydevs” who don’t build their websites the way other people think they should, because tech prescriptivists who indulge in gatekeeping are authoritarian scum.
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(filed under recommended, technology, webcraft, and rants) - Tears in Rain
- I’ve been reading a dying man’s blog post about regret, and I have opinions with which I’d rather not directly burden him.
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(filed under recommended, personal, death, regrets, and rants) - Cathedrals on Quicksand
- Some thoughts on a recent Minutes to Midnight blog post from the opposite perspective.
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(filed under recommended, technology, programming, workplace, and rants) - They Abandoned Their Children to Fortnite
- If children are obsessed with video games to the point of throwing tantrums when they can’t play, I blame the parents. They failed their children, and these children will spend their lives paying the price of their parents’ negligence.
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(filed under recommended, rants, society, parenting, and gaming) - This is Not My Side Hustle
- I got an email from a guy who doesn’t understand why I’d run a website without trying to monetize it. My response became a manifesto. Oops.
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(filed under recommended, personal, rants, manifesto, and webcraft) - Flaming Telepaths
- hearing this song on the radio back in the day pulled me into Blue Öyster Cult fandom
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, music, heavy metal 🤘, and Blue Öyster Cult) - They Too Are God’s Children
- a reply to Jeremy Sarber’s “The Mission Field is Decorated with Rainbow Flags”
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(filed under recommended, politics, religion, and philosophy) - Burn the Mothers Down
- I finished my first run through Final Fantasy XVI yesterday, and it’s been a ride. Expect spoilers.
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, games, Final Fantasy franchise) - My Manhood, My Property, My Way
- a rant and a meditation on biological sex, socially-defined gender, individual choice, and existentialism with music by Diamond Head, The Sisters of Mercy, Annihilator, and Frank Sinatra
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(filed under recommended, personal, political, rants, gender, Women’s Liberation, and Men’s Liberation) - Make Them Reject You
- If you don’t ask for things, and you aren’t willing to simply reach out and take them, you’ll end up with nothing.
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(filed under recommended, personal, workplace, philosophy, Women’s Liberation, and Men’s Liberation) - After 1989: A Trip To Freedom
- notes on the historical concept album by Minutes to Midnight
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, music, and history) - Disdain for Profanity is a Luxury Belief
- prescriptivist boors and bores alike have been looking down on profanity in English since 1066
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(filed under recommended, language, profanity, and rants) - Jesus He Knows Me
- Ghost is covering Genesis, and they picked Easter to drop this video.
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(filed under recommended, music, video, heavy metal 🤘, ghostband, Genesis, and religion) - Poem for a Mass Resignation
- the Great Resignation deserves a greater poet than I, but this might do for now
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(filed under recommended, poetasting, and workplace) - RE: Does a Blog Need to Integrate?
- blogs with RSS/Atom/JSON feeds are already interoperable
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(filed under recommended, technology, rants, and webcraft) - Creating YouTube Thumbnails with a Shell Script
- It’s almost as good as an embed, but without Google’s spyware.
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(filed under recommended, technology, UNIX®, command line, shell scripting, and programming) - RE: The Linux Desktop is Hard to Love
- a reply to Bradley Taunt’s post about the inherent jankiness of desktop GNU/Linux
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(filed under recommended, technology, UNIX®, and GNU/Linux) - Party Like It’s 1989
- a Web Zero Manifesto
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(filed under recommended, technology, webcraft, and manifesto) - Playing as a Woman in Final Fantasy XIV
- Why shouldn’t I? It’s not like I don’t pretend to be a man in real life.
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, gaming, Final Fantasy franchise, Women’s Liberation, and Men’s Liberation) - Personal Websites as Self-Portraiture
- The personal website is both medium and message, a self-publishing technology and a new visual arts medium, and every website is its operator’s self-portrait.
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(filed under recommended, technology, webcraft, and manifesto) - Questions for Your Cast
- a brief guide to character creation without prior worldbuilding
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(filed under recommended, writing, characterization, and worldbuilding) - Fuck Trump; Let’s Go Brandon
- Deference to authority is un-American. Fuck the President no matter who he is.
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(filed under recommended, politics, and rants) - Literature Ain’t Burger King
- Want to have it your way? Write it yourself.
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(filed under recommended, writing, and rants) - Hearing Rainfall
- Reflections on working from home, and why I don’t want to go back to onsite work
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(filed under recommended, workplace, and remote work) - Maybe I Don’t WANT To Be Reached?
- I have lots of reasons to avoid social media. Advertising is but one.
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(filed under recommended, rants, parasocial media, marketing, and advertising) - Parallel Transcoding from FLAC on Linux
- Using find and xargs can dramatically speed up the transcoding of large collections of FLAC files to formats like Ogg Vorbis or MP3.
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(filed under recommended, technology, UNIX®, and command line) - Glory and Blame
- In which I wax irreligious and take a whack at the problem of evil.
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(filed under recommended, personal, religion, existentialism, and theodicy) - Goddammit, Jon Schaffer
- Good thing I never mistook Iced Earth’s founding guitarist for a hero, let alone met the man in person.
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, music, heavy metal 🤘, politics, and rants) - My Wife Gave Me an AlphaSmart 3000 for Christmas
- I wasn’t expecting this, and it’s surprisingly handy now that I’ve gotten the hang of using it.
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(filed under recommended, personal, technology, hardware, writing, and word processing) - The Cop in My Head
- All cops are bastards, especially the one in your head.
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(filed under recommended, personal, Men’s Liberation, and rants) - Making Meaning
- inspired by a Gemini post by Case Duckworth
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(filed under recommended, personal, existentialism, Men’s Liberation, and writing) - Choose Life?
- the problem with video games is that reality sucks
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, games, politics, Men’s Liberation, class warfare, and rants) - I’m a Sodomite and I’m OK
- You’re probably one too, unless you’ve never had recreational sex.
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(filed under recommended, personal, politics, sexuality, and Men’s Liberation) - Final Fantasy VII Relived
- better than I expected, with some unexpected twists, but don’t pay full price
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, games, sci-fi, and Final Fantasy franchise) - Real Sex Education
- Compared to what I got in the 1990s, PornHub was an improvement.
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(filed under recommended, rants, politics, and sexuality) - Containment, Social Media, and the Dangers of Imitation
- Deplatforming wasn’t a major issue before social media, and it still isn’t even though social media more often creates cacophony than community.
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(filed under recommended, politics, parasocial media, censorship, and rants) - I Want My BSD!
- my autobiography as a Unix fan, with apologies to Dire Straits…
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(filed under recommended, personal, memories, technology, and UNIX®) - Turning Forty
- looking back from the top of the hill before I go over it
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(filed under recommended, personal, and memories) - The Definitive Count of Monte Cristo
- opinions on Robin Buss’ translation for Penguin Classics
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, and books) - Finding the Sweet Spot: Purple Prose and Fire Emblem Fates
- What if purple prose, used in moderation, wasn’t the aesthetic atrocity that style fascists and writers even more pretentious than I am make it out to be?
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(filed under recommended, writing, translation, localization, characterization, worldbuilding, entertainment, games, and rants) - C.L. Moore: Queen of the Pulps
- one of the great 20th century originals and a worthy heir to Mary Shelley
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, books, and C. L. Moore) - I Know I’m Fat. Did You Know You’re An Asshole?
- I don’t want or need your acceptance. You can think whatever you want; just don’t make your prejudice my problem.
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(filed under recommended, personal, and rants) - Programmer Passion Considered Harmful
- I might have been drunk when I posted this on Medium, but I meant it and I stand by it today.
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(filed under recommended, technology, programming, workplace, and rants) - You Should Listen to Galneryus
- This Japanese power metal act’s first three albums are tight.
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, music, and heavy metal 🤘) - Derelict by L. J. Cohen: a YA Worthy of Heinlein
- a review resurrected and expanded from the archives; I had bought the book and gotten my money’s worth
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(filed under recommended, entertainment, books, sci-fi, and young adult fiction) - Post-IPO Facebook: Echoing the Dot-Com Boom
- From my archive, a prophecy that went unheard but not unfulfill’d: I saw Facebook’s enshittification coming, but didn’t think it would be this bad.
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(filed under recommended, technology, politics, and parasocial media) - Just Married!
- I might have had doubts, but I don’t have any regrets.
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(filed under recommended, personal, and marriage)
Some readers might also argue that they’re my biggest shits, but if they’re reading my website they’re getting more than they paid for.
“Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?”
I dunno.
I had just redesigned my website, starting with my toolchain.
My shell scripts are pretty fast, and parallel make can build my site from scratch (text, images, and *.zip/*.tar.gz archives) in about 5 minutes, so I figure I could do one of the following:
- Rewrite my build scripts in Perl.
- Rewrite my build scripts in a trendier scripting language like Python or Ruby.
- Rewrite my build scripts as C programs. Never mind that I haven’t done anything substantial with C in over 20 years and the language has probably changed considerably since C89 was the new hotness.
- Try to replace my use of
sed,awk,m4, and HTML-XML-utils withedscripts.
All of these, however, are exercises in yak shaving. My shell scripts are good enough. There’s no need to fuck with them beyond adding functionality that I might need in the future but hadn’t needed earlier.
For example, when I generate my RSS feeds I use the modification date for <pubDate> instead of the creation date.
Thus, when I update a post, it shows up in the RSS feed as a more recent item.
I should probably update my feed generation script to include both the creation and modification dates at the bottom, for transparency’s sake.
But that can probably wait. Time I spend dicking around with my setup is time I could spend writing.
“Why do you write?”
I do it because I can. I do it because I choose to. I do it because nobody can stop me.
It’s a sacrament of defiance for me, an Odinic offering of myself to myself. In a society that only values people for their ability to further enrich the already wealthy, my writing is a gentle rebellion because it doesn’t make money for anybody; when writing, I am using my intellect for no greater purpose than my own amusement. And I won’t stop until I’m killed by death, because the power of Satan compels me.
And if all of that goes over your head, there’s always the old standby: “Why? Because fuck you is why.”
“Other than your blog, do you write long-form content elsewhere?”
I’m tempted to bristle at the word ‘content’; I think that people who don’t have any respect for art are most likely to call it “content”. I’m also tempted by a scatological impulse to describe what I flush as “long-form content”; one might reasonably assume that a corn turd three feet long counts as “long-form content”.
Regardless of my negative associations with the word ‘content’, I have written elsewhere besides this blog, but those other platforms are mostly long gone so there’s little point in name-dropping. I have also published a couple of novels — Without Bloodshed and Silent Clarion — and a couple of short stories — “The Milgram Battery” and “Limited Liability”. They’re out of print, but available on my website.
Your Turn
I’m not going to summon anybody in particular to take on this challenge themselves. If you’re up to it, do it. If you want to, send me a link by email.