Bird droppings

Social media over the last 15 years has been interesting. Waaaaay back in 2005, I started my first online blog over on livejournal. The archives of that blog are still archived here on this dreamwidth account.

When livejournal was sold to the russians, I along with a lot of other people, headed out to Facebook to do my postings and journaling. That was fine until around 2016 when I learned more about how Facebook was using all of our information to help fuck up our society. Since then, I've been mostly living on Mastodon.

My wife of 11 years is leaving me, and with her departure, I'm re-evaluating a lot of things in life. One such thing is the lack of creative writing that I've been doing for the past 10 years. In part due to the loss of livejournal in my life, and in part due to the fact that my wife expressed an attitude of being critical of what she considered "bad art," I've been hesitant and/or to do much in the way of creating written art. I'm trying to change that.

I think one of the things I need is a place to put my writings and nonsense. Here seems like a reasonable place. It's the best continuation of my livejournal space from 2005 and gives me an opportunity to use the same basic format to create longer forms of writing. I don't really have a lot of friends on this platform, though... I left most of them back on livejournal or on other social networks.

But as I was putting together a really weird "laptop" project in the aftermath of this ongoing divorce, I found myself thinking about keyboards and writing software for the first time in over a decade. I even pulled out my old copy of Ommwriter and did a little poetry and writing with a prompt.

It felt like coming home to an old friend.

Thing about me. I used to write constantly. Lots of poetry, a few short stories, lots of essays, tons of journaling, and lots of other little things. Some of it even won awards of a sort. It really hasn't been much of a part of my life for most of the past 10 years. But I want to change that and bring it back to my life. I want to start sharing my thoughts in a journal like fashion again. I want to write again.

So let's do it. Let's write.

I suppose some updates are in order since the last time I used this site was 6 years ago and pre-pandemic, and so much has happened since then.

Looking back, I see that my last posts were about the fact that I was buying an airplane. It was a small plane, but really fun to fly. I took that thing all over the place. My favorite memories were flying out to the desert or small strips with campgrounds next to them, and landing there. It was so much fun. When the pandemic hit, I used our little plane to travel to Michigan to let us look at houses and plan our cross-country move without using commercial air and risking covid exposure.

Alas, I'm giving up flying. Sold my plane earlier this year and will not be returning to it, not for a while anyways. The reason I'm giving it up has to do with several things. Probably the biggest reason is that I've been growing increasingly concerned about climate change, to the point that it's reached the level of intrusive thoughts. The last few times I went out flying, I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that I was pouring 15 gallons of leaded gas into the atmosphere every hour I flew the thing. It actually got so bad, I didn't even want to drive a gas car. Now I have an electric car, so I'm laundering the pollution through the power company, and that makes me feel a heck of a lot better, tbh.

Also aviation gas prices have been rising, and I've been feeling a powerful desire to go back to focusing on creative pursuits over the past year, which makes trying to keep up with my pilot's license a bit frustrating. It's not really what I've been wanting to focus on anymore.

What else has been happening... Oh yeah, burying the lede a bit there... I moved to Michigan! One of my partners, Coda, grew up around here, and California was getting too expensive for my tastes. So we moved out here, built a beautiful home, and have been nicely settled in for the past few years.

One of the motivations for moving here was to make it possible for me to leave the unreasonably lucrative job I had at Netflix. Loved the place, but damn it leaned into the "golden handcuffs" concept. I've since taken lower paying jobs doing game development, and that's been super super fun! I love having a job where I get to participate in such a creative process, instead of the increasingly hyper-capitalistic process that Netflix had become.

Let's see... what else do we got...

Oh yeah! I came out as non-binary over the past few years and changed my name to Robin. That's a whole thing that I probably should journal about at some point in its own article... My journey to acceptance of being non-binary.

Last, a more recent development... my wife of 11 years left me, and it's probably the strangest and most confusing breakup I've ever been through. I'll tell that story in another article as well, sometime.

I'm sure there's more, but I think those are the major major highlights! See you soon!