Notes | gru:Bz

Notes

Notes

Putting yourself out there: on self doubt, persistence

Being any kind of creator is mentally taxing at times. Publicly posting a story, a song, or a video you recorded is a double edged sword. It can be the biggest reward or the biggest source of anxiety. Sometimes it’s a little of both. It’s nerve racking putting yourself out there.

Notes

What makes WP Engine different from Bluehost?

This might sound dumb but I don’t get the difference between something like WP Engine and other hosts that specialize in Wordpress, like Bluehost which literally refers to itself as a Wordpress Hosting Platform and Dreamhost, both of which are recommended by Automattic?

I get that they have “WP” in their name; that makes sense for being easily mistakable for an official part of Wordpress, but the revision history thing just doesn’t seem like it’s as big a deal as Mullenweg is making it out to be. I know he criticized them for not contributing enough to Wordpress.org development but isn’t that kind of arbitrary? Like what is enough?

I do think being owned by a private equity firm is a little greasy for a company that offers hosting for open source software but Bluehost is owned by one too.

Is it just a matter of how big they are? Is it just a personal thing between two rich guys? I feel like it’s probably that.

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What's valuable to you?

I was just reading this Reddit thread about a blogging platform that launched a few years ago. It's grown into a successful space with a thriving community by now, but the comments were kind of cracking me up.

The #1 thing people were focused on back then was how to monetize it.

There's no built-in advertising options and it's really not even set up to run something like Google ads. SEO, maximizing engagement and clicks are not baked in. It's simply a place where indie bloggers can go to share their stories and hang out with other bloggers.

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Why even come out if you're bi or pan?

I've heard that a lot. Why would I even come out of the closet when I can pass for a straight guy? Just date girls and spank it to gay porn or something; don't do this shit in public.

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Seasonal euphoria

I'm wired backwards--or at least my seasonal depression is. I'm at my best when it's 20°F and everything's covered with a fluffy blanket of glimmering snow. I can sleep under a comforter without waking up soaked in sweat. I can actually enjoy a hot shower and it doesn't take me three hours to cool down. I can wear my long sleeve Oxfords to work without sweating my ass off all day.

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Progress in the middle of nowhere, Ohio

I just re-watched this old video of someone driving around filming my hometown with a camcorder in the 80's. It's unbelievable how much it's changed even since the first time I watched it a decade ago.

I want to record my own.

Intel and a few other big tech companies are setting up shop about 15 miles down the road and they project 1,000,000+ people moving to central Ohio in the next few years. We're one of those towns just outside of the city and they're already expanding highways and announcing plans to build a big downtown area. Things are about to drastically change.

Imagine recording a tape of this little town no one's ever heard of, saving it for 30 years and finally pulling it out of an old broken down box in the basement so you can upload it to YouTube. Time goes by so fast, next thing you know we'll blink and it'll be 2050. I'll scroll through miles of photos and videos in my iCloud drive, find the one I recorded 2024 and marvel at how different things were back then.

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The saddest advice I've ever gotten

When we were in our teen years my cousin and I started writing a bunch of music. He'd been playing guitar since he was like five years old so he was kind of a prodigy at that point. He's one of those people who can hear something and immediately tell you what tuning it's in and then start playing it perfectly.

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Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Zelda 3, or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has been my favorite installment in the Zelda series for as long as I can remember.

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The Bravery of Being Out of Range

Reading about the invasion of Lebanon today immediately made me hear Roger Waters' The Bravery of Being Out of Range in the back of my mind:

Hey bartender - over here! Two more shots and two more beers. Sir, turn up the TV sound, the war has started on the ground! Just love those laser-guided bombs, they’re really great at righting wrongs. You hit the target and win the game, from bars 3,000 miles away

The whole record Amused to Death paints a perfect picture of the Western world constantly fueling the war machine while we’re all amusing ourselves to death from the safety of our homes. And that was in ‘92; now we have a whole computer in our pocket so we can tune out from reality whenever we want, or maybe tune in to some war every now and again to see which team has scored the most points so far.

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I broke up with my weed dealer

When the first dispensaries opened up shop for recreational sales in Ohio, I felt like a kid in a candy shop. Then I looked at the prices.

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Okay I'm finally using Bear

Not Bear Blog, but the markdown app. I used Obsidian for a while and I really liked it, but it felt like overkill so I switched to Drafts. I kinda liked that too but it also felt a little bloated after a while, mostly because it integrates with so many other services. Literally the only feature I used was automatically sending the draft to Micro.blog’s editor, saving me a whopping .5 seconds over copying and pasting it.

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A rant about Facebook

You know what I hate about Facebook? It’s the only social network where literally everyone you know has an account. It’s one of those things that’s become a simple fact of life and no one ever questions it. If you take a step back it’s pretty crazy though right? We preach about the importance of decentralization but then the most popular… software… thing is the most centralized of them all.

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My experience on Vanilla OS so far

A lot of people assume Linux users are all hackers or at least have some background in programming. I do not. I’m part of the other demographic - the people who grew up poor and started using it to revive obsolete hardware.

I know enough shell scripting and other terminal stuff to (usually) get by if I break something, but I’m too dumb to use a distro like NixOS. I actually prefer using the commandline to add and remove programs and do little system maintenance things but I’ve never built my own version of Linux or even compiled anything.

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Why do I blog?

Lately I’ve put a lot of thought into why I blog. A few months ago, it was because I had so many ideas to get out of my head I just had to do it. I came up with post after post about my different experiences and the things I’ve learned and developed opinions on over the years. For a while, I didn’t even know what writer’s block felt like.

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Right side of the bed

Some of my best days start out absolutely horrible. Some of my worst days start out feeling like everything is going perfect.

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The old man down the road

I woke up to the doorbell ringing this morning. Who in the hell could be here this early?

So I got up and opened the front door. There was this little old man standing there in a brown Member’s Only jacket and some khakis.

“Hey, I’m your neighbor from two houses down,” he said. “You guys have a grey cat?”

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Drafts + Micro.blog

I’ve been using Obsidian for all of my blog notes and drafts since I started blogging. It’s a powerhouse for writing pretty much anything from code to blog posts, and it has a ton of themes and plugins to choose from. It might not be an Everything App™ but it’s definitely an Everything Writing App.

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Live for today

I saw an ancient meme on Reddit the other day, something along the lines of “in 10 years you’ll want to go back to now because the good old days are happening and we don’t even know it.”

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I quit energy drinks

I’ve been drinking at least one 12oz Redbull a day since somewhere around 2010. Right after high school, I was doing a lot of manual labor jobs so the extra energy boost really helped. Especially after partying all night like college kids do.

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Thoughts on AI to help with little bits of code

I know AI in coding is a touchy subject, but I’ve been learning a lot using Claude to help do things I otherwise had no idea how to do. I still have to know what I’m trying to realistically accomplish and what code I need to change, and how to shoehorn it into the rest of the code it without breaking everything.