I’ve been on a bit of a downsizing of the mental load of data hoarding recently, trying to get my blogging lightweight, easily maintainable, tidy.

that in itself comes with maintenance I find also.

the older I get the more I need access to both the consuming part and the publishing parts of my digital life — it’s gotta be easy to maintain and understand.

gone are the days of broken plugins on wordpress blogs or spending insane amounts of time on the right picture and edit.

time has really decided to remind me on the daily what time I can afford and what the cost of that is.

maybe it’s being married, new country, other factors that contribute to my focus on using my time more efficiently but it’s there.

like a nagging subtext reminding me to go fast, build light, easy to maintain, less moving parts, data ownership, more about the context of the content than the infra it runs on.

that being said I’m absolutely over the moon that we are returning to simple times.

it’s almost like these social systems are getting a new web2 connected life without the data sucking soul surgeons of big data providing us with a ui/ux saturation hell.

something to be said for fast, lightweight and performant, it reminds you and affords you the ability to get in and out again.

knowing that your connected connections of friends and thought leaders you look up to might swing by and drop you a little message or note to say hey.

while I miss some elements of the hectic yearly march times of old SXSW and other conferences I don’t miss the circus of it all.

the feeling of needing to feel connected is very much more push than pull for me these days and I guess you could say I’m content.

I’m glad that I can connect up easily my blogs and data streams to other platforms from the hard work of simplifying things others are doing.

I love that I can talk to Claude and get some assistance building out a basic system to post audio to my blogs using GitHub as a base for my audios for free - there is so much digital compute abundance now.

I do miss my friend subwolf though, he would have loved ai. he was taken too soon, and ill be forever sorry I didn’t know how to deal with him having a stroke/coma and to become someone I didn’t have the metal fortitude to help & understand properly.

I can’t mentally imagine what it was like for him to be brought back through all that pain and anguish by his mother and then to lose her a few years later after he was better.

not sure why I felt the need to write or remark on that, maybe it’s because I just woke early and got to writing or maybe it’s because I know it would build the best plugins and cool ai automations for this new frontier.

I’ll always give thanks for him being part of my digital journey from all those early days of running different bbs systems together in a town of other 68k people at the time.

Not minimal, overly complicated systems, lots of maintenance and tooling and wow too much time devoted to something so niche that outside that circle people wouldn’t understand why I wait days/weeks on routing to deliver my email!

all them hours on irc dude, entry points in tech really shape you and what you do, I wish sometimes I could just jettison some of that knowledge and way of operating.

maybe I’d have operated differently, spent more time in areas that would have benefitted me today, I don’t have time to play catchup or have the inclination too — now it’s fast, lightweight and minimal for me.

I’ve still got stories to tell!

peace and love dmouse x humble

p.s — the world is made for two, find someone that loves you and allows you to love the ones that love you better, that’s all their really is.