Towards something that almost looks like a blog

I withdrew from social media at the start of that whole global pandemic thing. Initially it was to bring my anxiety under control, and turned out to be the best possible thing I could have done for my well-being.

On the other hand, I came to miss having a place to dump things that may or may not be of value to someone somewhere. That's what this is!

I also wanted a little place that was mine -- hosted on servers I pay for, with software I control. The current wave of deplatforming should terrify anyone that has content hosted by someone else. I like cars, cats, and writing Python code. It's unlikely I'll ever become a target for any of that, but that's probably what all those people thought who were posting nudity on that site that was 95% nudity, and we all know how that one worked out.

I have a site. Actually I have another site as well. Those sites do what they do, and one of them gets non-trivial amounts of traffic doing what it does. I did not want to repurpose those. They might get updated with the things they should be updated with, but sometimes a thing should be allowed to be the thing that it is.

So here it is, something resembling a blog. I'll be migrating a bunch of stuff from my Markdown diary files. I have a lot of these, which I gathered in the hope of getting them into a static site generator some day. They didn't end up going into a static site generator, because I was overthinking the solution (and I'll probably post about that soon).

I picked the name "Exhaust" because this is a bit of a vent. Not "vent" in the sense that makes so much discourse ugly, but a place to dump the occasional thought, a thing that has happened to me, a picture, maybe the occasional story and anything else that crosses my mind. And I can do that without caring how many likes or shares it gets! As Todd Snider put it,

I might share some of my opinions with you over the course of the evening. I'm not gonna share them with you 'cause I think they're smart, or 'cause I think you need to know 'em; I'm gonna share 'em with you because they rhyme.