okaywtvr

For me, RSS feeds are a remnant of the old web that I find myself still using daily in the present day along with anonymous image and text boards. Because my feed is made up of sources that I enjoy reading, their content is always directly relevant towards me and my interests. There is never a middleman algorithm curating my feed and trying to sell me a product or opinion. It makes my web browsing experience feel much more genuine and honest, like standing in a virtual crowd of my peers. And if I want to step out of my comfort zone and get a feel of the current zeitgeist, anonymous boards give me an unfiltered view that is so raw compared to highly moderated and insular sites like reddit or facebook.

It’s the wisdom of the crowd in full effect. If everyone is able to easily voice their opinion (both good and bad), you can reliably get a feel of the majority as opposed being constantly spammed by the vocal minority. Heavy handed moderation, social feeds managed with ulterior motives, and barriers to having a voice is why many of us are living in echo chambers while perpetuating a fear of being attacked by other echo chambers. Admittedly, there’s a lot of profit to made in that space, but since I’m not the one benefiting from it, why should I contribute? In the past, trolling was fun when it was for the lolz, but now, it’s media ammunition to generate an endless hamster wheel of engagement…and I absolutely hate it.

Anyways, now that I am a grown-ass salary man, I can finally afford to buy my own domain to host my own personal website. I’ve also become very disillusioned with modern proprietary software and have regressed back to using text-based EVERYTHING. My home computer is technically Linux based, but you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking that I run Emacs as an OS and that my computer’s mouse is purely decorative. I live in it. I work in it. This whole friggin website is managed through it, and I use it to convert plain-text documents into anything normies would want including word documents all the way to full-on conference presentations. And the best part? If, god forbid, Emacs or any of it components become enshitified, I will always have a copy of my data that I can reliably read with my own naked eyes and move to whatever platform my heart desires. (Fuck you MS OneNote for making it nearly impossible for me to recover all of my PhD and post-doctoral notes despite still having the files.)

I now live through highly opinionated dotfiles of my own creation and it feels so good. Sure I’m essentially reinventing the wheel for myself many of the times, and yes, things do break occasionally, but okaywtvr…in the end I get an immense sense of personal satisfaction from my codebase, and I’m constantly learning something new. My wife says I’m basically “taking off my pants to fart,” but you know what? It’s a pure embodiment of fun and a genuine digital expression of myself that I hope might inspire others to embrace DIY and open-source.

So yeah, with all of that out of the way, welcome to my website! Feel free to explore, and of course…subscribe to my RSS feed!