About

Prelude

Question: Why the fuck does a world need another blog?

Answer: It doesn’t.

Then why?

I can go into some philosophical musings about this, but the answer comes down to I’m doing this for myself. There are many factors involved, and what follows is a free form thought dump at midnight on a Thursday when I’m desperately behind with things at work. Here goes

Personal Journal

About 10 years ago I had a catastrophic head injury. Coma, brain surgery, the whole lot. This injury was self inflicted - I got drunk, stoned and went long boarding down a hill. I’d never skated before. As a result, I had to learn to read and write again… although it was more like I had to “remember” how to do it. Ever since then and the many years of latent side effects I’ve had a crushing thought that lives permanently rent free in my head, always whispering with its wicked little tongue, saying:

Hey you, you dopey little cunt; one day stupid the choice you made 10 years ago is going to cause you to lose your mental faculties. Suck shit fuckwit.

Some may think this to be facetious, but this is a genuine and permanent part of my psyche and defines a lot of who I am. Anecdotally, I have terrible memory - I can’t remember if I had terrible memory before the accident which is meta to the core.

As a result of this permanent reminder of my own mortality, I want to use this to document my own experiences. We are lucky to live in an age where we can capture our experiences not just by words, but by image and sound as well. As such, I take this as personal responsibility to capture my life for me. Either it serves as a chronicle of my journey to reminisce upon, or if my mind fades then maybe it can remind me, if only briefly, of whom I was.

My Own Ego

I used to be an avid reader. I had consumed the entire Encyclopedia Britannica before primary school. Throughout childhood I was always told that I was an amazing writer, and I assume that the mental acuity I got from reading is what propelled me so far forward… or teachers were appeasing me, who knows. Regardless, I haven’t read for a long, long time, but I still cling to this self aggrandising idea of being some undiscovered Hunter S. Thompson type person.

On top of this, the older I get the more I listen to the wisdom of the elders; who almost unanimously say that writing is the epitome of human intellectual flowering. I don’t have an opinion on this because I don’t feel myself sufficiently enough a “writer” to have an opinion - however in this very brain dump as I’m writing this I find myself scrolling up to check my topic, making sure that what I opened with I’m closing etc.

If I still want to consider myself a good writer, well how about I fucking write and prove it.

Creativity

I’m a professional computer toucher, and I’ve said for a long, long time that people massively underestimate the creative power that goes into building and designing things. I also consider myself a somewhat decent computer toucher, and my career has been in building business systems. At 34.5y/o this no longer interests me as it once did - after decade or more of computer touching I want to do something else, orthogonal to them .

I have and idea that podcasts and long form interviews were the best thing to happen to media since news TV. I think long form discussions and interviews really lets the parties dig into each other and have a free flowing discussion, but also the lack of structure ends up being detrimental for education as too many points are often raised.

As such, I feel like we are currently in the golden era of podcasts and it has started to “run its course”. My reference points for this are nebulous to be considered little more than an opinion, but I personally see the next big revolution being “interactive information”. I think long form interviews lets people be informed but from a nuanced but single point of reference, whereas I think the real magic will be to let people inform themselves. And I think the way we do that is we let information be interactive. My skills let me do this.

How this relates to this blog I don’t have a clear sense of. I have some abstract idea of being “creative” across all fields, but I’m not even sure I hold this statement concretely. I can best sum up this position with 🤷‍♂‍, but I have already moved on other fronts to do this.

A Journey

This blog, and its name, was originally intended to be a journal of me buying a boat and leaning to sail. I decided in late 2021 that I was going to sail around the world. This blog will still entail that, but after traveling for the last 6 months I’ve learned that to make such big life altering decisions you really need to alter many parts of your life.

What this means in practice is that I want to document not only the physical journey of “hurr durr he went to a place”, but also the personal journey of changing lifestyle, setting goals (which I’ve always been terrible at, including regularly updating this blog) and recording concretely how things change with time. I’ve already changed a few major things about the way I live, and I’ll be writing these down soon.

Closing Thoughts

The above is an unedited, single pass mea culpa type thing. Make of it what you will. Lets see what happens.

wtf is with this weird FAQ you emo fuck?

I wrote this “About” roughly 7 weeks after I started this blog. As mentioned above; I had a clear intention of using this as a “journey” blog whilst I tried to buy a boat and learn to sail, but I have done nothing to advance that agenda. Instead I documented my travels across Europe and now South America, and this has now organically grown into something different. Its still the same pig, just with slightly different lipstick.

What has happened by writing this About though is that I now have a very clear focus. There is something to be said about writing down your goals… if only I’d heard this before 🙄

Some of your articles are dated months before you claim this blog started you fraud?!

Yes, the article dates wont make sense for early posts regarding the age of this blog. A lot of the content like photos I took but created the articles many months later, and I’ve chosen to chronologically date when things happened, not when I actually wrote the thing.

I am endeavouring to not let this happen again - information needs to be timely and I need to develop the discipline to do this.