works of wanderlust

Category: wandering & thinking

  • state of the blog, one: un-curated

    When I relaunched this site back in April I suggested that I would try not to write too many navel gazing posts about the blog itself.  I mean, to be fair, I like reading about how the sausage is made—as it were. I wish a lot more people who maintained personal websites and writing projects were actually interested in the creative process as much as they are interested in click-through optimization and search engine manipulation and all the other topics that seem as much about duping users into reading your drivel as is was about actually creating extensive collections of online expression.

    I probably don’t need to mention that writing this as I am in October 2025 the world is in a period of retracting rights of personal expression.

    I have been consciously moving further and further away from the corporate social networks and continuing to build a slow-but-steady presence here online. To my earlier point, this site was never about click-throughs or search engines or tricking you, the reader, into reading anything you don’t want to read. This is just the manifestation of opinion from one guy here on the Canadian prairies and the things I write about span a hundred different topics—you’re going to find something interesting and you’re probably going to be bored by just as much.

    When I relaunched this site, scraping it together from the remains of about four other niche blogs I was maintaining, while I was trying to find my footing and my rhythm I did stray into writing far too often about the blog itself. So, I declared that I would only drop one of those navel gazing “meta” posts no more than once per week. I’ve held pretty solid to that, and the number has been more like once per month.

    But here’s the sausage-making part: a lot goes on behind the scenes to write the words and collect the photos and too, keep the lights on here. No one would or could afford to have me sit here and recreate this kind of thing for them. It is a kind of work of personal madness that it even exists. My blogs have always been a kind of personal passion project. 

    All of that is to say that I do appreciate readers. I do appreciate clicks and when you find this on search. I have some light stats running and so I have a rough idea that people are visiting and they are reading certain topics. I know that, for example, if I shared more cast iron recipes I could flood this site with traffic. If I posted more hiking tips for the rocky mountains, I would probably build a dedicated user-base. Or, if I complained more about oddball observational neighbourhood gripes the search engine would light me up like a firework. I’m not a performing monkey, tho—so you get whatever I feel like writing about and you can feel free to dig through the archives and look for anything that is more interesting.

    Social media really has trained us to expect an internet built for an audience of one. That’s the simultaneous beauty and danger of the algorithm. When it’s acting nice we call it curation. When it’s isolating us to niche information we call it siloing our perspective.

    This blog is my perspective, but there is no algorithm. I have written about that before—somewhere here—and all to the point that like in yee good ole days, when papers and the evening news showed us everything they could jam into their publication-slash-broadcast allotments, we didn’t live in these curated silos of expectations. We just read everything, whether it was something that made us clap like a trained seal or not. 

    I’m no news outlet, but as I keep writing on this blog and filling it with stuff that interests me (knowing only a fraction of it will interest you) I do so understanding that I have far more in common with traditional media publications than I do with corporate social media feeds. There are (as of right now) about four average-length books worth of writing on this site and not a word of it is curated (or siloed) to you. And I think that’s a good thing.

    Thanks for reading.

  • social games, three

    I spent an hour curating. 

    Look, I’m sorry: If you follow me and I follow back, that’s the powerade of what is supposed to make social media work—but if I open up the feed and literally the only thing you do on there is repost angry memes and incite capital-lettered ranting commentary above links to random articles, I may need to unfollow you.

    I probably just did, actually.

    A fairly famous cartoonist I follow wrote something about his ideal social media feed, and it being free of algorithms and video reels, sorted in a meaningful (read: chronological) way, and a place for good discussion. Or, as he footnoted, he wanted the internet of 2008 back. I agree. Jokingly, sure, but gawd am I sick of whatever these spaces have become. 

    The flood of stupid is inescapable. You’ll notice that this blog, my site, and anything I control may be thought of as a highly managed and ordered space, but unlike the vomiting algorithms of The Socials, mine are purposefully curated to reflect a kind of personal expression on my part. That difference is important. 

    Dropping reshares and drivel into a big churning algorithm whose only job is to grab ahold of your attention and never let go, as is the case on social media platforms these days, is the polar opposite of what I attempt to do here.

    Yeah, to the untrained eye, they look pretty similar. But that similarity stops at a level so shallow that it would make the silver scratch off goop on a lottery ticket look like an atomic blast shield. 

    I curate what I post, I figured, so why shouldn’t I take more care curating what I see? Weed the garden, as it were.

    I mean, I need to spend less time online in these apps. I really do. And I barely spend any time at all in them, so I can only imagine what other more deeply entrenched social media addicts feel from their mainlining the algorithmic feed juice. Curating only does so much for that effort. And in fact, it may be that by curating I give myself more reason to stay on them longer. Sigh. But the hard reality is that I need to curate now so that when my energy levels are lower and more susceptible to the doom-scroll flow of the feed I have already done some of the work to reduce its potency. 

    So last night I unfollowed some of the people who I have incidentally picked up along the way. They will not notice. They don’t engage that way. They don’t comment or reshare or like. They are on there to firehose themselves, and give almost nothing in return.

    I had this rule: the courtesy follow. Had. If you are not a bot, and you seem like a real person posting real things that are not trying to sell me something, I would follow you back. But that rule has bit me in the ass. Angry shit-posters.  The hyper-political. The influencer repost machine. The caps lock granny. The patriotic sledgehammer. You all have a role, sure, but you are overwhelming me and you have created an internet that is dank and sickly. 

    My amendment to the courtesy follow has changed (even if it has not been posted so clearly elsewhere) that I will follow back anyone who is not a bot and who appears to be curating a web more closely resembling the internet of 2008: creativity, discussion, and something leaning in the direction of their own truth.

    I’m not rushing back quite yet, but I am trimming the digital weeds because I know I almost certainly will go back soon.

  • social games, two

    We all start to sound a bit like junkies when we ponder aloud the idea of fleeing the social platforms once and for good, weaning ourselves off our feeds, setting limits and goals and self moderation parameters, or screaming digital curses to the gods of going cold turkey.

    It has been a week. A fucking week of social media garbage.

    Let me define my parameters. I used to vaguely claim that blogs and personal websites and sharing platforms all fell into some common harmonious categorization under the term “social media” and that posting on facebook or twitter or bluesky were just another form of socially participating online. No longer.

    When I write from here on in about The Socials I am strictly referring to the toxic sludge pool of low friction group-text platforms that slurp up our engagement vibes for likes and shares and algorithmically grind it into a type of endless digital slop hose. It may be photo sharing sites like instagram or discussion forums like reddit or hate-text engines like shitter, but those are the targets of my current ire.

    These machines had such potential for good, but humanity it seems had different plans. First came the artists and philosophers, sharing ideas and vibes. Then came the marketers spinning webs of greed and consumption. Next came the bots in their AI legions attempting to con us into clicking and buying and selling our secrets for a hint of fake human contact. Finally have arrived the ideologies, hate filled rhetoric machines set on dividing and destroying the fragile peaces of times through misinformation and threats and raw, unfiltered hate.

    Each time a new platform arrives I dip my toe in the digital river and see if the current is any different than the one I just left.  But people never really change, it seems. Even the most honourable approaches to creating a space of the kind we all seem to yearn is thwarted by sinister agents of chaos hell bent on shaping the world to their dark visions of division and rage. 

    Bluesky was my latest attempt at participation, and yet nine months on my efforts are once again beset by the unavoidable impression that it has become a whirlwind of political rage and a blur of misinformation. Post sweet nothings and you are ignored. Post creative joy and it attracts hoards of malicious bots bent on deception and digital theft. Post opinion and someone will set their heart on vengeance and attempt to destroy your life. Post truth and someone will dispute it with every fibre of their being.

    If there was a kind of metaphorical temperature dial to control all this, the ouija spirits of the internet cranked it up another notch last week upon hearing the echo of a sniper rifle. Orwell warned us of the dangers of crowdsourcing our hate to the masses and of handing off our power to an unchecked state. We did not listen. And in fact if the vibe resonating within the socials is to be analyzed with any confidence democracy is rasping it’s last breaths. The end of meaningful freedoms may not be completely over, but the front line of expunging them from the modern world will be on the feeds of social media.

    I may not be done writing and posting, but I am considering if I am now finally done writing and posting there, or if I am just another junkie who will never truly break free.

  • meta (not) monday and other stuff

    Starting with an aside, I’ll just note that it drove me nuts when the company that makes and runs that dystopian social network—you know the one—decided to call itself meta. Many wager that they stole the term from Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Snow Crash which itself was a fiction-shaped social commentary on the explosive expansion of technology into our lives and his “metaverse” was, at least in my opinion, an analogy for the navel-gazing narcissistic amplifications that would inevitably extrude from every pore of an increasing entrenchment of virtual spaces into human lives. Zuckerbot probably just thought it would be a cool name, so now when anyone uses the word “meta” —which simply and properly in English just means something along the lines of “self-referencing”— one can’t help but seem like they are talking about that perverse social network, and not say, being reflective and talking about one’s own work and platform—which is where I was going with this…

    For years when I blogged I used to routinely use the term “meta Mondays” as an excuse to plant a flag in the ‘state of the blog’ and write about what I was working on in and around it, or more often write down excuses about why I wasn’t writing more or building it bigger and better. Meta Monday. Alliterative and clever and whatever.

    I apologize if you are a reader and were expecting a sudden explosion of new and insightful content about my random musings. I apologize if you have stumbled here from my old urls and are now wondering why those more focused brand-idents are a guy blogging about his weekends and his fitness.  My energies have been focused on other stuff.  Who knows how long that will last. I have put a lot of those energies into a couple project about which I may or may not ever share—professional stuff, ahem, you know how it goes—and when I’m spending six to eight hours at a keyboard doing that stuff, finding time to be expressive and philosophical here is a slipping luxury.

    And those damn social networks, amiright?

    The wasted human potential that has been sunk via billions of human life hours every day into this fuzzy digital existence. Gah!

    I was always a bit of an optimist. 

    Do you know why I started blogging?

    It was the afterglow of the science fiction idealism of the eighties and nineties. Authors would create this abstract setting where virtual spaces were pure and engaged. A place where truth was challenged, sure, but where rational thought and big ideas prevailed. People would write and share and create and build and make incredible things.

    What did we get?

    We got the shitty shadow. The Internet. Influencers selling their souls for clicks, deep fake images and video, AI slop, hate, rage, unfiltered racism, the masses looking at reality but then jabbing their own fingers in their eyes to avoid seeing it.

    If you can’t express your idea in an eight second video clip no one cares. 

    Ninety-nine point nine percent of attention goes to zero point one percent of the voices and creators. We haven’t broken celebrity, we’ve amplified it and commodified it.

    Long form expression is all but dead.

    Why write a post if no is going to read it?

    Why write a novel if an AI is going to steal it?

    Why host a blog if search engines will bury it?

    Why engage in a discussion if the brain at the other end of the connection is unwilling to consider it?

    What I used to hope for was a kind of online world where everyone has a place to write and share and create, at least a little something worth reading, but that was always a kind of long shot idealism—I will admit—and I honestly never even considered that it would go this badly for us online. In the last year or two my hope for a lovely digital future has faded to a kind of dystopia of necessity, of me eventually eluding escape for but a single reason: that ceding even one more byte to the darkness would be a betrayal of my life’s work. The internet is deeply broken for good and all that is left is a commercial platform run for the sole purpose of harvesting as much cash out of the fibres before the whole thing burns to the ground, and worse. 

    How’s that for a not-Monday morning thought?

    I guess what I’m saying is that my optimism is on life support.  Objective reality is apparently broken. The internet is a bully platform. The nerds built it and then the rest of the tribe saw merely another space that could be used to induce hate and pain and hurt—and for every one of us there and ninety-nine of them, and now they are shifting algorithms to amplify the ninety-nine to ninety-nine millions. I am drowning in a sea of digital stupid and I sometimes feel as though I am on the precipice of a post-internet phase of my life.

    And yet, here I am still writing.

  • hobbies defined, or why investing in things you love is not wasting your money

    I keep telling myself I am not a musician. Call it imposter syndrome, but despite having all the music-connected skills that I have, I still just think of it as eclectic side-hobby.

    Here’s the thing tho. 

    I’ve been playing in a real orchestra for the better part of my 40s. (Second violin, in case you didn’t know that about me.) I am literally in a kind-of-band with a chair to sit in and a part  to play and a rehearsal schedule to follow. It’s a real thing.

    And those bona fides extend beyond a bit of bowing too: I read music, I played the alto sax in grade school, can plink out the basics on a piano, own a chanter, used to consider myself something of a penny-whistle enthusiast, and definitely pay a mean recorder. 

    On top of that, I have done some loose digital composition of electronic music, exclusively in software of course (and as will become clear in the next few paragraphs) and never really more than dabbling in vibes and personal entertainment.

    I like music. I make music. I play music. I perform music. I buy music. I am kinda, sorta a musician. Self-doubt be damned. 

    I bring this up now because I have been sporadically poking at product and functional research around hardware synths. About five years ago I found a channel on youtube where this guy would collect, restore and review retro keyboard synths. It’s a weird hobby, really. And yet watching all those videos took me down a rabbit hole of interesting related topics, most of it looping back to the fact that I have been a electronic music fan all the way back to my CD-buying years and have a respectable collection of collected tracks and more. Simply, I like this stuff and found the art of it fascinating. There is no bottom to that rabbit hole, but my five years of bumbling, fumbling research of course had me playing around with software composition on my computer again and ultimately realizing that what I really wanted was something more physical—tanglible, real. The answer to that bit of musical envy, of course, is a hardware synth with lots of buttons to press and knobs to turn and samples to shape, sitting in a dark basement as one does when composing electronic music. I’ve been researching my options to buy one for the better part of a couple years, watching vids and reading reviews and trying to understand the technology with enough expertise to buy one that makes sense for me as a kinda musician diletante.

    Synths tend to look like pianos and can imitate them, but even in their most simplistic beginner formats are all manner of gateways to electronic sound manipulation, creating digitally aucoustic sound patterns, linking them to an input mechanism, looping mechanism, and other sound enveloping technology things. It all outputs as something we all would recognize, from dance to trance to ambient chill to 8-bit game soundtracks.

    The problem is that we already have two pianos in our house. And. And. And! And I hear you folks who know what I’m about to explain rolling your eyes: synths are not pianos, even tho they often look very much the same.  My point here tho is that if were ever to invest a couple hundred bucks into a synth I would need to make it very clear to the other members of our house that no, I was not buying another piano, I was actually buying a synth and it’s almost as much to explain to someone who ask why are you buying those new pants when you already have a toothbrush at home? You get it or you don’t. 

    The other (not so minor) problem is that I am currently between incomes. I hope to be gainfully employed again by the end of the summer if all goes well, but these things are couched in vast levels of uncontrollable uncertainty that have almost zero correlation to the effort involved. If I had a regular income a new synth wouldn’t even register as a purchase: it’s a couple tanks of gas or a week of groceries, and even jobless we are just fine financially thank you very much anyways. Yeah, it’s a bit more money than splurging on a new video game, but only marginally more—and definitely a better investment. 

    (Look at me talking myself into this.)

    And yet, after multiple years of research on synths I find myself in a hot spot of a dilemma: I have pretty much decided on the particular synth I want to buy—eventually or sooner—and yes I do have money set aside for mad irrational purchases, and oh it turns out its on sale this week even as speculation about store stock repleshiment dwindles on the verge of tariff-related price increases and—well— you might even recall that I am kind of sort of actually a musician and it’s would be a fun new instrument to play around with, no?  

    I’m going to go into the store to look at it later this morning. And it would be something like an impulse buy, but too, one that I have quietly researched and pondered for at least the last two years. Still a guilty pleasure. A musical guilty pleasure. 

    So there’s the rub.

    People who define themselves as things should invest in those things, right?

    I am an artist, so I buy paint and paper and take classes.

    I am a writer, so I have lovely keyboards and document management skills.

    I am a musician, so I play music and explore sound.

    We each and all of us define ourselves by a such a finite list of attributes in our life. My relatives camp and so they buy expensive RVs, htings to stock them with and rent lots at the lake.  I have friends who buy and maintain expensive sports cars. I have other friends who travel the world, cost be damned, because they are enthusiasts for such things. I have friends who pay too much for tickets to sports games or concerts because those things are how they define themselves to themselves and to the universe. These are not all things I would buy, but who would begrudge any of them for indulging in their hobbies and shaping their lives around non-functional investments of time and money? 

    We work, or don’t, and we can too easily live our lives in a purely functional way. And even those of us who nary can afford to do so sometimes allocate money that would best be spent on other things, smarter more functional purchases, to these pieces of equipment or supply or training or content that help us better define ourselves as something less purely functional and bound to sheer survival: these things that define what we call our hobbies or interests, perhaps even our humanity.

    And those are the things that let us explain to the world that we are more than even what we sometimes believe to be true ourselves.