Welcome to the Fediverse

December 16 of 31 December-ish posts

I think it’s fair to say that for anyone who has been online this year, 2022 has revealed itself as another parade of madness in the growing poli-cultural mishmash that we call modern society.

I’ve decided to take a year long break from corporate social media for my forty-sixth year on this planet. Understanding that (a) blogs are social media and (b) I write a blog, it becomes obvious pretty quick to most readers that I’m not taking a break from ALL social, just the big, morally-terrible ones.

Y’know. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit.

I was active on all of them before and into most of 2022, but then…

Describe your 2022 in politics, culture, and the universe?

This is supposed to be a blog about uncomplicated things, right?

Last year I wrote on this topic about my massively inconsequential place in the universe and how that shaped most of my purpose-seeking mentality in 2021.

This year, here I am again ranting about social media.

Tho, I be ranting because it’s worth being ranty about.

And the cray-cray for the nay-slay, as my teen daughter would put it, has me thinking more and more about how I can use this space over the next year to focus in on the stuff that brings joy and meaning to my days, and not focus on the absurdity of politics, culture, and the universe.

To that end, I’ve been dabbling in other ways to connect with people out there in that universe through platforms that are not owned and operated by lunatic billionaires. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what the content I put here is going to look like in 2023.

I may have started all this to write about running and cooking, but those are foundation stones for a life that has a lot of interesting stories to tell… I think so, anyhow.

While I should have spent the last ten days or so doing what I promised, which was, y’know, reflective writing and posting here, I’ve actually spent that little bit of free time doing something a bit more promising. I’ve written some software, I’ve built some networks, and I’ve drafted a script for a weekly comic strip that I’ll be launching here in 2023.

(I even have two weeks off work, starting tonight, to start drawing!)

I’ve also plugged this blog itself into that great big interconnected not-twitter network called the fediverse, so you should be able to search for @bardo on your favourite platform, for example, Mastodon, and you’ll get updates from me right there in your feed.

Politics and culture might be crazy right now, but I think my newly-remeasured reaction has been to start adding my less-crazy contributions to the mix, to attempt to balance things as much as I can help do that.

A million rational voices whispering wonders about the amazing universe in which we live might just drown out the thousands screaming madness.