Greg Pak Weblog

Seemed like this was the right place to share the news that Earthlink is down. Repeat, Earthlink is down.

You're welcome, six to ten fellow Gen-X dorks.

Just a little reminder to self that posting angry statements on social media about the terrible things that terrible people are doing often generates a lot of other angry statements but not much in the way of politically effective action.

I've always tried to prioritize posting actual factual action items (call your reps! donate to this org! go to this event! help this community group!), but sometimes I just... get mad! And post about stuff that made me mad! And people post mad stuff in response! Sometimes getting mad at each other in the replies! And sometimes that's a lot of energy spent on... not much but being mad?

Anyway. Lots to be mad about. Good for me to keep thinking about how to channel that into effective action instead of reactive ranting.

One good thing I did this morning while angry: updated my gregpak.link old school directory page with a bunch more helpful links for this terrible year. Please feel free to check it out!

Given the continuing collapse of social media, I finally deleted Instagram and Twitter over the past few days. Felt great! Also deleted Spoutible, Pinterest, Spore, Project Mushroom, Grainery, Vero, Artfol, and MySpace. Yes, MySpace was still kicking around. Now it's not!

The immediate impulse was to disassociate myself from services controlled by far right ideologues. But I got into a kind of Marie Kondo vibe and started junking anything that I wasn't using and didn't need. It's a mind-clearing exercise that frees up psychic space to focus on more important things. And it's good digital security - I now have a dozen or so fewer places that could leak my data.

I've kept Bluesky and Mastodon and I'm testing out Pixelfed, Cara, and Pillowfort to see if any of 'em can step up as an Instagram substitute. Feels manageable and makes sense. So good for me!

But then I got a little wild tonight and set up a second Bluesky account for just work-related posts -- so folks who just want to find out about my comics, books, films, and photography have a place to go. I don't really know how necessary it is and it's a little confusing even to me. But I had fun setting up the new account with my gregpak.com work website as the handle -- gregpak.net is my everything Bluesky account and my personal/political blog.

The big thing I've been aiming for with this digital cleanup kick has been simplicity and clarity. Is this part of that? I don't know. It was fun to get it set up tonight, and I'm billing it as a straight up experiment, and if it feels too weird after a week or so I can always delete it. We'll see!

Sending all the best to everyone who's struggling with it. It's a lot!

I was talking about making barebones websites on Bluesky and a cool person recommended Bearblog.dev, and here we are.

I had been updating the "blog" associated with gregpak.nexus entirely through handcoding, which was fun and goofy and satisfying. But Bearblog obviously makes blogging simpler and easier. I'm curious to see if this means I'm more or less interested in updating the blog here. There was something hugely charming about handcoding everything that encouraged really short updates, which I liked. But maybe this is good, too?

I'm still figuring out what the point of this blog should be. I have my business site at gregpak.com which is built like a blog and I have my personal/political site at gregpak.net. That really should cover it, ha ha. But maybe this becomes my goofball place where I post whatever 'cause it's connected to my goofball gregpak.nexus site.

Time will tell! Thanks for playing along!