Today, after at least three years of waffling I finally left the Quora community after more than a decade. I tried to find a reason to stay, and even took a break to think about it. In the end, I decided to delete my account outright.

I’d long struggled with using the service due to a lack of focus by the team behind it not addressing basic functions of the service. The home feed, search, a2a, and personal blogs or “spaces” had long languished in favor of financial expediency.

First its was sponsored low quality content. Then it was ads. Then they slowly took away the ability to to moderate writing requests. Now, finally the last straw: Quora+. Basically giving users the ability to lock their content behind a paywall. Half of my feed was unreadable because of this. Simply put the content on Quora is not of high enough value to pay to read it.

For years my online social footprint has been shrinking. I’m now down to Dreamwidth and Mastodon. I post here in fits and starts, but I really like the values of the team here. I use Mastodon pretty much daily.

Hopefully as I become less distracted by services with poor values I’ll have the capacity to contribute more here.

The weather has been mostly good for three weeks now and I find myself slowly being roused after a year of falling inward. Three significant life road signs came and went with little fanfare as I tried to navigate a new world rife with adversity. I do not believe it is possible to go back, that I will never get back to what was before. Instead, a new normal is setting in that I must find a way to preserver through.

To gauge how powerful an experience these last twelve months have been I would like to highlight those road signs that came and went. This time last year I turned forty, normally this is seen as milestone to midlife. A walking through a door into greater stability after many lessons learned in youth. For me, my 40th birthday rang out like a death knell for what was before. My birthday was a joyous time of friends, loved ones, and preferred activities. It seems like it occurred a lifetime ago. I have a hard time even picturing the person I was then.

Through it all, my wife was with me as we forged ahead as best we could. In the depths of the first lock-downs last summer we passed the road sign that was our one year anniversary of marriage. It was impossible to celebrate in any kind of real way, but we did what we could. She looks forward to our second anniversary this coming summer as a sort of do-over. I wish I could marshal the hope and positivity she still has, but its just not in me after hoping for a year that some kind of reprieve was in sight. So far no reprieve has come over the horizon and I am all out of hope at this point.

In spite of all the struggles, I achieved my white whale of goals last year: home ownership. I have spent decades trying to get my savings and credit in order enough to have something I have never truly had, a home. My wife and I had been window shopping for a couple years, but with the difficulties over this last year it took on greater importance. The extra room and increased neighborhood quiet has been a not so insignificant asset during these trying times. I am well south of "ok" from a mental health perspective, but I parish the thought of what the outcome would have been if I was still in our old rental through this.

But even this hard fought victory was dashed and replaced with more adversity. A week before we moved, my wife found a lump. From that point through now, cancer has been with our home. My wife has been brave and strong through it all. For me, it has been a white knuckle affair. I have been just wandering through the daily motions of life for months now. I've stopped reading, enjoying music or comedy, and this is the most I have written in months. Even the desire to settle my new space has been fleeting at best. Our family wants to make plans; I just want to hide away and cry.

But, today I wrote this post and I put a book in my work bag. I have started wearing my fitness tracker again and the reminders to move do not feel like screams of judgement that I cannot abide any longer. These are small signs, like the first tulip pushing through the mostly frozen ground point to the fact that something better is going to happen. It is not hope per say, but a changing of the season, a whisper that I might be stronger than I feel.

After waffling for a couple years I have decided to leave Quora altogether. Today I posted the announcement and began purging content of mine that was kind of dead wood. I hope to have every post with less than ten upvotes deleted within the next month, glean what I can learn from the rest, and be ready to hit the big "delete account" button by the 40th Birthday in March. I'll get more into the "why" in future posts, but I just felt it important to start posting here again.

Come hell or high water, 2020 will be the triumphant return of longer form writing.

It is a big, warm cup of tea kind of day.

Vermont finally has a Target and it is wonderful

neat small gauge train in Portland, ME

Got back yesterday from Otis. Sunday was Gramp's 91st birthday. He told Chrissy he didn't want to go to the fair for the first time ever that I am aware with the exceptions of years he was too sick to go. Instead we had a birthday picnic for him at the house and he seemed pretty overwhelmed the whole afternoon. About a dozen relatives shows beyond Chrissy, Joe, and I. Uncle Ernie looked a lot better than the last time I saw him.

On Monday he seemed to perk up a bit when it was just he and I. We did some cleaning in his closet, mostly just getting rid of obvious junk so he has room to move around. I pushed and was successful in getting him to let me take down the old ramp on the back steps. It was really unsafe and I am glad he can't walk on it anymore. Did some research today and I think I found a way to get him a new ramp made of metal for free.

Visited Gram on the way out of town, the headstone is finally up. I was pretty upset that it took so long, but it looks very nice. I could have lived without Gramp and Joe's names already being on it, but I wasn't consulted. I didn't stay long, its all still really fresh, but it is helpful to go there I think.

While I was down there I started yet another rebuild of my website, this will be the third in the last year. My html and css is just so rusty, but this new version looks much better. I stopped trying to do fancy shit and just did the most stripped down page I could think of. Hopefully I can maintain it.

Woke with the sun today and did a bunch of the things I have wanted to do. Even made it through work unscathed. Now I find myself looking forward to tomorrow.

Just chopping away. Her is hoping.

I was sitting at my desk today and took stock of all the projects I have on my plate and I am really looking forward to some of the things coming in the next few months.

I have been fiddling around with a G3 PowerBook I got for a song late last year and have finally settled on its role to my tech ecosystem. Up until now I have only really used it for more longer form journaling, the kind of stuff that is just for me. I plan to keep that up, but a great, and obvious use is for old school gaming. Many of my favorite games are total abandonware at this point and I am looking forward to installing them from the Mac Garden soon.

I have a couple vintage digital cameras now, a Quicktake, and a Mavica. Both should be compatible with my PowerBook and will produce the lower rez images I would prefer for my Neocities website that has been long neglected.

I need to fix my Linux partition on my Thinkpad. Right now the only solidly working computer I have is this Acer Iconia Tab with a custom Ubuntu install on it. It works well...but I never intended it to be my only system, just a smaller one that is easy to pack.

Ebay needs to become a priority in the near term too, a bunch of the tech I have needs new homes. Indeed, some of the things I have were bought specifically to resell, only to languish on my shelf.

After struggling to find options I have decided to soft retire my personal smartphone. In its place I bought the new Nokia 3310 feature phone and it will become my primary phone. I plan to make sure the sim card can be swapped so I can use it with my smartphone for travel, but most of the time my phone will be far more basic.

Last month I went back on anti-depressants for the first time in more than 15 years. Its been more than a month now and I can say life has gotten more manageable. I am really glad I went to the doctor when I did though, I can't even imagine how the last couple weeks would have gone without that visit.

You see, I lost my grandmother a couple weeks ago.It was sudden and quick. In a way it was likely what she would have wanted. She had been in the nursing home for some time and was very unhappy. She never wanted to be in such a place. My last visit with her was really good and I have been mentally preparing for it for sometime now.

Still, she was essential to raising me and was one of the most important people in my life. It will be hard to carry on, but I will manage because that is what she would have wanted. Iam proud to have known her and have been loved by her. It has left me with this feeling that I need to make my own mark, though I don't know what that means exactly.