Shell Out

Where to begin!?

It’s been so long, but I don’t think of this site as over. As difficult as I find it, or as uninspired as I am, I can’t bring myself to call this a failed experiment and give up on it – the intention is always to return here again.

As always, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Or the existant. I find myself believing that I can hold off writing while I build a new site theme, or switch from Hugo, or create something from scratch that meets all my needs.

So this is a new post, on my old theme, on clunky Hugo, manually uploaded like it has been for years, and I’m going to try to keep writing even when I would rather do it in another way.

“So what brings me back?” – I don’t hear you ask – and I answer: “nothing in particular”.

I feel lonely I guess. And not for lack of friends or company IRL, but because I sorta impulsively “noped out” of social media completely in a way I’ve never done before and lost a bunch of connections I value way more than I even realised I did.

Mastodon and aus.social were my homes for a while and I have to stress it wasn’t anyone or anything there that killed it for me. I was in a fragile state of mind when I left and I just wasn’t coping with my own self-imposed idea of what I wanted to be in that space. I’m back on elsewhere now, just to keep up with the tiny number of people I truly miss, but if you want to reach out, reach out here from now on.

I’m giving myself a theme this year: “out of my shell”, and in short I mean to push a little outwards to some of the goals I’ve put on hold or felt I was too unskilled to try. I have felt myself becoming more insular over the last three years and it’s left me feeling powerless, and helpless. So I’m not making grand sweeping goals, but I am publishing a new post for the first time in over a year1.

I do miss interacting with people, so if you see this post out there in the rss æther please drop me an email if you can be bothered2, or one day I might have a more public social media account you can say hello to. One reason I want to revamp my site is to get comments or post-pingbacks working like the good old days so I can use this as my outlet and still hear back from people.

I hope your holiday and new year have been joyful and relaxing and I hope to hear from you as I hope you’ll hear more from me this year!


  1. You can get this years xmas playlist that doesn’t suck on soundcloud if you care you listen to it in Jan. 

  2. josh @ this.domain.au