Well, I’m finally on the verge of getting four whole blog posts ahead [well, I was close… this week’s cleaning has crashed into my exhaustion, so I’ve done little beyond making my apartment nice and clean so far]. I’ve managed to slowly build up a three-post buffer (this post is maintaining that, not building on it, but I’ve got a topic and everything picked out for the next one and enough time to get it done today [this was incorrect]), but I’ve got a bit of a mix-up coming what with US Thanksgiving and visiting with my sister and our sibling. Which means this is the last post for this week since I’ll be taking tomorrow and Friday off to spend time with my family and not lose the buffer I’ve been painstakingly building these last few weeks. It’s been a real busy week, as I’m writing this, so I haven’t been able to make much progress on the goals I’ve set out for myself in last week’s post. I have spent some time doing research for where to host my blog and I expect that, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have most of that set up or at least figured out. I’ve only got a couple more weeks until my current plan on WordPress .com expires and I’m sticking by my decision to not given them any more of my money, even if my mind has been wavering. It’s not easy to go to self-hosting and I’m already so tired, so burned out, and so low on energy to do anything at all, so making the process of blogging any more difficult or complicated than it already is might just leave me unable to keep up with it’s demands. I mean, right now, I’m barely able to balance work and blogging on top of getting some amount of necessary rest in my evenings, so more steps aren’t going to make it any easier…

Still, since I’ll be using the WordPress .org software, I should be alright. There’s tons of guides out there and I know a few people from my Cohost days that made this change already, so I have plenty of people I can ask for assistance or information if I need it. I probably won’t need to, though. I am a fairly proficient user of the internet and most software since that is literally part of my day-job. I mean, I thought that same thing about putting my computer together back in July and struggled with that, but I have a bit more time to spare for all this stuff this time around, so I should be able to avoid getting super locked-in and hyper-fixated. Especially because I won’t need to shut down and dismantle my current blog in order to set up the new one like I had to do with my computer. Nor am I counting on getting my blog moved around in order to have fun this weekend, like I was with my computer, so I can easily put the project aside for a day or two if I need to. Plenty of reasons these two projects are nothing alike. And! If I wind up needing to drive to Chicago in order to make this happen, I’ll be going there anyway for Thanksgiving with the two members of my biological family that I’m still in contact with! No need to go super far out of my way, this time around.

I’ve thought about going the “pay someone to make it happen” route from the get-go this time around. I’ve got the money for it, thanks to my overtime, and it should be a simple enough process that any decent web developer or whatever could make it happen. Or even walk me through it. I just don’t know anyone who does that kind of work, nor do I trust the incredibly SEO-poisoned search results I’ve gotten the few times I tried looking someone up. It feels increasingly fraught to find anything that has to do with the internet when you’re actually on the internet. So much of the LLM generated trash is about setting up websites and there’s so many get-rich-quick scammers or hacks out there that will take your money, deliver the bare-minimum (if they do anything at all), and then disappear entirely. Every time I think I’ve found something, I find enough odd textual errors to convince me that, even if there is a real person behind this who isn’t using an LLM to do their work for them, I probably shouldn’t trust them with my text-heavy blog/life’s work (which this kinda is, as far as my writing goes, since I’ve been doing this so consistently for the past three and a quarter years now…). This has always been the one sort of conspicuous gap in my social connections. I know people who can do just about everything except build, maintain, and host websites. You want a blacksmith? I know a person. Chemist? Realtor? Doctor? Hearse driver? Horse breeder? I’ve got you covered. But absolutely nothing for websites. Hell, I probably know as much as anyone I know does about building and maintaining websites, just from my work maintaining and configuring my own.

I have no idea if I’ve already moved my blog [I haven’t]. I have no idea where you’re reading this or how you found out about it [I still do]. That’s the problem writing these ahead of time. For all I know right now, you’re reading something else and this “extra” post got tossed into a day later in the week so I could make room for the “welcome to my blog’s new home at the exact same web address but a very different host!” post I’m sure I’m going to wind up doing once the move has been made. I’m going to try to make the move happen over a weekend so it won’t interrupt my usual posting schedule, but we’ll see how it goes. I need to actually get SOME rest this week, after all. If you’re reading this outside of the last week of November 2024, you’ll know the move happened because I’ll be posting poetry and fiction again instead of just non-fiction, reviews, and complaints about my life like I’ve been posting ever since Automattic decided to try to steal everyone’s data without them noticing. This is probably the longest I’ve ever gone without posting poetry or fiction to my blog… Nine whole months. I can feel the desperate ache to post fiction welling up within me. I need to share my creative expressions! It’s no surprise that I’ve started two whole Dungeons and Dragons campaigns since this happened. I needed some outlet for my creativity since I didn’t want to post any more of that to a website that was willing to steal its users’ data so nefariously. Hell, if they hadn’t been caught red-handed by 404media, who knows how long it would have gone on before anyone had noticed… Or before I’d noticed that other people had noticed. It’s chilling to think about and the exact reason I’m making this move even after the setting was put in to NOT share your work. I’m not going to give any more money to company that is willing to screw over its users by creating a setting that is on by default. Fuck that noise.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about all this once the move has happened, but for now I’m going to end it here and hope that I’ve had an easy week of cleaning and website changing up to this point. I really need for things to go well or simply or even just easily for once. I’m so damn tired.