Magazines, Blogs, And Being Editor

What Do I Actually Do? 

I've been asking myself what I actually do. For a start:- 

I spent most of my life wanting to be a mad scientist or inventor or at least involved with STEAM of some sort. (STEAM stands for 'Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math.') And I have, sort of. I started in electronics and electrical right from primary school, mixed with a bit of market gardening, and hey - that wasn't a bad collection of experience before my 15th birthday. 

And then I hand built myself a computer way before they were cool (never actually got it to do more than flash the front panel lights in cool patterns because - well, because that's all those early computers had, front panel lights and piano key paddle looking switches, no keyboards and monitors for me) and bought a succession of early 'personal' computers as they were known then. 

As soon as "IBM Clone PCs" (IBM Clone Personal Computers, yep) came along I got one, got a BBS (Bulletin Board System) going on it - and started writing a load of text files online. Kind of like paleolithic blogging. And then the Internet came along and the pages I wrote then were arguably blog posts despite writing them in Notepad and in HTML format, and then blog software came along - and then online blog software came along. 

Blog posts are of course the ultimate DILLIGAF freestyle writing/diarising vehicle that aren't white or grey papers, aren't theses, instruction manuals, fiction, religious tomes, specification sheets, essays, nor newspaper or magazine articles.

Oh yeah - I also diversified into a year of computer typesetting for a small country newspaper, editing for the newspaper, and writing for it as well, so I got the basics of writing reportage and newspaper articles at grassroots level. 

But it's left me with a permanent question mark - what do I actually do? Are my articles, articles? Blog posts? What the actual heck is a "blog post?" 

The Dilemma

It's a conundrum alright. When I started blogging I was more opinionated and less insightful, because I was in my early 30s. Oh - I had insights too, I was just black and white about how I presented them - "Here's a thing I just realised, and  I say it's the only solution so - accept it. YW. Or else." I still had all these deep realisations but I tended to reject any other ways of seeing a matter.

There are holes in my record - which I realised just now stretch all the way back to the early 80s - OMG I AM OLD! 🙀😿 - because of special events in my life:

Apparently From Pre-History:

There was the Great Rain of '85 that kindly washed a whole box (unfortunately a cardboard box *sigh*) of diskettes and took with it three unfinished novellas, dozens of entries that were my - I guess blog posts as they were short discussion on stuff happening in the 80s - hipsteresque blog posts, and a load of actual diary entries. 

That was followed by The First Disk Hard Drive Crash just a few years later that wiped out my first BBS files directory, and which unfortunately were local only so not sent out onto the filebone where they'd have at least lived on and still been on multiple BBSs for me to recover.

It was going to be over ten years to The Other HDD Crash because I learned my lesson and started backing up, initially to a hellaciously expensive tape drive that was itself prone to weird issues, then to a ZIP drive when the tape drive started becoming too unreliable, and finally when the ZIP drive developed the Death Click I bit the bullet, borrowed a mate's ZIP drive to read my disks and store them to an equally expensive external HDD caddy, erased my ZIPs and gave them to said mate as a thank you for letting me use the drive for a week.

But TOHDDC did of course come. Quite literally, when I was backing stuff up to it and the cat reached up to snag the cable and it quite literally hit a hard floor from a metre up while still spinning flat out. 

So not much remains from that era either. . .

Pre-Modern History:

From the mid 90s I was already using the Internet to put my ramblings so from there on most things (sort of) got preserved. I say sort of because there are always flame wars, drunkposting, and stuff I ended up not liking. And a few OhNoSecond events... (yep, literal times I formatted a HDD or USB memory and the moment my finger had hit the Enter key, that split second before I realised it contained the only copies of a dozen posts I still hadn't posted...)

But TEdALOG Lite II: Don't Touch That Dial!!! (Which became just TEdALOG Lite II following a rejig of the blog) stands as the first of what I'd call "real blogs" in that they ran in online blog servers not some piece of software you had to nurse and nurture on your PC and that then posted a suite of pages each time you added a new entry or edited an old one, overwriting whatever was online and (in my case) costing as significant chunk of bandwidth and time each time.

TEdALOG Lite II was soon joined by TEdAMENU Tuckertime because food, and TEdADYNE Systems because I was getting interested in the ethical and moral issues surrounding cyborging, AI, and all manner of what not long after became mainstream issues like job losses to automation. 

These all languished for a few years when I was suffering health issues and then came back sporadically as I adjusted to a different life halfway across Australia and where I now still am, but happier than I've ever been, and now with a bit of a mission to get waste, sustainability, recycling, and food politics etc up as talking points and conversations.

And Now:

I've decided that I don't have a 'house style' to conform to, I don't have any one topic that's nearer and dearer to my heart than any other in my chosen range of subjects, and I write in a mix of tenses and POVs that people've found hard to follow at times.

My counsellor tells me that humans are meant to tackle projects serially with rest breaks in between, but that our 'always on' lifestyles are robbing us of the pauses we should take in each day. We're living in large metropolises and urbanisations where we should be in smaller villages or communes or at most no larger than small towns.

And because I'm always on, I guess my articles show it. But I do try. I take time for gardening and cooking meals slowly and with care, and we always take a break after a meal. And my writing also (I hope) shows that facet of life as well . . .

I've decided I write Self Help DIY Communal Shared Instructables with diversions and sidetracks. And I can only hope you like that and want more of it. There are shreds in there among all the verbiage, I promise. Oh and sometimes I write fiction pieces but you'll know those because they're generally a bit - off the wall/chain/brain. . .

I'd welcome a balance to my style on the various blogs and on the various topics, so if you feel you'd like to write here, please contact me. I'll tell you how in a minute. If you'd like to be part of what I hope becomes a movement, a swell of peaceful activism, contact me. 

Every person you share one of my articles with, becomes one more person who'll be inclined to raise their voice for some sanity, less waste, more sustainability. And now how you can find my other current articles, how you can become a part of it (hint: you already are, thank you for reading this article) and how you can contact me

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