A New Beginning

So here it is, another blog.

I have been a blogger for more than half my life. I love writing and I went though a lot of platforms that ever existed: Blogger, LifeJournal, Tumblr, Wordpress, Svbtle, Medium and Ghost. As a tech person I had this urge to just keep trying out the newest and the latest, which unfortunately meant more time maintaining than writing, to the point that none of my old blogs are currently active at this moment due to lack of maintenance and activity.

The last one I had was a Ghost-based blog that I hosted on a virtual machine, but I had to close it a few years back as I had no income during that time and spending lots of money running a virtual machine instance to host my personal blog seemed excessive. I found Ghost really good and wished I could continue using it but it just wasn't possible at that time.

Thankfully, I have found Pikapods, an open source app hosting provider who lets me host a Ghost blog for around $2/month with good performance — not an ad, just an endorsement — and so here we are. Unfortunately, I didn't back up all the themes and things that I wrote back then, so we're starting totally fresh here and that has been my intention to do so.

To everyone who's lost someone they love
Long before it was their time
You feel like the days you had were not enough
When you said goodbye

Now, why did I decide to go through the trouble of starting another blog?

Over the past few years, I've lost several friends. All of them passed away when they were 39, the first one around five years ago. It is said that time heals all wounds, but time also makes the heart grow fonder. On hard days, I wish I could talk with them again, listen to their wisdom and words of advice. And sometimes, all I can do was to replay their words in my memory or just look back upon what they used to say on Twitter or Discord.

I will be hitting 40 this year, and these losses makes me think about my own mortality, especially considering my blood cancer. I have so much thought that I need to put into words and even though I don't know if anyone would need or want to read these after I'm gone, the future me might one day want to look back upon what present me wrote and think about how much the world and myself have changed since then. I know that the world and myself have changed so much when I look back at the past 5, 10 and 20 years.

Other than contemplations and life stuff, I would also try to write about games and movies that interest me. In the past I used to have multiple blogs with one specific topic per blog, but for now I think I will put all of them together in this blog and separate them with tags due to time and financial constraints. I'll see how that works down the road but hopefully it won't be difficult to maintain and navigate.

I'm still considering whether to put in a Disqus comment feature, but since I will most probably only share this blog in several Discord servers that I'm around, you can just reach me on Discord. I'll see if my future posts in the games or movies category warrants a comment feature.

If you're reading this far, welcome and thank you for going along with me on this journey. Really appreciate having you here as I try to be open and vulnerable once again 👋