Introducing the Untechnical Blog
One quote from Nadia that's been feeling true for me is this:
We tend to assume that people use pseudonyms or alts for privacy reasons. But alts aren’t always about hiding who you are, but rather keeping your ideas separate from some root identity (ex. one’s legal name), so that you can still remember who you are when the ideas aren’t riding you.
One consequence of having a site at firstname lastname dot com that's titled First Name Last Name, is that you can accidentally fence yourself into a "brand."
When someone's first introduction to me is firstname lastname dot com and all they see are systems posts, I start to feel like I am my systems posts, like the ideas show up to the conversation before I do. And my conversation partner may feel like they're constrained to only talking about systems with me, like that's all I can and want to talk about.
You know how some people have that one topic they'll corner you about at a party if you give them an opening? You'd think systems programming is that for me. It was, at one point, but other things have quietly taken its place.
Say you're opening a website. You purchase a good ol' brick-and-mortar fixer-upper, and you hang your name on top: First Name Last Name's Store.
A store for what? What're you selling? You have no idea, you're not really selling anything in particular, you're just cooking stuff and putting it at the window when you feel like it, once every six months, once every blue moon, once-every-you-feel-like-it.
You cook a pâtisserie, then you cook another pâtisserie, you've got delicate petit fours and tarts au citron, and your storefront's starting to smell real nice...
and all of a sudden, you put kimchi on the window.
It feels wrong. Why does it feel wrong?
(And yes, before you say it, the images are AI-generated with Nano Banana. Good eye! But that's not why it feels wrong.)
You didn't intend for your store to be a bakery. You just happened to bake treats after treats after treats, and now you, by definition, have a "bakery."
Kimchi feels wrong to put on a storefront that's so delicately stacked with baked treats, even though you like kimchi, even though you neither christened nor intended for your store to be a bakery.
...what's wrong with kimchi?
As silly as it sounds, I've been feeling fenced into this "brand." That because I posted technical things on this site, I should continue posting technical things, and whatever's lacking in technical-sounding-noises by some bar of technical-noisiness shall be punted to the abyss, locked in the backroom to ferment.
Well, recently, I've been letting a lot of topics ferment, the kimchi that's not bad but also not what you'd see in a bakery. The backroom's starting to smell, and I better do something about this smell.
I didn't intend this blog to be exclusively about tech. When I started writing this blog, it was genuinely whatever came to mind, whenever I felt like it. You remember that feeling when you learn something new, that moment of "Aha! I want to get this on paper while I'm still a person who knows how to explain it with this level of clarity?"
That AIWTGTOPWISAPWKHTEIWTLOC?
That pulse of AIWTGTOPWISAPWKHTEIWTLOC was the metronome by which my publishing schedule ran, and the area that I happened to get these "aha!" moments in happened to be technical topics.
But what if I want to talk about other things? What if I want to talk about a new hobby I'm getting into, but I'm still garishly beginner at that hobby? What if I want to share games and animations I made, but I haven't drawn in ages and I really don't want the world to see that I'm de-rusting myself?
What if I can talk about these these, just not under my legal name, not my "root identity"?
Sounds like we need an alt. Well, right on time, hop on over to JJ's Not a Bluejay and I'll see you in a minute.
