A Green Mushroom

When I published my post about Belghast's passing the other day, I noticed this draft sitting in the backend of my blog CMS. It was drafted in August of 2023 and I had a few initial notes as seeds for ideas I could build out into a full post.  That's pretty typical for how I used to jot down thoughts that I would later craft into a full blog post. Without giving you the exact words, my notes essentially boiled down to the fact that Twitter was in rough shape and felt like it was on the way out, I was trying out Mastodon, and I was feeling a little unmoored on the internet. Now it's three years later and Twitter is essentially dead (for everything I used to use it for anyway), I haven't used Mastodon after that initial few months of 2023 experimentation, and the closest thing I have to a "home" social media is Bluesky. But even Bluesky just doesn't feel like a true home.  It feels like the place I go to scroll a few times each day when I want to get a puls...

Belghast was a longtime friend of mine.  At this point, we must have known each other for almost 20 years.  If you haven't heard yet... he passed away yesterday.  MassivelyOP has a write-up with some more details , so I won't go into those here. Looking back, my last post was almost 3 years ago.  I'm not going to focus on me in this post, but I just wanted to acknowledge that it's been awhile.  But, I couldn't let this go by without writing something. Belghast has always had a stream of consciousness writing style so I'm going to embrace that for this post and not overthink it. Bel created communities.  He was the heart of so many of them.  I originally ran into him in the early days of the blogosphere as it existed in the mid 2000s.  He made so many friends and so many connections.  At some point I got pulled into his orbit and into a few of the groups he was at the center of. And he was truly the center and the heart of so many of these com...