Introduction
First posts are difficult. I know the standard is to give an introduction, to explain who is writing the posts and what a reader may expect, but the fact is I don't know what I will write here, what technical or design changes this blog will undergo as I figure out more about it. I don't know what parts of my identity will be relevant and what parts won't. But a first post I must make, or else I cannot make a second or a third.
Who am I? I'm a thirty-something nonbinary trans man, residing in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America. I'm gay-married and have a dog; I had intended to be a parent to human children by now, but I believe that is not to be my fate. As I write this, I'm an out-of-work techie; here you may find my professional history. Like many other queer people and computer geeks I'm autistic. I enjoy tinkering and dabbling.
I decided to start a blog on my own web space due mostly to a mixture of nostalgia and the nagging feeling that I am too verbose for microblogging. I'm on a very nice Mastodon server, but I often find myself writing threads to express the nuance of what I think and feel, and at that point I must own that the format is not designed for my use case. Also, I wanted to play with software. I opted for a “minimal” setup that theoretically should play nice with RSS readers and the Fediverse, which is writefreely; I may experiment with other software if I find it's too minimal.
What you won't see here: I talk about my personal life elsenet, so I don't intend to do so here. Because writefreely doesn't have spoiler tags/CWs, I'll also be sparing on, ah, current events. I will definitely get into political and “controversial” matters, and some of what I say will certainly be upsetting whether you agree with it or not, but I'll try to be thoughtful. That's kind of the whole point of giving myself extra writing space, after all.