Rating: Soft Recommend
WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD
The God of the Woods is about an inspector trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy teenage girl while at a sleep-away camp in Upstate New York, Camp Emerson. The teenage girl, Barbara Van Laar, is the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the land upon which Camp Emerson sits. The strained relationship between Barbara and her parents, along with the family's troubled past in those very woods, leads investigator Judyta Luptack on a journey to not only find Barbara, but unlock the mystery haunting the Van Laar family.
2025 was the year I told myself I would become a movie guy. I wasn't a big movie watcher before this year and as a result I have significant gaps in movie history and knowledge. I haven't seen a lot of the classics and quintessential 21st century movies. So, I buckled down and started watching as many movies as I could.
This is the third and final post about blogging I am publishing this month as part of the Bring Back Blogging campaign. Be sure to check out the Bring Back Blogging homepage for more information about the campaign and links to other participating bloggers.
One of my favourite experiences when exploring the blogosphere is finding an interesting blog with a tremendous backlog of cool content. Finding these blogs is more difficult on the open web compared to finding profiles on centralized social media, but the reward of finding these highly unique pockets feels greater.
This is the second of three posts about blogging I am publishing this month as part of the Bring Back Blogging campaign. You can find my first post here. Be sure to check out the Bring Back Blogging homepage for more information about the campaign and links to other participating bloggers.
Starting a blog can be as easy or as difficult as you'd like it to be. Whether you want to make a text-focused blog, or an entire personal website with all kinds of content, there are plenty of platforms to choose from.
As part of the Bring Back Blogging campaign, during the month of January I will be publishing three posts about blogging. Be sure to check out the Bring Back Blogging homepage for more information about the campaign and links to other participating bloggers.
Blogs were the 'it' thing in the late 90's and early 2000's. Then came the introduction of centralized social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. When these sites took-off, many people abandoned their blogs and personal websites for the uniformity and ease of a centralized service with a rapidly growing user base. Eventually, blogging culture as we knew it disappeared to the far corners of the internet, kept alive by small groups of enthusiasts and believers in the form.
Publishing content on the internet can be an incredibly rewarding experience. However, the big bang level explosion of social media through the 2010's turned publishing into posting, and quality quickly succumbed to quantity. Yet, there are still plenty of ways to buck the trend and go back to the internet's roots and bring blogging back into the 'mainstream'. Today I'd like to share some tools and platforms you can use to discover, or for many re-discover, the world of personal blogs.
Many in the Global North do not value their online privacy very highly. I'll often hear people say, “they already have all my data, what do I care if they collect another piece,” or, “I have nothing to hide”. There are plenty of articles written about why these statements are flawed and that people always have “something to hide”, but that's not what I'd like to talk about here. Instead, I would like to share some tools anyone can use to help support those around the world who rely on internet privacy and anonymity.
In my last post, I briefly mentioned the Gemini protocol as a way of re-discovering bloat-free internet. In this piece, I'd like to dive a little deeper into the protocol, it's potential for average folks, and how you can explore this niche community for yourself.
The internet has evolved and grown over time. As a result, how we use the internet to communicate, learn, and conduct commerce has changed. Using email to exchange short messages with others has evolved into multi-purpose messaging applications. Visiting various websites for news has evolved into algorithm-based aggregators and Twitter feeds. Even reading webpages has gone from simple screens with texts and images, to an advertisement extravaganza with innumerable cookies behind every click. Beneath all the fluff and distractions, there are still foundational principles and tools that persist and provide a simpler, purer internet experience.
... And Why I Use Bisq
When I first learned about bitcoin and realized its potential, the only thing I could think about was how I could get my hands on some. After many hours of research, I learned there were several ways I could go about acquiring some. The four ways that intrigued me the most were: centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, mining, and earning. Mining and earning bitcoin are fascinating topics of discussion in and of themselves, however today I would like to focus on centralized and decentralized exchanges. For a stripped-down explanation of centralized versus decentralized, you can read my previous post on decentralization. In the context of exchanges, centralized versus decentralized entails a slew of differences that shape how one participates in the bitcoin economy.