davyrussell-blogheader-blank Reflection, quiet moments, exploring ideas, and sharing things that interest me. Thanks for reading. Most recent posts ...
I have mixed feelings about lawns. I hate those perfect golf-course lawns that line the streets of suburbs and cookie-cutter housing developments. The ones where little yellow tags caution about the poisons sprayed after the lawn service does their thing. But I like my lawn. I still mow it, but my lawn isn't a monocrop of bland green carpet. It's a biodiverse mix of grasses, but also broadleaf and…
It's been a minute...12 days, to be specific, since my last blog post. The pressure to share something has grown by the day. So has the guilt of not sticking to it. The feelings of failure...as if it's even possible to fail at personal blogging! My old "content creator brain" has taken the lead lately, and to be honest, makes it hard to think of anything "worth sharing". So then days go by, a…
I've been wrestling with something as I continue my Facebook Feed Fast . I'm 30+ days in now. No app on my phone. No longer checking the feed. It's been wonderful! But I feel the pull. Not in an "addiction to Facebook" sense, but the feeling that if I don't eventually reconnect to the feed, I'll become irrelevant, invisible, forgotten. I feel the unease of "cutting myself off from the world."…
It's been a whole month since I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. This is not the first time I've deleted the app, but it's the longest I've gone without eventually re-installing it. (I still have my account and use it for business.) I think this is a permanent change since I've found things to replace it with. What's really surprised me is the change in how I feel after stepping away from…
Do I ever tell people in real life that I blog? I recently read a blog post that posed the question. I figured I'd answer it here. I generally do not tell people I know in real life that I blog. It's not that I share anything here that I don't want them to read. I use my domain for my email, so anybody can deduce from that my website and visit anytime. To be completely honest, I don't need or…
I don't know if there's a word for the opposite of doom scrolling (on Facebook/Instagram/TikTok.) Lately, the term "wonder clicking" popped into my head. Maybe someone has already coined a different (or better) term for it, but it's essentially a different way of moving through the web. Instead of getting pulled through the endless scroll of rage bait, AI-slop, and ads that is the…
Twice a month, I buy some broad market ETFs and let them grow in a retirement account. Just about every financial expert will tell you it's one of the best ways to build wealth (we hope!) As somebody who is self-employed, and getting a late start in saving for retirement, I'm pretty proud of how I'm growing my basket. But I'm also conflicted. I wish there was another way to do this other than…
I've spent quite a bit of time over the past week or so exploring the indie web. Instead of doom scrolling on Facebook, I've had a much more enjoyable time wandering through Neocities, the Discover page here on Bear Blog, and poking around on Marginalia Search. I was quite surprised to find my OLD website come up in the search results (on the vintage tab.) I launched the X-Project Magazine way…
In January of this year, I started writing a novel that was kicking around in my head for the last 20 years. I've written more than 10,000 words, in an offline .odt file on my hard drive. No discoverability. No likes, comments, or shares. Just me, a cursor, and my imagination. It struck me how fulfilling it is to write this way! But I already knew that. I had known that since I penned my first…