Digital Minimalism and Other Misadventures

Over the past couple of months I’ve been on a mission to clean up my digital life and take more intentional privacy and security measures.

To that end, I’ve been going through all the different services and websites I’ve signed up for over the years and doing the tedious work of changing emails and passwords.

A couple of days ago, I changed my Discord email. After about an hour, I got an email from them saying I’d been flagged for suspicious activity and prompted me to change my password. I changed my password. Immediately after doing so I got a notice that my account had been limited. Attempts to appeal earned me an automated response essentially saying “tough luck.” So, I’m unable to do anything on Discord except react with emojis until my jail time expires in a few days.

Alas.

In other news, we had a very productive weekend.

Here’s a list of everything that got accomplished in no particular order of importance or completion:

☑️ Opened up my computer and cleaned it (so dusty omg)
☑️ Installed the new hard drive K got me a few weeks ago
☑️ Erased and formatted two of my older hard drives so K could steal them for the NAS she’s building
☑️ Attempted to install Linux
☑️ Failed to install Linux due to the fact that my Windows installation was –according to my resident IT expert –“all wrong”
☑️ Reinstalled Windows “correctly”
☑️ Hated my life while having to set everything back up
☑️ Marveled at how quick and speedy my computer was now that my OS was “installed properly and on the right drive”
☑️ Attempted to install Linux (again)
☑️ Successfully installed Linux (🎉)
☑️ Realized my files backup software doesn’t work on Linux
☑️ Went back to Windows so I could backup my files
☑️ Took down my broken widescreen monitor and got it ready to be shipped back to Samsung (this was a process)
☑️ Replaced the widescreen with a couple of older monitors
☑️ Lots of cable management
☑️ Accidentally messed up my files backup and wound up having to redo it all over again (this took several days)
☑️ Returned to Linux

Glad to be on the other side of all that, though I’m still in the process of figuring out how to replicate my usual workflow on Linux. I've got most of it sorted, but I'm missing a few quality of life features that I'll have to look into.

But anyway.

I’ve been trying to decide what my plans are for this blog. I haven’t posted anywhere for a long time. I relaunched my old blog a few times, fully intending to post, but always ended up not doing it.

I know the reason, it just took me way too long to do anything about it. The WordPress installation on my blog had a lot of technical issues due to some corrupted files that I didn’t have the technical know-how to fix. The site worked, but it was a patchwork job and no matter what I did there were always issues. One of the issues was that I couldn’t post to the blog using third-party software, and I've never been a fan of writing on the native environment.

On top of that, my site got hacked a couple of times over the years, and I had to drop hundreds of dollars to get the malware removed. This got expensive and annoying. I managed to lock it down eventually and set up proper security monitoring, but the whole experience was stressful and made me hesitant to post there.

I finally deleted the whole thing on Saturday and it feels like a weight off my shoulders.

So now I’m here and so far things feel a little less cumbersome. I can write my posts directly in Obsidian and send them to Ghost. I don’t have to stress about security vulnerabilities with outdated plugins or getting comment spammed every time I post things.

I don’t know if my theme for the year is simplicity, but I find myself naturally leaning towards getting rid of all the bloat in my life. The Marie Kondo “Does this spark joy?” philosophy works just as well when decluttering your digital life.

Not a whole lot sparks joy, it turns out. Just the writing of the words and the sharing of the words. That’s all I’ve ever truly enjoyed. And so I endeavor to do more of it.