I want my computer back.

14 Feb, 2026

I can still remember the look of our first family computer so vividly. The blue stripes over the off-yellowed case implying a speed the aging Pentium inside couldn't hope to match, the curved tube monitor whose back never seemed to line up quite flush with the wall. Back in the mid 2000s, it was a piece of technology so imposing it deserved an entire room all to itself, lest its towering form take over the entirety of the living room.

I do not know how it got into our home, necessarily. By the time "the CPU" (as other Latin readers may recognize it being coloquially known at the time) arrived in our home, it felt like both an aging relic and the pinnacle of technology; not that my six year old self would've known the difference at the time. The internet itself was still much more of a novelty. Only 7% of the population had access to the worldwide web through dial-up or broadband, a far cry from the current near-total adoption, which turned it from the glorified word processor it was most likely purchased to be into a powerful little toy for the whole family to gather around and fight for who gets to use.

No wonder then, that it took no time for the thing to sink its claws into me. Endless hours were wasted in the typical sites like Neopets and Club Penguin, the latter being the driving force towards deciding to sign up for an English course, as that was the only language the game was available on at the time. Social media was nothing more than a curiosity, and despite not having any friends who I could use it with, the concept of Facebook was endlessly fascinating to me. The phrase "how to create video game" and its endless variations must've been typed out on that clicky PS-2 keyboard hundreds of times, something which'd eventually set me on the career path I'm on to this day.

I used to look up at it with such a sense of wonder, this machine which looked like it'd crash-landed from another planet, my eyes glued to the CRT like moths to a flame.

Today, I stare jaded at the monitor, mindlessly scrolling through an endless stream of nothing, only good for dulling down the senses in exchange for "staying informed", whatever that means. As night dawns, the incessant blue glow of the ultrawide taking hold of my whole peripheral vision (no doubt contributing to the forming eye bags) reminding me to stop staring at big screen and go to another room to stare at little screen, instead. How did it end up like this?

I don't think it's merely a matter of nostalgia, of the naïve potential that came with being connected to everyone all the time, or the Windows Aero techno-optimism painted over every glossy application. The appeal of the Open Web is as strong as ever. I am still endlessly fascinated just as I was as a child by knowing all these sites out there were built by people, and I can just create one myself with little to no barrier to entry. Not just static pages, but tools, networks, games... And yet how is it that with such an ample ecosystem, there's only ever Five Websites? The open seas of old now appear so much more barren when Google will just hand you whatever answer on a silver plate before you're given the chance to explore, and platforms are so aggressively designed to keep you locked in that they'll show whatever you create to less people for the crime of appending a link off-site.

It wouldn't be cause for concern if I hadn't made this into my job. I'm very lucky that this passion manifested into a career of web and application development, but after more than five years in the industry, I'd begun to feel a sour aftertaste to the whole thing. What was there left to be excited about, after all? The "tech enthusiast" community so prevalent through the 2010s seemed to disappear overnight, as it feels that we've innovated everywhere there is to innovate, and the only things left to report are the new ways companies are fucking us over.

Within this background, the whole repulsion to computers feels more existential. I'm not the only person out there who started to feel a repulsion for these hunks of metal, but when it's not only your work, but your off-time and where most of your hobbies need to be worked on (digital art, game development, image editing), it's almost necessary to pace yourself before you decide to move to a cabin in the woods away from all technology.

This year, I made a choice. My 2026 resolution would be to enjoy being on my computer again.

To regain some sense of wonder towards technology, I've decided to commit to some series of changes throughout the year, to see if the spark's still there. Here's what I've settled on, starting January 1st, and the progress I've made along the way.

Remove the leeches

For a good, long while, I've chained myself to X¹ in something akin to Stockholm syndrome. Sure, I'm some kind of artist, and the site seemed to be the only website where the drawn form still appears to get any kind of traction² (you'd no doubt heard of the gross Twitter Artist moniker at some point), so it's wise — necessary, even — to continue to stay on this platform, despite the stupid changes we have to put up with on the daily ordained by its new figure head.

Less necessary was the need to scroll the site at the slightest hint of boredom throughout the day, a humiliating ritual that only seemed to serve to make me angrier, more frustrated with the state of the world. If I justified my presence in the platform as "social media visibility for whatever I create", doom scrolling its feed didn't exactly align with my interests, but when every app on your phone is a dopamine casino, there comes a point you start acting in auto-pilot. With any second of dead-air, my finger would hover towards the app's button; and I'd immediately be upset at myself for even opening the damn thing before letting the infinite scroll dull my senses away.

X is not the everything app, it's a virtual cigarette. You know it's gonna fuck you up, but you can't help but crave the next hit. Jack me up into the slop machine, boss.

Still, I'm not convinced the whole concept behind social media as a whole has to be tossed in the bin. I've always been a big supporter of Bluesky for one, way before it was anything tangible and just a hippie idea of an open protocol Twitter would sit on top of.³ The idea of social as a protocol anyone can jack into and do as they please with instead of a monopolized way to siphon your attention and control the discussion has plenty of appeal for tech nerds such as I, and for the less-savvy to enjoy the benefits of without having to know how the innards work (if they can figure out how the system works without having to take an Intro to ActivityPub class first, at least).

After it released in open beta, I had tried it here or there, but not enough people have made the switch for it to feel worthwhile. Good ol' network effects in action. Dipping my toes in then and again I found a more calm, welcoming community, that didn't have as much going on — but it did seem to have the right kinds of things regardless. Beautiful art, textform shitposts, and oh so much less stuff to get mad at. Still, whether due to inertia or a nagging feeling of it "not being quite ready yet", I stayed put, quietly hoping the AT protocol would mature enough, that the Bluesky application would reach feature parity, that the feeds would stop being so dry, that eventually the switch would feel natural enough so as to be seamless.

If I was so invested in the growth of this platform, why did I not put my money where my mouth is?

Before the year even started, I committed to the idea by making my final post on X.⁴ Luckily it wasn't difficult ripping the bandage off, as I'd long since suspected the feed was no longer showing my rambles to my friends anyway, so there was no material harm beyond not having access to what they were up to. Luckily, that FOMO washed over almost immediately, and in two week's time I didn't find myself missing the platform at all. My media diet quickly adjusted to include a mix of Bluesky and Tumblr (which I've been a long-time lurker of), one giving me my fill of world events and artists, the other hooking me up with the textpost funnies I can't live without.

My biggest fear through it is that I'd be somehow "left behind", not being able to keep up with the conversation at large. The "town square of the internet", so to speak. It turns out, you don't need to be constantly washed over a firehose of information to keep track of things. Friends will send me snippets through social media, or I'll catch a screenshot posted on another platform with just the important stuff, much of which is superfluous anyway.

I really enjoy the way Absurd Pirate put it in his own writing on the subject. "Once you've heard the message, hang up the phone" is a beautiful adage for the modern era. I can't say I'll be fully disconnecting anytime soon, but I do want to keep cutting off the spam calls I keep getting through my day.

Probably the best thing to come out of this is that my ritual of CTRL+T ing into x.com impulsively whenever there was nothing to do has almost completely subsided. If you're seeking to cross-out the cross out of your life, too, I can't recommend Nitter enough. Its to-the-point default webpage has gotten me to break the habit way faster than I would've otherwise.

Hopefully, this is only the beginning. I'm taking baby steps with the biggest leech of all, but I want to slowly take out all the sites I tend to linger around for a little too long in. Instagram Reels, of all things, is another embarrassing timesink I could do better without. What started as a way to keep up with what friends are doing on a day to day basis transformed before my eyes into algorithmic media, just another feed to scroll through, in a way so insidious it's hard not to engage when it's built for friends to send you snippets of the infinite feed through the day. Who knows, maybe this time next year you'll see me walking around with a dumb phone, being like "isn't this great? It can only do Whatsapp and SMS". Wouldn't that be a nice thought?

Own my machine

If there's anything more trite than complaining about the current state of X, it's complaining about Microsoft. Regardless, I hope you'll indulge me for a moment: somehow not content with creating the most wide-spread piece of spyware of the 21st century, the team behind Windows has outdone themselves in creating the biggest stupid piece of shit that doesn't fucking work billions of dollars in Azure revenue can buy. Microsoft is no stranger to total flops, it's a 50/50 toss-up to whether their newest release will be well received, as anyone going down the list of Windows releases on Wikipedia may tell you. But the reason is always different. Windows 8 was an ill-conceived software overdesigned for tablets and phones and underdesigned for desktop, Windows Vista had overzealous security and high system requirements.

The newest release however crosses over from flawed to straight up incompetent — in all the ways it can't stop breaking, like the OS equivalent of a hamster finding all the ways to fall to its own death. It's a minimal improvement to its predecessor in such a way it's embarassing they didn't choose to keep it going as originally planned, and it's not like there isn't any precedent for updating the look of the OS mid refresh. And that's nothing to say of the million different upsells for Copilot, Copilot and Copilot: this section was originally going to include the Office suite and OneDrive, but the former got renamed to Copilot 365, and the latter probably only has a couple weeks before it gets renamed to Copilot Files or whatever-the-hell. Also, Candy Crush comes pre-packaged with each copy of Windows 11 now, hooray.

What's more important is that it's just not reliable anymore. File searching has not worked for years, going on decades! And it can't even be excused anymore, seeing how they removed the little 3D dog at the bottom of your search. Every little update seems to take more of your agency away, as all of a sudden you can't create a local account or it's made harder to switch your default web browser. Windows will do the job, but it will fight you every step of the way to claw you right back into its preferred defaults.

So why not Linux? I've been using it under the hood for a good while when it comes to app development anyway. The way I justified myself out of doing the switch is that, really, I just want a machine that works.⁵ No tinkering necessary, just boot up whatever app was compiled for my OS and don't worry about the specifics too much. That said, my computer was no longer working for me; the perverse incentives were too strong for that to be the case anymore. And if I was going to work for it anyway, I might as well do it in a way that's customizable and all to call my own.

After learning about fancy tiling manager Hyprland, I installed it on a throwaway laptop I hadn't put to use in years. Unfortunately for me, I was completely hooked: almost everything appeared to either work out of the box, and the keyboard shortcuts felt so intuitive for a single-screen set-up that when I went back to my main computer running Windows, the muscle memory had inset too much. For a short little stint I HyprLARP'd with a Windows Store program that claimed to do more or less the same thing, but it was so rough around the edges that I begun to crave the real thing even more, and by early October the voices had won; and after passing out for about 4 hours I woke up to a fresh install of EndeavorOS on my main computer.

It was a nightmare.

Half of the tools I needed to get stuff done didn't even work! The drawing tablet drivers took forever to set up right, Discord had no way of screen sharing, Steam kept telling me that my recently formatted hard drive was corrupted with games that ran just fine on Windows, Zen Browser spontaneously melted every 2 hours as the screen would go blood red and not allow any input. About the only thing that actually worked well was Visual Studio Code and Minecraft. Whatever I patched in, two more holes would pop up back in its place. Most of the time I would simply give up and dual-boot back into Windows whenever I needed to get anything beyond light web browsing done. How was the Year of the Linux Desktop ever to get going in this sorry state?

As I'd come to find out, you get out of Linux what you're willing to put in, and god was Arch Linux a time sink. Just when I was at the verge of ditching the whole project, in late December I made a list of all the things I needed to get stuff done, and all the things that were missing in my Linux distro of choice, as well as all I'd miss if I were to switch back to Windows. After the Christmas week rush settled down, I decided to start from the top with a more beginner friendly distro like Bazzite and go through each and every one of the items one by one. Connection to my home server, drawing programs, proprietary game dev junk like Spine and Aseprite, SSD perms fuckery so I could access everything from both drives...

With a couple days' worth of dedicated bugfixing, I had almost everything I needed to get work done, and swiftly replaced all that couldn't be easily implemented. My phone-to-webcam program of choice did not play nice with Linux, so I had to run off and get a real webcam, something I'd postponed for years. Kdenlive was easier to set up than Davinci Resolve and it covers my trim-and-render use-case just fine. I'm lucky enough to not be chained at the hip to Adobe, and a long-time user of infamous image-editor program GIMP, so I didn't find myself double-hostage to both Microsoft and Creative Cloud.

I'm glad to say that I haven't touched my Windows dual-boot partition since. Of course, I'm still fiddling with it to this day, but isn't that the charm? Bazzite is fine and KDE Plasma is far more customizable than the GNOME I was so used to in prior experiences with Linux, but I missed the automatic window tiling from Hyprland. I stumbled on this blog post about Niri, an endlessly scrollable tile manager that just so happened to have a Bazzite variant, and have been testing it out (playing tuoys) with it the past couple of weeks.

These days, the Linux desktop is only as complicated as you make it. For years, it's often been reserved to the technically adept and FOSS purists, but these days anyone can install Linux Mint on their thumb drive and have an equivalent experience to that of the biggest OS on the market. Most people do everything on their browser these days anyway, and you can run almost anything else with enough elbow grease. If you're tired of Microsoft's bullshit too (and can spare some space on disk), I'd recommend giving it a test drive and see if it can manage your daily tasks, too. You might be surprised.

Tend to my garden

There's a bit of a running theme with my complaints of the current state of tech. Huge corporations can come in any day and ruin features or products you've been using for years, and since they've made it so you're dependent on them, and the moats are so big for any newcomer to compete on, you find yourself stuck to them no matter how much worse they get.

If your whole presence is dictated by these faceless megacorps, why would you not take back the reins?

No one's saying your entire art gallery has to reside on Instagram. Sure, some convenience is always welcome where it makes sense (hence why I'm on Bear instead of having rolled up my own blogging infrastructure), but I've been thinking about platforms wrong this whole time. They're supposed to be the top part of a funnel, the discoverability sector, aiming to where you want people to actually go. For some people this might be a more well monetized platform (low-effort Tiktoks to full-fat YouTube videos or Twitch streams seems to be a popular pipeline), but if the objective is to own your presence on the internet, you can just craft it yourself.

More common are the Strawpages and link-in-bios of the world, but the Indie Web movement has been something I've kept my eye out for a good, long while. Stuck making corporate looking websites with boilerplate Bootstrap components, I yearned from a distance for the free-form, rawdogged HTML and CSS of the wild web found in sites like Neocities and Nekoweb. It's uncommon in this day and age to see someone use a blank HTML document as a canvas, but there was a whole community out there simply... having fun with web design, as an art instead of a science.

For a web developer, it's surprising I don't seem to have many personal sites under my belt. Aside from the obvious post-work exhaustion, I'd always seen sites looking corporate as a desirable thing, and struggled to fit my own personality within that framework. This whole rearrangement of my online presence made me re-think this perspective, and finally, after being a lurker for so long, I decided to throw my hat in the ring. I wanted a place to call my own, a garden of sorts which I could tend to and add to at my own pace, a website that felt more like a living place.

Unfortunately, reader, this is the one part that I can't show you a finished version of yet. Site development is hard, and I'm an ambitious cunt! Inspired by virtual worlds of yore (and trying to figure out what the whole "living site" thing meant in practice), I prototyped a site where you could roam around as an avatar around a world. This ended up being a bit much for a personal site: if no one's there, the world feels empty and the functionality superfluous. Going back to the drawing board, I noticed that you could see other people's cursors in real time on the main Nekoweb site, and realized this interaction makes way more sense. It is the main method of interactivity with a site, after all, and if we do something stupid like turn your cursor into a little bee, the effort will be noticed even if there's no one else on-line at the same time.

I'll go more into the brainstorming and development of this site in a future blogpost when it's all finished, but you can see the work in progress prototype here in the meantime! Realizing cursor chat was also superfluous without anyone on, I opted for a Miiverse-like system of leaving notes for other people to find when they visit. When it's done, you'll be able to graffiti anywhere on the site and leave your mark. It makes revisiting it every so often a really joyful experience, even for the person who made it!

Once I move from the prototype phase, I'd love to add a booru with image-tags to browse my illustrations in, a proper Now page to write what I'm getting up to, and some form of mixed "Thoughts" feed that merges my Bluesky rambles and my more long-form blogposts into a single contiguous feed.

On that note, blogposts, huh? Guess what, this was all a trick to get you to read my "Hi this is my first post on Bear Blog" entry. You've already spent a good fifteen minutes wading through all my word-slop, and sunk-cost fallacy means you're stuck with me now, fucker.

I love writing! Can you tell? I've been writing since I was tiny, whether that be nonsensical Wattpad novels or Wordpress gazettes about the latest Club Penguin update. I'll jump at the chance to write text walls over technical documentation and Frequently Asked Questions about whatever project I'm cooking up. But I never really had an outlet for it! And having found out about this platform a couple years back and lurking through it since, I jotted down a good dozen or so articles I could see myself spending some afternoons to light up my keyboard with, musings on tech, game design and the post-modern era.

As part of my own blood pact, I hope to write at the very least 12 articles before year's end. Hopefully more, if I take a liking to the whole blogging thing; and maybe more frequent if I can contain myself from doing the skeleton textdump thing. It's also definitely helping my media diet! Reading a short little slice of someone else's life experience is giving me the hit that going through the Google News feed once did with less existential dread to go alongside it, and flicking through pages on Nekoweb is a healthier source of inspiration than Dribbble, the frontend designer's equivalent of a teen girl mag with unhealthily idealistic weight proportions. When I find out how RSS feeds work it'll be over for you all.

It might be too early to tell, but this exercise of my free will seems to be bearing fruit already. It no longer feels like I need to split my attention between different platforms, as all I do from now on is in service of building up my one personal spot on the web that I can call my own. I've been more focused on creation ever since I ditched predatory social media, and feel freer to make whatever I wish out of my computer; something I'd already felt with my personal home server now extending to my main device.

I might not be able to meaningfully change the incentives which have made mainstream tech such a terrible place to be, but in rejecting so much of what makes the internet worse, there's a cozier, more personal side of the web to be found. I'll be reporting back in a year and see where we're at, but until then, you'll find me watering my plants, getting my little internet garden to flourish. Feel free to visit anytime. 🌷

#technology #wildflowers