I'm spinning out in my top gear, so I lean into a more aero position and chance a glimpse of my bike computer: 40.1mph. Thrilling on a bike. The road is wide, straight, and free of traffic, but its unfamiliar, one I've never been on, and I'm dialed in to the asphalt ahead of me. This is only the second ride outside my new neighborhood, Belltown, Seattle.
The figure eight loop took me around Magnolia and Queen Anne. Moments before this descent, I'd suffered the climb out of Discovery Park, where I found an old light house, then took in some multimillion dollar views of the Sound. The rest of the ride was pretty mellow, following the Ship Canal Trail, which was pleasant and shaded until the marinas and shops on Lake Union.
We've just moved to Seattle from Central Oregon. I think a lot of people my age are going the opposite direction, to quieter towns where they want to raise a family. But my partner and I are both chasing careers, and, believe it or not, I'd like to go to an office, at least a couple times a week. Fully remote work certainly has its perks, but I'm worried my social skills are beginning to wane.
I've never lived in a large city, but I've always been curious to know if I'm actually a city person. I think I'd regret not finding out for sure.
Welcome to my personal blog
I want a way to keep in touch with friends and family (hi, Mom), and to showcase some of the projects I've been working on. And I want to give myself a creative outlet that doesn't fit the rigidly defined, infinite-scroll nightmare that modern social media has become. Here you'll find posts about biking and aging (thus, The Creaky Knee), exploring Seattle, what I'm reading, watching, and listening to lately.
I'm glad that Substack and Medium are seeing success, and I hope that more social media starts trending that way. I'd be happy to use either of them, but as a tinkerer and DIYer, I chose the route of building it myself. This blog and site are built with Wagtail, a CMS on top of Django (I'm learning both with this site), which gives me a lot of control and is written in a language I'm pretty OK at.
The creative people building sites on Neocities and Nekoweb have also been an inspiration. As a kid in the '90s, I had a Geocities site and a copy of HTML for Dummies. CSS and Javascript were in their infancies, so these were the days of <table> layouts and <marquis> text. Truly the stuff of Web 1.0. The indie web of today is purposefully reviving the styles of GeoCities, but with CSS and Javascript at their disposal, those devs making some remarkably cool stuff.
IIRC, my GeoCities site was called "Chickens Among Us". It was exclusively stories from a conspiracy theory I'd dreamt up walking home from elementary school -- intelligent chickens plotting in the shadows to overthrow the American government. Those walks also gave me time to obsess over a jetpack design that would actually work.
I guess, in a way, I'm hearkening back to those days too. At some point since then, my internet usage got really small. So much of my time online lately has been spent on just two social media sites. So, in the spirit of breaking out of those silicon silos, as a user and a maker, here is my contribution to the indie web.