It’s the end of November, and the first snow of the season reminds me another year is almost at its end. Since I haven’t written anything here in a while, let’s try something different, this post is a barely organized collection of thoughts.

Hope

From enshittification and AI actively making our daily lives worse, to the many humanitarian disasters and our governments failing us, it’s easy to feel hopeless. However, pockets of hope still remain.

Over the year, I talked to a fair few friends that give me hope, that inspire me and I strive to do the same for them.
While AI sneaking its way into practically everything we use has been demotivating and frustrating, it warms my heart to see people embrace alternatives like open-source software, self-hosting, physical or local media instead of streaming. A surprising amount of people is even dipping their toes into Linux.

I try to help where I can. It’s maybe a little silly, but it feels like being a part of a resistance in some way. Rising up against our corporate overlords, casting off our chains, tasting freedom again :)
I have been on my own journey, learning some new tools trying to escape this madness, but that probably deserves its own post.

I am hoping to continue helping in the coming months, even years. I’d love to have more free time and get to help people to set off on their own journeys, resist and rebel in their own ways. We’ll see what I can do.

The future of this site

Somewhat tied to the above, I want to make some changes around here. I want to move from US based services as much as possible, and I want to keep this site separate from traditional social media.

As fun as the Bluesky “integration” was to do, my site is now weakly dependent on Bluesky. I will probably soon remove this connection again, possibly replacing it with something I can run myself, I think being able to comment on the posts could be pretty cool.
The idea of old-school web-rings, buttons, “friendly websites” etc also entertains me :)

Currently, I am running all this on Netlify, behind Cloudflare, and I am experimenting with some different options and alternatives.
links.vildravn.dev is running on a little Hetzner VPS now, deployed with a neat little tool called piku and I might set up the main site in this way as well.
As far as Cloudflare is concerned, I am not sure. I like their filters that should keep AI crawlers at bay, but is that really worth the cost of putting all the eggs into one basket? Anytime Cloudflare goes down, it takes half the internet down with it, and my site is now included in that half.

Good Enough

This was originally supposed to be a standalone post, but I never got around to it. That’s kinda on-theme anyway.

I’ve been trying to be a bit more forgiving towards myself and the things I do. Not everything needs to be perfect, I don’t need to be perfect. Mistakes and imperfections are fine, they happen, some even say they make us human.

This whole blog is supposed to be me practicing the “good enough” mentality, and looking back I think it largely worked. I posted more this year than any other year and that counts for something.

Keeping notes

As I get older, I notice I can’t hold onto information as well as I used to. But my brain is being stubborn, resistant to that idea. I know I need to start keeping notes, but I am really bad at it. I do keep small reminders to myself on Discord but that seems super janky. Ironically, I enjoy writing formal documentation, but it just seems silly in some way to keep “documentation” on my life and the things I’ve done, I need to do and so on in some notes app, journal or something.

Maybe I just need to find something that works for me. I need it to be low friction, natural and portable. As much as I dislike using the on-screen keyboard on my phone, it’s the device I have with me everywhere and it’s the easiest thing to reach for when I need to jot something down quickly. But at the same time, I don’t want to always read the notes from my phone. I tried Obsidian, Capacities, Notion and some others, none of them really “clicked” for me and half the things now shove AI down your throat.
I love the idea of Obsidian but it feels so overwhelming, as if there was a pressure to keep things somewhat amazingly organized and I am not sure I am ready to commit to a fairly expensive subscription for Sync. I tried Obsidian with git at some point and it just overwrote my files and now half the pages are banished to a previous git commit and I have to revert to see them.

If someone is reading it and has suggestions, do reach out, please! :)

Conclusion

For some reason, this took me a week to write. I think I was just too busy. This might well be it for this year, we’ll see if I find the time and energy for one more post, but if not, see you in 2026 - a year that seems to promise and bring a lot of change.

Thank you for reading!