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There was a time in my life when I truly, genuinely felt that I was destined to live in California. This was likely in part a result of Hollywood endlessly glamorizing the place, but also, you know, the weather.

Since I moved to Vancouver, I got what I really wanted (nice weather) and the idea of living in California has become a bit of a joke. But nearly every day something happens that makes me say, vehemently, fuck America. Sorry, Americans, some of y’all are cool, but your country is fucked six ways to Sunday and half of y’all are determined to make it worse. Good fucking luck.

I am genuinely afraid for the general trend of Canada following the U.S.’s example. What happens in Canada, happened in the states a couple years earlier. So far, in a lot of ways, it seems we’re resisting the worst of that impulse. Hopefully that keeps up, because where the hell else would I move to?

A little joke I like to make sometimes (offline, where people think I'm funny) is that somewhere around 2012, something happened that caused our world to splinter off, and we are now in The Bad Timeline. But the world has always been a little bit batshit, I suppose, and we have probably always been in The Bad Timeline. It's just gotten really hard lately not to be aware of it.

I shouldn't have to care about celebrity court cases, or what company a billionaire idiot wants to buy, or whether a dictator who lives just an ocean away will decide that nuclear war doesn't sound that bad. I shouldn't have to worry about microplastics or how much carbon is in the atmosphere or whether I'll ever get the chance to see a healthy, vibrant, and unbleached coral reef. I can hardly take two steps without seeing something new to fret over. It's stressing me the fuck out.

I could, of course, just stop reading the news. Delete Twitter from my devices. Plug my ears and hum happy songs to myself whenever someone brings up the state of the world. Ignorance is bliss, right?

Except it obviously fucking isn't. So I should organize a protest, or donate to a worthy cause or two, or dedicate my life to making the world a better place!

Except I have to work and I'm really kind of tired, and the bills need to get paid, and have you seen the price of groceries lately? Add that to the list of things to worry about.

Over the years, I've built my personal website with pretty much every CMS tool available. I basically learned PHP with WordPress, but at a certain point, it just became too big for what I would ever need. I've used static site generators like Eleventy and Jekyll, and while they are excellent tools, they require a little too much effort to add a new post. Most recently I tried building a blog using Notion and Super — Notion is my favorite tool at work, so why not use it for my blog, too? This came with its own limitations, and ~$15/month for Super was difficult to commit to, especially when I have already paid for my own web hosting for years to come.

I don't want for much with my website; I just want somewhere to post things online. It needs to be easy, though, because sometimes I want to post from my iPad, or my phone, and I definitely don't want to have to open up terminal or an FTP application to add something to my website. There are lots of self-hosted website builders out there, but they're all either too bloated or complicated or limited or just... not nice. Or, like in the case of Pixieset, they're just too specialized — I'm not running a photography blog, and until we have RSS support and customizable blocks it's just not likely to be the right fit for me.

I was looking at CMS options and dreading what felt like the inevitable return to WordPress when I came across Kirby. It's free to use, though purchasing a license is encouraged.

If I end up sticking with it, I have no problem paying for it; the one time payment is guaranteed to work out to far less than any self-hosted, monthly option, and so far Kirby is an absolute delight. It's as powerful as WordPress, flexible, and free of all of the bloat and crap that comes along with even the most bare-bones WordPress installation. Importantly, you can customize the admin panel — which I can easily use from my iPad or phone — to making posting simple. I'm sure all of this is possible with WordPress (it seems anything is possible with WordPress) but hell if it wouldn't be the most ridiculous process. I gave WordPress a try, in good faith, a few months back, and the entire experience was somehow both convenient and nightmarish at once. Kirby is just convenient.

There are, as always, still a million things to do before my website is 'finished' by any means. Building my templates from scratch means I have to figure things out along the way, and I'm learning a lot as I go. In the meantime, though, I'm pretty happy with how things are turning out!