I’m an old man [waits for screams of horror to die down] and I was there when the first PCs made their way into the home. There was no Internet but you could dial in [fax machine noise] to a BBS and download some shareware if you wanted. My first computer game was Colossal Cave Adventure, an all-text adventure. I still dream in green phosphor. My first word processor was WordStar, and it was gorgeous: just a screen full of text. Even with all the command shortcuts listed on screen it was never the UI nightmare that is MS Word.

In those early days, the plain text days, we were just hobbyists sharing stuff with each other. Then the Internet came, and for a while, it was good. Until it wasn’t.

Billionaires and their mega-corporations learned to feed on us. Contented, happy people don’t have an urgent need to buy things to feel better — so billionaires and their mega-corporations do everything in their power, through the online spaces they own and the policies they influence, to cultivate misery, hatred, and anxiety. Then they turn around and sell you a solution to the very problem they created — and they do it using targeted ads crafted from tracking your every like, every share, every follow, every view, every purchase.

I’d rather not.

Here’s the thing about plain text. It lasts. It’s eternal. That .txt file from twenty years ago? Still readable — manchine or human. Ever try to open an old document only to find the program that made it no longer exists? Try exporting notes from a proprietary app sometime — or your task manger data. Proprietary formats are where your ideas go to die.

Plain text doesn’t lock you in. No subscriptions. No upgrades required. It belongs to you. Forever.

I keep my notes in plain text files and manage them with Obsidian. If Obsidian disappears tomorrow, all my files still work — portable, human-readable, and untouched. I write fiction, notes, and even this blog post using Markdown, a simple, intuitive plain-text formatting language you can read with your eyes. Any editor can open it. Even Word.

This website is an extension of that plain text philosophy. I rebuilt it from scratch using Zola, a static site generator, because I believe in fast, clean, surveillance-free publishing. It’s just HTML and CSS. No ads. No trackers. No cookies. No JavaScript. No bullshit.

Just text.

Like the Internet was supposed to be.