About

About

Once I ran a blog on Livejournal, almost a decade ago. Then I forgot about it. Then Livejournal got bought by a Russian company, but the servers stayed in the West. Then, at some unspecified point in 2016, the servers moved to Russia before anyone noticed. Why this is a problem, why it prompted me to move my LiveJournal blog to this site is explained in this post.

Who am I?

I’m a forty-something from Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, where I’m also based. I’m super geeky- I’ve got over 20 years of professional experience in programming using umpteen languages and systems. (For example, this blog is a good excuse for me to learn about constructing a website in Jekyll.)

I’m also super arty. One thing you’ll notice from my old posts is that I was getting into photography. Indeed, that got even more serious as time went on, but that’s just one of my avenues of creativity that I now realise I’ve been exploring all my life. I might elaborate on that in this blog…

Oh, and I’m also super queer! I don’t mean in the sense of that stereotype of a twink in a crop with an alcopop dancing to Kylie or something. (Which, by the way, is completely valid as far as I’m concerned.) I used to believe in that stereotype, and rebel against that, so it took quite a while for me to look at my life, and acknowledge that, yes… I am super queer. (Even getting used to the word “queer” took some work BTW)

Whilst I’m there: one of the aspects of my queer life is that I’m a queer secular nun- as part of the Glasgow Mission of the Order Of Perpetual Indulgence. I give a quick primer on what that means in this post. (Note: this blog contains my personal views, I am not speaking for the OPI here.)

Credits

This blog is being hosted on GitHub Pages, using Jekyll. My old Livejournal posts (2006-2011) were extracted from my LJ account using LJDump. I’m using Bootstrap for formatting, Jquery for extra UI tasks, JSCookie for cookie handling, and Bootstrap 4 Toggle for the Night Mode switch. The actual Night Mode styling is based on the Slate theme from Bootswatch.