I figured it was high time I started modifying my old blog.

The content is getting embarrassingly stale. As in, some of that stuff was written when my kids were little, and now they’re in junior high and high school. (Oof.) Plus, I’m trying to get some paid writing off the ground.

The last update was in 2016, right after a trip to Galax, Virginia. I got a recording of my wife’s cousin Dennis and his friends covering “One Horse Town,” with my phone at the time being the only place the recordings existed…and then broke the phone shortly after. In hindsight I had a laptop with me and should have immediately offloaded. Oh, well.

In that time, I went from being strictly freelance, to being a part-timer, and once the pandemic kicked in, back to strictly freelance. So many things have happened in the intervening time, and some of them I think are pertinent to this website.

What is Yokelpunk?

It was a play on cyberpunk, a genre of science fiction, typically dystopian. It’s inspired by the notion that kids who grew up in the country were used to not being able to run to the store, and therefore had to get creative. The notion of building things out of binder twine and bailing wire comes to mind. I once heard an interview with Richard Taylor of Weta Studios, talking about how they had a sculpture of a Weta bug made out of bailing wire. New Zealand is predominantly a rural, agricultural island, and he said largely the same thing I did: they grew up having to be creative, because you couldn’t just run to the store every time something needed to be fixed.

It’s my one and only tie to Mr. Taylor, sadly for me.

The origins

Back in 2010(!) when I registered the domain, my intention had been to make it into a low-high-tech blog. We were only a couple of years out from the Great Recession; surely there were other people like me, who wanted to tinker with older, possibly second-hand hardware, and who grokked concepts like using Linux to get things done. This wasn’t necessarily going to be fore the folks who wanted to run a fileserver in the corner, this was for the folks like me, who wanted to run Linux on those desktop computers.

Since then, tech journalism has tried to convince us that we were going to throw out those desktops and laptops. Sales of desktops have dropped, and to tech journalism, which is predominantly business & finance journalism, this meant the PC was dead, to be replaced with phones, tablets, and cloud services. Naturally we’ve replaced some of our desktop usage with those, yes, but many of us still do the “real” work with desktops and laptops.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. have all replaced a lot of the older, cruftier technology we used to use. And in the last couple of years, all of us have likely been bit by those companies' efforts to automate moderation. It only takes a few times of trying to post a news article from a reputable source, before a person gets tired of it, you know?

And now, with Windows 11’s release imminent and most PCs about to be obsolete in the eyes of Microsoft, I think it’s time for a return.

What will this be now?

Mostly a personal blog, despite the buildup. I’ll try to avoid politics but sometimes it’s unavoidable. It’s also going to be a place for the things I think Facebook might pigeonhole. But it’ll also be about hobbyist stuff I do, plus any tech items I think might be interesting to the low-end tech enthusiasts.

Because I think we still matter. I once heard a Linux podcast host say, there’s no reason why someone with any Linux skills shouldn’t be making $X an hour. I don’t remember what X was, but it was a sum of money most people never make. Maybe he’s right, but I also know in my former line of work, anyone trying to charge a princely sum would be told thanks, but no thanks. And sometimes, you just want to install Linux Mint on an old laptop so someone has a working computer who wouldn’t otherwise have one.

So here I’ll be, typing blog entries on either my old Dell Optiplex, or my old Thinkpad, in Emacs, building in Hugo, and uploading to S3. It’s a slightly janky setup, but it works for me.

Stay tuned, I plan to upload new content extremely soon.