Hi there! Welcome to my little corner of the Internet opinionsphere! Yeah, just what we needed, another person blathering their views into the world like anyone cares, am I right? Point taken, but hear me out.
I go by Parallax Abstraction and I'm a middle-aged, life-long and proud nerd, currently living in a small town outside Ottawa, Canada. I've been passionately into gaming, technology and other nerdy things my entire life and have been on the Internet since 1994, just before it started taking off. I've worked in IT for over 25 years and am still going strong at it. I'm also a big animal lover and charity pursuer. To paraphrase Louis Rossmann, I'm not trying to change the world, I'm just doing what I can to clean up my piece of it.
I've made content in various forms for a number of years, starting with this, to YouTube, to live streaming, to a podcast and other stuff. The realities of life have put most of those things on hiatus and while I do hope to stream again at some point, I'm probably done with YouTube for now.
I have a lot of experience in nerdy things and a some non-nerdy things as well and I've got things to say about them, so that's what this is for and why I've brought it back. I make my points directly and I don't suffer fools, strawmen or arguments made in bad faith. Don't expect fake platitudes, nor for me to avoid calling out bad takes. However, my views are also well researched, I admit when I'm wrong and welcome conterpoints and respectful debate. I hope you enjoy it and join in the conversation if you have something to add. Don't be shy, let's talk! Just be cool and I will too.
Here's some more history and info, if you're interested.
Geek Bravado actually originates way back in 2012. I wanted to improve my writing and ability to express my thoughts on happenings in subjects I was into and couldn't easily do that on social media and the forums I was using at the time, something that's become way harder in the era of algorithms and mob-enforced group think. It actually served both goals for me very well. I went from paying to host it on WordPress, to archiving all but a handful of the posts I thought still held up and putting those remaining ones on Medium. Then I realized Medium sucks and is just full of SEO baiting AI slop and things kind of went idle for a while. But now I'm feeling the urge to write again and decided to roll my own self-hosted site using Ghost. Best of both worlds, no hosting costs and more creative freedom.
The name Geek Bravado comes from a scene in an episode of The West Wing. Sam Seaborn is sitting in a diner with a friend who's studying to be a lawyer and she's stuck on a question. Sam gets impatient and just condescendingly blurts out the answer to her. She looks at him and says "Thank you for that display of geek bravado." That always made me laugh and I thought it was a perfect name for this endeavour given my goals for it. Somehow, the domain was actually available too!
My old posts were almost always long-form and rambly, which is why I didn't keep most of them. I like to think I've improved my writing a fair bit since then and while I'll still publish some more essay-like things from time to time, I'm hoping to post more frequently, but also more succintly, in the interest of both my time and yours. At one time, I also put up audio versions of the posts for people like me who often find listening easier, but I don't have time to do that for all of them now, and I'm not cool with using an AI tool to generate them. I'm still going to try to do it for the bigger posts, but it'll only be when I can and they might not go up day and date with the written ones.
This site is a hobby and isn't monetized, aside from the occasional use of affiliate links, which aren't about the money anyway. However, if you do like what I write and think others would too, please subscribe and share it around, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Thanks for reading!