Why?

Like many people I've increasingly found myself doom-scrolling through content I don't care about and which I quite often actively dislike. Whilst this is obviously not ideal in and of itself, I was becoming increasingly aware of what impact this was having on my attention span and how I engaged in other activities.

Sitting through TV series and movies, barely taking it in, it essentially becoming background noise. I got about halfway through episode 3 of a Bulgarian-noir crime drama and realised I had genuinely no idea what was going on.

Had there been a murder? Possibly. Or a kidnapping? Maybe.

Gaming whilst distracted led to an ignominious, infuriating and entirely avoidable death in the north-west wilderness area of Chernarus.

As for reading, forget it.

Twenty years ago TV and gaming were seen by many as wastes of time, something you did when you weren't doing anything more worthy. Now, they're something I have to actively try to do "properly".

So I decided to write.

Beyond university I haven't really written before, a few false starts here and there but they were very much lacking in identity or purpose. Any writing I'm required to do for work is usually technical in nature with little room for individual expression.

This time it feels like I not only have an idea of what I want to do with the blog, I'm also aware of how important it is to be able to consider and communicate your opinions authentically.

The age of AI is upon us and whilst it may have its uses, I definitely see those around me coming to depend on it more and more. Not just to automate the unthinking tasks but increasingly to abdicate the thinking elements as well.

I'm also aware that they likely see me doing the same.

Consequently the blog is intended to force me to consider, clarify and communicate my thoughts so that they go beyond slightly nebulous, short-term musings which vanish as soon as the next doom-scrolling session starts.

Why Bear Blog?

I'm quite a techy person, not in any great depth but I'll dabble with soldering custom hardware, I'll try to code, I troubleshoot tech issues for those who won't or can't. I've seen the way tech and the web environment has changed over the years and it's probably safe to say it's not generally for the better.

About a year ago I got a new phone and during the set-up process I was asked to give some random tech-company permission to serve me ads.

I found this intensely irritating, the fact they were just desperate to enshittify the phone, not as part of a trade-off in a sort of "you watch the free content, you watch the ads" kind of way which is annoying but understandable, but in a "we're contributing literally nothing but an annoyance, let us do it so we make money" sort of way.

Since then I've been much more considerate of which tools I use online. Paid email providers, open-source OS etc etc. Gradually moving towards more considered options.

I was aware of all these issues before of course, but that request from whichever tech-company it was acted as some sort of tipping point.

Bear Blog seems a great project from that perspective but the simplicity it offers also lets me just write. The more features a platform has, the more time I'm likely to spend "optimising" and the less time actually writing.

Almost all the blogging advice I see stresses the importance of images to stop people from drifting away from too much text. Not only do I not want to bother trying to find the perfect illustrative image, signing up to stock photo sites, resizing, adding alt-text and so on and so on and so on, I'm also making a conscious decision that in the context of this blog at least, it would be actively detrimental to the overall ethos.

So a minimalist blogging platform which, for a small monthly fee, doesn't fuck me right off, seems like a good idea.

Why Watches?

I'm conscious that, compared to many of the blogs on here, a watch based blog may seem out of place. Some sort of needlessly consumerist theme, probably written by someone out purely to get free product and affiliate links from whichever company is willing to provide them.

And that really isn't the case.

There's something about watches which clearly speaks to a lot of people and, to me, it can't just be due to their qualities as potentially expensive physical items.

When consuming watch content elsewhere I'm often struck by questions or ideas which never seem to get explored more thoroughly.

The comments sections are usually not the place for slightly longer form responses, anything beyond a "looks great" or "overpriced" seems like you're shouting into the void.

Hence, here I am.

The intention is to take those ideas, explore them in more depth and consider how that changes or reinforces my initial opinion. The intention isn't to review individual watches, it's to review ideas relating to watches.

That's not to say I'm not going to discuss particular watches from time to time, just that it's very much a secondary consideration.

If that sounds like something you might be interested in, cool.