Shady Characters

Look: I am just a blogger. I can write about punctuation, or emoji, or books, or calculators, and I can hope that my readers will enjoy it. I can post about interesting things I’ve read or watched and hope that someone else will find them interesting too. And that’s great! I never imagined I’d still be doing this (and still taking pleasure from it!) a decade and a half after I started. Nor did I imagine that blogging would give me the chance to write and publish one book, let alone four of them, but it did.

But as 2025 rolls over into 2026, the happiness I take from blogging seems a little hollow in comparison to events in the wider world. I suspect I needn’t go into what those events are — if you have a TV, a newspaper or a smartphone, then you are already very well aware, and, moreover, it would be understandable if you preferred not be reminded at all — but for me, the spite, the hate and the intolerance that drive current events are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

My power to do much of anything about all of this is limited. But even so, I’ve decided to make a couple of changes to the Shady Characters media empire™ to avoid actively making things worse. First, I will be deleting my accounts on X/Twitter. I hadn’t used them for some time, but X’s descent into free-speech absolutism reached a predictable and abhorrent nadir with the recent CSAM scandal, and I cannot in good conscience leave those accounts in place. I’ll be deleting them in the next thirty days. If you’d like to follow me elsewhere, look for me on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Separately, and time permitting, I plan to move the Shady Characters blog off WordPress. There are technical reasons for doing so, but there’s also the fact that WordPress’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, seems to be speed-running his transformation into a dictatorial tech CEO. Mullenweg has a talent for picking distasteful fights: in 2025, his main company got rid of three hundred employees who disagreed with him about a petulant lawsuit against another company; in 2024, he publicly chastised a transgender Tumblr user amid allegations of transphobic moderation policies. Mullenweg is no Elon Musk, but he is starting to show the symptoms, and I would prefer not to be a data point which supports WordPress’s numbers.

Honestly, neither of these changes amount to much. This is only a blog, after all. But taking a small stand feels better than doing nothing, and, in the end, I’ll still be blogging and I hope you’ll still be reading. Thanks for your support!