The Art Of Not Asking Why

Note from 4/10/2025: I decided to take these videos down, so they’re not available anymore.

Another S3 video I recorded yesterday! In this one:

• I’m working with a Mac
• Getting back into photography and Lightroom Classic
• Some personal details and why now
• My gaming adventures in Dredge

If you watch and have opinions, I’d love to hear from you 🙂

Note to self:

If you’re using apps made by (and made for) Linux folks, use Homebrew. Sure there’s a pretty macOS package. It works nicely until it doesn’t. And you’ll only find out 2 weeks into using it and waste time digging into it. Use Homebrew. #macos

It’s important to be silly. With yourselves, with your close ones. Being silly is closer to the real us than when we have our mental clothes, for meetings or as we go about our errands.

So be silly. Be humorous. Have fun.

My name is Shay. Pronounced like Shy. And yes, I’ve been asked if I’m shy too many times. Maybe there’s some truth in this question.

I’ve been JTR for a while, and before that just JR or Josh Rollins. Why that name? I’ll leave it to your curiosity and your Googling abilities for now.

What I’m thinking this particular morning, after sleeping too little, is that it’s time to stop “branding” myself. I don’t like the word “brand.” It leaves a bad taste on a personal blog such as this one. I prefer authentic communication, with humans on each end, exchanging opinions and ideas.

Nothing too dramatic here, no big revelations after being online for 20 years (has it been this long? Yes, I guess so). It’s simply time.

I’m still an advocate of privacy. It’s an important topic that should be discussed more often. People know far too little about giving out far too much personal information. But privacy is not hiding for the sake of hiding; it’s about owning your information and having more control over who you share it with and when.

At this point, with my face on several videos I’m creating and intimate conversations in several locations online, I don’t want to be a brand - a thing. This will be a process. People know me as “JTR” in several places, not to mention that it’s my username on a couple of platforms. It’s a starting point then.

So allow me to reintroduce myself again as me, and now we can move on.

I’m going through my old posts (on my old blog) to choose what to put up again here, with the old posting date. I don’t like how I wrote these posts. Part of me wants to tear them down and rewrite them, but that’s cheating. I’ve made progress writing, and that’s proof. It puts things in perspective.

As I watched The Lost King 🎬 yesterday, I was thinking it was a movie about a passion gone too far. The visions of Richard III, the R in the parking lot, the happy ending. Turns out though, it’s a true story.

That really got me thinking. If someone can have a “hunch” like this after doing some research, become a part of a society dedicated to uncovering the truth about a king long lost, and pinpoint the exact location of his royal skeleton… what else can we do? What else don’t we do that we otherwise could?

We can’t ignore science and facts, but on the other hand… can we? Isn’t much of what we know today to be science once considered magic? Who’s to say that we won’t discover a secret about our soul and its connection to the universe we now just consider to be superstitious?

Hmmm 🤨. Hmmm? 🤔

This is the second time I woke up tonight, 10 minutes ago. I’m in the bathroom, on the shower carpet, slowly relaxing from a strong gag reflex. I woke up feeling bile coming up my throat.

The first time, about 3 hours ago, was a weird dream where I chopped people into food products. Mostly sausages, but also chicken, and potatoes. Possibly tomatoes. It wasn’t the horror factor that woke me up, it was because it was boring. At some point, when I started on yet another human, my brain just went “nope. This is too boring, I’m up.”

Now that I’m fully up I think I must have eaten something bad with my family last night, but I didn’t. The food (100% vegan, by the way) was excellent, the kind that makes me miss home cooked food. And the humans, they were excellent too, close family.

Maybe it’s all a subconscious message, or maybe this is what happens when I fall asleep on my stomach pressed against the matt, full of food.

Whatever it is, I need more sleep. Sitting and writing this provided enough time for my stomach to calm down. So, thanks for listening. I’m going to try and get back to bed now.

Another macOS “secret” I got to share with the micro.blog community: When blogging from your Mac, hold down CTRL + CMD + Space to bring up the emoticons complete with a search! Ha! Wish I knew this during the March MB photo challenge!

Smart Folders, where have you been my entire life?! I’m starting to really not hate #macOS over here.

Spring is here, and some of the flowers in the nearby garden are blooming