Digest 20251202 – Bear blog?

We’re in December now, pals. One month left of 2025. I’m actually quite excited about December.

The biggest reason is that I managed to book 9 days off work for Christmas! This was a result of poorly planning my annual leave for all the rest of the year, but hey, I’ve not had 2 weeks off at Christmas since I worked in a school (when it was forced and unpaid)! I am literally counting down the days (17) until my OOO can go on.

We also have our Christmas tree up now, which is lovely. This year it was my turn to use my decorations. I have lots of brightly coloured baubles and glitter-filled ones that I made myself a few years ago. We alternate whose decorations we use, my Husband prefers his ancient traditional ones he got with his ex display tree from Wilko’s many years ago. I put his special Warhammer baubles up, though, so he’s happy with it!

The cat (because it’s always Kitler) hasn’t knocked it over yet…

I also had a nice Chirstmassy day out with my siblings and mother to the Christmas market at Chatsworth. I do love Chatsworth, I’ll take any excuse to visit. I am not a fan of Christmas markets normally because they’re usually way too crowded and overpriced, but since we went mid-week in late November, it was the right level of busy to be enjoyable. Consequently, I spent a lot of money on posh hot chocolate and sheep’s wool ear muffs.

🐻 Bear Blog?

I spent this weekend doing some financial admin (and setting myself up a system to track adult things like savings maturity dates and subscription renewals), which reminded me my hosting subscription runs on in 2026 and I need to decide by April if I want to make a change.

I don’t actually know what prompted this thought, but in the last couple of days I’ve been seriously thinking about the prospect of moving to Bear Blog.

WordPress.org is fine, but I do get aggravated with with all managing plugins and security. There are a lot of basic things it doesn’t do big default that I end up having to have plugins for. Most recently, so my sodding featured images show up in my RSS feed.

Might be nice not to have to bother with all that.

I’ve been having a little play about with Bear Blog, and things that appeal:

• Simple interface, no bells and whistles I don’t need.
• Don’t have to have a million plugins.
• Don’t have to deal with hosting.
• Loads pages really fast without all the trackers and other crap.
• CSS is cleaner and easier to work with! (The possibilities!)
• Good value pricing, and offers a lifetime subscription for a reasonable one-off cost.
• “Toast” button for people to show appreciation for a post.
• An email link for discussion instead of comments could encourage more connections. No comments are a pro and a con; they do stress me out sometimes.
• Write posts in markdown, which I’m used to with Obsidian and would mean I could draft and format in my notes.
• Admirable manifesto.

Concerns

• The biggest one is that there is no bulk import/bulk migration path, which means I have to manually copy & paste in 460 blog posts… And reupload every image… That’s a massive amount of time.
• Writing words in Markdown is great. Embedding links and images can be a pain in the arse.
• No comments might mean less engagement.
• There are no post categories, only tags, so I would need to rethink how I structure my blog.

I feel excited about it right now, but that might be from having fun trying to recreate the look of this blog over there. I have 4 months before my hosting runs out, so that would be loads of time to migrate everything over, if I do want to do it.

I’ll probably pay the £6 for a month and see how I feel about it once I’ve got all the features to test out.

🚶🏻‍♀️Movement

I’ve been shit with getting out running lately (and pushing myself to improve), and my walking average took a little dip. I am still keeping about 8k average steps a day so I’m happy about that – it’s double what I was at last year!

In the Modor challenge, I’m at 1,285 miles being attacked by an Orc at Sarn Gebur!

📺 Telly

• A Merry Little Ex-mas (Netflix) – I like bad movies, but this was shit (the main characters are dick heads), the only thing that kept my watching was the daughter’s Harry Potter boyfriend (loved him), and Chet was a great character, I just wish he’d been in a better movie!
• The Family Stone (Netflix) – Alice Levine is always on about this movie on Instagram. I’d never seen it before. It was weird and very dated (holy moly SJP character says some problematic shit!), Luke Wilson’s character is unsettlingly creepy, but it was kind of sweet in the end. But weird.
• 3 Body Problem (Netflix) – Why do people say this is so good? It was average for the first couple of episodes and then increasingly ridiculous until it was actually making me laugh. The dialogue and performances are stiff AF too. There is also a shocking amount of smoking for a modern TV show!
• Kath and Kim (Netflix) – maybe my 4th or 5th rewatch? I will watch this forever. It’s nice, it’s different, it’s unusual.
• Motherland (BBC/Netflix) – thought I’d try this. I’ve watched series 1, and it’s alright. The lives of middle-class London parents couldn’t interest me less, but I do like comedies with ugly characters, and I’d heard it’s good. I think this is the first thing I’ve seen Diane Morgan in here; she’s playing a ‘normal’ person and not an exaggerated character like Philomena Clunky or Mandy. I have to say Liz is my favourite.
• The Other One (Netflix) – I spent most of this amazed to see Katia from Stath Let’s Flats as a ‘normal’ uptight English girl. It took a while to warm, but I did find this heart-warming.
• Doctor Strange – I enjoyed this one, Cumberbatch is great in it, and the magic is cool.
• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2 – also great, really enjoyed this. Every time I rewatch thes,e I love Rocket more, I think he’s my favourite. Him or Nova.
• Thor Ragnarok – I was trepidatious to rewatch this one, it used to be a favourite, but I worried it was tainted by Love and Thunder.. and yeah, it is a bit. It would be so much if they’d cut Korg and all that shit out.

What else?

• I am hosting Christmas this year. Excited but also dreading it… I’ll probably be really stressed the whole day and not enjoy it.. unless I can work out the right balance of wine drinking!
• I’m loving being back into embroidery! I’m really feeling the creative juices starting to flow again.
• I made a lot of lemon curd tarts recently to use up some curd we had from the wedding hamper. Too many, we were eating four each a day 😅 had to put a stop to that. I’m not making more until someone buys us more!
• I’m enjoying my London Review of Books subscription but I am not keeping up with reading it in time for the next issue! I’ve got 2 unread issues stacked up. They’re meaty articles!
• I’ve been thinking about buying new jeans for years and finally got some Levis ribcage jeans. I love them, they make me feel stylish and they’re comfortable.
• We decided not to spend £350 on the Lego Enterprise D. We thought it’d be a sure fire preorder but we weren’t that excited when we saw it Vs the price. It’s just a lot of grey bricks, and fucking stickers.
• We found a new sofa that we love, just waiting on some Boxing Day sales. We sorely need a new one, the current one is very lumpy, misshapen, uncomfortable and shredded by the cats. A new sofa will mean time to redecorate the living rooms so we need to think about colour schemes!
• Still playing and loving The Outer Worlds 2!
• I love this photo of the cat stomping on our Lego City.