It’s been an eventful 2020.. er, 2022
End of the year is approaching. Recent events have caused me to think about writing more publicly. Well, writing more. Longer than tweet-length, anyway. A short recap, in the style I used to publish many years ago on a blog that only exists in offline archives now.
At the beginning of the year, I was part of the team finalizing Aivo Health’s chronic pain recovery therapy product for (soft) launch in the US market. It’s now available, but primarily for clinical study groups, as the funding environment caused us to postpone commercial marketing activities. Great team, groundbreaking science, and a lot of promise. Wish I could show you details of the study results, but the research team will publish later. Anyway, with the commercial activities on hold, I’m just an interested stakeholder since end of September. Wishing them great success, because chronic pain needs to be solved!
Quite a lot of cycling, though not quite as much as I was hoping for. My big life goal is very much related: I really want to go on a biketour through Ukraine, perhaps along the Dnipro river, as soon as the war ends and it’s safe to do so. Following the events there has really woken up a lot of curiosity for what appears to be an amazingly resilient and rich culture, and I want to both see it myself up close, and in a small way, support their recovery. Haven’t made any more concrete plans for that, because who knows when this will be possible? If this sounds like something you’d care to join, please get in touch — a group tour would be a very welcome experience for me.
The last few months have been going into short consulting and advisory gigs, reading more, thinking about lots of stuff (but I should have written about that more!), and working on some hobby projects I don’t really have big ambitions for, other than just making my own life more interesting. Among other things, I crafted up a custom shelf for our living room, to to prove myself I could. Pretty happy how that turned out.
And of course the events around social media. I was on Twitter from 2007, largely because of my then-role at Habbo, but, as was the case with many, it became a really important channel for me over quite a long period. Very early on, I could see that the public timeline was powerful as an emerging-trends discovery tool, and that certainly turned out true during several world events, but recently in particular the pandemic science and the war in Ukraine.
Largely because a lot of my engagement had turned into very short-form, I sadly abandoned my earlier online presence, and indeed a lot of it only exists in archives now. And due to the debacle going on at Twitter, that now includes my shockingly-large, 30k tweets timeline too, which I took offline in the beginning of November. It is not, btw, easy to delete tweets history while retaining control of your handle. But perhaps more on that later.
Anyway — I’ll be trying to get back into the habit of writing more long-form. For now here at Medium, which I have enjoyed for its focused writing interface and some marginal distribution gains I’ve seen, but the fate of Twitter (and my experience with Facebook, which I also abandoned a few years back) has me thinking that I would rather self-host this stuff again. I’m not looking forward to needing to maintain the tools again, but regaining ownership will have its costs.
[ ChatGPT was not used to produce any part of this post ]
