A New Direction For This Blog

September has come and gone. Autumn is in full swing now and everyone is prepping for the winter. September was a busy month for me, both personally and professionally. I started traveling more again and wrote up a storm on my Medium account.

I finally hit a nerve over there and have been experiencing viral follower growth as well as decent earnings. These earnings aren’t big enough to replace my day job earnings, more like extra money for beer. The subjects of my viral articles are climate change and the stock market. I’ve been pretty heavy on the climate change ones because gloom and doom (fear) seem to drive a lot of traffic.

I do believe what I write, so my voice has been very personal and genuine. I’ve been sharing a lot of contextual personal stories too and that’s made me worthy of a follow and few claps there. The main reason for writing in that genre was coming back from my trip out west. I wanted to write about nature more and I dove head first into it.

On the flip side my stock market articles attract some notoriety because of the greed factor. People want to get rich, especially in this shit storm of an economy we have. So many people are exploited these days, so damn many.

I also wrote some articles on eroticism, sex, and relationships. I even posted about my experiences in erotic photography. Those articles generated a good chunk of money but they weren’t evergreen articles.

The topics of sex, money and doom attracted a lot of traffic for me, with cooking breaking into the top 3 at random times. Yes, I even wrote about how much I love cooking with a cast iron pan!

Overall, I’m a very blessed and lucky man. I’ve done well in life over the years by making more good choices over bad ones. The best choice I ever made was marrying my partner, but that’s for another post altogether. My investments have done well too, and I can say that I’m a millionaire now, well on paper anyway.

I’m blessed and lucky to have a wonderful career that this website started for me and I will always be thankful to RapidMiner for giving me a shot. In short, my life is damn good but lately, my thoughts turn toward my legacy.

I don’t know how many readers I have these days but if you exist out there you’d wonder why I switched blogging systems again. I know, you’re groaning and I deserve all the shit you throw my way, but I did it this time to save costs and what will I leave behind on the Interwebz.

I’m doing this because I’ve reached an age where a lot of people I know have started dying around me, both friends and family members. I put a lot of time and energy into this blog, writing tutorials and whatnot, and I don’t want it to all disappear one day because my surviving spouse canceled my credit card. AWS is ruthless that way.

I’m also very busy raising my kids and very involved in my local government but I plan on stepping back from all that volunteer work and have only one board I’ll volunteer on. It’s good to volunteer and be a part of your community, no matter what it is as long as it’s positive.

The past year has brought me a lot of joy and sadness. I lost my father last November and I lost my dog a few months before that. We all struggled with the Covid shutdown and managed to escape the disease until May of this year. It finally got us except for my son, he must have an iron constitution.

Writing was there for me the entire time. I journaled, I wrote in Medium and my Blogs. I even joined a pen pal writing group and have writing pals from around the world. I made a goal when I turned 50 to spend the rest of my life writing and I expect to ramp that up over the next few years.

So what about this blog? Am I going to shut it down again? Am I going to change blogging platforms again? I have no freaking idea but for the first time in a long while, I feel free again. I feel free to explore new topics and revisit some old ones here.

I think that new freedom came when I moved back to blot.im and when I found out that RapidMiner was acquired by Altair Engineering. An old chapter in my life has finally come to a close and I feel ready to tackle the next challenge.

To that end, I began to think about what the title of this blog means. Neural market trends, what the hell do those three words mean?

Well, it can mean anything. It can be whatever I want it to be and that’s both terrifying and liberating.

The one thing I learned over the last few years was to be genuine and let it all hang out. Write till you cringe. Perhaps that will be the direction I go in here? Maybe I’ll write about the markets or startups. Maybe I’ll continue posting images of various stocks and interesting links. Or maybe, just maybe I’ll share my journey to success.

Until then, thanks for reading and being along for the journey.

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