My site has lain dormant for years. After posting a few stories on SubStack, and seeing how quickly they got lost in the fray, I decided that I would lose them in the fray here. Though I consider myself fairly adept in terms of technology, I’m still pretty much a babe in the woods when it comes to WordPress, the system I’m using to build and maintain this site. It’s the system that virtually everyone is using these days. This is mostly free and open source. When I worked for a web startup in the early 2000’s, content management systems like WordPress cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So bear with me. I’m trying hard, but this may be a bit clunky for a while.
About me
A displaced English major, I started my career as a news photographer for a suburban Boston daily (at the time, known as the Middlesex News). I worked for a while at one of the oldest and least successful video production houses in the Boston area and moved west, landing a series of video production and post-production jobs after a few years of a career change into IT. And back and forth between the two careers ever since.
I wrote for MacDirectory Magazine from 1999 until it ceased publication in 2024, and for MacInstruct, TechTarget/Enterprise Desktop and for a few other publications I’m sure you never heard of. Now, I’m mostly back to fiction writing, but I will still post some useful informational articles and some essays and commentaries here.
The odd artwork
You will notice my odd taste in artwork on this site. It goes back a long way. When I worked on the school paper in college, we had a stack of antique woodcut catalogs somebody found somewhere. We would toss them in the paper from time to time. I absolutely loved them. This was back in the 70’s. In the 80’s when I had my own computer at home (Macs, of course), every time I would come across an antique woodcut image library on CD, I’d grab it. They were always on sale because nobody else was interested in them. So now I have a rather large library on hand still find them incredibly useful.
About the site
To put it simply, this site is all about content.
Before I go into that further, I need to digress and say how much I dislike that word. Content. It gives the sense of commoditizing the work of creative people Cereal boxes have content. Freight cars have content. I can’t put what I find on most websites in the same category as that. “Content” is something that rather coincidentally is contained in something. Personally, I see the stories and articles I write as well as the pictures I take as something more than just content that fills up this website.
Okay. I got that off my chest though it doesn’t change much. rgetter.com will be a forum for displaying my work and my ideas, along with those of anyone who wants to comment on them. There will be no advertising nor even any influencing. I will be either relating things that I learned and discovered, short stories based on my experiences (loosely) and photography that I think will be somehow useful or entertaining for you. This won’t be a place where you will generally go to buy things. But there may come a point where, if I get enough viewers, I may start offering some of my longer work to paid subscribers (if I can’t find any actual publishers who are interested in it.) A lot more work went into that content, and it has been seen by enough people to reassure me that it’s good. But on the contrary, I think that my photography is all quite good and that will never be offered as premium content.
About AI
The only ways I use AI for writing is as an interactive thesaurus to help me find the right word to say something. At times, I may use it as a research tool, but I will always go back, and sanity check what it found for me. Some of my illustrations are AI generated (Adobe Firefly). I feel this is okay, because I can’t afford an illustrator yet and having one to help my story’s presentation on the web is very useful. I can’t keep digging into my woodcut clip art library collection forever. I try to do it discreetly and always with the most humble of apologies to my friends who are graphic artists (who I could never afford to use professionally).