In order to keep the topic focused for this particular post, I'm only going to share pictures that I took in Taiwan here. These are my “most beautiful photos of the Beautiful Island”.

I mostly enjoy landscape and cityscape photography. I have no real formal training in it other than a class I took in high school. I've also used an iPhone camera to take all of these. I have a Sony Mavica that I bought on Facebook Marketplace last year at home, and I'll probably start using that to take more interesting pictures some time soon...

#1 Snake Kiln Ceramics Cultural Park (Shueili Township, Nantou County)

#2 Skyline viewed from the Maokong Gondola (Wenshan District, Taipei City)

#3 Hamasen Railway Cultural Park (Gushan District, Kaohsiung City)

#4 Baguashan Great Buddha (Changhua City, Changhua County)

#5 Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (Songshan District, Taipei City)

All of these pictures are also available in higher quality on Wikimedia Commons, where I usually upload my better shots. The link to my profile page is here.

I am very proud of my work! Thank you for taking a look.

First, as you can see from the blog title, my name is Brady Perkins. Some of the posts on this blog will be photo collections, since I consider myself a little bit of a hobbyist photographer. But I also have writing that I'd like to start doing.

I have a pretty wide range of interests, but they usually connect in some way. And as a responsible member of the global network of twenty-somethings, a lot of those interests these days have to do with a larger perspective on issues that people often talk about in vacuums or where there are only a few canon opinions. I want to do my duty as a citizen and add to the discourse rather than only reading from it. But I need to offer something real for it, too.

As a friend told me last week, I'm a person of strong fixations. There are always a few sets of issues at any given moment that I suddenly take a strong interest in, research and try to uncover and learn about thoroughly. I want to write a resource for myself to use to catalogue those so that I can practice making better arguments for my interpretations of them. I also want the writing on this blog to have variety.

But the posts that I want to write are about making arguments against narratives that I think miss important facts, or that have missed a certain perspective. I'm hoping to generate some writing that's good enough to make me feel like I've accurately expressed my thoughts. I've found that there's always a time/skill trade-off, and by increasing one you can get away with less of the other. Starting with enough time to get good is the way to increase skill. So there will be long gaps between posts.

I'm starting to write this blog after having maintained a blog just writing about my personal experiences for a couple of years. I'm actually pretty happy with a lot of my writing on it, and if you want, you can still visit it at brpe.codeberg.page.

In contrast to that, my writing on this blog will be an exercise in my ability to write about topics, and persuasively, so there will be a little bit of a learning curve for me.

For an example of the kind of content I'm hoping to write, here's a post spotted in my old blog: a book recommendation and way to frame current events (although the articles here will be longer).

I really appreciate anyone coming from my old blog for supporting me in ending that one and putting this together instead. This is a time when my goals are pushing forward a little, and I'm trying to give myself new motivations. So, if you want to come back, add me to an RSS feed, start using an RSS feed so you can add me to it, or add me to your bookmarks bar.

Hope to see you back when I start posting for real. Thank you for the read!