I bring this up not to wave a flag of seniority, but because it’s genuinely the thing that shapes everything I write. I’m not chasing a platform’s algorithm this month and hoping it holds up. I’ve watched too many platforms rise, dominate, get acquired, get gutted, and quietly die to mistake any of them for permanent. What’s actually constant across fifty years of this is the person doing the watching and the writing, not the tool he happens to be using to do it.

That’s really the throughline behind everything I publish, whether it’s under MacGizmoGuy or under WaterlilyBear personas.

MacGizmoGuy started as a voice to talk about Mac-compatible gadgets and accessories, and it’s been running for nearly 20 years now. But the more interesting part of that site, to me, was never really the product reviews. It was the chance to write about the actual arc of personal computing as someone who lived through every hairpin turn of it, not someone reading about it after the fact.

I’ve got decades of computer graphics files still preserved through hardware migration after hardware migration, going back to when I was publishing ray-traced renders in Atari ST Format magazine in the late 1980s, work I built on a machine most people today have never heard of. I did SGML documentation work inside Fortune 500 corporate IT back in the 1980 & 1990s, long before “HTML” “structured content” and “markdown files” was a phrase anyone used casually. I’ve been a working technologist for the entire modern era of computing, and I write about it the way someone writes about a place they’ve actually lived, not a place they’ve only visited on a map.

My retirement persona WaterlilyBear came much later, but it’s really the same expertise instinct pointed at a different subject. I’ve been growing water gardens since I was a kid - for roughly fifty years, water lilies and lotus especially, and these days that means about two dozen patio tub gardens here in the Palm Springs desert, coaxing plants that evolved in temperate to tropical wetlands into thriving in triple-digit heat and container culture.

What most people don’t realize, unless they’ve been paying attention as long as I have, is that the world of ornamental water gardening has gone through its own quiet revolution over my lifetime, every bit as dramatic as the one computing went through. The waterlily varieties available to a home grower today, the color ranges, the hardiness, the hybridized cultivars bred for smaller container life, would have been unrecognizable to a gardener working forty years ago. Hybridization has done for garden plants roughly what silicon did for computing: quietly, patiently, turning what was once rare and difficult into something abundant and accessible, one careful cross at a time.

So that’s really who’s writing here, on whichever platform you happen to be reading this on. Someone who’s spent half a century watching two very different worlds, computing and horticulture, transform through the same slow, deliberate process of accumulated small changes finally adding up to something unrecognizable from where they started. I write about the current state of both, plainly and from firsthand experience, because I’ve actually been there for the parts that led up to it. If there’s a value I can offer that a hastily-generated summary can’t, it’s that: the texture of having actually lived through history, not just having read about it afterward.

I am Russell T. Bear - Mac Gizmo & Gadget Geek Extraordinaire -AND- “I am The Waterlily Bear. I am the Lorax of the lily pads! I speak for the waterlilies!”

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