Welcome to GSY Physio!

My name is Tobar and I'm a Physiotherapist who lives and works on the island of Guernsey, which happens to be where I also grew up. This site is essentially my personal blog where you will find articles, posts, pictures, videos, poorly formed thoughts, rejects of projects, barely coherent ideas, and sometimes hopefully some rather useful things. Obviously some will be related to physiotherapy and strength & conditioning, because whether I like it or not, those things have weaseled their way into being parts of my personality rather than just my job (quite rude of them really). Thankfully, however, it won't be limited to that - you'll also get music, visual arts, food, places, and people I find interesting that I think are worth sharing here. Sometimes it will include links - sometimes it'll just be stuff posted here. Hopefully it'll be used more than once in a blue moon. The move to doing this was borne of a disillusionment with the practices of the current social media giants, and the state/purpose of modern social media in general. I will write about this in a bit more depth in future, and there are larger ethical considerations at play, but I think it's worth a brief foray into here:

As someone who is far from a luddite, I saw the internet's early values of free exchange of information and ideas, with an emphasis on open sharing between people from all over the world with different perspectives, as a particularly cool and aspirational philosophy. Forums, message boards/forums, then later social media and video sharing sites, I absolutely fell in love with. I was able to discuss things I cared about with people who felt the same, despite living on a tiny island where (at the time at least) I was a bit of an oddball with niche interests that few here I could find actually shared. Suddenly the world was at my fingertips: I could create and share with others, and they could create and share with me. Over the past decade or so, as the early places of the internet died or fell into disuse, all interactions have slowly been whittled down and funneled into taking place in one of a handful of websites, and the human element of sharing that made those early places worthwhile has been minimsed. Algorithmically driven content, engagement metrics, and an outright removal of human curation - not to mention, with the advent of generative AI, human CREATION - has left the internet feeling like an isolated, lonely place, with it's sole purpose being to keep your eyes attached to one page whilst novelty in it's shortest forms gets thrown at you over and over and over in a continuous cycle. It's depressing, and largely unpleasant. The sites are programmed to keep you on there, and they're designed to know which emotions and motivations keep you stuck on the page for the longest. You'll get the occasional thing you are actually truly interested in, but the research has proven to the platforms: anger, disdain, disgust, fear, and distrust - whether aimed at others or ourselves - these are the things we all become addicted to, and they know exactly which things trigger those emotions in each of us as individuals. The other week I was scrolling on one platform, and the videos I was fed were as follows: - A cute duck video - A political post about a different country and how things are going to be terrible there - A video of an unprovoked attack where a 50 year old man punched a 7 year old and a 10 year old in the face - again in a different part of the world The total time was about 3 minutes. This is what the internet has morphed into. I did not have to search or ask for any of those things - these are not things that I specifically wanted in my life. At no point did I tell the site "I would like these things showed to me", the human element was never part of it - the things I signed up for years ago are nowhere to be seen, but now I have a memory of seeing children getting punched in the face despite there never being any process where I was asked if that was ok. The change of social media is not unrewindable - companies and sites can choose to reverse these choices and processes, stop engaging in poor behaviour, allow human curation/creation and give back user choice - BUT.... The big existing giants won't do it - we have to make active choices, some which they have purposefully made challenging and inconvenient, to move to other sites, other services, and take control of our own sharing and ouput - share things with others in ways we see fit. For myself, this will involve being more active in crafting out my own little space on the internet - right here - and by choosing my social media more actively. I have already started deleting accounts on sites I think have become too distateful in their ethics and practices (which I will talk about a bit more soon), have started bit-by-bit detaching myself and building contingencies for the ones that are harder to leave so that I CAN delete accounts from them, and have started being part of ones I think are doing a better job at making the internet a bit less awful. BlueSky is currently, in my opinion, the one that is behaving the best out of all of the biggest options without being prohibitively complex, and warrants being a part of. You can find me on Bluesky at @GSYPhys.io -

For those who have been happy to take the plunge and visit a site off of one of the major platforms, thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing things with you here.