Trying This Blog Thing Again

I’ve been “blogging” on and off for more than a decade now. I struggle to decide what to put out there: I have so many thoughts, and I rarely have a time or place to share them. Every place sort of has its own issues: I love text-based social media, but the best we have is forums like reddit, which are not a great place to post “opinions” or thoughts, because they’re intended to be discussion forums, or Twitter-style (are we seriously calling it “X” now?) platforms that incentivize very short posts, which in turn incentivizes writing the pithiest version of your statement possible with no nuance whatsoever, which incentivizes reactionary statements and makes productive conversations very difficult. Twitter is a great place to get your ideas seen (or used to be, before it completely died and became a dark nightmare hole), which is why people like Cory Doctorow split up their articles into Twitter Thread and post them that way, but also, that lends itself poorly to long-form content, and much better to angry internet rants. There’s tumblr, but tumblr is… tumblr. I’ve used Instagram stories before as a medium to share my thoughts in a text form, and I like the flexibility of the format more than Twitter, but also, everything is only up for 24 hours, and how on earth are you supposed to archive those things?

(Of course, sometimes I like that stuff is only up for 24 hours, because it lets me test ideas, before I write them for real, but then, I just… don’t write them for real.)

I don’t know what it is about the blog format that speaks to me, but I like it. I like reading thoughts a person spent time putting together, especially when they’re on a topic I’m interested in. I have lost hours to reading blogs: dev blogs, author blogs, academic blogs, fashion blogs. One of the fastest ways to get me to respect you is to have a blog with coherent thoughts in it. I get that the current meta for long form content is the YouTube video, but videos with long runtimes intimidate me, because then I have to commit a massive block of time to watching the whole thing. It’s so much easier to dip in and out of a written piece as needed.

And honestly, I don’t have it in me to make videos. That is way too much friction for getting an idea out. There are things you can do with video that can’t easily be done with text, sure, but whatever. It is what it is.

So, this is a new website. I used to use wordpress.com, but I got sick of not owning the site and having random ads served everywhere. And honestly, I started using that site when I was 12, and I feel like I’ve outgrown it. Despite the fact that I’ve deleted the old content, and the fact that the page has gone through multiple theme changes, I’m not a fan of the old domain, and I still emotionally feel like it’s a site I posted things on when I was a child. Part of my inability to update my blog has been not wanting to use that site. But now I have a space that I own, which is nice, with a name and design I feel comfortable sharing with people.

So yeah, let’s try this again!

(Who am I kidding – updates are still going to be horribly sporadic, lol. Writing is hard; finding time to do so is almost harder.)