On opening a blog (Or: why resisting the urge to disappear off the Earth?)
This is pretty new to me. In fact, I can only think of a few blogs I've ever followed, and not one with much interest. I was never big on the whole "megaphone" approach, or "projecting an image" that can easily border on self-idolatry. I've seen what happens to people getting devoured by their own internet character.
After all, my internet baptism were forums. I figure that if you're born before the turn of the millennium, it was either one or the other. I enjoyed lurking, occasionally commenting, maybe a bit of trolling (I was a troubled and lonely child). My first forum was one where me and my middle school friends simple shared our favourite stuff. Games, music, comics. No set topic, no grand objective or ideas to expand beyond our tribe. It was essentially a mini-community space, already somewhat social-coded in the way every topic felt a bit like a blog post.
Then socials came, which were an unsurprisingly successful combination of the two major approaches. You shared your stuff, people shared theirs, all in the same space, and in communication with one another. "Users" became "friends" then "followers". Interweb and tech-positivity quickly becoming the monopolic data-gobbling hellscape we all now know and hate.
Never really digested the Meta platform(s) either. It was easy to see beyond the veil and the hypocrisy of everyone, even myself. Maybe that's why all my attempts at self-promotions feel so insecure, but at the same time I cannot really escape the urge to play that game. I know it works (engagement, projecting, publicising), and I really want/need it to work, so why not? It's probably this weakness of mine that led me here now, and stunted my progress overall.
If it wasn't clear, I've always a been awkward.
I'm getting tired of moving my online presence is search of a community or in the ideal of "networking". I opened an Instagram business page that I hate (my whole deal being mostly writing and that social being mostly visual should have been a clue, but I let it pass in hope of, again, building a network), then moved to reddit which is slightly more down my alley (bots and perverts excluded?). Then more recently Bluesky, where - hey, I can attach my itch.io handle and with some coding mumbo jumbo this might lead more people into finding my books? Sign me up! And yeah, I'm also not consistent in keeping these things up to date, because I honestly lack to capacity to give meaning to "posting" as an action, without having anyone that I know will read me. None of my friends follow me through this stuff, and it feels like a terribly lonely ordeal. This will probably be one of the last few attempts of it.
Soo... This blog will definitely be more than little nobody me writing about my stuff like a sad 14yo. But it will also be about my stuff, my projects, my writings.
If you've read up until this point, thank you. A little more is to come.