| The First Blog | |
| Date: 6/13/24 | Mood: Tired |
| Listening To: September by Earth Wind and Fire | |
The first real blog post! I've been meaning to write this for a week, but that's how it goes on this bitch of an earth. One of the concerns with starting a website is that ultimately I don't have that much time to dedicate to something like writing a blog and setting up a website.
I've really shied away from writing for the last few years, I've continuously claimed I'm the one person in my peer group who hates writing, and that isn't necessarily untrue despite how much I flirted with being A Writer in the past. I'm trying not to be too precious about it this time, and mostly focus on just blogging stream of consciousness about the things I'm thinking about as they come to me. This isn't going to be an anti-professional web haven if I'm too focused on producing Refined Work. I'm trying to carve out a new/old way of living here.
Writing the blogs in HTML is also a thing I've found kind of intimidating. I've finally settled on writing it in Visual Studio Code, where I can save a blog post template and just copy it into new blog posts, and save the backups to my dropbox automatically as I write. The plus of having a mostly HTML site is that damn everything's really small when you aren't super devoted to multimedia presentation. At some point I'd like to produce some actual art and maybe a small animation or two, but for now it's just some text pages that amount to nothing. It's nice to be reminded coming from the world of 100 GB video games and blu-ray rips of movies that most information is just astonishingly small. We don't have to live in the bloat of storage.
I also just feel kind of bad about how rough everything looks. I know that's the point, but I have to go through the deprogramming myself as part of this. With this blog I'll be posting about the website on main, probably, as I write new blog posts, and it's a little anxiety inducing for me. I'm hoping to carve out a space here that's deliberately different to my podcast persona, I'm not exactly looking to do written criticism in my free time when I do a bunch of spoken criticism for my job. But also there's things like book thoughts or album reviews that I want to get out somewhere. These days I post them to my locked twitter, but that's ephemeral in the extreme and frankly I think it's smart to begin pulling away from using social media to hold long term information I care about anyway. So maybe there'll be some very uneducated music reactions on one of these pages at some point.
The actual thing I keep thinking about is how much I miss livejournal. I spent a good chunk of the late 90s and early 00s pouring out all my teen angst on LJ, like a lot of online people my age, and I would give a lot to be able to read all those posts and cringe down to my toes about how earnest and weird and going through it I was when I was 15. But also it means when I was setting up the CSS for this blog, I was like 'how close can we make this to an old LJ skin?' and I got as far as seeing if I could find a pack of the Roshi PaleFaces gifs for the moodlets when I went 'knock it off you're delaying writing to just pretend this is important' so here we are doing this instead. But no really, if you know where to find the Roshi PaleFaces moodlets in bulk, let me know. I know where to see them all on a website, but I don't want to have to download them one by one because I'm lazy. Too much work for an indulgence like that.
The main thing the blog needs is some sort of bio, but I don't even have any idea how to sum up myself for that. I've been lucky enough to coast on the notoriety of my podcast work for a long time, so I don't really ever have to introduce myself online, I can just point to that and be like 'you can figure out what I'm about' but like ... I don't know. In some perfect world there will be people who eventually find this site who have no idea about the podcasts, don't give a shit about Gundam (and wonder who that lady is saying Welcome to Blogging on the blog page) or anything else. I don't know. Maybe this is the human contact version of the desire for infinite growth. I always want to be meeting and affecting new people. Number goes up. Maybe it's okay to peak as a personality, and do stuff for nobody but myself.
Anyway I guess that's enough for the first one of these. This weekend is a three pod weekend but I don't have to watch Gundam and I don't have ALF reading for next week, so maybe I'll find some time to update the website a little more. I don't know how to add an RSS to the blog, so please check back on your own accord when you think about it, or maybe follow me on twitter at @em_being. I don't tweet very much anymore, honestly, so you'll see the latest blog post mentioned sooner or later if you scroll down.
You know, assuming I keep this up. It'll be very embarrassing if it turns out this was just like a six week dalliance and nothing ever gets updated again. Not the end of the world, but I'd feel bad about it.