It’s a bitterly cold day here in Baltimore. It’s 5 degrees above freezing, and that’s the high. The chill can be nice, but the building I work at is drafty and the electrical is subpar, so if we plug in a ton of space heaters, the power goes out. (I should just open Netflix in Google Chrome on my laptop, it’ll probably raise the temperature of the whole office.)
It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a blog of my own. Sure, there’s BuzzerBlog, but that’s a specific focus, and any time I’ve asked the community if they want to see off-topic posts from me/us, the answer has always been a loud and clear “no.” But I do wanna talk about stuff! And I want to do it more than in more than 300 characters (sorry, BlueSky). So, I’m resurrecting my blog.
Will I be posting here with any kind of frequency? Probably not. Maybe if I get a stick up my ass about something. Maybe if I want to share something that is too long for Bluesky or whatever. But I’ll be here, and I’ll make sure that I share things out on the social media platforms I’m on, so you don’t have to check my stupid website every day just to see what I think of Bonne Maman jam or who my top music artists are this year. (Unlike everyone else on the planet who has Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music or even Amazon Music, as a stubborn millennial, I’ve never let go of my MP3 collection, I’ve just moved it to a server and run PlexAmp and last.fm, so my 2024 Wrapped is actually going to deliver in January, as God intended.)
The Internet has gotten a lot more challenging to enjoy over the past few years. When I was growing up, there were social media networks that you could identify today as social media networks, even if they weren’t called that. Places like LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace—websites that made it easy to fellowship and connect with people. You’d make your page, then you’d find people or groups that interested you, and you’d connect with them. You’d have your Friends feed, where you could see what all your friends were saying. If you wanted to talk about something else, you’d have to go to that community. As I saw it, Facebook was one of the main social media networks to implement an algorithm, which tried to predict what you’d wanna see based on what other people are seeing, and now we got introduced to new things, new people, things we didn’t ask to see.
Now, there’s more “things we didn’t ask to see” and it’s absolutely annihilated the things I want to see from the people I want to see. You have to jump through so many hoops on Facebook to just see what your friends have said, in a chronological order. BlueSky’s getting there, but old habits die hard, and making new feeds isn’t particularly simple or easy. All of that to say: I think there’s value in having a space I can curate and shape exactly the way I want, and there’s no better place than the website I already own and pay for.
