In Response to Alex Schroeder's "Why Blog?"

=> 2025-01-25 Why Blog?

Earlier this week on antenna, I saw Alex's response to @adam@social.lol's blog challenge. It poses the question as:

The Blog Question Challenge asks the following questions:

• Why did you start blogging in the first place?

• What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

• Have you blogged on other platforms before?

• What’s your favourite post on your blog?

• Any future plans for the blog?

I started blogging - though we called it journalling at the time - sometime in 1998, though the dates are probably off, and the earliest site I've been able to fish out of the Wayback was from mid-1999. I consider mid-99 my official start, lining up nicely with a point in my life where it felt like everything was changing for the better. I was going to university. I kissed a crush in the rain under streetlight after our friends' electronica concert at a local school. Another friend tried to proposition me later that summer (I chickened out at the last minute). I fell for one of her friends, who she'd met online, and who was in town for the summer. All this is kind of to say that everything was both changing and extremely fluid, and I was reading other people's journals, teenagers like myself, in Canada and the UK but mostly in the States, who bought domains and hosted their friends and spent hour upon hour not posting on social media, but writing about their lives. I fell for reading about other people's lives.

In that sort of haze, staring down the new millennium, the internet still a bright and shiny thing, I felt like I had to write, and I did.

So that's the how: I've talked about it before, and how after just a couple of years, people were migrating to LiveJournal, and it felt like the fire had gone out. And it had. But I still wrote on LJ, at first regularly, and then sporadically, for more than a decade. And after that, it was the age of social media, and though I was hard at work on other projects (a big software project, since released, and actively maintained, as well as my literary writing, which I got back into in the mid 2010s), writing about myself, publicly, online, was something that had kind of fallen away. Apart. I'd started because of the community, all the people roughly my age who I'd read when I went to one of their sites, clicked on their "links" page. There were always more people. There were always more journals. Until there weren't.

So this was all ancient history until I met Clarissa (left_adjoint) online by way of a conference, and through our DMs, learned about this whole gemini thing. It took a year before I decided to take the plunge, and got started at rawtext.club (later moving to tilde.club). In the quiet of geminispace I saw a place where people were once again writing, rather than just posting. It was, and is, inspiring. I started writing some poetry and doing some pixel art on my tilde account. I eventually started a gemlog, but the poetry came first.

But then the writing came. The gemlog. Later I'd start a neocities site, with a journal, which again felt very 1998, only this time I was using CSS instead of spacer images and tables (as we did, well, before CSS). And in writing both, I've tried to keep it simple:

• No frameworks. I want to write in the native format: gemlog here, HTML at neocities. I don't want to write markdown and run a script to convert it to the right format. Down that road is a multi-platform existence that hedges against the existence of any particular one. I want to feel as if my writing depends on the particulars of wherever it's being presented.

• Not notepad, but... Back in the day I wrote everything in notepad, because that's what I had in Windows 3.11 (what I was using to make sites on my old 486 for GeoCities, and later, elsewhere). But while I'll happily use an IDE, or VS Code, for other sorts of projects, they're overkill, and I largely want something that'll do syntax highlighting and stay out of my way. So, vim.

• Backups, regularly and always. I don't want to rely on having to fish stuff out of the Wayback ever again. I track everything in git and keep it in private GitHub repos.

As for future plans, just keep writing, and keep writing in advance. I usually have a few weeks worth of posts unpublished at any given time, and this gives me space to not worry about what I'm writing next while trusting that, every couple of weeks, I'll write several posts in quick succession. And as for favourite posts, here are a few:

=> Make Things and Leave Traces: On Choices and Inevitability | Notes on Coffee | The Poets are Posting Their Ws on Twitter (CW: Sexual Assault and Violence)

=> gemlog