What’s that thing people write in their blog and then never return again? I feel like Cory Archangel made a project out of it. Someone like that. Anyway, the point is that people start a blog full of determination and wonder at their own bravery, and then quite understandably never return.
And so it shall probably be with me, though I at least have the sunk cost of about an hour of working with Hugo to try to make it at least somewhat passably useable both in the back end and the front end, so that might give me at least a week of runway? What if I were to add recurring to-dos? What about adding it to my burgeoning habit tracker? How about I make my life miserable as a way to write more? They say the greatest writing comes out of tragedy and sadness, right?
The truth of the matter is, I write all the time already. I write documentation for my videogames using the fabled Method for Design Materialization, I write quite a few emails, I write a diary about being the chair of a university department, I write a few words here and there about the movies I’ve been watching, I write Morning Pages, and other things too.
I used to have a blog! It has been defunct since, what, 2019? Started it in 2006 according to my records, when I still lived in New Zealand. A bit over 1,000 blog posts it seems. Lost in the wind. Well, not actually lost in the wind, since all the files are on my computer, but pretty lost to you at least, reader. I used to love blogging! It felt like a happy medium between a diary for nobody and an academic/formal publication for nobody. Instead, some relatively carefully formed words, practiced daily, for, back then, a few people who cared to glance its way.
I’ve been driven to start another blog mostly by the sleight of hand of life. I was a judge and then juror for the most recent Independent Games Festival and I ended up looking at around 80 games in the course of a couple of months. Quite a few of those games are worth mentioning in a way that goes beyond just saying “hey did you ever play Growth Spurt?” to random people at random times. That’s the sort of project you might undertake on social media, but social media is dead! And even if it’s not actually dead, it’s a horrible place to take the time to share your thoughts because they just vanish into the ether and end up feeling like they’re worthless by definition, fleeting. I’m no fleeter.
So here we are, staring down another blog. Self-hosted. I suppose there was always Medium, or Substack (though I think they’re cancelled, right?), or something else with a name. Platforms. Well you know what? I am a platform. I stand on myself. I want to be a guy with another thousand Markdown files on his computer of stuff he wrote. That’s just the way it is.
I’m also sort of trying to write a book right now, and I can’t help but feel some sort of rickety bridge between total privacy and the horrors of trying to get published would make a lot of sense. Knock off the rust, practice some turns of phrase, do the dance.
So here we are. Well, I’m here, you probably aren’t.