The Start of Yet Another Blog
Ever since around 2002 or so when I found out you could just make your own website and put it up for the world to see, I wanted to do that.
I don’t know when I first learned what Google was, but whenever that happened, I was regularly using it to search “SpongeBob,” I guess, and that led me to SpongeBob fansites. I had no idea how to make a website—I remember thinking Word could do it, and I remember emailing one of the fansite owners showing them my little 7-year-old attempt of what my website would be. That’s embarrassing—but they sent a very nice response!
In time, I found out about something no one remembers: MSN Groups. That’s what I used to make my own SpongeBob fansite, because you didn’t have to do any HTML or pay anything for hosting with that service. Of course, looking back, you couldn’t fully customize the look. But it was essentially a whole website.
Then a few years later I learned of Blogger. My interest at this time was Club Penguin, and, you know, in the late 2000s, there were many Club Penguin blogs. My concept of what websites should be didn’t really line up with blogs—I thought you’re supposed to have a home page welcoming people to the site with a list of the different pages! What is all this “new posts at the top” stuff? Nonetheless, I accepted this new format. I was also making videos at the time, but that’s another topic. Anyway, I had a Blogger, and then I moved to Wordpress for whatever reason. Kept that up for a couple years. I don’t really remember what I wrote about aside from “Hey here’s the news this week” like every other Club Penguin blog.
And then, in high school, there was Tumblr. I followed a few fun people on there but mostly I used the site pretty much as a journal (in addition to the handwritten journal I kept), with a focus on fun things I was into. Actually, I just now looked through my Tumblr for the first time since 2014, and…wow… I posted cringe. Of course Tumblr was always a different sort of site, but I definitely tended to post more like I did with traditional blogs.
And then in 2014 I made a new Blogger (honestly I think this was because I actually knew people in real life who had blogs there). And then in 2018 I was back on Wordpress again, and frankly I have no idea why. Really came full circle.
You know what really helped kill the frequency of my blogging, though? Twitter. Instead of developing one idea into something lengthy, just send out whatever little thought you have instantly. Even on Twitter I’d frequently write some very long threads—if you’re not on Twitter, it’s kind of like if you cut a blog post into dozens of tweet-sized chunks. In some cases, it’s more like you already hit “send” but then you add “AND ANOTHER THING…” in a reply to yourself, maybe several more times.
I find it fun to just send out random observations and opinions into the world, honestly. But, I think many of us have a sense that our use of Twitter might not be…healthy? I know personally I had to delete the app from my phone because it became a compulsion where my thumb would just reach for that blue icon—my brain kept saying “give me the good feelings from seeing new tweets now!!!” All social media can give you that problem but Twitter is just the drug of choice for me. Deleting the phone app was a way to keep it at bay, but of course I’ve still been visiting the website.
Anyway, with Twitter on a road to its death currently, faster than we could have imagined—and I doubt it’ll get off that road until a change in leadership occurs—I gotta say, I will miss following cool people if it comes to it. But I’m also starting to wonder: should I get back to developing the thoughts I send out into the internet void in a more careful way?
(“Careful” does not describe my teenage blogs at all, by the way; those were just some rambling journal entries, like I said).
But seriously, instead of just immediately sending out my thoughts on a song I hear, I could write it down, assemble a list of these random thoughts, and then send it out at the end of the week. It actually sounds pretty fun. So maybe that’s what I’ll do here. Don’t know if it’d be a regular thing, but I want to try it. Maybe a “These Would Have Been Tweets” post.
I guess even though I never pursued it in my education, writing is something I just gotta do in one form or another. I’ll always want to take my thoughts somewhere and blurt em out—and doing so on paper (or the digital representation of it) is usually easier than vocally, for me. It’s like my inner voice comes out better with writing than with talking.
So, yes, now this blog exists—yet another one from me. We’ll see what happens.