Over the past few years, thanks to a multitude of factors, I’ve gone from near daily writing on a variety of topics to going multiple months before having to basically force myself to write something of substance.
You can blame a multitude of factors — burnout, depression, stress, frustration with the meta conversation of many subjects I like, and so on. Writing just stopped being fun and started to become more work than anything else.
It was never intended to be. While, sure, I’d love to make reasonable side money from this website, I know that’s realistically never going to happen. I just don’t play the online personality game that everyone else does. I’d rather write honestly about subjects I care about and share real opinions, rather than just pump out soulless top 10 lists and follow the hive mind on everything and anything trending. That’s just not me. Never has been, and never will be.
To that end, over these past few years I’ve tried a few different times to get things going again here, written the typical entry for it, and then had massive gaps again. It’s frustrating, but the time wasn’t wasted — other projects got the attention they needed, and I’ve most importantly taken some time for myself, which has been long overdue.
With changes to the blogging landscape which have mostly, incidentally, been triggered by Musk buying Twitter a year ago, I’ve found myself a bit annoyed that my reach is now cut to practically nothing, since the Twitter API changes made a few months ago killed my preferred sharing platform, Triberr (more to come on that in its own article) I’ve found myself also feeling freed, and that my content can both be more natural (I’m no longer considering how it will be taken on Triberr) and I can write and publish whenever I want, as I no longer feel I need to adhere to a “best time to publish” that seemingly every platform has.
Content also doesn’t immediately get shared to Twitter / X, which is actually kind of nice — while it is a bit annoying to have to manually plan each post on the platform and do them manually, I can also trivially control what does get pushed to the platform and what I leave here for simply if you wish to find it. Sure, I could enable and disable sharing previously, but that was something I felt I needed to keep active to keep things the way they should be. The psychology of blogging is weird, especially when you lay that over the somewhat odd way I think about things and the quirks I have.
Anyway, while I hate that my reach has dropped like a brick, I do feel better in that I can write a bit more freely about whatever, and have this site be what it was intended to be as a public expression point for subjects I have an interest in, be they entertainment, history, science, or tech — from events that changed the world to the dumbest things on the internet, I’m a man of many interests and thoughts, and I’d like to share those interests and thoughts here for those who may be interested.
Hopefully I’ll keep this up and things will start looking quite normal around here again. Until then, uh, yeah, we’ll just see what happens.