september 4 etc
I've written a blog post every (week)day since August 11. While I don't think this constitutes the longest writing streak of my life it is most definitely my longest blogging streak.
I was never much of a blogger back in the day because I never knew what to blog about. My first stabs at blogging were around the time I started writing professionally (pRoFeSsIoNaLLy) in 2005.
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Aside:
This isn't to say I wasn't mucking about online before then, because I was. I had an email address in 1995. In the late 1990s I was part of a handful of online gaming communities (word games and puzzles, not AAA titles). My main username (I had three) combined the title of an anime I liked and the name of a Shakespeare character I loved. I never had a MySpace page, but I was a depressed young man with delusions of artistic grandeur and the beginnings of a drinking problem, so I 100% had a Deadjournal.
/Aside
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In this blog's second-ever post, I wrote the following:
I'm in the process of overhauling my entire approach to being online, and I like how it's going so far. This is about joining Bear but also more than that.
A few weeks later I expounded:
Part of that is about figuring out how to blog in a way that feels true to me.
Later in the same post:
I'm trying to figure out if [combatdavey.net] should be about one thing or about everything. I am large and contain multitudes, so shouldn't those multitudes also be here?
The long and the short of what I'm getting at is that the big blogging streak (#tbbs) that started on August 11 wasn't the result of mapping out juuuuuust the right strategy and making actual decisions re: what parts of myself I would put here and what parts of myself I would keep to myself. It was the result of realizing that it didn't matter.
For most of my life, I was fixated on the idea that there was a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. I'm not talking about morality, where such prescriptions are useful. I'm talking about strategy, reasoning, and impetus. When you are a person whose brain works a certain way (iykyk), you get bogged down in the details because everything you do is about understanding and then performing accuracy and correctness, which itself is about achieving (earning?) validity.
One of the reasons I was nEvEr A gOoD bLoGgEr was because of a preposterous notion I had —— which itself was based in a certain reality —— that if I couldn't commit (and conform) to a schedule I shouldn't blog at all. This is (was?) an idea that people used to talk about at like, WordCamp events and other conferences. The dictate was that bloggers needed to commit to a schedule and stick to it to be successful. An associated dictate was that you could always post more frequently than your scheduled rhythm but never less frequently. Like, if you committed to posting 3x/week, and did it for a while, you had to stay at 3x/week or post more than that, but you couldn't post less than 3x/week or you were, IDK, in danger of losing your audience (or something).
This wasn't a hard and fast rule. It's not even a rule at all. It was a protocol that was someone's idea that other people talked about so much that it got lodged into my head as a law. When I say that I am a "person whose brain works a certain way," what I am saying is that I ingested a strategy and filed it away as a rule and as I could never quite figure out how to blog within the context (confines?) of that rule, I didn't blog at all. Or much, at any rate.
Yesterday I had a question for Herman, the guy who created Bear (i.e. the blogging platform you are likely reading this on), so I emailed him. After his (amiable!) response, I started looking through his old blog posts and found a link to a site I had forgotten about but was so, so glad to be reminded of.
At the bottom of that site (which I am going to visit every few days for the rest of my life, I think), there's a little bit that goes like this:
What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves.
This is largely true of many, many problems.
If there is a point to this post, it's probably you can just do things but, also, when you do, little pieces of you that have been waiting to be activated (for lack of a better word) will rise to the surface and show themselves. And even though being known is a mortifying ordeal, rediscovering parts of yourself you thought were lost is exhilarating.
On y va!
🎵📺 There was a time when Television was very important to me and whenever I hear this song I return to that time. (Spotify)
😂⚰️ I went to the old Gawker website today for no reason and saw something that made me grin like the Cheshire Cat. Then I clicked through and full-on chortled. (Gawker)
🖼️🖼️ Spent a few minutes exploring Google Doodles earlier today and thought you might want to do so as well. (Google)
😂🎭 A couple of days ago I posted about how SNL had announced its new cast members. Veronika Slowikowska (from Barrie, Ontario!) is one of them, and I didn't know much about her, so I checked out her TikTok. I'm now 100% sold. (TikTok/@veronika_iscool)
😂♀️ While we're talking about TikTok, a reminder that Kylie Brakeman is funny as hell. (TikTok/@deadeyebrakeman)
🏀🎙️ I took a break while writing this post to record new episode of Red Black Comeback, a basketball podcast (heavy focus on the Raptors, Trail Blazers, and WNBA) that I do with my buddy and Silverpine CEO Jon Hays in Portland, Oregon. That episode will be up tomorrow, probably, but we have a bunch of others you could check out if you were so inclined. (redblack.fm)
🚑🤖 Americans are about to get screwed over in re: healthcare in a new, exciting way that is so messed up I don't even know how to talk about it coherently. Yes, AI is involved. How did you know? (Futurism)
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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