Untitled. Yeah. That'll do.

I never know quite what to do with a blogging platform. Every time I've tried to blog, I've made it like two or three posts before I've dropped it. The blogs I had when I was like 16, back in the 2000s, I'm very glad they're gone. I had some colossally bad takes, back then...

They told us the internet was forever. In the past decade or so I think we've all learned that's a lie. Stuff just disappears, and unless some crawler somewhere scraped it, and rehosted it, it's gone. I don't think a single photo posted to my Myspace page still survives, and I'm okay with that. Google probably has my Google+ posts deep in some archive that'll never see the light of day, but I don't see why it would ever be used against me. I've posted far more incriminating stuff since then.

So, what do I do here? Do I embrace the ephemeral? Treat this as a long-posting tool on Bluesky? Should I instead host a blog on my "server" (an overworked Raspberry Pi that is steadily becoming inadequate for the self-hosted services I keep adding to it)? What should I blog about? Should it be anything? My clumsy attempts at self-hosting a few services for both my own privacy and just reliability and resiliency to dark corporate manoeuvres? Should it be all stream of consciousness drivel like this? These are the important questions.

I do know I will likely use this as a second place to post my abortive attempt at a webcomic. I did a few comics, and plan to do more. I just struggle with inspiration sometimes. Often. All the time. I could write about that, but who wants to read about how someone else is feeling a lack of inspiration, when they're also struggling with inspiration for their own ambitions? Sure, looking around and seeing people creating great works of art when you're staring at a blank page is demoralising, but I think wading through a swamp of people saying they struggle with inspiration can be just as bad. If you're reading that, all you're seeing is that there is no hope.

I could talk about what I do to feel inspired, how I spark my own creative impulses sometimes, but it doesn't always work for me, and it may not work for you at all. Watching my creative process is like watching someone fail to start a barbecue. The lighter sparks, the gas doesn't catch, soon enough I'm unwittingly swimming in a cloud of propane, and I scare myself when the barbecue does finally light on my next attempt. That's what creativity is to me. Struggle, explosions, fear of trying again.

I don't think I really need to talk about self-hosting services. Go watch someone who knows what he's doing. Jeff Geerling or someone. I just read other people's guides and get half of the guide wrong and then bash my head against problems nobody else in the world seems to have had, until it magically works. I don't know anything.

I don't know what I'll put here. Maybe this will be the only post. How many blogs only have one post? A lot, I bet. How many Wordpress or blogspot or blogger blogs got churned under the waves as services changed hands or got terminated? All of those lost thoughts. The in-the-moment thoughts of people throughout their little slice of history. So much of that is gone, now. How many people posted about their struggles and are no longer with us? How many people still with us have forgotten the person they were when they made those posts on now-vanished blogs? Now, that kind of stuff is all trapped on social media. One day Facebook will shut down. One day Twitter will cease to be. We can only hope.

Social media seemed to democratise the promise of everyone having a homepage, of the old web, without the hassle of hosting things, setting up a webpage, paying for a domain, all that crap, but it slowly turned into a vicious machine for twisting the experiences of others against our own feelings of depression or inadequacy, siphoning off our lives with tiny hits of dopamine just to keep our eyes on the feed.

There's an essay in that. I've ranted at length in the past about what social media was, what it became, what it could be again. Maybe I'll write that here, one day. Spoiler alert: I basically think MySpace was the perfect form, and we should go back to that. It was more like a forum account with a focus on profiles. I'll get into that in another post, maybe.

So, I ask you, all zero people who'll see this, what will I be writing about? I kid, because you'll have little to know input in that.