I don't know why it's so hard for me to start writing these days, but I am really hopeful this blog and website will help.

I suppose a good enough start would be: why a blog and why now?

I'll save the longer introduction for another time, but I think some context is in order: as of writing this I am in my early-headed toward-mid-30s and have been online since I was ~8 years old. I've journaled on paper here and there, most candidly during the tumultuous highs and lows of my early 20s, but they were sporadic false starts. I tried going digital and used my tumblr for blogging around the time when I was an undergrad in college, which is kind of what I want to recapture here. And then there was twitter (rip) and private twitters (bad experiences there), and then twitter became the cesspool it is now and I deleted those entirely. Finally I moved to blusky to keep up with others but hesitated to put as much of myself out there like I used to. There is a reason I'm not linking any social media to this site. Today's internet of social media "microblogging" sites run by assholes really screwed me over and turned an already precarious habit into reclusive silence. And even when I did use these websites, it never felt QUITE right. I was always nervous to be TOO genuine.

Now I rarely if ever post anything personal or thoughtful online at all because of how shit the internet has become, and how painfully aware of the shit I am. Long gone are the days of carelessly posting on corporate owned websites without considering what was being done with my data and who was looking. I can't even pretend to not care. For one, I don't want my words or images picked up by the grotesque ai machines that run rampant these days -- at the very minimum I am not trying to make it easy for them to find my stuff. To think I used to post pictures of my self on these sites!! All those unheeded warnings about the dangers of the internet really make you think now-- I was naive to think the fun internet would last much longer than it did. Outside of the death of the internet bs, I'm also not interested in being perceived by a certain class of online randoms. If you are here on my page, you're lovely, I am sure, but you also very likely know exactly what and who I mean. I'm absolutely not interested in my stuff "doing numbers" or going viral.

I'll take pride in my only big numbers viral post on my twitter being about the cgi werewolves in Van Helsing (2004). That (admitedly kind of boring outside the monster effects) movie is over 20years old and I still think those are some great werewolves and werewolf animations.

The problem I have with how things are now is that I have things I wanna write about and share (in a limited sense)! I don't want to be silent!

The solution I came to? Make a personal website with a blog!

This is my space (harhar) and I'm going to use it for my needs; if someone like you stumbles upon this blog and wants to read my silly thoughts, totally cool! awesome! maybe we have similar interests or experiences! BUT I want to be clear, despite my little adressing the audience asides, that this blog is not going to be written with an audience in mind. It's not here to entertain or inform, although those would be neat side effects. At the end of the day this is for me, so I can leave some kind of mark behind, so I can record pieces of myself in time and look back and remember what I was doing, how I was feeling, what excited me, where I have been, who I was with, and so on.

I'm not promising this blog will be interesting to anyone besides myself but it will exist. I will make it so.