Like many folks—even folks who have been online for decades and grew up on, in, and involved with many different iterations of “Internet”—I find myself spending a lot of time on social media.

To my detriment. Social media¹ is momentarily engaging and gives the illusion of being both connected and informed, but it’s not good for the attention span and I feel like I’m running in circles, chasing my tail some mornings. Do I need 15 takes on Bad Thing™ before I’ve had my coffee. Do I really need to know how The Main Character of the Day™ messed up so badly that they became the main character of the day.

The link to the article editor in the back-end of my CMS sits on my bookmarks bar, just five little icons away from the Bluesky butterfly, and is just as easy to click. Except I never do, these days.² Blogging can be just as valid an outlet for my errant thoughts, and this editing window on a monitor could just as easily be my sidekick and companion during the workday, instead of the endless doomscroll on the phone. Blogging used to be the way most of us shared things online. Well, “most” in this case being the folks who had stepped away from early Facebook and hadn’t yet been trapped by Instagram. Or Twitter.

Why did we blog? It was the thing to do, for a time.

There were all kinds of blogs, back in the day (insert your slightly out-of-focus, sepia toned memories from 2006 here) and while some blogs grew (into news sites or fan sites or “content”) a lot of blogs just… stopped. No fault, no blame; and I know exactly how it is. We have limited time and attention, and as the internet mutated and developed and grew several new appendages, other bits of the internet figured out how to grab more of that limited time. The itch to share could easily be scratched elsewhere, and the back-and-forth conversation and community found new places to roost.³

This blog [rocketbomber.com] was always a bit of a shambles, without a focus for most of its existence and slowly becoming a bookselling-and-publishing adjacent space because I was employed as a bookseller at the time. That’s what I felt like writing about, the rabbit holes I’d dive into. It shouldn’t have survived.

It persists because I do — and because I’m spending the $21 a month (plus annual domain registration fees) to keep this and the rest of my Online Empire intact. Mostly because a couple of those .coms I own have email addresses attached (also, now, 20 years old) and I can’t really afford to ever let those go.

And so. The Blog, this blog, sits there unused. A elegant relic of a more civilized age.

Oh, I suppose I do get the old dog out of its comfy bed for a quick walk around the internet, every now and then. When I’m feeling nostalgic about the blogging-internet-that-was or when the social media platform du jour is either in full melt down or does something so egregious we all threaten to leave in a huff.

Occasionally I have something genuine I’d like to share, or a flag I want to run up a mast, and having the blog as that place—my place—online has been a comfort.

I still have plans. I will likely open a new storefront on Internet Street (metaphorically speaking, and mentioned on the blog previously) where I can share my game design stuff⁴ and as the design ideas grow into games and resources and physical objects, that’ll be the home and space for that portion of my creative output. But I’m also getting an itch⁵ to do some long-form writing on media. Given what I like, “media” means TV and movies, and more sci-fi (and superheroes) than not. I could wrack my brain for a new URL and blog title for writing about sci-fi but I’ve done that, I did that (all the way back in 2008) and the brand I came up with then will serve admirably now: Rocketbomber. The shout the anguished anime protagonist makes as they launch their mecha special move, and more prosaically, the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar III, the original RoBo [rocket bomber] program.

I’ll be starting with some “Marvel Mondays”, mostly just my thoughts as I rewatch various bits of the Disney/Marvel corpus ahead of the December premiere of Doomsday. And after we’re all well and truly sick of Marvel, I’ll probably shift over to Mythic Mondays, as we plumb the back catalogue for 80s sword & sorcery & fantasy flicks, and then to more generic Movie Mondays (if I have to) after we run out of schlock fantasy.

The trick, to both projects, is to step away from the time-sinks, and get back into the writing habit. [/mblind]

..

¹ primarily Bluesky, in my case: the methadone of the reformed twitter user

² current exception, ah, noted.

³ Mostly discord, these days? I think?

⁴ OH LOOK an actual topic to hang a blog on! what a crazy happy idea!

⁵ an itch social media can’t scratch. and no, I don’t want to make a YouTube channel about it either.

Things don’t always go as planned, and in this case (even with a domain name purchased and a fair amount of intention) we don’t always get the online name we might want. It’s an old story; I wanted to call my very first blog Parenthetical Aside (lol. so young. so naive.) but of course that was, like, everyone’s first pick for a blog name, even back in the early early 2000s.

So I’ve edited the announcement to reflect that. We are now going with [*New Blog Name To Be Determined], which is a lovely placeholder.

The name I had intended to use (the midnight cartographer) is now apparently a new series of middle-grade fantasy books, and that’s on top of a pre-existing YouTube channel, a “cinematic alternative rock” artist on Bandcamp, and the other series of middle-grade fantasy books that was self published a couple of years ago. The space is getting a little crowded. So far I’m only out around $15 for the domain name registration, which I’ll just not renew at this point, and we’ll go for an easy re-brand.

When? And with a new blog, does that mean no more updates to the venerable RocketBomber? I guess we will see…

27 months.

The last post to this site was on 31 October 2023, and that means I’ve paid my web host for two solid years and haven’t bothered to blog anything. Just keeping the lights on. And for a couple of email addresses, along with the domain registrations…

OK fine, the monthly “hosting” bill is about more than just this one blog. But it is criminal how long I’ve neglected it.

I have a longer list of things to do for 2026. There are a couple of static pages that I need to set up, landing pages for both my professional site and another for the business site, after I file for the DBA and pay appropriate local registration and administrative fees. In parallel, I need to get the Itch site up and running so that when I hit my publishing deadlines for 2026, those pdfs have a place to live and maybe even sell (priced pay-what-you-want for this first year). Once I convince myself I can hit multiple publishing deadlines in a single year, for 2027 there might be a Patreon or some other way to subscribe, and we’ll do it all again.

And while I also want to blog more, in 2026, it’ll be at a new URL. RocketBomber was and is my personal site, it was about bookselling when I was a bookseller, and about feeling lost in the wilderness and casting about a bit when I more suddenly wasn’t a bookseller, a decade ago and more. RocketBomber has been a solid “brand” but it was never the perfect fit; like a lot of domains I’ve collected since 2000, it was for a project that never quite launched. When you start planning, you buy a dot com (like a normal person) because you don’t want to be in the situation where you have a great name but someone else has the website.

This year, when I write, I want it to be on a topic I am enthusiastic about, a hobby I actively enjoy, projects I’m doing on my own time because I can’t help but work on them. I want to be inspired, I want to share the joy, I want to have fun and hopefully I can communicate all that. So I’ll be diving into RPGs, fantasy maps, fantasy fiction, and table top games as [*New Blog Name To Be Determined], and producing my own game-related stuff on Itch, as Interpunct Games (and also under the Fantasy Mile brand).

This isn’t a goodbye. I’ll likely still need a personal blog for personal things, especially since the new site will be narrower, topic-focused. But the energy and activity will be over there, and RocketBomber will only get its [typical?] once-a-year-or-so updates.

It’s been a year since I wrote Beautiful Twitter Sunsets, and roughly a year since the ownership and management change over on Twitter-that-was, and after something like 13 years on that site (and who knows how many words written) I have deleted my account. My accounts, actually, I had more than one. The alts rarely updated but one was “Available Quests”, a handle that posted D&D, table-top appropriate quests like some kind of guild job board and the other was “Timeline Operations”, a customer service account for time travelers stuck in this awful splinter timeline. TimelineOps was always a fun character to step into and the jokes mostly wrote themselves as I interacted with people.

Anyway, both of those and the main account deleted.

Like everyone else, I am waiting to see what comes next. Mastodon is probably the technical (and tech) leader in this race but has a horrible brand, a fractured user base, and something of a reputation among the folks who haven’t used it yet. The ActivityPub protocol is the key jewel in Mastodon’s potential social media crown, but we’re still waiting for another major player to implement it [Tumblr, maybe?] or for someone to build a new app and website from scratch that will federate with Masto and the rest using ActivityPub, while also resonating enough with users that it gains traction.

The other ‘open’ option that is 1. not open, 2. wholly owned by a private company, and 3. actually gaining some mindshare out there is Bluesky. Bluesky, or bsky.app, is using the AT Protocol (yes, they capitalize it even though you’re supposed to say “at protocol”, not sound out “A. T.”) which is similar to ActivityPub in that it will allow different platforms to cross post and ‘federate’ and let you take your online social presence with you to whichever platform you’d prefer (that uses the AT Protocol). Except that the AT doesn’t connect to anything and no one else is using it. Bluesky is succeeding where a number of other platforms ain’t by basically looking like and acting almost exactly like twitter from, say, 2017 while also restricting access behind invite codes while they go through their “Beta”. The first batch of invites went out to journalists and a few other heavy hitters so they’ve managed to make a site that you’d want to read with accounts that you’d probably like to follow and then immediately closed the door to everyone, only opening it a crack.

It was just six weeks ago that Bluesky hit a million users, despite technically being around since 2019. It could probably grow to ten times that size in another six weeks if they opened the door to everyone, but the folks that run Bluesky are being very careful. Users are great but users are also the worst thing about a lot of social media.

If you go to the bottom of this web page you’ll find links to my accounts on both of these new platforms¹. I’m spending more time right now on Bluesky and will probably be active there for the foreseeable. Though the social media I probably have more fun using is Tumblr, which is kind of hilarious since I was on Tumblr even before making a twitter account in 2010. Everything old is new again.

Twitter-that-was: You were awful, and then somehow over the past year you got worse. You will not be missed; mourned a little, maybe, because you were a part of our lives for quite a long time, but not missed.

There’s not a replacement yet. Like everyone else, I’m still waiting to see where we all land.

¹ The Links section is baked into the CMS and almost trivial to update, when I remember to update, so if you are reading this in 2 or 3 years time and we’re all on some new second-life VR/AR social media platform called StupidGoggles or TormentNexus or whatever, my account for the latest-greatest social media platform should be down there too.

Some of you have likely noticed that the URL interpunctgames.com redirects to this blog — mostly by clicking a link on one of my online bios and discovering yourself here.

I do have plans. I also need to file a DBA with my local county and get a business license from the local city and some other odds and ends (including actually making a separate web site) and I don’t currently have the luxury of gobs and gobs of free time given the 40 hours a week I spend in other gainful employment.

The non-existence of that separate site seemed like something worth noting, though, so I’ve noted it.

Plans (for 2024)¹ including getting on a regular publishing schedule and providing actual downloads (free on itch.io) on my way toward longer-format products and uniting some of the currently unrelated bits-and-thoughts I have floating inside my head into something larger and more coherent.

More information, or at least some hints, about the 2024 schedule and the over-all plan behind it will be coming later this fall². If you can recall some of my sporadic blog posts from earlier this year I’m working on fantasy maps, among other things, and trying to figure out appropriate map scales and templates. That’s part of it, and will probably be the bigger part, but hopefully I can also drag my undiagnosed lump of brain matter away from hyperfocusing on just that and can also move along other, currently slower moving parts of the project too.

Thanks for reading, and for not kicking me out of your RSS feeds.³

In other housekeeping here on the blog: I’m not sure if this means more regular updates here as well as on the new site. I certainly enjoy sharing my progress and process, and I could certainly be a lot more systematic in how (and how often) I share. We shall see. Watch this space, I guess.

¹ I had similar plans for 2023. and 2022. and, um… yeah ok fine it’s been a while.

² Just a reminder that we just started fall/autumn and ‘later this fall’ is technically any time before 21 December.

³ should I not have mention that? no… wait… don’t do it now…