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]
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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.