I can tell from the visitor logs that someone is trying to hack, redirect, or otherwise gain control of this blog (why? the other thing I can tell from the visitor logs is how infrequent the traffic is) and while I can ban IPs (and will start doing so) I realize the futility there because any entity with the knowledge to try this kind of hack, however hamfistedly, likely also knows how to redirect so as to come at it from a different IP.

So I’m just going to put this on the front page for a bit: Whoever you are, just stop.

Obviously it’s not working for you, and having any sort of “in” to the back-end of my CMS doesn’t really matter when I have separate control, through the company from which I purchase webhosting, to the SQL databases and actual files. In a worse case scenario, I just delete the blog, reinstall, and restore from backups. Though I shouldn’t have to go that far. (But thanks for the reminder to to do a backup)

You can save a lot of your time by just not trying. As for my time: well, I’ll just keep monitoring the situation.

When you’re young and there’s a whole world ahead of you, you can feel paralyzed by what you perceive as near infinite options. What do I choose?

Two or three decades on, though, you can feel trapped by your choices. How is it that a decision I made at 17 now seems like it has closed off half the world to me?

The truth, of course, is that we can always make new choices, but the wisdom (or “wisdom”, or scar tissue) of past experience means we know that choices have consequences. It’s not that we can’t make the same kind of leaps into the unknown that many of us were willing to take at 22, we just know the trade-offs and compromises that we’ll be making alongside that leap.

The trade-offs and compromises were always there, we just see them clearly now.

At 17, I was an idiot who thought he knew everything. At 22, I was an idiot who would admit he didn’t know everything but felt he had the tools to learn anything. At 44, I know I’m just an idiot.

I’d love to chuck it all, move out west, start over, and take the sort of leap of faith I should have made in ’96 or ’98. I’d love to go back to school. I’d love to start over in another part of the country, some place that feels new and full of opportunity (even though intellectually I know the frontier closed more than a century ago, ‘the west’ calls, especially places that vote bluer than here).

But I still have family, and a move like that would mean putting a continent between me and them. My parents are reaching an age where my proximity might matter.

That’s the last tie, though. I’m not following my life’s passion or anything with the current employment situation and while my metro area is fine, economically, I’m not a huge fan despite having been born here. It would take very little to dislodge me from this slightly uncomfortable rut. A job offer. A relationship. Hitting rock bottom a fourth time.

There are changes I can make anywhere; the living situation doesn’t matter, really. If I’m going to be a writer, I can write from anywhere. If I’m going to “go back to school” I can do so just as easily with a library card and internet connection, so long as I don’t have to have the paper (getting a new credential would be better, though, to be clear). I can make resolutions (annually, even) to be fitter, or more social, or more frugal, or better in whichever way.

Even now, I have 20 years or more of “work” or a “career” before I can reasonably expect to “retire” (sadly, I doubt I’ll be able to retire) and 20 years is a long ass time. Outside of any restrictions I place on myself, or the ties I willingly double the knots on, I could honestly try anything. I have a lot fewer obligations and restrictions than most people my age – no spouse, no kids, no job I love and just can’t leave.

A whole world, even.

With a whole world ahead of you, you can feel paralyzed by what you perceive as near infinite options. What do you choose?

Any sort of daily writing can feel like a chore. For many writers, it’s a weight we take up willingly, but it’s still a weight.

There’s a cartoon I can’t find at the moment (at least not via Google Image Search) that shows Sisyphus of myth doing the thing, and at the top of his hill is a guy at a small desk with a typewriter. The boulder slips away, as of course it does, but there’s a conversation,
“Still pushing that rock?” the writer asks.
“Yep,” Sisyphus replies, “Still writing that novel?”
Which concisely sums it up, neatly encapsulating the feeling that writing is an endless, thankless, hellish task.

If you’re a journalist, this is the job: push it up the hill, and then start over. The assignment is open-ended; you can win a Pulitzer and that’s nice and all but doesn’t change the fact that you have to fill 50-odd pages of newsprint (or feed the starving web algorithms) every day. If you don’t, someone else will. If you don’t like it, go write a book or something.

Bloggers aren’t journalists, and we’re typically not paid [?] [I don’t think this has changed since 2014; if you have an update hmu] so the deadlines are different and the stakes are smaller. But it’s built into the etymology of the word: “web logs” are—or were—Logs: diaries & journals. They could just as easily be weekly or monthly or fortnightly or some other regular schedule but if there isn’t a regular schedule, readers sort of… wander. It’s not that they don’t like you, or that they’ve forgotten you, but you key into something fundamental when you can give your readers that consistent daily hit. Preferably at the same time every day, and they will never say so (ok some will) but they mean every day unless you’re dead and even so, some will lament you weren’t keeping a buffer. Or didn’t have the ending pre-written.

This bleeds over to twitch streamers now, and to YouTube channels, who have the same expectations that they’ll be on every day no breaks no vacations. And occasionally to specific hosts on YouTube; it’s fine that the channel chugs along and produces content But Where’s Tom’s Wacky Thursday WTF-Fest! Did you fire Tom? BOYCOTT. “I mean, Tom’s back now but his show just doesn’t seem the same since he took two weeks off last June for his brother’s wedding and father’s funeral”

Even if you personally have a passion for the material, reader expectations can become a weight.

10 years ago, when the previous version of my personal blog launched [now at archive.rocketbomber.com] I was publishing “bestseller charts” for manga on a weekly basis. When I started I loved the challenge of it – of figuring out how to get the data out of the barest scraps of info off of public-facing sales sites and attempting to find the underlying numbers, even if the best I could manage was comparative and not, you know, actual hard sales data. I stopped when Borders went out of business and other online retailers basically conceded the game to Amazon. But before the whole thing fell apart I was spending about 4 hours a week (and $99 a month for a host to run my web scrapers on VMs) to produce… drumroll please… basically a top 10 list. More often than not, a top 10 list not much different from what you’d find in the NYT books section on Sundays, or with a click on Amazon.

It was a weight. I carried it for a couple of years because I like the subject matter (manga and comics) and because I liked the mental puzzle part of it. But unless something changed, it wasn’t a weight I could carry without help—and when the change hit, it wasn’t to help me but to make it all seem kind of useless. I’d pushed that rock up Sisyphus’s hill and discovered why it always slips away from him.

Even when I had *loads* of time, I couldn’t always manage daily updates. When I was unemployed, the job of finding a new job typically took up about 4 hours of my day. There was time to write. (I did write, doing some link-blogging and writing a few music essays.) But even with time, I couldn’t always pick up that weight. When you’re feeling down and worthless, you can’t always put on the Happy Face to write about something you love, or even muster the energy for the srs bzns posts that don’t need your enthusiasm but still need you to, ah, write.

Even when you are employed and relatively happy and there’s food in the pantry and the rent is paid and all outstanding bills are 3 to 4 weeks out: it can be hard to pick up that weight. Here’s a new game, here’s a funny video, here’s Twitter. Distractions abound. Go for a walk. Do a little more research on that one thing. Lunch with a friend. Hell, clean the house.

When you’re avoiding the tyranny of the empty page, you can get so much cleaning done. I’ve cleaned a bathroom and recaulked a shower enclosure rather than re-open the working-document-slash-gaping-wound of a draft.

##

Why now?

I’m not sure, entirely.

I mean, the blog has always been here, I pay the hosting to keep it going. I even tidied up a bit, moved things around, installed a newer version of the CMS, and made everything ready to blog again…

And left it to sit for a year.

Midlife crisis, maybe? Attempting to reclaim my youth with a brand new red corvette convertible or harley, except I’m an online nerd so instead of rustling my thinning hair on the open road, I pop the top on a new blog platform and take it for a spin?

Whatever the motivation, I feel a little better and pretty much rested and so, I’m looking at the top of that hill. I intimately know this weight, and yet, I take up the weight. I start pushing that rock.

As has been the case since 2015, I’m having a little difficulty writing, mostly because of current events. It takes me longer to read the news, and longer to process it.

But there were also things going on in my personal life that made everything more difficult.

On top of real-life-outside escalating and dialing it up to 11, I was unemployed for a stretch leading into a much longer period of being severely underemployed, and I had to move twice in 10 months. I used to live in an intown neighborhood where I could walk to grocery stores & restaurants with easy access to transit when I needed it. Now I live out in the suburbs where I can actually afford* rent.

(*sort of) (I still feel like I’m being gouged by a cartel of local landlords)

So. I have felt a bit lost, “at sea”, and that’s even before you add on the successive annual burning of ever larger dumpsters as the splinter timeline we’re all stuck in attempts to single-handedly prove a multiverse by presenting a reality so ridiculous that this can’t be the ‘real’ real.

I can’t disengage from the world and just live in my bubble (even if it’s a comfortable little bubble with books and tea and beer, occasionally I have to go outside to resupply all three). Politics seems to have taken over my poor Twitter account, but I don’t want politics and activism to take over my life. I certainly don’t want to spend (additional) hours every day soaking up just how terrible the world is to then distill and bottle it all up in blog posts. So this likely won’t end up as a political blog, even if my interests—like urbanism, affordable housing, and best uses for public spaces—occasionally intersect.

So what do I write about?

A blog about entertainments and fan-stuff seems a bit… Well, what’s the analogy to use here? Whistling past graveyards? Fiddling while Rome burns? A frog just trying to enjoy his hot tub? But even if some people find it ‘inappropriate’, we have to hold onto the things that make us happy, the ‘normal’ things. We can celebrate works that are creative. We can have a little fun. So maybe my thoughts on comics and games and movies are still relevant, and still worth sharing.

What can I give the rest of you, at this moment, that will help? And is that ‘thing’ or topic or thesis (whatever it ends up being) within my means and my skills?

All questions rhetorical. Or more accurately, they’re questions I need to find the answer to myself

For the time being I’ll be continuing the stream-of-consciousness self-examination style for a bit as I get back into the habit of daily writing for public consumption. I’ll probably also start something longer (longer than 500 words anyway) and if that takes a shape I like I might even share. And I suppose if I can’t overcome either the writer’s block or the doubt, if nothing else maybe I’ll have more to say about that.

So I could probably start this post with a conjunction like ‘So’, an attempt to imply an ongoing dialogue and to evoke the hoary old trick of in medias res, to rather capably demonstrate (in one sentence) why I need an editor. And I could compound that sin (if it is a sin) with a sentence packed with even more parenthetical asides—which don’t always need parentheses, mind you, I know several ways to ramble—and it is this tendency to ramble and to try to commit to screen my thoughts more or less exactly as they form, multi-threaded, throwing off tangents, phrases spliced into a glue-laminated beam of a sentence with not just too many adjectives and adverbs but whole modifying clauses in a style that starts out with me thinking I’m clarifying my points and making a better argument but which ends up being muddied and exceptionally difficult to parse. ¹

##

I have other doubts about my writing, but this matter of ‘voice’ cuts across a lot of the rest.

Having a distinctive voice to your writing is a good thing, mostly. If you have a knack for comedy, or for making complex ideas clearer through simple folksy analogies, or for eviscerating a target with insults without the crutch of profanity, that distinctive voice will help you build an audience and might also shape the topics you write about.

Depending on your chosen topics, though, writing in a ‘voice’ might be a drawback. If your writing is meant to introduce an unfamiliar issue or to persuade, an overly conversational tone either makes you easier to ignore, or puts ‘cracks’ in your writing that gives trolls in the comment section obvious places to begin attacks.

I found my voice in writing blog posts, 500 to 1500 words at a time. I refined my style on Twitter, where my projected persona is jaded and snarky and brilliant (your perception might be different from my intent) but only when I can restrict myself to a single tweet. As soon as I try to use that platform to “write“ [“Hey let me expand on this, might take more than a couple tweets. Thread, 1/x”] I will recommit all the crimes I’m guilty of when writing blog posts. This makes sense; one of the original descriptions of Twitter was a ‘microblogging’ service, so if you take the ‘micro-’ out, you’re just left with a hard-to-read piecemeal blog. ²

I’m a bad writer. ³

It’s not that I’m a bad writer, in as much as my syntax is technically correct and my diction is usually on-point. My preference for a ‘spoken-word’ style, though, for words as they might be delivered live, in a performance, can make my written words harder to read. And while my word choices are… fine, I also lean heavily towards the pretty, sparkly, & infrequent when a plainer word would do, and do more work.

If these blog posts were scripts, meant to be read—by me—then all the commas and asides and emdashes and the incorrectly-used ellipsis⁴ in the line above (and most of my writing) can be read as mark-up, code for the performance, letting me know where and how long to pause. I used to think of this as excusable, normal even, me speaking directly to my audience, but that’s an after-the-fact justification: I touch type, not super fast but fast enough, and I am in fact speaking these lines as I write – to myself in my head, not out loud, but until I wrote this sentence it wasn’t something I was conscious of. Now I’m never going to be able to forget it. In fact, after 20 (25?) years of doing it this way, I don’t know that I could do it any differently without specifically learning “writing” as a new skill. ⁵

A conversational style or written voice is best when employed in one of two ways:
First, where we agree (or I assume we agree) and a quick recap of the subject is all we need
& Second, if I am relating a humorous anecdote where the exact phrasing and the pauses and the rhythm of the joke are important to the eventual delivery of the punch line.

I don’t want every blog post to read like a joke⁶ and for the most part, I’m not going to assume my audience agrees with me. What kind of makes me sad is that this ‘conversational’ style (not pioneered by bloggers but widely adopted) is now used by some fairly toxic political writers—online, on social media, by niche publishers who call themselves ‘news’—who use it as both a knife and a shield. “Of course we all can agree” is the sneaky-snake-oil-slick way to introduce some poison and “well you’re taking me out of context” follows as the obvious defense, even though no context was given. Just the assumption that “we” (for however they didn’t define ‘we’) all “agree” allows them to talk to the in-group while coasting under radar: a nod to the people who have the unspoken context and a dodge for the rest.

Blogs are personal, even now. ⁷

Well after the blog-as-business-model has both failed, and evolved; well after the endgames for Gigaom and Gawker; well after Verizon basically bought up every not-quite-failing content farm and rolled them into Oath; and now, where you don’t necessarily think of outlets like Engadget, HuffPo, Vox, Polygon, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, or The Onion as blogs [yeah, they’re blogs] or even necessarily bookmark-and-visit any of these sites daily, since you get your links from social media or aggregators.⁸ Blogs are personal, and more present than you realize.

Social media is built on the old Live Journals and Web Logs: a post is something you write to Facebook or a picture you upload to Instagram. Twitter, as noted, was a ‘blogging’ platform; Medium tried to be Twitter but longer (and a lot of other things) but Medium is perhaps most notable as a blogging platform for people who really only need to write the one, long blogpost.

The bones and the idiolect of ‘blogging’ are all over the web and have largely overtaken traditional media, at least in online translation. A ‘post’ is an article; news articles have comments; and news articles are dated, tagged, archived, & linked to. Online newspapers and newsweeklies are blogs now, despite themselves.

We’re surrounded by blogs and yet it feels blogs are dead. If I might be allowed poetic license for a bit: corporate ghosts are animating the corpses of what used to be individual, personal blogs, stealing the topics and mission statements but lacking any warmth or life.

But, call me a romantic or a nostalgist, the old blog format is still good for something more than just its building blocks, taken by other media. So long as it is still sort of affordable for one person to buy a domain name & web hosting, with easy CMS tools like WordPress, or combined platforms like Squarespace (and future competitors for both), there will still be blogs and bloggers. If you have something to say, you should still be able to find your voice.⁹

Just don’t plan on getting rich. A blog, by itself, can’t support you. Same as it ever was, you’ll need something else (merchandise, historically and most commonly, and with Patreon as a new-ish source but not significantly different from PayPal aside from the agreed-upon monthly billing aspect of it) – Despite how corporate-and-business blogging can seem to be these days, for a lot of us—who still do this casually because we want an outlet for words—it’s a hobby paid for by the day job. It’s not a wide open frontier anymore, there’s no get-rich-quick or getting-in-on-the-ground-floor left.

Just words and people to read them. Just the outlet, and a voice.

.:.

##¹⁰ ¹¹

¹ If I had an editor, the advice would probably be to cut this intro. or tone it down. or streamline, clarify & move it, if it had a point to make.
² another paragraph that could be cut, no loss. additional sin count: two parentheticals, reliance again on italics and on single- and double-quotation marks to enforce a voicing of the line that probably only works when I’m reading it in my own head, a ‘quote’ dropped in without context with the assumption the reader will understand this is supposed to be a typical ‘thread’ tweet intro, a [*shudder*] semicolon, and a point that does not necessarily follow the paragraph above. not that it has to, but again, a paragraph that could be cut
³ “see, this would be the better line to lead this article with”
⁴ originally just intended to mark where words were intentionally omitted (elided) from a quote, the dot-dot-dot of the ellipsis are now read by most as a long pause, and is used as such in most scripted/novel dialogue and in transcriptions of spoken word. an intentional pause. but unless this entire post is meant to be a transcription of a speech as delivered the ellipsis is technically incorrect in this particular written context.
⁵ editing. I think they call that skill editing.
⁶ at least not yet. I may get there.
⁷ ooof. bad transition. honestly this should be a separate article, not an add-on to a essay on personal written ‘voice’. Give me three paragraphs, I’ll try to ham-handedly tie it back to the blog title.
⁸ this isn’t actually a sentence, just 3 similarly formatted sentence fragments and a 4th fragment that is different enough it seems like a conclusion but there’s still no SVO to start diagramming this sentence on, just 4 adverbial clauses. It only works because it’s anchored by the short sentences immediately before and after
⁹ told ya. took five paragraphs, but booyah
¹⁰ the double-hash is a proofreaders mark to signal a page or section break. I’ve been using it for that purpose in my personal drafts for decades and at some point I don’t quite recall exactly when I began using it in blog posts on the regular as well
¹¹ endnotes aren’t going to be a thing. it’s a one off that worked in this particular post, I don’t plan to make a habit of this.