It was exactly twenty years ago today that I registered the domain on which this blog sits.
The archive only goes back to 2012, thanks to a database disaster some time in the mid-2010s. Frankly that’s something of a mercy, at least for me; those early years of learning to write in public betray a naivete which, while perhaps in keeping with the shopworn utopianism of blogging’s Gilded Age, was rather less in keeping with my biological age at the time.
Somewhat surprisingly, it’s all in the Internet Archive, though anyone spelunking in there will mostly find a lot of automated link-dumps whose targets have presumably long since rotted away to nothing, spattered with sophomoric efforts at science fiction criticism and other attempts to make myself visible. That was the gold rush experience which, once combined with hindsight, taught me the truth of the saying about selling shovels; in the end, I did kind of write my way out of an unqualified and aimless existence in the town this site is named for, but the writer I have ended up becoming is not at all the one I thought I might become.
Honestly, though, I think that’s probably a very lucky break in the long view. Writing is still the beating heart of almost all my work, if not always the most obvious expression of it. And while precarity is still very much my co-pilot, well—the same is true for many people who have not been so fortunate in terms of (mostly) avoiding doing things they didn’t actually want to do. Plus my current precarity is notably less precarious than that from within which I decided, twenty years ago, that I’d give this blogging thing a serious go. All things considered, things could be a very great deal worse—and most days I’m able to recognise that, and to be thankful for it.
Like the majority of people still blogging outside the platforms, I seem to have finally managed to shed the nostalgic idea that we might return to the discursive dynamics of those days. (Thanks, Heraclitus!) I keep seeing new attempts to revive RSS, but the problem was never technological; it would take a considerable change in both the culture and the technological stack to revive what in hindsight looks like a charmingly slow rolling global discourse.
Meanwhile the digital Fortyniners keep pulling the same trick; Substack is the latest Deadwood, arcing strongly into the enshittification phase, and there’ll likely be others. Part of me almost regrets the scruples and hesitation that kept me off that platform during its exponential phase, but the greater part of me knows that the sort of hustle necessary to get a toehold is not compatible with the sort of writer (or person) that I am. I have Worldbuilding Agency as a base for public-facing writing related to my professional work—and I really do need to thicken the flow over there, given that other methods of marketing are similarly incompatible with my character—but the prospect of “virality”, the grail I once quested for, is of zero interest to me any more.
That said, I’m almost equally suspicious of the “dark forest” philosophy, as many manifestations thereof still very clearly retain virality as their underlying telos; they just want to get their story sorted before being discovered and juiced for novelty. And hey, I get it—deep down, recognition is what we all want, as creatives or just as people, and looking for a way to get it that might convert into some sort of stable flow of money rather than a brief nova of exploitable attention is completely understandable. Nonetheless: hiding out in your little enclave of deep-fried memetics and angsting about the possible incursion of “normies” in the mid-Twenties is pretty much the same as saying “you probably haven’t heard of them” in the late-Noughties. It’s a sort of inverted hipsterism, trying really hard not to show its deep ressentiment of the last generation that wasn’t too scared of sousveillance to go out dressed like idiots and find a party. That ressentiment is totally understandable, to be clear—but it’s no less corrosive of the art it informs, IMO.
On the topic of art, there have been a few write-in requests for more “creativity content” here, arriving at the same time as a sense that my art practice is reaching a point where I probably do need to make a better job of documenting process and development, if only for my own sake. Having taken the financially insane decision to rent a studio/office, I now have the space to work and experiment with new (to me) techniques. I was pleased with last year’s pure collage work, but I’ve been having lots of ideas that demand something more in terms of media and method, so I’m currently scrambling up the foothills of mixed media (and particularly acrylics), making a lot of mistakes but—crucially—having a lot of good wholesome flow-state fun.
My current obsession is gel-plate monoprinting, a technique fad I seem to have caught onto around five years after it first took the crafting Y*uTube scene by storm. My idol and inspiration in this space is Jackie Bernardi, less for her particular aesthetic or even technique, and more for her unashamed foregrounding of play and accident in her process, and for the completely unfakable delight that radiates from her footage. I have very little expectation or aspiration that my visual art will bring in anything more than pocket change; I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it ever manages to so much as pay its own way in terms of materials, to be honest. What I want from it is escape, I think; words are (and always will be) my matter, to borrow from Le Guin, but there is a sort of meditative blessing that comes from having an almost entirely wordless activity of making into which I can retreat.
So, yeah. If you’re still reading along here, for however long it’s been—are there any two-decade veterans out there, still plugged into the feed?—then I thank you for your attention to this narcissistic little numbers-station of a website.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to order two rolls of medical examination-table paper and a fresh tub of matte gel acrylic medium.
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