Post Numero Uno
You know what's funny?
This post -- and, by extension, this journal -- marks my return to Blogger. I actually opened an account on Blogger in the early summer of 2001. Around that time, I was fresh out of my junior year of high school, and looking insanely forward to my senior year, thinking about college. But more than that, I was also finding acceptance for the first time in my life. For once, I felt I had trustworthy friends, people I could depend on, shoulders to cry on, real friends, like I'd never had before.
That, uh... well, that didn't turn out so well.
So yes. For the first time since 2001, I'm posting an entry using the Blogger interface, and in a way it feels reinvigorating, not unlike bathing in an oasis after spending several weeks walking through the Arabian desert. I'm now free from the restraints of being on a site that seemingly focused more on the aspect of social networking rather than journaling, or blogging.
Ugh. Social networking.
***
I mentioned starting this account in 2001, and I might as well explain what drove me to it, other than the need to reach to others in an attempt to compensate for my lack of actual friends (the kind I thought I was actually gaining at the time... hah!) In high school, I had several teachers who noticed I possessed something of a natural talent at writing. Having looked back at some of my high-school era writing recently, I could never understand what the hell they were gushing at. Most of my writing from that time was pretentious junk that served to appease my instructors in an overdone effort to mask my underlying stupidity. But then I gathered that most of my classmates possibly weren't as talented at writing, even though they were better at writing by-the-book five-paragraph essays with coherent points and arguments. Perhaps they were impressed that I could construct readable sentences at the tender age of 16, whereas most people go through life without knowing the difference between "there," "their," and "they're."
That kind of approval early on caused me to evaluate my own skills. As it turned out, I really was impressed with how I wrote. For many years dating back to grade school, I had made several attempts to find a creative form of expression, having once considered drawing and cartooning for an extended period. (I can barely draw a stick figure on Microsoft Paint these days.) During my years in middle school, Mystery Science Theater 3000 entered itself into my life and served as a lasting influence on my humor and my appreciation for all kinds of things. To this day, it still does. I remember reading The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide -- a supplemental episode guide written by several of the show's writers and collaborators at the time -- and thinking that was some of the funniest use of printed text on paper. An English teacher in 8th grade turned me on to writing as a form of creative expression, and, like masturbation, became one of those natural discoveries that couldn't be harnessed.
I never really wrote about my own life. At that point, video games and pro wrestling consumed my being, as did the discovery of the internet, so I just wrote about that. Not necessarily fiction, but thoughts. One of my obsessions -- even to this day, which I'm sort of ashamed to admit -- was to write great lines I had heard on TV or in the boy's locker room or wherever and repeat them ad nauseum on my notebook, or whatever piece of paper I could find, and then supplement them with random sketches -- at that point, I hadn't yet shaken off my fondness for drawing. As I became more and more acquainted with the brand new home computer that my parents had bought me one holiday season, I learned to type on my word processor (Works 4.0) and do whatever I could on that. I went as far as inserting myself into Usenet communities (the internet that existed before the internet we know and love now) and being wordy about whatever. Of course, I was (and, to some degree, still am) a complete moron and was rightly scolded for all my ridiculous ranting.
It snowballed from there, and I became more and more of a grammar Nazi each passing day, treating writing like my special paintbrush and something that I felt should not be misused or abused. It came to a point where, at the same time I was learning the ins and outs of coded web design, I learned about a service called Blogger, which allowed me to keep a running diary about stuff. So in May of 2001, I made my first official blog post.
***
I continued experimenting with blogging software while also honing HTML/CSS/Photoshop skills, until I decided to join LiveJournal and do all my writing there full-time in the middle of 2003. Between the time I left Blogger and joined LiveJournal, my writing was evolving, not unlike Pokemon. (Except for Farfetch'd.) I became more and more open about myself, sometimes being a total pussy and not using the names of people I had the hots for (Sarah and Lucia come in mind -- especially you, Lucia. If you're reading this, I want to OM NOM NOM you SO BAD. Sarah... drop me an e-mail or something.) But for the most part, I was starting to be more frank about certain details of my life. At the same time, I realized that in the field of writing opinions about things that had nothing to do with me, I was eeking out 2,000-word diatribes like nobody's business. Why? Because, hey, I had something to say, and very few people were around to listen to me in real life. So I wrote, wrote, wrote, 'till daddy took the bandwidth away... or something. Basically, I made it a point to write as much as I felt and not care that 97 out of 100 people would find it too long. What mattered was when the three that did read it would be impressed and give me their thoughts.
LiveJournal slowly changed my attitude about that.
Joining LiveJournal was not a matter of finding the software superior, or anything of that nature. I did so because it had one major advantage -- whereas my blog on a standalone site would need word-of-mouth and various other methods (pinging and what-have-you) in order to direct attention to it, LiveJournal guaranteed that I had an immediate network of people who would, in theory, keep track of my writings, and comment accordingly using their public identity. That, to me, seemed like a good reason to move all my business there, going so far as to import all my blog entries since the Blogger days to the site.
It began innocently enough... but then, the internet as a whole changed.
At the time I joined, there were two methods of joining -- either you received an invitation from a friend (in my case, my account was opened thanks to an invite from my friend John J., Sentro in my book) or by paying for an account that included extra super-duper features. This was done to curb the insane amount of server traffic that resulted from its initial popularity. At some point, LJ acquired enough extra resources that it could no longer justify being such a closed-door community, so the closed-door policy ended and now anyone could join.
Anyone.
What happened was... well, it was the first example of the evils of social networking, which Max Goldberg of YTMND described in brutal detail in a news entry he posted a while back. In summary, as communities grow larger, so too does the amount of content that flows through it. But the thing about mass amounts of user-created content on an untamed wilderness like the internet is that the majority of it is, to say the least, crap, and not enjoyable crap at that. Whereas the initial wave of LJ users (such as myself) were interested in connecting with words, the next wave consisted of self-absorbed individuals using their LJs as attention-getters, in an effort to become e-famous, at a time when the only memes in existence since the ARPANET link was established were Mahir, the Dancing Baby, and All Your Base Are Belong To Us. LJ entries of substance were replaced with useless "WHAT FRIENDS CHARACTER ARE YOU?" and "HOW RELIGIOUS ARE YOU?" quizzes. Most people went with the flow, as expressions of thoughts and feelings became clichéd in the minds of the ADD-stricken, fast and furious majority.
I wanted to adjust, but I never felt right doing so, so I trudged along. At some point, I started becoming self-conscious about my own e-popularity, worrying that I would end up meeting the same fate as I already had in the real world of flesh and sunlight -- an outsider who represents the older, more pathetic cliches of the internet. So I became less wordy in an attempt to cater to an audience that didn't consist of me. The self-conscious attitude never wavered after that point, as I became too afraid to post at length about anything that might offend other people. Politics became a taboo subject for me, after noticing that others (usually liberals) had posted more well-informed opinion pieces on deeper political issues, while I simply looked like a ranting old man in contrast who wrote letters to the newspaper without reading them. My biggest failure, and ultimately the death of my political opinion, was when I expressed a desire for man-woman marriage over same-sex marriage, not realizing until too late that my opinion was actually based on a desire to see marriage as a practice end for everyone.
Ultimately, MySpace entered the scene, took off wildly, and, as a result, made me even more bitter, as it represented the worst of social networking in one big clusterfuck. Only, unlike LJ, it was an inferior system that somehow became the most popular thing in the universe since color television. And everyone was using it.
Ugh.
***
Coming back to Blogger after all these years was a result of deciding to return to my website-based roots and realizing that I didn't want to be part of anything larger. I remain on LJ in a limited role doing what I admit I enjoyed doing in the last days, posting short entries about random thoughts, but with the added advantage of not getting anxious over failing to write something more substantial. I don't own a MySpace or a Facebook because I refuse to put myself in a situation where people I don't know or care about can connect with me in an effort to bolster their own ego. On this website, I call the shots, and, as far as I'm concerned, this is my blog, a place where I write the way I was meant to write, without worrying about appeasing some internet majority that laughs at written pieces longer than 100 words.
Welcome.
This post -- and, by extension, this journal -- marks my return to Blogger. I actually opened an account on Blogger in the early summer of 2001. Around that time, I was fresh out of my junior year of high school, and looking insanely forward to my senior year, thinking about college. But more than that, I was also finding acceptance for the first time in my life. For once, I felt I had trustworthy friends, people I could depend on, shoulders to cry on, real friends, like I'd never had before.
That, uh... well, that didn't turn out so well.
So yes. For the first time since 2001, I'm posting an entry using the Blogger interface, and in a way it feels reinvigorating, not unlike bathing in an oasis after spending several weeks walking through the Arabian desert. I'm now free from the restraints of being on a site that seemingly focused more on the aspect of social networking rather than journaling, or blogging.
Ugh. Social networking.
***
I mentioned starting this account in 2001, and I might as well explain what drove me to it, other than the need to reach to others in an attempt to compensate for my lack of actual friends (the kind I thought I was actually gaining at the time... hah!) In high school, I had several teachers who noticed I possessed something of a natural talent at writing. Having looked back at some of my high-school era writing recently, I could never understand what the hell they were gushing at. Most of my writing from that time was pretentious junk that served to appease my instructors in an overdone effort to mask my underlying stupidity. But then I gathered that most of my classmates possibly weren't as talented at writing, even though they were better at writing by-the-book five-paragraph essays with coherent points and arguments. Perhaps they were impressed that I could construct readable sentences at the tender age of 16, whereas most people go through life without knowing the difference between "there," "their," and "they're."
That kind of approval early on caused me to evaluate my own skills. As it turned out, I really was impressed with how I wrote. For many years dating back to grade school, I had made several attempts to find a creative form of expression, having once considered drawing and cartooning for an extended period. (I can barely draw a stick figure on Microsoft Paint these days.) During my years in middle school, Mystery Science Theater 3000 entered itself into my life and served as a lasting influence on my humor and my appreciation for all kinds of things. To this day, it still does. I remember reading The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide -- a supplemental episode guide written by several of the show's writers and collaborators at the time -- and thinking that was some of the funniest use of printed text on paper. An English teacher in 8th grade turned me on to writing as a form of creative expression, and, like masturbation, became one of those natural discoveries that couldn't be harnessed.
I never really wrote about my own life. At that point, video games and pro wrestling consumed my being, as did the discovery of the internet, so I just wrote about that. Not necessarily fiction, but thoughts. One of my obsessions -- even to this day, which I'm sort of ashamed to admit -- was to write great lines I had heard on TV or in the boy's locker room or wherever and repeat them ad nauseum on my notebook, or whatever piece of paper I could find, and then supplement them with random sketches -- at that point, I hadn't yet shaken off my fondness for drawing. As I became more and more acquainted with the brand new home computer that my parents had bought me one holiday season, I learned to type on my word processor (Works 4.0) and do whatever I could on that. I went as far as inserting myself into Usenet communities (the internet that existed before the internet we know and love now) and being wordy about whatever. Of course, I was (and, to some degree, still am) a complete moron and was rightly scolded for all my ridiculous ranting.
It snowballed from there, and I became more and more of a grammar Nazi each passing day, treating writing like my special paintbrush and something that I felt should not be misused or abused. It came to a point where, at the same time I was learning the ins and outs of coded web design, I learned about a service called Blogger, which allowed me to keep a running diary about stuff. So in May of 2001, I made my first official blog post.
Testing Blogger on my site for the first time. No new posts until the site is finished. Later...Stirring stuff, no? I didn't bother writing anything substantial until two months later, when I started writing random details about my life and ranting about various things, all the while being really wordy in the only way a 16-year old prodigy wunderkind writer can be. The Blogspot experiment ended in November that same year, as more feature-heavy blogging software was made available, and I could therefore just write on my website and have post titles (Blogger didn't have them in those days) and neato page templates and other foofoo crap.
***
I continued experimenting with blogging software while also honing HTML/CSS/Photoshop skills, until I decided to join LiveJournal and do all my writing there full-time in the middle of 2003. Between the time I left Blogger and joined LiveJournal, my writing was evolving, not unlike Pokemon. (Except for Farfetch'd.) I became more and more open about myself, sometimes being a total pussy and not using the names of people I had the hots for (Sarah and Lucia come in mind -- especially you, Lucia. If you're reading this, I want to OM NOM NOM you SO BAD. Sarah... drop me an e-mail or something.) But for the most part, I was starting to be more frank about certain details of my life. At the same time, I realized that in the field of writing opinions about things that had nothing to do with me, I was eeking out 2,000-word diatribes like nobody's business. Why? Because, hey, I had something to say, and very few people were around to listen to me in real life. So I wrote, wrote, wrote, 'till daddy took the bandwidth away... or something. Basically, I made it a point to write as much as I felt and not care that 97 out of 100 people would find it too long. What mattered was when the three that did read it would be impressed and give me their thoughts.
LiveJournal slowly changed my attitude about that.
Joining LiveJournal was not a matter of finding the software superior, or anything of that nature. I did so because it had one major advantage -- whereas my blog on a standalone site would need word-of-mouth and various other methods (pinging and what-have-you) in order to direct attention to it, LiveJournal guaranteed that I had an immediate network of people who would, in theory, keep track of my writings, and comment accordingly using their public identity. That, to me, seemed like a good reason to move all my business there, going so far as to import all my blog entries since the Blogger days to the site.
It began innocently enough... but then, the internet as a whole changed.
At the time I joined, there were two methods of joining -- either you received an invitation from a friend (in my case, my account was opened thanks to an invite from my friend John J., Sentro in my book) or by paying for an account that included extra super-duper features. This was done to curb the insane amount of server traffic that resulted from its initial popularity. At some point, LJ acquired enough extra resources that it could no longer justify being such a closed-door community, so the closed-door policy ended and now anyone could join.
Anyone.
What happened was... well, it was the first example of the evils of social networking, which Max Goldberg of YTMND described in brutal detail in a news entry he posted a while back. In summary, as communities grow larger, so too does the amount of content that flows through it. But the thing about mass amounts of user-created content on an untamed wilderness like the internet is that the majority of it is, to say the least, crap, and not enjoyable crap at that. Whereas the initial wave of LJ users (such as myself) were interested in connecting with words, the next wave consisted of self-absorbed individuals using their LJs as attention-getters, in an effort to become e-famous, at a time when the only memes in existence since the ARPANET link was established were Mahir, the Dancing Baby, and All Your Base Are Belong To Us. LJ entries of substance were replaced with useless "WHAT FRIENDS CHARACTER ARE YOU?" and "HOW RELIGIOUS ARE YOU?" quizzes. Most people went with the flow, as expressions of thoughts and feelings became clichéd in the minds of the ADD-stricken, fast and furious majority.
I wanted to adjust, but I never felt right doing so, so I trudged along. At some point, I started becoming self-conscious about my own e-popularity, worrying that I would end up meeting the same fate as I already had in the real world of flesh and sunlight -- an outsider who represents the older, more pathetic cliches of the internet. So I became less wordy in an attempt to cater to an audience that didn't consist of me. The self-conscious attitude never wavered after that point, as I became too afraid to post at length about anything that might offend other people. Politics became a taboo subject for me, after noticing that others (usually liberals) had posted more well-informed opinion pieces on deeper political issues, while I simply looked like a ranting old man in contrast who wrote letters to the newspaper without reading them. My biggest failure, and ultimately the death of my political opinion, was when I expressed a desire for man-woman marriage over same-sex marriage, not realizing until too late that my opinion was actually based on a desire to see marriage as a practice end for everyone.
Ultimately, MySpace entered the scene, took off wildly, and, as a result, made me even more bitter, as it represented the worst of social networking in one big clusterfuck. Only, unlike LJ, it was an inferior system that somehow became the most popular thing in the universe since color television. And everyone was using it.
Ugh.
***
Coming back to Blogger after all these years was a result of deciding to return to my website-based roots and realizing that I didn't want to be part of anything larger. I remain on LJ in a limited role doing what I admit I enjoyed doing in the last days, posting short entries about random thoughts, but with the added advantage of not getting anxious over failing to write something more substantial. I don't own a MySpace or a Facebook because I refuse to put myself in a situation where people I don't know or care about can connect with me in an effort to bolster their own ego. On this website, I call the shots, and, as far as I'm concerned, this is my blog, a place where I write the way I was meant to write, without worrying about appeasing some internet majority that laughs at written pieces longer than 100 words.
Welcome.
posted by RobertoKay at
12:26 AM
2 Comments:
I do appreciate that your title fits the posts.
Truth in advertising.
Welcome...back!
http://www.aquateencentral.com/images/themovie/49.jpg
Welcome home, baby. I say this to all of your things... for this is a robbery.
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