Another year…

I’ve had this blog set up for something like 12 years now. I haven’t really been using it that much recently. It’s not so much that I don’t have things to talk about, but that I don’t know if what I have to say really matters in the grander scheme of things. Or would have any impact anyway.

When I started this blog, I was living in Singapore. Or rather, I started a version of it there on Blogger. Then some other blogs, and then I rolled them all into this blog and kept posting. In Singapore, blogs seemed to matter quite a bit. People took them seriously in a way that they just never did in the US. So, when I posted something, I had an expectation of a reaction of some sort.

Now, and maybe especially now with the rise of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. etc., posting on a blog is sort of like screaming into the wind, or into the eternal void. You can make a lot of noise, but chances are that no one will hear you or even notice.

And even if you say something really important and meaningful, it hardly matters anymore. Maybe I could add a blue check mark to the title of my blog? I dunno. I think it’s because of the polarization of online content in general. People only want to see what’s loudest on both ends of the spectrum. There’s not much room or interest for what’s in the middle. That’s pretty sad but I guess it must be human nature.

And so I let this blog sort of stagnate.

Beyond that feeling that blogging just didn’t matter as much here, I was having a lot of technical issues with Dreamhost. I still am, actually. I’ve had my blog constantly getting restarted by their server because it’s supposedly taking up too much RAM or eating up too much of the CPU, which seems ludicrous to me. I’ve trimmed it down to being really basic and it hardly gets that much traffic anymore, but it’s still apparently being problematic. I can’t even do updates without the thing crashing half the time. Honestly, I think Dreamhost is just punishing me for not upgrading to Dreampress.

Fuck Dreamhost. Fuck them in their ass.

I’ve been coming to a realization though, that I’ve been thinking about blogging the wrong way. Maybe I always have been. Or maybe I started doing this at some point without realizing it.

There’s a difference between blogging to be heard and blogging for myself.

And I think I was blogging to be heard and when I realized that I wouldn’t be heard, or most likely wouldn’t be heard, I lost interest.

So maybe I should be blogging for me. As a way to get my thoughts down and work through them and maybe come to some interesting conclusions. A professor I took a history course with told me once that you never really know what you think about something until you have to write down your thoughts about it because it forces you to really clarify your opinions. She was right. Thanks, Professor.

So, I’m going to try to be a bit more consistent here, even if what I’m posting is something that is only going to matter to me. I’m not trying to be a news outlet. Just a me outlet.