Yeah, I know that's a SPICY TAKE™ for someone starting a blog on neocities, but I'm saying it anyway. I'm so damn tired of it all.
In 2022 I started blog on Substack under the same name as this website, only for it turn to out that Substack was too cowardly to kick actual Nazi (ha, I love that I can just CALL THEM WHAT THEY ARE and not worry about an algorithm nuking me!) propaganda to the curb. As everyone who knows what happens when you tollerate people like that started moving away, I asked other creators where they were moving to, but came to a frustrating conclusion: every modern website built to write blogs or newsletters is built more around building a business than a personal blog full of random, low-pressure tomfoolery. They overcomplicate things, charging you once you hit a certain number of followers.
It all stinks of the sad reality we're in these days: Writing, in and of itself, is not seen as valuable by the people with the money to fund good writing. It needs jazzed up with some fancy wrapping. You don't run a blog, you run a newsletter or a community or - God forbid - a bunch of clickbait AI slop weaving together someone else's videos, pictures, or tweets.
And yes, I used em dashes around the AI bit to be purposefully cheeky, because em dashes are great actually, you guys saying only AI uses it are just mean. One day I'll get accused of using AI and I'll have to link to my old, awful fanfics to prove I was an em dash gremlin long before AI even existed, and it will be all your guys' fault. I hope you're proud of yourselves.
As much as making money would be GREAT (I am struggling to make ends meet and I have a Ko-Fi if you can spare a few dollars for a queer, disabled writer who has to move in two months) I'm not trying to "fill a market" over here; I'm trying to get back to doing a thing that I love doing in a time where nobody seems to appreciate that thing anymore. I'm gunning for my Livejournal era full of regular ramblings about whatever is on my mind, where not every post will be for every person, and I don't think I need to cram people's email inboxes with yet another newsletter to do that. I have more than enough social media platforms I can use to promote what I write; a much better use of them than letting myself slip into exchanging quips with people who voted to kill me, in fact. And while I'm not quite so naive that I believe "If art is good enough it will become popular!!!" I do believe in creating what I want, sharing it where I can, and seeing what sticks.
After all, if getting anywhere creatively on the modern internet is such a hopeless, confusing crapshoot no matter what I do, I might as well just be myself.
If you're reading this when it goes live, you might have notice this site looks like hot trash. Besides just getting back to blogging for the sake of it, my other goal is to not let myself get so caught up in how pretty everything looks that I don't, you know, write. I'll slowly make this site look nicer and nicer as time goes by, maybe rewarding myself for each new post with some time spent coding. For now, though, I spared you all the truly authentic Web 1.0 experience by putting it in dark mode. It looks like a business' front page after people die but your eyes have been spared... for now. As a lover of pink, I make no promises for the future of this blog.
-Netbug
