First Blog Post
When I told my friend I was going to start a blog, he sent me the meme above. I had thought myself to be original. Clearly, I was wrong. Although I am less original than I had thought, I continued to make my blog.
Before I say anything else, I would like to thank Chad Baldwin for making the blog post that made my blog possible. He gives easy-to-follow instructions on how to make a free blog on GitHub Pages and provides the template for his blog. I hope to one day have a blog that is as full of personality as the ones you find on Neocities or Nekoweb but until I learn more advanced HTML and CSS, this template more than suffices!
Why am I starting a blog?
If I’m being honest, I was inspired to start a blog by this video that mentions some of the oft-repeated issues of social media, namely how easy it is for our feeling of clarity to be hijacked and the incentive for social media to recommend moral outrage porn. Although I had previously read the papers the YouTuber cited, it was his link to this blog post by Toronto-based YouTuber and musician CJ the X that finally pushed me over the edge. In it, they provide reasons for why you should start your own blog and why we should develop a Web 1.5, not 3.0. It’s a quick read and I recommend you check it out! The Internet is so boring these days and it’s cheap (if not free) to make a corner of it your own.
Beyond any sound criticism Big Tech, the real reason I am starting a blog is that I hate social media. More accurately, I hate how often I find myself endlessly scrolling through Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube when I would rather be reading or writing. I hate how instead of actually developing and refining my thoughts, I end up mindlessly consuming “content.” Sure, every once in a while, the slop machine recommends me something that excites me intellectually or artistically, but those are few and far between. More often than not, I use “content” to salve the unpleaseantries associated with having A Thought. It’s frustrating to have the outline of something you think could be great but that you are not yet able to articulate. What’s worse is when you have a thought that seems so true, but, if accepted, would require that some of the beliefs you took to be fundamental be abandoned. I want to work through these thoughts, to seriously consider them, to be unsettled by how little I know and how wrong I was. I want to write about these thoughts in depth and have it be able to be read by others.
I still have an Instagram account, but I only open it on my computer. I hope this will stop me from mindlessly scrolling while also being able to stay in some form of contact with my friends. I deleted my Twitter account a while ago, but sometimes I still miss the tweets of my favourite niche Internet micro-celebrity. Reddit and YouTube are a bit harder for me to kick but, so long as I don’t enter a depression spiral, I find that I can adequately regulate my use of them.
What will I talk about?
I would like to write well-reserched, long-form articles here and there. I would like to post my undergraduate thesis here. I’m currently polishing it for grad school applications, but when I’m done, I hope to give others the opportunity to read it. When that’s done, I hope to read a bit more about sex-negative feminism and theories of autonomy for an upcoming project. No promises that anything will manifest, but I hope so.
I would also like to write shorter essays on whatever’s on my mind. These may or may not contain citations or arguments. I need to stop associating writing with philosophy and being graded, and I think this would be a good way to break that association.
When I have time to learn HTML and CSS, I intend on creating a section to log the books I plan on reading, the books I’ve read, and my thoughts on them. I’m not a fan of book rating sites like Goodreads. When I used to have a Goodreads account, I had this impulse to mark a book as read and rate it as soon as I had closed the covers on whatever I was reading. I hated that feeling and I would like to not experience it again. Blog posts take more time to write and I may not always be near my computer when I finish a book, so I would not be as incentivized to flatten my experience with a novel upon completing it. Avoiding the temptation to use a star rating system is also a plus in my eyes.
I also hope to have a section on my blog that’s just a collection of quotes, poems, and songs that I like. I am prone to forgetting and I have no desire to keep a commonplace book that I will never read. It is so much easier to search things through a blog than to leaf through a poorly organized notebook. Also, these are things I want to share! I might not have the most esoteric selection of songs and poems, and maybe the quotes I like are pedestrian, but it’s my blog and I can be banal if I want to!
So, what now?
I don’t know. I’ll post when I want to. I’ll write about what I want to. I recommend you make your own blog; it truly is super easy and if you’re in need of a hobby, coding is a really fun one. Hopefully it won’t be too long until my next post, but until then, I hope you have a wonderful day.
—Florens