I’d love for this whole thing to be more conversational.1This includes a missive to you, Dear Reader — please feel free to strike up a conversation either here in the comments or on Mastodon if something I say on here makes you think, or feel, or just want to say something. Don’t hold back. It’s the new 1999, there’s no rules — all we have is how we decide to go about things. Inherent to social media is that most of what you say is gonna be ephemeral — if the web is people, a tweet toot is a sentence whispered to yourself, and if you’re lucky somebody else hears it and you connect. I’m not a Dead Internet2From the Atlantic: “The Internet Is Mostly Bots” (archive.is) and “Maybe You Missed It, But The Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago.” (archive.is) truther,3Hm, a loaded word. but at its worst — my worst, maybe — I can’t deny that the Old Place sometimes felt like that. Being online, even though the web is not a sea, sure felt like a scream into the water sometimes. Unheard by all but nearby fish.
The opposite of that feeling, on the Old Place anyway, was the couple times a year somebody, often a bot, often a person doing very specific searches, would like/fave or otherwise acknowledge a post from Too Long Ago. And this felt RUDE. To confront me with my own words in the notifications column that should’ve been a safe space? I don’t even like myself from two weeks ago, and this is from two years ago? Wow, okay.4That’s why it felt rude to me, anyway, but I feel like this is a common sentiment.
But that’s not conversation. So let’s start talking.
I’ve been clicking around blogs. Old blogs, current blogs, pandemic blogs, blogs by people who you might have heard of, blogs by people nobody remembers, blogs the people who were there hold up as the great blogs, passion project blogs with two decades of dedicated writing on it. It’s funny how something from 1999 can resonate while something from 2016 utterly fails to. Allow me to quote the thing that inspired me to write this, a conversation between bloggers from 2010 that managed to resonate.
Below the fold, other people’s words. Continue reading “On constellations”