The 10 Year Drought

Ahh so what does one write for the first new post on their website that they’ve neglected for nearly 10 years? I’m not entirely sure, but I suppose I can start with, “Why start writing again now?”

There was a point in time when writing on the internet was my primary way to reflect on what I’ve done, where I’ve been, who I’ve met, and most importantly: who I am. Over time social media slowly became the place where everyone’s eyeballs went and with that came a waining interest in my own little corner of the internet. Which is interesting, because dumbstuff was never popular, and I never wrote for any reason beyond it being an odd form of journaling. But as we all know, social media is one hell of a drug. And as we also know, social media has become quite fractured in the wake of Twitter’s downfall. I’m still not striving for an audience, but I do want to take back the control, and enjoy the creativity that designing, coding, and writing my own website provides.

I was really happy with the last iteration with dumbstuff that I left rotting on the vine (the theme was so old that you literally can’t scroll to find any archived posts beyond the first few handfuls.). It was very photo-centric, filled with really fun gifs I had made, and lots of other nonsense. That iteration of dumbstuff was hosted on Tumblr, which is a social network in and of itself, and was a move I made when I became tired of having to find new blogging software every few years. Prior to Tumblr I was posting most of my thoughts on LiveJournal. Between the two it accounts for an extremely important and formative part of my life that I struggle to remember these days other than the rare times I’ve dug back through those very archives.

IDEAS

Wanting to express my creativity Getting older, wanting to reflect on the good parts of what I’ve accomplished, and also reckon with the sins and missteps of my past: the racism, the misogyny, the lashing out at people I barely knew because they made me feel insecure.