Imminent Death Of The Blog Predicted!

While prophecies of the end of Usenet or the wider internet never came true, notwithstanding the latest variant that it’s already dead, this blog is coming to a close. Since most people likely read via RSS, this final post serves as your notice.

Recently it occurred to me: I think the fact that the world writ large already doesn’t have a place for me because I’m not healthy or productive from a normative standpoint, and so I’m destined for a pretty dark post-midlife, is what makes me keep trying to blog or trying to do social media, because, in the former case, at least I’d leave a record that I was here, and, in the latter case, even parasocial validation is validation, but the problem is that neither one of those things is necessarily very substantial, and so I’m still left standing in quicksand, and I really just need to find the wherewithal to draw down from the attempts.

I’ll be continuing to maintain the homepage and post to the statuslog, and I’m accessible via email and iMesssage.

This site, at least for as long as I have use of the domain (which might not be for long without any active blogging happening, since it comes to me through Automattic’s “dotblogger” program and would cost something like $1,500 a year on the market), will be converted into a static “best of” site. I’ve already started selecting posts for inclusion and I very much welcome any suggestions in that regard.

I’m still deciding how I want to approach the social media question, if at all. As it stands both my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts have timed auto-deletion configured and if I can figure out what sorts of people make sense for me to follow, that sort of ephemerality might keep me on one of the other of those sites, but that remains very much undetermined.

So, not only is the grand project of restoring twenty years of blogging to remain unfinished, what I’ve been writing while doing that work also will sink into the memory hole, although most if not all of this blog remains accessible in the Wayback Machine.

As with most large decisions I’ve made in my life, this one came as a slow, nagging trickle and then suddenly rushed in all at once and was done. I’ve no compulsion to replace this blog with something else, although that’s where I thought this might be going over the past week as I indeed spent time setting up another approach. It was that effort which made me realize I needed just to be done.

I’ve drawn this post out long enough. I said it moments ago: I need just to be done. Thanks for the reads, and the tip jar support here and there. I’m out.