On Self-Expression: My Quarter Century Of Blogging
It’s with a near certainty and small sense of frustration that I say there was something that came before, but memory issues preclude me having any definitive sense of precisely, or even imprecisely, what it was. All I know is that it existed—or, at least, I’m pretty sure it existed. Dependent, then, solely upon what’s actually been discoverable and/or recoverable, today stands in and serves as my twenty-fifth blogging anniversary.
What we have is this post, from a site I ran purporting to be the Global Effort to Eradicate Know-nothings. More colloquially known as GEEK Force, it was something I sort of stole from a series of Jon Katz columns for HotWired. As you can see, this was not so much a personal blog as a link and commentary blog and from the somewhat arch standpoint of a royal we concerned with what would have been at the time termed the “cyberpolitics” of the day.
As near as I can tell from some rather methodical and painstaking research I did back in 2023 for the ever-ongoing blog restoration project here, the earliest findable personal blog began several months later in December 2000. None of that yet has been migrated. There’s some indication that in fact this began in September 2000 but as I sat down to write this, I can’t find anything to confirm that.
The twenty-fifth of March in the year two-thousand it is, then. I’ve been blogging my way through the past fourteen and a half trillion miles of travel around the sun. That’s just under half the time and distance I’ve been alive.
Pablo is hosting IndieWeb Carnival this month, with a focus on self-expression, including a few suggested starter questions for participants to take or leave.
- How do you present yourself to the world?
- What does self-expression do for you?
- Do you use self-expression as a coping mechanism?
- What has been your journey to becoming a more expressive version of yourself?
I’m not sure how directly I’ll address these specific ideas here (and I understand they are just suggestions), but I’m betting what follows at the very least will hint at some of the answers.
Certainly, if nothing else, the answers can be found in earlier posts if not in this one. There’s little question that blogging has been my primary form of self-expression since I began twenty-five years ago. If you’ve been a regular reader—especially in recent years—you know full well that writing here very much is a coping mechanism, without which I’d only be even more lost, despite the continually recurring mixed feelings I have about it.
I’ve participated in two previous IndieWeb Carnivals: one on digital relationships, and one on impact.
Months ago, although I didn’t see it until much later because I’d not been paying any attention to Mastodon, I was tagged by Naz in a sort of blog challenge/meme thing that had been making the rounds. At one point in February I sat down to take a crack at it and instead immediately fell to a bout of claustrophobic angst. Given the significance of today, it seems as good a moment as any to make this happen.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
As noted above, while I’m fairly certain I was blogging before the commentary construct of GEEK Force, I can’t remember what that involved or what it was like. By the time we get to the personal blog that appears in late 2000 what you’ll see is that it’s a fairly bog standard diary-type blog on which I was microblogging several or more times a day.
What I can find of it as I write this begins on December 23, 2000, on which day are three posts. The first is about being at an ex’s house using the DSL and sleeping until two in the afternoon. The second is about two different bartenders inviting me to things to which I did not go. The third is about how playing the South Park pinball game makes me wish I had an opportunity to quote Chef exclaiming, “Damn, woman! I just gave you sweet lovin’ five minutes ago, are you trying to kill me?”
Back in the day, my blogging was not medium-form, titled posts, but pure microblogging of the type that less than a decade later would be usurped by the ease and brevity that was early Twitter, although when we did it on our own sites we weren’t dealing with 140-, 280-, and 500-character limits, it’s just that many of us tended not to go on at length in any particular post.
So, why did I start blogging? I can’t fully answer that, since I don’t know what was my actual first blog. All I can say is that I had things to say about the politics of the internet and then I had things to say about myself, even if I mostly was saying those things about myself only to myself, just in public.
The more things change.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
Late in February, I decided to take another crack at 11ty. This after several self-aborted attempts in the past at one static site generator or another and finding them altogether too opaque, despite the fact that once upon a time I self-hosted MoveableType from an OpenBSD box over my home DSL line. What motivated the switch to 11ty was that I’d grown tired of being unable to work on anything too substantial, let alone get back to the blog restoration project, because Weblog.LOL essentially was frozen in amber while work proceeded on the Neato replacement, and my archives were broken because the build process dies before completing them.
The goal was to get everything working that I needed to be working, as well as to bring back internal backlinks, a feature I’d left behind when I left WordPress to return to Weblog.LOL and which is fundamental to how the blog is structured since I don’t use tags, and categories are what I use to designate the original site of publication in a way that makes them browsable.
There were some snags along the way, and, yes, to get everything working I had to make use of very problematic tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, but since the blog is pretty close to the only thing to give me any satisfaction in a life that’s going nowhere but downhill from here, I (if somewhat sheepishly) make no apologies. I needed this site to work of the sake of my own sanity, and I did what I had to do to make that happen.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
My earliest blogging used Blogger, from which I eventually switched to MoveableType (and the affiliated TypePad), from which I eventually settled for a very long time on [WordPress](https://wordpress.org/0, hosted and self-hosted alike. There have been sojourns to Micro.blog and Write.as and Proseful and Weblog.LOL, a brief time using a weird sort of shell script whose name escapes me, and a short flirtation with Pika. I’ve at least looked at other options now and then, such as Bloggi and Blot. I spent more time, collectively, on WordPress than any other piece of blogging software, but my pretty firm desire to want nothing to do with it anymore since Matt Mullenweg became deeply and problematically weird in fact was a factor in finally looking toward static site generators.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
At the moment, I write in Panda, the standalone Markdown editor from the makers of Bear, which means I’m doing nearly all of my writing on my laptop rather than on some other device, although I think that over the decades that’s generally been the case. Right now, I’ve a _drafts/ folder in my posts/ directory in my 11ty project, and work on things from there. To make things easier, I’ve made an Apple Shortcut that will add pre-formatted YAML front matter to an open Panda document.
date:
categories: ["bix.blog"]
title: >
On occasion I will jot snippets or draft portions of possible posts in Apple Notes when I’m out and about and only have my phone, but since I basically think as I write most of the writing needs to be done sitting with the laptop mostly all in one go with only minor editing and very rarely I might move a paragraph from one place to another.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I write when I can’t not write. I can’t explain further. I write when I can’t not write.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
This varies greatly. Something like this post, I actually started in on during the second week of March, and worked on bit by bit over time until the day came. Some posts summer in my head for awhile, maybe with a jotted or note or two so I don’t forget something important, and then actually get written in one fell swoop, typically then to be posted right away or perhaps the next day if I feel like I’ve already posted “too much” that day, or if I just feel like I should give myself a day in case something else occurs to me. The reality is that some posts appear to be more or less fully-formed and waiting to be transcribed, while others are beasts that require some substantial degree of taming before posting.
What are you generally interested in writing about?
Everything here fundamentally is about me. I’m writing about me. There’s no way to do anything other than write about me. If the post is about a television show, it’s about me. If a post is about politics, it’s about me. If a post is about capitalism, it’s a post about me. If a post is about autism, it’s definitely about me. This is the ongoing construction of a monument to myself, because otherwise it will be like I never was here at all to begin with. So, yes: I am interested in writing about television, and about politics, and about capitalism, and about autism—but these are all posts about me. This is the soul of blogging, the one that keeps getting nearly snuffed out by hordes of content marketers and SEO experts. As concisely noted by Kevin Lawver, blogging is the great empathy engine of the web.
Who are you writing for?
The danger in this question lay in the fact that it’s almost off-handedly casual but in many ways is an open existential pit.
In the end, like many other bloggers, I’m writing for me, but for me at least this can’t help but mixed up with the flail of wanting to be heard. Last year, I gave up blogging entirely for several months, and as noted in the epic, public depression of my birthday post (linked earlier) this blog was replaced by a long quote from Franny and Zooey in which Franny Glass hates on herself and anyone else who doesn’t have “the courage to be an absolute nobody”. The reality is that I still believe, and always will believe, that #FrannyWasRight and yet the curse of many a blogger is that they can’t not write. I process the shitstorm inside my brain by writing it out performatively (not derogatory) in public, and I’d be worse off without doing so, but it’s also true that it’s difficult to feel like you aren’t seen and aren’t heard.
Back in early March, when I finally began coming to terms with the fact that it’s all downhill from midlife which wasn’t even the high point of my life if any point along the way even could have been considered one to begin with, I’d gone silent on Bluesky for several days, having left off with this:
My life is a waste and should have been given to somebody else.
No one noticed. Not many people noticed when I shuttered my blog for several months later year, either. (Some did, and they emailed, and I don’t want to pretend those people didn’t exist.) I’ll leave off on this question with something else I’d posted to social media in early March.
Sometimes I re-read old blog posts and think about the people who after I’m dead will come across something and wonder why they weren’t reading me while I was alive.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
This is an impossible thing. It’s difficult enough as it is for me to make “best of” selections at the end of each of the past few years. It’s also true, though, that I have favorites from old blogging that I’ve restored despite not yet restoring everything else from the site from which it came. I’ll always be fond of reminding creators that if they can’t handle serialized reaction they shouldn’t tell serialized stories, and it’s always important to me to note that people had Inception wrong. More recently, my ode to a goat is one of the best things I’ve ever written. It’s worth noting, too, my post on Heartbreak High and my post on Shoplifters of the World, each of which I’d sent to the relevant creators because I know how important it is to feel like you’ve been seen, or to be told that you made someone else feel seen.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
Having only just been redesigned and relaunched on 11ty, there’s nothing major on the horizon here except for getting search up and running, and then hopefully returning to work on the blog restoration project, which is going to take a very long time and involve wild swings in motivation. Beyond this, it’s my intention to find a way for the blog to significantly outlast me, because it’s all I have to leave behind.
Just before posting this, a blogger emailed to compliment my recent redesign based on an old Tumblr theme, and as I said to them in my reply, I’m still not entirely sure it doesn’t still need some tweaks, but thinking your design might still need some tweaking very much is par for the course for bloggers, and has been from the beginning.
Tag ’em.
Here I’m just going to steal Rachel’s approach. It’s simply too high a cognitive load for me to try to determine and discriminate who to tag, and also because at this point pretty much everyone’s likely already been. If you haven’t, and you’re reading this, consider yourself “it”.
Full disclosure: I’d actually forgotten that Pablo was hosting an IndieWeb Carnival on self-expression this month until I was all but finished writing this post. It does present an opportunity, however (and one I don’t think is entirely out of line based on this framing) to say just a little bit of what my self-expression was like before blogging.
Like many kids there was early drawing—often things like ships from Star Trek—but I especially remember a therapist during my parents’ split asking me to draw something and what I drew was (presumably) me standing alone at the banks of a giant, room-sized computer.
True to the above, my family and I once made a Star Trek fan film, featuring me as Captain Kirk beaming down to a planet of dinosaurs—although in these hilariously brown-striped, very-1970s pants—my copy of which is lost to one of the several hard drive failures of the past decade.
My pre-school Montessori teacher once noted that I frequently burst into song, although she did not note about what, but I’ve mentioned before that this is something I continue to do to this day, typically about whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing, and more often than not to some actual tune.
In high school and then again briefly in college, I published an underground newspaper called The Myra Stein Underground Press, named for an infamous “missing teacher” incident and prompted by having submitted articles to the annual April Fools’ Day edition of the school newspaper that were not accepted—despite the entire back page then depicting a dead bison (the school mascot) with a lament of not having received enough submissions to fill the issue.
In college, I became embroiled in a campus controversy over “playing” a bronze Henry Moore sculpture like a percussion instrument, including penning for the student newspaper some self-expression about that self-expression.
Also in college, my best papers were when I took off on some sideways angle into getting the work done, like the Dramatic Studies paper about “the relationship between form and theme” I structured as a tabloid exposé on the one in Waiting for Godot, or the paper about “social drama” for a sociology class where I simply juxtaposed—verbatim—all the news coverage about the above Henry Moore controversy with the six steps of social drama, which I typed the day before it was due, and (because, sure, why not?) in landscape orientation.
Political self-expression is self-expression, too, and not long after first getting online in 1993 I became one of three organizers for one of the first-ever internet petition efforts, against the Communications Decency Act (which I’ve mentioned here), which inspired the Center for Democracy and Technology and landed me in the pages of Rolling Stone.
At some point in my twenties, I went through a brief poetry (or poetry-ish) phase, and once when I was a Voxer (see earlier) I even managed to get up at a poetry reading somewhere in New York City. (Here’s three.)
”Alone”
alone in the blue light
of a corner of Berbati’s Pan
in the blue light
of bands playing melancholy music
”Conjurer”
he sat at the table with
one leg crossed over the other
and back to the railing
his hand paused expectantly over
the plastic coffee spoon he
was spinning as if waiting
for a divination
”Stinky”
something stinky this way comes
it’s a wandering soul out like the bums
Even during my era of blogging, there’ve been other forms of self-expression. When I publicly track what books I’ve read, what television shows I’ve watched, or what movies I’ve seen, this is self-expression. When I used to track the places I’ve been, that, too, was self-expression.
My longest-running form of self-expression outside of blogging is a photography hobby which, while it has its fair share of waxing and wanings, ultimately traces back to well before the blogging era, and although I have a modest-sized cardboard box full of analog photos, I haven’t looked at any of it in decades.
Even the other websites I continue to pay for and maintain say something about me even if not about me, by virtue of that choice to maintain them—whether it’s a lost labor zine, a narrative dreamscape, some Mark Twain, a look at an unfilmed movie, or a ridiculous campaign.
When, really, was I not self-expressing?
While recently restoring blogs to my RSS reader after taking some significant time away from the entire idea of trying to keep up with other people, I ran across a trio of posts about digital gardens, the approach to maintaining a personal website that stands apart from blogs by essentially eschewing the reverse chronology for a sort of topical tending over time.
A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. It also creates a pressure to publish something—~anything~—whether you have anything worth saying or not. It prioritises novelty over quality.
I truly love the idea that topics might grow over time with constant refininement. Expand! Condense! Connect! Threads that weave through other threads and aren’t just sticky notes like this website here, but instead a personal hive mind, a more permanent—and perhaps useful!—stack.
Many homepages of personal blogs are more like about pages than they used to be. This way you can read a little about the author and then you can choose to click through to the list of blog posts. I think this is good. But, it doesn’t solve all of the issues I brought up then.
My brain can’t think, and therefore can’t write, like a digital garden because for me a digital garden is too much the database. The chronological accumulation of the blog structure better suits my narrative sense of telling myself into existence over time. That said, I do think my reliance on internal backlinks create a vague structure akin to a narrative garden, in the sense that anyone stumbling upon an old post referenced by a newer one has ready access to my later and developing thoughts on the matter at hand.
I do not actually believe that the blog format prioritizes “novelty over quality”, per se, but rather than some uses of the blog form do this, because that’s what the blogger wants to do. Granted, that argument is flummoxed somewhat by specifically microblogging on one’s own blog (like we used to do before Twitter), since that particular genre of blogging tends toward the quick reaction or note that’s more or less concurrent either with some news event or with a sudden thought.
Nonetheless, the microblogging exception does not I think prove a rule that blogs inherently favor novelty over quality. What gets at the difference between blogs and gardens, I think, is that difference between narrative thinking and database thinking. When I post a “new” post, half the time it’s to continue a public self-conversation I’ve been having about something all along. True to the form, that involves citing older posts. I don’t see that as pure novelty, because it’s part of an ongoing narration.
There’s no need to “disrupt” the blog structure because there isn’t anything wrong with it, and disruption—an entirely terrible Silicon Valley framing to begin with—isn’t necessary in order to embrace other forms of personal online writing.
It’s something of a truism that bloggers blog about blogging, which almost always involves blogging about other bloggers blogging about blogging. Here are some posts by such others I’ve read recently.
Manu:
I seldom share my most personal mental states. I don’t talk about my struggles very often, I don’t share my failures or my difficulties. I don’t share the down moments, I don’t write about the low points—most of the time. This site is just a curated slice of myself and my life. And that’s true for most personal sites out there and also most social media profiles. But we all know that this phenomenon, this hyper-curation of what gets shared online, can have a profound effect on outside observers. Being exposed to only the good parts of other people’s lives can lead to all sorts of mental issues and that’s a pretty well-known phenomenon at this point.
Lou:
I knew the names of my co-workers kids and whether their parents were still alive, what kind of dog they had and what their favorite TV show was. I worked with one guy for 20 years and I could answer every one of those questions about him and I doubt that he could have answered a single one of them about me or any of the other people on our team. He was a nice person, just uninterested in other people. Trust me, if you share pieces of your life on your blog, I am paying attention. I know who loves dachshunds, who has kids in college, whose partners have health issues and what kind of software you like the best.
That was the magic of the web back in 2002. People writing stories, chatting about life, creating art, laughing at weird shit, and having fun. It was about personal expression, not likes, clicks, or money. This is the time to start being people again. We’ve all had enough of being products and enduring the endless manipulation of Big Social. Let those things wither.
So perhaps the answer to Luka’s question is that I mitigate the pressure of always being pleasant online by providing much more about me on my own website. I contextualize my writing with my art, my art with my inspirations. When I talk about bummer things, it’s more clearly just one part of what I’m doing and thinking, because more context is visible.
Is it weird that this resistance I feel towards blogging again feels a bit like social anxiety? One would think it doesn’t matter, as, firstly, you really don’t know who I am, and second, it’s my site/space, and I can do whatever I want. I guess this is one of the reasons I felt that writing on my blog constantly was so good for me. If things were to cool down, then it would all become awkward, as it has.
Apis:
I write this blog because I get caught up in my own head. I am a serial ruminator, and if I don’t get some outlet I will just sit there thinking myself in circles on assorted subjects and be miserable the whole time. By writing these ideas down, not only do I get to ruminate on them while I write, I also have the opportunity to get it out of my head. I get the opportunity to see that my thoughts and feelings have a home outside of myself.
Naz (again):
You can still have a home. A place to hang up your jacket, or park your shoes. A place where you can breathe out. A place where you can hear yourself think critically. A place you might share with loved ones who you can give to, and receive from.
Somewhat early on in my blog restoration project, I took a stab at creating a reading guide of all my known blogs, whether or not any particular period still had an accessible archive to be restored.
There were more than several different personal blogs (one of which specifically began on 9/11), the “cyberpolitics” blog with which I started this post, a handful or two of project- or subject-specific blogs (e.g. one about voting, one about baseball, and one about Firefly DVDs being flown to the International Space Station), a couple of movie-specific blogs, more than a few other Whedon-fandom blogs, a blog for the Ethan Haas Was Right viral ARG campaign, contributions to Portland Stories and Blue Oregon, and—of course—my three years of original reporting and stand-alone journalism at Portland Communique.
When you look at my archives page, furiousnads.com, geekforce.org, theonetruebix.com, twitchyunreliablelooking.com, and whatplanetisthis.com are nowhere near complete. All but the second contain just a post of two I wanted to have online in order to be able to reference them in newer posts.
All told, when taken together as a body of work, this likely accomplishes or at least sufficiently fulfills the mission of normalizing being a whole person—although its remains very open to interpretation just how many of me this actually represents.
The bulk of what’s been restored here so far consists of my blogging from April 2018 until today, which was when I began in earnest to blog about my 2016 autism diagnosis.
This stretch is what I consider to be my modern blogging period, which began the month after the clusterfuck of my Vocational Rehabilitation job placement which sent me at the very least into extended autistic burnout, if not in fact into a more general lower baseline due to one or another possible (if as yet not officially diagnosed) fatigue condition.
This context more or less pervades all of my blogging since, which of course includes the years of the declared pandemic emergency and incipient—and now not so incipient—American fascism. If ever there were a period likely to stoke the motivation of someone who can’t seem to help blogging themselves into existence if not always persistence, surely it would be this one.
I don't want to die. I don't want to be swept away in the biblical floods, lifted out of my house by a swirling vortex. I don't want an unknown pathogen to wreak havoc on my vital organs. I don't want my skull caved in by a fascist militia because of my alternative lifestyle. I don't want to be struck by an errant bullet because I picked the wrong time to buy groceries. I don't want to be left economically destitute, without another person to rely on as I starve to death under a highway overpass. I don't want to kill myself because there's nothing left to be around for.
[…]
I'm afraid to die, so I made a website. Someday, I will die. Rebellion and stubbornness will only get me so far in the battle against time. I do what I can to put little barriers between myself and this overwhelming force, but I have to be realistic. We all do.
What happens now?
There won’t likely be another quarter century of blogging, at least.
It’s not that I have any clear sense of when I’ll be drawn down from the daily task of living, but it’d seem to me ridiculous to think that I’d still be around at eighty. There’s not a convincing argument to make to the contrary. My father died at 70, seventeen years ago next month. My mother—who’s been blogging for nearly as long as I have—turned 85 just a few weeks ago. She is my only means of financial support, and if you do the math she’d have to live to be 110 in order for me to make it to eighty.
Once she’s gone, I won’t be all that overly far behind.
In the end, what I want is to have my previous twenty-five years of blogging fully restored to the web. Will it happen? That depends on my always ready to flag motivation, and on my seemingly forever and ever undiagnosed fatigue. It depends upon how deeply on any given day I’m remembering that #FrannyWasRight. How many more years I’ll be able to tack on is anyone’s guess, as long as their guess isn’t especially high.
I know.
You wanted this to be a celebration.
For me it just feels like more weight.
I’m an “OG” blogger, but there isn’t an old folks’ home for those, or a retirement plan of any kind. I’ve blogged for twenty-five years. Sometimes I think it matters. Sometimes I think it doesn’t. I’ll blog this year. I’ll blog next year, if I’m here. I’ll blog the one after that, if I’m here.
Then, at some point, inevitably to be more soon than late, I won’t blog anymore.