Poor Old Michael Finnegan (Begin Again)
This is the sixth blog I've started, not including actual pen-and-paper journals, which are not really blogs anyway. (They are more of an exercise in collecting every self-indulgent and embarrassing thought I've had since I was eight.) My technological journalling started with a Tripod vanity page that I constructed during my freshman year in college. I say "constructed", but it was really more of a plug-and-play sort of deal. Click here to add a picture. Click there to add a background. Type in this box to turn your title into a dozen or more font sizes. Add MIDI files (so many MIDI files...) Click, click, click, and hello world, I'm your cherry bomb. In my defense, as ugly as it turned out to be, I did try to maintain a sort of color palette, and I did learn some basic HTML while working on the page. Not that that counts for much these days. But there was a mini-bio, music reviews of the CD's I owned, I think a couple of book reviews, several pages of random quotes (if you say you've never collected quotes in a special notebook at some point I'll tell you you're a liar), and the aforementioned MIDI files. I was also stupid enough to post some of my literary efforts without a copyright, but I sincerely doubt anyone stole them. I also sincerely doubt that anyone I didn't already know looked at my page, so there is that.
After the Tripod vanity page came the heady days of LiveJournal. Oh, the color themes! The little animated tiles! The utter randomness! The comments! I'd had a bit of experience at this point with forums and comment threads before, but this was a whole new adventure in meeting and greeting. And boy, did I ever meet and greet. Everyone I ever met, I had to link to their LJ. I had to read everything, post comments, post to their friends' comments, add their friends, and so on, in an endless web of attention and connectivity. At least in my circle, there were standards of depth and intelligence that you had to keep up with, or people would just fade away. It was like an early, early mashup of Facebook, influencer culture, and a "this is the face I show the world" journal. I kind of miss my main LJ, but I mostly just miss the icons and the color palette, because when I think about that period of my life and the things I know I wrote about and how I wrote them, there is just not enough cringe in this world.
After that came Xanga. There's not a lot to say about that; I'd signed up on that platform because a bunch of people from the LARP I was going to at the time were on it, and I wanted to be part of the team. I don't believe I ever posted anything on it except the occasional song lyric, I mostly just read everyone else's posts so I'd have icebreakers to talk to them about.
I started up a blog on Salon, hoping to be the next Julie/Julia, but about having a sparkling, acerbic wit and depression instead of cooking skills. (I have no cooking skills.) Salon, I quickly learned, had something of a politics-based bent to it, in that you'd get pushed closer to the top of the page (and therefore get noticed more) the more likes you got, but in order to get likes, you had to like other people's blogs AND attract the notice of the people who were at the top of the list already, AND get them to like your blog, and it all seemed like a lot more work involved than I was, at the time, willing to put in. I'm still not really willing to move myself up the bloggy food chain by a system of mutual liking. I think it gives people a false sense of security, and let's face it, I'm Gretchen Wieners in a sea of Regina Georges in those types of situations, and that's just not who I want to be.
I started a blog with my friend Jess that was supposed to be about makeup and general lady things, I did one nail polish review, and got caught up in going back to school and then a divorce, so that went right out the window. Jess is a much more consistent blogger.
My initial efforts on Blogger were thwarted when I discovered that there is a whole world of Hooters Girls blogs out there, and they are fucking HILARIOUS, so I spent a lot more time reading those than actually writing my own content, and then just got three jobs, an acrimonious divorce, and a major life adjustment to cope with and didn't feel like blogging. Truth be told, I think I forgot I had a blog for a long while. I probably should have kept a blog of my assorted dating misadventures, but you can just go on Reddit or Facebook and see lists of bullshit things that guys do to try to shame you into dating them, truly terrible dating profiles, and play by play Tweets of dates gone wrong. I don't need to recount all that for you, but let me tell you what: they're all true, and if I am ever single again and have to wade back out into that swamp, I will instead go out to the mountains of the Pakistani wilderness and live out my days as a hermit and goatherd, because fuck that noise. I have enough going on in my day-to-day that I don't need to actively go out looking for a trash fire to jump into.
This iteration was brought to you courtesy of my very best friend Zabbs, who said that I should write a blog about how it is virtually impossible to get ahead in this day and age. Just in case you wanted to know who to blame.
After the Tripod vanity page came the heady days of LiveJournal. Oh, the color themes! The little animated tiles! The utter randomness! The comments! I'd had a bit of experience at this point with forums and comment threads before, but this was a whole new adventure in meeting and greeting. And boy, did I ever meet and greet. Everyone I ever met, I had to link to their LJ. I had to read everything, post comments, post to their friends' comments, add their friends, and so on, in an endless web of attention and connectivity. At least in my circle, there were standards of depth and intelligence that you had to keep up with, or people would just fade away. It was like an early, early mashup of Facebook, influencer culture, and a "this is the face I show the world" journal. I kind of miss my main LJ, but I mostly just miss the icons and the color palette, because when I think about that period of my life and the things I know I wrote about and how I wrote them, there is just not enough cringe in this world.
After that came Xanga. There's not a lot to say about that; I'd signed up on that platform because a bunch of people from the LARP I was going to at the time were on it, and I wanted to be part of the team. I don't believe I ever posted anything on it except the occasional song lyric, I mostly just read everyone else's posts so I'd have icebreakers to talk to them about.
I started up a blog on Salon, hoping to be the next Julie/Julia, but about having a sparkling, acerbic wit and depression instead of cooking skills. (I have no cooking skills.) Salon, I quickly learned, had something of a politics-based bent to it, in that you'd get pushed closer to the top of the page (and therefore get noticed more) the more likes you got, but in order to get likes, you had to like other people's blogs AND attract the notice of the people who were at the top of the list already, AND get them to like your blog, and it all seemed like a lot more work involved than I was, at the time, willing to put in. I'm still not really willing to move myself up the bloggy food chain by a system of mutual liking. I think it gives people a false sense of security, and let's face it, I'm Gretchen Wieners in a sea of Regina Georges in those types of situations, and that's just not who I want to be.
I started a blog with my friend Jess that was supposed to be about makeup and general lady things, I did one nail polish review, and got caught up in going back to school and then a divorce, so that went right out the window. Jess is a much more consistent blogger.
My initial efforts on Blogger were thwarted when I discovered that there is a whole world of Hooters Girls blogs out there, and they are fucking HILARIOUS, so I spent a lot more time reading those than actually writing my own content, and then just got three jobs, an acrimonious divorce, and a major life adjustment to cope with and didn't feel like blogging. Truth be told, I think I forgot I had a blog for a long while. I probably should have kept a blog of my assorted dating misadventures, but you can just go on Reddit or Facebook and see lists of bullshit things that guys do to try to shame you into dating them, truly terrible dating profiles, and play by play Tweets of dates gone wrong. I don't need to recount all that for you, but let me tell you what: they're all true, and if I am ever single again and have to wade back out into that swamp, I will instead go out to the mountains of the Pakistani wilderness and live out my days as a hermit and goatherd, because fuck that noise. I have enough going on in my day-to-day that I don't need to actively go out looking for a trash fire to jump into.
This iteration was brought to you courtesy of my very best friend Zabbs, who said that I should write a blog about how it is virtually impossible to get ahead in this day and age. Just in case you wanted to know who to blame.
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