It’s time for my annual tradition of making a website and then never keeping up with it. Maybe this time will be different.
It’s the end of the year, a time to look back and to look ahead, assessing and planning, reflecting and… whatever the opposite of reflecting is. Around this time, as work slows down and things begin to get scheduled “after the holidays,” I start to tinker around the edges of projects I’ve wanted to do all year and never really got around to. This gets transformed into a kind of pre-New Year’s Resolution, which – as most resolutions do – goes forgotten by February.
However!
This year has been a bit different. I have been spending the last twelve months pursuing hobbies that I had put aside for a long time:
How much of this can be filed under “boring midlife dad seeks pitiful hobby to make himself seem more interesting”? Is it 80%? 90%? Maybe. But the point is, I did stuff and I continue to do stuff.
Making a website is something I’ve always wanted. I learned to code HTML in middle school, around the time the Hackers movie came out (unrelated). After platforms came to dominate the landscape of online presence, “personal webpages” were slowly replaced by profiles and algorithmically-driven feeds. Gone were the days of webrings and link pages, carefully curated by the personal interests of the people who built them – now, our recommendations were built by a corporation, using technology designed to extract the most profit.
Oh, and ads. Millions and millions of ads.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
- Jeffrey Hammerbacher (He’s no anticapitalist hero, btw)
I had only ever really used Facebook as a social media site. Since leaving the platform in the summer of 2020, I haven’t posted or spoken anywhere, and have only kept up Instagram / Threads accounts to follow people who share my interests. This means most of my extended family has no idea what I’m up to or interested in, and I also don’t really have a way to reach people outside of my personal interactions.
That’s why I wanted to write out a website of my own. I wanted a place to share things with people that wasn’t tied to a platform, where I could do as little or as much writing as I wanted, and where I could show people things I think are interesting. And I’m not trying to make this my career or another source of income – I have enough of that, and I don’t want to distort myself to chase engagement or a bigger payout.
Our lives are invaded enough by capital parasites as it is. I just want a place to talk.