I'm not sure when I stopped blogging the same way that I'm not sure when I started. The same way that everything feels sort of blurry if it dates back far enough. But I had my fair share of Blogspots, that much I remember. There was one where I just wrote about the changes happening in journalism in the mid-2000s. There was one where I wrote very personal letters to the president, back when that president was a Bush. There was even one that me and a bunch of friends wrote about Battlestar Galactica. So believe me when I tell you I have blogged.
And then, I didn't.
There's any number of reasons why, from simply getting too busy with various jobs, to finding outlets that would publish my writing for money, to growing bored of the subjects I was blogging on. But the biggest reason was that the ideas that I used to blog about ended up on Twitter instead. Thoughts on journalism, on the president, even on sci fi classics. Honestly, Twitter became everything to me: A social life, a place to find work, a launching point for a million different things. Twitter literally changed my life.
But nothing lasts forever. I know this well and yet it hurts every time it happens. And now, with the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk and his rapid transformation of the platform into a Fox News fever dream, I—like a lot of other people—am looking for ways out. I have all the feels about this, most of them sad, for all the reasons I just stated above. But a song I loved a long time ago always told me that "the secret to a long life is knowing when it's time to go," and I'm pretty sure it's time to go.
Which is a very long way of saying that I'm going to revisit blogging again. Part of it is to talk about this interesting time in the ongoing story of the Internet, about the possibilities that are opening up after a decade of stagnation at the hands of giant corporations. But more than that, with Twitter slipping away I feel like I'd like a place to do the sort of thinking-out-loud that I used to do on Twitter and, well, I'd like to do it in a place that I actually own this time.
So here we are. Nothing can possibly go wrong now.
Published December 10, 2022.
Weapons and Motives. Punk Planet: Year Five
In the latest installment of my series reflecting on Punk Planet's legacy, I focus on the magazine's fifth year, when it shifted significantly toward political issues, particularly anti-war coverage, culminating in the "Murder of Iraq" cover story.
Posted on Sep 29, 2024
Everything is kinda shitty and stressful right now, so I wrote about something that's neither: the remarkable new game UFO 50.
Posted on Sep 25, 2024
The thing I love most about doing journalism is you never quite know where you're going to end up once you start digging. That's been especially true with my work on Rebel Spirit, which sits alongside the best reporting I've ever done. Today our second episode is out, and it's all about digging to expose a 70-year-old lie.
Posted on Sep 10, 2024
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