Preemptive Retaliation

Let’s trace this path back to the beginning. Back in the day, I started on blogger.com, a wide eyed fourteen year old who posted, on average, three times a day about everything and anything. From there I dabbled in LiveJournal which, as previously discussed, started out as a quizlet repository and developed into what would be my Student Breakdown Blog, but before it became that, blogger was still my mainstay. I wrote in that thing until I turned eighteen, and even after that I had a secret blog that I would vaguebook into when I needed it.

Like my other post, I just checked to see if they were both still active. They’re not, but they exist. They linger in the forgotten corners of the internet. Like the embarrassing photos of my youth, I want to throw them in the bin and forget them forever – but at the same time, I really can’t.

Let’s get back on track. I had blogger, then blogger again, then livejournal, and then I shifted over to wordpress. I think I had about four wordpresses in total. On a spectrum of serious to not, these three sites sat on the outer edges and directly in the centre. I don’t think any of them lasted longer than a few months. Still, they persist too – I assume, somewhere. After that I had a break. At least, I think I had a break, because no domain names are coming to mind. Then when I was twenty-three I started a new WordPress with Mike, where we challenged each other to make silly short stories, and we challenged each other to be better. But that wasn’t enough for me.

In 2015 I self published a book. At the time it was everything I wanted it to be, but after all these years I’m less inclined to talk about it. But that’s how things are now. Back then, I published a book, and a published book needs a website. All the youtube videos with their video essays and podcasts about writing habits sold me on SquareSpace. Did you know that SquareSpace can help you make a website for your brand and/or business? So that’s what I made. The front page had a ridiculous picture of my face, and I had a cavalcade of business cards that led to it, and I talked about what I thought a writer would talk about, which ended up being mostly about videogames.

You can read those words too. They’re here. On this new site. I’ve come round to WordPress again.

The reason for this feels sadder than it is. I took stock of my finances – a hard, good stock, that took me weeks to gather my muster for – and realised I was paying upwards of fifteen pounds a month for the privilege of having no one read my blog. Not one single person. Apart from me. And that doesn’t count.

So here we are. We’re downsizing. I don’t need a full website anyway – I just need somewhere I can have a nervous breakdown and have (apparently) no one see it.

I guess that’s why I haven’t deleted those old blogs, why I’m not nervous about them. In the end, it’s a drop in the ocean of drops in the ocean of pages on the internet. And my drop of drop isn’t too concerning to the masses.

Hello WordPress, my old friend. Hello.