The cusp of a new year seems a good time to start blogging again. It’s also one of the few times of the year when I’m drunk enough for blogging to seem sensible or even cool, though Stephen Ramsay suggests that blogging goes back to Heian-period Japan:
Not quite a diary (still less a “log”), but not quite a collection of formal essays … This sort of occasional writing is undoubtedly ancient, but for me, the ancestral daimon of blogging isn’t Marcus Aurelius, or Michel de Montaigne, or Samuel Pepys, but the irrepressible aesthete, poet, gossip, courtesan, and genius of Japanese literature Sei Shōnagon (清少納言, ca. 966–1017 or 1025), whose Pillow Book (枕草子) is undoubtedly among the great masterpieces of Heian-period blogging. In it, she discusses cats, fashion, unscrupulous priests (and their boring sermons), poetry, ennui, and, of course, politics.
Not that blogging was ever cool, but if being cool ever mattered to me my life would have turned out differently. I used to have a blog at matthewgraybosch.com, but I’ve decided to move my blog to this domain.
What will I do with the other domain? Well, I’m open to changing jobs for the right offer, but LinkedIn is a cesspit of toxic positivity and Microsoft isn’t paying me enough to put up with it. So I’ll put my resume and such on my old domain.
What can you expect to find on this blog? Whatever I damn well choose to post — which is pretty much how I roll on social media, too. There won’t be a newsletter, but I do provide a RSS feed. If you are unwilling or unable to use my feed and insist on a newsletter, I can hardly stop you from putting my feed’s URL into a RSS-to-email service — nor am I particularly interested in doing so.
Why not do a newsletter? Because I don’t give a fuck about you. I don’t want to know who’s reading my blog unless they can be bothered to actually email me themselves. You should not have to provide your personal info just to pollute your head with my randomness.
I suppose I could stick to social media, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. The people running the Mastodon server I currently frequent seem reasonable enough, but they are nonetheless strangers to me and I would be a fool to trust them overmuch. The smart play would be only use social media to interact with other people and not post anything there that did not first appear here.
Everything I post here is entirely mine and under my control. I am not subject to moderation here, and any attempt to censor me is temporary. The only way to interact with me is via email; there is no comments section and no pretense of a community here. This is by design. I wanted a soapbox of my own; I’ve no interest in providing one to others.
I doubt anybody would care to read this blog, but if I can’t curb my inability to keep my opinions to myself I might as well do it here.