Some thoughts about writing in general
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This is not the first time I've tried to set up shop, with a blog of my
own --- a phlog, a gemlog.  Nor is it the first time in the tildeverse,
nor yet on tilde.town.  It's great fun to play around with static site
generators, and greater still to write your own.  But all this time,
there's a problem rattling in the back of my mind --- I have such a
love for these textual environs, for all the little calm spaces, where
people write out whatever they feel like, unconcerned with SEO or like
counts, set apart from the flow of capital, and yet --- what am *I*
to write about?

What do I have to say?

That's not an easy question to answer.  There's a pattern, here, one
I've participated in myself, of people coming in and saying: Alright!
I've had enough.  Enough of the bloat.  Enough of the trackers, the
JavaScript, the layer after layer of cruft and decay.  Enough of the
advertising.  I'm tired of this hyper-commerical web, tired of what's
been made of past generations' hopes for a free and open world.

So they, and I, come to Gopher, come to Gemini; and they-we wax poetic
about the virtues of plain text, how it's *so* much better, we'll stay
here for good; and in a week, the phlog goes dark.

I can't promise I won't do the same, even now.  But there *must* be
something to write about, outside of internet protocols, if I am to stay.
Thoughts, feelings, stories.

I have a bit of a strange relationship with writing.  When I was a kid
I always wanted to be a novelist, always playing with worldbuilding,
fucking around with fonts and line spacing in Word; bur never had the
patience to sit down and stick with the process of writing anything.
Quite a long time after that, probably when I was around 16 years old,
I took college English 101 through Dual Enrollment.  It was hard, having
never written an essay before; but as time passed --- I don't remember
when --- I took to keeping journals.

There's a whole wicker chest, back at ma's place, just full of notebooks,
diaries, hundreds upon hundreds of pages of words that say ... nothing
at all.  Just mindless rambling.  I put on a YouTube video or an episode,
and write whatever comes into my mind.  So I have beautiful handwriting;
I can write comfortably on unruled paper --- aside from bound notebooks,
that chest holds reams and reams of loose-leaf printer paper --- and
yet I struggle to write anything with *purpose*.

Public speaking is my worst class right now, but not for the reason you
might think --- the performance comes easy.  Most shyness about that
was beaten out of me by the St. John Chrysostom Oratorical Festival
as a larva.  It's because I can't for the life of me understand how to
write speeches.

At any rate --- I want to write more *stories*.  Either original work, or
just fanfiction!  (I'm a great fan of the game Rain World, at the moment.)
I want to write stories, and reviews, and little rambling essays like
this one.  Reflections, arguments, whatever.

There's just one thing, really, that I want to try and avoid writing
about overmuch --- and that's technology.  Hardware and software.
Too much of my time and energy's been wasted mulling over what the Best
way of doing things may be; hopping from language to language, instead of
just building the projects I want to; writing and rewriting static site
generators and CSS stylesheets, instead of *writing anything to post*.

Enough!  I'm tired of fiddling with externalities.  Here I am, for
good? --- artist and writer.  That's what I want for myself.  That's what
I want to pursue.

Have a good night.