What the what? A blog in 2026? Why a blog?
Come here.
Stay a while and listen.
Here's a round-a-bout recollection of my getting back into "analog" media, a search for meaning on the internet, and my reasons for starting a new blog in the year of 2026.
I don't want to speak for everyone, but I think that the COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns broke all of our brains in a fundamental way that is going to need to be studied over the course of our generation. My sense of time is completely broken. It's really been hard on my mental state over the last couple years... this ominous feeling of how fleeting everything seems. I've generally become disillusioned with the current state of the internet since 2016, and have spent the following years slowly (emphasis on slow) walking away from all of these platforms that have become entrenched in our daily lives. First it was Facebook, then it was Twitter, now it's Instagram - which I'm slowly giving up because it has become so hard to see the updates of the friends and family I care about. Everything is a reel, and everything is vying for my time. I miss seeing the artists that I followed buried between all of the ads and videos from accounts I don't follow. It's all just noise meant to push our buttons.
I'd like to replace the social media sized dopamine hole in my brain with hobbies that are more fruitful and creative. I want to document my life with photography and writing. I want to be able to share those updates, or even just thoughts about a new movie or game. But sometimes what I want to say is messy. I don't want to have to edit my take down into 280 characters for engagement. From where I cynically sit, frankly...I want to disassociate entirely when I look at the internet and see the miasma of AI-slop regurgitating and feeding us the mental equivalent of empty calories.
Back in late 2023 I was dialing in on the right dosage for medication after being diagnosed with ADHD and depression. I bought a journal because it might help with this eroding sense of self and to provide structure to my scatterbrained thoughts. I needed a pressure release valve. Photography had been helping me stay connected to family, the conscious act of showing up for family get togethers and trying to document helped ground me and provided a creative and analog outlet (mostly digital cameras, analog in the sense of returning to devices designed and purpose built for one use) that was divorced from my career as a visual artist. And so thought writing would help reconnect with myself in a fun analog way. It has! Writing...physical writing, pen to paper, is a real joy when it's for the love of the game and is also years divorced from my last school assignment. Through 2024 and 2025 I found myself returning to write memories down. To be clear, I'm bad at journaling. With my ADHD there are times where I can go months without writing something. The point is that it's there, and it lets me get thoughts out in a way that's just for me, my own enjoyment, and my own memory. Sometimes it's a short paragraph about a new movie; sometimes it's pages recapping a vacation that I want to remember.
In 2026, I started writing little daily memories. A couple phrases, or a short sentence, recapping a highlight from my day. I treat it as a form of meditation as an effort to be more mindful of the time I have spent here and trying to be more mindful of the time I spend with loved ones. It's been a great little exercise where I try and focus on the positive...even something as small as cooking a nice meal, or cuddling on the couch with my wife and pets. I thought maybe having a blog as a more public facing addendum to my journaling would be a good exercise as well.
This year (2026) I began another blog to help keep me accountable for Project Meteorite and my own indie label for a video game I'm developing on my own, to keep track of development in a more structured way. I view this more personal blog as an attempt to help keep me accountable for sharing updates in a more unfiltered way...but also in a more positive self-affirming way. Too many times in the past have I started on a draft post on Instagram or Twitter for a thing in my sketchbook, only to trash it because it wasn't polished. Maybe this blog could serve as a repository for my photography and/or sketchbook in a setting that is divorced from the viral nature of the modern internet. From the outside looking in... the rat race and clout chasing on social media... the endless churn where things become "content" has left me feeling more than a little sour. I am looking for meaning in an age on the internet where all of the push notifications screaming for my attention feel like a metaphorical gun to the head. The genie is out of the bottle with the culture of dark patterns in the algorithm pushing us to be more polarized, but it doesn't have to be this way.
Look, I'm the first to admit I'm a bit of a hermit. I work from home. Aside from my wife, most of my social interactions are with coworkers over video calls on Slack & Zoom, or my weekly game night with college friends over Discord. And I doubt I'm alone in thinking that since COVID I have experienced my social circles shrink, and my own introverted tendency to retreat further into myself heightened. This isolation and taking a step back from social media helped me see how these platforms were purposefully driving a wedge between people because hate clicks print money. This feeling, or rather loss of feeling of community left me feeling more isolated by its superficial nature. I miss reading artist blogs and participating in forums. As I watched communities transform into dogpiling and fighting over the "Discourse de Jour" I became more nostalgic for Web 1.0. Earnestly...I want to take back some of my agency and save some of what I loved about the early internet. To me that first step is having something relatively decentralized that can be "mine" for my own sake and not adding to the noise by chasing the algorithm with shit I simply don't enjoy making. Web 2.0 sanded off a lot of the friction of the early internet. Sure everything became more clean and "intuitive", but that friction was part of what made it cool!