It’s been a long time since my last blog post, and it feels so fucking good. While it does feel so incredibly good to be writing again, there is something so unfamiliar about my relationship to this space, my blog, and the internet in general. Which leads us to answer the first question I will answer today:-

Where did all the old blog posts go?

They’re all happy and alive, frolicking in a server farm far far away. In reality, the internet has changed, and so have I. In fact, the internet I used to write about never existed in the first place. It was fiction, almost naive fiction, presented as reality, and as we know, reality shows never age well.

I had to take the archive down because I couldn’t draw a line between the person I was in the 2010s and the story I want to tell now. They’re not purged, I want to curate a few of them and present them within context when I have the time, but until then, the only way to access them would be web archive or something.

Story you want to tell?

Yes, that’s what blogging is you silly pants! I’m just in a very interesting period of my life, in a very interesting period of time, and both I and time are in a very interesting position. I’ve just left OTF after a very interesting five years of supporting people who build great tools to save those most vulnerable online, and now I’ve joined Techcultivation and looking to do more of that and beyond. Not to mention great projects being set up like the SVT which I really want to tell you about. Those are all stories, from the past, the present and the future that I want to tell.

That I need to tell really.

Surviving a World in Crisis

Ron Burgundy saying "Well, that escalated Quickly"

Not gonna sugar coat it folks, since the last time I wrote a blog post, things have been rapidly becoming shittier. It was partially why I stopped. I called my older posts “almost naive” earlier, and they totally were. I’ve been disillusioned for as long as I can remember, and angry for even longer than that. I’ve also been tired. But the disillusionment, one side effect was it made me feel embarrassed by the naive fiction I used to peddle pre-2016.

I will not belabor the point today, I’ll keep that for later blog posts, but here is why I’m writing again. Was I wrong about things in the past? Yeah I was. Was I naive? Almost adorably so. Did my politics evolve since then? I hope so. Is there a danger of me spewing more naive fiction that I might be embarrassed about in the future? Well, that’s actually my plan, and it’s almost crazy enough it might work.

When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going.

Audre Lorde

Not writing has not been working for me. Writing things that turned out to be naive worked for me at the time. Crises robbed us from our imagination. But we don’t all have the luxury or privilege of being doom preppers or nihilists. Just as the climate crisis will hit the poor, the queer and those in the larger world first, it will come for their imaginations first.

I want to write again and maybe encourage you all to start blogging again because we need to save our imagination, it’s the only way we can keep going. So expect more wonderful stories on this website, both the ones I promised above, and more, about how we’re gotta get through this and make things better.