On the topic of blogging...

I realized recently that as much as I do it, I don't actually like chatting on social media.  Like, there are some aspects that are exciting... the freshness / liveness / the exhibitionist nature of it... but I've recently found it to be tedious, at least for what I want from the internet.

I was a pretty active blogger back while blogging was a more commonplace thing to do, and I really enjoyed doing it.  I think one of the main reasons I enjoyed it was because of why I did it.  I began blogging was because of a habit I picked up in college.  I went to art school, and an important part of my creative process was simply sharing work.  When I graduated I lost the rigid structure of weekly critiquing sessions imposed by my teachers, so I simply looked for something else and blogging filled that role.

I began, I think, by sharing incomplete ideas... ramblings.  Just things that I could tell were a part of my process -- my fascinations.  I didn't worry about appearing boring because the artistic process is often oh-so-painfully-boring.  I didn't strive to blow people's minds or change my audience's opinions.  I didn't even really have an audience in mind.  I just wanted to air out my thoughts a bit, I guess.

At some point along the way I met internet fame.  Nothing huge, but enough to excite me and make me aware of the potential eyeballs around what it meant to be on the internet.  Enough to make me want to be more concise and respect my audience in a new light.  Admirable, sure, but it started to mean that I'd not just let loose on what I loved because I was afraid I'd lose audience.

Oh, also, social media blew up -- which I think did something to how I engaged with the net -- like all of a sudden I was given a role to play.  While I used to be some dude who just shared as a part of my process, I let social media change me so that I became hyper-self conscious.  After all, I had this very 👍likeable and subscribable👍 identity to live up to.

Anyhow, I'm writing this because it fascinates me, and because I'm realizing that I really miss blogging... like, the type of rambly blogging I used to do.  So I think I'll return to this old format of internet publishing and work on keeping true to what I came here to do in the first place -- which is to give a status update on my progress.

So yeah -- that's where I'm at in my process.  I expect to be rambling a lot more on this blog shortly.  We'll see...