What don't you blog like you used to?
Friday, September 30, 2022
A reader was recently thinking (or maybe it was me who was thinking?) That I am not blogging quite the same as I used to.
It's a common problem in the blogging world. Someone writes a piece twenty years ago and it hits a nerve and everyone reads it and then everyone expects you to keep writing a piece like that for the rest of your life even as the world changes and you change and the audience changes and the economy changes and goes from the 9/11 era to the CovID++ era, and Twitter goes from very cool to a dying bloated fail whale being eaten alive by a botnet or some machine learners somewhere in the world who don't pass the Turing Test.
And as a blogger you hope to hold yourself to those high standards that you set for yourself back when you were writing to Livejournal, or Blogspot, or at Gawker, or on your own blog. But the eras change, and opinions change, and you and I of course get older and more distracted and have to work for a living because if you can't write viral blog posts then you can't sell ebooks and if you can't sell ebooks then you can't making a living working from anywhere so you go work at a mall and then the government decides to destroy the already failing economy and you can't even go into McDonald's to eat without showing proof that you a card carrying member of whatever you think about the current era I'll give you the following lines to have some thoughts:
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Feel free to print out this blogpost and rant in that space, you can say whatever you want about the CovID++ era. I won't shadowban your penmanship, I promise.
And you might be thinking: "Ev, I am tired of hearing you say things about the CovID++ era. I am CovID fatigued, and I am UNSUBSCIRIBING from your blog if you don't stop writing about the current era (may it not last the next 18 years, plz) and what I want you to do is write like you used to back in the day when things were so simple and you just Livejournaled your thoughts before The Russians bought Livejournal and it wasn't fun anymore."
But maybe you weren't thinking that and I am not a mind reader. I am just a simple blogger trying to write every day so that my blog does not lose momentum and die like all of the other blogs that have come and gone over the years.
Sometimes I'm bothered by the world changing. Every time the economy changes it throws some people under the bus and other people figure out how how to dodge that bus and make a living somehow despite all of the odds. Maybe we should refactor our thinking about the narrative and just see CovID++ as a little cushiony pillow masquerade that gave us a soft economic landing into this current era that we are living in. If they don't keep it up then CovID++ was just a cushion. And if they keep it up for the 18 years then you and I will be a lot older and a lot more CovID++ fatigued than we are today.
Imagine if I keep writing in this blog for the next 18 years. Wow. That will be a lot of words I have written and you have read.