Category: Meta

Another (Social Media Site) bites the dust, and 2024 updates.

FFXIV, Ghostpaw, Meta, World Wide Web

Cohost couldn’t quite make it work.

I’m quite certain I’ll spend more time this Sneptember talking about this little website, but just off the top of my head, there’s some really amazing folks and communities I met through Cohost.

Maybe cohost and mastodon seemingly working have made me complacent about maintaining my own site, so I guess I’ll have to think about putting real content here. Until then, feel free to contact me on your horrible communication tool of choice

Some quick bullet point updates for how things have been going and what I’ve been up to this year:

  • My raid group Final Fantasy XIV this tier is great, I’m still self conscious about being a bad DPS player
  • Finally got into VR Chat. I have a lot of AV projects and I’m not great with blender but it’s very fun.
  • Been much more serious about birdwatching than I was in the past. Good brain hobby.
  • Got lured back to Warframe. I don’t know how long I’m going to stick at but it’s a time sink.
  • I still don’t get enough art of Ghostpaw or spend enough time doing furry things to make my brain feel good about it.

More, Shorter posts.

Meta, Uncategorized

Since I expect that this will become a more common way to find my content in the near future, I’m going to start posting a lot more short pieces instead of expecting everything to become a long-form essay.

Partly this is an acknowledgement that most of the places I’d normally post ‘short form’ are some flavor of fractured audience hellscape I don’t have control over, partly it’s just to keep perfectionism and ADHD from joining forces and creating months long content droughts.

Professional Amateurism, Normalcy Myth, and Blogging-As-Architecture

Meta

In every hobby I pick up, I always feel like I’m walking a fine, imaginary line between casual and hardcore. I see myself taking things seriously, but I also feel like what looks to most people to be “an obsession” is still not “serious enough” to others. It starts with dipping my toes in and then becomes investing my time and then soon I’ve lost myself in something. I stick with it longer than most, latched on and not letting go as others change gears or release the idea.

There’s also the dozens of other proto-hobbies; The things where I’m consuming and maybe experimenting but my mastery is too light for me to even think of it as “participatory”, things I keep locked in a notebook or folder for fear of embarrassment. But that tinkering rarely blooms into this “Professional Amateur” status I keep thinking about lately. It’s that sense of being 80, maybe 85% of the way there, and it’s how I feel about Final Fantasy XIV.

Blogging and writing, too, is a skillset where I feel like my experience lands me in this role. Snowmiaux.com is probably my…. 6th or 7th blog? Yet I have posted very few things since starting it back in November 2020, but dozens of drafts are sitting in the wings, waiting for enough interest to finish them. (RIP, my Minecraft base tours from six months ago)

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Why another blog?

Meta

One piece of ancient internet advice states; “Don’t start a blog.” This has morphed over time into advice about how starting a blog isn’t a good way to make money… and I’m honestly shocked that even needs to be said. I’m not starting a blog with the intent of profit; I’m starting a blog for the purpose of being in control of at least some of my presence on the internet.

I’ve failed to follow this advice dozens of times and I’m going to keep doing it forever, more than likely. So this post is a quick dump on why I think I might need to do it, and what I expect to do with it going forward.

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