After reflection…

…I’ve decided I’m just not going to look at the notes on the Tumblr cross-posts of this blog. When I’m active on Tumblr, I do read the notes on stuff I post there, but somehow in making the jump from another blog to that platform, I think it kind of crosses the line from “This is a reply to me,” which I do read and engagement, to “This is people out on the internet talking about me,” which I don’t tend to read or engage with.

It’s not that I don’t still disagree with the people who commented on my spoiler post in that fashion. I do. It’s just, they’re doing their thing in their space, as I’m doing mine in mine. There’s no reason it has to be a literal conversation.

So, apparently it needs to be said…

…that when I write a thing on my blog talking about how I feel about a thing, I’m on my blog, talking about how I feel about a thing.

I say this because earlier today I wrote a post that was mostly just how I feel about spoilers. It concluded:

It’s true that I’ll only see a movie the first time once, but I also generally only see movies on the big screen once. If I want to get the most out of that opportunity, I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary. I don’t want to know all the twists. I don’t want to know all the jokes. I don’t want to know all the background details.

But I want to know the story, in the same way that an ancient Greek crowding around a poet singing on the street corner would know of the rage of Achilles.

I feel like that’s pretty clear that I’m talking about me there, and that I’m not speaking in absolutes in any sense of the word. E.g., “I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary.” There’s no value judgment attached. No exhortation towards others. Not even an invitation to join me.

I guess I can see people reading the middle part, where I wonder if the anti-spoiler part of geek culture isn’t related to what I call the “Canon Keeper” part of culture, as being prescriptive. Perhaps I should have spelled out more explicitly that I don’t see the link as being what you might call inherent or direct. That is, I didn’t say, “The only reason anybody could think they don’t want spoilers is they approach canon like this way, and that’s wrong.” I wondered if there’s a link, at the cultural level.

And to explain what I mean by that: even after I started actively seeking out spoilers for some things, I still felt… weird about that. Like I was doing it wrong. I would sometimes be apologetic about the fact that I’d spoiled myself, or downplayed the extent to which I did it… because Everybody Knows That’s Not How You Do It, right?

If the post had a larger point, it wasn’t “Look at me, I made the correct choice, don’t you wish you were more like me?”, it was, “This is where I am right now on this. This is why.”

The weird thing is that even though the criticism of it cropped up on the Tumblr cross-post, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t have happened… or wouldn’t have been so pointed… if I’d made the post on Tumblr to begin with. If my critics see this over there, they might take exception to that, and it’s certainly not something we could prove one way or the other without being able to peer into adjacent alternate realities… but I feel like maybe people read a more prescriptive air into things they see as an “article” on an external site rather than a “post” on a personal blogging platform.

Well, this is still a personal blog. The name in the address bar is mine. The posts here aren’t pieces for some clickbaity online magazine. I’m not sitting here dispensing the wisdom of Solomon when I’m talking about my life, even if I do have a weird philosophical aside in the middle of a post.

The next time I notice that kind of snark in the Tumblr notes, I’ll probably ignore it. I certainly won’t make a policy of responding to it every time. And I’m not going to change how I blog.

So, why a blog? And why now?

This is not the first blog I’ve had, or even the first one at this address. I tend to give up on blogging when it seems to take over my life to the point that it’s interfering with my passion and vocation, which is fiction writing.

The problem is, this doesn’t change the fact that I still have things to say. So I start making some commentary on social media. Then I expand on that. Then it becomes a conversation. Then I’m spending all my time on social media, and I cut back from that to almost nothing.

The problem is, this doesn’t change the fact that I still have things to say, either.

After considering the options, I decided that a blog where I can sound off as I want or need to was the best choice, from a time and resource management point of view. Yes, I am active on social blogging sites, but here I can shape my message as I see fit and manage the conversations that I find worth my time to have.

That the first real post made on this blog was about an odious man being odious should not be taken as a token of everything that is to come. It’s more or less a coincidence. I spent a lot of time yesterday tracking down a DNS problem and then a back-end server problem, or else this blog would have gone up early yesterday afternoon and the first post would have been something else.

But the timing worked out so that this morning was my first real chance to get this going, and it happened that I had a made a statement on Twitter the night before that deserved amplification and support. So it goes.

Those of you who follow me on Dreamwidth know that at various times I’ve treated my space there as a differing mix of professional status report and personal blog. For a long time, though, it hasn’t felt like the right place to put my thoughts out, and just lately it hasn’t felt like the right place in general. It feels like an apartment I sublet rather than a house where I live, if that makes sense.

I’m more comfortable working in WordPress, and I can host it myself. I’m not closing my Dreamwidth account or the associated Livejournal one, and I may still post to them, and will certainly use them when commenting on other blogs hosted on those sites.

But the long and the short of it is, I’m moving my blogging operations here.

This is home.