Location: a cramped metal box hurtling through the air towards Minneapolis, MN
Music: Bear McCreary’s Black Sails Original Soundtrack, aka the Platonic Ideal of period drama. Go check it out. Thank me later.
Blogs are weird. I can’t remember the last time I visited a blog in its purest form: not someone’s ramblings posted to Medium, but an actual, honest-to-god blog that somebody created as an online diary and made all pretty and pithy and people bothered to stop by and read 2,000 words on their interpretation of the meaning of life or reflections on their latest trip to Tokyo, and left engaging comments that sparked honest conversation.
(Cooking blogs don’t count. We all know they’re just patently uninspired SEO ploys with the added bonus of chocolate chip cookies at the very end.)
This is not a lamentation of the decline of Blog Culture(TM), to be clear; Medium has a very nice UI, and although there’s still a certain appeal, at least for me, in the idea of carving out some little corner of the internet for yourself, and solely yourself, it’s just all so… bothersome.
Multiple people have told me that coders are among the laziest people in the workforce. It’s an active laziness that allows you to justify toiling away for ten hours in order to smoothly automate tasks that would have taken you, at most, three minutes to complete. If that’s true, then I think I was probably born to be a coder. Proficiency notwithstanding.
Anyway, my point is this: blogs are dumb. They had their time, and now that time is over. RIP.
Which is why it’s so weird that I see, on so many articles and listicles detailing *~*~proactive networking tips that you can do from your desk!~*~*, people stressing the importance of keeping a blog. It seems analogous to when Baby Boomers tell you to print out eight hundred copies of your resume and hit up every tenant of your local office bloc and hand them out like the worst kind of Halloween candy.* But I guess it’s worth a shot. It’s not really hurting anybody, and it’s not like Facebook and Google and Amazon don’t already know everything there is to know about me already. What’s one more tidbit of myself going to do?
On the bright side, maybe this blog will be the inciting event that leads everybody to realize just how soul-crushingly boring it is to mine my data—and yours—and everybody’s. You’re welcome.
I don’t know why I started writing this anymore. I’m on a flight to Minneapolis and I’m *collective gasp of all millennials around the world* a little bit tired of podcasts. I’m working on a new full-stack project (the progress of which I’ll probably keep track of on here, for lack of anything more substantial to post) but I’ve hit that wall where I can’t really do much else because I am utterly, completely, unsustainably dependent on StackOverflow, which I can’t access up here unless I want to shell out, like, $6.00/hour for wifi that somehow runs even slower than I do. So… here we are. Yay.
I don’t even have a WordPress set up yet. I’m literally typing this in my Notes app on my laptop and wondering whether I’ll even bother to post it later, or if I’ll accidentally rediscover this in about five years and think, damn, girl, who the fuck cares? Or maybe I’ll never open this again, and after I die somebody will somehow crack my laptop password (it’s not that hard to guess, if you know me) and think, wow, good riddance.
For now, I guess, I will pretend to care. But only to the extent that strangers and self-anointed “thought leaders” on the internet keep telling me that sharing my thoughts on a site no one will ever visit is somehow going to aid in landing me a job in which I can put my efforts into (fingers crossed) helping render this sort of shit advice obsolete.***
Just kidding. I’ll take whatever damn job opportunity allows me to continue paying rent.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to watching Jordan Peele’s Us over the shoulder of the person sitting in front of me.
*Perhaps it’s the coder in me speaking, but… handing them out in person? To everyone? Seems like a waste of time. What if I just used a t-shirt cannon instead?**
**If my career in webdev goes belly-up, catch me spinning this into a painfully unfunny stand-up bit at whatever comedy digs in Los Angeles have the lowest of low standards.
***As far as snake oil goes, at least this advice isn’t quite as terrible as, say, anti-vaxxers.
