starting a blog

I remember having a skyblog¹ back in middle school, when basically everyone had one. But memories are blurry: I don’t even remeber what I was posting, probably some old school youtube links of songs I liked² and pixelated images of some early-stage memes. Anyway, it hurts to say that more or less 15 years have passed since my last encounter with the world of blogs and shared some thoughts with the outside world.

the urge to touch grass and start writing

In the same vein as the Youtube playlists such as “dark academia to romanticize studying” and the likes, I feel we are starting to romanticize having an old school simple blog where you would write spontaneous, deep insights mixed up with mundane pictures of cats in the streets. It very well be one of the reasons I am starting.

Scholar Interrupted at His Writing - Gerrit Dou - 1635.
(what it feels like to study with the dark academia playlist)

But thinking about it, I believe getting into this habit of writing can lead to many positive effects on daily life. Getting better at writing would be great. It may help sorting out thoughts. It may allow to evacuate ideas that are piling up, or catch them before they get erased. It is also something I can come back to later, references of my experiences.

More simply, exploring new hobbies and occupations is a nice thing, and maintaining a blog is for sure a hobby in itself. It also helps in sorting out and sharing any other interest in life.

Making it as a public blog as opposed to a mere private obsidian vault is only a way to increase motivation, to kind of force myself to commit (and then to get to share and brag about it!).

back to the old internet

In the 2000s, it seemed to be to me that the internet was scattered in a chaotic Milky Way of smaller websites, blogs, forums and personal pages. Now, many would say that there are like 3 websites - such as Instagram, X, Reddit - capturing 99% of the traffic with a good chunk of being a feast of bots and AI “slop”.³

Is the old internet dead? I have no idea, maybe all the sites are still there, somewhere, but the overall impression: we stopped spending most of our (ever-expanding) internet time on these small personal websites we had added as favorites over the years for a more streamlined, comfortable, standardized doom scrolling. I just think it can be fun to try and bring back some of our old Windows Vista era internet culture, and you can consider this blog to be a modest attempt!

anxiety to output

I am not saying that my skyblog of the late 2000s had any reader (well, I was probably spamming it to my friends on Windows Live Messenger). This time as well, I am not expecting millions of daily readers on my random thoughts and rants, and this is fine. This is what I want to keep in mind in order to ease the anxiety to write things as they come, without putting filters, imagining what everyone may think. I will try to ignore this, and making this a habit is current wish.

thank you for reading my first blog post!

NB: despite the sadness that skyblogs have been shut down and most of them have probably become lost media, I think it is amazing and very funny that the French national library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) has been archiving them! You simply need to be an accredited researcher to access them.⁴