It’s Been Awhile…Alternate Title: Does Anyone Blog Anymore?

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It’s been awhile 👋.

Recently, Life Things have been coalescing in a way that has me itching to write on here again. I’ll talk about the one special Thing that tipped the scales a little later. But for now, I think we can all agree social media is what it is, and it’s not getting any better. Not that I completely hate it. It’s a place to meet and interact with cool-cat people from all over the world, people I’d normally never get a chance to meet and interact with, so there’s a Yay!

But when you kick up the rock that is FB/Insta you’ll find the wretching-ly gross Zuckerberg and his lot. Twitter is ad after ad after ad and there was the Musk-Near-Miss incident that gave me a case of the vapors. Oh, and if you know what’s good for you, you won’t get me started on what I think about TikTok.

I’m exhausted by it all*.

Exhausted by the constant feeling I need to keep up, all the time, everywhere, all at once. Exhausted by the worry I might miss some important friend or family member’s Big News. Exhausted by having to scroll or hide the infinite stream of Reels/Shorts/Clips/MindNumbingWhereDidTheLastHourGo?15-SecondVideos. And they also have all the pretty numbers to tell you how many times your post has been seen/interacted with/impressions/engagements/…effing hell, already. It’s kind of like if you were trying to figure out a way to drive millions upon millions of people insane all at once, this would be it.

Andrew Lewis is attributed as saying, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

I don’t pay for any of those platforms. They could disappear in an instant** and there wouldn’t be anything any of us could do about it. Well, until the next Cerberus-like “service” pops back up and I’m signing up and clicking the Accept Terms and Conditions without reading.

I do pay for my domain name and this here site, however. People can visit if they like. Leave if they like. It’s all cool. Most importantly, though, it’s going to be a slow, quirky life here with photos and updates and perhaps a thought or two about books, movies, food, writing, life in Japan, bell crickets***. So please come back if you’d like. That would be nifty keen.

Here’s a thing. I’ve been dipping the proverbial toes into the ai art-generators and that’s a hoot. I asked Dall-E to give a visual representation of my return to the blogging world. Here are couple hilarious results:

Bologo!

Boloog!

And my personal favorite, Go Bogl!

I’ve loads of Mini Posts to share. I hope you stick around. ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪

XO,

terrie

Note: My absolute favorite places to hang with people these days are with my amazing Patrons on Patreon and those above mentioned cool-cats on my Discord**** server. But since Patreon isn’t really a blogging site so much (a bit clunky actually) and Discord is so incredibly not conducive for having and following conversations (everything just gets buried), I’m going to just start talking into the void here, tossing out tidbits of loveliness hopefully, some weird, a little silly and please feel free to chime in in the comments. I’ll write back.

* That said, I’ll still be there doing my one post (or fewer a day). I love the people, not the soulless platform that has us all by the … throat.

** although with the money they’re making, you can bet that won’t be happening any time soon.

*** I finally bought some Japanese suzumushi/bell crickets and there’s a real cricket love story to go along.

**** Let me know if you want a Discord invite. Sound/Tech Guru, Richard, is in charge of all that.