The purpose of this blog

I learned to read at age four, and by the time I was officially taught in school how to write at age six, that wasn't entirely new to me either. I took to writing like a fish to water and soon did a lot of it, just for fun. I believe I started my very first diary at age seven or so - I still remember that it was what you might call a "proper" diary, with a hard cover and a little padlock, though I didn't maintain it for long.

As a teenager I kept a diary in a bunch of plain notebooks over the course of several years, until I got my own PC and transitioned to digital, first just on my hard drive, then on the internet. My longest-running diary was on Livejournal, where I posted for thirteen consecutive years. That blog still exists, and sometimes I think that reading it back could provide potentially fascinating insights into what past me thought about life in her early twenties, but then I remember all the random drivel I produced for years just to keep my daily posting streak going and shudder. Plus my uni years are a time I'd rather forget.

In my late twenties/early thirties I slowly transitioned from blogging to posting in social media sites. I was never a big fan of them, but blogging online had got me used to actually getting responses from other people instead of merely writing for myself, and those were increasingly hard to come by on my old blog. I never had a great time on sites like Facebook though, and mostly used my accounts to share the occasional slice of life or ask friends for advice.

Facebook eventually became literally unusable to me a few years ago, with a feed full of ads and a notification panel full of fake notifications wanting to tell me about nothing. I moved to Twitter, where I had both fewer characters available and fewer connections; then Elon Musk happened. I started to read reddit a bit more; promptly that started to go down the drain due to corporate greed. The enshittification of social media is accelerating.

I've heard some people say that they've simply stopped using them and that they are happier for it, but that doesn't quite work for me. Writing is quite cathartic for me, and I miss being able to randomly tell the world about both the wonderful and the annoying at times. I looked around for a new social media site for a few months, but just couldn't find anything I liked.

This week I turned 40 and finally thought: sod it, I'll just make another blog. It may be old-fashioned, but it worked well for me in the past and I'm not that fussed about how many readers I get at this point. I'm not going to hide it (it should be linked from my Blogger profile), but if nobody cares that's also fine. I just want to be able to write down my thoughts.

So that's what this is going to be - a place to share random thoughts about things happening in my life or in the world. There's not going to be any kind of schedule, just a place to jot things down when the mood strikes me.