Baby's First Blog

I'm young enough to not really know what web 1.0 was like. But I'm not like, young young -- I just turned 30, and I have the balding pattern to prove it. Instead I vividly remember logging into Instagram for the first time in high school, using its filters, sharing my little jokes, enjoying the handful of likes from people I knew in real life, people in my calc class, bandmates, the cute guy who sat across from me in bio, that kind of thing.

Fast forward to over a decade later, and now I'm working toward being a neo-luddite. I still have an iPhone, but I'm working on deleting apps like Instagram that don't serve me. I still have email notifications turned on, but I'm working through unsubscribing from things that pick at my wallet. And I still have to scan the stupid QR codes at restaurants, but I'm working up the courage to just ask the waiter for a paper menu instead. (I usually get such bad cell service that I would probably benefit from this despite the urge to throw my phone in the river.)

There are going to be things I imagine I have to use my phone for -- texting people to make plans, for calling my therapist, for playing music when I'm walking around -- but watching YouTube while I'm disassociating in the shower? That probably doesn't help me.

I remember using the internet in the early 2000s, but we had dialup, and my mom was anxious to keep the phone line open in case someone needed to call the landline. (Remember landlines? Lol. Should I get one...? Half joking...) My brothers and I would negotiate half an hour at a time with our mom to go online and download as many games as we could in order to play them offline. All bets were off when we learned we could load a Flash game in a browser page and continue to play it after the line disconnected. Genuis!

But when my elder millennial friends mention features like web rings? AOL? An un-indexed (or at least poorly indexed) search service? A time before Google? Oof, stone age, right? When I played the game Hypnospace Outlaw , I approached it with the curiosity of an archivist peering into a century-old story not yet uncovered. For my friends though? A nostalgia trip that beckoned huge tower computers their families would keep on an enormous desk in the corner of the dining room, or even a dedicated computer room. (Remember computer rooms? Should I have one? I dunno... in this economy?)

In college, I was a co-editor of my honors college's no-holds-barred bi-weekly publication for two years, and a contributing writer before then. That sounds fancy, but it essentially answered the question "what if The Onion were a shitty school newspaper?" (A question I know we were all asking.) Brain Stew, it was called, was a beautiful relic of the 90s too. I'm certain the first issues were laid out on those huge tower computers in someone's basement.

The other co-editors and I would slap together satire, fake interviews with professors, comics, musings from classmates, alongside slightly more serious content sometimes. I started a column I called "inQUEERies," where I answered questions my friends would ask me about queer culture. And it was fun! It wasn't a blog (since it wasn't on the web, which is where the word blog steals the "b" from) but it definitely was a little log of what was going on in the world of the mid-2010s. Sometimes hyper-specific to the college, sometimes about national politics; sometimes earnest and genuine, sometimes biting and acerbic, but always something that we felt strongly about.

So now, the present. Leaflet exists! And that's really fucking cool! I've thought about writing a blog for the longest time. Partly as a place to dump my thoughts like this, but also as a way to have some small presence on the internet again, where people I know in real life can keep up with the goings-on of my hobbies and stuff -- weird art I find, things I think about culture, little jokes and comics I think of. I never really got on board with micro-blogging, so even BlueSky was a hard sell for me. ( I have one! I just uh... never post.)

But another ulterior motive? My main hobby right now is making indie video games with my best friend as Team Stinky Cat , and I've reached a level of proficiency with programming now that I feel confident enough to write a little blog about how it's going. You know, what's my state machine like? How'd I decide to do path finding? What's my process for handling strings in the game? Might just be whispering my little secrets into the void, but so much of my self-learnt journey in game dev has been fostered by community -- my mentor Jakub, folks I've met through the Seattle Indies org, chatting with friends about their pain points in different genres, but most importantly (I think at least) leering over the shoulders of other people who had the same inclination that I feel now. Stack Overflow definitely exists for when you need a hard answer and a harder time parsing other programmers' egos. But what about the soft stuff? A lot of folks know to use an if/else statement sometimes, but how do you decide the architecture of a project?

Well this blog might not be exactly dedicated to architecture... but I do want to write my little nuggets of thoughts here! I like Leaflet's approach to blogging, where I can group things into Publications when it suits the style, or make just little one-off notes here and there. That's so cool! I also am very much in love with Markdown (huge Notion stan here, but less and less so over time as it goes all-in on AI...) so the ease with which I can just sit down and knock out an idea is so tantalizing.

I'm at once sitting on the bed in my childhood room posting " Hammocks: they're making headlines " on Instagram; sitting down at my little MacBook Air in 2017 banging out a full parody of The Shining over winter break for no more than 10 students to read, and now; sitting down at my thoccy keyboard on my lunchbreak at work writing this blog post, my first ever, and imagining a time now that reaches backward before likes and iOS consumed so much of my brain RAM.