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And Then There Was Nothing

2026-07-29 1396 words Metablogging

I hadn't intended to post anything new to this blog quite yet. I was going to pick it back up at some point, when I had the time, when I had an idea. Well, no, ideas weren't the issue, holding on to them for more than a few weeks was a different matter. Although if I still have a half-note on an idea somewhere, does that count as holding on to it?

Either way it wasn't going to be like this. It wasn't going to be a big fanfare either, no one's there to listen, but I was going to hit the ground running. Do a couple of series, slowly build up the various sub-sections of the site, just as an outlet for myself.

That was the plan, except it was never really the plan, I know myself better than that. Have I told you yet that I think my hobby might be setting up systems, tools, and theoretical workflows for things I'm never actually going to get around to doing?

I would more likely just fiddle a bit around the edges. Poke around in the custom static site generator, do the kinds of updates that barely seem to change anything. Write some notes for potential blog posts, amuse myself and no one else.

But then disaster struck. As I was prodding around cursing at CSS for no good reason I decided to recreate something I'd come across when browsing the web, Dave Rupert's Bookshelf. Having spent the last three years slowly recovering from a reading mega-slump, I was looking for a more visual log of my reading anyway, so why not make a little page for it on this site?

The example looked pretty enough, and even Goodreads couldn't make it past my aversion to any social media besides Mastodon. After some of the aforementioned cursing at CSS I managed to make something that I thought looked quite nice.

Foolishly I figured, since I've done this for my reading I might as well make a shelf for the movies I'd watched in the last few years. Easy enough. Now that that's done there's no need to keep the old yearly movie recap posts around. Aah. And there it was. The Great Calamity.

The last bit of meat, just some reposts of movie reviews, that was still clinging on to the skeleton of this supposed blog were finally picked away, leaving it completely bare, devoid of any content. Naked, more naked than I was that time I locked my locker keycard in the hostel safe and forgot the combination.

We have no choice but to wrap ourselves in the duvet, call reception to open the safe, and write a new post to hide the blog's naked shame. Of course, on such short notice there is only one thing we can blog about. The worst of all the blog post categories, the dreaded 'metablogging,' when you don't know what to blog about blog about blogging. But, hey, I'm not blogging about blogging, I'm blogging about not blogging, that's different, right? Right?

What This Blog Isn't

A Media Log

Despite the fact that adding a media logging feature to this site triggered The Great Calamity, I don't think media logging or basic reviews are going to be a big part of this site. Not in any meaningful capacity.

I do intend to keep adding books and movies to the shelves on here, it's easy enough to do now that it's set up, maybe even easier than the way I record them in my personal notes right now.

But I don't feel like that's what a blog is for me personally. Except in the sense that I also want this site to be a kind of archive of things I do elsewhere online.

Including the quick movie logs/reviews on letterboxd. Maybe I'll record the occasional mastodon tootalong somewhere too.

Weeknotes/A Journal/What I'm Up To

This blog site isn't going to be a web diary, it won't have any kind of regular 'what I've been up to' or 'weeknotes' section like you see on blogs of a lot of tech folks.

I'm not up to that much, it wouldn't be interesting to you, and it wouldn't be useful to me. I'm pretty sure of that, because for the last couple of years I've been keeping a journal on and off and I imagine 'weeknotes' would end up a lot like my early journal entries.

My early entries tended to be fairly dry recaps of what happened that day. I didn't really know how to journal, or what it was for. I mean, I knew people kept them, I'd read memoirs, so I knew what interested me as a reader, but when I would try to write one myself it just... wasn't interesting.

I knew what the issue was. They weren't in any way intimate or self-reflective, but trying to force them to be didn't help. Still, I kept up with them on the days I wanted to record regardless, mostly when I was travelling. I didn't pressure myself to make them self-reflective. Which was the key to actually making them self-reflective. And, if you allow some navel-gazing, kind of fun and interesting to read back at times.

Over time I really began to value it. I'm happier when I journal, and when I don't I notice that I'm grumpier, more easily annoyed, and less content.

I still have a hard time journaling when nothing special is going on. I journal the most when I'm travelling, and not just about travelling, but it's a good jumping off point. There is always something to talk about, even if it is just a dry recap. Usually just starting unlocks something more.

Ok, so why not just do that on the blog? Because everything that makes those entries worthwhile are exactly the kind of things that I would not want anyone to read. Ever. Ever. (Right now)

If I record a day where I go to a museum, have lunch, think about why I used to hate myself but don't anymore, and write down some thoughts on a sexual encounter I have, those last two parts are more likely to be the interesting ones. But, ain't no way in hell I'm going to share that with you, kind stranger, or friend, or indeed mean stranger.

Varia

Conclusion

So, that's a bunch of stuff this blog isn't, is there anything else left for it to be?

Maybe.

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