I'm guessing this is my first post! Not sure how I will like it here, but it's cute and scrappy enough. Definitely never blogged in HTML before.

But why do it in the first place?

Well, good question. I think that's already answered by Zonelets' page already - the modern internet has coalesced into just a few big name social media sites. And everything else feels kind of corporate and soulless. Whereas the internet that I grew up on, people really put their hearts into their own little corners of the webspace. You could add personalised themes, make music autoplay when people were lurking on your website, have custom cursors. Now everything is ads and AI slop. I deleted Instagram from my phone last month after I saw the 20th AI cat dancing and thought to myself, am I really going to spend hours and hours of my life killing my attention span? It's entertaining, yes. I'm a cat mom myself. But it's not human.

I guess a big reason I'm going back to old-school blogging is that I really would rather not support the fragmentation and destruction of my attention. I don't want to sell my soul to the attention economy, any more than I already have. Goodness knows I turned off my screen time stats on my phone since it's not something I was ready to be confronted with for the longest time. Now I have it back on, to stop living in denial. I deleted not only Instagram, but Facebook, TikTok, Threads, Reddit off of my phone, too. YouTube is still something that I allow myself to indulge in, though lately I have been trying to slowly and consciously digest whatever I watch. I am aiming for mindful consumption, and not just numbing myself with just any easy entertainment I can get my hands on. Substack's on my phone, too, though I didn't consider blogging on Substack, because I didn't think the blogging I want to do (more vibes, more The Sunday Currently, personal milestones and feelings and musings - rather than elaborate, philosophical thinkpieces) fit in with that crowd, though I do also like to partake. But, and I might be wrong, I seem to recall also seeing ads there. And that's just not it for me.

That's why this blog, I think. Obviously the more positive reasons are that I do want to share bits and pieces of my life. Journaling has been something I got back into this year, and it's really been great for my state of mind. I'm also currently devoting a lot of time to retroactively noting down things that have happened in the past few years that I took for granted - trips I took, movies I saw, blogs I read with insights that, despite my shot attention span, I do still remember. That's also been a lot of fun. But now I want to document these things more proactively, and have something to share with my friends.

That's all for now, I think. Tot zo!