When I created this blog, around 14 years ago, I also created my first Twitter account. Twitter was a service I used a lot more frequently in the wake of the total enshittification of Reddit (long story short: the sex creep of a CEO decided to kill 3rd party apps in an effort to appeal to investors… RIP RIF). Even as I belatedly embraced Twitter, it was clear the writing was on the wall: the service was in an uncontrollable death spiral. Now that the brilliant Elon Musk has rebranded it as X for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever, I have deleted the app altogether.
It wasn’t easy letting go of Reddit. It was easier letting go of Twitter. It will be even easier to let go of Threads when the time inevitably comes.
So what are my options for social media? While I love decentralization in theory (that pipe dream has been thoroughly murdered by billionaires and investors), Mastodon requires its users to be a bit more technical than Twitter. I qualify as a techie, but I wasn’t on Reddit and Twitter to hang out exclusively with other techies… gods no. Bluesky is currently invite-only, but I haven’t gotten my invite yet. Threads is a clean (read: “featureless”) app, but I don’t care for The Zuckster cloning yet another service I used to like. (RIP Craigslist.)
All this turmoil has made one thing clear: blogs, though kind of passé these days, could be more important than ever… okay, I just realized I sound like Jude Law’s arrogant character in Contagion (“The blogosphere has the right to know!”). So maybe this is not so much of global importance, but it’s important to me. I need a home on the internet. And though this blog has fallen to shambles in recent years, it’s the best home I’ve got.
Speaking of homes in shambles, here’s a picture of my house after the mother of all trees fell on it during an Oklahoma storm:
As I write this, it’s been over two years since my last blog post here. The Goug’ Blog was supposed to be a place for me to write about books, comics, and the occasional video game, but mostly movies. I grew bored of that narrow-focused hobby and moved on to game development and making comics. Somehow it didn’t occur to me I could write about those hobbies (and others) here. I also get more than 280 characters to do it.
So, uh, welcome to my blog. It’s about everything.
The Goug' Blog 