Oh no! Not a blog!

Yes. A blog. I really had to think long and hard about this. On the one hand, the blog is dead. Dead dead dead. But I like doing things that no one else is doing anymore. That’s why I draw with a pencil, and that’s why I write things longer than 140 characters.

Way back in 1996 I had a website that I built myself, coded in html in a text editor. And on it, I had pages with long opinionated articles. It was a proto-blog. Amazingly, people found it and read it and wrote emails to me about the things I wrote. Correspondences and friendships happened. Then I got busy, and I began to wonder “Who really gives a shit about what I think or have to say?” And then I stopped.

Then, in the beginning of blogdom, I had a blog that I built in TextPattern (remember that?) And it was followed mostly by my friends and family and one or two strangers and a bunch of spam. Then I thought, “Who really gives a shit about what I think or have to say?” and I stopped writing.

Then I got involved in Armin Vit’s Speak Up: one of the first design blogs on the internet. It was active and lively, and I spent thousands of hours on it. It was a community! And I wrote for it and commented on it and engaged in long discussions and battles and jokes, and made a number of very good friends who are still friends today … but it outgrew itself, and other design blogs proliferated and the smart people moved out and the dumb people moved in and I thought “I don’t really give a shit about what these people think or say.” and I stopped writing.

That was around 8 years ago, I think, and ever since I’ve been collecting bits of this and that for … for a maybe blog. I’m on Twitter, but I hate Twitter. In that context I really can’t imagine what I could say that would be worth giving a shit about. But I have over 10,000 followers! And I don’t tweet and I don’t read it! But I keep thinking of things to say, and I don’t know if anyone really gives a shit what I have to say, but I feel compelled to write, and maybe some of it will be worthwhile.

These endeavors are ultimately narcissistic, and that’s what bothers me about it, but I will try to keep it as varied and interesting as possible. Expect some explorations of image-making and designers, some screeds about the state of the world (and design), some updates on myself, some rambles through my image archives, some fiction!, and whatever else pops into my head that seems worthwhile.

I won’t be including comments—I don’t have time—so I won’t even know, really, if anyone is reading it but me. But that’s fine, until such a time as I decide “Who really gives a shit about what I think or have to say?” and quit.