Why am I still doing this? Or, perhaps to the point, why did I start doing this again? This article from Aftermath does a good job of explaining why.
Since the rise of social media, I feel like it’s significantly less likely for someone to have a “personal website”, because everyone is concerned about their “reach” and “engagement”, and if you want both of those things, you want to be on a well-established social media site.
But if you’re more concerned with self-expression and having a space to truly call your own, having your own website is hard to beat. And I think as people become more and more disillusioned with social media — Twitter and Facebook in particular — I think personal websites are going to become more and more important to a wider range of people.
Times have changed a bit, though. The word “blog” seems to have fallen out of wide usage, to be replaced with “newsletter”, this being a result of the assumption that people will sign up to get your posts delivered to them via email, rather than going out of their way to visit your site. However, most of the “newsletters” out there are actually just blogs: people having a space to call their own, writing whatever they feel like at any given moment.
The best blogs… sorry, newsletters… of course have a distinct focus. One of my favourites is Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At?, which is one of the few sites out there continually taking the garbage of the AI industry and other enshittified parts of the Internet to account for their making life worse for everyone.
And, of course, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know about my own MoeGamer, which is my main video game blog. MoeGamer has now outlived all of the professional, commercial sites I have ever written for, which is a nice feeling. Sure, I don’t update it every day or indeed regularly, but there’s a ton of stuff to read on there, and I’ve made sure all of it is hopefully relevant and interesting, regardless of when you come to it. No racing to get “news” out the door; no rushing games to meet embargoes; just in-depth articles about games that, for one reason or another, I have found it worthwhile to spend some time, effort and words talking about.
This site, though, this is mostly for me. This site is my virtual replacement for the personal diaries I used to write as a teenager, only at no point have I become embarrassed enough about something I’ve written to want to throw the whole thing in the outside bin so it would never be found by anyone, except maybe the dustmen, who I hope had a good laugh about how much I fancied Nikki Rose before flinging the book into landfill. This site is my reminder of at least part of my time on this planet which, for sure, has had some hefty ups and downs over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.
Does it have many people reading it? No. But I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it for myself — and if anyone happens to stumble across this little corner of the Internet and gets something out of something I’ve written, that’s just a happy bonus.
If you’ve never given this sort of thing a try and you find yourself frustrated at social media, I can highly recommend giving it a go. It’s dead easy to get started with a platform like WordPress or its numerous imitators; in many cases, you can get up and running for free, too.
However you choose to do it, I can assure you of one thing: having a space to truly call your own, in which you can express yourself completely freely, is something that I’ve started to find increasingly important with each passing year. It’s a good thing to have an outlet, for both the good feelings and the bad, and banging out 500-1000 words every so often just about whatever’s on your mind is a healthy habit to get into.
That’s why I’m still doing this. Not to be famous, not to make money, not to get engagement and followers. But because it’s just something I want to do, and which I find is of great benefit to my overall wellbeing. Give it a try!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.