Nobody Even Reads This Anymore, Right?

The long weekend is coming to an end. Looming. I have a couple of hours to confess, before the clock strikes twelve.

What is it about Blogspot's Times New Roman font, which is generally treated as the anal version of typography, that feels like the presence of an old friend?

Everyone is going back to their respective workplaces. To their place in society. To their designated function and purpose.

And there's me.

When everyone's busy doing what they're doing, where do I fit in?

The anxiety of being discovered inhibits me from being my true self.

If only I had known the bitter shame of failing to conform, I would deny any form of social awareness.

Tick. Tock.

You have 45 minutes left.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I just want to disappear.

I'm nothing but a walking shadow of my remnants. Crumbling past and decaying memories.

And expectations of once upon a time a prodigy.

Cook-off

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Writing is a lot like cooking.

You get the appropriate ingredients (ideas), clean and prep them (jotting down the idea), cut them up and throw away the skins (get rid of irrelevant stuff), filter out scums in the boiling water (get rid of even more irrelevant stuff), season it with aromatic (add flairs and metaphors) and top it up with garnish, and you’d probably end up with something more or less edible.

If it tastes good, that’s a bonus point for you. And for a brief moment you thought you had it in you to become a professional cook.

Just like cooking, writing is never instant. Even if you just want to make something simple, cup noodles still take four minutes to get ready.

Just like the dry noodles needing time to seep all that boiling water, you also need inspiration to seep into your brain and turn them into a short passage according to your vision.

Or not. That might be ridiculous. This is just a thought that pops up as I am currently rewriting yet another draft of my long(ish)-form essay about the evolution of the music genre that doesn’t seem to be done from two weeks ago.

“The only kind of writing is rewriting” As the great sailor-author Ernest Hemingway once said.

Now, I’ve always been scared of calling myself a “writer” or even an aspiring one, because in this age of instant gratification and abundance of content, taking a long time to create one blog post that’s not exactly catering to the masses seems like a waste of energy.

In a sense, that’s actually unfair both for me and for all the content creators out there, because things do take time. 

Unfair for myself because I’m beating myself over the fact that it takes more than one week to finish a mini-essay about music streaming, when I know darn well I’m progressing. Unfair for everyone in the creative industry for undermining their process and somehow thinking that their creation happened instantly.

Even YouTube “video essays” that are seemingly just “rants” probably needed at least a month for idea generating, conceptualizing, and implementation (scripting, script editing, recording, re-recording, video editing and god knows what else). Well… at least the ones I watch and find value in.

And I get that it’s hard to quantify creative processes. How long is too long of a process? How much does a decent design actually worth? How much does an extraordinary painting worth? What defines a good creation? If an alleged “masterpiece” doesn’t have people appreciating it, is it still a masterpiece? If my writing, which I poured out my heart and soul to, doesn’t gain any traction, should I say it’s a flop and I should stop writing?

Even so, the nice thing about creative processes is that it always ultimately stems from the depth of our human need for self-expression. I write because I have an (abundance of) idea to communicate and pour into words. I didn’t initially seek approval or audience, although recently I find myself longing for a community in order to hopefully discuss the idea further and inspire me to keep writing. 

And maybe build myself a portfolio as a “writer” of some sort, because apparently I can’t just expect people to believe that I’m smart and a great verbal communicator.

I know that’s rich coming from me, and I realize how late I might just be. With the uprising abundance of generative AI tools that easily, almost instantly, lets people create soulless contents for the mere sake of capitalizing on it. “Ways to make money from ChatGPT”, they would claim.

We should be celebrating more often the journey of our creative process. Because it’s fun. Because it serves as proof of our existence, the synthesis of our accumulated subjective experiences. It’s who we are as humans.

Creating is a lot like cooking, and just as necessary.

Why I Haven't Been Showing Up (Here)

I've just read a Medium blog post about "showing up".

And I gotta say, these past three years or so I've learnt my lesson to do so. Showing up is exactly the only thing you can control in life. 

I used to not be able to relate to my fellow college mates whom people talked about because they "disappeared" from college. You know the ones, not attending classes but still have their names attached in the academic registry.

Until I become one of them.

There are various reasons for it to happen, and I don't speak for anyone else, but in my case it's mostly personal and internal struggle. A struggle to mingle with new people. A struggle to learn completely new things. A struggle to make peace with myself for not being perfect.

Over time, I managed to pull through with the help of friends who were all going through the same stuff. Apparently, nobody actually knows what they're doing, so all you can do is... you guessed it, show up. 

It's just stoicism, isn't it? Focus only on things within your control.

You don't know for sure if you're going to get the job or not, you can only show up to the interview and try your best. You don't know if your  You don't know for sure if your writing will get the attention it deserves or not, you can only consistently write.

And the act of showing up itself will lead you to a whole new experience. Unexpected things. And a couple of expected ones, I presume.

So why am I writing this?

Probably to ask myself, if you think showing up is important, why haven't you been doing so, as the owner of this blog?

Good question, my friend. (nanya sendiri jawab sendiri) 

Ironically, it's not like I stopped writing. I've just stopped posting.

There's not a single deciding factor. Maybe it's the lack of time and energy from my day job. Maybe it's the demotivation from the declining viewers' count. Maybe I just no longer find ranting in blog posts fulfilling and tried more serious things but never ended up finishing them. Maybe I began to think that spending so much time and energy to write isn't worth it anymore.

Or maybe Blogspot is no longer the satisfactory platform for me anymore.

I've been considering switching to more "modern", mobile-friendly blogging platforms with built-in audience. For my mini-essays or observation pieces related to my media interests like book or music reviews. Perhaps platforms like Medium or Substack.

I already gave a shot at Substack, setting up my pages (and projected topics / sections), and posting a couple of writings. But the menu is just so unintuitive and full of unnecessary bullcraps like subscriber newsletter setups, un-removable "podcast" section on my page, "social" posts and pages, and so on. It's like Medium with extra bullshit.

Medium sounds great because of its emphasized focus on writing, built-in audience (although with stiff competition), modern user interface, plugged-in article images, and mobile-view support. The way it's built makes it feels like it's supporting "branching" ideas like the ones my head usually makes up. Since I've tried signing up for it, I've been getting newsletter emails for topics of my interests, like app designs and writing. That's where I get the idea of how people generally write on the platform (one-sentence paragraphs and clickbait-y oh I'm sorry, it's hooks titles).

I love Blogspot because it's been a safe space for me. It acts like a dedicated little quirky corner for me and my antics in the vast realm of the internet, since the dawn of 2009. 

But the internet has shifted. Everyone keeps in touch through visual-based social media platforms now. Why write (and read) long-ass paragraphs when you can just snap a picture and post it for everyone (you filter to allow) to see, in an instant?

I used to plug links to my blog on Twitter (oh I'm sorry it's X now) whenever I published a new post, where I was my authentic self and my follower friends were highly tolerable to my antics. Usually when I tweet (oh I'm sorry it's post now) a hyperlink to my new post, it turns into an intuitive 'widget' thing that people would easily click, especially if I added thumbnails.

Now the platform policy doesn't really support any external links that will take viewers to another website. Whenever I tried to tweet a Substack link or blogspot link, the (recently implemented) view metric feature shows virtually zero viewers.

Probably also something to do with the seemingly declining trustworthiness of Blogspot. I've done a couple AI-labeling gig jobs, and all the Blogger websites I encountered had only shady contents (SEO keywords spam, copy-pasted articles, etc). So maybe my 15-years-old blog with nothing but my original rant contents is also mushed together with those shitshow.

So... yeah, I'm not really sure what's next. I'll probably still rant here every now and then, and shoot my shot at writing more topical things somewhere more audience can read them. I'll keep updating!

Cheers.