Remember Blogger?
I’ve been digging through my archive and the oldest blog post I could find was from March 2002.
Twenty two years. Oh boy.
Also found my old MP3 blog, but you’re all far too young to remember those.
Category: Website
“Created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort.”
Blogroll: noun ‘a list on a blog page, usually running down one side, that has links to other blogs, websites, or online discussion groups’
The nice thing about controlling my own space online again is the ability to do what I like. No one blogs anymore, but it doesn’t mean I can’t have a goddamn blogroll.
Don’t worry, it’ll grow.
Purpose
I’m still wrestling with what this blog is for.
Once the rest of the website is finished I’ll be relaunching Midnight Quatermass. I’m pretty active on Instagram and occasionally post to Facebook. And gods help me, I’m even thinking about reviving my old tumble-log purely for images I find online that are currently filling up my hard-drive.
Back in the day I wrote a few personal blogs along with an MP3 blog (remember them?), was active on all the social media platforms and also had my writing going up on various websites and magazines… That time has passed and maybe if Google Reader still existed it’d be easier to find a use for this particular space now. The loss of GReader and Twitter-as-it-was were real body-blows for me. I miss other sites, but these two services changed the way I work so drastically for the better that I just took it for granted they were gonna stick around.
Now the truth is that I don’t read any blogs on a regular basis anymore – I need a nudge from elsewhere to find or remember them.
It’s a mess. We really did fuck this stuff up.
So what I don’t want to do is simply replicate the posts I write elsewhere here. But finding an audience for this slice of the website feels like an uphill struggle. I may have got it right initially by calling it a notebook and should continue to use it primarily as just that – notes to myself.
Maybe the better stuff I post here will grow into something worth rewriting for the newsletter which has already has an audience… I probably need to have a look around and see what folk are using their blogs for these days.
Usually I just allow stuff to fall into place, but this feels like something I need to kick around a little more.
Bear with me.
Merch Table
Still working on the rest of the website and put up the first story in my A Girl and A Gun series.
Kinda want this on a T-shirt now…
You can read the short story here.
Hit me up on ICQ
I’ve been checking out my old, now very much offline, website – hand coded in html until Blogger came along and changed everything – to see if any of it is worth archiving properly.
My contact details included a map to our house. Back in 2000 it felt like only 56 people were dialled-in at any one time and every single complete stranger I met online was a delight so this didn’t feel weird or unsafe at all. Not long after we took a three month trip around the world crashing with people we’d never met in real life via a punk rock message board and they’re (mostly) still firm friends now.
We never had anyone roll up unexpectedly*, but did get a lot of calls from Americans at 3am asking me questions about AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.
Jess was overjoyed.
*although one day I got chatting to a random Australian in the bookstore I worked in and invited him home to watch a movie. He stayed with us for about six months…
Slowly but surely…
I’m putting my first crime comic book to bed so of course I’ve now decided that this is the best time to start working on my website again. There’s a difference between procrastination and PROcrastination. I’ve got about 40 pages of the crime thing left, but the coda is written and I know how the finale plays out. Looking forward to getting it finished so I can start another kids’ book.
Fetch: The Rescue is out in just over a month I think. Dave is inking issue 2 of our return to horror books. Then the crime thing and then (hopefully – I haven’t pitched it yet) the sci-fi kids’ thing. That should take me to the half year mark and keep Dave and the team busy until Christmas I guess.
Got a lot of other stuff to fit in this year so of course I’ve also just booked the first family holiday of the year with another planned for the summer. 2024 started busy and looks like its going to speed up some yet.
Miles and miles to go and all that…
Kicking the tyres
I haven’t used this WP template before so I’m just generating a few posts to see how the thing hangs together. It’s gonna be a while before this is up and running properly.
You should definitely go watch THE GUEST (2014) though.
The Notebook
I’m trying to keep this simple. Every time I build a website I get distracted by all the extra bells and whistles and then spend far too much time under the hood trying to fix all the things I inevitably break. So this time the main page of the site will be a blog that I’m simply calling The Notebook. I’ll use it to keep thoughts and ideas online that either don’t fit elsewhere or will eventually get developed into something meatier.
Maybe eventually it’ll develop into a thing that can stand up by itself. We’ll see.
Setting this thing up again
I do this about once a year. Maybe this one will stick.
2.10am
OK, this is just a test as I’ve been playing with the template HTML. Anything but real work huh? Damn. it’s getting late.
Mike is blogging to: The Ataris – Blue Skies Broken Hearts Next 12 Exits