Mirum magnum

Hello world!

Back in the prehistoric era of the internet, when "social media" wasn't a term (nor was the concept of a blog), I got small-time Internet Famous™ by maintaining an online diary as a teenager living in the southern United States. I never sought to do anything with it at all; at the time I was already a prolific journal-er, usually scribbling into a binder full of looseleaf paper several times a day, and it was an accidental segue to turn that into something that others were able to read.

The internet was a much smaller place back then (and I'd definitely say nicer, but what a benefit we get with hindsight and age) and there weren't a lot of people around. There seemed to be even fewer people like me — a queer kid in a shitty home dynamic — something I didn't realise the gravity of until the editor of a random magazine I'd never heard of asked if I would be willing to rewrite one of my journal entries into an article that they could publish. It was my first paid job as a writer and the response I got from people who read that issue surprised me considerably.

I was just writing about my life, largely for my own benefit and to an audience of myself, and had no idea that anyone else cared — much less saw something relatable — in their own lives.

In the years since then my life has changed in myriad ways. I left the south for New York City just as I was becoming a legal adult. After several years living there, circumstance brought me to the other side of the planet and I landed in Sydney, Australia. After nearly a decade there I moved again to Melbourne — where I still live.

I lost the habit of writing a daily journal — a sad reality that wounds me every time I pick up a pen and bemoan how bad my penmanship has gotten — and while I still maintained some form of online journal for quite a while, as the routines of my life changed I found that habit hard to keep up with, too.

Then, enter social media. In retrospect, I've never really used it like other people seem to. It's always been a relatively passive thing for me and in a lot of ways my Facebook presence was just the next iteration of the online journals I'd kept for a quarter of a century; though, perhaps with a more robust comment section.

With the latest hard-right turn by a billionaire asshole sucking up to a fascist autocrat, I've decided that I want to pull back on my presence on anything Meta-related beyond what's unavoidable. And, here we are now.

The one thing that Facebook excelled at, in my opinion, was allowing me the ability to passively share something and people could engage, or not, as they wanted to. I have yet to find a decent replacement for that (or Twitter, but the latter has more options to work with), but it's spurred me to bring my personal website back from the netherrealm.

I don't anticipate that this is going to be quite the "dear diary" that my website was in the past, but I see this being a place to muse, write longform thoughts about life and politics and whatnot, and essentially keep doing more or less what I was using Facebook for anyway. Just without the alt-right enshittifying my existence without my consent.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes. The internet is a lot different than it was back at the turn of the century, and teenage me never would have had any idea of what was coming down the road.

But if you want to interact, please feel free to! For now, I've put the comments section behind an account, but it should be quick, free, and easy to get going with it. I'll take feedback on the experience from others and will no doubt keep tweaking this as I go along and get used to using a new CMS.