Ella C Tucker

&The Rest

Blog Intentions

05 May, 2024

I'm starting a blog, here, at ectcetera.net! And to kick it off, I'm doing some writing about why I'm doing it and where I plan to go with it.

This is mostly directed at myself for the moment. But maybe it can serve as inspiration if you're in a similar position now. Or, a decade from now wondering how such a prolific writer got their start.

I used to interact with the internet in basically a read-only mode.

That doesn't mean I didn't use the internet, far from it. I read blogs, browsed Reddit, watched a bunch of YouTube, and formed opinions on Twitter's main characters.

But I didn't post much. I had a vague sense that putting anything of myself on the internet was dangerous. That I would be taken advantage of by nebulous bad actors. That someday college admissions or employers might disapprove of something I had said.

I got some of that from my dad, who had a full stranger danger view of the web. (He went so far as to ban me from using voice chat in games like Overwatch, which I ignored of course.)

I got some of it from my own observation that very real bad stuff did obviously happen on the internet. I know plenty of people who have received various forms of harassment here.

But that's not the full story of the internet. Lots of really cool stuff happens here.

Every day, people on the internet:

  • Learn new things about the world, others, and themselves.
  • Engage in dialogue to refine their thoughts.
  • Advocate for social and political change.
  • Create art of all kinds - written, visual, musical, interactive.
  • Meet new friends, collaborators, and accomplices.

I want to be a part of that!

There's another angle of justification here:

  • I'm gonna be around for a while! I'm only 23.
  • The internet is gonna be around for a while. Probably longer than any project I'll work on, any job I'll have, or any physical place I'll live.
  • Connections made here can provide alternative sources of meaning, income (read: survival), and socialization to lean on when those other things change.

These certainly aren't my unique observations - the first two bullets are almost direct paraphrasing from @visakanv's talking points. He writes often that posting on the internet was the most important thing he possibly could have been doing as a kid. And idk, this guy basically posts for a living so his observations of how powerful it can be are worth something.

I'm also inspired by all the work done on the IndieWeb, especially the idea of owning my own data. I somewhat-similarly resolved to start posting what I was up to to Twitter around September of 2022, right before a good chunk of the site blew up. The coolest people I followed mostly moved to Mastodon. I moved there too and post semi-regularly now (read: a couple times a week). I really like Mastodon, but I want a home for more long-form writing and pages I can link to when talking about my projects.

Part of me feels like I need a full IndieMark before I start posting. What's even the point of anything if I can't send and receive WebMentions, a protocol I had never heard of a month ago? But that's just an excuse to delay the writing and posting, which is the actual important part. I've already delayed this post by a month redoing the whole site from the old techno-blandness style to something much more me. And I added support for asides while writing this because I found I wanted them. I could spend a year adding site features without any blog content.

Maybe I should just be using an existing blog platform to get all that for free. But I'm a bit of a control freak and want my website to be structured exactly how I want it to be. Not a single tag that I don't understand!

I guess that leaves one question: what am I going to write about?

This site used to be purely a portfolio site, meant to link to on a resume and show off all the cool games and other technical projects I've worked on. It's still that too, and I'll also be blogging about these projects while they're in progress, discussing solutions to problems, etc. But I don't plan to limit myself to just that. If I feel like posting about some niche rabbit hole I fell into, I'll do that. If I have something to contribute to discussion on social issues, I'll do that.

I won't let this site be a brand - I'm making it for me, all of me, to engage in the world.