I’m not going to apologize this time for the lack of updates. I do that every time I post here, and I think I’m just putting too much pressure on myself. I come up with ideas for blog posts all the time and then never create them. I think perhaps if I just treat this like I would have back in my Livejournal days (wow that seems like another lifetime ago!) I would be able to be more consistent with my content creation. I’ve also done a lot of introspective meditation about whether I even want to keep this website going as a blog or do something else with this site. I might still end up deciding to shut down this blog entirely and put something else here, but I’ll keep this domain name until I die! With this blog I think I’ve also placed too many personal and completely arbitrary rules around what I allow myself to write. Like I can only write about my game project or I can only write about my D&D stuff, or whatever I am into at the time. That isn’t being fair to myself though. My interests have always been fluid, changing constantly. I actually like that about myself, why punish myself with silly rules that I made up about what I can or cannot write in this blog. As I write this, I can’t help but think about how absurd I’ve been.
I’ve also recently created the goal for myself of becoming more intentional with my consuming of internet content. This means that I spend less time on the more popular social media sites. These sites and their algorithms decide what content I see, which includes far too many advertisements. It also has a big impact on what news I am presented. I still plan to keep using Facebook but I no longer use Twitter or Instagram, and I only use TikTok if someone sends me something to watch (but not if it is actually sent within TikTok because I have those notifications shut off). Instead I’ve begun subscribing to RSS feeds, remember those? RSS is still around, still incredibly popular, and has the advantage letting me curate a much more intentional feed of content that I decide I am interested in, not what some large corporation thinks I should be interested in. I highly recommend doing this. My general mood and mental health has improved drastically since I’ve made this simple switch in my internet behavior.
I’ve also recently become a big fan of the fediverse! In fact you can subscribe to this blog if you have a fediverse account such as on Mastodon by using the username bobbyb@www.bobonthenet.com or the URL https://www.bobonthenet.com/author/bobbyb/. I’m even considering spinning up my own Mastodon instance, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. For the foreseeable future you can find me @bobonthenet. I really enjoy Mastodon. I feel that it fits in a lot better to my goal of being more intentional with my internet consumption than the other major social media options, simply because it doesn’t apply an algorithm to my feed. I’m also not bombarded with ads.
My goal with this site is to create something, share it, and have it be appreciated by others. I want to create art that others can appreciate and that enriches the world wide web with its introduction. I use a broad definition of what art is, so for me it includes any work I do in video games, writing, drawing, tabletop RPG content, recipes, and so on. My interests, I admit, are very mercurial so I can’t tell you what to expect here. I’m ditching all my silly and pointless rules that I’ve created for myself, though, and opening up this space for everything that is me. Hopefully, you’ll see more of my writing here, but I’m ditching ALL my old rules, so maybe you won’t. There are no rules to make me.
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