I'm not really one for speeches so I'll just say 'thanks'

Filed under: blogging | writing

(This is a copy of my last newsletter edition.)

No idea what to talk about here besides my life since May, when I posted my last update. Black Lives Matter took priority throughout June and most of July until I suffered social media burnout towards the end, and I’m still feeling the burn today. I log in, check notifications, and log out. I can’t bring myself to read my timeline for longer than about 5 minutes. It makes me anxious, and it’s so noisy but clearing the noise would require unfollowing a lot of people who I like and admire which I don’t want to do. It’s not their fault that I can’t handle the nature of tweets, and they’re not even about BLM or racism per se.

I’m just sick of the world and things that are happening with no real, sustainable evidence of changing. I felt empowered during the early months of the latest BLM wave (I still don’t know what to call it because it’s a movement that has been going on for years and it’s one of many manifestations of decades of Black civil rights). But then it turned to extreme disappointment when I saw so many people who played at activism for a few days, go back to their ignorant updates or do that liberalist thing where they exclaim shock at how bad White people in power can be as if Black people hadn’t done this for decades—let alone weeks—before.

Everything felt like a distraction and while I knew I couldn’t and shouldn’t look to non-Black people for this kind of moral or active support (I say non-Black because a lot of non-Black POCs had shown examples of anti-Blackness alongside White people which wasn’t surprising but it pissed me off nonetheless), it left a bad taste in my mouth. So I logged off and I’ve not felt a great need to come back in the same way I had before. I don’t know whether I will. I almost don’t want to. I want to be able to talk, speak to only the people who talk to me, and leave. Lists serve that purpose but it’s whether I can be bothered to log in to make that work. We’ll see.

For now, I’m just blogging. I have a backlog of ideas to blog about and I’ve really got into it this weekend. Over the last week or so, I finally got into Halt and Catch Fire, a series that examined the computing boom of the 80s and the Internet Age of the 90s. The acting was superb and I particularly enjoyed the parts about the Internet, the Web, and search (as that’s my job and a great passion of mine). Then, I listened back to a podcast episode with my favourite blogger, Jason Kottke. I’d temporarily postponed him (not quite a cancellation) after a post that rubbed me up the wrong way but he put me onto Halt and Catch Fire (as he appeared in it for a brief scene) and I’ve modelled my blogging style on his over the last year or so.

And now I’m here. Turns out I did know what to talk about after all. As always, please check out the links below to my blogs and Patreon which financially supports them all. Maybe one day I can do this blogging thing full time as if it’s the 00s.

Thanks and take care.

—Luke

Somebody* on life learning Halt and Make Fire