It's easy to forget that the internet has not always been what it is now: hyper-commercialized, social-medialized, subscription-based, algorithmed out the wazoo, and that there are only like five sites that 99% of people visit regularly. Big business, this internet thing. Who knew. I miss those days, when blogs ruled the World Wide Web. Would kids these days even know what is meant by the World Wide Web? They certainly wouldn't know what a blogroll or a web-ring was. You never knew what you were gonna find on the old internet. Can you imagine, they published physical books with links and descriptions of websites you should visit?

I taught myself HTML and a bit of CSS back then in the pre-millenial days, and put together a few random fan sites. It was fun. No pressure, no expectation to monetize anything, just doin' it for the passion of it. Homebrew websites like this one are a rare breed these days; websites that are built from the ground up by a single person, without fancy website-building programs, or Wordpress or SquareSpace or whatever. The kick-in-the-butt reason I'm launching this now is a bit of a test: one of my main projects has had a website hosted through Wordpress for a number of years now. I recently did the unforgivable: update plugins without testing them out first. One of those plugins royally messed everything up to the point where I can't even access the backend anymore.

Bottom line? I don't want to be dependent on Wordpress, or anything else for my online presence, if I can help it. GitHub is fine. It means I don't have to screw around with FTP like the old days!

And this is, for the moment, going to be an exceptionally low-tech homebrew blog. Just HTML and CSS, baby. Very manual in how everything is set up: everything that gets updated I have personally gone in and updated myself by hand. I learned some Javascript and React a few years ago, but I never got very comfortable with them. I do have dreams of coding this using React, and ways in which I might put that to use. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it would just mean some aspects of the site might actually auto-update based on the posts I upload, and that everything would load a little quicker, and gosh, I dunno... if I were to go back and learn React, or whatever the best equivalent is now, this little site would be a good place to experiment with it.

So, what is this blog going to be about? We'll find out together. I am very happy to have this domain, this pilcrow.monster! Pilcrow is what the paragraph symbol is known as in typographical circles. It has some interesting etymological history, as well. All shit I am casually fascinated by. Hopefully my interest in typography comes through in the design of the blog! There's lots of things I'm casually fascinated by, and very curious about. Chief among them all things books. But all of that I can ramble on about in another post.

How lovely is this, though? No character-limit, no rules, no plugins, no oversight. No monetization, no social media. I might add some of those links, later, let's be real, but for now? I like it nice and quiet. Yeah, not even any images yet, baby! TEXT-BASED FTW.