I am so tired of social media. It has become so transparent, to the point I know I’m being emotionally manipulated, shown the right posts to rage-bait me to keep me “doom-scrolling.” Threads (and, by extension, all of Meta) is the worst offender. And I fall for their trap every single time.
I miss the old days of the internet. I keep going back to the mid 2000s, when Twitter was young, and some of us wrote blogs.
I first started writing a blog using text documents, with a PHP layer that would render them. No database, just the file system. It was super simple, and my friend Leniar hosted it on his server, which was a computer running from his house. Later, I migrated to WordPress, but continued to tinker with themes and plugins. I loved it.
I enjoyed writing it, and enjoyed knowing people would read it and leave comments. That was the best part. I made some long-time friends through that blog.
Back then we also had Twitter. You could post to it via text message (hence the character limit.) We also had to pay for texting, back in those days! Twitter was reverse-chronological, with the newest posts on top. No algorithms. No nazi sympathizers running it.
These past few weeks have been rough for me. With federal agents assassinating American citizens on the street, the same agents coming to Maine, it has all been a bit too much. I took a break from social media, I deleted the apps from my phone, and I’ve been slowly detoxing. This quieter time made me think of those halcyon days of blog-posting and today I finally feel good enough to write all of this.
Basically, I want to revive this blog as a place where I write about what I feel, what I see, and what I think. It’s still about Hunky Tops, but it’s also about everything else that surrounds Hunky Tops. And, hopefully, it will be about connection and community.
I installed a comment widget today. It’s called FastComments. This is me, trying to recapture some of that mid 2000s magic and bring it back to life. If you managed to read this post, leave a comment. Tell me how you’re feeling, what you’ve seen, what you’re thinking. I would love to read it.
Oh, and social media? I pledge to reduce my attention to just one platform, and the chosen one is Bluesky. Hunky Tops will keep its presence everywhere, but the main engagement center will be on Bluesky. It still has that “early Twitter” vibe that I miss. Have we connected there yet?
About the header photo: that was me in January, 2006. Wearing a t-shirt I had made for my blog. I guess 20 years ago I was already making t-shirts.
