Radio Silence

I've been online in varying capacities since around 1986. And one thing that I've learned time and time again is that, by and large, no one cares what I write about. I'd leave questions on active BBSes that sat there unanswered. I could stop flame wars on message boards just by responding to the original post. Over the past tweny years, I have made over 6,000 posts on this blog and they collectively have fewer than 4,000 comments -- and half of those are from me saying thank you for responding at all. (And the vast majority of the remainder of those comments are from a single person -- a good friend who passed away in 2022.)

I don't say that to try to drum up engagement or elicit sympathy or anything; I just provide it as background to say that I looooooong ago stopped writing for anyone but myself. Writing for me isn't really about what I can relay to you, the reader; writing is about putting structure around my thoughts. By having to put together my ideas in sentence and paragraph form, I have to string together whatever's floating around in my head into a cohesive fashion. I'm forced to organize my thoughts and ideas. That I share them with publicly with anyone else is somewhat ancillary.

In fact, in many cases, I'm really only sharing them with myself. I can't tell you the number of times I've searched for something online, only to have one of my posts as a top result. Stuff I'd put in the effort to research previously, but I'd completely forgotten about. Or unique particulars about a story that I found intriguing, but since fell by the wayside for whatever reason(s).

I largely use social media the same way. I've never gotten strong engagement with anything I've posted on any platform, so it acts as microblog of one-liners and short non-comics related pieces that I might want to recall later.

But apparently, I've been doing that wrong.

Certainly not everything, but many of the things I post on social media that I have gotten responses to were criticisms. Not of the content itself -- not that the person thought my opinion was wrong -- but that I didn't post it properly. It's too frequent. Or not frequent enough. It's got the wrong hashtag. Or the right hashtag used incorrectly. It's too spammy... but why don't I promote my material more? Whatever Goldilocks zone social media posts are supposed to be in, I'm always missing it.

I seem to have gotten even more of those comments than usual lately, so I'm going to step back a bit from being online. No blogs, no social media, no attempts at engagment. Now, for anyone who might be thinking, "Fuck them, man! Post how you want!" I will no doubt get back to that -- maybe in a few days, maybe a week, maybe a month... -- but I wanted to post something brief here on the off chance that anyone is wondering why I've gone radio silent. I dunno. Maybe I'll wind up writing a bunch anyway, and have tons of already-completed blogs ready for the rest of the year!

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