As should be apparent, I've just relaunched this site and attendant blog; I've completely redesigned it using the ever-enjoyable SvelteKit Javascript framework. Breaking out of the prison of pre-rolled CMS systems like WordPress or Ghost is just immensely freeing. It opens up the possibilities for creativity in a way that they haven't been before. It allows my to create my vision on the Web, rather than what a one-size-fits-all CMS wants to force me into.
As should also be apparent, the posts on this blog are ancient, as in six years old or more. That's been a very brutal six years for me, and I don't feel particularly connected to any of those posts, or the posts on Ultraculture. The posts on the Magick.Me blog are largely technical in nature, and should remain of use to new students at that site.
It has also been four years since I've published my last book, four years that have been taken up by running a company and regular podcast. Time is stupid. Those four years have also been overshadowed by leaving California ("Pull up and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure", Covid-19, the collapse of a relationship and the general collapse of the world. The dust from all of this is still settling.
Over the coming months, I'll be blogging here when the call strikes. This will mostly be a haphazard collection of all of the stuff that doesn't fit into my other projects (Magick.Me and the podcast). I'm probably not going to talk about magick at all here; I do that enough. More likely will be a kind of jumble of creative writing, thoughts on technology, technical posts on coding, thoughts on music and culture, comics, role-playing games. A hoard of geekery. All of the stuff that doesn't fit, that I don't care in the slightest if people read, and that is not designed to sell anything. In short, this will be an old school blog the way they're supposed to be—random, disjointed, and not full of ads or garbage AI or outsourced clickbait writing.
Having run and written for blogs for a living since 2001, I saw their evolution from 'My thoughts about Star Trek and cats' to the Gawker era to the Buzzfeed clickbait era to wherever they are now—that is, flaming piles of dogshit that are little more than hosts for parasitical Google AdSense popups and probably aren't even written by human beings.
The age of the blog has come and gone, to be replaced by video-only content on YouTube and TikTok. Very few people read blogs now, and the average millennial doesn't even own a computer—only a phone (Jesus Wept)—and has certainly never heard of an RSS reader. That said, blogs are hopefully still where a lot of original and creative thinking can get done. Being technically literate, I'm not interested in putting my content (oh God, I really just said that...) on Medium or Substack, so it's going here, on a site I control, that cannot be censored or monetized (other than to mention my own books and classes), exactly as it should be.
So, if you're reading this, welcome, and I hope you enjoy my writing here. After all, better to vent here than on social media... may it all rot in hell.
