Blog Launch, Take 2

When I launched this blog back in April, I actually did intend to write things in it. I had plans to launch software projects, take up photography sincerely again, and do a lot of soul-searching in ways that social media couldn’t accommodate. Conditions were good for resuming long-form writing.

But nothing got written. I think there are two main reasons for this:

1. I was experiencing real burnout. Not specifically from my job, or resurgent neuropathy pain, or personal projects, or streaming, or the summer heat or the vegetation overtaking my house. It was all of those things working together that were making it difficult to function above a passable level, much less draft deeply philosophical essays or technical documentation.

2. The first site was ugly. I use Hugo to build this site, and I started with a minimalist theme that was perfectly sufficient for my needs. I am not a graphic designer by any stretch of the term, so I made only a couple cursory changes, the most noticeable being a switch from the default dark-theme gray to a darker brown (see the header above).

   The result was that the entire site looked very brown. Way too much brown. Off-white text on brown background everywhere. I didn’t factor how much having an ugly blog would dampen my enthusiasm for adding content to it.

In July, I took two weeks of vacation to clear my head of anything related to work, games, streaming, coding, or daily life in general—I’ll be putting up a longer post about that trip soon. While returning from daily hikes back into my usual routine has been a bummer, I think the vacation time is going to pay dividends through the rest of the year.

For one, the site is much easier to read now. Learning the finer points of Hugo was sometimes a struggle, but I pushed through the frustration and put together a layout that’s readable on mobile. That little bit of design confidence will be useful in the desktop app project(s) I want to do later.

Moreover, though, I really miss long-form writing. I used to do it more regularly, before the ubiquity of social media. Now that I’ve taken some time to air out the noise in my brain, I finally have things to write about. On top of that, I started finding reading more enjoyable in this time off, which in turn refueled my desire to write more. In a life full of negative feedback loops, I’d almost forgotten what a positive one looks like.

I’ll have a lot more to say about that in my vacation summary. Until then, enjoy the new site!