What is a blog? A motley collection of thoughts...

Blogs don't generally come naturally to me. Growing up on games, I'm used to ejecting my thoughts as a response to prompted topics. The first place I adopted this mindset was, er, the Minecraft Forums. At eleven-ish I really shouldn't have been on a forum of any kind, but you could do worse. I responded to topics I knew about, topics I thought I knew about, and topics I knew nothing about. Before I ever used twitter (and, frankly, more than I use twitter even now), I had gotten used to expelling random thoughts. The problem with forums is these thoughts...hang around. I really need to remember the password to that account. A few hundred adolescent posts removed from the face of the Earth really wouldn't be missed.

After forums came live-chat services. I run an Instagram for Lego models and some other stuff, but the really active years were 2014-2017. Through Instagram I did a tad of long-distance dating with girls who had similar interests (and they were girls - I know full well that sometimes a "girl" is a 40 year old man with armpit stains). We spoke over voice and video via Skype and Kik, and Instagram on occasion, too. When I broke up with the last of these long distance partners - around two years, that one lasted - Instagram became a backseat of relatively interconnected memories. There wasn't a great deal of posts on there that she hadn't commented on and our mutual interest in Lego meant any Lego model I'd built was usually informed on, at least in concept, her thoughts. It took a few years before my Instagram was, well, mine again, at least in my head.

In late 2014/early 2015, I played a game called Garry's Mod and played on a so-called "roleplay server" - where you act in one fictional universe or another, creating your own character and side story within that universe. I played on a Star Wars server - on a big capital ship with around 200 other active people, though only about 50 were online at any given time. For Garry's Mod, I learned the benefits of Teamspeak, and both it and Garry's Mod gave me my first foray in communicating via voice with strangers over the internet. I met one of my closest friends on that server - we've played dozens of games since then, helped each other through relationships and such - but also developed my mindset further. Improv and being good at streaming your consciousness was vital to keeping people entertained.

Discord is my newest - perhaps last, given how pervasive it is - platform for discussing my thoughts. I'm older and maybe a teeny bit wiser, meaning I stay in servers I like and try not to be in servers just to complain about one thing or another. I run my own game development team through Discord, communicate with friends, and run a community regarding my work there of around 600 people. Every day I spend a few hours in voice chat, which helped me through the pandemic, especially when we switch on the webcams for a bit. Truth be told, I used to do a lot more writing than I do - my game development work has eaten my free time lately. Moreover, writing thoughts in a journal - hectic, free-written - didn't feel as appealing anymore. It felt like I was mincing my brain for productive thoughts to write down.

A blog, then, isn't natural to me - but reading other blogs is something that is, and through it I've come to realise how a blog isn't a place to display on-the-whim thoughts, like all the social media above. It's somewhere I can talk at length on a topic I like, and that comes to mind. Through it I can externalise thoughts I usually wouldn't, not for fear of controversy or something, but just because long-form communication is not standard over the internet. Someone's either gonna read this, or...they're not, ultimately. Someone may be reading this sentence right now. Or, perhaps more likely, nobody might ever read this particular blog post. In that case, I really better speak my mind - if for no other reason, then as a record of this particular ginger's day-to-day.