valkyrie's ramblings

Differences in Mediums

Hi! Hello!

I don't really know how else to start off a first blog on this kind of thing.  Maybe it'd be better to not ramble and meander through subjects, but that's just kind of the person that I am, so that's what you're going to get.  Writing blogs is an old skill of mine and it isn't one that I have flexed in recent years.  So you're going to have to bear with me while I find my footing again.  The rocky shore of shouting my thoughts at the internet has never been easy to land on, but I found a way to feel comfortable once upon a time.  And while the rocks have changed and my joints are a little bit worse for wear, I'm sure that the memory of how to balance here will come back sooner than later.

Blogs are an old place.  Half-journal, half-philosophical-rambling in my experience.  I ran one for years when I was in college because I needed to do something with my thoughts and my roommates weren't always down to listen to me wax existential about my existence in this world and how the internet was affecting the way that different people were looking at art on deviantART.  It wasn't popular.  No one commented on it.  No one spoke to me about it.  Nothing came of it.  And really, I couldn't have asked for a better experience.  I didn't need anything to come back to me from the outside. I just wanted to express things in a place that was more public than a notebook.  I already had notebooks of my thoughts, but I needed to be sure that someone else could see it if they were looking.  It was a different era.  I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote until I had no thoughts left.  It was both a necessary action and something I did to keep myself on a regular schedule.

And while things have changed (I have a full-time job, I have a set schedule, I have a cat), I find myself wanting to just pour out all of those thoughts and read the dregs of what's left in my mind like reading tea leaves.  I don't think I'll see anything, but maybe if I stare for long enough, I'll find some secret nugget of wisdom, some narrative I could write somewhere along the way.

But times have also changed.  The way that people pour out their thoughts has transformed over and over, so why now am I turning to a blog?

Blogs, in the year of 2026, feel both old - a relic of my childhood - and a satirical shell of themselves.  There's a lot of old blogging platforms that still exist, but now everyone is starting a substack and writing things out for their followers.  I am very specifically starting this blog on a bare bones site because I don't want advertisements and calls to action.  I just want you to be able to read.  I am not here to monetize your attention.  I am here to ask you to look at the world around you, really look hard, and think about what it is that you find staring back at you.  There are many people that have this phrase in the years that I've been alive, but we are the universe looking back at itself as it tries to learn about itself through our experiences and our senses.  What you do with your time here is up to you.  But I hope that I can give you a little bit of something to chew on when you walk down the street tomorrow.

Now there are other people that would look at the inclination to share thoughts and think about YouTube or streaming or something with an audible voice.

And to those people I say, "I'm tired of second screen content."

This feels even more like a joke when I have a video open for background noise while I'm writing.  But really what I'm tired of are people writing their video essays and creating things that are meant to just be the background noise of a meal with no concept that they should be providing something that has substantial meat on its bones.  People have been slowly boiling down everything that they want to make into content that they know will get relegated to a second screen, a phone that is playing noise, some TV blasting sounds during the day.

And there's value to the noise.  It's a human thing to want to listen to stories while we're doing things, but I fear that there are a lot of pieces of media that are now being made just to be noise and not to really feed anything.  Just facts told to some people over and over so that you have the information about a situation, but not the understanding of why it matters or what else it can mean for the rest of your life.

So I don't want to write video scripts.

I also suck at it.

That's a reason too.  I understand spacing and how words look in physical space, but there's a lot more that I don't understand about everything else that they're doing when I have to speak them out loud and measure the cadence of my voice and the volume and delivery.

I would much rather give you words in orders with connotations and meanings that I understand and let you puzzle out the rest of what I mean between the words (although this post may be a little bit more direct about the value of the writing for me, but other things I write will be more opaque with less of me in it and more of the thoughts).  And maybe this way of writing is just the kind of voice that I have.  I can hear myself saying the words in these orders quite clearly.  But when I go to speak them myself, I trip over things and stutter.  So take it from me, although I know how to speak to you with sound, I like the words on the page more most of the time.

But there is a third reason why I'm doing it this way.

But in order to get around to it, I want to go back to writing.  I want to talk to you about writing and the different ways that writing can fit into your life.  We are constantly writing in this era.  Emails to everyone, Slack or Teams or whatever messages to your workplace, text messages to your family, comment on a news article, comment on a family's status somewhere online, chat of your favorite streamer.  It's all writing all of the time.

And that writing takes on all of these forms.  And sometimes we don't think of them as anything special, but I would urge you to look at all the places and all the reasons you write and then think about your own creative work and what you are doing there and sometimes you can find a way to combine the two.  You can turn your story into the comments on a news article online.  You can turn your murder mystery into a family recipe.  You can turn a tender story about the love you feel for your family into a set of clinical doctor's notes.

These are hermit crab essays, a practice that I was introduced to in college as a way to expand the way that we thought about the writing that we did, to expand it and let it take on all of the forms that it needs to take on.  This mimics the way that in real life, hermit crabs will collect when there is a new shell and they will pass around all of the shells, helping people adjust and figure out their thing until everyone has a new home in a new shell.

And this is where we get back to that third reason for making a blog instead of anything else.

I tried.  I tried to take the thoughts that came out as long, rambling thoughts and condense and stretch and bend them into a video format, creating ideas and framing and notes.  And everything about the ideas rebelled from what I was doing.  I couldn't make those thoughts coil and fit into the box of what a video would need from me.  So instead, I came back to the blog where the ideas fit into the tangle of thoughts and turned them into something woven and fun.

I will talk further about stretching yourself, ways that I stretch those creative muscles in other ways to make sure that I always have something interesting to do and experience when it comes to all that creative work that I do.  But sometimes, an idea knows the shape that it wants to be.  Sometimes, you need to listen to what it needs to be.

I've gotten away from a lot of what I wanted to say, but I can quickly summarize it all for you:

I just want to share my thoughts.  I just need to know that someone else is listening today.  I hope that all of you out there, new and old users of the internet alike, are taking care of yourselves.

I'll see you soon.