Behold, the Last Blog!
It's mid-2026, and the written word, the longest-standing technology, is dead, buried next to a thousand lonely 56k modems, rotary phones, bayonets and bronze axes.
Okay, people still use the written word, but writing must be adulterated on social media; platforms like X or Blusky infuse their authors with a need to see the numbers go up. Likes act as a sieve, filtering the writing you're exposed to based on an algorithm, essentially ensuring that whatever you see is palatable to you.
Reddit is even worse in this regard, outright hiding downvoted posts, turning unpopular thoughts into a sort of witch-hunting ritual. There's a sick sort of satisfaction in seeing someone with a bad idea get downvoted into oblivion, especially if they edit their post complaining about it. Or even better - if you later see them delete it, the ultimate show of dominance on the subreddit about BlazBlue: Nether Retrograde, a video game that probably exists.
New to the last few years, though, is this media getting hoovered up and aggregated into AI, with little snippets of the most liked posts put into a blender and shaped into a vaguely accurate, but banal slop. In this way, AI is very much like McNuggets - made of reconstituted slurry, easy to digest, tasty in the moment, but not very good for you, and benefits a corporation that is even more evil than the median.
None of my old man ranting here is particularly new, here, but I want to set the stage for why this old, haunted turnip is making the last blog to ever exist. I remember a time when you had to - wanted to, in fact - go to more than four websites. The vast majority of my internet browsing habits are now down to just youtube, reddit, blusky, and google AI results (with some healthy skepticism, so I don't have to feel as bad about the fact that my lizard brain likes getting quick, broad answers to random questions.)
In truth my consumption habits have been more or less this concentrated for quite some time; I remember getting introduced to Reddit at my first college job, and I've never quite been able to quit it, despite being well aware that genuine human connection is deliberately frustrated on it. Compare Reddit to, say, an InvisionFree forum. At least on InvisionFree, communities were usually legibly small; Dunbar's Number allowed you to remember the regulars and come to understand them on some level, even if they had the wrong opinion on Metal Gear Solid 2. And perhaps more importantly, upvotes and downvotes didn't exist, so bold opinions got to exist. The odious ones did too, unless you had a good moderator.
Perhaps the closest we can get to a tight-knit community these days is Discord, but there's a sort of transience to Discord that I just don't like. It gives messaging more than it does posting. And baby, I want to post. Messaging is ephemeral, posting is eternal.
Discord is also full of perverts, so there's that.
The thing about blogging is that it feels constructed, like my word choice matters, like I'm a careful carpenter, shaving away at cedar until something more than the sum of its parts comes out. (Not this first post, though, which is more of a ramble). This is why I'm compelled to blog, even though it's doomed to be read by almost no one.
So, welcome to an actual blog actually created with actual words in mid-2026. As a haunted turnip, my interests are diverse, but be prepared for a lot of takes on video games and other pop culture ephemera. Other interests include writing, psychology, politics (when I can stand to think about them), and the slow, inexorable march toward human extinction that millennials have a front row seat to :)
