10 years blogging son

When I started I was all giddy about the idea of blogging for ten years, there, it’s done.

Me, last year. I probably haven’t changed much.

Five years in French, five years in English. It’s weird because in my head it feels like I barely started to write in English and that most of my blog is in Royal Language but it’s not. It also feels weird that as much time passed since ‘09 than it did between ‘04 and ‘09. The past five years feel like two.

Est ce que je pourrais encore écrire en français ? Je pense pas. Des fois ça me manque d’écrire des trucs genre “ça fait mal au cul quand même MERDE” but it’s pretty much what I write in English, so. I really feel good knowing that just by switching language I can now reach way, way more people. Communication is about this and I’m a global child.

In 2004 Facebook had launched and only a couple of Americans in a campus knew about it. Jacques Chirac was still France’s president. Ray Charles, Marlon Brando, Jerry Goldsmith, Sacha Distel, Rick James and more joined the underground. Meanwhile, I’m setting up this blog on my own, using at that time .Text, a brand new CMS in .Net. It’s confusing (ten years later, setting up a domain name with a website on your own is still hilariously tedious and fucked up) I’m geeking out and finally I can blog on July 16th 2004. I was already blogging in 03 for a friend but now it’s my thing.

1,410 posts. 9,845 comments. Akismet has protected your site from 183,271 spam comments already. There are 8,741 comments in your spam queue right now. Averaging 4,000-5,000 visitors a month and 80K page views, whatever.

In ‘04 comments were so important in the blogging paradigm. Now no one cares about comments, after ten years we all know how it goes, either people suck on your shaft or they want to cut it. Mildly interesting and emotionally tiring.

People don’t read anymore, I don’t know how much they were ten years ago. Now it looks like it’s 30 minutes a day for 5 hours of TV? I pretty much do the exact opposite and that’s probably why I’m lonely too sometimes.

Anonymous? At that time, anonymous really meant troll and no substance. Today, anonymous can be substantial and great –see people on Reddit and 4Chan- but it still means troll. To me anonymous is in the long run toxic, it modifies your persona and you basically become a dick. When your real name is attached to thousands and thousands of words, you pay attention quite a bit. But it also has so much more weight or I like to think so because when I read something very interesting and that I can put a face, a name, a place on it, it makes it way more real and true. It stays in my mind.

#BUTTS. So there’s a picture of my ass somewhere in the archive and it’s still in the top 3 of what people are searching for on my blog with my articles on a MIDI game audio engine. It’s fun. Sex and sound, those things are neat.

I always liked the idea of leaving a trace of my life here, for future bored historians. I mean now it’s just ten but I see myself blogging until the end, so when I’ll hit thirty or forty years worth of blog posts, that will be quite interesting to read I think. Like, they always try to decipher what happened in the past with me it will be like, “BAM here you go, forty years of personal notes on what was going on with my life here, sounds, pictures and shit you’re welcome”. You will just need to be able to read, which might be a “skill” in the near future.

Perspective? I am still the same wishing I was skateboarding more but with like, so much more knowledge. I wish I knew how many pages and articles I have read to blog about, it’s probably ten or twenty times the amount of posts I have created. Maybe I feel a slight fatigue though. Computer games, they’re awesome but there’s so much frustration too. I totally get Jon Blow’s bit, “you’re 35 and you somewhat don’t really want to introduce yourself as making games”,  I didn’t feel that way a few years ago and it makes me frown.

There are books about adoption for parents who want to, but there’s no book for 30+ years old adopted people and I could write one, the title would be “Got Confused?”. The simple fact that ethnic wars happen and seem validated by people choosing sides sort of denies my entire life, like it couldn’t happen. The Exception Dilemma. But it happened and it is happening even though having lived exclusively with white people for 35 years as my scope widened has been weighing on me. Because of the bullshit. Because of the “I love other cultures, especially mine” fuckery that everyone is applying. I’m really out of that loop (whatever culture has something good, I’ll take it) and I love it but it isolates the shit out of me. The more humanist you are, the more satellite you become and gravitate in an empty space.

Sometimes I see a white person alone in the middle with tons of black people around and you can read the despair on their faces while they try so hard to maintain a straight face, it’s too much. I’m on another level of relationship, a tourist level where I’m too curious to judge and too genuine to be scared. If I enter a Mexican shop with Mexicans around, they can tell with my pants up, being polite and smiling that I am just like them even though I’m not. To respect other humans is some basic stuff. Or I’m at the café surrounded by every ethnic background possible, everyone is smiling and I’m reading that Arabs and Jews can’t live together since 1947. Uh yes, they could.

It’s funny and fucking twisted how shit works in this world.

Without blogging I wouldn’t be in L.A. today. I met my first California friends online by reading a blog, I didn’t want to wait for French websites to translate articles and news I wanted to read so I was going ahead and reading them, “connecting” with the West coast without really realizing it. When Digg was Reddit, man. I spent so many evenings back in France reading hilarious stuff and learning about English/US/Aussie culture. I’ll never quite understand your thirst for greed in your mind or sugar in your plate but you guys are some funny motherfuckers. Then I visited CA, fell in love with someone and I was like why not make the big jump? I like it here. Well that was a bit presumptuous to think it would go without trouble but here I am, settling down.

Thank you for reading that stuff from time to time, I hope you learn some things here and there and I’m sorry when I’m cloudy and can’t really express things correctly aka therapy time.

Onward on the next decade. Plan: sustain some income using my skills, buy some land, build a passive house. I might need the next two decades though. May your life be awesome, awesome reader.