kyefox.com
The Links That Bind
I collect things on this little internet of ours, and have for a long time. I want to get back into the oldschool sort of blogging where you just post whatever's on your mind. That's a process in the project queue currently behind working on a little TTRPG world for Patreon and working on my long-deferred novel about fox people and adventure across an ancient continent full of mystery and mayhem.
For now, the stuff that's stuck with me, year after year.
If you don't keep up with the cast of Star Trek the way I do, you might not know Wil Wheaton has written about his experiences as a child actor with toxic parents, or the way the TNG crew became family. Or how he nearly succumbed to alcoholism like so many former child actors and how he's thriving lately. He's also an original blogger with a podcast where he reads to you and interviews authors.
Anil Dash is another long-time follow: a rare sort of New Yorker who can bring you along with his appreciation for the city rather than beat you over the head with it. His posts right after 9/11 and yearly posts provide a rare view into changing views and feelings about the day, the place, and the world around it. He also writes smart things about tech.
I don't follow John Scalzi's blog like I used to, but any long-time blogger is worth reading when they do retrospective posts.
And he hits on a problem I see trying to find blogs to share here:
> Speaking of things that actively denote the passage of time, today is also the 28th anniversary of Whatever, the blog you are reading right now. Whatever is definitively one of the longest-running personal blogs in the world, although one must acknowledge that the “blogosphere” is but a shadow of what it used to be in terms of size and interest… until, that is, one starts to think on all the writers (particularly journalists, a job I myself used to have) who have now posted up to Substack or Ghost or Beehiiv, or who have started an email newsletter or whatever, because mainline journalism is being private equity-ed to death and all the journalists who were laid off still want to be able to eat. Yes, the blogosphere is back, I say, in a new, and perhaps slightly more economically desperate form. Don’t necessarily expect any of the Substackers to agree with me on this, however.
I won't link to a Substack, for reasons well-articulated on Leave Substack.
Often, if a blog is still up, there are no posts for years. The more common case is the former blogger who only posts on Twitter with all the same problems as Substack. They might be on Threads or Instagram, which aren't as bad, but aren't really blogs. Threads is inaccessible to me since Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy on identity is encoded in its demand that I provide a photo ID to prove my identity, which it would not.
Most of the rest have just vanished, or only keep a list of publications on their website. Or they're only on YouTube, which is by far one of the best places of all the holes creatives lock themselves into, but it's not a blog. Most people aren't Hank Green with his ability to shoot the shit with an audience while not being buried by YouTube's opaque algorithm. He has the We're Here newsletter. On Beehiiv, but at least it's text, and not on Substack.
The open web isn't doing great. I have a list of 300+ individual websites and over 2000 links. Doing something with that is a project and, given history, I don't think many people will look at it because it's not as enticing as a Reel or a Short.
I like YouTube Shorts. I wish all the comedians, artists, and smart people I enjoy in short clips there would start a blog. But I know why they don't. Who would read it? If you're a busy gigging comedian, do you take the time to hammer out a blog post that either no one will read, or too many people will misread, or do you stay on the podcast circuit with kind people and professional editors making sure your words come across as well as you spoke them?
Anyway. Back to the novel.
