My typing style outside of this blog is what I would call erratic.

Stuff from my Twitter.

To be fair to me, it's a good reflection of how I talk in real life when I'm around people I'm familiar with. I'm animated when I speak – lots of emphasis and tangents in unpredictable places. I make up words and skip on punctuation/capitalization to get the ideas out faster. I'm very comfortable with how I type, and like how well it reflects how I feel!

But it's refreshing to be on here and feel like I have to present my ideas in a more... understandable way.

These days, I've got a lot of different expressive outlets I use regularly: my physical journal, my private Twitter with my friends, my Neocities, a Mastodon instance specifically for people insane about fictional characters (me), a comics diary, and this blog. I don't really have a system for separating each thought I have – a lot of them I end up wanting to share with more than one audience – but each outlet allows me to frame it differently. It's not "what do I want to convey" but "how can I convey it best." It's an experiment in mediums.

For example:

• Something like Neocities gives me a lot of creative freedom, because a webpage is so interactive and customizable, but it also has parameters I need to work within - namely, my own patience and my extremely beginner coding skills.
• Twitter has a character limit, but that's nice to play with too. How much can I express in 280 characters or less? It's also quite freeing in that you don't need a complete, eloquent thought for it to be of value in that sphere.¹ Also, you end up learning to write to entertain, kind of.
• The beauty of journaling is in its audience – it's for no one else but me, so the fun challenge there is taking down the filter I have around other people and putting down my ugliest thoughts, without fear of being seen as the Worst Person in the World. (The other challenge is not getting annoyed by how slowly I write.)

I guess it's like having rules for a game. The best kind of rules aren't restrictive, but give you enough context to work with to get creative with your playing.

The rules – parameters, challenges, Fun Points – for blogging that I follow are:

THE AUDIENCE. My friends know I run a blog. It's linked in my Neocities, which I sometimes link to on my Twitter. Do they care? Sure, they like that it makes me happy, but they get enough of me elsewhere, so they probably don't read this! I operate under the assumption my blog is visited near-exclusively by people who do not know me in any other capacity than the blog. I get to figure out which details to skim over and which to dive into. I'm a bit more careful about sensitive information, but a bit freer about some other things.

THE FORMAT. Blogs are longer-form than most social media, allow for markdown, and are kind of annoying to add images or fancy things to. Most people type properly, without too many instances of random capitalization or emojis. Prose is the name of the game. As both A) a person with a dedicated memes/reaction images folder and B) an artist, not having an easy, frictionless way to add visuals to emphasize a point – or in some cases make one – is a fun challenge. It forces me to try and put my thoughts into words, using the limited styling tools provided to me, and gives me the freedom to go on as long as I like until I get there.

THE NEIGHBORS. I love reading blogs that are introspective and personal in nature. Some of my favorites on here include Kang, Misu, and Kayla, who write thoughtful posts of varying lengths about their own lives that make me want to do the same. Anyone can do what they like with their blog, and I could probably treat my blog like a lowercase thoughtdump like I do my Twitter if I felt like it. But I like having a rule that tells me to try and emulate blogs I enjoy reading, try and make the internet a little warmer by being more sincere, try and share something of myself beyond just jokes and rabid thoughts.²

There are probably more, but I like things in threes.

I'm thinking now about this one meme that goes, "I’m going to get a good grade in therapy, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve." In one of my old blog posts, I expressed anxiety about what people think of my writing, and I think at that point I had already had some idea of this "self-expression as a game" metaphor I posit in this post. Even if I wasn't conscious of it, I was already playing what I felt to be the game, but with the mindset in that meme. (TLDR I was trying to win blogging lmfao)

I'm like this with every hobby at first, I think, as unfortunately I suffer from an affliction called neurotic bitch disease. But as I keep up the habit, I start to notice how it impacts me – and my perspective, my moods, etc – positively, all by means of my indulging in them rather than being good at them, and I stop worrying so much about it.

Suffice it to say that, after a few months, I am a little more normal than I was when I made that post. I'm still playing the game of course, but it's more like making sand castles with some pals rather than poker – I'm never going to win anything, but I'm always going to go home at the end of the day happy I had a good time.

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1. The downsides of this are that, unfortunately, A) more people are just coming to use this as their entire MO when it comes to thinking, and/or B) they mistakenly assume the tweeted thoughts ARE complete and throw a fit about them. Recommended reading on expanding one's media diet: Against Waldenponding by Venkatesh Rao↩

2. Not to say that my blog is or will be totally Jokes and Rabid Thoughts-free.↩