They say that, whatever you post online, it'll last forever. But how true is that, really?
Lately, I've been thinking about my online presence. Much of my fleeting thoughts have been on Twitter, but with the way Twitter is going, I believe it won't be too long before those fleeting thoughts are gone. So, I've been working on a gallery on my site. True, you can see my art on other sites like FurAffinity, as well as social media, but the thing about social media is that you can see it, and then it's gone. Art sites are nice, but each one carries so many caveats or baggage (many furries who are interested in my art wont even look at FA, and I don't blame them.)
Then, there's the issue of persistence. As I've been reposting old art online, I noticed something: There was a gap of about 8 months between my old FA and new FA where art I had made just... didn't exist. Is it on Twitter? Possibly, but good luck finding it. Is it on Patreon? Probably, but I can't even navigate my own posts, even using the post manager, so I seriously doubt the ability of someone else trying to find out about the art that I've posted. Internet Archive is really weird about archiving tweets, and I don't even know if they do Patreon. Plus, when people see Patreon, they just assume that they need money to view it. Google is unreliable, so for all intents and purposes, that art only exists as JPGs on my hard drive and (hopefully) on the hard drives of the commissioner, for commissioned pieces. Also, this isn't even to mention very old art, which pretty much does not exist online in any form in 2023. I've been slowly but surely reuploading the old art, and I would like to go as far back as 2004, but it remains to be seen how far back I'm really able to go.
This leads me back to what I was talking about originally, fleeting thoughts. Words of the past, little tidbits, much of it just funny jokes or random thoughts, but some of it being developer trivia that may be important to someone some day. As I was working on setting up this blog, I found out that the instance I'm on on Mastodon, vulpine.club, is shutting down. This would be the third time I've had my presence wiped from Mastodon, with all my fleeting thoughts, random tidbits, and echoes of the past erased permanently, not by my choice.
This all is not even to mention Discord and how stuff posted there is fleeting. So much stuff related to development is just, in Discord, only existing as long as the server exists, with the potential for being lost due to accidents, never to be recovered. In this modern internet where everything is fleeting, I realized the importance of making something like a blog. Everything I post online is eroding away every day, and it feels like a boulder trying to fight against the crash of the ocean waves. Eventually, the boulder will become a rock, and then a stone, and then, gone.
As I write this, I haven't completely set it up yet. I'm using Grav, and while it's very handy, it's also slightly cryptic. I haven't exactly figured out how the tags and categories work, so if you're reading this and are a professional Grav user, let me know. Since I'd love to write about stuff, but I'm not sure what people would like to see me write about, I'm open to any suggestions. I've set up a Google Form where you can put your suggestions for topics in. I can't guarantee I write about everything that's submitted, but I would like to hear your suggestions nonetheless. I would say "let me know in the comments below," but I wasn't able to get the comments plug-in working, and also, I just feel like that would be an easy attack vector. I also don't know how to set up RSS, like I have on my Gallery page, so feel free to let me know about that too. I probably could have written my own blogging code, but this way makes it much easier for me to just focus on writing. Plus, I can include pictures and video (though this post has none.)
I don't know how many people are gonna want to click through to a blog post whenever I write something, like gamedev updates and whatnot, but I feel like it's important that I do this. Here, I can talk in greater detail about what I've got going on, rather than just posting it with only a little bit of detail on social media, to be lost and forgotten within a few hours. Also, whatever I post here belongs to me, and it'll be up to me when it gets taken down. Obviously, I wont last forever on this earth, but I'm hoping that here, it's much easier to archive by archive.org and by others who would wish to save it. I don't know what the future holds for my games, but I like to hope that there will be a decent amount of people who want to read what I wrote in the past, and I'm hoping that, by starting this blog, I can make it easier for those people to do so.
Also, I would like to thank Ninji again for suggesting Grav and helping me out with setting it up.