Let's do some Julyreply shall we??

Photo unrelated, here's a sick-ass sunset from the other day

As Junited has come to an end, its originator reached out about this little thing called JulyReply that sort of acts like a "yes, and" for blog posts throughout the month and like, you know me. I'm nothing if not down for monthly projects.

There are no real rules in the traditional sense other than:

1. Make a blog post that is a reply to another person's blog post

Deal. Eeeasyy.

For my inaugural JulyReply entry, I chose this post by Absurd Pirate that hit my Bubbles feed this morning and spoke to something that's been bothering me.

I'd recommend reading the post first because (obviously) this is in conversation with it, it's interesting (if not a bit rougher than I'd be), and I think the context is important. I also want to get ahead of the "Wait your first JulyReply post on your blog is a reply to a post about why the trend of metablogging sucks" and like, yea. It feels like a weird choice at first but I think there's a lot of good here!

AND - full disclosure, I'd gotten maybe four paragraphs in on Absurd Pirate's post and committed to using it as a jumping point it before I got to the part where they'd lovingly linked to my awkward bird post themselves. Everything full circle. I swear I didn't chose it because of that lmao

I'd done small like updates on the band's site for a few years but outside of that and Livejournal back in the late 90's/early00's, most of my life has been on social media, and it took both Twitter turning into the nazi bar (it was mostly there to begin with but Musk was the camel straw) and then the Cohost collapse ("COHOST MENTIONED" ALARM SOUNDS) to get me to jump onto Bear and begin taking blogging seriously¹. Which is to say that in the scheme of things, I'm "new" here so I've been trying to both find my own feet and also understand the larger ecosystem.

I realized the other day how often I am covered in scratches from taking care of so many cats and like, I rarely give it thought but a coworker mentioned it during a meeting and I'm like, wow. Yea. I'm torn the fuck up lmao

I started using Bubbles every day and realized that while there's lots of absolutely fantastic shit on there, there's also an over-abundance of posts with intriguing titles that turn out just to be about the Bear discover feed or "blogging about blogging" for lack of better term (exactly the stuff Absurd Pirate is discussing in their post) and I pretty quickly clocked that as something not at all that I'm here for.

There's nothing wrong with blogging like that, but there's a certain point where it becomes insular (or as Absurd Pirate puts it, circlejerky), and one of the big offenders I found was the 'tech' category in the Bubbles filter; most of the posts categorized under that fell into one of three camps:

1. "AI" nonsense
2. Legitimate dev stuff that's cool but not for me
3. The "Blogging about blogging" stuff

Unchecking 'Tech' in my filters has eliminated a lot of the three categories above, which rules, but it's also (and arguably more importantly) gained the added bonus of saying "13 cats" in the corner at all times:

But there's still a fair amount of the "blogging about blogging" in the other categories ("writing" is probably the biggest offender) and I don't know what the balance is, man.

Ultimately I want to see people's weird hyperfixations, their longform deep dive into some weird topic I'd never even heard about (Again, shit like the Laura Michet Earthship post). I really don't wanna read about "how to write a blog post better" or "how to get seen on the Bear discover feed". That doesn't mean others are like..."blogging incorrectly" (I don't think there really is a way to "blog correctly" and also more power to you if this is your bliss lmao) and I can't speak for anyone but me, but that's exactly the type of shit I'm trying to escape from social media and boy is there a lot of it. I know what I wanna be posting myself, what I wanna be reading, and Absurd Pirate's post really spoke to something I've been thinking about a lot.

Anyway, be the change you wanna see etc. I'll keep doing weird bird photos, too much of the moon, drawing pokemon, gifs of weather, writing about shit like Gundam stage plays and Godzilla suit re-uses, Magical Insurance Bureaucrats and whatever else strikes me at any given minute.

Thanks for reading. Here's your end of post cat; her name is Cutie and she's climbed up on top of the fucking curtain rods because she's chasing a fly that got in the house (again I say, RIP my glasswares)

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