Blogging
As lame as it sounds, I feel like I’ve been shaped by blogs. I started my first blog in 2011, right after I finished middle school. I wrote exactly one post, and it was about the end of school: the triviality of the awards they gave us and the pain of leaving friends who would go to different high schools. It was excessively formal, and it took me several days to craft those few paragraphs. At that point, I wasn’t the biggest fan of writing and each word felt like pulling teeth.
Throughout high school, I had a variety of different blogs that I would revisit every few months to add a post or two. Most of the posts I wrote were just different variations on “I used to hate writing, but this post marks the beginning of a new era of me writing regularly on this blog.” I would never actually live up to this grandstanding for my zero readers, but I imagine it made me improve my self-reflection skills when it came to writing.
I started to love writing during college essay season, where I wrote dozens of essays for my ten college applications and was able to write about myself and my thoughts for the first time in my life. This led to my newfound desire to become a writer and a journalist for a fleeting moment. The summer after I graduated from high school, I started blogging again. Roughly four years after my first post, I spent every day for 100 days writing, wondering if it would be a path to understanding myself and possibly a future career.
Though it hasn’t panned out into a future career, my love of blogging is what led me to start this newsletter, functioning as a blog that people would actually read. Blogs and newsletters were all the rage in the early 2000s. However, the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and later the rise of centralized blogging platforms like Medium made blogs rare. However, as the tide has turned against these companies, blogging and newsletters are rising again in ubiquity. I’m excited for it since this is my domain.
Compared to Facebook posts or Medium posts, which are churned out in large quantities and often link to posts from other people, I love that blogs and newsletters are so isolated. You have to individually subscribe to each newsletter, or go to the blog or use an RSS reader like Feedly to access them all. The value in this is that you know where your information is coming from. Beyond that, there’s a strange intimacy of blogs and newsletters. Since I always published blog posts solely for myself, I always imagined that other bloggers had a similar strategy and that reading their blogs was like taking a peek into their personal sanctum of thoughts and feelings.
I’m thinking of starting to blog again. That may seem a little ludicrous with my weekly newsletters and my many failed historical attempts to regularly blog, but I think that they could be less edited and less thought out like Austin Kleon’s blog. Let me know what you think! You wouldn’t have to read it, but I might link to posts if I do decide to go through with it.
Drops of the Week
where I *drop* recommendations of cool things this week
Playlist
sadboi experience - I like to listen to a great variety of music when I’m feeling down, from hip hop and metal to folk and lo-fi beats, so I wanted to put them all together in one place.
Article
“Style is an Algorithm” by Kyle Chayka - interesting article regarding Amazon’s Echo Look, which seeks to judge the quality of your outfit and give suggestions. I honestly abhor the idea of a machine telling me how to dress, but maybe those are just my Luddite-esque tendencies (good god that sounded pretentious).
Novel
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng - I wrote a newsletter about books last week without giving any book recommendations and my friend Tanner roasted me for it. This novel is heartbreaking and devastating and probably my favorite thing I’ve read this year. Ng’s other novel is also incredible, but this is my favorite of the two.
Thanks so much for reading! If you have any comments/concerns or fan/hate mail for me, you know how to reach me (links below). Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends too! You can also hit this link to subscribe if you're not subscribed already!
:~)
Love,
Nikhil