houses we haunt
Last week, I was combing through some link changes and stumbled back into my tumblr, which for awhile was where my domain led and served as my website (its feed being an easy thing to follow and separate pages enough to hold other stuff with easy updateabiliy) It was that way for a few years until Tumblr tried to cast out all the porn, but kept flagging any collages that had nudes in it as such, Thus I spent an ungodly amount of time clicking through to challenge what their bots were flagging as adult content. I don't even have nudes in a lot of work, but it was still annoying and not how I liked to spend time. So since I had grown used to modifying blogger templates for other sites, I moved back here and set up a similar system of pages. While you can follow blogspots vial rss, what I lost in terms of functionality was that easy ability to follow.
Fast forward a few years and reading through tumblr, I kind of missed all the engagement there, the people who still live in that space, so thought I might reopen the doors, dust off the furniture, and use it to post snippets and drafts of things. Old projects, new projects. Things that don't get picked up my journals after a couple submission rounds(which are sometimes the best pieces.) Granted most people have similarly fled tumblr in the intervening yeats, but we'll see how it goes. it doesn't hurt and while I usually post just snippets here and on other socials, there I will be posting full poems there, some of which aren't published elsewhere, so it's a good thing to follow if you are Tumblr minded.
In many ways, it feels like haunting an old home in a city where I'm not sure anyone actually even lives any more. Facebook feels like this sometimes..compared to what it used to be like. So many have moved onto twitter or instagram or left social media entirely. I do like it, since I feel like that is sort of the nexus of my online social world, largely since it not only serves as a connection to writers and creative folks, but also family and old friends, people from college and high school who would be lost otherwise to distance. I spend more time there, or at least did until the last month or so (my biggest beef is that I can't control the bad news machine there and what I see in my feed, so it was making me anxious, so now I only go on there later in the day and direct those scrolling impulses to instagram in the morning.)
I imagine, the numbers will wane further. I really like instagram, but twitter still feels like throwing a dime in the ocean. I like it for work, and tweeting programming stuff for the library, and use it for the press a little in less crazy times, but I don't quite know what to do with my personal account. Lately I've been posting news, cool little gifs, and snippets of published or work-in-progress, so we'll see. The blog-world also feels deserted sometimes for shorter content platforms, but I imagine I will never leave this space, since I've been in this house for over 15 years now. The Poetry Blogger network gives me some hope that others are still living in their spaces and regularly updating.
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