The More Things Change The More They Remain The Same

Once again, I took a hiatus from blogging and once again I’m back to give this blogging/writing thing a chance. Also, I have backtracked from what I said I have done in the last blog post. I reactivated my Twitter account. I’m back on Reddit as well. I even did some podcasting again before finally pulling the plug on it today.

I keep going back and forth on decisions and actions with one stance or another and then do a complete 180 on said stance after some time. Blogging has definitely taken the bulk of being put on the back burner of all my hobbies. And yet, here we are again. Will it stick this time around? Guess time will tell.

My current reasoning is that I have been increasingly dissatisfied with my podcasting. Maybe it’s the self-islolation, but I feel like it’s hard for me to voice my thoughts and opinions like I have inthe past. Not having people to talk to on a regular (customers at work aside) has affected my talking skills for sure. This has resulted in painstakingly spending ridiculous amounts of time editing the audio recordings. And let’s not even bother talking about making transcripts with otter.ai. Just more time disappearing before my eyes. And the end result was a final product that I didn’t feel too satisfied with.

Writing/blogging is definitely less time consuming. I just have to make the effort to push myself to type words on a. blank page, reread to confirm all dots and commas are where they need to be and then publish. So far, so good for for 2022. We’ll see if I will keep this up.

The Compulsion To Blog Again Is Upon Me

It has been some time since I last blogged. A lot of that had to do with my engrossment of social media. I would check FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc on a daily basis. Without realizing I would spend a few hours idling by looking at people’s “best versions” of their lives and compare it to bland mundane version of myself.

Also, I would realize that it was time wasted, that I could have done something more productive, or, at the very least, more entertaining. That would fuel my self-loathing and despondency and I would escape further into my shell and just consume more media and blog nothing.

Typing with my iPad

I recently got myself an iPad and wireless keyboard as my Xmas gift and figured why not test it out as a supplement to my computer when I don’t have it with me. Thus far I’m enjoying the keyboard that I got based on a review I read. It’s a great little keyboard made by Microsoft and feels almost as good as a laptop keyboard. More importantly it was extremely affordable ($39.99).

Don’t Mind Me, Just Dropping A Few Lines

It’s been quite some time since last I wrote. It’s also been some time since I last even recorded a podcast for that matter. I’ve been half-assing both in such a manner that I’ve lost all motivation to do either. I figured there are people that are much better at both and what could I possibly contribute to the ether that would be worth reading or listening to?

Nonetheless, here I am back again. I can’t shake the scratch. I’ve done a lot of reading, listening and watching media content that, in my opinion, I don’t ever see myself ever being able to produce with my meager skills. Despite that realization I’m still compelled to connect some words together in a stream of conscious manner and post to the very same ether that has all this great quality of content.

Part of the reason is psychological. It gives me some kind of purpose in life. It also helps me combat the loneliness and boredom that I’m faced on my days off. I’m 2 years or more single at this point. I only have human interaction while at work and when I’m off from work I escape into the world of fiction via media content. For a good long while this was a good solution. I was at peace. Life was good. But as the time has gone by, I’ve started to feel incomplete and lacking something.

Anyway, so here I am typing my current feelings and converting them into text form. I’m currently not at my place of residence and don’t have access to my mic so this seemed the simplest option between blogging and podcasting. Truthfully though, if I’m being honest with myself, I would probably still choose this option.

The few months that I started podcasting again, I realized that I just don’t have the chops for it. It was more of a curiosity and an idle hobby than anything I would consistently do. Once I hit a roadblock and went on hiatus it just became harder to get back to it as the weeks went by.

Also with writing, I can erase any hiccups I initially put down. I can edit down my drafts with quicker ease than I would ever be able do with audio. Uhms, like you knows and other disfluencies don’t exist in the written form unless you intentionally leave them in.

So here we are, about 400 words in now and I’m feeling more at ease and better. This has been therapeutic after all. I’m sure there will be more random stream of conscious blather making its way on here some time soon. As this itch to do something, however inconsequential, will persist in the recesses of my being. Until the next urge.

On To SquareSpace!

So after a month at most using Blogspot as my content manager for my podcast I decided to give SquareSpace a shot. I’m so glad I did. At first I signed up for the 14-day trial period and as I was fiddling with the layout and pages and so forth I came upon an amazing discovery!

SquareSpace has really upped their game to give their customers “unlimited storage” as well as unlimited bandwidth. For as long as I can remember, all across the board,  the max size limit to any file that could be uploaded on their site was 20MB. It seems at some point they deviated from that policy and allowed audio files have a max size limit of 160MB which is more than enough for my podcasting needs. I was paying $15/month to Libsyn for 250MB of monthly storage which is more than I needed but their next tier down only gives 50MB which wasn’t enough. For $8/month, I can use SquareSpace as both my content provider and content manager.

I got to kill 2 birds with one stone, save some money and still have ownership of it all. Prior to this discovery I was thinking about foregoing ownership of the audio files and just putting them on Archive.org. Now I don’t have to. I’m pretty glad with this decision.

Which leads me to think about the future of this blog. I guess for now I’ll still leave it on WordPress. I don’t blog enough to want to finance it and I’ve written so much over the years I don’t know if I want to move it all. Not to mention I have another domain name that points to here.

For now, this blog is still safe on WordPress. Maybe someday later that’ll change.