Blogging Adventure 2 Battle

I enjoy writing my thoughts. For whatever reason, I could never fully express myself in a coherent way verbally; I try to talk to people about certain things and it always comes out as gibberish, like I’m speaking a different language or something…to both them and me. When I write, however, things make sense. My thoughts are organized, and I can lay them out in a way that actually gets the message across. With things like blogging and social media, I feel like I can finally communicate with the world as large in some way. Perhaps people will read it, perhaps they won’t. It’s the means of finally getting my ideas and my hopes and dreams “out there” that’s the most important to me.

You could be asking, “if you just need your thoughts written out, why not keep a diary or journal?” A valid question, and one I’ve tested several times. While keeping a diary is a great idea for those practicing self-reflection, my reason for writing is for self-expression. I’ve kept my thoughts locked away in a personal journal before, but it really did nothing for me. I have no need to go over my own thoughts. I do that all the time anyway! Talking to myself is in no way satisfying (and comes off as creepy, as experience has taught me). To have the opportunity, the thrill, the risk of placing my thoughts and opinions on some kind of public forum is what does it for me. I can’t talk, but I can write. This is my “perfect” way to communicate with anyone willing to listen…or read, I guess.

With those theatrics aside, we now come back to this post, on this particular blog service. Deep down, I’ve wanted to have a personal blog as a hobby for a while now, but the services I’ve tried never seemed like a good fit. Wordpress is awesome, but it offers a bit too much for someone who prefers simplicity; all the bells and whistles made me feel pressure to put in 500% effort into a hobby I did for fun. Tumblr was a great fit for me for a while, until I realized it’s more social media than blogging, with a clientele more suited to fandoms (nothing wrong with that; the gals on there make some wonderful GIF sets of my favorite handsome pro wrestlers). Not only that, but Tumblr keeps pushing non-members to sign up for their site, going so far as to block extended viewing of someone’s blog until they do so. That’s some bullshit there. I want my thoughts to be wild and free, or else it’ll just be like a journal again. Defeats the purpose, y’know?

After bitching about Tumblr’s shenanigans on Bluesky, someone from pckt.blog reached out to me and offered an invite to their blog service, implying that their way of doing things might be more my style. Well, I gotta admit: it’s a very good first impression! The minimalist UI alone was enough to make me more comfortable than something like Wordpress, and it seems way more open and flexible than something like Tumblr. So far, it feels like a good fit and something I could really settle into without trying so hard. Hell, this long-ass post right here is just spilling out of me with zero effort. It’s a nice feeling…one I haven’t had for blogging in quite some time.

It feels like a Goldilocks situation, where I finally found the bed that was “just right” (funny that, I always figured I’d be one of the three bears). pckt.blog seems pretty agreeable with me, and I just might end up supporting it more down the line if I like it. But more importantly, this might get me to start writing out my thoughts again so I can finally get them out of my stuffy brain and let them be discovered and judged and discussed by others.

It’s a good feeling. Let’s see where this goes.