Reconnecting with blogging after a long hiatus made me a little nostalgic for the 2000s, which has by far been my favorite time to be online. I felt part of something bigger than myself. Lots of interesting people shared their own life experiences and observations. I shared my own experiences and observations too! We played games, we made mix tapes! Oh man, Green Monkey Music Project. God bless music torrent sites. RIP Oink’s Pink Palace.

Okay, okay, back on point. I was connected to so many great people. I don’t know where some of these people are today. I am connected to a fair amount of them on social media, mostly Facebook.

Some people continued writing regularly, a lot of them (including me) stepped away for a long time.

I felt it would be nice to connect with the people from a very important time of my life, and see what they are up to.

Here’s an interview with one of my all-time favorite bloggers, SamuraiFrog!

Splotchy: What is your blog? 

SamuraiFrog: Electronic Cerebrectomy, which is, true to form, a Muppets reference. I took it offline because I went through a weird time where I was deleting posts, stuff was getting deleted for nudity, and I was getting a TON of spam comments with links that took a lot of time to delete.

S: When and why did you start blogging?

SF:  I started blogging in 2005 while I was in college. It originally started as a way to just write down random thoughts and waste some time at the computer lab between classes. It became a sort of daily writing exercise, but when it started getting attention, I enjoyed the interactions and conversations with people. My sister died in 2006, and the daily blogging became a way to sort of cope with that, too. I need some kind of structure or else the days sort of blend together; I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2016, so that explains that.

S: Did you stop blogging? 

SF: Yes.

S: When did you stop blogging? 

SF: 2017 is the last time I posted on Electronic Cerebrectomy.

S: What were any factors that contributed to stopping?

SF: My wife had a couple of deaths in the family that happened closely together, and we both had a couple of health scares. I had a second nervous breakdown and I just got tired of fighting with people about what I felt were not worth the energy to argue. I understand getting heated about politics (lord knows I get that way), but fighting about Star Wars or Star Trek? My wife had a cancer scare, hearing about how Jar Jar Binks sucks just didn’t seem like something my life needed. My mental health went through some real valleys, too, as I was diagnosed with ADHD and C-PTSD about six months before I drifted away from it.

S: Do you ever miss it?  

SF: Sometimes. I met some really neat people and made friends. A lot of times I don’t. I think one of the biggest issues with Blogger was that you couldn’t block users, you could only disallow anonymous comments. I think it’s really important to curate your space. There are a lot of bullies out there who leave abusive comments and then try to tell you that shutting down random arguments is some kind of weakness because you want to “live in a bubble.” There are people who I should have really cut out of my life a lot earlier because they could be really abusive under the guise of being challenging. I have a lifelong history with abuse, I don’t need it from the comments section. We’re not going to solve any crises here, two randos in a comment section with no power. It wasn’t all bad, I got exposed to a lot of cool things and people, but there are always folks who just feed on people like me, who are sensitive and sometimes easily baited into an argument. It taught me a lot about human nature, I suppose!

S: Do you think you’ll ever pick it up again?  Why or why not?

SF: Not likely. I think it was a phase I went through and now I’ve been on Tumblr for a very long time, and sometimes Facebook and I’m cannibalizing my old movie reviews from my blog for my Letterboxd. This is apparently something that we spoonies do, where we do big projects and decide “Well, I did that and now I need a different kind of stimulation elsewhere” and we just tear the thing down and build something else instead. It was mostly a fun phase, even for all my complaints, and made me feel connected to a community, but I think there was a time in the mid-2010s when a lot of people drifted away from it and it got less fulfilling. I think I said a lot of what I felt I needed to say and also learned, which is a valuable thing to know, that not everything requires my thoughts on it. There was a time on my blog where I got so reactionary and negative and it was fun to write (and to read, judging by the engagement I was getting), but it was also very draining and made it hard to enjoy things sometimes. I think I got a lot of that out and am in a more… well, not necessarily a peaceful place, but a more occasionally sanguine place. It’s nice to be able to not engage on everything instead of just reacting. Sometimes I don’t know enough about something to have an opinion that’s worth reading. Remember when everyone had to have a take right away? That was so exhausting.

S: How do you feel about social media? Does it give you the same feelings as blogging? Why or why not?

SF: I really like Tumblr because it’s a lot more friendly to some communities and because you can block people. It’s micro-blogging, which satisfies my ADHD more because it moves at the same quick pace as my attention span. You can just post or reblog images or write something biographical or historical and it just kind of shows me where my thoughts and feelings are at for the day. Spending time there is fun for me because it’s like engaging with a lot of little things inside one main thing I’m doing. I honestly like Reddit for similar reasons, but I stick to the nostalgia blogs and give the political discussions a wide berth.

S: How do you feel about the state of the Internet in general?  This is a very broad question, so feel free how to answer as you see fit.

SF:  I think there are a lot of people who have maybe been taught by social media that their opinion always has to be shared, even if it’s uninformed or uneducated. I feel bad about that. I think it’s facilitated movements that have been detrimental to society because it’s easier for people to find each other and communicate. It sure made bullying a lot easier. I think it’s given people this idea that they are entitled to instant access to you. I lament this sometimes, but my wife always points out, too, that there are a lot of good aspects to the internet. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve found a lot of obscure media that was hard to find pre-internet. I like that people are making art and cartoons and comedy and sharing it and getting feedback and becoming better and better. Good ideas, too, about where society should go are spreading like wildfire. It can be a very frustrating place, but also I’m on Wikipedia constantly and reading public domain novels and using the Internet Archive. I just hope it gets better as far as filtering out misinformation and disinformation. It’s so easy to manipulate people, and it’s discouraging to see people in your life, who don’t seem hateful, suddenly become tools of misinformation movements or just, like, racists. A lot of this is my personality; I can tend toward the worst-case scenario. But there’s a lot of good and I still refuse to believe people are inherently bad. I just hope eventually the internet will do what a lot of us always hoped it would and expand everyone’s idea of what community and humanity and life really are. Maybe that sounds naive, but I’m a trauma case, so I can get away with saying that.

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Thanks so much to SamuraiFrog for his thoughtful answers.

You can find him on Tumblr at A Cosmic Castaway as well as the infamous Godzilla Haiku.