This one is a two-fer interview. Andy has a personal blog as well as a music blog.

I have known Andy for a ridiculous number of years. We’ve never personally met, but we’ve been in contact since the mid-90s! Our online relationship pre-dates my first marriage, my first blog, my first personal webpage, my first email address.

Andy had a mailing list dedicated to Galaxie 500 and its offshoot bands, Luna and Damon & Naomi. I have no memory how I found him or his list.

In the previous century, I was temping at a law school. I can’t remember if the person whose job I was doing was on leave or had left permanently, but it was so early in the Internet that the law school had me use her email address for any communications rather than give me my own.

I, uhhh… signed up for the G500 mailing list as her. If you somehow figure out how to look for the old Usenet group alt.fan.galaxie500 (or was it alt.fan.galaxie-500, can’t remember) you can see some posts from a Ms. Ivy W., aka me.

So, I have known Andy for as long as I’ve been on the Internet, which is crazy.

So, onto the interviews. First, his personal blog.

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Splotchy: What is your blog?

Andy: Everything’s Swirling

S: When and why did you start blogging?

A:
WHEN: The first post is from June 2003, it started in Blogger (I think I had some earlier short-lived attempts but this is the one that caught), spent a few years in WordPress and then moved into Jekyll in 2015.

WHY: It was the thing to do, it was really an online diary – I expect I’m the only one who reads it much!

S: Did you stop blogging?

A: No.

S: Do you feel part of a larger community when writing your blog?

A: No community at all, there never was, I’d occasionally get some feedback, comments, but this was more about individual posts rather than the blog itself. It probably didn’t help that its subject matter was so broad, so having long series of posts about Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or an obsession with musicians’ footwear, or Alfred Hitchcock films, probably made it difficult to generate any sort of community – removing the ability to comment/feedback probably contributed to this lack of connection – but the comment spam became intolerable and tiresome … and the only comments I was getting anyway!

S: Do you have people you regularly interact with?  How large a group is it?  Are they also bloggers?

A: A bit of reaction on social media, but very little – it has basically become me and my partner blogging at each other!!

S: What keeps you motivated to post?

A: To be honest my posting has tailed off of late – I have little sporadic flurries of posting but it’s pretty quiet (from 70 to 150 posts a few years ago to 38 last year (and most of those were a Christmas thing), 7 this year – there was only 1 in 2020 – I’ll blame COVID!! I keep posting because every so often I think I should … the ongoing Hitchcock series needs to finish and given how slow I’m getting through that it’ll keep things going for a few more years.

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Splotchy: What is your blog?

Andy: A Head Full of Wishes (AHFoW)

S: When and why did you start blogging?

A:
WHEN: A Head Full of Wishes didn’t really start out as a blog, but it’s pretty much what it has become – up until the late 90s it had been mostly news and information and only very occasional opinion – the first foray into blogging for AHFoW was one I created for Luna’s farewell in 2005 – Luna’s Last Waltz was a multi-user blog (although mostly me) and only ran for three months or so – it was never intended to be a long-term thing. In 2006/7 I moved AHFoW into WordPress which is the time at which I guess it became closer to a traditional blog.

WHY: I’m not sure why, it was probably because by then the Galaxie 500 Mailing List was tailing off (more on that later) and it was an attempt to keep the community of Galaxie 500 etc. fans going. Ironically I guess it struggles a bit in that respect –  but I can’t imagine not doing it. In 2015 I moved from WordPress to Jekyll – which didn’t handle comments by default and since, commenting had been pretty low, and mostly spam it didn’t seem to matter, although it was a nail in the coffin of the community I was hoping for,

S: Did you stop blogging?

A: No.

S: Do you feel part of a larger community when writing your blog?

A: Not part of a blogging community – but the community around the bands does exist, although community happens elsewhere (on social media… so more of that below too).

S: Do you have people you regularly interact with?  How large a group is it?  Are they also bloggers?

A: I have tried to foster community around AHFoW (using many different platforms, Reddit, BBS, Guestbooks, etc.) but it has really struggled. There are a few other music blogs that still seem to be around – but I’m not interacting with them particularly – so I guess I’m part of the problem. Most interaction around the blog is done via social media (1,700 followers on Twitter/X, 720 followers on Instagram, 1,700 followers on Facebook, 1,900 in FB group)

S: What keeps you motivated to post?

A:  The bit of community there is is part of the motivation, but mostly I guess force of habit. The website first started in 1994 — so almost 30 years – I can’t imagine not doing it.

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S: A couple general questions, around social media and the Internet. How do you feel about social media? Does it give you the same feelings as blogging? Why or why not?

A: Social Media has become a scourge, it should have been the saviour, but because it is RUN by people whose values are different from mine it’s become something we’re stuck with (see Cory Doctorow’s The Enshittification of TikTok). It is also USED by people who have a different agenda – which is mostly at odds with my own.

I am stuck with Facebook and Twitter because it is the main reach for AHFoW – and without them it would have no audience at all – so I’m stuck there – and users don’t leave Facebook’s walled garden, so it ends up with me posting (almost) full posts there otherwise people wouldn’t read what I write at all (and I do like to think I am being read). But it’s not blogging – it has different motivations and it very rarely has the depth or thought that goes into blogging.

But worse that that, social media has become an unpleasant place to be and because it has become so broken, I am somewhat losing the skill of “social” and “community”. It’s become a marketing platform for everyone… and sadly that’s all it has become for me (and I hate that). I miss the past. Social media has made it harder for me to be social.

I never really embraced Facebook – but I did love Twitter, in the earlier days it did feel genuinely communal – but it was taken over by commerce, journalism, citizen journalism, and knee-jerk haters looking for arguments – people behave appallingly on there now, so much disrespectful and careless behaviour that I tend to be a pusher these days rather than a part of it.

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.

A: I think my last paragraph above about social media applies to the Internet in general but here goes:

I love:

• That I am never lost.
• That I can find restaurants and cafes when I need to.
• That I know when the next train or bus will be, and if it’s been delayed.
• The bit of community that I can still find.
• Finding and discovering music and old films.
• Wikipedia and The Internet Archive and Musicbrainz …
• Some bloggers still managing on to the past.
• That I can identify that flower or bird or bit of music.

I hate:

• The death of the fan website 🙂 – and the community that existed around it.
• Capitalism – so many adverts.
• The hate and the disrespect.
• That so much is broken by advertising and capitalism (most search results are infected with advertising).
• The platform it gives to bad people.
• The misinformation and lies that are spread and treated as fact.
• The noise (and the lack of signal)

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Thanks so much for these very thoughtful answers, Andy. I know the Internet can be a sad, lonely place, but I’m so happy we found each other. You are special. ❤️