doing an ollie for the girls

I briefly considered making my first actual post a rant about Christmas, but that's boring, and anyway by the time this post goes up Christmas is probably going to already be over. (Turns out it wasn't, but whatever.) I don't have enough non-holiday-themed posts to bury it under yet. Maybe next year. Instead I'm going to talk about blogging. Neat, a blog post about blogging, how meta. But wait, hold your goddamn horses. This isn't what you think. I'm not here to talk about how you can make money at home. You can do that just fine with two feet and an OnlyFans account.

I've been on the internet a long time — since late 1997, in fact. My parents were freshly divorced; I, a weird, isolated, cluelessly queer little teenage dork, was living with my mother in the house next door to my maternal grandparents. At first, my access to the internet was occasionally going on my grandmother's AOL account in the upstairs bedroom and faffing about on AOL's old file browser for weird sound clips. But then school started, and my mom, who worked as a teacher at my school, didn't believe in going home ever so I basically had to sit there and use the classroom computer for a solid two to three hours while she worked on her curriculum. My initial explorations were pretty tame — Sonic the Hedgehog stuff, sometimes Final Fantasy VII or Duke Nukem stuff. Eventually we got dialup at home, I got my first taste of cyberbullying, you know how it is.

Point is, sometime around 2000, or 2001, I discovered LiveJournal. Remember LiveJournal? No you don't, don't lie. Anyway I had an account on there and I used it a lot. And then I stopped using it. There were always other places to go blogging. Over the years I'd get the bug and go on places like Tumblr, or Twitter, or whatever. This isn't even the first time I've used Blogger, though my old address seems to have been nuked. They salted the earth so you can't use the name again either. Damn, didn't think it was that bad...

Anyway for a while I used Medium. See, I got into the habit of posting my video game and movie reviews on Twitter. This turned out to be a fantastically fucking terrible idea, so I wound up moving to Medium in 2021. This was a much better place for my talents... at the time. But over time I noticed something: more and more of the site was disappearing behind a paywall, with that stupid fucking sparkle symbol that we usually associate with AI slop buttons. (Why the fucking sparkles? that's somehow even more insulting than like, I don't know, a picture of a robot. But maybe it reveals the root of the AI bro's beliefs: that AI is magic that can create artistic talent overnight, make their wives call off the divorce, and get the crabgrass out of their lawn.) More and more of the site seemed to occupied by bloggers not interested in just living on the internet but hustling, looking to make a few bucks running a travel blog or writing about how to get into finance over the internet or some other suburban white people shit. Somehow, over the four years I'd used the site, Medium had become SEO hell. I suppose it was inevitable, given that it started as a way to write long-form Twitter posts. And we all know how that website turned out.

My initial thought upon realizing this was that surely, there are other, more modern blogging sites that aren't like this. Blogger is an old standby, but as my adventures with running June Gloom 3D and later June Gloom 64 revealed to me, it is brutally difficult to work with. Surely, I could just pull up stakes, go somewhere else with likeminded people, and just post about stuff. No horrid paywall. No toxic culture of search engine optimization, monetization, or writing absolute horseshit for clicks. Just people living in the moment.

"lol," the universe said. "lmao."

Folks, I don't know how to tell you this, but something has sucked all the joy out of the internet. Even blogging — perhaps the single most self-interested, unilateral act you could perform on the internet, just posting shit online that means everything to you and nothing to anyone else — has been taken over by the money freaks. I go online looking for blogging advice and all I see is people talking about how to make money with it. I don't want to make money with this crap!! Imagine going on my boomer shooter blog and seeing me trying to score a few bucks off of me writing a thousand words about Quake. Fuck off with that, that's the most soulless shit I can imagine doing. I want to go on Medium and see people complaining about their parents. I want to go on Substack and see people posting My Chemical Romance lyrics. In pink. I want to go on Tumblr and have it be the good, unhinged Tumblr from 2010, not... whatever sad mess it is now. I am (almost) 43 years old and I want to see my fellow Millennials using the internet for what it's for: screaming into the void online about post-hardcore bands and anime.

Instead I see a bunch of dorks writing about stock options and milquetoast liberal politics. And a lot more neo-Nazis than there used to be. Time was our grandparents knew what to do with these motherless bastards; now we can't even get them banned from a goddamn website. Where did we go wrong? Maybe we should have made an example of Lowtax from the beginning as a warning to the rest instead of waiting two decades for the son of a bitch to do the job for us.

you love to see it: a data center on fire

The internet has always been terrible, but you under-30 types don't know how good we had it compared to today. So this, ultimately, is the reason why I went back to Blogger: it's a relic of a bygone era of the internet. It's hard to use, it's got one of the worst text editors in the history of man, you basically have to have gotten a degree in web design in 2004 to know how to use it. I don't have that, but I think I'm doing okay. Point is, in an era where the internet seems to be reduced to like five or six sites, find your niche and do something weird with it. Go on Medium and post about old MMOs. Go on TikTok and talk about immersive sims. Do literally anything besides spending all day doomscrolling the same goddamn influencer videos. Get out there and get on a skateboard and take it somewhere you shouldn't. Do a sick grind inside City Hall. Skate past the mayor while giving him the finger, then do an ollie to impress the girls.

It's practically all we've got right now.

—June♥