Hello there! How are we doing? I’m doing… fine.

I remember joining social media back in 2006 by first making a profile on Facebook. I had an AOL Instant Messager (AIM for the uninitiated) account back in the day, too. My username was Amish Vader, referencing my twin passions at the time: Weird Al Yankovic and Star Wars. Never had a Myspace or Friendster — they seemed to pass me and my ever shifting friend group(s) by.

Back then, the internet was very different. We all know this. Facebook was the central hub of nearly all online interaction. Your profile and friends list were everything. Your relationship status, even more so. Posts to your “wall” were the high school equivalent of newspaper headlines, even if it meant only a handful of responses. Profile pics and “pokes” spoke volumes without a single word. New features were revolutions in and of themselves —  bumper stickers, Messenger, link previews, the “News Feed.” To be there in the early days was to be an explorer and homesteader on a new frontier. Everyone was on equal footing, and the internet was what you made it. I remember sending a friend request to my biggest musical influence at the time, Eric Whitacre, and being astonished when he accepted it. In this new digital world, we had so much autonomy and power.

Oh, how far we have fallen.

Granted, a lot of things are different now than they were twenty years ago. We’re older now, too, and memory is a sticky, flexible thing, especially when it comes to our collective childhoods. I will avoid waxing about how our once lively news feeds have been clogged with media we never asked to see, or how every surface of every app is lined with ads in a way that often make their core functionality impossible without paying for “Premium.” Even the word “content” has become a catch-all phrase that encompasses everything from a vacation Instagram post to a three-hour podcast discussing the exciting prospect of cobalt futures. Anything we upload is merely a buffer between auto-generated material designed to get you to buy something. And this was how things were before AI started generating even more stuff no one asked for.

Sometime around 2020, I stopped posting. Almost everywhere, and almost entirely. I no longer saw a reason why I should put anything out there in the online world when the likelihood of it being seen by a real person I cared about plummeted to a soft maybe. My wife and I often discuss how the internet used to be a place you went to, on your computer, sitting stationary in a computer room or basement in your home, like a gateway to a secret clubhouse. It’s since mutated into something pervasive, and it’s grown noisy, impersonal, and expensive. By default, it ceases to be an open forum for engaging with peers.

I’ve already gone on too long. The point is, I want a place to put stuff on the internet so that my friends and family can see it. I’m inspired by the somewhat recent restructuring of theverge.com, which has vowed to “revolutionize the internet through blog posts”. Being a lurker online is… fine, but I feel like I’m missing out on interactions with people I know and care about who I don’t have the pleasure of seeing in person. I want to claim a space (even if it means paying for the cloud storage on WordPress) for me where I can just post a photo from a day trip or vacation, write (in brief) about what I’m up to, or, maybe, MAYBE, show off a song or two. I’m not here to put my ideas on some kind of pedestal, and I PROMISE this will be the maximum post length. There are enough folks with “big ideas” on the internet already. I just want to justify buying a nice camera by having a place to put the photos.

So now, I own denu.blog. I bought it. It wasn’t too expensive, thankfully. But now, it’s mine. I’m calling the blog relics. The name comes from the username/handle (@urlithrelic on instagram, etc.) I’ve adopted since I’ve begun running D&D campaigns, but there’s more to it here. A website can outlive (🤞) the rise and fall of social media platforms, and isn’t subject to the whims of billionaire marketers or petty trolls passing themselves off as kings. This space can be a time capsule for day-to-day life in the way that a diary used to. And in a way, we’ve all become relics. We are all objects of the past, forged in the crucible of our youth, ornamented by the treasures of good times and weathered by the storms of the bad. There should be a record of that, and it doesn’t have to live between ads for Factor Meals.

There’s going to be a newsletter feature here (eventually…) so you can get regular updates about what me and my family has going on. Might even spin it into a physical zine, which could be cool. In the meantime, you can add your email to the list here (link). Hope to stay in touch.

— Brian