Cast your mind back to 2010. You're browsing Blogger and you stumble upon the creative diary of a quirky teenage student. You can see, from the striking .PNG banner which enables the unusual effect of semi-transparency, that it is entitled 'Blog For A Future Generation'. It's full of this teenager's WIP photography projects, frequent instalments of his desperately derivative Youtube content, scathing paragraphs of unsolicited shit-talking and, occasionally, the odd album review.
Perhaps something (I couldn't imagine what) compelled you to subscribe, and you've somehow managed to maintain a vague commitment to this platform over the following decade. Personally, I assumed it had long been bought out and shut down. And now here you are, startled by the apparition of an out-of-the-blue post from a blog you'd long condemned to the darkest recesses of your brain.
Let me give you the full story of how we got to where we are.
I decided, shortly after quitting my job as an NHS 111 Health Advisor, that I wanted to write. Not as a career (I'm not one for freelancing!) but as a hobby, to help distract from any future work-induced doldrums. I'm an imaginative and literate person with an above-par vocabulary, and I didn't want to leave these attributes to waste any longer. Initially the plan was to write a novel. But the conscious effort I've made in recent years to read more books (and the subsequent discovery of incredible literature that I know I could never live up to) has somewhat deterred me from this idea. Still, though, I wanted to write. So I got myself a Wordpress account. That's what people use to write these days, no?
I was immediately confronted by the insistence of a username. I went with a frequently used alias. Now I was being pressured to come up with a domain name. I went with the aforementioned alias .wordpress or whatever the extension is for the free default option. Then it wanted a title. I closed the tab at this point, having not yet decided what I wanted to write. I'd signed up on a whim and, truth be told, I felt somewhat assaulted by these demands for immediate nomenclature. I recalled my only previous semi-successful attempt at keeping a blog, something about a future generation, taken from a Chicks On Speed song that I didn't at the time know was a cover of the B-52s, despite it featuring most notably on an EP called 'Chix-52'. 'Blog For A Future Generation' - it was a dumb name, I certainly wouldn't be repurposing it.
Over the next few days, I was harassed by automated emails, encouraging me to continue the creation of my new blog, and each time another one came through, I tried to think what on earth I wanted to write about. Again, my mind kept drifting back to my only previous semi-successful attempt at keeping a blog, trying to remember what I used to post. I recalled a painfully ill-informed collection of posts about cyberpunk - these days, one Sprawl Trilogy and a Matrix later, I cringe at the thought of considering myself some kind of aficionado on the matter, when I now realise I've still not amounted to more than a mere novice. The only other thing I could remember were music reviews. I didn't remember the actual albums I'd appraised, but I remembered the system I used to do so - tracks were rated in order of preference, and colour-coded for easy categorisation.
Having been a longtime dweller on 'what my all-time favourite album is', I started to think about how this colour-coding could actually be implemented practically. If the colours represented preference, perhaps I could assign each colour a value, therefore giving each album a total score which could be averaged and used for comparison, in turn quantifying the qualitative data I was collecting. Furthermore, a recent foray (recent as in about the same amount of time I've been a novel reader, since around 2017) into Japanese pop music of the 80s, retroactively umbrella'd under the term 'City Pop', has had me itching to speak about the subject for quite some time. But my struggle to mentally integrate this genre into the eclectic sea of 'other music' I'm interested in has prevented me from doing so thus far. But a blog with a systematic tiering solution would be ideal for comparing all the music together. It just needed, as Wordpress kept reminding me, a name. I settled on 'The Sound System'.
Wordpress, I soon discovered, is an impractical and impenetrable Rubik's cube of a website. Several features are obscured behind mysterious paywalls, with very little indication to a layman of what unlocking them will actually facilitate. Demos make basic operations look simple, but illogical layouts, unexplained terminology and a maze-like 'structure' soon render any tutorials useless. Worst of all, googling the solutions to your rudimentary queries is utterly futile, as even the most recent of troubleshooting guides (labeled 2021) are outdated, and the screencaps used as an example do not even begin to correspond to the latest 'version' that you're desperately trying to navigate.
Frustration overcoming me, I gave up. If I couldn't simply individually colour items in a list, the whole idea would be snuffed. Then it hit me in the face - I could simply do this. I'd done it before! I googled 'Blogger' and found that not only did it still exist but that, presumably through the magic of Google accounts linking together, I was already logged in and ready to go! I had a quick skim - it was every bit as cringe-worthy as expected, but my flare and verbal prowess were both sharper than I'd recalled. If all this can be archived, I thought, I'll settle here. Fuck Wordpress.
And here we are. All previous posts 'redrafted' (not deleted, you never know when you'll need something from the archive) and the blog soon to be visually transformed with a slightly less ostentatious fascia. And renamed, of course, to match its repurposing. And so it's time for the Blog For A Future Generation to climb into the time capsule, to be forgotten by all civilisation and never unearthed again. Whether or not the reader of this new venture is of a future generation, I hope you'll join me on whatever this new musical journey turns out to be. Let's be honest though, it sounds like it'll probably be tediously formulaic.
Oh, and yes. Blogger is so much easier to use. Once again, fuck Wordpress.
No comments:
Post a Comment