I'm a writer and maybe moviemaker. I wrote a blog called The Bleeding Tree for a long time, back when people blogged. I tried to start another, as Rise of the Flying Guillotine, both here and on Tumblr, both long after either was meaningful space to be, but was defeated less by the dying format than by the name, which dispite artwork and logos by Ryan Allred that directly tied the name explicitly to martial arts cinema, was shadow banned on all Meta formats, so there wasn't a lot of ways for me or anyone else to promote it.
Was it intended to imply something about the basic fact that the Techno Robber Baron class should be publically executed? Sure, but because it was a shadow ban, I wasn't even able to make the case for the explicit meaning.
So, here's the thing. I've needed to get off most social media for a long, long time. I periodically take breaks and whatever I'm planning to do now might just amount to one of those periodic breaks. I just know that engaging with all of the Trump Daily Outrage media is not going to do my mental health any good, nor am I going to improve the outside world one bit with my awareness of all it.
My plan right now, is to keep my Instagram - yeah, Meta seriously let me have the name for my account, but wouldn't let me promote anything else with the name from that account! - and my Bluesky. At this time, I seem to be able to use those responsibly. My intention is that whenever I stop being able to use them responsibly, I'll drop those, too, but I feel more comfortable having some toe of connection to some people through the Internet, whether that's healthy or not. Everything else, I'm disabling but not yet deleting, if only because deleting causes so much problem down the line.
{Well, I'll keep my Letterboxd, too, but I don't do a lot of social stuff there, so that's not much of a worry for me.)
Here's what I want. A weird little group of people to explore creativity with. I'm not sure if this Tale Foundry video is the perfect example of what I'm talking about, and I may eventually link a lot of similar videos in hopes of getting to the perfect one, or at least to continue circling around it. That said, it's a pretty good start for my purposes.
Possibly the most important experience in my creative development was having "story groups" in middle school. My Creative Writing - or was it just a part of an English/Language Arts class? - got broken up into groups of 4 or 5 and we wrote stories and read them to that group in order to get input and response. The excitement of crafting ideas for this really specific group that you got a sense of how they worked individually and as a group.
This might be where moving to L.A. will turn out to be a mistake. So far, so much of the conversations I've began have been with people with a much different kind of perspective. Of course, this could be something that simply requires more time. We are still settling in.
What is this blog? Obviously, I don't know yet.
I know if I say it's a place that I talk about movies and media, I'll do nothing but talk about politics. If I say it's about my creative process, I'll have nothing to say about it. Hopefully, it'll build a personality of its own if I keep at it.
