Why Did I Start a Blog in 2021?

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 A couple of reasons, actually. I’ll try to break them down:

  1. I recently purchased a new phone with a vastly improved camera over the one that was in the previous phone that I’d been using since 2016 (if you must know, it was a Samsung Galaxy Amp-2 that I got “free” with my Cricket account).
  2.  I’ve been working on getting into the habit of writing every day (outside of my full-time job as a technical writer, that is) and I find that short-form, steam-of-consciousness posts give me the kick I need if I’m feeling burned out from work.
  3. I picked up a few fun new hobbies since the start of the pandemic. Namely, scratchbuilding/kitbashing and miniature painting.
    • Obviously I'm not an expert on any of the above, having only just started doing scratchbuilding and model making last year and miniature painting only a month or two ago, but I figured a blog would be a fun way to document my progress (and my myriad mistakes) and gauge my improvement over time.
  4.  I also found myself wanting a space to help keep track of my other hobbies:
    • Creative writing, first and foremost. It’s always been my main passion and I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have several concurrent novel projects that I’ve been working on. Some of these novels survive up to and beyond a first draft, most sadly don’t. I just chalk them up as practice.
    • Reading. It’s always been one of my favorite things to do, even if I’m not the fastest reader in the world. I still average between 55-60 books a year. I’m on goodreads, but I don’t really friend people or follow anyone.
    • Collecting. Action figures in general, Transformers in particular. Though not as much recently (I’m kind of running out of shelf space).
    • Video games, though I've been so busy with my other hobbies that I have a backlog of games that will take me forever to work my way through.

But why now, especially at a time when most people on the internet haven’t so much clicked on a personal blog since before the great recession? Well, it mostly came down to a random youtube video I watched a while back that was a deep dive into the venerable Michaelsoft Binbows meme. If you haven’t seen the video (and trust me, you definitely should), I won’t attempt to summarize the Pulitzer-quality investigative journalism seen in this video but I will note that a post from a long-standing Japanese blog called Alf’s Room proved instrumental in locating the building that once housed the legendary Michaelsoft Binbows. The Alf’s Room website meticulously details the hobbies and interests of its proprietor, Yoshinori Adachi and just something about it really inspired me to want to do something similar with my own hobbies (albeit nowhere near as detailed).

After watching that video, I was hit by the sudden urge to write about things that interest me and post them on the internet. This blog, much like my goodreads account, is mostly to keep track of my own stuff and not to build any kind of a following. Since I already have some pictures on my phone of the things I've been working, I figured I might as well add some words and make a blog out of it.

If you found this place, welcome. I hope to post at least a couple times a week, starting with some pictures of projects I took several weeks (months?) back and doing some retrospective write-ups on them. Stick around?

- Matthew

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