Getting My Writing Home Back

I start every post with a headline. Not because I like it. Because the algorithm does.

That's the confession this whole update is really about.

Why Do I Even Start With A Headline?

I've been on social media long enough that some habits just... stick. Headline first, hook first, whatever gets the algorithm to actually show your post to someone. And truthfully, it doesn't feel right to skip it.

Not because I believe in it, but because I've been doing it for so long that not doing it feels wrong.

I’ve Fallen Into The Trap

More and more of the content I see (and the content I make) is becoming a performance. We're not writing for the reader anymore. We're writing for the algorithm, and hoping the reader is standing somewhere behind it.

I'm guilty of it. Every post I've put up is held hostage a little, by whichever platform it's sitting on. And that hostage situation cuts two ways:

1. You might not even get discovered for what you made.
2. You put in all the time and effort, and then one post doesn't sit right with the platform's terms, and the whole account is gone.

At some point, I wasn’t creating what I wanted to create - I was performing for the platforms.

Living In A Shopping Mall

When I think about constantly posting on social media, it's like living your life inside a shopping mall.

It’s often a performance, you can't really be yourself. You can't relax. You can't unwind, because everything you have is on display for whoever happens to be walking past.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be seen, mind you.

I want people to acknowledge what I put out, to see my faults, to know I exist. But when it becomes this much of a performance, you run the real risk of losing the thing you were actually trying to say in the first place.

So I've been intentionally pulling my content off the mall floor. And building somewhere that's actually mine.

So I Built Myself A Home

Since my last posts and also about losing my writing home, I have been making a lot of changes to the website.

Most of what I did, you won't even see, because I split my time almost evenly between two sides: the front end, which is what you get to experience as a reader, and the back end, which is what I experience as I write and create.

That back end matters more to me than it probably should.

I want to feel comfortable in my own workspace, even if it looks messy from the outside.

Especially then, actually, because having the mess around me is part of how I make sense of what's going on.

Every so often while I'm working on the front end, I'll spot something that isn't good enough yet... and I'll just stop and fix it, right there.

The Slow, Manual Work Of Bringing People Home

While all that was happening, I was also catching up on the older posts.

53 of them, brought back one at a time.

This was a manual process and it took a lot of time.

First I had to find the posts. Then I had to find the right tool. I landed on FireShot, because not every comment section lets you scroll and select cleanly, and the free version handles that fine.

But that’s not all - FireShot gives you one very long screenshot, a strip of comments running the full length of the page.

That's not something AI can read cleanly in one piece, so I had to manually chop each one into sections using an image splitter from PineTools.com before anything could actually be transcribed.

Find the post, screenshot it, slice it, then let the AI OCR the text out of each slice and turn it into an actual comment.

Repeat that process over 50 times.

Here's why I bothered.

All of it, every post, is public. And the comments people have left me over the years are, in a way, proof.

Proof that people are actually talking with me, not just scrolling past.

They're on social media right now, sure. But I've been finding ways to pull them home.

What About The Look Of It

The same argument I've been making about content applies to how the site looks, too. I wanted the visuals to be representative of me, a little.

I've genuinely enjoyed the style you've probably noticed by now on the site.

It started years ago…

I bought a “Retro Graphic Assets” Pack and Loved It

The hand-drawn feel of old-school art. There's a kind of romanticism in it. A sense that effort actually went into each piece.

When I bought these… ooh, I felt like a little boy as I opened each graphic because it’s so interesting.

These days, with AI, it’s easy to create impossibly advanced graphics that would have taken me years to learn - but with so many tools available to us, we no longer face that problem.

• Sometimes I'm lazy and I just put up something in-your-face and direct
• Other times there are layers built into the piece, and if you look closely, you'll find more in there
• Then, there are times AI just refuses to do what I want. When that happens, I use whichever version lands closest to what I actually had in mind, even if it's not there yet.

I wanted mine to have some flair. Hopefully, it can inspire that same feel and excitement I had, something like a pseudo-art experience, when you look at it.

I love manga and anime

The 1st ideas I had were to learn into this style but I decided against it.

I've seen how uncomfortable it makes people feel when they see an artiste’s work completely get ripped off with no credit or reward to them.

For example, when ChatGPT started generating art that looked unmistakably like Studio Ghibli's style, and the reaction wasn't all happy, even as people happily Ghibli-fied their pictures.

I don't want to be the guy who shrugs and says "it's fine to use AI" when I've seen the reaction play out and I know it takes real effort to make that the traditional way.

Where This Goes Next

This part is still very much a work in progress, but here's the plan.

• I write the content first, on my own site.
• Adapt it for the different social platforms, to actually get eyeballs on it.
• Pull the comments from those platforms back onto my site again

I keep coming back to the same reason. You never really know when your account hits a bump and the algorithm decides you're done.

Remember, posting on social media is still putting your content on a rented platform, plain and simple.

The powers-that-be can rip it away easily.

My website is the one place that's actually mine. When I bring the content home, it stays.

The Proof This Was Worth It

I said earlier that social media feels like living in a shopping mall. Everything on display, nothing quiet enough to actually sit in.

My friend Joycelyn is the clearest proof I have that a "home” works differently.

She's been incredibly supportive of my content, especially the theatre-related pieces, and she gives me feedback completely on her own, without being asked.

She still responds to posts that are years old and backdated, the kind of thing that would get buried in an hour on any platform, decided by an algorithm, not by her.

On my own site, there's no algorithm deciding what she sees first. No feed pulling her attention somewhere else mid-thought.

Just the post, and her, and whatever she actually wants to say about it.

That's the whole point of building this website home... fewer walls and distractions between the people who genuinely want to be here and the thing I actually made.

• Social media is a shopping mall, it’s built for traffic.
• Your own website is a home where you can welcome people to your world.

I think that's the difference I've been chasing this whole time, and it's slowly coming together.