It’s a real back to the future moment, this. Where I’ve headed off for a year or two on a journey of personal inspiration, seeking new knowledges, grand new themes, new looks, new designs, new vibes, only to come crawling back to the place where it all started. It’s all very Joseph Campbell.
My very first proper blog ran on a website called Blog-City, and for some insane reason I remember that my first post was on the 15th of July, 2003. This followed many years of experimenting with all sorts of web hosting and design services (all completely free) including GeoCities and Angelfire. I had websites for myself, for my made-up career, for imagined airlines and businesses and all sorts, not to mention links outwards to rudimentary social media services and websites like Neopets. The internet was simpler then; maybe it will be simple again some day, but probably not.
Once I started working properly on my career, I tried to separate out all the different parts of my life into different web presences. There was social media, of course, and since 2007 I’ve had Facebook, Twitter, and the rest (most of them are private or deactivated now, apart from Mastodon, which I’m enjoying playing around with). I had separate sites for my filmmaking, for my work and profile as an academic, for my photography stuff, as well as a blog archive just kind of floating around. When I registered danielbinns[dot]net back in 2014, I thought ‘right, time to link everything up’, but I never quite got there in a way I liked. Everything was still floating, still nebulous.
Part of this was the technology, maybe, but primarily it was due to my trying to force things to fit in a particular way. This is personal and psychological as much as it has anything to do with a particular host or platform.
Several things have happened in the last few years to make me reconsider all of the above. The pandemic was a player, for sure, but it also took me reading stuff and watching videos and learning about different ways of managing my time, my notes and knowledge, my skills and expertise, and just figuring out who on earth I was and accepting that person.
Long story short, we’re back here on WordPress, under a new domain, The Clockwork Penguin. TCP isn’t a business, necessarily; for now, I still like making stuff under the Deluded Penguin moniker. TCP is more of an ethos, a place to play and experiment, to reflect. To look back over some notes and some things I’ve been thinking about; to post fragments, or more developed work, works in progress, or just some cool links I found. I don’t know if it’s a cozy place or a mysterious place; if it’s a house sitting next to a river, or a garden where I can plant things and watch them grow. But I look forward to finding out.
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