Dog with a Blog
me logging on
What am I doing here?
“Sometimes I worry my critical muscles have atrophied,” I wrote in a characteristically short, unembellished Rate Your Music review last year. It’s a common enough insecurity, if a little silly to indulge at 26: most adults feel their best years are behind them in some respect, and I consider myself fortunate to feel it about something people tend to get better at as they age. Those who know me will be well aware I’ve flung myself back into Music Mode this year, and I’m pleased to report the “analytical ear” I feared losing has returned with a vengeance. Amazing what exposure’ll do!
So no, I don’t think any less than I used to. But I do write less. I look at the amount of hobbyist writing I was putting out in my college years, and although I wouldn’t call all (or even much) of it good, there was a time when I wrote about media for the sheer joy of putting the words out there, and I miss that! I miss the months I spent tweaking my 2018 Bionicle music retrospective. I miss the weeks I spent writing the one college essay I was ever proud of, an analysis of the ways Jeff Lieberman’s Just Before Dawn establishes its diegetic space. I miss the way my mind used to race when experiencing something new, progressively stratifying my thoughts into words, ideas, turns of phrase—I miss having shit to say.
The people yearn for macroblogging
I am not a concise person. Anyone who’s ever spoken to me can tell you as much (another insecurity of mine!); while I can be reserved and awkward at times, the moment you bring up a topic I have any personal stake in, the conversational gloves come off. (“Not to get too into it…”, I might say, before immediately getting too into it.) It took a while for me to realize it, but this is one of the reasons I never quite took to “microblogging”: for me, shouting into the void is an activity at odds with an arbitrary character limit. If I’m this long-winded when talking to actual people who presumably would like to get the occasional word in, the void shouldn’t be the one telling me to hurry it up!
Half-jokes aside, I’ve spent a long time wishing for a platform where I can go long on what’s been on my mind, somehow not realizing the format I sought has been around longer than I have. With that said: do not expect any kind of consistency. I hope to do some deep dives on here, but you’ll see just as many hot takes and stray observations. I make no promises regarding post frequency; they’ll be done when they’re done. The topics covered will vary wildly, and I doubt any one person is going to find all of them interesting, let alone as interesting as I do. And that’s fine! Respectfully, this blog is for me, not you. But I do hope you find some value here all the same.
The name
I’ve been going by some variant of “dogstarman” online for a few years now, after the Stan Brakhage film of the same name, but .man domains aren’t publicly available, and to be honest, I’ve always felt more like a Dog Starman than a Dogstar Man. So it doesn’t feel like too much of a pivot to call myself a Starman Dog instead. Also, I like the game EarthBound, which has both Starmen and dogs in it. Maybe I’ll have someone make me a little logo of a Starman and a dog hanging out. That’d be cute.
What now?
Now comes the good stuff.