Just a quick note to acknowledge some changes around here — I’ve updated the blog’s look and fiddled with the colours to make it a little less stock-Wordpress. I’ve added some new content, including subscribe and support options to the right of the page, Facebook and Twitter share links at the bottom of posts and a few other cosmetic changes, including a page setting that will allow me to hide long posts behind a “continue reading” link.
All of this is a learning process; with my last blog I let WordPress host it and they handled all the back-end stuff. With this blog, yeah, I’m using WordPress’ tools, but it’s mine from start to finish, which means I’ve got to figure out how it all works on my own. The reason I’m going this route is simple, though: I don’t want to give some corporation the right to censor me if enough alt-right trolls decide they don’t like what I’m saying and spam them with complaints.
FYI, that happened on my old medieval-reenactment blog more than once; it’s a known problem that white supremacists are infiltrating reenactment communities, and one of the ways they take over is with a deliberate effort to silence progressive voices in those spaces. (Yeah: Medieval reenactment groups.) One of the reasons I started this blog is because I was tired of wasting my emotional energy on pushing back against white supremacists in a hobby community when I needed to waste my emotional energy on pushing back against white supremacists in the world at large.
This week I also started a Twitter account linked to this blog with the handle @hungover_the. (Twitter gave me the identifier, and I liked it enough to stick with it. I don’t know if you can change it anyway.) I’ve never used Twitter before and have in fact actively resisted using it, but that seems to be the way things work in this world. So despite Twitter being “merely an aggregator of venom,” I’ve taken the plunge. We’ll see how seriously I take it, but I do plan on making an announcement on Twitter (“tweeting”, in the jargon of the initiated) each time I make a new blog post, so if you want a non-email way to follow this blog and have a Twitter account, it might be worth following me.
The set publishing schedule remains Tuedays and Fridays, which seems to work and has taken a lot of stress off me. (Quick nut-and-bolts updates like this one won’t count towards the schedule.)
