I could always go back to LiveJournal.
Hi pals…I’m a little under the weather (not COVID, don’t worry) so I’m going to try to keep this reasonably short today.
Just to touch upon a topic I’ve noted before, the social media hoohar is still going on, as everyone is casting about trying to figure out what the new Twitter is going to be. Frankly, I think the new Twitter will be “the old Twitter, only worse” but in the meantime I’m trying out Mastodon, I’m there on Cohost, and I’m also on The Hive (user name: “mikester” natch), which is phone-app only but looks promising. I even revived my Tumblr, for Pete‘s sake.
I don’t know where we’re all going, but we’re certainly going somewhere. I do expect Twitter to survive, even despite current ownership, and as someone said they’re going to discover themselves engineering back to the solutions that already existed when their thoughtless whims all come crashing down. The trick is whether or not the advertisers and the power users will stick it out ’til everything settles down.
But whatever happens, you can always find me here, and you can see what else I’m up to (or had been up to) at mikesterling.com. And that reminds me…I’ve long lamented the fact that “mikester.com” was registered only a few short months before I thought about doing so, and after years of being what appeared to be a mostly-inert webpage it is now in the hands of some domain sales site at the low, low cost of nearly $4000. So, for about 4% of the price I registered “mikester.net” instead. It just forwards to mikesterling.com. Hey, that’s a whole four characters less! A real timesaver!
Okay, so this isn’t just me blabbing about social media and domain names, here’s some actual comic book content. It’s the Wizard-a-like Hero Illustrated‘s video magazine #2 from 1994! Warning: may be hard to take all 25 minutes in one sitting. Features a Rob Liefeld interview and commercials for a video game I don’t remember.
I don’t use any of those social media tools, so I’m grateful for this blog. Happy Thanksgiving!
I miss those heady days right after the turn of the millennium when everyone I knew was starting a blog and I would have them all bookmarked and go through them all each day and every one was different. And I would discover these weird and wonderful blogs of strangers and read them to find out what they had for lunch or where their sister got her wedding dress. And the comixweblogosphere was robust and diverse with snark over here and nostalgia over there and scholarship in the corner. And none of it was homogenized or monetized or corporate. That era was way too short.
That’s IT! Time to bring back MySpace!
True story: I had my name as my blog (andrewaltenburg.com) but had a time of financial distress. During this time the domain expired and I didn’t immediately have the money to re-up and somehow it got snagged and turned into a site that gave advice on how to cheat on your wife to married men. I checked the domain registry for years… and it was always $5000 or some crazy amount that I would never/ever pay. But a couple years ago during the midst of Covid, I was looking up options for a domain name for my comic strip, when I happened to see that andrewaltenburg.com was available for the normal price of something like $20 or whatever. I picked it up through GoDaddy and set it on auto renew.
re: Twitter/social media – sigh. I left the twitter at Halloween and don’t miss the drama. I do miss the various conversations I got to be a part of, but unfortunately those conversations were already beginning to fray due to the emergence of the hostile class that invaded the service upon new ownership. I didn’t experience anything especially egregious I suppose but I could see the critters crawling out from under the rocks where they had been. It was jussssst on the precipe of being instantly unfun so I deleted my account. Twitter just wasn’t worth it and it’s definitely not a hill that I wish to die on (literally or figuratively).
@Walaka – I think that era was way too short as well….. as it is, some of the links that Mike uses are for sites that no longer exist and many/most? haven’t updated their sites in years. It’s like walking down a once vibrant main street and seeing empty storefronts.
[…] Walaka of Earth Two crosses the dimensional barrier to say […]
[…] comment sections and all that jazz between the comic blogs at the time, and I look at (as Andrew points out) my almost entirely-rotted links page and lament the loss of many of those voices. Which is why […]
“It’s like walking down a once vibrant main street and seeing empty storefronts.”
I just watched “Roger & Me”, and that’s exactly what much of Flint, Michigan looked like!