hello world!

Hello! It feels weird posting here, almost like coming back home.

I'm Jocha. I'm a twenty-something guy who misses the internet he grew up in, a lot. Thus, this blog was born!

I used to host a several blogs on Blogger many years ago, when I was just a kid and fiddling with the family computer was my idea of a fun time. A lot has happened since then, and I've gone through many, many different phases and interests, but the idea of writing a blog has always called to me like a siren song. In the year of 2026 (!!), the blog is no longer a place in the Personal Internet (™) but a weird thing that most of us have forgotten still exists.

As a teenager, I had an Instagram account, a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, you name it. The blogs I had died with my old Gmail account, which I deleted because it was weighing me down with past ghosts (and thousands of unread spam emails from free trials, newsletters I forgot to unsubscribe from, and the like). I was everywhere all at once. Now, you don't know this about me yet, but I've always struggled with the idea of being scattered. Though as I grow, I become less anxious about being wider, I'm still enamored with the idea of having a single thread to follow.

By opening this blog I'm doing the opposite of that – last year I created my own Neocities website, which is still (and will forever be) in development, I have several Tumblr blogs (among these my personal blog, my old fandom and editing blog that has been running for over a decade at this point – if you take into account the archive –, and my new gaming blog), I'm slowly getting into the habit of journaling and making spreads for things I like, such as movies or books, and I'm also building my own Obsidian vault, where I keep everything from recipes, to notes on academic papers, to beers I've tried, to gaming 'spreadsheets'. I still very much struggle with the idea that not everything needs to be contained in a single place. But I'm managing. I want to create about the very same thing from different perspectives, and abandon the thought I need to make The Perfect [Something] about it, the One And Only Thing About This Interest Of Mine.

I hope my blog is yet another place to explore myself. In 2026, I want to become aware of things I'd never noticed about myself, and most of all, slow down and actually pay attention to my days, to what I love, to what i think, to what grows within me when I interact with the world.

Part of the reason I disliked 'traditional' social media was the lack of customization. I felt constrained by the soulless profiles you can create, with only a profile picture (sometimes a banner) to express yourself. I think many people feel like this (that's, in my opinion, the very reason Carrds are so popular among teens nowadays, and why Tumblr is stubbornly holding on to life despite everybody from The Outside™ thinking it's dead). I've always been in love with my computer, and spending afternoons and holiday mornings crafting a new look for my Tumblr blog feels like such an intimate connection with the Internet, whatever it is now. This is why Substack never worked for me either (that, and the fact people seemed too interested in their engagement there. I really want the feeling of screaming into the void and only sometimes having the void scream back).

Lilly Ashton, who does not know this blog exists, is the reason I decided to open it today. On her Tumblr blog, she urged people to join the Blogspot resurgence of 2026, and just reading those words made me think back to all the times I spent my days writing entries nobody read, and how happy I was doing so. When I remember those days, now, they all have the same light to them, a soft light from the end of the afternoon, when the world is tender. I'm sure many days were darker than I recall, and many of them cold and unpleasant. But in my computer lived that light.

I hope to see this blog grow thick with entries about the silliest little things. Things that I love, that live in many, many places, in many, many different ways, because I'm very, very happy when I talk about them.

If you're reading this, did I succeed? How many years into the future does this blog still exist? How many love letters to the world have I written so far?

With love,

Jocha