Shawn Huelle

hello again (again)

What is this?

I have written this before, haven't I?

In March of 2005 (more than 20 years ago), I started writing a blog. I wrote there sometimes regularly and sometimes only intermittently for a little over ten years. That blog was called rocket to nowhere and was hosted first at blogger and then at rocket2nowhere.com/blahg. Quite a lot happened there. The thing that eventually became my doctoral dissertation started there. I wrote about books and film there. I posted a whole bunch of photos as well as the occasional mp3 there. I made and broke blogging rules for myself there. I published a lot of thoughts there.

I eventually abandoned that blog. It had been infected by some kind of fake pharma hack/virus thing, I felt as though the intermittently was becoming ever more intermittent, and blogs were dead or dying. (If you subscribe to the Dead Internet Theory, the whole internet was starting to die right around then.)

Just about six years later, I missed it. I missed having a public place to put words and ideas and photographs online that wasn't "social media" or overrun with/by algorithms (see "Dead Internet Theory" above). So I started another blog.

I called that one Any Minor World That Breaks Apart Falls Together Again. It still exists, but more on that in a moment. I wanted that blog to be a completely stripped down version of rocket to nowhere. There would be no "blogroll." There would be little to no styling. There would be writing (usually short form), and there would be photographs (without context or explanation).

That worked well for about two years, until I started a project that ended up taking the blog over. A description of that project (as well as the project itself which is slowly ongoing) can be found here, but the gist of the project is this: I am reading A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari one random page at a time and transcribing whatever I mark in the text.

I have not decided to abandon that blog. Or rather, I have decided to abandon the "blog" part of that blog and let that space simply be the Thousand Plateaus project. The project turned the space into its title even more than it already was its title.

To that end, I have removed all non-Thousand Plateaus posts from that space and put them here in this new blog. They are all collected under the tag "Any Minor World."

I also dug up the rocket to nowhere archives, converted them into ~650 markdown files, and then put them here in this new blog, too. They are (almost) all collected under the tag blahg.

So what is this going to be?

In the previous version of this post, I stated clearly (?) what I thought the blog was not going to be:

It will not have a theme [in that it will not be single-theme]. It will not attempt to monetize itself or anything else. It will not be concerned with SEO or number of visitors.

I would like to add two things: It will not be coherent, and it will not be consistent.

And while all of those things are and will hopefully remain true, they still don't really answer the question What is this blog going to be?

In terms of how it looks, this blog is already somewhere between rocket to nowhere's aughty aesthetic and Any Minor World's forced minimalism. In terms of content, this will hopefully be a continuation of what my blog has always been. Or, to make a gesture toward my personal (blogging) philosophy/aesthetic: This is going to be random. It's going to be stupid. It's going to be cheap. It's going to be shitty.

Stick around anyway.