It’s been almost a decade since I did much blogging on this site. During that time the Internet changed significantly, with individual blogging the victim of an extensive coordinated assassination attempt by big social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Yes, I still refuse to call Twitter X, because that’s just a ridiculously stupid non-brand, and is representative of the once-valuable Twitter being destroyed and stripped for parts. Twitter and Instagram were once really useful complements to individual blogs, and part of an ecosystem where each component was effectively a different critter that each had its role to play, and they all added up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Then Facebook and Twitter (and Instagram, and YouTube, and Pinterest, and LinkedIn, etc. etc.) became where people went to read updates across a whole swath of the people they cared about instead of reading a blogroll. When Google tried to kill RSS (which they kind of succeeded in doing, and also kind of didn’t) Facebook and Twitter were just so much easier to find everyone at once, so most of us bloggers wound up abandoning our blogs to post exclusively on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. That’s what I did. From a sheer user-based UX perspective, it made sense. That was kinda sad, but for the most part it was also kinda fine until those platforms grew super aggressive with their algorithms, preventing people from seeing everything from those people we deliberately chose to follow and instead serving up an endless stream of ads, suggested additional promoted profiles, and a flood of bots, and worst of all, explicitly manipulated what people saw to engineer outrage to juice engagement. The Trump era can in no small part be blamed directly on the bad actions of massive social media companies.
It should go without saying, but this is not what my generation had in mind for the Internet back in the 1990s.
Some of us (hi, Ernie!) launched Substack newsletters, Medium pages, Patreons, and other such things, which I may do sometime in the future. But for now, what I want and need is a way to learn in public, to keep a journal and research notebook (a la Warren Ellis) that isn’t owned and monetized by some huge-ass corporation, and to reconnect with my friends from all over.
Things are going to be janky on here for a while. Not only has the Internet changed since 2015, I’ve changed quite a bit too. My daughter Zoe is six months away from being an honest-to-God teenager, and I’ve become an honest-to-God graybeard. (So far the gray is contained to my beard and hasn’t spread to the ponytail yet, but that’s just a matter of time…) I finished my PhD in USC’s Media Arts + Practice program in 2018, then joined Whittier College as a visiting assistant professor while consulting for clients like Walt Disney Imagineering, where I did some work on Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser (aka “the Star Wars hotel”). When COVID-19 hit my family and I finally abandoned Los Angeles and moved back to Ohio to be closer to our extended families. In 2021 my wife Laura and I both joined her alma mater Miami University, her in the student advising office and myself as an Assistant Professor in Miami’s Emerging Technology in Business and Design (ETBD) department in its College of Creative Arts. I’m now the Director of ETBD’s Games and Simulation program, which brings with it a ton of overhead, so my own research and studio practice have taken a back seat somewhat – but I did soft-launch something I’m calling the Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). WNDRLab is primarily a virtual lab and working group more than an actual physical space, a banner under which to showcase my students’ worlds and my research into things like XR with the Apple Vision Pro as a continuation of the thinking I started doing back on the HoloLens team at Microsoft. We also bought an old (1871!) farmhouse in 2023, and are still in the never-ending process of fixing it up, patching up its jerryrigged ancient-ass HVAC systems and other quirks, and so on. All of this is a long way of saying, I’ve got tons of things competing for my time, so there are likely to be bugs and broken links and pages that don’t look right. The 2015 me would gnash my teeth and rend my garments over such things, but the 2025 me has accepted that there are other, more important things to worry about, and there always will be. (See my previous note about Zoe being on the cusp of teenagerhood.) So please forgive any such glitches; it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that there is always triage going on.
BUT, I miss this. I miss the days when we were a bunch of blogging punks that would get together at SXSW. I miss geeking out on stuff I’m exploring in public. I miss the opportunities and the social connections my blogging days led to. I’m not turning the comments on here because that was a bot-loaded shitshow even back then, and I shudder to think what that would do now – but please do feel free to reach out and say hi if you feel so inclined. There’s so much in the world right now that I’m interested in (XR, the future of games, the future of art), and I want to share what I’m learning, and geek out about it with other likeminded folks. If you’re reading this, hopefully that’s you – so please do say hi! As Aaron Manke always says at the end of an episode of Lore, “I love it when people say hi.”
Happy new year, and welcome back!