Welcome, and cheers to Blaugust!
Now playing in a blogosphere near you: me, here in this blog, which is my personal internet playground!
I'm KF. If you want to know the reason why I'm here, I think my "About" page sums it up pretty well. But to speedrun the explanation: I think it's neat, important, and fun to make space for earnest appreciation of the things we like.
That is the purpose of this blog. It's also my goal for Blaugust 2025, which I decided to sign up for (and also create this blog for) somewhat on a whim. But the desire to do something like this has already been simmering in a quiet corner of my heart for some time, so I'm hopeful that this fun blogging festival is the perfect place to indulge and celebrate it! It's my first time participating in Blaugust, though it's not my first rodeo with attempting to blog. I look forward to figuring it out once more along the way.
A toast to Blaugust!
Fittingly enough, appreciating Blaugust itself is how I'd like to kick off this blogging journey.
Like many in recent years, I've developed a real aversion to the ever-enshittifying social media and online platforms that were supposed to connect us in meaningful ways. While insightful connection certainly can and does still happen in those spaces, including out of necessity, it's just gotten so much more difficult. I miss when the internet didn't feel like such an instrument of exploitation. I wish it wasn't so hard to connect with each other in safe and interesting ways over the internet (and in general/offline, too, probably).
I've gone into hibernation for, if not outright abandoned, most of the online spaces I used to inhabit. They became such joyless experiences for me. And I thought that, at the very least, I could control whether I gave these platforms my time and presence at all, since we seem to have increasingly less control over what they do with it while we're on them. But it means I've also had to wonder many times if it's worth it to eternally evade the enshittified online ecosystem at the cost of erasing myself from the most convenient opportunities for connection. Where do you even go? Who will even be there?
I'm still grappling with those questions and that balance, with no easy answers in sight. But it's why I appreciate efforts like Blaugust, which feel very much in the spirit of encouraging meaningful connection, doing so with thoughtful intention and on our own terms. It's reassuring to remember that there's so many other folks out there, collectively searching for and actively trying to build the same kind of thing, of online spaces to connect in fun ways that feel good. It reminds me that things can be different, and that the power to start making that happen is already in our own hands.
So, cheers again to Blaugust and online spaces for connection, community, and creative self-expression! Excited to witness and support finding even more ways that we can foster that enthusiasm, capacity, and agency for the kind of internet we need and deserve.