Bring back the blog

Some of my favorite memories from college are of me waking up in the morning, rushing over to my laptop to see if there were any new blog posts on Michael Sporn’s Splog or any new animation community news on CartoonBrew. There were other fantastic animation blogs to follow back then; to name a few: Hans Bacher’s One2More2Time3, Jenny Lerew’s Blackwing Diaries, Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Research. Today some of these blog lie dormant and untouched, or worse they are completely gone (although I’m sure we could find some archived in the Wayback Machine). These blogs were the pulse of the animation community. I have the distinctive memory of obsessively hitting my browser’s refresh button hundreds of times over the course of a day to see if there were any new posts.

But then everything changed. Soon everyone had iPhones and Facebook accounts. The long format long posts filled with a person’s work, thoughts, questions, obsessions, was now replaced with short format content on social media. Internet memes took over as the predominant way to relate to your fellow human beings.

I don’t think blogging ever really died out, but it definitely changed. Blogs today seem purely focused on SEO to bring traffic to websites in order to sell you something. Thanks, capitalism.

I’m sure there are still old school bloggers left, and now I hope to join their ranks again. This blog is my attempt at bringing blogging back. At least, the kinds of blogs that I enjoyed c. 2007.

Screenshot of my favorite blog of all time, Michael Sporn’s Splog. The site is still live, you should go check it out! It’s a treasure trove of animation history. There’s nothing else quite like it.