tadaima!

honey, i’m home!

album cover: tadaima by akiko yano (1981)

five reasons why I invested in a standalone blog

1. i want to write about shows, exhibits, etc. and i want people to be able to find them. being google-able increases that (vs Substack). this matters more to me than reach, i think; this is the one metric I care about.
   • my boyfriend arby once quoted someone else: “you should write about the exhibits you go to, because that’s usually the only memory of that exhibit that will exist.”
     • i’ve been to many life-changing exhibits that i haven’t written about. (big bang data, ai weiwei at the royal academy of arts in london, joan miro at tate modern, art as therapy in the rijks… dami pala!!!)
       • hey now i have this blog so maybe i can now!
2. it’s empowering to have a platform-agnostic space where i can write and do whatever the fuck I want with no pressure. mostly to write. i also don’t want to clog people’s inboxes with whatever experiments i’ll come up with. substack feels like a party. this blog is a receiving room, and you see the library of my mind.
3. i can choose to have an analytics-less experience if i want to. might be counter-intuitive against #1 because SEO, but let’s see. substack emails you 24H after you post about your analytics. i’m too sensitive for that if it happens too frequently.
4. i write a lot and share on instagram stories, though my account is private. i thought that if i had a blog it would be a more reliable archive.
   • a lot of people ask me: “do you remember what you said before about X and Y?” and it then becomes an extensive triangulation of different archives and sources.
5. a colleague once told me that she likes reading my stories when she unwinds after work. i like the idea of bringing comfort, having a steady place where everyone can find me and expect me.
   • when i was a kid, this was my favorite thing to do online: read and reread blogs.
   • maybe my colleague (in her early twenties) yearn for blogs, which she may not have experienced as my generation did.

it’s been my dream to have my own domain, to figure out a wordpress.org hosted blog. my love for graphic design and affinity for coding began with wanting to have my own blog. 

what will happen to my substack

i mean it will still be there, there’s no reason for it to not exist. i just don’t think my intentions here are compatible with the channel. i don’t want to bombard people’s inboxes. emails like that gives a sense of purpose and urgency. what if i want to do a 30-day posting everyday challenge? etc.

probably longer essays on substack? as long as it has a strong sense of purpose and urgency, then i suppose it will land there.

what to expect here?

a lot of pensées (thoughts) on the quotidien. i write a lot about music, fashion, art, pop culture, politics on my instagram stories, so i expect whatever i write there will eventually land here. i could conceivably have a separate section for *special stuff*, but frankly when i daydreamed about this, the first thing you on the landing page see has to be the blog.

anyway, welcome! let’s have a good time.

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own