Greetings, my fine feathered friends! Welcome to Shiny Objects, your #1 source for Magpie news and opinions!
It's an experiment, see? I'm trying to get a few birds stoned at once here - I need a vehicle for keeping in touch that's universally accessible to friends across various platforms, I've been searching for a good way to share my travel writing, and I also need an incentive to check my email more often.
My hope is that this format will be a good place for that paragraph or two of observations and complaints that are too longform and indefinite for facebook but too impersonal for private text conversations, and a spot for those witty non-sequiturs and bad puns that I imagine I'd put on twitter (if twitter was at all appealing to me).
I'm terrible at keeping up with instagram mostly because I forget to take pictures, and I write too much for snappy captions. A public blog feels like shouting into the void - who am I even talking to? The entire internet?? No thanks. I'm too ADHD to watch a YouTube video all the way through, never mind make one. Private social media is a bit gauche, or a bit too intimate, or a bit too self-centred. Although perhaps a weekly-ish digest of my thoughts and adventures is no less self-centred, at least I can try to be artful about it here. If nothing else, it's a more consolidated narcisissm than the five hundred facebook posts I make when I get into town after a long trail section, and perhaps seems less attention-seeking.
It also doesn't hurt that this platform is potentially monetizable. In the event that my hiking career takes off and my writing becomes popular enough to make some money, I won't have to port everything over. As it stands now, a little private newsletter experiment for friends and family and maybe some commited instagram followers, it's free. Once I hit 200 subscribers, I'll start offering some bonus content for a paid subscription, but the bulk of my trail writing will stay free forever - I really ought to be paying you for tolerating my self-indulgent silliness.
So here's what you can expect from Shiny Objects:
-section updates when I'm on trail. Every three or five or whatever days, when I have internet access in town, I'll do my best to send something out. I write daily on trail, so I'll have at least an edited journal entry, a song I've been listening to, and maybe few photos for you. When I'm hiking with other hiker-internet people, I'll send out links to their stuff too.
-weekly vanlife dispatches when I'm off trail; likely on Thursdays. It just appeals to me, Thursdays. I probably read too much Douglas Adams as a kid. This could include snippets of essay drafts I'm working on; updates on my various experiments in pleasurable failure (I'm bad at art and I love to make art, I'm bad at climbing and I love to climb, I'm a mediocre skiier and I love to ski); lightly fictionalized transcripts of verbal exchanges I particularly enjoyed; extremely Scorpio text messages (aka self-owns); crispy deep-fried screenshots of linguistics memes; shameless promotion of my own Spotify playlists; cool facts about space… I dunno! Clearly I have lots to say and a fondness for eccentric punctuation, so let's see if this works out!
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