Introducing pablog
Hi all,
pablog is Pablo's blog. It's a subdomain at my personal website, where I share vignettes and updates about my work.
In this space I don't expect to write fiction.
I've been feeling an embarrassing nostalgia for an era I'm too young to wholly remember, forcing me to scour various media to satisfy the curiosity prompted by my arbitrary knowledge gaps. I'm referring to the late 2000s, a five-year pocket of time that spans from 2007 to 2012, an era that I remember as purporting a distinct green and blue look, aggressively aquatic and bubbly, as if illuminated by bright studio lights and viewed through the reflective and glossy surface of a glass screen. More succinctly, the time period described by the Frutiger Aero aesthetic, a complementary style to the largely favorable attitude people had of the internet, far enough removed from the dot-com bubble to forget or forgive, ready to embrace its possibilities with renewed eagerness.
Not too long ago I asked strangers about their experiences online during the 2000s, broadly construed. Here are some of the comments I received:
Everyone had a blog. Not like modern cookie-cutter blogs, but slapdash HTML pages with unintuitive layouts and garish backgrounds and graphics. 9/10 times that’s where super obscure information was.
Blogging was so sweet then and so therapeutic. Facebook ruined everything.
Search algorithms were much more primitive, but due to the public internet being basically much, much smaller, it was faaaar easier to find basically random people’s personal sites
A big thing for me is the fact that there were individual fan forums for each band/series/film/book. I remember the mass exodus of fan spaces to Tumblr in 2009.
Oh the nostalgia, you're all hitting me right in the early internet feels! Remember when 'surfing the net' was an actual term people used unironically? I sure do. I'd spend ages just hopping from one hyperlink to another, discovering random sites and feeling like a digital explorer. And let's not forget the times when downloading a single song on Napster or Limewire could be an overnight task – only to find out it was mislabeled or worse, a virus. Good times, good times. And who else remembers the rush of setting up your personal GeoCities or Angelfire page, complete with flashy GIFs and an obligatory visitor counter? Simpler times before social media algorithms dictated what we saw.
These and other comments led me to Bear, since it seems to have a similarly-minded group of people who understand blogs like I do: a personal site to read about various topics as rich and interesting as its authors. I prefer this sense of the word to the modern one. I can't in good faith consider AI-generated walls of text surrounded by a collage of advertisements "blogs".
Before starting this blog I spent some time reading through the Discover page. I've enjoyed reading through what you have all written, and in the coming days I'll be writing replies to those posts I found most interesting.
It's probably a good idea to write a little about myself since, after all, this is an introductory post. I live in the US and I'm finishing my last semester of graduate school. My work focuses on philosophical conceptions of privacy, mainly within the context of LLMs and aggregation of big data. I'm currently working on a thesis project concerning ethical obfuscation techniques. My fiction writing is almost entirely in Spanish, so my personal website with links to my work is on the main domain. Bear seems to be more popular in the anglosphere, so I won't be referencing or linking that here. Outside of this, I teach private lessons on programming and computer science.
Before I end this—some of you may have seen an earlier post called "Welcome to Jekyll". Prior to setting up this site, I used GitHub Pages to host a Jekyll project, and while I was editing some of the CSS for this theme I used one of those posts to test the syntax highlighting, but I accidentally published it. It should be deleted now.
Thanks for reading, and welcome to pablog.
Best,
Pablo