Last year, software developer Brent Simmons wrote something which stayed with me. It’s short, so hopefully he won’t mind me quoting all of it.
“This blog is almost 22 years old, and in all that time I’ve been solid about posting regularly — until this recent dry spell.
I skipped the summer. Last post was in June. There was just one that month, and just one in May.
I have an explanation: while my health and physical circumstances are unchanged and, happily, fine, I have not felt the drive to write here that I always felt.
I never, in all these years, had to push myself. I’d get an idea and I would be compelled to write it up and publish it. It was always that simple.
But I haven’t felt that way in many months, and I’m not sure I will again.
Maybe this is temporary, and there will be hundreds more posts to come.
But I kind of think not, because there’s a bigger issue: I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.
I have no plan. I’m feeling my way to that destination, which is years off, surely, and I just hope to manage it gracefully. (I don’t know of any role models with this.)
Anyway. In case I don’t write here again — in case these are the last words of this blog — thank you. I loved writing here, and you are why.”
Since then, Brent has stayed true to his word, and really has become less of a public person. He’s made just one more blog post since then, and seems to have deleted nearly all of his tweets too.
* * *
The idea of me stopping Dirty Feed for good is anathema to me. I can’t imagine it ever actually happening. Even my intended break at the start of 2021 came to a sudden, ridiculous end 15 days later. Maybe, like Brent, I’ll suddenly change my mind one day. But I don’t see it happening any time soon.
I sometimes wonder exactly why I feel this way. Plenty of people used to write online when they were younger, and just stopped – sometimes moving into podcasts or something, but often just breaking off from any of that nonsense entirely. This piece I wrote a couple of months ago explores one reason for this.
But there is another reason, and it’s one that’s only really become obvious recently. The better I get at researching and writing things on here, the better I’ve become at uncovering genuinely new information about the TV shows I love. Whether it’s old Spitting Image competitions, Red Dwarf set nonsense, or recasting on The Young Ones, there are facts there which nobody has ever uncovered before, or have at least remained buried for years. Sure, they’re also facts a great many people wouldn’t give a damn about, but if you’re someone like me, you know exactly how they tickle a certain part of your brain.
The thing is: to do this kind of stuff properly, I have to be what Brent calls a “public person”. Brent usefully gives a definition of this: if you have a blog, a Twitter, or any kind of online presence at all, that’s you, that is. And I fit that description to a T.
I want to be very clear: it really is pretty much impossible for me to write this site without being some kind of public person. And it’s not just about promoting your work so people read your stuff. It’s that, as I briefly commented in my last post, you can’t really do this stuff alone. Television archeology requires help. Not always, perhaps. But often enough that this site would be a hell of a lot less interesting and accurate without the contribution of others. All you have to do is read the thank you notes at the end of each piece linked to above, and note that every single one of them comes from the fact that I am a public person on the internet.
Being that public person is how you find things out. And I want to find this stuff out for my own pleasure, as much as for anybody else. Sure, Dirty Feed is intended to be read by others. But plenty of it is written purely to satisfy me.
* * *
The thing is, though: a huge part of me really does feel like Brent.
Not the part of me that writes Dirty Feed; this place has always been a safe haven of sorts. But the rest of me. The part you mainly see on Twitter these days. Because I really have got more and more uncomfortable with being a public person in that particular way.
The reasons are many, varied, and mainly tedious. Nobody needs yet another rant about Twitter from me. And of course I do get some very pleasant interactions on there which are nothing to do with my work here. But I obviously get less pleasant interactions.1 I also simply run into the problem that nice people who I like often tweet about things I really don’t want or need to read about. I’m all for Twitter opening my mind. But there’s a difference between that, and yer common or garden doomscrolling.
It’s more than that, though. I’ve started to seriously resent how easy it is to become misunderstood on Twitter. A combination of the character limit, my desire to tackle things in a non-obvious way, and people occasionally not reading what I’ve actually written, results in people often not quite understanding what I mean. It drives me a little bonkers. It makes me want to communicate purely through the medium of carefully-written articles with hundreds of footnotes2, where I rarely run into the same problem. If that makes me a bit of an arsehole – and it probably does – then so be it.
But in a lot of ways, the issue is broader than Twitter. It strikes me that every single time I’ve pulled away from contributing to a community online over the past few years, I’ve become happier. I still lurk on a number of forums, but post on virtually none – and I rarely feel the need or desire to. I used to write for other websites, but now concentrate all my writing here – and that focus has made me a much better writer than I used to be. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted the decision to take a piece of myself away from the net. Because it’s always given me more space in my head for the really important things.
Right now, I want my online world to shrink, not expand. On Twitter, I’ve started taking regular breaks in a way I never used to, and I intend to take far more. And even given my complaints above, I have to admit: being grumpy about how other people choose to express themselves on Twitter is never, ever going to be a positive or helpful thing for anyone. People have a right to their own voice. I’m best off simply removing myself from the fray.
All of which brings us back to Brent Simmons’ post. Because yes, these days I find myself weirdly on the side of Brent, in a way I never really thought would happen. I thought I’d live publicly on the internet forever. Instead, I find myself desperately wanting to reduce the “needless” part of my public persona. Perhaps replacing it with lots of lovely long walks instead. Or watching lots of classic MGM musicals. Or anything, really, that takes me away from publicly baring my soul on a regular basis. I don’t mind it here, in a place that I control. But elsewhere, I often feel like part of me is being scraped away.
And yet to continue writing Dirty Feed, I have to be that public person to some extent. Brent is happy to stop writing. I’m really not. Because for me, to stop writing is to stop discovering. And I’m not ready for that.
It might be impossible to square this particular circle. But I suspect that the closer I can get to doing so, the happier I’ll be.
I particularly enjoyed the person who insulted and then blocked me recently because I was sarcastic about Futurama, a show I have made it very obvious that I love. Because Futurama isn’t endlessly sarcastic about a million different things that its writers love, obviously. ↩
Well, two footnotes, anyway. ↩