Blogging About Social Media Like No One’s Ever Done That Before

I love Tumblr. Like really love it.  Except for when I’m scrolling through my dashboard and I come across a post from someone I’ve been following awhile because they are funny, smart, and post .gifs of my favorite show/movie/actor/artist/etc. and they talk about how excited they are to turn 16 in a few months.  It usually takes me awhile to stop feeling like Jerry O’Connell in Can’t Hardly Wait and start posting again.  There are people my age on Tumblr but I’m sure if a census was taken the majority of active users would be under 21.

I was and am an old school LiveJournal user.  I’ve been using LJ for over a decade and despite growing concerns over the direction of the company and the treatment of its users I don’t plan on getting rid of my journal.  Unlike this blog which I intend to be full of things I don’t mind anyone reading and would love for everyone to read, my LJ is more a diary I write in and share with a small, close circle of friends.  I complain about life, share funny, private stories about my day, and do a lot of fannish discussion of pop culture.  This blog is where I’ll write about being a comic book movie fan who is intimidated by comic books (something I actually plan to write) and my LJ is where I’ll complain about my favorite minor characters not getting the attention they deserve in the The Avengers campaign.  I also tend to do that on my Tumblr. Which brings me to my next point of social media only being for the young if you’re not willing to change along with it.

I’ve seen some grumblings from old school blogger friends that Tumblr is too easy to use and it doesn’t promote conversation the way more textual blogging does. They’re not wrong but I think there’s a place for both. I have a busy life and sometimes I’d love to write 3000 words about Series 2 of Sherlock but don’t have the time and more to the point someone else made a photoset that in 6 small graphics/gifs perfectly shows why Benedict Cumberbatch owns my heart right now. I’m a writer before anything else but I believe in the power of the hidden word in every form of visual art.

I do get a little cranky about how knowing basic HTML and CSS aren’t as important as they used to be. I’m ancient enough to still proudly talk about the Geocities site I built from scratch in 1997 using HTML I taught myself out of an HTML For Dummies book and a hefty bit of “View Source”-ing. I’m writing this entry using the HTML tab in WordPress instead of the visual because I like coding my own links and I even shelled out the yearly fee WordPress requires to use Custom CSS on their templates. After an aggravating 24 hours of finding templates that were almost right except for one color or one column width or one something I gave into my control freak tendencies and took back control.