Maya

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I'm Maya, a goblin of the Pacific Northwest. I design, write, and administer maya.land, a moderately sprawling piece of hypertext that's nearly five years grown. It has a bloggy section wedged in a back corner, somewhere behind the clickable MIDI gramophone.

By week, I am employed as a software engineer for a giant tech company. I principally work on systems centered around optimization models. It is not the kind of thing I blog about, and seems almost embarrassing to mention here. Still, if you caught me at a work happy hour you would perceive the same frenzied enthusiasm that leaves crumbs on everything that I do put up online.

By weekend, I spend far more time link-hunting than is healthy for a person with a laptop-bound job.

This is the part where I'd like to make a breezy allusion to some very cool, very prestigey offline hobby that one does out of the house, with other people, and not hunched over. Let's all pretend I've mentioned one.

What's the story behind your blog?

I'll confess I'm an eavesdropper. I used to linger in parks to people-watch, scribble down lines in a notebook from others' conversations too good to forget. It is easy to live traveling in familiar wheel-ruts when there are whole other worlds of people moving parallel. Tiny points of public contact can be enough to remind you.

Then COVID. My travels shrunk. I was cloistered in a condo in a neighborhood that boarded up, terribly bleak. Even after they decided outdoors was safe, I didn't go out much. Summer 2020.

I'd always been a certain kind of Internet denizen (fuzzy feelings toward StumbleUpon, studied eclecticism in media preferences, appreciation for fractal subculture) but in this period I started needing something different from it. How do you eavesdrop within your browser?

This oriented me differently toward the Web, and uncovered a few motivations to start publishing. Webmentions appealed to me as a protocol, and I liked the sovereignty arguments the Indieweb folks make. Xanthe's site gestured at expressive possibilities both familiar and unfamiliar; certainly, I'd spent enough time on Geocities in my youth to appreciate the forms predating feeds and "social", but it'd never have occurred to me to define an idiosyncratic style guide, to work up an artistic design different for every page. Kicks Condor was and is the visionary behind my whole -ism of the Internet. While I still dare not dream of ever getting to his level, setting up a site of my own seemed imperative.

Therefore: a domain, a static site generator, a lot of hours spent twiddling with web technologies I'd never been taught.

I've not added complications (in the watch sense) to it in a long time, and I owe it a design refresh, but the whole site feels as homey as you'd hope it would after years. This is perhaps a happy consequence of having made it as self-centered as I did. If I'd been shooting at some idea of what other people would appreciate, I think it'd have had to change more.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

It's not that it isn't "creative", but it's first a consumptive process. The blog is an artifact of my chewing over an experience of the Internet, of culture. It's undeniable that the website exists, that I am really posting it up, sending out the bytes and packets and tags... but in my heart, it's only pretending to be for other people's access. According to this, it's really only an exercise of articulating my thoughts and feelings for an imaginary friend, in order to make them more legible to myself.

So, practically: with respect to my linkblogging, I annotate things I come across in hypothes.is (phenomenal tool: to be able to stomp across the Internet scribbling notes on the margins!). I pull the annotations over into my notetaking system. And then later, I go through what I've pulled over, and I think: do I want to point people to this? I am of Robin Rendle's school: "blogging is pointing at things and falling in love". Are there comments I must make alongside?

It's a feedback loop that shapes what I try to consume, too. I've written about this a bit before, but it's an old Tumblrite's habit. I have an intuited ideal blend of topics to reflect what I care about. If I've not had anything good about music to post in a long time, that means I'm not spending enough time on music. If everything's getting too angled toward one obsession or other, it's a good cue to even things out.

Outside of linkblogging, I also produce writing that we may deem both "overwrought" and "overwritten".

The process here, typically:

• A thought occurs.
• I make abortive conversation about it with others.
• I sometimes successfully discuss it with my sainted mother.
• I continue to stew for a few weeks, accumulating emotional energy around something incomprehensible to the people in my life.
• I earmark a good amount of a Saturday, gather material, and rage out a draft that is something like what you might scream out of a window after a bad day.
• (If interrupted at this stage, the draft may sit for weeks or months or years. An amateur's method relies on momentum.)
• This bit may be surprising to my readers: I do edit the draft. I intend the exhausting indirection of the high-level structure that you may observe. As regards the sentence-level prose, I make some effort to tamp down its congenital prolixity. Not, like, enough for others to notice, probably, but definitely more than zero effort.
• I post it. I thereafter see ten more things I need to change. (I change them, because I am not an institution and owe no one clean versioning.)

I try to come up with the post titles that will most cleanly both allow the kind of person who would like a thing to recognize it, and allow the kind of person who would not like the thing to recognize they should skip it. This is the polite way to entitle things. There is also the cryptic poetic way – think Olu's "Immortality" – which I also respect. Everything else is clout-chasing.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Flights of fantasy are most frequent and most powerful when one's mundane life is at its worst. Creative acts on side projects flourish when main commitments stagnate. As a preteen, I drew innumerable pictures of women with wings because I felt stuck – I mean, I was stuck, you don't have a lot of agency or autonomy being twelve. I spent envious time imagining beautiful architecture and the luxuries of the rich because my environment didn't resemble that.

So, what would the ideal creative environment be from the perspective of output? Probably not that different from being locked down in a highrise with a laptop, the view out the window too elevated to make out the faces of anyone on the street below. It's sand that seeds pearls. (Unhappy the oyster!)

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The flow:

• Hypothes.is
• ✨ cron ✨ on a VM running on a lint-ridden machine in a closet. This also pulls in other things like last.fm data for my use and abuse
• Tiddlywiki
• ✨ more cron ✨
• A Jekyll repo of a size I won't discuss in polite company

I also have webmentiond for webmentions! Lovely project.
Porkbun has been a totally solid domain registrar.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I might use a different static site generator? Jekyll's treated me well, but I hear alternatives are faster. I'd probably seek out a different templating language, since the complications I've introduced into Liquid are ... quite beyond its intended scope.

I don't know that I'd call my linkblogging "responses", an initial choice which is baked into my URL structure. Likely, my URLs would look altogether different, without any dates.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Oh, God. Well. I kick some money to Goatcounter. Right now the site's run from a server in a closet, which is to say that its costs are immense but paid entirely in household labor. For annoying availability reasons I'm eventually going to move all the static content to AWS, where I expect it will take very little money indeed to host (I have a couple websites there already that demand about fifty-two cents a month each).

It generates no revenue. Every now and again I wonder whether I should add ads for things that have gotten Picked Up. There's no one right way to do just about anything on the Internet, so you have to evaluate each monetization approach in the context of a particular blog, and in the social context of that blog. I'm thinking of an online acquaintance who is compensated by ad revenue for the experience of having her stuff frontpaged on Hacker News; truly it is right and just that she be paid for having so many jokes fly over so many braying heads.

Still, I feel very protective of the idea that I – as a webmaster, which for me means something more like an artist than like anything else – should be able to define the terms of exchange with a site visitor without their being able to point to any material incentives of mine. I know many have felt their time wasted by the way I do everything. My site isn't for them. I should hate to give the impression that I'm trying to lure such visitors in for, well, impressions.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I have an extensive blogroll that at some points has been better known than my actual site. To commemorate this interview I've tidied it up somewhat, moving those whose feeds haven't updated in over a year to a "defunct" section.

As for whom to interview... I'm very interested in the people out there doing their socializing via blog / site in the post-Livejournal era. I get the impression that for certain demographics (largely younger than mine?), public web presences form a useful complement to the chattering impermanence of Discord. Alexandra's written on blogging before more generally, but I'd love to read her answers to these questions.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Mark Eastgate's Hypertext Gardens is from 1998 and is essential reading for anyone trying to break their thinking out of what corporate tech has since made of the Web. It was also annoying enough to re-find just now that it merits loud public linking.

The blog-reader will appreciate ooh.directory, a project positively Yahoo!vian in ambition.

This song is better played live and yelled along to, but I can't imagine too many of you will get the chance, so Spotify shall suffice.