I’ve been meaning to reopen a blog for a little while, and I’ve been working on that for a few weeks now. I’m very happy to welcome you to my secret Internet home today!

One of the things I lost over the past few years, but especially since 2020, is a willigness to put myself out there and open up, both in online contexts and in real life. It is pretty much thanks to blogging that I learnt to enjoy writing in English, and it’s an online activity I’ve been missing lately.

It’s been slowly going better on the real-life side of things, thanks to friends. At the same time, I’ve come to realise that there are needs I will only be able to fulfil online, and discussions I will only be able to have online at all. And this should be OK! I’m not sure why it took me so long to accept as much. So I’m trying to keep a better balance between these two realms now, and I hope reopening a blog will help with that.

As for online communities, I think I’ll be much more comfortable doing my own thing with a blog than exclusively on Twitter. I’m hardly the first one to point this out, but I’ve been missing the homeliness of long-running blogs dedicated to singular passions, and the feeling you get when a personal text post from your favourite mutual shows up on your tumblr dashboard.

More often than not, expressing myself genuinely on Twitter feels like chopping up a limb, trying to make it fit into a tiny, tiny jar before throwing it into the void, and then hoping it will make any sense at all to my followers. 2020 in particular made me realise that there are fundamental facets of myself I’ll never be able to fully express on Twitter, at least not without endless addendums and postfixes.

This is probably a shared frustration for many Twitter users, but I think it’s especially felt by people who are both from outside the Anglosphere (or the West altogether), and themselves minorities within their own country. Of course this is not a universal constant, but it is always among people from outside the West, or with diasporic family histories, that I’ve felt the same frustration bottle under the surface.

For a lot of us, joining English-speaking online spaces has been salutory to find a community, but it’s also a very frustrating process once you realise that US-centric spaces will never really be able to meet you halfway, no matter how much work you put in to be able to communicate freely. Facing this wall, you end up having to translate basic, simple facets of the way you experience the world, when the very reason why you joined these spaces was to find connections unavailable in real life.

Being both French and racialized, it’s a wall I keep encountering again and again, and I’d like to finally have a space to just be and express myself more freely. I also really hope I can reach more people with similar backgrounds through this blog. It’s largely the writing of people with families or personal histories outside the West that has tided me over during the pandemic, whenever I felt estranged from its treatment by newspapers, colleagues and friends here in France.

My hope is that using this blog as a “home base” will make it easier to share my interests and thoughts elsewhere, in a tweet or in a physical discussion, without alienating anyone or pressure to overexplain myself. I’ll be able to write posts about what I care the way I see fit, and then to just link to them when needed. The simple act of using this blog as a semi-public diary will probably be very healing in itself; I should be able to articulate more clearly the things I care about if I have written about these things once before.

On a more pragmatic level, I just think a blog is a much more comfortable space to talk about all my interests without feeling like I to have to segment parts of myself, as I often do on Twitter.
I always worry about cluttering my followers’ timelines with a myriad of unrelated interests. My Twitter nowadays is very fandom-oriented, with occasional VN development things, but I’d like to be even more open about different interests, without cutting out any of them: I want to talk about When They Cry and visual novels and lit criticism, and programming and online subcultures, and international solidarity and creative digital labour… And more still! No one has to read or enjoy all of it, but I think having a blog will make it much easier to be open about these interests without alienating anyone either.

In this blog, you can expect to find, among other things:

• Visual novel development logs. I’ve been slowly getting back into VN development again, and I want to be more open what I write as a process, without any result-oriented pressure;
• Fairly personal diary entries, like this one;
• Short mini-reviews of things I’ve watched or read;
• Semi-personal, semi-public thoughts on weird interests or politics;
• From time to time, more public-facing, presentable articles on specific subjects.

Everything is subject to change; my only certitude is that I want to write freely without any self-imposed pressure.

Since part of the writing here will be personal, and part of it more public, I’ve also decided to include short contextual notes at the start of each post, to explicit its intended audience and the context behind it. You can read more about that here.

I hope you’ll forgive me if the writing a bit clunky or weird; my blogging voice is still rusty, but I hope to find something comfortable to use again soon!

Thank you for reading this lengthy, roundabout way of re-introducing myself. I know it was perhaps a bit gloomy, but I promise I’ll have joyful things to write about in the future as well! That’s part of the point, too.

I’m Rastagong, pleased to meet you!
Welcome to my secret home, and please enjoy your stay!