New Directions

As some of you who've been reading my writing for a long while may distantly remember, I originally opened up this blog for two purposes:

1. First and foremost, I wanted to make sure I laid a claim on my own domain title here on Blogger - mostly on the off chance some troll decided to make a fake post under my name to discredit me (the discourse gets pretty viscious in indie political analysis social media.)
2. As online and social media censorship has grown and moved from "ban all the fascists" to "ban everyone who doesn't agree with neoliberal orthodox ideology" I sensed that I was going to need to find a work around. My theory was that if I could spread my online imprint across multiple sites and more importantly, across multiple corporate providers, it would be essentially impossible to completely shut me up.

Obviously, my first objective was reached because you are now reading this post on a website addressed at ninaillingworth.blogspot.com. Which leaves us with the obvious question, did spreading out across the internet actually help me fight censorship? Truthfully? I don't know. It does seem like my work turns up more often on various search engines because there's more websites with my name on them out there, but otherwise I've been unable to properly test the hypothesis in any reasonable sense.

Part of the problem is that until today, I haven't posted any unique content on this blog - it's all been links to articles on other sites. Naturally, a lot of my readers already follow those other sites so they'd have no need to visit this blog unless I was suddenly banned or removed from those platforms. This is perfectly reasonable behavior of course and frankly, it's what I suggested readers do when I told them about the blog; but it does very little for me in terms of branching out and increasing my digital imprint. I realized this quite a long time ago, but in doing so promptly ran myself smack dab into another insurmountable problem in its own right - the fact that Blogger's interface and customization options are to put it politely, inadequate.

For example, I have spent a solid two years trying to find a way to actually change the link color in any of the usable themes so I could mess around with a background color that isn't white. The option exists in every theme and I've changed it dozens and dozens of times - but no matter what, the links always come out blue. As you can see, I just eventually gave up and used a blue theme color set and a white background because the whole process is exhausting. When you combine this sort of thing with the already limited frame options and the whole claustrophobic effect virtually every website on Blogger has when you view it on a phone, I just never found very many opportunities to post something new on this site instead of my own website, my image blog on Tumblr, or my Patreon blog. As a longtime user, what I would say Blogger does best is provide a very easy to master publishing outlet for casual, off the cuff, blog style posts that aren't too link heavy or too long - in other words, the exact opposite of most of the writing I've been doing for the past few years.

Recently however, I've found myself caught in a writing terrible cycle; I produce vast amounts of formal writing for five or six weeks, and then burnout and fall into a downward spiral for weeks, or even months at a time. If you're interested in knowing more, I recently wrote a humorous bit of autobiographical fiction about my last ride on this godawful roller coaster for my Facebook page to try and express the feelings, if not the actual events that direct that process. Getting some sort of handle on this problem and developing coping strategies has been a long and arduous process; I've stumbled, I've fallen flat on my face and I've made promises I would never be able to keep - both to myself and my readers. What I have come to realize throughout all of this however is that hiding is not a strategy, and I'm far better off when I engage across multiple platforms, even if I'm incapable of producing formal writing, than I am when I recede into sh*tposting on Twitter to escape my feelings of irresponsibility and self-loathing.

With that in mind, I've decided to revive this website and re-purpose it towards an informal media observations and critique blog - a task I feel Blogger itself is ideally suited to handle. The basic idea will be that I'm going to share some of the most outrageous propaganda you find in the day to day media, and offer some form of brief commentary. The key feature here will be the informal "blogging" aspect of the work; both because I don't want to detract from my more formal writing about the media on ninaillingworth.com and also because making a big stinking deal out of every article I write while hammering away at it until it's perfect, is clearly burning me out and driving me a little batty. Sometimes, you just want to blog about how awful western corporate media is.

Please note that if you'd like to check out the rest of my writing, you can find links to every site where I publish anything (even tweets) on the right hand side of the page under "Links." Furthermore, I maintain a backup Twitter account pretty much entirely for the purposes of posting links for every single piece of writing I publish online - you can find it here. Finally, yes I am fully aware that it's hard to read the dark blue "spent link" color on the right hand side of the page; there is absolutely nothing I can do about it unless someone decides to fix the edit link color feature on Blogger itself.

Let's hope this is the beginning of a rewarding, and ongoing relationship.

- nina illingworth