I’ve been meaning to compile my trip reports for some time now, in part because I get great value out of reading other people’s, and in part because I am starting to lose track of what I’ve done/seen/learned.

I’ve also been meaning to offload my Notes app drafts somewhere,¹Did you know AllTrails has a character limit? Probably not. It took even me a while to realise this, and only because I am more tedious than most. so this seems like as good an avenue as any to channel my extremely millennial nostalgia for the ‘old internet’.²You know, back when I used to pay my sister real Australian dollars to farm the daily free Neopets welfare handouts for my beloved red Gelert.

I don’t have strong feelings about what this blog is for yet. Something like…”giving an account of oneself.”

I guess I just wanted to write a blog again, like the ones we used to write before being a Content Creator was a proper-noun-career-pathway — before SEO and LLMs ruined search, before Tumblr banned porn, before Blu-Ray, before Dogecoin, before DSLRs, before Next.js by Vercel — before any of us knew this much about one another.³Yes, I am arriving at ‘that age’ where I am old enough to remember how things used to be — but not old enough to start making boomer memes about childhoods spent sitting on the porch/playing in the creek/attending slumber parties like we can’t still do that. Because we can. Creeks still exist. Other people’s houses still exist. Porches still exist. And so do blogs. They didn’t go anywhere.

I didn’t learn to drive until my mid-twenties, shortly after I was finally diagnosed with ADHD. It’s been a real downward spiral in the last few years — I got really into cars, which led to driving up and down twisty roads, which led to trailheads, which led to hiking, which led to everything else. Along the way, I’ve been figuring things out as I go — what feels wrong, what feels right, and how I want to be in the world.⁴“It is a blessing to be given a quest for understanding.” (Amber Khan, The Quietest Revolution, 2022)

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

So I’ve been wanting to write a blog like this for a while now — I sure do read enough of them (of “blogs like this”). But the second I started taking the idea seriously, the marketing hindbrain started rearing up again, and so did my sympathetic nervous system.

The hamster wheel would ask, well, okay, what’s the point? Who cares?⁵I guess the point is that no one cares about all those things — no one would care about any of those things if they didn’t also happen to care about me. Parasocially, limerently or uh, a third, more wholesome/reciprocal thing. There are lots of hiking blogs out there who prioritise Google Search as their target audience, and they do just fine. So surely I can’t do worse if I target “people like me” — first of all because hey, hi, it’s me, I’m already here, I have my first reader — but also because I already have it on pretty good authority that even people who are not like me (i.e. my long-suffering friends) can find it in themselves to care about the things I care about, just because I happen to care about them. How large is the Total Addressable Market of people who hike and climb and run and drive and cycle and camp and powerlift and watch the sun set and the moon rise in one night? Should I perhaps…niche down? What is the purpose of putting content on the internet? Does the act itself always already belie any such noble intent as ‘authenticity’?

I used to run a MySpace shop where I’d make layouts for free. Now the status quo is the inverse; we create ostensibly free content with the ultimate intention to monetise. I also used to be a child, living rent-free with my parents. Now I have opinions about index funds and embedded network providers. So it goes.

If there’s any one benchmark for success in this endeavour, I think I’d like to measure how very antithetical this can be to “content optimised for monetisation”. I often say pithy shit like, “You can’t optimise for optionality,” and I say it because I do think it’s true — but even if the purpose is not to optimise, let’s not falsely dichotomise this with “having a nice time” or “just hanging out”. Maybe I’ll just leave the door open and, you know, fuck around and find out.