hello

Written by Patrick J Turner Jr

Published on December 17, 2023

Hello again! Welcome to my blog. My name is Patrick. I am 22 years old. I am a computer science major from the Carolinas and I have a passion for photography and the internet. That's ultimately why this blog exists. I enjoy posting my work and thoughts out onto the net for people to read. Some people have even said that they enjoy the things I post, and that gives me the motivation to keep doing it I suppose.

It may not really be a secret to anyone who has been watching this site for a while now, but this is the third or fourth "first" blog post I have written and posted to the site. For some reason, I find myself unable to determine what I want this space to be. I have been unable to commit to putting my written thoughts out there for people to see. I guess I'm scared to show that sort of vulnerability, and also don't particularly feel great about my writing ability.

But the idea of this blog, this place where I express myself, my own personal little archive, I can't seem to let it go. I have always been a little obsessive about seeing and preserving everything. I have saved my entire family's photos onto three separate hard drives and a few cloud storage platforms. There is a zipped folder containing every diary entry I wrote during high school on every single device I use. I keep every letter and memento I have ever been given. You could say I am a very sentimental person. This blog as a means of preserving and displaying my own thoughts and feelings is appealing to me.

I also enjoy having an online presence. From a very young age I was on the internet and making videos with friends on YouTube. For better or worse, some part of my psyche has revolved around performing an online image. This is not necessarily a bad thing, or at least I don't feel like it's unhealthy for me. Maintaining an online presence through YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and now this blog has served as a way for me to connect with my friends and people I would never have the opportunity to meet otherwise. The internet has fundamentally shaped who I am and how I interact with others, and while that may have its downsides, it's also just where I'm at right now.

I've been reading old internet blogs from the late 90s and early 2000s and feel this great sense of nostalgia for a time I never really got to experience. I have been on the Internet from like 2008 to the current day, but sort of missed out on a lot of early social platforms like blogs and forums. Despite this, I really identify with a lot of the afterimages those old blogs present. The people writing those blogs then are people not unlike my friends now. Half of my circle would probably have run the craziest blogs imaginable if we were born a solid five years earlier.

So, yeah. I guess I want to keep the dream of this blog alive. I want to write about my life and my interests, and I want to improve my skills as a writer. Time will tell if I decide to keep up with it at all, but this site is something I genuinely want to flesh out more. I think the main challenge now comes from actually getting myself to write and maintain it. I have long had horrible writing practices of writing for a solid amount of time, getting distracted, and then abandoning the writing altogether. I lose my thread too easily and do not return to it when I put it down. This is something I intend to work on.

Something else I've noticed I'm bad at: conclusions. So I think I'll just leave it at that.