So, the funny thing is that I really did want to blog for the 25th anniversary of Firefly next year because it was my home fandom for a decade, but now that there’s a new project I think I’m already burned out on The Discourse, and I’m just going to withdraw. From that idea, but possibly from the very idea of post permanency, including here.

This likely is why on Saturday I’d said on Bluesky, “I’m having one of those periods where I wish I knew how not to be online.”

It’s almost certainly why I’d decided just to do a The Fantastic Four: First Steps rewatch last night but got halfway through and needed to stop and just go to bed at 9:00 PM. I’d gotten all kinds of dysregulated all over the place and continued stimuli probably would have tipped me over into a full-on mood dive, complete with sobbing fit.

Between trying to suss if Adam Baldwin is still a transphobe, and that thing on Bluesky last night that basically said the show was gutter trash from top to bottom, fifty-six-year-old me just doesn’t have the regulatory stamina. Maybe if folks merely disliked the thing. But there’s such vehemence, bordering on “if you found any value there, you’re a terrible person”, and I just don’t have the fortitude to deal.

Holding my sense of self together is hard enough as it is. I’d thought working up to a 2027 where I remembered my fandom days would help that, but in this environment it does not. Spending a year celebrating what I got from a decade in a what others see as a “lowkey lost causeism apologia” fandom just doesn’t seem like a thing I’d come out of okay.

There is an off-chance that I’ll be taking a hiatus here, as well. I’m actually starting to think that the blog restoration project is a mistake that moves things in the wrong direction, and I should have less of a footprint in the world rather than more of one. I’ve already started culling Bluesky, and am toying with the idea of using Hide Distracting Items in Safari to remove my ability to post except to reply to other people and repost things.

I’ve tried this before, this idea of trying to withdraw, and failed, but I’m starting to wonder, deeply, if I just need to become more ephemeral in general. What’s gained, really, by having all this shit linger around. I’m more than halfway convinced that it’d be healthier for all concerned if I just lived on my homepage, an ephemeral statuslog, and in other people’s Bluesky replies.

I feel stupid and contagious.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous.