Well here we are
How many hello worlds do we have in us?
Years ago I started a writing blog. I settled on the domain inflatableink.com -- not the best name, perhaps, but I liked it well enough. I got myself the handle @inflatableink on Twitter and, for a while, all was well.
Along the line somewhere, I fumbled the domain (the details of that are lost to memory) and, by the time I got my act together, it had been squatted. I shifted the blog over to inflatablepress.com. An irritation.
Over the years, I became less interested in writing about writing, though I never stopped actually making stuff up. As I type, inflatablepress.com is still out there. Not for very long I don't think. Maybe I'll salvage a post or two before I set fire to it.
Then Twitter was bought by an idiot who installed a nazi robot and invited lots of nazi people and their own bots to have a big old nazi party. So I stepped over to Bluesky and Mastodon, taking @inflatableink with me.
Then, a couple of days ago, I noticed that whoever had squatted the inflatableink domain had thrown it back into the pool. On a whim, I picked it up. Now, I've got a lot going on at the moment. I'm working on code and with clients, developing my agency site at getinstancelabs.com. I'm working on fiction. I've just published two PHP books and I'm writing another tech book about PHP and Python. I'm also, you know, despairing at the world. So obviously I don't have time for another project.
Except here we are.
If there's any ethos to this iteration of Inflatable Ink it's this. There isn't one. So much of what I've been doing recently is careful and measured and targeted. Often when I post to a blog or a social media account, I worry about whether I'm staying relevant to the mission at hand, whether I'm undermining a brand or addressing the wrong audience. There's nothing wrong with that -- sometimes you have to stay on message -- we all have our day job projects.
But it occurs to me that it might nice to have somewhere to stick up a cat picture or a limeric. Somewhere to vent or endorse. To list books and articles and records for no particular reason beyhond the fact that it's a small pleasure to do so. I could do that on Bluesesky or Mastodon, I guess, but I'd rather have my own little base to tinker in. I've been Musked once - and that was enough.
The joy of this is that the stakes are incredibly low. And that's quite rare.