My my. How this blog has grown. The blog you see right now Hey Starshine actually had many incarnations way back in early 2000 when I was still a baby blogger. Exhibit A back to the time when I was still an intern for a post-production company and had this huge, huge crush on one of their clients. I am HOWLING WITH LAUGHTER as I read this one.
Thanks to Wayback Machine for archiving my old blog. There are times when you just need to look back and be reminded of how utterly naive and stupid but hilarious you were. (Small win: By 2007 I had already purchased and bought my own website purely for my own amusement and geeky curiosity. I wish I had taken screenshots of the layouts I’ve created if only for posterity. *le sigh!*)
Blogging (or weblog, as we used to call it in the days of yore) was something I have loved right from the get-go. It actually started with my curiosity on how certain groups in GeoCities were able to customize their layout. Banner texts on fire! Sometimes on ice, too, if that’s what floats your boat. From Xanga to LiveJournal to Open Diary to MySpace to Pure Volume, I was fascinated with literally everything new that I could find in the internet. HTML and CSS codes fascinated me. My heart fluttered each time I found that lines and lines of codes were able to do so many things. It was like sorcery to me and I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I spent many lunch hours and after-school hours researching on what we call front-end web development now. That term sounds so snotty now, but back then it was simply codes and create a website for me. 😆
Lo and behold: A brand spankin’ new newsletter!
With all these years of blogging passion projects would pop up here and there. (A fansite dedicated to my beloved boyband Westlife, for example. Ah, to be young and 18 again.) And today is no exception. I’ve been working on a newsletter! Finally! This one had taken me months and months to plan and ponder on the content. I was worried that not many people will be interested. There were times when it felt like I no longer knew how to write. That I’ve simply devolved into screaming unintelligible nameless things into The Void. For someone who has written ever since she could learn to grasp words and sentences, this is a very frightening thing. But. Thank God there is a but somewhere here. But then I thought “The hell with this. I’ll go ahead and just write a newsletter.” So I set one up in Substack called it Paranoid Tiptoe and wrote my first ever issue. Then I scheduled it to be sent out on the afternoon of May 15 Hong Kong Time. BAM! Just like that and it has been done. I’m leaving it to The Void whatever happens to that first issue. But hey. If kdrama and notes on traversing life are your jam, please do subscribe. I would love to have you in on it. Click on the image below to be taken to the newsletter sign-up page. No spam, I promise! Eternal Scout’s honor. (Plus points if you get the “Welcome to Night Vale” reference.)
I’d love to talk more about the early days of blogging and how much I miss so terribly the good ol’ weblogs. Back then it felt purely personal. And quirky and fun. I loved LiveJournal’s “moods”, where you can download a set of gifs depicting moods such as happy, frustrated, anxious, and excited. And then you would put that in every post telling other users what was your mood for that certain day. My choice of mood gifs were ones from “Supernatural”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and “Angel.” Before slinking back to my offline life, here is another oldie but goodie blog post I made when I was young, dumb, and broke. And also a lightweight with alcohol. (Which would actually improve months later ,much to my parents’ amusement and dismay. At least then I rarely got drunk when my tolerance for alcohol greatly improved. Small wins, people!)
