A few years ago I started posting sketches and unfinished artwork in a secret tumblr account. I don’t quite remember why I did it, but it must have been some combination of:
- getting in the habit of “finishing”
- avoiding (minor) scrutiny I’d otherwise experience from any (very small) following on other accounts
- an early idea of working with the garage door open
Either way, I started posting a ridiculous number of loose artworks to the point where I’d pretty much stopped using DeviantArt and Instagram altogether. I even somehow gained a handful of devoted aesthetic rebloggers who would constantly repost my stuff. Who knows how they even found it…
Years later I applied this idea to a beat dump on soundcloud where I’d post music, with an even greater emphasis on those three motivations. The second piece was further empowered by liberal use of private tracks. It became almost a time capsule of sorts for me to go back and listen to how my sound improved and evolved. The timeline view and option to upload album covers gave it an edge over just listening to my own .wav files in folders, especially for getting REALLY into how I was thinking and feeling at the time. I could also share tracks with close friends and interact with some form of community on the soundcloud platform (although most of them were clearly poorly disguised bots). It was great. So I posted everything to both this and the art microblog separately for a long time.
Here and there I found myself thinking, why not make a “Siyang everything dump” where I just aggregate EVERYTHING I think about or experience or make into one place? Without having to navigate separate platforms or new identities? Where people can find out about the other stuff I do too (slight overshare: this might have come from some unresolved jack-of-all-trades insecurity where I need to prove that I’m decent at a lot of stuff to accept that I’m not amazing at any one thing)? This became almost something of a meme in my journal in the last few years.
Exploring where to go let me to a bunch of interesting tools (many of which I still use):
- obsidian vaults
- notion (was a bit too slow and clunky for how i wanted to use it)
- APPLE NOTES (god tier tbh)
- wholesome finsta or private twitter account
- are.na
- substack
- digital gardens
And after all that, I’m now arriving on some really basic ideas that anybody could probably come up with. Maybe the reason everyone turns to microblogging on social media (twitter, instagram, even tiktok) or macroblogging on an actual blog is that it’s the way to go. So I’ll try it again. The good news is all my notes and notions and obsidians have a ton of unorganized medium-form content that’s just itching to get posted. It’ll be fun to go through and curate the backfill on that. The nice thing about digital gardens is that I don’t have to commit to posts being frozen in time either; I can go back and revisit them as their meaning changes in my life.
And then lastly, maybe I don’t actually need a centralized place where everything haphazardly gets dumped in its rawest form anyways. Maybe it’s good to collect and curate a little, in little bundles like a newspaper or a zine. A show-and-tell of sorts. Art goes on the art website and songs go on the song website, and here’s a little collection of the latest of that I’ve chosen for you with some of my thoughts on them. That’s a bit more pleasant-sounding than a “dump”.