WordPress touts itself as simultaneously comprehensive and simple to execute, which is why it’s frustrating me to no end that I can’t get these templates to do what I want them to do. Part of that is because I don’t know what I’m trying to get them to do, necessarily, but that’s in the larger scope. In the short term, doing things as simple as “putting the site tagline centered below the site title” is proving to be an insurmountable challenge.

I’m wondering how much all this site template dickering is merely a distraction that keeps me from what the ultimate goal of this site is: a place where I can write, ideally daily. The practice won’t become a habit unless I commit to it, and if a subconscious part of me is afraid of doing that (for whatever reasons), it’s awfully convenient to have the site design itself be not just a stumbling block but a complete roadblock. Leaning into this and coming up short of what I want is giving me a massive headache, and once that headache has set in, it stops all other forms of progress on other projects I’ve committed myself to.

Maybe what I needed after all was just a Substack newsletter.

I have a loose outline of what I want this site to be, which I might as well recount here since it will give me some nice long blocks of text to play with while settling on design. The following are topics I’ve decided to write about:

• Things the internet (including Twitter/Tumblr/Mastodon) are talking about
• News items I just read about in The Atlantic/Slate/AP/Longform
• Really cool old thigns I found on the internet 10-15 years ago, remixed and reexamined
  • This will include ancient memes as well
• Things going on in my life
  • Cultural differences between Australia and the US, or now vs then
• Reexamining events from my past with the new perspective of age
  • I’m a big fan of the Family Lore content from Gallus Rostromegalus
• What games I’m playing and how I feel about them
• Progress on creative hobbies such as needlepoint, crochet, possibly writing/fanfiction? I’m not sure whether to put this here or keep it under my sister sites unattached to my real name.