10 years!

Lay your heart 

Lay your soul 

Upon my magic carpet 

Now we are flying 

To Venus just to kill some time for tea OK

It has been a while in more than one way. This year the blog gets to be ten years old! So far it has been quite a journey. From the popular days when it would get +500 views per day to a much, much quieter days now when a handful of people visit it weekly. From the merry days of rapidshare and megaupload to hard times of file hosting purges and scarcities. We've been through a lot and times have changed, unseen friends, but this blog did not. For better or worse the format stayed the same. I have things I wanna type about so here they are.

THE PAST

I started Flying Teapot in high school when I was 17, back in 2008. Previously I was a part o a few other attempts at blogging mostly with school friends. I had a rant-esque blog that I co-wrote with a friend (it's in Croatian and it was still up last time I checked, it's full of angsty teen rants) and a shareblog called vndrgrvnd, which is still up for some reason, that I ran for a brief time with my then very close friend Zmaj and another friend. And then there's Terror Noise Audio, a blog I still kinda neglect all the time for no apparent reason.

Flying Teapot was all mine though, from beginning to now. I wanted a place where I would give back to the community, I was leech before (a dead term by now I think?) and I wanted to atone for my leeching sins. Endless opposites and experimentation ensued. Most of them half baked or never finished (or even started). I was tempted at times to introduce other authors (back when it was cool to do it and back when people actually asked me if they could join) but now I'm glad this remained solely a one person effort. This I don't mean in a ego kind of way (none of this is intentionally self indulgent) but more in a way that it slowly because of that this became an indirect historical record of my life. A companion piece to another historical archive of my listening habits on last.fm which predates all of my other internet presences. Scrolling through my previous posts memories often come flooding back, remembrance of various phases I had with music, film and art in general. It also allows me in a way to explore how I thought of certain topics even if my opinions were cringy at times or badly written. I can also read through my posts and remember how I felt at particular times; where I was then both mentally and physically. A lot of posts during my college years (which took forever by the way) have a very distinct feeling of melancholy, depression and lethargy. I hated myself during that period (in a not very apparent or original way, I just drank a lot and did stupid shit) mostly for just coming to terms that I'm studying something I'm not really good at or actually talented at all for. Lethargy is still a very detrimental and auto destructive issue that I have which after college started impairing my working abilities. No idea as of yet how to get over it. But that's how it goes for most people and I learned to live with it for now anyway. But not everything here is so somber, plenty of posts ooze with relief and happiness (all Sun Ra posts were obviously made when I was in a great mood). I don't know why I'm writing about this now, I just think it's interesting.

THE PRESENT

I'm not a very active community user but it seems to me that these, more personal, types of blogs have slowly died away. More convenient methods of sharing came about. Youtube, spotify, bandcamp, streaming in general came along and made everything more easier (good thing!). There are hundreds of specialized channels, sites etc. that curate excellent niche or known music. Nothing is obscure anymore, you can go on forever following youtube generated suggestions. There are some downsides though. I'm saddened that blogs pretty much became just a utilitarian cover+short info+tracklist+link affair while before there was always a balance between that kind and this kind of blogs. The community part is either gone or relegated to something faster (discord etc.). I miss when people would write about the music they are sharing. Reading short stories about people's experiences with music, their descriptions of unknown bands, amateur anthropology! Back in the "good old days" there were a lot of interesting people sharing interesting music from their own carefully curated collection. You could talk to them in the comments, you would exchange information and pass on other good blogs that each found. I feel like a good chunk of that is missing now, overtaken by sheer accessibility. Is blogging dead? I don't know but no matter how long my periods of inactivity are I still don't consider shutting this blog down for good. Every once in a while a stream of energy hits me and I feel I could go on for days just talking about and sharing music shooing away my lethargy demon. Maybe one day it will morph into something completely else.

THE FUTURE

So now where does this leave Flying Teapot? I'm not really sure, my tastes have become much more conventional over the years. I'm slowly getting back to where I started. Old post bop and black/death metal, with occasional brief forays into other genres. I now have a sizable physical collection so that I don't even need to turn on the PC to listen to my favorite albums. I often feel like I don't have anything interesting or worthy to share that hasn't been shared before somewhere else. I don't have the pulse on the vein (maybe I never had). I stopped watching movies and I don't read manga anymore. I read books but boring ones. Autobiographies, biographies, history, classics, vapid fantasy and sci-fi. Nothing really captivating or worth talking about for the tenth time. I became a boring, safe person haha. Maybe I ran out of things that I wanna talk about? I don't know, I'll just have to figure it out as time goes. See you at the twentieth anniversary and thanks for being around!

I still miss my old dog. I'll never forget you. You meant much.