so as a young lad desperate to be Relevant™ in the social media of the day in my national corner of the Internet — blogs — I blogged about Serious Things like Art and Media and Politics and The Discourse™.

I don't think that I was particularly disdainful of people who did stuff I wasn't into — fandom and using the medium as a form of therapy and self-discovery, but it was something that wasn't interested in doing. I wanted to be Listened™ to and to Matter™.

Like, was there a steaming pile of erasure and misogyny in the Malaysian blogosphere on the early oughts? Fuck yes. I can remember at least two dudes who did it. One placed himself as Malaysia's First Blogger, and the other was definitely Malaysia's Premier Blogger.

Both were Terribly Serious Men who wanted to Change the Media Landscape with blogs, and the first wanted to turn Blogging into a Discipline™ and the other decried “Lifestyle Bloggers”, most who were women.

And I wanked with them.

Like, I disagreed with them, and I wanked hard, mostly because I was friends with many of the women who got into blogging before these guys, but I also liked to think because I recognised their implicit misogyny (I didn't, of course).

But it was wank, and I was basically riding on their coat-tails for audience, even if I disdained from the idea of tracking my site numbers.

Yeah, I was pretty insufferable 😂

anyway, where the fuck are these guys? well, I have no idea where Aizuddin Danian is these days— oh, he has a cigar blog, that's nice, but Jeff Ooi decided to quit blogging to Change the World™ through politics by becoming an MP.

he's still the MP of Jelutong, but after becoming the poster boy of saying dumb shit, I think he's been eclipsed by other members of his party who learned the value of tact. More tact, at least.

anyway, i didn't want to spill ☕ on those poor buggers, but to make note that the stuff that I didn't think mattered? it was actually hard, community-building, emotional labour stuff. and actually immensely rewarding, for yourself and others.

i know, this shit is late. but it turns out that, as i get older, the stuff i dismissed as “soft” and “not relevant”... is 1000× more important than stuff that's supposed to Change the World™

it's not valued as much, really.

plus, a lot of those kids who were big into slash fic? some of them ended up critically thinking about entertainment media

when RaceFail2k9 happened, the sudden uptick on insightful commentary that flooded fandom on racism and intersectional feminism? that hadn't happened out of nowhere, it happened under the radar of cishet men as meta.

it's funny what eventually becomes what matters on the long run, and, really who you ought to be closely listening to

protip: it ain't cishet men like me

these days when i see political or media commentary, or Serious Business, I check who's saying it.

if it's some rando cishet dude, almost always it's not very interesting, unless they're an expert of their field and I've seen their work and it's good. but even then sometimes they venture out of their fields, and it's always monumentally disappointing.

a cishet dude exploring his feelings is rarer and still interesting as a novelty... but... ehhh.

i think it's good that they're doing it? just... even when I'm doing it it's kind of performative? and hard to do good without sounding like you ripped o
it off someone not a cishet dude.

because there's so much prior art though