Statement of Purpose

To begin, I would like to disclaim that this is not my first time creating a blog–though I doubt that is too surprising. It seems to be a common occurrence for those who write online to never truly abandon the practice, even after setting aside one project or another. I’m not going to link my old blogs, though they aren’t particularly difficult to find, but I will write about them and their history briefly. 

When I was teenager, I started posting media criticism; specifically related to anime, though not exclusively. I was influenced by the early video essays and reviews of anime and video games I watched on sites like Blip and Youtube, and felt inspired to try media criticism myself. My first blog started on Tumblr when I was thirteen years old before switching over to WordPress around a year later. On WordPress, I initially contributed to someone else’s anime blog covering seasonal releases, though I quickly began to focus on my own personal media blog until that became my primary project. I kept up this practice for quite a long time. My last piece of criticism/analysis was posted in 2021, a year after I graduated from my undergraduate degree in English literature. So suffice to say, I’ve been blogging for quite a while.

I stopped writing in 2021 on that blog for a handful of reasons–burnout being the most prominent. I had already been struggling to keep myself motivated writing for the blog, which had begun to feel like a bit of a chore after juggling it with school work for several years. In general, graduating from a college was a massive sea change for me. It was a moment where I realized just how truly exhausted I had become over years of pushing myself to get good grades without a clear goal of what I even wanted my post-college grad life to be. I felt overwhelmed by the realization that I had been working toward this goal of graduating college my whole life only to have no greater vision of myself past that point. Eventually, I landed myself a full time job (though the COVID job market certainly didn’t make that a quick or easy process), and I stopped blogging due to that continued emotional burnout in combination with an exhausting 40 hours a week work routine in a hectic and disorganized corporate work environment.

A secondary factor in this is my increased disillusionment with the internet, specifically in regards to the “content creation” field as many like to call it, and major social media platforms like Youtube, Instagram, and what used to be called Twitter. These used to be places of inspiration for me where I could see writers, critics, and creators of all types find stable careers and make the art they wanted to make. Alas, there was a kind of inevitable adult disillusionment that has occurred as I’ve learned the all too unfortunate truth about these platforms, which care more about harvesting time, attention, and personal data from their users than fostering spaces of true community and creative expression. Pushed by algorithms that reward those who create fast and efficiently, creators experience burnout and increased mental strain as their audiences grow, rather than finding a stable career. These platforms, designed by capitalists and focused on numerical growth over quality, encourage this kind of burnout–to the point where video essays about creator burnout is a content niche itself. By learning this, I came to the realization that maybe it would be better if I didn't post or publish any of my thoughts online.

As someone with a lot of social anxiety, this made for an irresistible escape route from my blogging hobby. I never had a huge audience for my previous blog, but as someone who witnessed many internet careers go up in flames due to burnout or harassment, I feared experiencing the same outcomes, especially as someone already going through a different sort of burnout at the time. So I retreated. I deleted most of my public social media accounts and began to only write my thoughts about media in the privacy of my own personal media journals. These are decisions that I haven’t particularly regretted, even if looking back on them I will admit that they were partially driven by catastrophizing and anxiety that was not entirely logical. I do still believe that using social media less is an undeniable positive–my screen time has gone down drastically and I feel more focused and less distracted than I did during the years where I logged onto Twitter and scrolled there daily. I’ve felt much more present in my life and I have found it enjoyable to not have my thoughts and feelings available to the public at all times.

With all that being said, you might be wondering why I’ve decided to start a new blog. After all, I seem relatively content without one. Why throw myself back into the stew, particularly if I’m so skeptical of being a creator online in this current age? Well, I think the primary reason stems from two realizations. The first is that I’ve never actually stopped writing about the media I engage with. Yes, I stopped posting as many Letterboxd reviews and stopped contributing to my anime blog, but it wasn’t long after I stopped that I found myself seeking a private outlet for those thoughts in the form of my media journals. In those journals, I jot down notes on whatever piece of media I’ve most recently finished, creating a log of my exploration of various mediums. There is a freedom to be had in having this activity only exist in the private realm, but it was through me starting a different media criticism project that I found myself questioning if I truly wanted to only keep my thoughts in that private space.

Almost a year and half ago at this point, I launched my movie analysis podcast called Cinema Bones. Co-hosted with my close friend Masie, we discuss movies that, as we like to say, are “bad, but kind of good?” This may come across like a shameless plug for a different creative project (and certainly it is a plug! Please listen to our podcast, I think it’s pretty good), but it was a point where I began to consider the prospect of posting criticism online again. Masie and I have always had a casual approach to the podcast, it’s mostly an excuse for us to watch movies together and talk about them, and there has been something very satisfying about that combination of posting media criticism online while not being particularly concerned about whether it leads to any grander ambitions. 

When I was younger, I definitely think I was enamored with that idea of turning criticism into a career. After all, most of the people I followed and looked up to online were fellow bloggers, media journalists, and video essayists who were turning criticism and analysis into what seemed like long term careers. Of course, years of seeing these industries crumble or become oversaturated has taught me otherwise, but at the time it seemed like a great prospect. Who wouldn’t want to turn their passion into a career? Well, as alluded to before, it turns out there’s many reasons to be skeptical of that prospect. From uncaring publishing/social platforms to harassment and burnout, I came to realize pursuing some other type of ambition would maybe be preferable to my mental well being. Capitalism is a system that encourages us to commodify ourselves, something only amplified in the digital age where social media platforms become potential opportunities to turn ourselves and our personal lives into consumable content that can be made into a brand. My generation is enamored with aestheticization and, while I enjoy a good aesthetic myself, I find it hard to not connect that with this era of personal branding and commodification.

However, Cinema Bones helped me realize that publishing media criticism online does not mean you are inherently pursuing said commodification. It can just be a means of personal expression. Delineating my media criticism into purely the realm of the private journal is the easiest way to avoid this kind of capitalist creep, but that is an awfully binary way of approaching the reality of the world we live in. Besides, this current internet we find ourselves posting on is a modern rendition that deliberately obscures the not too distant past of open source software and personal websites that dominated the early 2000’s. Who’s to say my blog can’t just be a personal space–a little garden I cultivate in the same way I cultivate my personal library? I’ve always worried about my writing not being particularly unique or original–I feel like most of my analysis has probably been done elsewhere and better by other writers and creators–but in the realm of personal expression uniqueness does not have to be a requirement. Two neighboring gardens can have the same seeds, but that does not mean they are created by the exact same person or that they do not have their own unique qualities.

So, now having outlined my history with blogging and why I left and now have returned to it, I figure I should get into the main goals I have for the blog/newsletter titled Terra Home:

1. Only write about what I want to write about.

This one is self-explanatory. So often with my previous blog, I felt like it turned into an obligation. I had this series where I reviewed seasonal anime premieres and I continued it well past the point where I enjoyed the cycle of seasonal anime watching. Additionally, while I occasionally would write posts about video games or even manga and literature, I found it difficult to not pigeon hole that blog into only being about anime. The reality of my media diet is that it is all over the place in terms of medium. I am not someone who hyperfocuses on one medium. I have my preferences, of course, but like the average art enthusiast I’d say my taste is eclectic and encompasses a variety of mediums and genres. Confining this blog to one medium like I did previously would only lead to me feeling stifled like before. I’m trying to avoid burnout, so topics of this blog will be as all over the place as my mind and interests are in real life. I can only hope that my personal voice will help carry readers through the occasional whiplash.

2. Be thoughtful and critical in my work, but not necessarily create “reviews.”

As mentioned previously, when I started writing criticism, I was influenced by what I was reading and watching at the time. This was primarily video essays and reviews of media that tended to lean in the direction of trying to persuade the viewer on their opinion of a work’s quality. To some extent, this kind of qualitative judgement of a work, or at the least the implication of one, is somewhat unavoidable in criticism and analysis. Readers and viewers are likely to try to extrapolate the tone of one's observations and I’m not going to say my personal opinions on the enjoyability/recommendability of a work will never be brought up in my writing. However, my hope is that with the writing I post I’ll be focused more on trying to explain my feelings/the experiential qualities of the work rather than boil it down into an un-nuanced thing-good-thing-bad dichotomy. There are enough people doing that on the internet. Instead, what I hope readers get out of my work is a new viewpoint on a piece of media, or at the very least an understanding of why I find it interesting either in spite of or because of its flaws. Additionally, I hope to engage with the labor behind art and bring up the creators and production history of what I cover whenever possible.

3. Have fun and be flexible

A point that could be inferred from the prior two goals, but I feel it’s one important to extrapolate on nonetheless. Since the goal of the blog is self-expression, I’m not going to hold myself to a specific posting schedule. If I start a series of posts with a certain topic, I’m not holding myself to completing that series or trying to post said series on a regular basis. Like the topics of my posts, I’m not going to try to railroad this blog into something consistent. I want to be driven by an internal sense of passion for the topics I’m covering, not an arbitrary calendar deadline I created.

Those are my three main goals, but before concluding, I have two other points I would like to discuss in relation to this blog:

A Qualifier

Some hypocrisy is inevitable.

As much as I have waxed on about the downsides of commodifying writing/creating online, I will not act like I would turn down the opportunity. This newsletter is 100% free and always will be, but if somehow I manage to grow a big enough audience to open say a Patreon or start creating paid tiers on Ghost, I will likely do so. I have no ambition, nor an expectation of getting to that point. I’m not exactly going to be working hard to get this blog out there and promote it to the masses. It’s a niche pursuit and hobby first and foremost.

I’m not turning down the idea though because while I know the downsides of commodifying one's passions, I would ultimately still prefer that to the realities of most labor under capitalism. Commodifying one’s hobbies has downsides, but it is still preferable in many ways to engage with capitalism’s form of labor with something one has a passion for than to drudge away laboring with something one does not care about in the slightest. Having recently quit a desk job I had for basically four years, I’ve really come to grips with the ever-present sense of cognitive dissonance one has to maintain under capitalism. Under this economic system where one must work in order to obtain basic necessities such as shelter and food, there is often a disconnect between our internal, moral worlds and the external world we live in. At that aforementioned desk job, I often had to reign in my internal thoughts and beliefs about the corporate, chaotic, and unfair environment I worked in in order to get the money I needed to pay for rent and groceries. There was a constant conflict between what I was thinking and what I had to do at the job itself. My job was for the most part not painful in terms of the activities I was assigned, but seeing the system surrounding my position often was mentally taxing. I think this inherent tension will always be present under the capitalist systems we currently occupy. Even for the most morally steadfast of people, who seek to live as ethically, as eco-friendly, as kind to the world and other people as possible, there will be moments of unintended hypocrisy because the systems we live under force those moments to occur at some point. So maybe, if I’m lucky, I would be happy to use this blog to earn grocery money, but that is not a priority or a long term goal. I’m about to start attending grad school for Library Sciences for a reason after all.

Why is this blog titled Terra Home?

Part of the evolution with my relationship with the internet over the past few years has been to anonymize myself more. Aside from one private account, I’ve changed all of my social media and media tracking platforms to be under an internet handle. I will be publishing my writing and podcasts under my real first name, but generally speaking Terra Home is both the name of this blog and my broader internet handle.

I chose the name Terra Home quite randomly. When I was trying to think of an internet handle, it was basically the first thing that came to mind. There’s something I find comforting about the name Terra Home. I’ve always had a fondness for the character Terra Branford from the video game Final Fantasy VI. Although I have somewhat embarrassingly never finished the game, despite considering myself a big fan of the Final Fantasy series, the tension of her character as a magically powerful half-Esper who simultaneously has to grapple with a lack of internal purpose and identity is compelling to me on some sort of innate level. Psychologists could maybe do a better job of analyzing why that is than I could, but the point is that I’ve always felt drawn to the name Terra by extension of my fondness toward that character. If I had to change my real name for whatever reason, I would probably change it to Terra. 

To lazily recite the dictionary for a moment, Terra can also be a word that refers to our planet. As such, you can sort of read the full name of the blog as an acknowledgement of our planet’s status as the true and, for the foreseeable future, only home for humanity (despite what Silicon Valley assholes will try to tell you about the possibility of colonizing Mars). Cheesy, I know, but as someone who has grown up in a very environmentally beautiful place in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and has known about climate change from elementary school onward, I can’t deny my tree-hugging interpretation of the name. In a way, the name Terra Home is meant to ground me in the reality of the world I live in, but also acknowledge the beauty of it. And one of the things I personally find the most beautiful about the world we live in is the art/media created by fellow humans: these personal, creative, intimate expressions that we use to communicate with each other. I hope that I can at least explain how I’m affected by that art in a way that’s interesting on this blog.

If you’ve read all the way through this rather self-indulgent statement, I hope you got something out of it. As always, thanks for reading.